Click here to sign a petition to Save Our Last River.

Granite Construction Corporation continues to demand public approval to develop the Liberty Quarry project — despite the damage it would do to the lands, the wildlife and the people in De Luz, Fallbrook, Rainbow, Temecula, Camp Pendleton and beyond.

Granite’s for-profit quarry development would damage the Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve; the last wildlife corridor between the Santa Ana Mountains and the Palomar Mountain Range; the Santa Margarita River, our last free-flowing river in Southern California; Native American sacred sites; Camp Pendleton’s ground water; and the air we breathe.

Just as important, Granite Construction Corporation and the supposed public approval process threaten to damage the public — the majority of people in the target area, who do not want the quarry in this location.

Stop the corporate minority from damaging our majority, our quality of life, our environment, our heritage, our right to say no to being harmed by corporate greed.

Sign the petition! Click here to Save Our Last River.

Reposted from The Californian‘s original publication on Wednesday, April 27, 2011

From where I sat … which for part of the evening was in the last row of seats at Rancho Community Church in Temecula and the rest was at home in front of my laptop.

Funny, they didn’t all look like misinformed wackos, NIMBYs and environmental extremists.

Most of the 1,500 or so people who gathered Tuesday for the first of two Riverside County Planning Commission meetings on the proposed Liberty Quarry seemed like neighbors and family folks, the kind of people you’d run into at Costco or a Little League game.

Nearly everyone who packed the church and sat in the overflow area outside was there to oppose the controversial quarry, proposed to be blasted into a hill just south of Temecula on the Riverside/San Diego County line.

Credit the organizers of the opposition for bringing out a sizeable crowd — the largest I’ve seen assembled either in support or opposition of anything in 20 years of covering news here — on a Tuesday afternoon.

Inside the packed sanctuary, the audience was generally well-behaved. Planning Commission Chairman John Roth had the tough job of maintaining order in the emotionally charged room. However, he probably exacerbated the situation by continuing to chastise the audience when they applauded or jeered.

The couple of yahoos who chose to yell at the commission did nothing to help their cause.

Credit also should go to the five members of Temecula’s City Council who, in an era of political correctness, minced no words in their disdain for what they said were quarry owner Granite Construction’s flawed studies and attempts by the company’s public relations team to give Southwest County residents the old “razzle dazzle” for five years.

That brought to mind an incident in December 2006 when Granite’s public relations team descended on The Californian’s office, swept into our newsroom and started putting wrapped Christmas presents on the desks of reporters and editors.

“Here’s one for you, Wayne,” said one who put a gift on my desk thinking I was Wayne Halberg, our editor at the time.

When I realized what was happening I walked over to Halberg’s desk and said either he should remove the Granite folks from our newsroom or I would — and that I did not intend to ask them nicely.

Halberg, who would have never allowed such a blatant ethical violation had he realized initially what was going on, got the PR folks out of the office. The gifts were donated to charity.

On Tuesday, Granite’s supporters again stated their strip mine — which would desecrate sacred grounds of the Pechanga Indians and be directly in the path of afternoon ocean breezes that make Temecula’s Wine Country possible — would be good for Southwest County.

Razzle dazzle, indeed.

Contact columnist John Hunneman at hunneman@californian.com.

California’s Republican U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina died Saturday when her Retire Boxer Money Bomb exploded prematurely, killing Fiorina immediately and injuring a campaign aide. Fiorina, the infamously fired CEO of computer giant Hewlett Packard, was 56.

Distraught and slightly singed campaign manager, Marty Wilson, stood outside Fiorina’s Sacramento campaign headquarters as firefighters extinguished a small fire caused by the explosion.

“We don’t know what happened,” Wilson said. “Carly was getting ready to launch the money bomb email. She’d just put another million bucks into the campaign, but that was it; she wasn’t going to risk any more of her own money, so we really needed contributions. Anyway, the fuse must have been faulty. The thing went off in Carly’s face. It’s gotta be [U.S. Senator Barbara] Boxer’s fault. Or [President Barack] Obama’s. We demand an immediate investigation and an apology to Carly and the California voters, not only for this deliberate assault but for Boxer’s refusal to have an honest and serious debate about the issues during this crucial time for our nation!”

Paramedics treated Wilson on the scene for a minor head injury and first-degree burns.

The deadly explosion followed another life-threatening incident just two weeks ago at the Republican Party’s Hispanic 100 Awards Gala in Newport Beach. According to an event volunteer, Fiorina had been “slamming down tequila shots, trilling her tongue and shouting ‘Andale!’ in this really pathetic accent. Then she passed out. We thought she was dead at first. But, nope, she barfed and got up to dance.”

Republican Party insiders had purportedly been concerned about Fiorina’s “self-sabotaging behaviors” since she became an economic advisor to the 2008 McCain-Palin presidential campaign, which made Wall Street and CEO compensation reform key platform issues. Skydiving into a campaign event, Fiorina had become entangled in the lines of her golden parachute, preventing the chute from fully opening. Skydive experts at the time said she would have plunged to her death had she not had the presence of mind to pull the cord on her bonus chute. Still, she made a hard landing when she said Sarah Palin was unqualified to run a corporation, and the campaign fired her from the media circuit.

Although Fiorina’s tenure at Hewlett Packard was longer lived than her time on McCain’s campaign, she suffered a more devastating crash from HP and was eventually ranked by Portfolio magazine as one of the 20 worst CEOs ever:

“A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005. THE STAT: HP stock lost half its value during Fiorina’s tenure.”

Despite her very public HP failure — or perhaps because of it — Fiorina was determined to prove herself in the public arena, and Boxer’s senate seat became her next target. She reconciled with Palin, who endorsed her in the primary, when Fiorina depended on the conservative Republican vote to topple moderate Republican Tom Campbell.

But just last weekend, noting Palin’s sagging polling numbers, Fiorina declined to appear with her at a Republican event in California. Palin’s husband, Todd, subsequently leaked a scathing email:

“Sarah put her ass on the line for you, Curly [sic]. She thought you were the real deal. But you and me both know you’re no Joe Sixpack. All that crap about starting as a secretary. You pulled yourself up with your family’s gold plated bootstraps. And now you can’t answer a simple invitation with a yes? Please explain how this endorsement stuff works, is it to be completely one sided, cuz if so, you don’t have a wolf’s chance in Wasilla of getting a cabinet seat in Sarah’s administration. You think you can throw a punch, but my Sarah can take you out in one shot! From a helicopter!”

Fiorina’s past job performance was not her only weakness on the campaign trail. She was A-rated pro-life in a pro-choice state. She supported offshore drilling in an anti-drilling state. She supported Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law in a state where 71 percent of Latino voters oppose it. And, in her op-ed piece announcing her campaign she highlighted her failure to exercise her right to vote: “Admittedly, I have not always been engaged in the electoral process, and I should have been.”

One of the few votes Fiorina reported casting was for California’s anti-same-sex marriage ballot measure, Proposition 8. That revelation, apparently intended to woo conservative voters, attracted the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay lobbying organization, which invested in anti-gay, pro-Fiorina advertising targeting Latino voters.

“Wouldn’t you know it!” said Juan Bautista, an independent gay voter, who was passing by Fiorina headquarters when the money bomb exploded. “One of the few times Fiorina bothered to vote, and it was for Prop. 8. What a poop she is, er, was. And the NOM ad, have you seen it? It’s pure manipulation. At least it’s not as bad as that pissy Sharron Angle ad telling Arizona Latinos not to vote at all. ¡Pendejos racistas!”

Most daunting of all Fiorina’s political challenges was her claim to be a jobs champion, which was contradicted by her corporate experience, noted for mass layoffs and outsourcing jobs overseas, strategies that have not been forgotten by California’s workforce.

Pedicab driver Bobby Sneed, who dropped off a fare just before the explosion, had little faith in Fiorina’s commitment to creating jobs for Californians.

“She laid me off from HP, shipped thousands of jobs overseas, and got a $45 million boot out the door. Now I’m essentially unemployed, she’s worth $120 million, and she was asking voters to give her money? Good lord! She wanted the senate badly enough, she should’ve just sucked it up and bought it, like Meg Whitman. Look, Fiorina soared to the corporate heights by whatever means she had at her disposal — and her dad’s telling her she’d never amount to anything surely motivated her — but she lacked the ability to translate her personal ambitions into a vision that captured the voter’s heart. And, I know it’s petty, but I couldn’t get beyond that snarl she was always trying to hide.”

Perhaps feminist activist Gloria Steinem captured the tormented essence of Carly Fiorina best, after Fiorina committed a live microphone faux pas in June:

“We had the prospective joy of two powerful women competing for a U.S. Senate seat. And in a moment of unintended, unedited honesty, what did we get from Fiorina? A pearl of wisdom? A poignant revelation? No. We got a snarky comment about Senator Boxer’s hair. That, Sweetie, is not feminism.”

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Crossposted at The Progressive Post.

Note: Carly Fiorina image from Carly for California campaign ad; Carly punch, from Californians Opposed to Carly Fiorina Facebook page; Carly Out of Control from Carly for CA website.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Mama, what do angels look like?

This, my small kiddo asks. In the throes of divorce. Of making a game of beans and rice. Of sorrow. Of innocent query and wonderment. This she asks, but how shall I answer? What can I say that would not be a lie passing my lips?

In the speckled dark of a sleepless, starry sky, I sit on our hill as she chases shadows in the warm breeze and a coyote pauses beyond the fence that separates us. The hill is ours because we love it. I think it loves us. It makes paths for us around the rabbit holes, the tarantula borrows, the grainy mounds of queens and workers in constant toil. The People say it is a holy place; the altitude puts it a peedy bit closer to the gods. But I am distracted from the possibility of clutching a deity’s apron strings by whispered anguish calling to me from places I cannot pronounce and some I can.

Will the ashes of unwanted wives fertilize the next generation? Will tar balls become the tender of shrimpers and oyster folk? Will children who play with spent artillery shells transcribe the booming rhythm of war into the next amazing rap sensation? I search for hope amidst the moonlit carpet of rabbit turds, brown and rich, the prickly stubble of deer grass, recently shaved by a peon’s scythe, the manzanilla, its soothing ways unrecognized in the wild by those who buy it by the box.

The moon laughs at me and catches my girl, catches her dark curls and darker eyes, twirling into a glowing tornado, spiraling up toward the night, up into a future I fret I cannot affect, and my fear pulls her back to earth. The coyote howls across the hill, and answers echo from a distant canyon. I peer through the grasses to watch her, stymied by the impassable chain-link fence. A border to me, it cuts her world in half. And so she paces, her prey on the other side. And I chew a manzanilla bud, rub the tender skin beneath my skirt. The grass makes me itch. It makes me itch because I love to scratch. And so I scratch as I look out over our little town, ours because we scratch each other.

Why do I love it so here? How dare I raise my child in this place? This place of bitter anger and sweet Peruvian chocolate. Of testicle trees, our avocados, and shocking scarlet bottlebrushes. Of well-repressed, grey-green groves and lusciously chaotic words wending their way behind closed doors, between tussled sheets, into fearful hearts. The heat of conflict radiates from our bodies, our beds, our lands, entangling the legs of a bawdy blend. And I wonder, what’s not to love?

I lie in the dry grass, caressing the stars, eyes languid and wet, and I sense the loss of something, something I might not have ever wanted. The coyote, impatient with human encumbrances, glances at us and trots across the border, free to dine and commune with her own. My kiddo, delighted with discovering her ability to dance, moves deeper into the dark.

Angels? I call.

Oh, never mind, Mama. I just saw one!

And she spins, spins into the sweeping night. Soars out of reach. She is gone. Gone.

Love,
K-B

© 2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

This piece is crossposted at The Progressive Post.

Note: Painting by Kate Gressitt-Diaz.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

The book was a struggle, but I felt duty bound to stay put in my yard chair and honor the author’s effort to finish the thing. Consequently, even a trail of ants, Fallbrook’s ever-present organic waste abatement crews, distracted me from the chore of reading. I watched the good little refuse engineers tidily toting to their nest the remnants of a mourning dove egg, probably dropped from its cedar nest by a murderous Blue Jay. I’d heard a ruckus the day before and ducked inside to avoid its calamitous end. But damn if fate didn’t catch up with me! At least the ants were swift and effective. Perhaps too effective.

I remembered the gift my father sent to my kiddo when she was small enough to still handle insects as though they were playthings. It had been a surprise, a special grandfatherly treat. And, according to the accompanying literature, we all — yes, children and adults alike — were in for hours of entomological fun as we played audience to the life’s work of the inhabitants of Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm.

Actually, said inhabitants of the green petrochemical-based farm were shipped separately, which meant a wait for all that fun we knew was coming our way. In the meantime, we filled the bottom couple inches of the farm with the lily-white synthetic sand provided, and eagerly anticipated the ants’ Herculean feats, their mind-bending commitment to earthmoving, their fastidious exercise of home economics — all the requisite behaviors of a proper ant.

The estimated day of arrival drew near, and we tacked the ant poster that came with the farm to my daughter’s wall. Together, we reviewed Milton’s ageless discourse on the wondrous world of ants. With a couple of honored bugologists in the family, I thought this might prove a prophetic science experience for the kid, soon to graduate from daycare to real school.

At long last, our ants arrived — as expected, only soldier-workers of ambiguous gender. Queens were prohibited from travel. In we poured our new housemates to their escape-proof quarters, while I considered the years of effort I’d previously expended to keep the little bastards out of our home. Nonetheless, we gave them a welcoming honey-water spritz and set them in a place of honor at the dining room table.

Thankfully, Uncle Milton had adequately forewarned us, so we were not surprised when a few ants died the first day or two. This was to be expected. What was a bit disconcerting was the ants’ method of disposing of their dead: They broke down their brethren and, piece by piece, added their teeny black body parts to the white synthetic hills. And, to my maternal dismay, the ants continued dropping like, well, flies. Every day, we awoke to a grislier scene of death and dismemberment as the lily mounds became speckled with the black grains of dissected ant bodies.

In fear for my daughter’s psyche, and not a little grossed out, I poured through Uncle Milton’s brochure, a desperate review in search of advice I might have missed, critical guidance for keeping ants alive and well, but to no avail. The ants continued their unthinking hill building and their dying, only to be recycled as pepper to the sand’s salt by their surviving peers.

As the ant population rapidly dwindled and the hills darkened, I wondered about the significance of the ants’ unnatural existence on my table. Even when confronted with increasing mortality, the soldiers just plodded along, following the mandate of their biology — until the sad day when but one ant remained alive.

A lousy way to start the morning, I groped my way to the kitchen for day-old coffee and the eye dropper of honey-water, and returned to find the sole survivor atop the tallest hill peering skyward. I was grateful that the poor thing was too brainless to experience the bitter isolation of such utter aloneness, too rudimentary to beseech some great ant god in the artificial green sky to end this brutal abandonment. Unwilling to expose my daughter to such angst, I shattered the plastic and dumped the last ant outside in the garbage — to eat himself to a happy end.

I was certain then, as I am now, that we are not intended to keep ant farms on our dining room tables. Any more than we are intended to live in petrochemical plastic and perpetuate our soulless behaviors into our own extinction — our reckless Wall Street finanigans, our natural resource guzzling, our political demolition derbies, our hate-mortared border walls.

But, hey, it was just a bunch of ants, you might say? Yes, and if we don’t do any better than Uncle Milton’s ants, the species in my yard is likely to outlast us all, tidily toting our remnants back to their nests.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

We’re tootling down the 15 Freeway to Coronado, my husband and I, and I’m subjecting him once again to public radio. It goes something like this:

A reporter announces that President Obama has declared the H1N1 influenza outbreak a national emergency, which should improve treatment and prevention of the flu.

Me: Finally!

He: Hmmm.

Me: I wrote about that months ago — caught flak for being a Biden.

He: Hmmm?

Me: For over-reacting. Apparently, the VP and I were fear mongering — in contrast to stating the obvious, which the president has now done.

He: Hmmm.

Then there’s a report on a Saudi female journalist who was sentenced to 60 lashes for her involvement in a Lebanese TV show, “Bold Red Line.” The show featured men discussing their sex lives, a taboo in Saudi Arabia. One of the men was sentenced to five years and 1,000 lashes; two others received two years and 300 lashes each.

Me: Saudi Arabia, now there’s a great ally for the United States, because we abhor cruel and unusual punishment — except when we don’t like the culprit.

He: Hmmm.

Me: Or when the culprit’s Muslim.

He: Hmmm.

Me: Or African-American.

He: Hmmm.

Me: This is nuts!

He: Hmmm!

We listen to a story about the search for Everett Ruess, a beloved 20-year-old poet wanderer who disappeared in 1934. Earlier this year, his remains were erroneously reported as having been discovered — based on inaccurate DNA testing.

Me: Bad DNA testing, jeez! That’ll show up on CSI.

He: Hmmm.

Me: And in plenty of appeals courts. Yet another hit on the taxpayers.

He: Hmmm.

As we approach our destination, we listen to one last story. It’s about the 350.org International Day of Climate Action events that are occurring around the world this weekend. They are intended to remind folks about climate change and the need to work together to decrease the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to 350 parts per million (ppm).

According to the story, though, public interest in climate change is shrinking a lot faster than the carbon dioxide ppm. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found a “very sharp drop” since April 2008 in the percentage of Americans who believe there is “solid evidence the world is warming.”

Me: No evidence? What additional evidence does the public need? How many more polar bears have to starve to death for lack of habitat before they get it? How many more times do scientists have to report increasing temperatures and shrinking glaciers? Can’t they understand it doesn’t have to happen in their backyards to make it real?

He: Hmmm.

Me: Are you listening to me?

He: Turn right on Orange and left on First. Then show your ID at the sentry gate.

We’re there, and I see the telltale double take when the Navy sentries notice the “Don’t Be Gaycist” sticker on my windshield. Then we pull into a parking lot at Naval Air Station North Island, for the commissioning of the USS Makin Island LHD 8, the Navy’s newest amphibious assault ship.

A few thousand of us make our way to the shuttles or stumble over crane tracks, and find our color-coded seating sections. Along the way, we stop to shake hands with all the uniforms my husband knows, but we make it to our seats without my doing anything else overtly liberal.

But then I flip through the program. The cover image appears to be a Photoshopped model ship imposed on a crested sea stock photo. Even the military is cutting costs, which is both reassuring and disconcerting. The ship’s motto, “Gung Ho,” is emblazoned across the image — working together, it means. Inside, color photographs of senior military and government leadership smile at us formidably, starting with the Commander in Chief, President Barack Obama.

Me: Look, Honey. They’re all men. President Obama’s a man. And then there’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a man. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, another man. Naval Operations Chief Admiral Gary Roughead, a man. General James Conway, Commandant of the Marines Corps, definitely a man. Commander, Fleet Forces Command Admiral John Harvey Jr., a man. Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet Admiral Robert Willard, a man. And look, keep turning the pages and it’s man, man, man, man, man, man, idiot actor man — our governor — man, man, man. Where are the women in senior leadership?

He: Hmmm?

Me: The women, where are the women?

He: Hmmm.

The ceremony starts, saving him, and the speechifying begins, although most of the folks keep it thoughtfully short. Congresswoman Susan Davis (D-San Diego) offers a quickie, touting the jobs the newly commissioned ship has brought to San Diego and enthusiastically welcoming the Navy’s first green ship, with it’s way-cool hybrid electric-drive propulsion system.

Me: The Navy invested $2.5 billion in a hybrid amphibious assault ship? That’s pretty damn Gung Ho! What more evidence of global warning could the public possibly need?

He: Hmmm?

The audio system fails, so the band kicks in, to calm the restless natives. And, at last, the flag is raised aboard the ship.

Me: Good marching band, Honey.

He: Yes, that’s the Marine Drum and Bugle Corps. They’re out of D.C., called The Commandant’s Own. There’s none better.

Me: Hmmm.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Survey results chart courtesy of Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

USS Makin Island photos by Kit-Bacon Gressitt.