CA-48: Harley Rouda gets the DCCC! (While Keirstead has Chuck Johnson’s “Liberal OC.”)

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Generally we resent the hell out of the corporatist DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) when they wade into a local race and tell us Democrats whom we should back in our primaries.  Generally they’re wrong or over-cautious, and hostile to progressive ideas.  But last week they chose correctly – or so think I and most realistic progressives in the FIGHTING 48th – when they picked Harley Rouda as “the strongest candidate” for beating Crazy Relic Dana Rohrabacher as well as spineless Republican lobbyist Scott Baugh.

Stronger, that is, than the guy who’d so far seemed like the Democrat establishment’s favored candidate, and indeed made off with the STATE Party’s endorsement – stem-cell scientist Hans Keirstead.  Keirstead – that’s that squirrely glittery-eyed little guy in scientist garb you keep seeing on TV, starting every sentence with “As a scientist I…”  (And about whom I’ll say nothing bad if he’s actually the Dem to make it through the primary.)

Another local commentator who believes that Harley is the strongest candidate for beating Crazy Dana and helping take back the House for Democrats, is the filthy alt-right HB blogger Chuck Johnson (also known as “Fred,” “Henry Paul Lipton,” “Kristen Sullivan,” sometimes probably “OC DEM,” and God knows what else – he has even posted obscene comments on the Weekly under my name which is illegal – God knows the “man” has no shortage of time on his hands.)

Except, Chuck is a proud worshiper of the Republican incumbent Dana Rohrabacher.  So here’s how he figured things (as he explained later here) – he would help Dana by trying his best to hurt Harley, so that Dana’s opponent would be the weaker Hans.  (This was before anybody expected the entrance of Baugh.)  And Chuck would do this – since Chuck’s main skill is defamation and there wasn’t enough material to say or invent about Harley, at least without getting sued – by defaming Harley’s supporters.  Principally, since Chuck is also a racist hater of Huntington Beach’s Latino Oak View neighborhood, he’d do it by defaming the fine young neighborhood activist Victor Valladares, inventing and broadcasting lies about this Harley supporter’s former marriage.  “That should hurt Harley, and help Dana!” thought Chuck to himself.

So back in February when the Cal Dem convention was approaching, Chuck invented a gross tale about some non-existent video (that still nobody has ever seen) featuring Victor doing horrible things to his ex-wife.  He told the story, on his blog, under the name of a completely fictional HB Democratic woman writer that he also invented, a woman who was HORRIFIED at what Victor had done, and BEGGED her Party to disown him.  To represent this “Kristen (or Kristin) Sullivan” Chuck chose a found photo looking like what he’d imagine a conscience-stricken Democratic woman might look like (right).

Then, as you’ll remember if you read the blogs in February, Chuck, using a whole host of fake identities, spread this slander wherever he could, always awkwardly tying his Victor defamation to Harley!  Every day this blog deleted several such anonymous comments on the topic back then. 

So far, who cares?  The really twisted part is this:  A local blog ironically named the Liberal OC, run by another slanderous oaf named Dan Chmielewski, but an oaf who actually does SUPPORT Hans Keirstead, was the only place that printed this trash.  Regularly.  It was nearly all you’d see on the Liberal OC, for over a month.  Unscrupulous Dan, the supposed Democrat who actually believes in Hans being a better candidate than Harley, let himself be used obscenely by more-unscrupulous Republican Chuck, who was only attacking Harley to try to help Dana Rohrabacher.

THEN, as what Chuck deemed his master-stroke, using the stolen pen-name “Henry Paul Lipton” and posing as a conscientious and outraged Democrat, Chuck sent off this e-mail to every member of the Central Committee (click if you really want to read the trash, you’ll still have to squint and I like it that way)…

Fortunately this despicable behavior didn’t have much of the intended effect.  Apparently nobody believed (and few read) the obviously false e-mail – and kudos to Dems from DPOC chair Fran Sdao down for that.  Victor is still a Central Committee member in good standing, leading the Chicano-Latino-Immigrant Democratic Club of OC.   Hans did manage to get the state party endorsement, but that had probably nothing to do with Chuck’s libels of Victor, and much more to do with Hans’ cleverer machinations.  And now that’s balanced off by the DCCC, and most Democrats elected and private, making the right choice – for Harley Rouda!

Chuck did boast, on his blog, in chest-thumping Trump style, of the success of his vicious smears:

But in the comfortable privacy of his fake identities on the Liberal OC, Chuck was a lot more pouty and dispirited over the non-response he got:

Well, sorry to expose you to the Hans Keirstead booster club, but there you have it – the Liberal OC and Chuck Johnson.  That reference to “GCT” above is Chuck’s REAL full-time obsession, Ocean View School Board President Gina Clayton-TarvinIn more recent news, Gina got a temporary restraining order on Chuck based on his numerous violent threats against her and her family;  unfortunately last week Judge Timothy Stafford declined to make the order permanent, accepting Chuck’s explanation that all his obscenity and threats were “metaphorical” and First Amendment-protected criticism of public figures, so Chuck is feeling right now like a free speech hero when most folks know he’s just a gross lying scumbag, a polyp on Huntington Beach’s rectum.  As Surf City Voice publisher and occasional Orange Juice blogger John Earl put it on Facebook the other day:

“The court has spoken. I respect the judge and we must accept his ruling, pending any possibility of appeal.

“I understand the difficulties in balancing free-speech rights with the right to be free of bald-faced and vicious harassment.

“But I have read Mr. Johnson’s blog posts and I have observed video of his behavior. And for him to depict himself as a crusader for 1st Amendment freedom is like Trump calling himself a champion for women’s rights….No, scratch that, it’s actually more like Hitler claiming to be the spokesperson for Jewish rights.

“I will not compare Mr. Johnson to a pig because pigs are intelligent, lovable, and much-maligned animals. But I loathe to call him a human being except that my own humanity forces me to pity him for his sick fucked-up mind, the same way I pity the rest of the pack of racist and anti-semitic psychopaths (recycled Minutemen and MAGA true-believers one and all) with whom he hunts his victims at local school board meetings.

“And what did Ocean View School District trustee Gina Clayton-Tarvin do to earn the obsessive, threatening, constantly-hyperbolic, dim-witted, self-parodying, chaos-inducing presence of that mob at school board meetings?

“The answer: she stood up for the rights of Mexican American school children, very effectively.

“Ms. Tarvin and the majority of the Ocean View School District Board of Trustees have handled this ongoing mess with class, bending over backwards to respect the free-speech rights of the thugs who disrupt board meetings (with the disgraceful indulgence and encouragement of trustee Norm Westwall) while they (the board majority) still meet the needs of thousands of students from all backgrounds.

“Mr. Johnson’s court victory is ephemeral.

“The lasting victory will be in Ms. Clayton-Tarvin and the rest of the majority of the Ocean View School District Board of Trustees’ determination, despite the mob, to continue to do their job.”

And that’s all the news that’s fit to print about that, right this second! Vern out…


About Vern Nelson

Greatest pianist/composer in Orange County, and official political troubadour of Anaheim and most other OC towns. Regularly makes solo performances, sometimes with his savage-jazz band The Vern Nelson Problem. Reach at vernpnelson@gmail.com, or 714-235-VERN.