Who says the ironically named “Liberal OC” blog is utterly useless? Well, actually everybody does, but that’s not really fair. Dan C often posts, under his own name, undigested information that he doesn’t know what to do with, and on occasion that can be a useful find.
For example, if Dan hadn’t posted last week that the OC GOP had voted to proudly endorse ALL TWELVE of their eligible OC incumbents for re-election, it may have taken us ANOTHER week to learn of that unremarkable news. (As an aside, Dan’s chosen 50’s-era “it’s a man’s world” image for his post seems inappropriate when 8 of the 12 candidates are female, but that’s enough about Dan.)
To hear the following nine mediocrities named off in a list, is really … something. Something, I would think, embarrassing to that Party, if it were susceptible to that phenomenon. Well anyway, let’s see what our Republican muckety-mucks have to say for their exciting 2022 line-up:
“At our final Central Committee meeting of the year, the Republican Party of Orange County proudly voted to endorse our Republican incumbents ahead of a competitive 2022 midterm election.
“We endorsed these candidates early because they have earned not only our endorsement, but they have earned reelection by their constituents. From Congress to Orange County our Republican legislators have fought hard for our communities. If we want to flip the House of Representatives, make gains in the state legislature and protect Orange County – we must act now to defend our Republican seats and defeat the Democrats in targeted races throughout the county. Our endorsement is the first step in that process.”
So, these Republican incumbents, particularly these two Congresswomen, four assemblymembers and two BoE church ladies have earned this support because “they’ve fought hard for our communities?” To what communities do they refer? Do you remember any of these people fighting hard for your community? I sure don’t. Well, let’s get into the weeds. Kim and Steel?
In Congress, Young Kim and Michelle Steel have impressive legislative records for first-term representatives. They have worked to be problem solvers in the minority, finding common ground where they can to pass meaningful legislation. Far too often in Washington D.C., Democrat partisanship gets in the way of progress. Young and Michelle have been at the forefront of stopping the failed and far-left Biden agenda. When Republicans take back the majority in 2022, we are confident they will lead in solving our nations most important issues with commonsense conservative principles.
OK, “impressive legislative records” is funny, though maybe we shouldn’t expect minority congressmembers to pass legislation, especially in this polarized time when their very job description is to stop any successful Democratic effort. No, they are not “problem solvers” (although Kim is nominally in that caucus) nor do they look for any “common ground” with Democrats. They’re both Stepford followers of Leader Kevin McCarthy who in turn dances to whatever tune Donald Trump plays. (Trump who LOST spectacularly here, TWICE.) These two ladies show ZERO independence, at a time when independence is sorely needed in that Party.
They both downplay the seriousness of the January 6 Insurrection, and both voted against the committee investigating that atrocity. Like most of their colleagues, they voted against both Biden’s essential Covid relief bill and the new bipartisan infrastructure bill, while still boasting about the dearly needed benefits it brings to their districts. Kim’s defense of her “no” vote was particularly nonsensical and received national ridicule:
Young Kim is still the same Portrait in Courage who, running in 2018, said that she “hates to see crying children,” but “didn’t know enough” about President Trump’s child separation program to have a position on it. Most recently, she explained her refusal to join the censure of Paul Gosar for his fantasy-cartoon killing of AOC by what-abouting old comments by Ilhan Omar and Maxine Waters that Republicans find distasteful. I’m pretty sure Ilhan and Maxine didn’t threaten their colleagues with murder.
But at least Young Kim can form a sentence; Michelle Steel is at the bottom of the barrel, in a category with Texan cartoon Louie Gohmert. She and her svengali husband Shawn (left) have never shied away from publicly worshiping the Rotting Yam (who lost this County spectacularly twice.) This year the bulk of Steel’s district was devastated by oil spills, and folks who may have voted for her became aware of the Steels’ ties to big oil, their stubborn support for offshore drilling, and their fanatic opposition to all environmentalism. Not a good fit for a coastal district!
Well… back to the wisdom of our grand GOP poobahs:
Sacramento is out of control. Our Orange County Republican delegation to the State Assembly is critical to pushing back against Gavin Newsom and the Democrat supermajority. We proudly endorse Assemblyman Phillip Chen, Assemblyman Steven Choi, Assemblywoman Janet Nguyen and Assemblywoman Laurie Davies. These skilled legislators have delivered for their constituents and are best fit to return to Sacramento to continue to fight for every day Californians.
These “skilled legislators have delivered,” and they are also “best fit?” Does anyone know anything they’ve done? And yes of course they’re in a superminority, but Republicans with some beliefs besides saying “no,” Republicans like John Moorlach and Tim Donnelly, always found Democrats they could work with on issues that transcend Party – issues like civil liberties, transparency, efficiency, and helping small businesses.
Laurie Davies – isn’t that the south county politician that wanted to ram the 241 extension into San Clemente? Janet Nguyen – isn’t that the staggeringly corrupt Little Saigon boss who singlehandedly brought CalOptima to its knees? Irvine’s mumbling Steven Choi (left) doesn’t do anything in Sacramento, but can’t tweet enough about the wondrousness of Trump. And I’m still waiting to hear from anyone who knows anything about Philip Chen. “Skilled legislators have delivered,” yeah right.
…Sheriff Don Barnes has fought Sacramento Democrats’ push to undermine public safety and law enforcement by defunding the police, ordering early release of prisoners and demanding local agencies enforce mask and vaccine mandates.
Sheriff Barnes has remained steadfast and focused on protecting every Orange County resident. We proudly endorse Sheriff Barnes for reelection…
That first sentence is pretty badly written, making it sound like Barnes did all this (non-existent) defunding of police and the rest. But Barnes is the worst of their endorsements – not a mediocrity like the others, but a smooth, competent, dangerous authoritarian.
To catalogue the misdeeds of this Sheriff (who was shamefully endorsed in 2018 by conservative Democrats Lou Correa and Tom Daly, over a decent Democrat challenger) will require a much longer piece. But let’s try to make a quick summary, in Declaration of Independence style:
- He has presided over a lawless and unaccountable department, guilty of many unpunished acts of brutality, mishandling and withholding of evidence, dishonesty and burglary.
- He has continued his predecessor’s (Hutchens’) co-operation with ICE, handing over nearly a thousand inmates to federal authorities for deportation – more than any other California sheriff – even during a period of Covid outbreaks in immigrant detention centers.
- He has become a folk-hero to this county’s anti-mask freaks by proudly refusing to lift a finger to enforce any kind of state health mandates during the pandemic.
- Knee-deep in his predecessor’s catastrophic jailhouse-snitch scandal, he has resisted any disclosure or transparency in an apparent effort to bury that disastrous chapter in history.
- And, having some kind of strange hold over the Board of Supervisors, he wrung from them an unaffordable, budget-busting $151 million raise in 2019; now that Board is raiding HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of our federal mental health money to throw at an expanded Musick Mental Health Jail that they want him to run.
This is the Sheriff with whom the OC Republican Party is well pleased. We can only hope that a decent, qualified, viable opponent to this Sheriff materializes, someone as good as our DA challenger Pete Hardin, and also that that person doesn’t get stabbed in the back by prominent Democrats this time around.
Back to the OC FOP, I mean GOP:
…We also proudly endorse Barnes’ colleagues Hugh Nguyen for Clerk-Recorder, Shari Friedenrich for Treasurer and Claude Parrish for Assessor….
Well, EVERYBODY loves Hugh and Shari, and I don’t know anything about the Assessor, so let’s move on…
In addition, we have endorsed Mari Barke and Lisa Sparks for Orange County Board of Education. They have fought for parents’ and students’ rights against special interest groups who believe parents should not have a choice in the school their child attends and the curriculum their child learns in the classroom.
And here they broach the TRUE clown car, the always-ridiculous OCBoE, on which Barke and Sparks are nothing but yes votes for nutjob crusader Ken Williams.
It’s really fortunate that this Board has a lot less power than you might think from their name, but they sure waste a lot of our money and make our County look stoopid with their fights against mask and vaccine mandates, the mythical boogieman of Critical Race Theory, their endless losing lawsuits against long-suffering Superintendent Mijares, and their unquestioning greenlighting of any and all charter schools that had been previously rejected for good reasons by various local school boards. (I won’t even get into Mari’s psycho husband Dr Jeffrey Barke, who thinks he can kill Covid with his pistol!)
Republican voters of Orange County, your Party leadership claims that the above folks “fight hard for YOUR COMMUNITY.” Whatever, wherever, your community is, I would ask you to question that.
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So that’s what we have to say about the OCGOP’s endorsed incumbents. It could be though, when we take a closer look at Fred Whitaker’s little Rump County Party, that we have been expecting more of them than we really should. Consider:
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Postcript: Spitzer
Notably missing from this list of OC GOP endorsed incumbents is the District Attorney. Does this mean they’re tired of him, they want him out? Nah, he’s done as good a job as his predecessor Rackauckas at not stepping on any Republican political toes, and he’s been really busy fearmongering against Democrats. He’s probably just sticking to his promise of eschewing political endorsements, which is a good thing.
But it must be painful. You can tell how terrified Todd is of his challenger Pete Hardin – he can’t stop for one day throwing insults, smears, and #hashtags at him. For example, here’s what he posted yesterday – the OC DA’s Happy Thanksgiving greeting to you and me! (Note how the graphic was not enough, he had to add a little commentary at top.)
Happy Thanksgiving to you too, Todd!
Rotting Yam. Where’d ya find that?
If I credited you for all your coinages I use, why, people would say I was Zenger-indebted.
No problem. I got it from Jimmy Kimmel (or one of his writers).
Vern, you wanna hear something about Phillip Chen? Here ya go: he wrote this year’s AB 496, which allows a deceased person to be cremated with an American flag. So apparently he supports flag burning.
I was hoping you’d show up here!
I don’t think that that argument flies. Both burning of the American flag to retire it and cremation of the corpse are intended as gestures of respect, as is doing them together. Flag-burning as protest is not a gesture of respect to the flag, though it is an allowable gesture of disrespect to the object of protest (usually some government policy.) So Chen would not be pro-flag burning generally, especially as protest and it would be an easy argument to swat away.
Presuming that you’re looking at another race against him, it would be worth your seeing how many times he’s helped conservative/sellout Democrats block good legislation on committees. That’s where he does his damage.
Janet Nguyen is a skilled thief of public funds. The End.
Vern!
This is the season to “Give Thanks”!/
“Count your Blessings”!
So I am thankful for the fact that none of those a holes represents me in elected office ‘oh well’.. there is the, county Sheriff and DA….but the rest of that list of Trump Lovers… won’t be on my ballot….THANK GOD!
I’m thankful that Josh Newman breaks the otherwise Republican stranglehold here in the Frozen North. Philip Chen is sort of a nothing whose expected bad votes in the legislature matter mostly in committees where conservadems align with him, but Young Kim is a true embarrassment to us. Redistricting might change that.
I don’t know about redistricting helping us against Young Kim. I keep waiting for you to write a helpful piece about the process, so I don’t know what’s final or not, but last map I saw of 39 gives her Fullerton to Fountain Valley, including all of Little Saigon. First of all, leaving out Jay Chen. And no names occur to me of Democrats who could beat her there. Maybe a Viet Dem.
I don’t think that she’ll end up with that much, but if she does it will just be because there’s such a dearth of possible Asian-majority and even Asian-potential plurality districts in this state (due to lack of concentrated residential patterns) that they may justified it on those grounds. And there’s an argument for that. Jay could still run there, though, if you can influence certain friends of yours not to attack him as a carpetbagger.
My piece about the process is now nearing “War and Peace” length, and I’m not even done yet. The state’s software was seriously screwed up — changing the number of people in each district, leaving various numbers of unallocated voters out of the map with no actual way to find them — that I had to start my map over literally about 20 times. This is because I don’t just try to get my districts within 4% of each other; I try to get them within .03% (roughly 1/300ths) without the “real” authors ability to break census blocks. They don’t like people to do that, because then the experts are hemmed in and can mess around. With my map, they at most have to cut an extra city in half. Which reminds me: they don’t let us superimpose city maps. Good news is: I hope to have it by Monday.
Bushala, Zenger and Ryan wouldn’t be the ones ruining the election for Jay. Anyway what we mostly hate is 1) someone lying about their residence, or 2) moving just to run. And Jay would be doing neither.
The REPUBLICANS and Young Kim would blast Jay for being an out-of-town, LA liberal, wrong for the OC. And that would probably lose him a lotta votes, being mostly true.
Vern: carpetbaggers move to run. Fake carpetbaggers lie about where they live in order to run. Both reveal different levels of narcissism and honesty.
Sidhu, Galloway, Ackerwoman, Umberg (stalked by Jerbal), Walters, and Kerr are all prime examples of the perjuring MFers who create phony and always unbelievable residences. Galloway actually faked three different addresses in the same election, surely a record. But then she also ripped off her aunt who was left homeless and died before she could collect a judgment against “LoGal” so Lorraine’s cellar had several cellars beneath it.
Then there was the hapless clown Sukhee Kang, who really did move from Irvine to Fullerton (the empty nesters made a sensible decision said ChemLew) and got his ass handed to him by Bushala; and then moved back where he came from.
So given that Jay would not have to move in order to run in against Young Kim, does that put him in the clear re carpetbagger attacks? (Vern, please answer if Zenger doesn’t.)
Jay is not from LA; he’s from near Brea and La Habra. He’s pretty mainstream rather than highly liberal. (Mostly he’s just sensible, which may make him seem liberal.) And he’s not “wrong for OC,” which tends to like intelligent candidates (Michelle Steel notwithstanding.) Young Kim would be afraid to debate him.
Well it’s up to Jay. I think people should run for Congress where they live, even if that’s not required. But I also can’t think of any Democrats off hand, in the new 39, who could beat Young Kim.
To Zenger: Yup. And then there’s out-of-district Congressional candidates like Tom McClintock who neither move nor lie about it, and they’re following the law, but I think they’re at a disadvantage.
PS Your bipartisan list of OC residence-liars could be longer. I made a collage of them once and had to give up when I got to 13. And if we’re giving credit to Jerbal for busting Umberg, we must give credit to the “Northwood Night Stalker” ChemLew for nailing Choi!
PPS I think this was an early version… I see Mimi! Paulette! Solorio! And Kimberly Ho! (Sarmiento insists that the rumors he lives in Orange Park Acres are false.) I apparently didn’t know about Umberg.
Where and when did Mayor Sarimento EVER address his residency questions?
I remember watching video of the Ware trash guys showing six weeks trash pick up of empty containers. Keep in mind had teenagers at the time attending Foothill HS in Tustin (his Alma mater).
Please show us where Vince has EVER addressed this and not that Barbaro dude who was his “GO to” defender.
The DPOC of the early 2000 nds raked in a lot of dough at that Fourth street mansion but. Noone ever saw stocked refrigerator.
Waiting patiently…….
Umberg was living in Villa Park while pretending he lived in an SA condo. That was in 2008 or so as I recall. Jerbal wrote a story about it with pictures n’ everything. 2 years later he was making excuses for Sidhu’s perjury, because, ya know, the perjury was of such short duration.
The funniest part of 2010 was when ChemLewski tried to cover for Galloway by proclaiming her 3rd fake home “lived it.” I think Bushala wrote a post about it.
ChemLew who was Carpetbagging Choi’s worst nightmare.
I aspire to not be as hypocritical as either of those bloggers. I like Sarmiento for other reasons but as far as I can tell he belongs in the above image.
It’s a strange and perplexing disease, this carpetbagging; but in a way it’s a useful tool in recognizing the worst among us, and their need to be elected something – anything, really. How many elections has Hide-and-Seek Sidhu been in since 2004? My count is seven (not counting his attempt at the County Clerk job – satellites offices in orbit). When you think about it, the mania is sort of impressive. That’s once every 28 months.
Here’s the thing that amazes me: they are literally doing this more than six months before our July 7, 2022 primary. They simply don’t want anyone from the party challenging their choices. OK by me: it’s easier to hit a stationary target, and this almost guarantees that no more than one Republican makes it onto the runoff ballot in everything but the County Officer races, where a majority closes out the race, and the BOE, which is plurality wins from the get-go.
I wonder if the DPOC is going to be as awful about refusing to endorse the Democratic candidate for Sheriff as it was in 2018 — when my trying to help Duke Nguyen (by undermining the Racky-Barnes Axis) was part of why I was expelled from leadership.
Where can one find the voting records of these candidates? It’s important that voters know their representative’s positions, especially seniors, parents with children, lovers of the ocean and others. It’s incredibly important that Democrats take this information to the public at senior centers, child care centers, community centers, and every beach city. Forget the labels, stick to the facts to prove non-representation.
Lotsa places. Given where you live, you’re probably mostly concerned with Steel. I’ll look for a few sources for you.
Here’s a completely objective source
https://justfacts.votesmart.org/candidate/157194/michelle-steel
#toddspitzerforprison2022 #lockHIMup #prosecutorialmisconduct is a Felony . Vote #PeteHardin4DA unless you want four more years of SPIT
I don’t think you’re doing Hardin any favors here. You have any real documented criticisms of actual illegal behavior, post them, If they check out, they’ll stay up.
Spitzer was in fact endorsed by
OCgopoop, sorry you are wrong in that.
But anyway, how much to advertise hashtags on your blog? We are getting ready to start a new tik tok and want to promote our social media. FYI: This is separate from Love and her thing,she is doing something with Luis, but this is me and some friends of mine.
The Spitzer endorsement was not included in this OC GOP statement. You may be right, but where did you see an OC GOP Spitzer endorsement?