Right around the time I started blogging here (late March) I also started writing a monthly column for the Orange Coast Voice, a progressive paper full of great investigative journalism, that covers Huntington Beach, Seal Beach, Fountain Valley, and Costa Mesa. If you live in those towns you should subscribe to it for 25 bucks a year, but until you have a chance to do that, you can check it out at www.ocvoice.com.
So, my new column for May concerns State Senator Tom Harman, who represents th
e 35th district, stretching along the coast from the towns I just named, all the way down to Dana Point, and including Irvine. Entitled “The Descent of Tom Harman,” the article was going to examine this politician’s abrupt shift to the right which seemed to happen exactly when the moderate Republican Assemblyman won a special election in June 2006 for the state senate seat vacated by John Campbell. He is still remembered by most voters in this area as a reasonable, friendly, Republican champion of the environment; when Diane Harkey ran against him in 2006 she called him the “most liberal Republican in the assembly.” But since winning a seat in the Senate he has racked up an abysmal anti-environmental record and has spent most of his time bashing immigrants (a newfound obsession) and railing against healthcare reform; as we discovered at the Minuteman Rally last week, he has become one of Barbara Coe’s favorite state politicians.
Like I said, I was GOING to write one article about this, but I came up with so much material on just his environmental record that it’s turned into a four-part series. (I’ll have to deal with immigration, healthcare and other issues in future segments.)
So, click here and read the article, it will make your skin crawl! It opens with a spooky Vonnegut epigram, and it features a creepy cameo from our friend Jubal. “The Descent of Tom Harman, part 1 of 4” (Pinche editors changed my title though.) Leave a comment and look around the rest of the OCV blog, you’ll find lots of other good stuff there!
And here’s something I didn’t mention on the OCV: if you think maybe, after reading my series, that Senator Harman doesn’t deserve another term, you should know his opponent, his ONLY opponent, is the Democrat Ginny Mayer, a Harvard doctorate in Asian studies with experience in aerospace and academia, who supports universal healthcare, protecting our environment, and a “fair and humane immigration policy.”
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