By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO—I believe that Alan Bersin, a member of our Jewish community who served as a U.S. Attorney in San Diego and later as San Diego Unified School District superintendent, may have shown me a way to persuade my wife that we should get another dog.
We had one dog that lived 17 years, and another that lived 15 years, and Nancy was heartbroken each time one died. She says she can’t stand to have her heart broken again. I believe the joy of having a dog, for all the years it is alive, outweighs the pain of someday having to part with it. Come to think of it, I feel the same way about marriage.
Bersin, who since has gone on to become the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner, issued a news release on Thursday, June 23, telling how a dog trained by his agency recently sniffed out $2.4 million in cash that smugglers in Mexico had concealed in spools of telephone cable headed for Venezuela. The dog had been provided to Mexican authorities under the Merida Initiative, described by Bersin as a “joint U.S.-Mexico effort to combat the threats of transnational narcotics trafficking and organized crime.”
Nancy sometimes gets absent-minded. We still joke about the time she put away some jewelry for safe-keeping and then couldn’t remember where she put it. Some years later, when looking in the filing cabinet for an old tax return, she found the jewelry in a file folder. Think of all the trouble we could have avoided if we had simply turned a valuables-sniffing dog loose on the case.
I’m not certain how dog-trainers do it, but I can imagine passing dollar bills under the dog’s nose– “Sniff, boy!” — until it is able to recognize the differences between those bills with the picture of George Washington, and those with the image of Benjamin Franklin, and all those in between. Just imagine, I could bring the dog into my closet and say, “Find me a Grant, boy!” and he’d put his nose to my trousers and jackets and retrieve me riches!
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It’s one of those coincidences that while Bersin was concerning himself with dogs, his wife, Superior Court Judge Lisa Foster, was ruling on another species of animal that has pups: seals. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that Foster said pro-seal advocates had failed to make a compelling case for keeping up a rope at the Children’s Pool in La Jolla to keep people away from the area of the beach where the seals like to sun themselves. But the controversy is not over. Foster is expected to rule July 15 on other issues involved in the case.
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The Voice of San Diego reported that District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis—if elected mayor of San Diego—has pledged not to accept a pension from the City of San Diego. She’s pretty well set with her county pension, which could amount to approximately a quarter million dollars a year, when you tally up all the time she worked for the county of San Diego as a clerk typist, assistant district attorney, district attorney, and also as a Superior Court judge. … Dumanis and another member of our Jewish community clearly have different perspectives on compensation from public bodies. According again to VOSD, Assemblyman Marty Block has been grousing about the cut-off of legislators’ salaries since State Controller John Chiang ruled that they failed to pass a balanced budget before the voter-imposed state constitutional deadline. Block, blocked from his funds, suggests that perhaps there is a question here of regarding separation of powers. Can the state’s executive branch properly and legally interfere with the legislative branch?
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A story about Block in the San Diego Union-Tribune may prove more popular with voters. Michael Gardner reported that to increase its chances of being enacted, Block is amending his bill that would require that families of homicide victims to receive notice if a murderer seeks commutation of his or her sentence. The bill grew out of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s midnight reduction of the involuntary manslaughter sentence of Esteban Núñez, son of former Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, who had participated in a fight leading to the fatal stabling of Luis Santos, son of Fred and Kathy Santos. At the parents’ behest, Block authored legislation to require the same notice –10 days – that victims’ families receive when a governor is considering a pardon.
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Two longtime Jewish prisoners are in the news. On Saturday, June 25, the civilized world will observe and condemn the 5th anniversary of the kidnapping and imprisonment by Hamas of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was captured on the Israeli side of the Gaza border and has been held incommunicado ever since. Locally, Audrey Jacobs, regional director of the StandWithUs chapter in San Diego, has called for sympathizers to sign a petition calling for Shalit’s release.
Meanwhile, the Zionist Organization of America is criticizing President Barack Obama for refusing to allow the imprisoned Jonathan Pollard a one-day furlough from prison to see his dying 95-year-old father, or to attend the funeral. Says a press release from ZOA director Morton Klein: “The ZOA has stated repeatedly that it regards the continued imprisonment of Jonathan Pollard as an injustice. Mr. Pollard has long expressed a desire to move to Israel and Israel would accept him. His on-going imprisonment is unnecessary, unjust, disproportionate and inexplicable in terms of protecting the national interest. But more than that, the refusal to permit him even a day’s leave to attend his father’s funeral is unnecessarily hard-hearted, brutal and uncalled for. We strongly criticize President Obama for this act.”
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With references to the cautiousness instilled in her by her Jewish grandmother, “Miss In-Between,” Hayley Rafner writes in the current issue of the San Diego Reader about the frustrations of young women between the ages of 18 and 21, who can’t go to bars for fun, and who have few other places to go in the evening except perhaps, the Kearny Mesa Bowl. But, oh, those gutters seem so wide, and the alleys so narrow. Being a Jewish grandfather myself, I find myself thinking while reading Miss Rafner’s article, “Don’t worry, this too shall pass.”
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Harrison is editor and publisher of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com