We carry no brief for Diebold, Inc., so we weren’t saddened to hear about California Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s weekend massacre, in which the company’s touch-screen voting boxes, along with those made by competitors, were decertified for use in the upcoming presidential primary (Feb. 5) and beyond. Bowen immediately recertified the machines, but she […]
Letters + Opinion
Posted inLetters + Opinion
What’s it all about, Alfie?
In June the North Coast Journalwas accepted as a member of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), a group of 130-plus newspapers reaching “more than 25 million young, educated, active and influential adults in the U.S. and Canada,” according to the AAN website. “To meet the association’s rigorous membership standards, newspapers must demonstrate that they […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
The long and long of it
I reported any number of ridiculous stories over the course of my career — all brilliant conceptions of bone-headed editors. There was the one on how corporate executives fit physical fitness into their busy work schedules, summer stories about desert heat, a feature about elevators in the TransAmerica Pyramid, interviews with mall shoppers about the […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Smörgåsbord of scandal
One.Vice President Darth Cheney evidently had elsewhere to be Tuesday morning, but the House Resources Committee nevertheless plunged ahead with its hearings on if and how and why he engineered the deaths of around 70,000 salmon on the banks of the Klamath River in August 2002. The hea…ring was called “Crisis of Confidence: The Political […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
When the people lead
How many North Coast Journal readers received an e-mail link to the transcript of the July 13 edition of Bill Moyers Journal, a weekly PBS show that appears on KEET? I received several, from different directions, so I thought I’d better read it. The topic was impeachment. When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi took […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Air waves
When public radio stations explode, they do so with great force. Generally speaking, public radio stations have among the nastiest, most poisonous political atmospheres of any type of organization imaginable. Think of when Pacifica Radio blew up a few years ago. The recriminations went on for months. At Berkeley Pacifica flagship station KPFA, one programmer […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
North and South
Railroad politics — it’s getting pretty grim, folks. Let’s extract two points from our recent cover story about the North Coast Railroad Authority (“The Squeeze,” July 3). First, the authority and its supporters will block any move to convert the dead and decaying train tracks around Humboldt Bay for use as a bicycle and pedestrian […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Shades of green
Has it really been three years since we last sat across the table from Eureka’s David Cobb? At the time, Candidate Cobb was in the thick of his political campaign — for the presidency of the United States, at least nominally — and also serving as the focal point for a fractious Green Party dispute […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Crime scenes
If there is anything that sets the Eureka Reporter and Times-Standard apart from each other it’s how each covers crime in Humboldt County. Crime coverage is considered bread and butter to most newspapers as it’s the one thing that tends to interest all readers, regardless of what neighborhood they live in or their age, gender, […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Twelve inoffensive men
Scour the land from shore to shore, from the frozen North to the chigger-infested Southern swamps, and nowhere in these United States will you find an institution as heartbreakingly emblematic of our democracy as the civil grand jury as constituted in the great state of California. Every year, in each of our 58 counties, several […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Fast forward
There’s probably a whole lot of people around Humboldt County who got their first introduction to Redwood Forest Foundation, Inc. (RFFI) a few months ago. A non-scandal had erupted, then quickly fizzled, over the work of Times-Standard reporter John Driscoll , who had been covering the Pacific Lumber bankruptcy hearings in Corpus Christi, Texas. A […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Drunk and stoned
In case you missed it, there’s been a fascinating little war of words over marijuana, prohibition and murder playing itself out in the pages of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat over the last few days. On June 10, the Press Democrat carried a long feature by Ukiah-based reporter Glenda Anderson about a region-wide upswing in […]