(Mod: Once again we have scoured the vast reaches of the
Internet to bring you what we feel are the most important stories of our
times. It is not a job that we take lightly, nor do we feel that we
have any ideological or other situational bias in the selection of these
stories. It's just that we don't like a lot of things, and posting
articles that put them into a bad light brings a measure of joy to our
troubled hearts. I challenge you to come up with a better, or at least
more realistic, reason for doing this. Here is the news.)
Four area water agencies sue El Monte firm (
San Gabriel Valley Tribune link)
The
San Gabriel Valley Water Co. for many years has been extracting
groundwater in San Bernardino County beyond its rights — and without
paying for it — according to a lawsuit filed Thursday.
The complaint, filed in San Bernardino Superior Court, alleges that each
year since 2005, the San Gabriel Valley Water Co. and its subsidiaries,
Fontana Water Co. and Fontana Union Water Co., have extracted thousands
of acre-feet more per year than a base amount established decades ago.
San Gabriel water company services communities that include Arcadia,
Baldwin Park, Montebello, Monterey Park, Rosemead, San Gabriel, West
Covina, Whittier and parts of unincorporated Los Angeles County.
Water has allegedly been removed from the Rialto-Colton Basin, where the
draw-down may cause water users in the area to purchase more expensive
water from other sources.
The four plaintiffs are the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water
District, the city of Colton, the city of Rialto and the Rialto-based
West Valley Water District.
The SBVMWD provides water from the State Water Project for direct use by
13 retail water agencies from Rialto to Yucaipa that serve more than
700,000 residential and business customers.
(Mod: So the same guys who put all kinds of deleterious
chemicals into our soon to be drinking water are also now accused of
being thieves? And if these guys haven't been paying for water, should
we have to do so? The ethical dilemmas that face us are great.)
California county votes for secession from state, cites overregulation (
Fox News.com link)
Supervisors
in a far Northern California county where residents are fed up with
what they see as a lack of representation at the state capitol and
overregulation have voted in favor of separating from the state.
The Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 on Tuesday for a
declaration of secession, the Record Searchlight of Redding reported.
The vote appears mostly symbolic since secession would require approval
from the state Legislature and the U.S. Congress, but supporters say it
would restore local control over decision making. They want other rural
counties in Northern California and Southern Oregon to join them in the
creation of a new state called the State of Jefferson.
"Many proposed laws are unconstitutional and deny us our God-given
rights," Gabe Garrison of Happy Camp said at the meeting. "We need our
own state so we can make laws that fit our way of life."
Garrison was among more than 100 people who attended the meeting, and
most were in support of the declaration, according to the Record
Searchlight. The declaration does not launch any type of formal process
toward secession, but only reflects the county's support, said Tom Odom,
the county's administrative officer.
The idea to create the separate state of Jefferson goes back decades. It
gained momentum in 1941, when the mayor of a southern Oregon town
called on counties in the region and their neighbors in California to
form a new state. The goal was to raise attention to the region's poor
roads. The movement became popular, especially in Siskiyou County, where
residents have long felt that their concerns are overshadowed by more
populated parts of California. It was shelved after the attack at Pearl
Harbor, though its spirit lives on today.
Another proposal that came up two years ago in Riverside County called
on more than a dozen mostly conservative counties to break off and form
the state of South California.
(Mod: We posted an article a while back about South
California. It would have bordered the eastern edge of the Angeles
National Forest, which would have technically put us right near the
border. Separating from Sacramento sounded like a pretty good idea,
actually. Though there are some here in town we would have gladly left
behind.)
Steinberg shelves main environmental measure to aid arena effort (
Sacramento Bee link)
Following
last-minute negotiations with the governor, state Sen. President Pro
Tem Darrell Steinberg shelved his main environmental reform bill
Wednesday night, and instead pushed forward with a bulked-up alternative
bill – one that includes provisions to assist in development of
Sacramento’s downtown arena.
Steinberg announced he was setting SB 731 – his major California
Environmental Quality Act overhaul bill – aside after talking with the
governor Wednesday night. In doing so, he added two key statewide CEQA
changes to SB 743, a newer bill, which had been more focused on
streamlining the Sacramento Kings arena project. The fine points of
those amendments were still being negotiated after session Wednesday.
SB 743 seeks to speed the judicial process for handling environmental
lawsuits, limit the courts’ ability to stop construction and add
mediation to the mix. Steinberg said he would add a provision at the
governor’s request that gives the governor’s Office of Planning and
Research the go-ahead to develop a new way of measuring traffic impacts
of major projects, based on total “vehicle miles traveled” rather than
intersection congestion. He also said he’s adding a section that reduced
the need to do environmental studies for certain commercial mixed-use
projects near transit, if those projects are part of a “specific plan
area.”
(Mod: It is refreshing to see the author of such Sacramento
so-called environmental action laws as SB 375 and SB 1 ditching almost
everything he's claimed to stand for in order to help a couple of his
billionaire pals build a downtown basketball arena.)
DiFi attacks New Media journalists (
Cal Watchdog link)
A
year ago California voters gave Sen. Dianne Feinstein another landslide
victory even though she refused to debate her opponent, Elizabeth
Emken, who for once was a decent GOP candidate. DiFi must believe she’s
in the House of Lords.
Now Baroness DiFi wants to define as a “journalist” only those in
MainStream Media. New media would be considered peons with no First
Amendment protections. Matt Drudge, the most famous and influential of
the New Media Journalists, tweeted that she was a “Fascist.”
What’s so great about the MainStream Media anyway? In 2003, Judith
Miller of the august New York Times, the most prestigious newspaper
ever, stovepiped lies about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass
destruction” from the Republican Bush administration into the pages of
her newspaper.
Then there was the infamous Pulitzer Prize that went to the MSM’s second
most influential paper, the Washington Post, for a manufactured story
by Janet Cooke, “Jimmy’s World,” about a supposed 8-year-old heroin
addict.
Baroness DiFi’s position is especially embarrassing for Silicon Valley,
whose billionaire investors mostly backed her. They’ve built the
infrastructure of alternative media that, finally, take us outside the
government-MainStream Media axis, and their own senator stabs them in
the back! Baroness DiFi still wants to live in the Dark Ages of 1993,
the year before the Web Awakening of 1994.
(Mod: Calling Dianne Feinstein a "fascist" just because she
wants to outlaw Internet alternative news reporting might be a little
harsh. Well, OK, maybe not.)
Citrus College board of trustees sends residency questions to state attorney general (
San Gabriel Valley Tribune link) Despite
warnings that they would continue to waste taxpayer money on a “witch
hunt,” the Citrus College Board of Trustees voted to let the state
attorney general decide whether or not Trustee Gary Woods is holding
office illegally by not being a resident of the district he represents.
The board at its Tuesday meeting heard a presentation from Christopher
Keeler of Fagen Friedman & Fulfrost, the attorney hired to advise
the board on the allegations against Woods, and voted 3-2 to authorize
an application for leave to sue in quo warranto, with Woods and Trustee
Edward Ortell dissenting.
Quo warranto, as defined by the attorney general’s website, is an action
filed to remove a public official from office. Applications to sue an
officeholder are reviewed by the state’s Opinion Unit, which approves or
denies the action. Lawsuits are maintained by the attorney general, the
website states.
The report, Keeler summarized, included information from Citrus College
Faculty Association’s past president John Fincher, who presented the
initial allegations in March that Woods lives, not in the one-bedroom
senior apartment in Azusa, but a home in Sierra Madre that he co-owns.
It also included a report of limited surveillance by a licensed private
investigator held Sept. 5-7 last week, where Woods was witnessed leaving
the Sierra Madre residence early in the morning and returning to the
home late at night on at least two of the days the surveillance was
conducted, as well as traveling to the Azusa apartment complex at 7 a.m.
Saturday and leaving less than an hour later. The committee also
visited Woods’ Azusa apartment on Sept. 5, witnessing the trustee’s
living quarters and noting that the phone line and answering machine
were in working order.
(Mod: Well, there you go. Who would have ever thought that living in Sierra Madre would be grounds for termination?)
Scathing obituary tells of abuse, highlights fight against child abuse (
Christian Science Monitor link) Anyone
expecting a sweet remembrance of the life and times of Marianne Theresa
Johnson-Reddick was in for a surprise if they opened the obituary pages
this week in the local newspaper.
Johnson-Reddick died at a Reno nursing home Aug. 30 at the age of 79,
according to her daughter, Katherine Reddick, 58, now a psychology
consultant for a school district outside Austin, Texas.
Katherine Reddick said she decided to share the story of their painful
physical and mental abuse after consulting with her brother, Patrick
Reddick, 58, who lives in Minden south of Carson City. They said they
grew up with four siblings in a Carson City orphanage after they were
removed from their mother's home and had been estranged from her for
more than 30 years.
"Our greatest wish now is to stimulate a national movement that mandates
a purposeful and dedicated war against child abuse in the United States
of America," the obit said.
Six of Johnson-Reddick's eight children were admitted to the Nevada
Children's Home from 1963 to 1964 after they endured regular beatings,
sometimes with a metal-tipped belt, and other abuse at the hands of
their mother, Patrick Reddick said. He said he's had phone calls from
"all over the world" about the obituary.
"Everything in there was completely true," he told The Associated Press on Thursday, describing her as a "wicked, wicked witch."
He said they wanted to "shame her a little bit" but that the "main
purpose for putting it in there was to bring awareness to child abuse
... shame child abuse overall."
"People doing that right now, they can read that obit and think," said
Patrick Reddick, who last saw his mother more than three decades ago.
(Mod: Below is that obituary.)
Marianne Theresa Johnson- Reddick born Jan 4, 1935 and died alone on
Sept. 30, 2013. She is survived by her 6 of 8 children whom she spent
her lifetime torturing in every way possible. While she neglected and
abused her small children, she refused to allow anyone else to care or
show compassion towards them. When they became adults she stalked and
tortured anyone they dared to love. Everyone she met, adult or child was
tortured by her cruelty and exposure to violence, criminal activity,
vulgarity, and hatred of the gentle or kind human spirit.
On behalf of her children whom she so abrasively exposed to her evil and
violent life, we celebrate her passing from this earth and hope she
lives in the afterlife reliving each gesture of violence, cruelty, and
shame that she delivered on her children. Her surviving children will
now live the rest of their lives with the peace of knowing their
nightmare finally has some form of closure.
Most of us have found peace in helping those who have been exposed to
child abuse and hope this message of her final passing can revive our
message that abusing children is unforgivable, shameless, and should not
be tolerated in a “humane society”. Our greatest wish now, is to
stimulate a national movement that mandates a purposeful and dedicated
war against child abuse in the United States of America.
(Mod: There has to be a movie in that somewhere.)
This concludes our
Dianne Feinstein proscribed Internet activities for today.
