Please welcome the new Orange Juice blog team!

You may have noticed that the Orange Juice team has two new bloggers. Please welcome Vern Nelson and Sarah Michele Spinosa.

Vern is an accomplished musician and, as it turns out, a terrific writer. He is known in Orange County for his work on behalf of the peace movement. He is also active in politics in his own town of Huntington Beach.

Sarah is also a terrific writer. She is relatively new to Orange County, but she has already made quite a splash here at the Orange Juice. Two of her posts are already in our top fifteen posts, as tracked by Google Analytics. Sarah, like Vern, is a Democrat. While Vern is a progressive, Sarah is very proud to be a moderate.

I also made the decision tonight to cut loose several bloggers who have not contributed anything here in months. We will miss them and should they opt to come back they will always be welcome. One of the bloggers we cut was the infamous “Little Saigon Insider,” who wrote several terrific posts about the political machinations in Little Saigon…but then he disappeared. With his exit we close the book on having anon writers on our team, for now at least. I can only hope the Trannies didn’t figure out who he or she was and take him out. That threat was always there, which is why he or she used an anon name in the first place. I never knew the real identity of Little Saigon Insider.

Our other Democratic writers include Claudio Gallegos, who won’t be here much longer due to job considerations, but without whom there probably would not be an Orange Juice; Aria Ghafari, a U.C.L.A. student who has been quite busy working on the Barack Obama presidential campaign; and Tish Leon, who is a Santa Ana Parks and Recreation Commissioner.

Our Republican bloggers include Mission Viejo’s Larry Gilbert, who is an expert on eminent domain abuse; Gilbert has also been producing political documentaries for a long time with our husband and wife team of bloggers, Ron & Anna Winship, who live in Newport Beach; and Santa Ana’s Thomas Gordon, who is running for the OC GOP Central Committee.

Additional political coverage is provided by my fellow independent, Luis Rodriguez, who is also from Santa Ana. Luis and I also used to serve on the Santa Ana Housing & Redevelopment Commission. We both resigned in the last year. I did so in particular as an act of protest when Thomas Gordon was tossed off Santa Ana’s EPIC/Gang Commission by the Santa Ana City Council.

As always, we continue to look for new bloggers to add to our team. I am interested, in particular, in adding a Libertarian or two. I would also like to add more Republicans and perhaps another independent or two. And when Claudio moves on, we will be looking to add another Democrat or two as well. If you are interested in joining our blog team, please email me.