the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Bread & Circuses

But it’s one thing to bring the case and quite another to win it. If our only desire is that Gallegos bring cases against the elite, we would have done as well with any bum standing in the Plaza, ranting about the perfidity of “the corporations.” It’s even likely that the bum’s rhetoric would be zazzier than Gallegos’. But we fear that there is no distinction between effort and accomplishment in the mind of Schwartz, or in the mind of any of the many Gallegos supporters who still look on the man with starry eyes and imagine that he has claimed the county on their behalf. Schwartz writes that Gallegos has many accomplishments in the prosecution of white-collar crime. Sadly, he does not bother to list any.

This isn’t to say that Gallegos hasn’t achieved positive things. It’s easy to make the case that the DA brought some sense to the county’s prosecution of marijuana crimes, even if he did so by decriminalizing the drug de facto. It’s a strategy that is not without its own consequences, but it’s inarguably more sensible than what came before.

Anything else? Schwartz himself listed two high-profile, white-collar cases that Gallegos brought and lost. In the one, he sought $250 million in remedies and in the other he sought the removal from office of a member of the Fortuna City Council. Are there any white-collar cases of as high a profile that Gallegos has won? If so, Schwartz has not remembered them. And so, to date, the man’s reputation is more grounded in failure than in success.

With this issue,the Journal is thrilled to launch something that we’ve been dreaming about for some time. Fiction issue! Since just about the entire staff was out of town last week, we figured that this was a good time to finally get off our butts and do it.

This is something we’re going to look to do twice a year from here on in, and who better to launch it than one of the North Coast’s greatest chroniclers, our old friend Crawdad Nelson. His “California Improved” is a pitch-perfect tale of lost young folks set in the Arcata of about five years ago, I’m guessing. It’s an honor to print it.

Tell us what you think. Fiction issue? No fiction issue? Favorite author you’d like us to hound? One warning: If all you have to say is “I thought every issue was fiction issue!” take note that we’ve already heard it 100 times.

Correction:Last week’s story on four California ballot measures related to Indian gaming — “Does the House Always Win?” — misstated the number of additional slot machines that one tribe would be allowed upon passage of the initiative. In fact, the San Manuel Band would be able to run 5,500 extra machines, not 7,500 as stated in the article. The Journal regrets the error.

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