Gail Eastman has really stepped in it.

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Hat tip to Allen Bartlett at PowderBlue Report for posting this first.   A friend slipped me the mail piece in question, as it only went to permanent vote-by-mail homes, but I was underwater and couldn’t get it online.  (While you’re over at Allen’s, he also has a pretty good voter’s guide worth reading.)

Anaheim City Council incumbent Gail Eastman has stepped in it.  Yes, and worse than usual.  While her Council compatriots Kris Murray and Lucille Kring accepted the disciplinary measures handed down from GOP leadership, and went on to devise outright lies about the competition, Eastman blindly plowed forward with campaign lies about HERSELF, to be promoted on a glossy piece of mail that got a great deal of attention Countywide – although not the kind of attention she had hoped for.   Kris Murray had pushed out a deceptive but not “untrue” mailing with a simple message of being the “choice of Republican leaders” including photos of Crony Capitalist Republicans to back up the claim (after all she is not the choice of Republican PARTY leaders, just the three pseudo-conservatives pictured here in this mail piece.  Kosher.)

But Gail Eastman stepped ALL THE WAY over that line and used… “The Elephant.”

Oops.

Now perhaps it’s just her newly minted status as a baby Republican, since she only dropped her Decline to State status in 2010 for the party of Reagan and its hoped-for endorsement.  (She failed then too, by the way.)  Perhaps she didn’t understand that the “elephant with little stars on the back” is a trademarked corporate symbol, whose use is as carefully controlled as any Disney character image on the market.  Use of that symbol indicates a candidate is endorsed by the Republican party, something Gail Eastman has never been, something Eastman was ruled alongside Murray as ineligible to even be CONSIDERED for when they stood before Mark Bucher and company at the Endorsement Committee.  But even if Eastman failed to grasp that concept, her professional handlers must have known it, and they ran with it anyway.

GOP Leader Scott Baugh was not amused. 

The letter Baugh sent out immediately made it clear that she is not endorsed, she is not to use the symbol, and the next use of the symbol will result in a GOP mailing telling voters of her deception.

I appreciate that Baugh took this stand against the blatant misrepresentation of a party already hurting with Anaheim voters due to the promotion of bad leaders using an R after their names, but I can’t help wishing the reaction had been stronger.  In my mind his letter would have automatically gone out to every Republican high-propensity voter in Anaheim, outing the deception and the lack of character of a candidate who would present such a bald-faced lie to the public. 

Kring, Murray, and Eastman all knew the standard for receiving the GOP endorsement.  They thumbed their noses at the standard:  Kring went on to lie about it, earning her a public thrashing during a Central Committee meeting.  But Eastman and Murray still arrogantly put in an appearance to the Endorsement Committee, asking that Mr. Bucher’s group overlook the public employee union money glowing red in their bank accounts for all the world to see, and consider them, “based on their records.”  Thankfully party leaders didn’t buy it, ruled them both ineligible even for consideration, and bid them a good night.  As the lone concession to “party unity” the GOP took the position that they would not endorse at all in the Council race in Anaheim.

But since Eastman and Murray want to be considered for their records, let’s review:  Murray and Eastman voted for the highest pension formulas legally allowable under the new rules, for new public safety hires. It takes the math skills of a 4th grader to understand that unsustainable pensions offered for new hires in the future mean fewer staff on the street. Murray and Eastman don’t get it – they don’t get it by a lot – but  it now makes sense why – bullies like Anaheim Police Association head Kerry Condon are willing to run lie-packed commercials against the ONE vote against offering those pension formulas:

Eastman and Murray joined Harry Sidhu in that bogus offering to the AMEA in 2012, reportedly to shut up the OCEA money machine running mail against the “Giveaway Three” who had approved the Gardenwalk hotel $158 million subsidy.  Their only cut to the budget that night was the Mayor’s staff, leaving the leader of the 10th largest City in California with one part-time policy adviser working 20 hours a week.  But all other AMEA staff got 2 bonus worth about $1,000 each.

Then there’s the roughly ONE BILLION DOLLARS in Crony Capitalist projects spread across Anaheim during this administration, every one of them tied to Mayor-turned-lobbyist Pringle.  Yeah, let’s look at the “Republican” credentials of these two leaders who believe their track record outweighs their violation of the Baugh Manifesto’s NO UNION MONEY agreement.

I can’t help wishing that Baugh’s one peace offering would be rescinded, and the GOP would now automatically endorse the one GOOD Republican remaining in the Council race, with the open party nod to James Vanderbilt. As a Republican in good standing, and a former member of the GOP Central Committee from years ago, Vanderbilt should have been a no-brainer for at least one endorsement, but the OC GOP refused to step between two heavily armed camps.  The price we pay for peace is to watch Belgium fall.

It’s not too late for the GOP to help Anaheim clean up this mess. A letter or mail piece COULD still go out as a “member communiqué” reaching out to high propensity Republicans, and addressing the deception of Gail Eastman in conjunction with a monumental SMACK across the head to “republican” District Attorney Tony Rackaukus, whose lie-packed video attack against the Republican endorsed incumbent Mayor of Anaheim clearly benefits Democrat Lorri Galloway more than any other candidate.  Whose side is the DA on? 

If the whole idea of the Baugh Manifesto forbidding public employee union money for GOP endorsed candidates is to keep the decision makers out of bed with those collecting those tax-payer funded bennies, then what does it say when the Anaheim Police Association burns through their remaining credibility to put out a video with union leader Kerry Condon telling the same outrageous lies as the District Attorney?

Look at the comments feeds for the videos, and there isn’t much believability there, with many comments openly ripping the District Attorney and Kerry Condon for the obvious lies being told by political mud slingers. Today’s headlines feature more stories about the wrongdoing in the District Attorney’s office and the DA being the subject of investigations himself, than articles of the DA’s office working to put bad guys away.

Kerry Condon is most famously know for blowing the supervision of his one and only employee running the office of the Anaheim Police Association, who embezzled well into six figures for FIVE YEARS without Condon’s oversight, but he wants us to provide his department with authority to make “split-second decisions” that leave people dead, and we aren’t supposed to have ANY say in the matter?

So far in this election, I have yet to see ANY truth being told by the entrenched Kleptocracy.   They make up their own set of “facts” about the Mayor, his running mates, and now even about themselves.

Mayor Tom Tait has been leading Anaheim through four of the most contentious years in our city’s history.  He took office and found the budget in shambles, years of overspending depleted reserves and the city was broke.  Trying to regain footing put the Mayor at odds with his colleagues, his public employee unions, and the Crony Capitalists that had been feeding at the trough for years and expected more of the same under Tait’s leadership.  They were horrified to sit outside the building and watch him close and lock each and every one of the back doors left open by predecessor Curt Pringle, and their efforts to inject their own pry bars to the municipal checkbook have had limited effectiveness, in that they get the check written, but Tait ensures it is done in daylight, with media attention for the check signing ceremony.

And yet through it all, the ONLY thing they can find to hit Tait with is a pack of lies:   He hates the Angels!  He hates cops!  He hates Bruno the Police Dog!  How stupid do they think voters are?

I am sad that Gail Eastman has been sucked into the vortex of the misdeeds of others because I don’t think she is a dishonest person, I think she is an honest woman who is in over her head and unable to discern that the friends she’s listening to don’t always have her best interests at heart.  If she needs an example to point to she need look no further than the mailing that has left her open to ridicule and indelibly damaged her credibility and moral character for those of us who know she has no right to the symbolism her “people” flat out stole for her politically profitable use.  I can only hope she wises up in a hurry, or joins Murray in packing up her desk.