Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report

State Assemblyman Dan Logue was the torch bearer for Prop. 23, which lost by a landslide in the state. It also lost in our county, which Dan represents.

But you’d never know that from his latest memo. Instead, he is touting the passage of Prop. 26.

“Needless to say the fight to suspend AB 32 was an uphill battle, drawing the ire of the ruling class and Hollywood’s fashionable left. While so many focused their money and attention toward launching biased attacks against Proposition 23, Proposition 26 was able to gain passage unscathed,” Logue writes.

The details are here.

The heart of Dan’s district has the nation’s third-largest unemployment rate. Perhaps it’s time he stick to home, and work harder for his constituents, rather than worry about “Hollywood’s fashionable left.”

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The Grass Valley Planning Commission will meet on Dec. 21 over the flap about whether to open Hospitality House in a light industrial and business park area of Grass Valley.

It is expected to be a one- to two-hour “humdinger” of a public meeting, rivaling or eclipsing the B&B dispute in Nevada City. The issue could well wind up in the lap of City Council as well.

The plan for a new Hospitality House at 964 Golden Gate Terrace — thanks largely to a $1 million grant — has been met with opposition from some adjacent property owners, including a petition opposing the plan by Samba soccer parents, as well as others, as I reported the other day. (Still no follow up on the flap in the local media).

The planning commission staff is recommending that the permit be approved at the Dec. 21 meeting. A meeting to discuss the issue this week was tabled as both sides met with police and city officials to address concerns.

I’ve talked to Joe Heckel of the City of Grass Valley and Cindy Maples, executive director of Hospitality House, about the project as well.

Both acknowledge the concerns but are hopeful that an agreement can be reached. The planning commission would have to find that there was undue concern about safety and health to vote down the use application. Any planning commission decision could be appealed to the city council.

I’m hoping the planning commission does the “right thing” and approves the plan. It could be a “win-win” for the community.

Having said that, the Hospitality House needs to be transparent with its operating plan and vigilant in enforcing the rules and regulations.

Grass Valley developer Rey Johnson, who formerly was on the city planning commission, also owns property in the area.

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Editor’s note: Here’s my FOI records request for documents related to our county clerk-recorder’s other voices of yesterday that stated: “For the second election in a row, I received written accounts from our poll workers that there was intimidation and disruption caused by poll watchers at some of our polling locations. Voters complained to our inspectors that they felt intimidated by some of the poll watchers.” I’ll let you know what it turns up.

November 18, 2010

County Clerk-Recorder
Registrar of Voters
950 Maidu Ave
Nevada City, CA 95959

RECORDS REQUEST

Dear Records Request Officer:

Pursuant to the state open records act, I request access to and copies of

all correspondence with voters and/or poll workers related to this document
http://yubanet.com/regional/Op-Ed-Gregory-Diaz-Let-s-Respect-the-Election-Process.php.

I agree to pay reasonable duplication fees for the processing of this request.

If my request is denied in whole or part, I ask that you justify all deletions by reference to specific exemptions of the act.

Thank you for your assistance.

Sincerely,

Jeff Pelline

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The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Staff Sgt. David P. Senft, 27, of Grass Valley, Calif., died Nov. 15 at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained in a non-combat related incident.

He was assigned to the 5th Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.

The press release is here.

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The social security numbers of 31 City of Nevada City workers were inadvertently put online, I’ve learned.

The social security numbers — part of a PERS document — were inadvertently included in a packet of materials that was posted on the City Hall’s website for Thursday’s planning commission meeting.

They were posted online last Wednesday and removed on Tuesday, City Manager Gene Albaugh confirmed to me. They no longer can be viewed.

“Somebody messed up,” Gene told me. “There’s no excuses.”

The three pages of PERS documents were buried in another 40-page document that outlined plans to add housing to the Nevada City Tech Center. They inadvertently were placed there during the processing and scanning of documents at the City Hall photocopy machine, Albaugh said.

Obtaining somebody’s social security number can lead to credit card fraud and other criminal activity. “Identity theft” is a growing problem on the internet. However, nowadays there are other ways to gain access to a person’s sensitive information with “spiders” that crawl the internet looking for sensitive information about an individual — or just getting ahold of somebody’s credit card receipt.

(I immediately removed the link to the document as soon as I was notified, but it already had been removed from the City Hall’s website.)

Albaugh said he met with the workers, department heads and the city lawyer to discuss the matter. He also notified the city council.

The city said it has done its best to make sure nobody made copies and has safeguards in place to prevent this from happening again.

Transfering hard copies to the internet has sometimes resulted in such snafus.

When I was Editor of CNET News in 1997, I wrote this story:

“Billionaires hire a cadre of high-powered lawyers and security people to guard their privacy, but they may be unwittingly giving out their Social Security numbers to millions of users over the Internet.”

“CNET readily found the Social Security numbers of such leading American businessmen as Time Warner’s vice chairman Ted Turner, Intel’s chairman emeritus Gordon Moore, Hewlett-Packard’s deceased cofounder David Packard, and Microsoft’s cofounder Paul Allen through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Edgar database–all in less than an hour.”

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On the TV and radio show “Democracy Now” the former VP of CIGNA, one of the largest health insurers, disclosed that CIGNA met with other big health insurers to hatch a plan to “push” its critic filmmaker Michael Moore “off a cliff.”

It was planned as an “incredibly intense” PR effort that included an investigation into Moore personally (“about his wife, about his kid,”) as the former CIGNA exec told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.

“The interview contains new revelations about just how frightened the health industry was that ‘Sicko’ might ignite a public wave of support for ‘socialized medicine,’” Moore writes.

WENDELL POTTER [former executive, CIGNA]: …We were concerned that the movie ["Sicko"] would be as successful as “Fahrenheit 9/11″ had been. And we knew that if it were, it really would change public opinion about our health care system in ways that would be harmful to the profits of health insurers. So, it was very important for this [attack] campaign to succeed. At one point during a strategy meeting, one of the people from [the insurance companies' public relations firm] APCO said that if our efforts, our initial efforts, were not successful, then we’d have to move to an element of the campaign to push Michael Moore off a cliff. And not meaning to do that literally, but to—

AMY GOODMAN: Are you sure?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, I’m not sure. To tell you the truth, when I started doing what I’m doing [as a whistleblower], I was concerned about my own health and well-being, maybe just from paranoia. But these companies play to win. And we’re talking about some big bucks at stake here—billions and billions and billions of dollars.

AMY GOODMAN: So what were they talking about when they said, “If this doesn’t work, we’re going to push him off the cliff”?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, it would be just an incredibly intense PR effort, if necessary, to spend more premium dollars to defame Michael Moore, to discredit him even more as a filmmaker.

AMY GOODMAN: So, were you doing research on him?

WENDELL POTTER: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You were going—personally?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, I was a part of the effort. I didn’t—that was part of the reason for hiring APCO and to work with a trade association, is that it relieved me of the responsibility of doing that kind of work. You paid for it to be done by people who were experts in doing that kind of research.

AMY GOODMAN: But they were doing an investigation into him personally?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, absolutely. We knew as much about him probably as he knows about himself.

AMY GOODMAN: About his wife, about his kid, about—

WENDELL POTTER: Oh, yeah. You know, it’s important to know everything that you might be able to use in some kind of a campaign against someone, to discredit them professionally and often personally.

AMY GOODMAN: And did you use that?

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The shares of GM, nicknamed “Government Motors” and derided for its government-funded bankruptcy, are now fueling a rally on Wall Street.

The shares opened at $35, above the IPO price of $33. The IPO fueled a broader market rally on Wall Street, with the Dow up 175 points in morning trading.

“”This is a bit better than people had been projecting. As to a year ago. it’s not even in the same ballpark,” Ron Bloom, the U.S. Treasury official in charge of the GM investment told Reuters Insider. “A year ago, people said ‘you have no exit, you have no strategy. This company is not fixed.’”

Last week GM reported it had returned to profitability and expects to have its first full-year profit since 2004.

Much work needs to be done at GM, but the IPO rally and pricing is encouraging. A growing number of analysts are speculating that taxpayers could break even with the GM investiment with a drastically improved cost structure and better quality product. The details are here.

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