Mountain Views News, Combined Edition Saturday, August 22, 2020

12

OPINION

 Mountain Views News Saturday, August 22, 2020 


LOOKING AROUND 
TODAY

STUART TOLCHIN

MOUNTAIN 
VIEWS

NEWS

PUBLISHER/ EDITOR

Susan Henderson

PASADENA CITY 
EDITOR

Dean Lee 

PRODUCTION

SALES

Patricia Colonello

626-355-2737 

626-818-2698

WEBMASTER

John Aveny 

DISTRIBUTION

CONTRIBUTORS

Stuart Tolchin 

Audrey Swanson

Mary Lou Caldwell

Kevin McGuire

Chris Leclerc

Bob Eklund

Howard Hays

Paul Carpenter

Kim Clymer-Kelley

Christopher Nyerges

Peter Dills 

Rich Johnson

Lori Ann Harris

Rev. James Snyder

Katie Hopkins

Deanne Davis

Despina Arouzman

Jeff Brown

Marc Garlett

Keely Toten

Dan Golden

Rebecca Wright

Hail Hamilton

Joan Schmidt

LaQuetta Shamblee

 
As I walked around early this morning 
in a futile attempt to beat the heat, I of 
course noticed the exquisite beauty of 
Sierra Madre Canyon and marveled at 
how fortunate I was to live here. I moved 
here 42 years ago when unexpectedly I 
suddenly became a single parent of two 
children as my ex-wife decided that Los 
Angeles was not the place for her and 
I could have the kids. I couldn’t have 
been happier. The first thing I did as a 
newly single parent was hunt for a more 
suitable place to live with my kids. My Law Office was in El Monte and 
I owned some apartments there but realized through my law practice 
that El Monte was a neighborhood containing lots of crime, violence, 
anger, and poverty. I had good reason to know, I represented the Chief 
of Police.

 Anyway, a bit north of El Monte. I spotted what seemed like 
a residential area in the mountains. I drove up Santa Anita Avenue 
about as high as I could to a street called Grand View. Good beginning 
I thought. I went west on Grand View, turned right on a street called 
Mountain Trail which lead into this very secluded canyon which was, 
and still is, beautiful. I saw a guy walking and asked if he knew of any 
property for sale. He told me the Mailman had a house he wanted to 
sell and I saw the mailman sitting at a cute little store called Mary’s. 
I talked to the mailman and asked about his house for sale and he 
said “Sure”, you want to see it. It was a little 2 bedroom cabin with a 
wonderful view over the canyon. The mailman said. “Do you want to 
buy it’ and I said “sure” and after a couple of minutes we agreed upon 
a price. Later I learned that he thought I had paid too high a price. 
Prices in Sierra Madre have skyrocketed. The mailman is gone now 
and at the farewell party two weeks before his death all I could say to 
him was “Sorry Charlie “ . He laughed and that’s how I remember him.

 What I’m describing is how easy it was for me to move up here 
but over my 42 years I have noticed the place is an all-White enclave. 
A family up the street has adopted a mixed-race African/Caucasian 
child who is now about 5. A few months ago I was wheeling my infant 
mixed-race grandchild when the little 5 year old looked into the buggy 
and began jumping up and down, “ She looks just like me”, she cried.

 As you might imagine, I am troubled. I imagined that real 
estate agents steered whites away from black neighborhoods and 
blacks away from white neighborhoods but what else is involved and 
why have I not cared up until now? A book mentioned in the New 
York Times entitled The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein caught 
my eye. I bought the book and read only the first pages of the preface 
and learned that the US government’s methods systematically imposed 
residential racial segregation in the twentieth century. Devices used 
to impose “undisguised racial zoning, public housing that purposely 
severed previously mixed communities, subsidies for builders to create 
whites-only suburbs, tax exemptions for prejudiced institutions”. The 
book explains how these policies still influence tragedies in places 
like Ferguson and Baltimore. I do not know if our beautiful white-
only enclave is the result of these discriminatory legal policies. I did 
not really care much about our white only demographic before but it 
bothers me now. That’s how life works I guess. (Did the George Floyd 
murder reveal anything that was unknown before?) Today, some of the 
beauty of this place has already vanished for me and perhaps, as you 
think about it, for you as well. 


Mountain Views News 
has been adjudicated as 
a newspaper of General 
Circulation for the County 
of Los Angeles in Court 
Case number GS004724: 
for the City of Sierra 
Madre; in Court Case 
GS005940 and for the 
City of Monrovia in Court 
Case No. GS006989 and 
is published every Saturday 
at 80 W. Sierra Madre 
Blvd., No. 327, Sierra 
Madre, California, 91024. 
All contents are copyrighted 
and may not be 
reproduced without the 
express written consent of 
the publisher. All rights 
reserved. All submissions 
to this newspaper become 
the property of the Mountain 
Views News and may 
be published in part or 
whole. 

Opinions and views expressed 
by the writers 
printed in this paper do 
not necessarily express 
the views and opinions 
of the publisher or staff 
of the Mountain Views 
News. 

Mountain Views News is 
wholly owned by Grace 
Lorraine Publications, 
and reserves the right to 
refuse publication of advertisements 
and other 
materials submitted for 
publication. 

Letters to the editor and 
correspondence should 
be sent to: 

Mountain Views News

80 W. Sierra Madre Bl. 
#327

Sierra Madre, Ca. 
91024

Phone: 626-355-2737

Fax: 626-609-3285

email: 

mtnviewsnews@aol.com

A member of 
the

California 
Newspaper 
Publishers 
Association

DICK POLLMAN


2020 ELECTION: BIDEN VERSUS ‘A 
GRAVE COUNTERINTELLIGENCE 
THREAT


We’re compelled to interrupt our regularly scheduled program 
to bring you the latest dire reminder that Joe Biden, 
now the official Democratic nominee, will be facing off 
against a willing Russian stooge who welcomed Vladimir 
Putin’s illegal assistance in 2016 and is totally fine with 
doing so again. This reminder was voiced Tuesday by the 
Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, which released 
1,000 pages that truly frames the stakes in 2020.

 Page 32 says it all. During the 2016 race, there was a “direct tie between senior 
Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.” Trump’s chief plotter 
was his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

Here’s another gem: “The committee found that Manafort’s presence on the campaign 
and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services 
to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on the Trump 
campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share 
information with individuals closely affiliated with Russian intelligence services…
represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”

Indeed, Manafort secretly shared Trump campaign info with a guy named Konstantin 
Kilimnik, who just so happened to be “a Russian intelligence agent.” That jibes 
with a passage in the Mueller Report that said in the summer of 2016, while the Russians 
were busy hacking on Trump’s behalf, Manafort was sharing “internal polling 
data” with a Russian suspected of being an intelligence agent – most notably, polling 
data from the key states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

We’ve long known that Trump is a Putin stooge – despite Bill Barr’s craven attempts 
to spin it all away – but it’s refreshing to see it spelled out by a Republican-led Senate 
committee. Especially all the dirty details about how team Trump tried to cover up 
the 2016 Russian connection: “The Trump campaign publicly undermined the attribution 
of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia, and was indifferent to whether it 
and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.”

Ah yes, WikiLeaks – the repository of the Hillary campaign material stolen by Russia’s 
hackers. This new Senate report, vetted by the panel’s Republicans, contains the 
strongest evidence thus far that Trump and his campaign used Roger Stone as a conduit 
to get the inside skinny on what the Russia-WikiLeaks operation was releasing.

But enough about 2016. What about now?

The Senate report hints – but does not spell out – that the Russians, with Trump’s 
silent indulgence, is trying to meddle on his behalf in 2020. The committee features 
a statement from one its members, Ron Wyden, who says that the report “includes 
redacted information that is directly relevant to Russia’s interference in the 2020 
election.”

Ideally, it would’ve been nice if the report had told us more. But to recognize what’s 
happening, we need only remember what one of our top intelligence officials said 
publicly earlier this month. William Evanina, a career law enforcement guy who 
runs the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (and a Trump appointee, 
no less) said this: “Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former 
Vice President Biden…some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President 
Trump’s candidacy on social media and Russian television.”

But has Trump ever sounded the alarm about any of this? As if.

Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, recalls 
in a devastating new video that whenever he and other senior security officials tried 
to broach the Russian meddling issue with Trump, it didn’t go well.

“He was distracted, he was disinterested, but ultimately, he denied it. He denied that 
this was a threat. He denied that this was a concern,” Taylor said. “What the president 
wanted to talk about was how resoundingly he’d won the election in 2016…
From that point on, you had people in the administration who were scared to go out 
and talk about one of the top national security threats facing our country.”

Granted, the Trump-Russia connection is not one of the top-tier voting issues in 
this election. The pandemic and the crashed economy clearly take precedence. And 
the Democrats, in their virtual convention, are rightly emphasizing the everyday 
traumas that directly and adversely affecting people’s lives.

What the new Senate report does do is remind us that the choice this year is ultimately 
between authoritarianism and democracy. It’s up to us to save our noble 
experiment.

–Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a 
Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, 

A HEARTFELT

 THANK YOU!


Mountain Views News

Mission Statement

The traditions of 
community news-
papers and the 
concerns of our readers 
are this newspaper’s 
top priorities. We 
support a prosperous 
community of well-
informed citizens. We 
hold in high regard the 
values of the exceptional 
quality of life in our 
community, including 
the magnificence of 
our natural resources. 
Integrity will be our guide. 

A special thanks to all of our Supporters and Subscribers! We could not have made 
it this far without you. This heart was created by my Granddaughter (Maila Thomas) 
who really knows how important the Mountain Views News is to our community. 
Please note that this is only a partial listing. 

Susan Henderson, Owner/Publisher/Editor

Mountain Views News 80 W Sierra Madre Blvd. No. 327 Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024 Office: 626.355.2737 Fax: 626.609.3285 Email: editor@mtnviewsnews.com Website: www.mtnviewsnews.com