Saturday, January 21, 2017

RAW: Violent anti-Trump protest near Inauguration

San Rafael Protests for Sanctuary Cities and against President Trump 1/20/2017

Marin Politicians want to increase the cap on Sales Taxes!

TAM seeks support for Marin local sales tax cap exemption

Local Marin school bus service is one of several transportation services that could benefit if the state Legislature grants a 0.5 percent local sales tax cap exemption for the county.
Local Marin school bus service is one of several transportation services that could benefit if the state Legislature grants a 0.5 percent local sales tax cap exemption for the county. Frankie Frost – Marin Independent Journal
The Transportation Authority of Marin is seeking support from local municipalities for state legislation that would authorize a local sales tax cap exemption.
The existing half-cent sales tax that funds the authority’s Marin transportation projects expires in 2025. Lifting the cap would make it possible for the authority to ask voters to increase that sales tax.
“We’re on the agenda of every city in Marin,” said Dianne Steinhauser, the authority’s executive director. The Fairfax Town Council was slated to discuss the item Wednesday; the item is on Novato’s agenda for Jan. 24.
The San Rafael City Council voted 4-1 Tuesday to take no action on the proposed legislation, with Mayor Gary Phillips dissenting.
“I think we need more community input, both on transportation projects and on how a high sales tax rate would affect our community,” said Councilwoman Kate Colin. “How does it affect our ability to attract businesses? How does it affect people’s ability to pay it, especially in low-income communities? What are the ramifications of raising a sales tax cap?” Colin added that she wanted more information on which transportation projects were proposed.
Steinhauser acknowledged that the expenditure plan hasn’t been developed yet and staffers don’t know what might be included.

Editor's Note: Well that sort of comes first doesn't it? TAM wants a blank check. Yeah right.  Of course they want more of our money. 

Friday, January 20, 2017

WHAT’S SCARIER THAN TRUMP? THE ELITE REVOLT AGAINST HIM


WHAT’S SCARIER THAN TRUMP? THE ELITE REVOLT AGAINST HIM



TOM SLATER
DEPUTY EDITOR


Commentators, celebs, the CIA – all are in open revolt against democracy.




20 JANUARY 2017

Today’s the day. Any minute now Donald J Trump will be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States of America. Hair Force One is about to land. And it will be a historic moment. Not because Trump is the saviour of the ‘forgotten’ men and women of America, as he put it outside the Lincoln Memorial last night. Nor because he’s some sort of white-supremacist counter-revolutionary about to awake an army of goose-stepping pussy grabbers, as his more vociferous critics would have it. But because, in plumping for Trump, the electorate dealt a blow to technocracy, to a narrow, elitist status quo, to a caste of people who openly revile them, and who are now in open revolt against them.

The word ‘unprecedented’ is chucked around a lot in relation to Trump. And indeed he is. Not only has he crashed like a tangerine wrecking-ball through the modern political consensus, he’s potentially the first president-elect to be sworn in while the question of whether he wanted to be president is still an open one. In spite of his colossal ego, its likely he never thought he would win; many still think this was a publicity stunt for Trump TV gone horribly, horribly wrong. That’s why there’s a postmodern feel to it, an air of unreality. While Obama cultivated his coastal luvvie persona, appearing like a Daily Show pundit turned president, Trump is more of a Kardashian. And his 3am tweets now break the internet on a daily basis.

But what’s also ‘unprecedented’, and far more destructive, is the reaction to him. Ever since Trump arrived on the political scene commentators have chided him for breaking ‘democratic norms’ – from his spreading of ‘birther’ conspiracy theories about Obama to his threat to lock up Hillary. But the American elite, in a post-vote fit of pique, has decided to break the biggest democratic norm of them all: respecting the result of a freely held election. Because there’s another word that has been flung at Trump in the days approaching his inauguration: ‘illegitimate’. And this isn’t just being uttered by trustifarian protesters, due to descend on Washington en masse in a tantrum-like demo against democracy. It’s being uttered by broadsheet commentators and respected political leaders.

Dozens of congressmen are due to boycott the inauguration, following the lead of civil-rights leader John Lewis, who told CNN last week that ‘I do not see this president-elect as a legitimate president’. He said ‘the Russians participated in helping this man get elected, and they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton’. But this is only a convenient excuse. The allegations about Trump being in league with or in hock to Russia amount to a whisper campaign. The infamous dossier which alleged collusion between Russia and Trump, and the existence of a certain, urine-drenched video tape, is completely unsubstantiated, a collection of memos about things that ex-MI6 man Christopher Steele – collecting ‘oppo research’ for Trump’s Republican and Democratic opponents – was told by unnamed sources in the FSB.

And every step of the way, the campaign against Trump has been aided by the US intelligence agencies. The CIA is currently in open warfare with him. Whether or not the CIA leaked the dossier to the press – as Trump claims – we may never know. But it both lent credence to these claims and triggered their publication when the CIA and FBI decided to brief President Obama, Trump and certain members of Congress on the claims. The dossier had been lying in journalists’ in-trays for months, as they all struggled to corroborate it. Though Buzzfeed was wrong to print what remained little more than intelligence-community rumours, it was effectively given an excuse to do so when news of the briefings broke; a semi-public-interest defence could now be cobbled together.


The Dark Trump Rises





Thursday, January 19, 2017

Happy "Che Guevara is Dead" Day

Next time your kid comes home in a Che Guevara T-shirt, ask him if he knows what the Cuban murderer of Cubans actually stood for. Sit him down, strip the gauze of ignorance from his eyes and have him read these Guevara quotes.
Then burn the damn T-shirt.
1. “Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!”
che guevara quotes
The only good Che Guevara is a dead Che Guevara
2. “Blind hate against the enemy creates a forceful impulse that cracks the boundaries of natural human limitations, transforming the soldier in an effective, selective and cold killing machine. A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary.”
3. “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary … These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution!”
4. “A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the The Wall!” The Wall is a reference to the wall where Che’s enemies stood before his firing squads.
5. “I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ … I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don’t get nailed to a cross or any other place.”
6. “If any person has a good word for the previous government that is good enough for me to have him shot.”
7. Che wanted the result of the Cuban missile crisis to be an atomic war. “What we affirm is that we must proceed along the path of liberation even if this costs millions of atomic victims.”
8. “In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm.”
9. “Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”
10. “It’s a sad thing not to have friends, but it is even sadder not to have enemies.”

Obama Supporters Vs. Trump Supporters on the Election and Healthcare


Wednesday, January 18, 2017

A look back at 2013 " CSD Directors have a champagne toast to themselves and we pick up the tab. (Highlight Video 1 minute 20 seconds)


See related story in the Marin IJ HERE

From Leah's NextDoor posting on 11/11/2013:

Gerald, that is insulting to say the least. I chose my infant daughter over campaigning and we all know the CSD has not a shred of jurisdiction over housing issues. Please start attending the CSD meetings to see for yourself instead of attacking people like myself who you've never taken the time to meet or contact. I have spent 4 years getting sitters so I could volunteer my time for our community as a member of the board. It's this kind of unneighborly and uncivil behavior that can lead to no good. The vocal tea party minority may have "won" the election. There will be a steep learning curve for the new board members and I assume the community will be holding them to the same standards. My husband and I have been frankly horrified by the ignorant rhetoric around low-incoming housing and it appears that well educated, open minded folks who want to make the world a better place through education and housing for all, even if that means paying a few extra b ucks for it, are sadly, few and far between. If I learned anything in graduate school it was that economics matter. Social justice matters. We are all only here for a short time - why not work to make the world a better place for all than hold on so tightly to a closed minded self righteous attitude? I ask you, how does it make you feel to attack someone you've never met in a public forum? do you think that has gained you friends, followers, respect? As a mother of 2 young girls, do you think I should teach them that this is how one responds to differences in opinion?

See related post from 11/11/2013 Marin IJ Story  HERE

and residents letters to the editor reacting to the story  on 11/13/2013 HERE

The champagne toast is over and now we must pick up the tab.



HUD attacks Westchester County. Wake Up call. Will Trump force low income housing in Marin?



This video is from 2013  while under the Obama Administration HUD policies. Will Trump carry forth the same AFFH policy (Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing) which forces communities to build low income housing exclusively for minorities in areas of high concentration of white residents.  It presumes that racism exists anytime the demographic makeup of a neighborhood does not reflect the ideal racial mix.

Marinwood-Lucas Valley in particular is the target for the Marin County Supervisors since they control unincorporated Marin County development policies with three out of five votes.    Since we only can vote for one supervisor for our district, the supervisors are immune from negative consequences of their votes.

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

How to evaluate a Regional Plan by Randal O'Toole

Speech isn't Dangerous but Censorship Is.

Milo isn’t dangerous, but censorship is

The equation of words and violence harms open debate.
But the prospect that Yiannopoulos stands to profit from a boycott should trouble his opponents less than the chilling effect of consumer book boycotts on speech. As the National Coalition Against Censorship points out, boycotts like this are increasingly familiar: ‘We are aware of at least seven other similar situations involving threats or fears of boycotts, four of which were successful in having books withdrawn, delayed, revised, or not reprinted.’ As boycotts become more common, corporate media may become less willing to publish controversial books, right and left. Simon & Schuster’s entire publishing enterprise, not just the Yiannopoulos screed or the imprint publishing it, is being targeted, which means that Yiannopoulos could prosper while the company and other authors suffer.
Of course, boycotts are themselves a protected form of speech in the US. Accusing boycotters of censorship confuses private protests of speech with state actions (like hate-speech bans) against it. As private citizens, consumers have obvious rights to organise against books they disdain and the companies that disseminate them. Besides, consumer preferences have always determined what and who gets published or aired in commercial marketplaces. You might say that when consumers boycott media companies they’re hoisting them with their own petards.

Boycotts present political, not legal issues, and they require sober political judgements, often absent from our battles over allegedly harmful speech. ‘If there were ever a man whose book should be treated as a weapon, it’s Milo Yiannopoulos’, Sady Doyle proclaims in Elle, referencing a familiar, false equation between speech and action, between advocacy and incitement. The ‘harassment’ his speech encourages is actually ‘a violent assault’, she asserts, warning that publishing his rants will ‘endanger human lives’. Yiannopoulos must revel in this rhetoric, as Doyle acknowledges. He calls his forthcoming book Dangerous, exploiting the sensational reputation that outraged critics have helped him establish.

People who fear that books can kill are unlikely to be persuaded that metaphoric ‘violence of the word’ is not, in fact, the equivalent of actual violence, and a book is not a weapon, unless you plan on hitting people over the head with it. They will not accept the narrow, constitutional definition of incitement as speech intended and likely to cause imminent violence. (At most, Yiannopoulos has been accused of advocacy that effectively encourages other people to threaten violence.)
They will not heed proverbial pleas from free-speech advocates to engage in the marketplace of ideas, by countering ‘bad’ speech with ‘good’ speech, not boycotts, and by disavowing demands for hate-speech laws that increase state power to decide what we may and may not say. While internet trolls flourish and people are subjected to doxing and death threats for challenging them, ‘good speech’ can reasonably seem fraught with risk.

An open marketplace of ideas has always been an ideal. In practice, the marketplace has been partly controlled by wealth and corporate power. But even in the wake of late 20th-century media conglomeration it was still a serviceable, functional ideal and a foundational one for free speech. Does it remain so?

The 21st-century marketplace seems increasingly dysfunctional, posing a primary challenge to free-speech advocates today. The dysfunction will only become more acute as America’s incoming tweeter-in-chief continues lashing out at critics to his nearly 20million followers. Remember the 18-year-old girl who asked candidate Trump a question about abortion rights and equal pay during a forum? He described her as an ‘arrogant’, ‘nasty’ young woman in a tweet, and his fans responded by threatening to brutalise her. Who can blame her for being scared (‘I didn’t really know what anyone was going to do’, she said), and how can we convince her not to retreat from a raucous, sometimes vicious marketplace to ‘safe spaces’ of like-mindedness?

That’s one question at the heart of our debates about speech. We can at least assure her that she has a right not to be targeted with explicit threats of violence. Actual threats, narrowly defined, forfeit constitutional protection, although, as a practical matter, they can be difficult to control.
But we can’t assure her that she won’t be excoriated for her views; we can’t protect her from feeling demeaned or intimidated. There’s no avoiding the hard fact that freedom of speech, like freedom generally, requires considerable fortitude. Safe spaces for speech aren’t free. Free speech isn’t safe.
Is Milo Yiannopoulos dangerous? He’d like us to think so. But he depends on the outrage he provokes, which his offended listeners have the power to withhold. We can speak and act against bigotry without engaging directly with bigots who won’t reason with us, and without trying to silence them. Yiannopoulos’s rants, epithets and insults aren’t threats; they’re taunts and demands for attention. Let’s not give it to him.

Wendy Kaminer is a lawyer and writer, and a former national board member of the American Civil Liberties Union. She is the author of several books, including: A Fearful Freedom: Women’s Flight from Equality (1990); I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional (1992); and Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity and the ACLU (2009).
This article was first published in the Boston Globe on 10 January 2017.

A World without Racism

A World without Racism




Let’s drop our tribal divisions and unite as Americans.
By Zack Wright — August 8, 2016


Racism is not a problem in the United States Marine Corps. There is no distinction between black or white Marines — or any color in between. Drill instructors, NCOs, and commanding officers alike teach their men that there are no races in the Marines — to the Corps, whether you are light green or dark green is irrelevant. We are all green, and that is all that matters. For many decades, Marines of all different shades have fought, bled, and died beside each other. Promotion is based on performance scores, not on race. Discipline is based on individual action, not on race. Marines identify as Marines, not as a race.

If more Americans discarded the divisive labels that are thrust upon us every day by government policy, progressive ideology, and popular culture, we would have a much more united, less factionalized, less racist society.

One of the first things I remember being taught in life is that skin color does not matter. Discrimination, segregation, and hatred are wrong. Separate is not equal. I took this nugget of truth to heart and I have tried to live my life in a manner that confirms that ideal. Race is an artificial human social construction, a construction which has been a powerful force in conquest, enslavement, segregation, apartheid, murder, and genocide. Race is a negative force; it is a way for people to justify division and separation between groups of people.

Just over 100 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt, in a famous speech, called for discarding the hyphen that many Americans carried as part of their identity. He argued that maintaining the hyphen in American society, would lead to the eventual destruction of America. “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all,” Roosevelt said, “would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

RELATED: Identity Politics Are Ripping Us Apart

Last year, then–Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal echoed this sentiment when he said of his parents, “They weren’t coming [to America] to raise ‘Indian-Americans.’ They were coming to raise Americans.” Jindal proclaimed that he was tired of hyphenated Americans, a practice which only divides us.

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. called for the end of racism in America. He dreamed that we would “one day live in a nation” where Americans “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Unfortunately, our nation has changed from the United States I knew in my youth to the country that we live in today. While I concede that my perspective has changed from that of a child to that of an adult, I believe that our country — while never having fully succeeded in discarding racism in the past — has regressed in the last decade. It’s true that the evil, government-sanctioned horror that was chattel slavery and Jim Crow are long gone. Public schools have been integrated for more than four decades. In theory all U.S. citizens are equal under the law. In 2008, we elected a black president.

RELATED: America’s Balkan Values

Yet despite these signs of progress, today we are mired in a backward-trending divisive ideology of self-segregation, fruitless categorization, and tribalism. I watched in profound sadness and disappointment in the winter of 2014 when, in the midst of the terrible self-destructive riots in Ferguson, Mo., President Obama, the man with the perhaps greatest opportunity to lead our country into reconciliation and unity since Reconstruction, instead further divided our country. I was listening, waiting to be led to a new America, and he left me disappointed and Ferguson burning.

The end state of the progressive ideology that celebrates and reinforces race as an important distinction in employment, crime, education, and politics is a society that is further split into warring factions. It is rolling back the spirit of E Pluribus Unum. Instead of uniting the country as one, it seeks to divide us based on the color of our skin. Our young people are assaulted by a racial ideology that tears us apart. Divisive jokes, slurs, nicknames, and categorization confront our youth every day. Rap songs, social media, and popular culture all reinforce that divide instead of minimizing it. But instead of finding ways to move past these troubles, progressive ideology seeks to normalize racial slurs rather than eliminate them.

I have experienced racism in my life. Things have been assumed about me because of my appearance. I have been called slurs. I have gotten in fights. I, too, have been categorized against my will. I am one of the millions of Americans who does not fit into the convoluted categories and divisions that government policy and racial ideology try to force us into. I refuse to be categorized based on my skin color or ancestry by anyone — but especially by the government.

In order to exercise your constitutional right to buy a firearm in the United States you must fill out the ATF 4473 form from which a background check is conducted. Buyers are required by our government to categorize themselves by answering two questions: Question 10A on ethnicity requires you to check “Hispanic or Latino” or “Not Hispanic or Latino”; Question 10B requires a buyer to define himself by choosing at least one of: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, or White.

RELATED: The Race-Obsessed Left Has Released a Monster It Can’t Control

Archaic classification systems are non-scientific, flawed, divisive, and pointless. How should a person answer whose parents and ancestors were Arabs born in Egypt? What about white people born in New Zealand? Are they not Pacific Islanders? Is it not insane that Lebanese, Pashtun, Bengali, Tamil, Turkish, Cambodian, Indonesian, and, of course, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans are all classified by our government as “Asian”?

One of the most insulting incarnations of racism today is the idea of race-based voting. Whenever politicians and media predict the outcome of the “Black vote” or the “Latino vote,” I cringe. How is it not racist for someone to assume — or even expect — an individual to vote based on the color of his or her skin? What is more racist than to ascribe a person’s political views to her physical appearance? Should not a person vote his conscience? Should not experience, philosophy, religion, economic status, residency, education, occupation, and morality have far more to do with an individual’s political perspective than his or her pigmentation? Expecting someone to think, behave, or vote a certain way based on skin color is as racist as segregation. And yet many who dare dissent from the politics they are expected to hold based on skin color are often called traitors or Uncle Toms.

I am a conservative American who hates racism. I am in fact actively anti-racist: I want to live my life in a way so that my tiny corner of the universe is positively improved by practicing anti-racism. What is the end state of divisive racial ideology? It is unending division. For progressives, is there ever a point where Asian Americans, African Americans, European Americans, Hispanic Americans (another socially constructed category — arbitrarily divided from Native Americans) can just be Americans? Not that I’m aware of. Progressive ideology seems to want to divide us — permanently.

Alternatively, the admittedly far-off and idealistic goal for American society from a conservative perspective is color blindness. If race shouldn’t matter in how we judge individuals, let’s treat it like it doesn’t matter. Let’s remove race as a criterion for consideration. Conservatives should work toward a society where nothing is influenced or decided based on the color of a person’s skin. A truly uniting policy would be to move beyond these feudal bonds of socially constructed imprisonment. Let us cast off any stereotypes, assumptions, benefits, grievances, or impairments based on the amount of melanin in a person’s hide.

Encouragingly, there is a precedent for this idea in American history — when disparate groups of English, Dutch, German, Swedish, Welsh, and Scottish colonists became, simply, American. Later, the Poles and Italians became Americans. The Irish — once thought to be too different to ever truly assimilate into our culture — became Americans. During the First World War many Americans of Germans descent made tangible changes in their customs and culture to become, simply, Americans.

I am not advocating that you forget your heritage or ancestry. As free men and women, by all means celebrate your ancestry and heritage as you please, but remember that we are an American Nation, and that “American” is our nationality — something far more important and unifying than the artificial and destructive concept of race.

So let me join with President Roosevelt and Governor Jindal in calling for an end to hyphenated Americans. Let us drop our tribal divisions and embrace our shared heritage and nationality. Let us unite as Americans. Let us remember that separate is not equal. I hope that, as Americans, we will move toward a color-blind, post-race, and post-racist society. That is the only way to end racism.

— Zack “Cookie” Wright was a sergeant in Lima Company, Third Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment and is a veteran of the Iraq War.

Monday, January 16, 2017

San Francisco "Send them to Marin!"



Urban Habitat's Bob Allen speaks at Bay Guardian conference June 12, 2013. His solution to displacement of African Americans and Latinos in San Francisco is to force more urban growth in suburban and rural counties like Marin, Sonoma and Napa. He completely misses the irony that his "solution" is to for other communities to deal with it. He claims that community's who call for "local control" are racist, segregationists. Because of this, no money from HUD or MTC should be given unless a growth policy is adapted. A better solution is a regional government which would eliminate local control. He also implies that Marin is filled with Agenda 21 conspiracy theorists. Urban Habitat receives its funding through public and private donations and income from its litigation. Allen utterly ignores the plight of ethnic communities. Don't they need local control too? Wouldn't "local control" allow for communities of color to stay intact? In Chinatown, the Mission, Hunters Point communities suffer while the social engineers cause the disruption and displacement of thousands.