Teena Miller’s amazing fundraising birthday party was for the charity Food is Free Bay Area. What a nice way to raise money to benefit the community, as Teena and JD always do! It was nice to be among many friendly faces here in Vallejo while we celebrated at the Solano County Fairground’s McCormack Hall.
Here are other pictures posted from the event. For this group photo, I had to think fast. I found some reels of packing tape, put them together, and stood on them so that I could almost be seen in the back row.
Here’s a video of my last attempt to remotely convince the Oakland City Council that their Smokefree Multi-Unit Housing ordinance was pathetic. I’m so glad Vallejo at least did it right, without a smoking of cannabis exemption. It’s so short-sighted not to protect all residents of multi-unit housing from second-hand smoke. At least the ordinance improved the lives of bar employees and bar patrons who wish to enjoy fresh air on bar patios.
Here’s the text of what I said (including what got cut off):
“I’m here as a volunteer member of the Alameda County Tobacco Control Coalition speaking on item 5.5. It’s really disappointing that an exception was made for cannabis SMOKING in the attempt to pass a smokefree multi unit housing ordinance. How many times did the doctors and experts without a cannabis lobby agenda have to testify in front of the Oakland City Council that there are a plethora of ways to ingest cannabis that does NOT affect the immune-compromised and otherwise vulnerable neighbors who don’t want smoke wafting into their windows, electric plugs and residential patios? Whose interest is being protected when the Oakland city council only concentrates on the cannabis lobby talking points and not the health of citizens who almost never have the means to pick up and move because they are tormented by the lack of fresh air in their own homes? Medicinal or not, there is no MANDATE that cannabis be smoked even though that has been normalized, and this aspect of the smoke-free policy for Oakland is now just another unenforceable piece of paper posing as an ordinance. I encourage you to revisit this flawed logic. There is no doctor who can honestly say that the healthiest way to ingest cannabis is through particulates entering the lungs. At the same time, at least you got the smoke-free bar patios portion of the ordinance right. For that, I thank the council on behalf of Oakland bar employees and patrons that want fresh air while working or outside consuming drinks. Thank you.”
Here is the entire video of the Consent Item’s public comments. In Oakland they combine all consent item comments at the same time, so some of them are not germane to the 5.5 ordinance on Smokefree Multi-Unit Housing and Bar Patios:
This was very much worth flying back from Hawaii a little earlier! Shea and I took the redeye on Friday night and after a very brief rest I headed over. Shea joined me later. I wasn’t about to do something without my dogs, so I had them the entire time, even though Bonnie was her cranky self and startled a few folks. Fortunately, she’s harmless (but loud). Snoopy, on the other hand, was such a good ambassador, that he even was held by a stranger for her photos since she missed her late dog.
As you can see, once again we had families with kids, dogs, and without sitting with Santa and Mrs. Claus (Tom and Julie).
Thank you to Bill, America, Ted, Shea, and Sara for your contributions to these photos!
Thanks to Big Tobacco, today marks THIRTY-FOUR years since my dad has been gone because of his smoking. He was only 50 years old when he died (the same age as his mom from her smoking), so he could very reasonably be alive today at 84.
This is one of my favorite pictures of him with me. He knew how much I hated his smoking and he thought it was funny when I would draw “Cancer Cures Smoking” signs and tape them to his nightstand. One year for MY birthday, he bought a smoking cessation kit for himself, because he knew how much I wanted him to stop, and this was all before his quintuple bypass at age 48.
Even that didn’t stop him from resuming smoking a month later and within two years an aortic aneurysm caused him to hemorrhage to death in rush-hour traffic on Highway 92 here in the Bay Area. He never regained consciousness and it turned my entire family’s lives upside down, including my immigrant mother who was somewhat lost without him. I had no choice but to step up and protect her and her household with my two younger siblings, so I grew up very fast knowing at that moment what I wanted to concentrate on with my activism when I went to law school (I was still in college on the other side of the country).
I spoke on the consent item with Vallejo receiving about $930,000 in California Department of Justice funds to facilitate the forthcoming Tobacco Retail License.
I also spoke on the action item regarding the first reading of the TRL.
While it isn’t the most robust TRL I had hoped for, finally MY CITY and a second jurisdiction in Solano County (the largest city by far) has now started the process of addressing the historically high commercial tobacco youth sales rates that had no enforcement. This TRL will reduce blights and food deserts, and facilitate far fewer youth from becoming addicts who will die miserably after suffering from tobacco-related illness.
I spoke on the consent calendar and the specific action calendar item with many colleagues and amazing Vallejo youth (some as young as 13). The hashing out of some of the details by the council was frustrating, but at least it’s a pretty strong TRL. The one-time seven-year grace period with which to sell the businesses with the tobacco license exemption to strangers is at least a date certain (January 1, 2032). Still, the licenses to sell to close family members are in perpetuity, unfortunately. Still, we should be able to chip away at the 100 retailers and get it down to the goal of under 50, depending on the population of Vallejo at that time.
I’m very disappointed at the lack of understanding of the penalty structure by most city council members. More years during which time to accumulate the penalties is actually better for enforcement. Still, the council decided only to make the retailers forego the privilege of transferring the license if they are caught three times in one year. Without even ONE mandated check on businesses per year, and all the whining about the lack of resources and the challenges of hiring a coalition partner like Bay Area Community Resources, the odds of any of these bad actor retailers getting caught three times in a year before the tabulation resets is extremely unlikely. We’d have to have the efficiency of the best surgeon to accomplish that kind of monitoring of a single retailer.
Congratulations to my friend and HSNB Volunteer (that’s how I originally met her) Tonya Johnson on winning the title of Miss Vallejo Tri-City!!! She’s an amazing and well-traveled young lady with a passion for animals, so I know she is very deserving of this opportunity.
Several weeks ago we ran into each other at a mayoral candidate’s forum.
Despite all the doctors agreeing with us, they kowtowed to the cannabis industry.
I’m very disappointed that Oakland City Council, where I called in last night with many other tobacco control advocates in the Bay Area, delivered a haphazard ordinance. While I’m thrilled they will have smoke-free bar patios, they included an exemption for cannabis smoke on their smoke-free multi-unit housing ordinance, which renders it toothless and completely unenforceable. Here are my comments (in the video below). At least I’m happy to say that when it came to SFMUH, we passed it CORRECTLY here in Vallejo in 2022!
This is the full video of the item that was discussed on November 12:
I know it’s cliche, but all politics are local works on many levels. Unfortunately, the clown show that will soon be the federal government, full of corruption and misinformation, is going to bring hell to the USA and the world. Many innocents will die unnecessarily for many reasons (Ukrainians, Gazans, pregnant people, etc.) just to suit the ego of a few people, and in particular one extremely flawed man in decline. I predict mass incarceration and police brutality will be emboldened, together with the racism that promptly saw the harassment of Black people with texts asking them to pick cotton the day after the election.
If there’s any good news from my perspective about the 2024 elections, it’s that with local politics things went the way I had hoped. I supported my friend Andrea Sorce for mayor of my city of Vallejo and she was victorious, even though I like the other three candidates and have known two of them for a while. Our new state senator I got to meet on election night at Andrea’s election party and he remembered me from our zooms and emails, which was nice. Christopher Cabaldon is a gay half-European/half-Filipino guy just like Shea and was a very successful mayor of West Sacramento. Cassandra James is northern Vallejo’s supervisor officially now, although I’m not her constituent. Similarly, my friend Alex Matias is for District 1 in northern Vallejo, but he was victorious. My new city councilmember, Tonia Lediju, is my friend and she was uncontested in her bid to run for that office.
I am grateful to live in this state (California) but really done with the USA experiment. I have had so much respect for those who have served in the military including so many in my family (soon to be five generations). However, American pride is really gone when I think about how the electorate in disproportionately powerful states are invoking the worst of the puritanical roots of this country’s political origin.
Yes I’m lucky that I am eligible for European citizenship, even though Italy itself, the country through which I can obtain that citizenship, has a fascist bitch at the helm. However, that country still has universal healthcare and a high standard of living, even based on my own family’s prosperity. Almost all of them have a vacation home in addition to their primary home, which they own. They work far fewer hours and have vastly more time off from work.
I woke up this morning considering throwing my US flag in the garbage. I used to insist on having it out for every holiday that was appropriate to show that a liberal like me would still always identify as American. I don’t think I can bring myself to do that again, even if the next president is a butch, full melanin, indigenous Latina trans woman. I would say, “great,” but it will never reverse allowing Bush 2 to get the popular vote the second time because he used racist electoral college methods to steal the presidency the first time. Very similarly the name recognition of Felon McRapist was something the ignorant American electorate gravitated to rather than another overqualified, experienced, and competent woman.
Cults are a real problem and misinformation is rampant. Things are not going to get better, but the white supremacists will go to the ends of the earth to maintain their power.
He doesn’t know what a tariff is. He doesn’t know what a socialist or fascist is. Everything is a word salad and the man is declining, with a 39-year-old nutjob as his VP pick.