Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report

Our resident pseudo intellectual, hard-right activist and Simi Valley “escapee” — George Rebane — is running out of local poker pals on his blog. Five to seven poker pals is considered ideal, but George has fallen below that.

—Russ Steele, the global warming denier and friend of Dr. Anthony Watt, is no longer a local. He relocated “off the hill.”

—Rich Ulery, former chairman of the local GOP, has moved to Arizona.

—”Scott O,” who embraces George’s ignorant definition of “rag head,” has moved to Idaho.

—”Fish, who often pollinates the site with his total nonsense, never lived here in the first place.

Who of his like-minded poker pals remain? Todd, Gregory, Don Bessee, and Bill Tozer. And that’s about it.

This speaks volumes about the eroding local base of George’s like-minded compadres — set against the backdrop of an aging and declining population. Tough times!

“At least four people were dead, including a suspect, and 15 people injured after a gunman cut through a security fence and opened fire on a crowd Sunday evening near the end of the Gilroy Garlic Festival, sending panicked festival goers running for their lives,” the Mercury News is reporting.

“It’s sort of a nightmare you hope to never have to live,” said Gilroy Police Chief Scot Smithee.

Brian Bowe, the executive director of the Gilroy Garlic Festival, said the Gilroy community was “family.”

“We have the wonderful opportunity in the community to celebrate our family through our garlic festival, and for over four decades that festival has been our annual family reunion.

“And it is such a sad, just horribly upsetting circumstance that this happened on the third and final day of the festival,” Bowe said.

—San Jose Mercury News, CNN and other media

DoorDash, the leading on-demand food delivery service, has quietly launched in our area — the latest sign of tech-driven food delivery and rideshare expanding into the Sierra Foothills, this blog has learned.

DoorDash lists 36 restaurants near our 95959 zip code, including Big A Rootbeer Drive In, Pete’s Pizza, Cirino’s, Kaido, Tofanelli’s, Diegos, Jernigan’s, Lefty’s, Treats, Friar Tuck’s and others.

We like to eat out at our local restaurants. But we tried DoorDash this weekend, ordering burgers, milk shakes, cole slaw and onion rings from Big A. DoorDasher Eric delivered our lunch within half an hour and said it is being well received. It started about a week ago, he said. We ate our burgers while watching the Giants’ baseball game.

DoorDash is one of a growing number of technology companies that uses the internet (via PCs, tablets and mobile phones) to provide on-demand food delivery.

We’e a small market compared with the big cities that these companies serve, but our retiree population could make it appealing for them. Some people don’t like to drive — or can’t. Others don’t like to cook. It also could provide extra, incremental revenue for our local restaurants.

San Francisco-based DoorDash was founded in 2013 by Stanford students, and its backers include Silicon Valley venture capitalists, such as Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and others.

Along with DoorDash, our area now is served by Uber for ride sharing and Instacart for grocery delivery.

We’ve regularly used services such as Doordash when we’re staying in big cities or traveling on vacation, as well as the ride share services. Our mobile phones are equipped with DoorDash and Uber apps for out-of-town travel.

“In case anyone missed it, the president of the United States had some choice words to describe Maryland’s 7th congressional district on Saturday morning,” the Baltimore Sun writes in an editorial. “Here are the key phrases: ‘no human being would want to live there,’ it is a ‘very dangerous & filthy place,’ ‘Worst in the USA’ and, our personal favorite: It is a ‘rat and rodent infested mess.’ He wasn’t really speaking of the 7th as a whole. He failed to mention Ellicott City, for example, or Baldwin or Monkton or Prettyboy, all of which are contained in the sprawling yet oddly-shaped district that runs from western Howard County to southern Harford County. No, Donald Trump’s wrath was directed at Baltimore and specifically at Rep. Elijah Cummings, the 68-year-old son of a former South Carolina sharecropper who has represented the district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1996.

“It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. The congressman has been a thorn in this president’s side, and Mr. Trump sees attacking African American members of Congress as good politics, as it both warms the cockles of the white supremacists who love him and causes so many of the thoughtful people who don’t to scream. President Trump bad-mouthed Baltimore in order to make a point that the border camps are ‘clean, efficient & well run,’ which, of course, they are not — unless you are fine with all the overcrowding, squalor, cages and deprivation to be found in what the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector-general recently called ‘a ticking time bomb.’

“In pointing to the 7th, the president wasn’t hoping his supporters would recognize landmarks like Johns Hopkins Hospital, perhaps the nation’s leading medical center. He wasn’t conjuring images of the U.S. Social Security Administration, where they write the checks that so many retired and disabled Americans depend upon. It wasn’t about the beauty of the Inner Harbor or the proud history of Fort McHenry. And it surely wasn’t about the economic standing of a district where the median income is actually above the national average. No, he was returning to an old standby of attacking an African American lawmaker from a majority black district on the most emotional and bigoted of arguments. It was only surprising that there wasn’t room for a few classic phrases like ‘you people’ or ‘welfare queens’ or ‘crime-ridden ghettos’ or a suggestion that the congressman ‘go back’ to where he came from.

“This is a president who will happily debase himself at the slightest provocation. And given Mr. Cummings’ criticisms of U.S. border policy, the various investigations he has launched as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, his willingness to call Mr. Trump a racist for his recent attacks on the freshmen congresswomen, and the fact that “Fox & Friends” had recently aired a segment critical of the city, slamming Baltimore must have been irresistible in a Pavlovian way. Fox News rang the bell, the president salivated and his thumbs moved across his cell phone into action.”

The rest of the editorial is here.

Our loud, local wackadoodles/pseudo intellectuals/Trumpsters/global warming deniers/(insert here) went ballistic when The Union publisher stated what the rest of us know in his column “Impeach me, please.” The response reminded me of a a verbal version of the torch-wielding mob in Frankenstein (see video below). Of course, Don is not alone. Here’s more:

–”Trump can hardly run a reelection campaign on policy triumphs. His polling results show him trailing the top four Democrats: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris. And so he will sling as much filth as possible and hope his base comes out in sufficient numbers. This is what he knows how to do. This time around he will shout about ‘socialism’ and ‘You can leave.’ He will make ugly caricatures of ‘the Squad’ —the four members of Congress whom he targeted this weekend.” — David Remnick, New Yorker

–”Donald Trump’s tweets, this past weekend, were of vintage racist stock. To tell someone to ‘go back’ to the ‘places from which they came,’ as Trump did, clearly addressing four congresswomen of color—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib—is stereotypical, lowest-common-denominator racism, embedded in familiar scripts and powered by old tropes. ” — Doreen St. Félix, New Yorker

– S&P 500 Has Performed Far Worse Under Trump Than Under Obama “When it comes to talking himself up, Trump in particular has compared himself to Barack Obama. So, how do the two presidents measure up in terms of growth in major indexes, measured between their inauguration and May 31 of their third year in office? The short answer is that Trump has quite a way to go. Under Obama, the S&P 500 grew by 56.4%. The Dow Jones Industrials Average was up 50.6% and the Nasdaq, 92.9%. The numbers under Trump were 21.4% for the S&P 500, 25.2% for the Dow, and 34.2% for Nasdaq.” —Fortune

The summer issue of Sierra FoodWineArt magazine is at digital.sierraculture.com.

Our theme: “Everything old is new again.” It points to the history of Lake Tahoe’s wooden boats; Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent purchase of two iconic Old Tahoe estates; and the ongoing renovation of two of the oldest hotels west of the Mississippi — the National Hotel and The Holbrooke in the Sierra Foothills.

The issue also cites the naming of Grass Valley-Nevada City and Truckee as California Cultural Districts, a prestigious statewide designation to help preserve the past.

Our magazine includes travel guides for Auburn, Grass Valley, Nevada City and Truckee; articles on the BriarPatch, farm-to-table cooking, and wine & food festivals; as well as a feature on the art and poetry that is aimed at building local knowledge of the recent devastating fires (and hopes to foster emergency preparedness). This includes a $75,000 award to local poet Molly Fisk from the Academy of American Poets.

Our cover features Saga, a 1930, 38-foot Chris-Craft commuter photographed by Steven Lapkin. Edward and Deborah Scott named their boat after the book “The Saga of Lake Tahoe,” written by Edward’s father.

On a personal note, I’ve known Ed for years. He is a retired general counsel at Chevron Corp., whom I got to know when I covered the oil giant for the San Francisco Chronicle between the mid-’80s and mid-’90s. We remain in touch.

The issue also includes extensive photos of Lapkin’s boating photography. Steven writes: ““What makes a picture stunning isn’t the gear or technology, it’s the story. In my wooden boat work, my main focus is on the subjects, and the vibrant, realistic lighting so that you-see-what-I-see through the lens. I feel the details and nuances: the water droplets, the wake, the glistening chrome, and fine gloss finishes.”

We also show Steven’s photos of the America’s Cup yachts, including Team Oracle’s wing-sail catamaran in front of the Golden Gate Bridge (see pages 2-3 of our new issue).