Wading In

I was unfriended by a Facebook friend for the sin of watching the new HBO documentary “Leaving Neverland” and finding the two men accusing Michael Jackson of child molestation credible. Being unfriended made me laugh because she wasn't upset with me. She, like millions of other Jackson fans, hate having their worst fears confirmed. They don't want this to be true. I don't either. Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five were a huge part of my childhood. From the albums to television specials to cartoons to solo albums I loved the Jacksons. Being an African-American family of five boys I felt a connection to the Jackson Five.  However the truth about Michael Jackson seemed obvious after the first accusation of child molestation by Jordan Chandler in 1993. We'd never seen Jackson date a woman or a man for that matter. His home was a child magnet of carnival rides, a zoo and sleepovers with popcorn and movies in his private theater. He would take children on shoppin...

Ten years ago, I woke up and turned on my laptop and went to the Daily Republic website and was devastated to learn of the shooting of Fairfield City Councilman Matt Garcia. I immediately called my brother Tony who answered and knew why I was calling. We shared our shock and horror. But mainly we just cried together on the phone. Later when Matt had been removed from life support and passed away I told Tony that it felt like hope itself had died. He told me, “Matt has inspired too many people to let hope die. But hope took a beating today.” It seemed like some horrible cosmic joke. Twenty-one year old Matt Garcia, elected to the Fairfield City Council on a platform of supporting youth and curbing violence is murdered on the streets of Fairfield. What's worse, his killer mistook him for someone else. It was a pointless act of evil in which a worthless example of a human being took the life of a priceless one. In 2007 Matt invited me to lunch at Joe's Buffet to discuss...

“If we get rid of Trump, Pence will be worse.” You've probably heard progressives say this ever since the 2016 election. It's a popular sentiment but it's demonstrably false. We've never had such an ill-prepared, unfit, divisive threat to the republic in the Oval Office as Donald John Trump. I've always thought one could throw a dart at a phonebook and hit upon a person who would be a better president than Donald Trump. But in regards to Vice-President Mike Pence... At least as a Tea Party Republican Mike Pence has read the U.S. Constitution. Tea Partiers required the Constitution to be read aloud at the beginning of the 112th Congress and added a rule that the part of the Constitution that justified a particular bill had to be listed at the top of the bill. We know that Donald Trump surely has never read it. In fact, in Michael Wolff's “Fire and Fury” former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg is quoted as saying he tried to teach Trump about the Bill of R...

The passing of Arizona Senator John McCain is poignant for a number of reasons. Probably none more than that he represented the last of a dying breed of forward-looking Republicans unafraid to reach across the aisle and work with Democrats, and to criticize their own party when necessary. In the wake of his death we've heard words like patriot, hero, honorable, integrity and maverick and all of those words describe who John McCain was. But he was also a complicated, flawed man and one can acknowledge those flaws and still admire the man. Being a political geek I'd watched McCain on the Sunday shows for a decade before his 2000 presidential run and devoured his 1999 bestselling memoir “Faith Of My Fathers.” His harrowing story of military service in Vietnam, surviving the USS Forrestal fire, being shot down on his 23rd bombing run and spending five and a half years of confinement and torture as a POW was genuinely moving. I admired the work he'd done in the Senate with v...

Thursday, September 19, 2013 FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA Finders are not keepers By Kelvin Wade From page A7 | September 19, 2013 | 4 Comments Imagine you’re walking through the mall parking lot and you find a wallet. You open it up and it’s stuffed with $2,000. Also in that wallet is the driver’s license of the owner, with his address clearly printed on it. What would you do? A 19-year-old Fairfield man faced a similar scenario and is now in court over it. Daniel W. Holochuck and a friend allegedly found an envelope with $1,900 in cash in Costco’s food court. The envelope, lost by a clerk, contained a transaction receipt. Since Holochuck and his friend didn’t turn in the envelope, Holochuck has been charged with a felony under an 1872 law requiring people to turn in found property when one has knowledge or means of inquiry to the owner. All I know of the case is what I’ve read, but setting aside the Holochuck case, what would you do in this instance? Glen James, a homeless man in Bos...

Time to get a library card By Kelvin Wade From page A7 | September 05, 2013 | Its National Library Card Sign-up Month and we have work to do. If you have a child or you know of a child who does not have a library card, it’s time to get them signed up for one. If there’s no library card in your wallet, you need to get signed up, too. I’ve always loved libraries. My parents took my brothers and me to the library often when we were kids. It was most likely because with five boys, anything you can do for free was a no-brainer. As a teen, I spent more hours at the Fairfield-Suisun library than I did pumping quarters into video games at the Gold Mine in Solano Mall. When I first started this column way back when George H.W. Bush was president, researching a column was a much different process. If I wanted the most basic facts on a given issue, it meant a trip to the library. It meant accessing newspapers, magazines and books. Tracking down specific information on a given subject was often a...