.Debriefer: January 20, 2016

The only story this paper will ever publish about coyotes, and not once does Tom Gogola refer to them as 'wiley.' What's happening to journalism!

QUIZZICAL COYOTES

A mystery of sorts has been solved that involved a coyote, a car and a problem. It seems one or two coyotes have been hanging by the side of Highway 1 down in West Marin, near the Slide Ranch. The coyotes have been staring down drivers and then attacking the cars. Nobody’s been hurt, but someone is going to get hurt if they don’t stop feeding the coyotes, which Lisa Bloch at the Marin Humane Society says is the likeliest culprit for the ongoing attacks on vehicles.

There’s a slogan, she says, that people in Sonoma and Marin counties need to abide: “A fed coyote is a dead coyote.” The idea is that the coyotes get comfortably aggressive around humans once they’ve been fed by the hand of one. “We want them to be afraid of us naturally,” Bloch says. “If they are not afraid of us, they come close to our cars, get hit, fight with domestic dogs and can possibly become aggressive.”

WROTH SETTLEMENT

Last week, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors voted to approve a settlement reached late last year in the U.S. District Court that will find the county paying $1.25 million to Esa Wroth, who sued the county
after he said he was Tasered
more than 20 times at the Main Adult Detention Center. In the settlement, the county agreed to pay $1.25 million while Wroth agreed to drop his lawsuit against individual sheriff’s department officials named in the suit. The county also admitted no liability in the agreement, says Deputy Sonoma County Counsel
Josh Myers.

STATE OF THE HYSTERICS

A funny thing happened during last week’s presidential State of the Union address, Barack Obama’s final send-off to congress—unless Glenn Beck is right and Obama’s going to seize power for all eternity. You never know. Failing that, the SOTU speech was delivered while 10 American Navy sailors were being held by Iran after their boats had inadvertently entered Iranian waters the day before. Republican hysteric-candidates to a man, and woman, condemned the weak Obama for not immediately bombing Iran for taking “hostages” and making them sit there in
their socks, on Persian rugs no less—yet they made no similar demand about other imprisoned Americans in Iran, even as the brother of Jason Rezaian was
Rep. Jared Huffman’s guest at the SOTU. No calls for the bombing of Iran over an American journalist held in captivity for many months on bogus charges, but lots of calls for bombing the country even as Secretary of State John Kerry secured the release of the sailors within 24 hours?

That seemed a little weird, and showed the candidates for what they are: a bunch of opportunistic hotheads. Rezaian is (or was) the Washington Post reporter held on espionage charges in Tehran, and after Obama refused to bomb Iran and instead resorted to that pesky and un-American concept of diplomacy to free the 10 soldiers—there he was again a couple of days later, another moment of goddamned American weakness as he freed even more Americans from Iran, as the GOP sputter-monkeys kept up the call for bombs, bombs and more bombs. Welcome home, Jason Rezaian.

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