(Picture Courtesy of the Bolsavik Blog)
I was all set to go counter-protest today at the VAALA “FOB II” Vietnamese art exhibit in downtown Santa Ana, but today’s O.C. Register reported that the City of Santa Ana decided to close the exhibit, “because it was being done in a space that did not have permission for gallery use.”
B.S.! The City easily could have allowed the show to continue. The Santa Ana City Manager, Dave Ream, and the Santa Ana Mayor, Miguel Pulido, have been known to bend the city’s laws to suit them and their backers. So why did they toss the “FOB II” exhibit under the bus?
The truth of the matter is that Assemblyman Van Tran’s acolytes, the “Trannies” have been in cahoots with Pulido and two of his Council Members, Claudia Alvarez and Vince Sarmiento, for some time.
Remember the Measure D ballot measure, which allowed Alvarez to run for a third term? It passed in part because over 2,000 Vietnamese voters on the City’s west side went to the ballot with slips of paper telling them to vote for Measure D – and for John McCain, in the presidential primary.
We have found a Buddhist temple during last year’s City Council elections that had political signs illegally erected all over the temple’s property, touting “Team Pulido” which included Alvarez, Sarmiento and Pulido, and signs belonging to a host of Trannie candidates.
And we have also reported other overtures between Alvarez, Sarmiento and the Trannies. In fact both Alvarez and Sarmiento participated in a parade in Little Saigon last year. This is indeed an unholy alliance. And now it has resulted in outright censorship of artwork, in a city that supposedly supports the arts.
The Viet protesters had a right to complain about the exhibit – but their goal was to shut it down, and the City of Santa Ana helped them do exactly that. What is wrong with that? Well, let’s see what the editor of the Bolsavik blog had to say about this:
The problem is with the way the protests are organized and called. The Bolsavik’s mailbox, which monitors the right-wing listservs, lit up with something like 200 emails a day over this exhibit, and a fair guesstimate is that 90% are vulgar and maybe 5 or 6 are threats of physical violence including murder and arson.
There you go. The City of Santa Ana sided with people who make terrorist threats. So much for the Santa Ana “Artists Village.” Now we all know that censorship reigns in Santa Ana.
There is of course precedent for censorship in Santa Ana. Both Sarmiento and Alvarez supported the infamous “Code of Ethics” that was part of Measure D. That Code was meant to silence bloggers who were on various city commissions. Most of us have since quit our commissions. That was of course the goal of this stupid Code.
Alvarez went on to call her fellow Council Member, Michele Martinez, a drug dealer during last year’s Council elections. That was a clear violation of the Code. But it was never intended to apply to Team Pulido.
Where by the way is Supervisor Janet Nguyen? Why didn’t she stand up to the City of Santa Ana, and defend freedom of speech? Her county office is blocks from the gallery that held the FOB II exhibit. But she stood by the sidelines and let the terrorists prevail. She is completely useless – and just as complicit as Van Tran in this debacle.
I was there in the middle of the day Saturday looking for any remnant of the proposed protest. There were work trucks blocking the entrance to the parking structure and a couple of workers cutting wood to the side of the building. The grounds surrounding entire place looked clean and organized. The front doors were locked tight. I could not tell that there was a protest a few days ago.
why you have to hurt another filling? I’m not republic and I’m not against communist either!