Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/577975
GregStevens,Publisher Chip Thompson, Editor EDITORIALBOARD How to have your say: Letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and no more than two double-spaced pages or 500words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section will be published. Email: editor@ redbluffdailynews.com Fax: 530-527-9251 Mail to: P.O. Box 220, 545 Diamond Ave., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FACEBOOK.COM/ RBDAILYNEWS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @REDBLUFFNEWS It's not hard to choose the smartest words Kinky Friedman ever said. "Your boys need a dog," he told me. As it turns out, I needed one. About10yearsagoIad- opted a sweet, gangly dog from Kinky's rescue ranch. Last week, a day shy of his 12th birthday, that dog died. His name was Echo, and he was a good boy. Kinky is seldom described in similar terms. You could call him politically incor- rect and still fail to capture the full measure of his offen- siveness as a novelty country singer, satirical detective nov- elist, or politician. But Kinky redeems himself as the man who founded the Utopia An- imal Rescue Ranch in Me- dina, Texas, which they say has "saved more animals than Noah." This is where I found Echo. At first I wanted to adopt Echo's brother because I liked the look of him. "No, you've got kids," said Tony the caretaker, who pointed at his brother, a long-limbed puppy. "You want him. He's a lap dog." Tony pointed out the large paws on the mixed- breed dog and mentioned that his mother had a little Mastiff in her. "He's going to be a big dog," he said. Echo went right past big and became implausibly large, topping out over 100 pounds. He looked like an outsized black Labrador topped off by a stately block of a head. He got so big that to take him places in my sedan we would have to flatten the back seats so the boys could lay flat in the trunk. It must have looked odd when we'd pull up to a park with the giant dog bounding out of the back seat and two boys popping out of the trunk. He was a dog like I always wanted and was the only dog I ever had that did not need a leash. He happily walked beside me wherever I was headed and never chased a cat, rabbit or squirrel. I once had a dog that would chase the birds in the sky. Not Echo. He stuck with me. If I called, he came. If I walked, he heeled. And boy did we walk. We had favorite routes in parks, through neighborhoods, and along rivers. Writing this, I'm honestly wondering what the point of walking without Echo is. Do people really walk without dogs? It's customary to describe a dog as loyal. Echo was not. While I suspect he held me close to his heart, he would happily go off with anyone who wanted a walk. We have a friend who used to come take Echo for walks to relieve the stress of writing a disser- tation while planning a wed- ding. I'm speaking, of course, of our friend. Echo never married. He was a calm, good-na- tured dog, as many larger ones are. Little dogs would see his body block their view of the sky and yip and yap at him. He'd sniff in apparent confusion at their aggression. It never occurred to him to fight another dog. He would have rather taken a nap. If I have one regret it was in choosing his name. The folks at Utopia named him Sponge- Bob, which seemed to cap- ture his affable, slightly dim nature, but while he was car- toonishly large I thought he deserved a name with more dignity. However, I failed to anticipate how silly I would sound when calling him in a park. Other people would look at me as if I were a kid throw- ing a stick and hoping it was a boomerang. He leaves behind a fam- ily that loves him, several pill bottles from a blessedly brief but final illness, and many tumbleweeds of black hair that in recent years had be- come increasingly gray. In lieu of flowers, which he never saw the point of anyway, the family asks that donations be made in his name to the Uto- pia Rescue Ranch at utopi- arescue.com. Let's reward Kinky's good behavior. I am dreading telling Kinky about Echo because he'll try to get me to take another one, but I'm done with the op- tional heartbreak of owning a dog for now. I'm unlikely to find another dog like my Echo, anyway. He was such a good boy. JasonStanfordisaregular contributor to the Austin American-Statesman, a Democratic consultant and a Truman National Security Project partner. You can email him at stanford@oppresearch. com and follow him on Twitter @JasStanford. Jason Stanford Remembering my dog Echo Cartoonist's take Here's a bit more of the his- tory of "Quake Lake, Mon- tana" (searchable by title or as "Quake Lake" in Wikipedia). It's worth your time to read about, as I said last week, "the aftermath of one of the great- est natural disas- ters we had never heard of. In 1959, under a full August moon, a 7.5 magnitude earthquake shook the whole Yellowstone/ Hebgen Lake area (located several miles from West Yel- lowstone). The ground under the lake literally tilted, rais- ing the south and east shores up 12 to 20 feet—leaving a vis- ible bluff, including the shore in front of our site. Only after driving the north shore of He- bgen Lake, on Hwy 287, and reading the numerous infor- mational signs did we put our bluff together with the disas- trous earthquake. While the shores on our end, and the Madison Arm which was the primary source of the reservoir, lifted 20+ feet, the northern shore, in- cluding lodges and homes, dropped by 15 to 20 feet. If you fill a shallow pan with wa- ter and raise one side ever so slightly, you will see a small- scale effect of such a geologi- cal phenomenon. The water sloshed toward the dam at the northwest end, topped over the dam and washed away several cabins of a beachfront lodge (partly submerged still). The owner/ manager of the lodge ran in desperation past her false teeth on a counter to make a leap across the widening gap to the rising hillside. Her Mal- amute dog likewise found the bank and led the woman, in her nightgown, around crev- ices and cracks caused by the quake. In all, 28 people died, mostly below the dam in campgrounds and cabins, some in their sleep as boulders crushed them. One heartbreaking story re- counted a woman with her 3 children who watched dad cling to a tree against the 100+mile-an-hour winds cre- ated by the downstream land- slide. He, as well as 2 of the children, perished in front of the surviving mom and child. 250 campers and cabin res- idents gathered below the dam on a hilltop while nurses who'd been camping triaged and treated the injured. The full moon and car head- lights, instrumental in their immediate predicament, showed that they were cut off; the authorities thought the dam had failed until one of the camper's notes reached them. Air Force Helicopters dropped smokejumpers for rescue. Earthquake Lake resulted from a massive landslide sev- eral miles downstream, which rushed downhill over 100 miles per hour leaving an earthen dam, behind which a lake built up to a depth of 190 feet. To this day, house-sized boulders balance, long end up, where they came to rest over a hundred feet above the earth and rock dam. Large earth-moving equip- ment was quickly organized and brought to the slide and dam to create a spillway al- lowing the rising waters from the Madison River to dissi- pate and gradually carry away enough of the debris to re- move the threat of structural failure and downstream dev- astation. We then took in the multimedia informational dis- plays in the visitor center. Having been subjected to in- tensifying winds throughout the day, we found 50+ mile- an-hour gusts pushing our car doors shut, and forcing us to lean hard to cross the lot. It contributed to the eerie sense of natural vulnerability those survivors must have felt. I found some news gems while wading through ar- chived stories at Instapundit. com (pjmedia.com/instapun- dit). One item, sourced to pj- media.com/tattler, by Debra Heine on July 7, was titled, "New Docs Reveal DOJ, IRS, and FBI Colluding to Pros- ecute Obama Opponents." Look up the title or go to Don- Polson.blogspot.com, where it posted last Thursday, the 24th. Obama's Department of Justice "wanted IRS employ- ees who were going to testify to Congress to turn over doc- uments to the DOJ before giv- ing them to Congress. "Records also detail how the Obama IRS gave the FBI 21 computer disks contain- ing 1.25 million pages of con- fidential IRS returns from 113,000 nonprofit social 501(c) (4) welfare groups (nearly ev- ery one in the United States) as part of its prosecution ef- fort." This is such a legal, po- litical and constitutional abomination that, until some- one is made to pay with fines and jail, Americans of all ide- ological leanings are not safe from state-sponsored perse- cution. Emperor Obama, never passing up a chance to flout the law and the constitutional separation of powers, grabbed 20 million acres of Alaska. He proclaimed yet another unilat- erally-designated wilderness that virtually no one will ever recreate in, but will assure the environmental wackos that he's on the side of locking up America's natural resources and against letting America benefit from our own God- given energy reserves. Reported at Thehill.com on July 7, "GOP lawmaker: Obama saying 'up yours' to Congress," Alaska Republican Don Young condemned Obama's execu- tive order designating nearly all 20 million acres in the Arc- tic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness to prevent oil and gas drilling, saying "We have a president that says 'up yours' to the Congress." I find in the entirety of Ben Carson's comments, on the in- compatibility of Islam's ad- herents and the Constitution's oath for higher office, that he was right in every respect— and he did not negate the Ar- ticle VI "no religious test" rule. "Footnote on Carson and Islam—CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) helps prove Ben Carson's Point" posted under the "Is- lam" tab on Wednesday, Sept. 23 at DonPolson.blogspot.com. Read it before criticizing me. Congrats to the Tehama County Tea Party Patriots on their 6th anniversary. Bring a salad or desert to complement pizza provided by the Tea Party Patriots tonight at the Westside Grange. The results of the informal dollar-a-vote Republican pri- mary poll: Bush=4, Carson=31, Christie=3, Cruz=11, Fio- rina=17, Huckabee=2, Paul=3, Rubio=10, Trump=59. 21 voted to send Hillary to jail. Don Polson has called Red Bluff home since 1988. He can be reached by e-mail at donplsn@yahoo.com. The way I see it Quake Lake; comments on issues He got so big that to take him places in my sedan we would have to flatten the back seats so the boys could lay flat in the trunk. It must have looked odd when we'd pull up to a park with the giant dog bounding out of the back seat and two boys popping out of the trunk. StateandNational Assemblyman James Galla- gher, 2060 Talbert Drive, Ste. 110, Chico 95928, 530 895-4217, http://ad03.asmrc.org/ Senator Jim Nielsen, 2634 Forest Ave., Ste. 110, Chico 95928, 530 879-7424, senator. nielsen@senate.ca.gov Governor Jerry Brown, State Capital Building, Sacramento 95814, 916 445-2841, fax 916 558-3160, governor@governor. ca.gov U.S. Representative Doug La- Malfa, 507 Cannon House Of- fice Building, Washington D.C. 20515, 202 225-3076 U.S. Senator Dianne Fein- stein, One Post St., Ste. 2450, San Francisco 94104, 415 393- 0707, fax 415 393-0710 U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, 1700 Montgomery St., San Fran- cisco 94111, 510 286-8537, fax 202 224-0454 Local Tehama County Supervisors, 527-4655 District 1, Steve Chamblin, Ext. 3015 District 2, Candy Carlson, Ext. 3014 District 3, Dennis Garton, Ext. 3017 District 4, Bob Williams, Ext. 3018 District 5, Burt Bundy, Ext. 3016 Red Bluff City Manager, Rich- ard Crabtree, 527-2605, Ext. 3061 Corning City Manager, John Brewer, 824-7033 YOUR OFFICIALS Don Polson I find in the entirety of Ben Carson's comments, on the incompatibility of Islam's adherents and the Constitution's oath for higher office, that he was right in every respect—and he did not negate the Article VI "no religious test" rule. OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com Tuesday, September 29, 2015 » MORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/RBDAILYNEWS AND TWITTER.COM/REDBLUFFNEWS A4