You gotta clean out your garage once in a while. If you’re us, you have a lot of protest signs in there, from the past several years, many of them not relevant any more. If you’re us, you may discover the garage is not particularly rain-proof. If you’re us, some of these signs just need to be chucked at this point, partly because they’re water-damaged. But not without a fond photograph and comment.
Ah, this one had to do with trying to get rent-control for Anaheim mobile home parks. The lively Ms Fabry was one of many Rancho La Paz residents who died due to stress from John Saunders’ extreme rent hikes – we wrote about that here. Anaheim City Council, with the exception of Jose Moreno and Denise Barnes, did NOTHING to help these endangered seniors. Eventually a law was passed, with a lot of work, by Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva, but it only protected this ONE PARK, in the WHOLE STATE – Rancho La Paz.
Lately I’ve been getting e-mails from a Jack Bustamante, an activist mobile home owner in Torrance, who is pushing for the passage of Assemblymember Muratsuchi’s AB 1035, which would extend the rent protections won by Sharon for Rancho La Paz to all parks in the state. It’s nice to see Mr. Bustamante using passages of my 2014 piece “HB’s Mobile Home Uprising.” As he says, nothing much has changed since then. The SAME greedy villains – most notably John Saunders – are still buying up mobile home parks across the state and driving vulnerable seniors out of their homes. This blog will be keeping an eye out on AB 1035, and lobbying for it .. and good luck Mr. Bustamante of Torrance!
This sign, from 2020 when Kenneth Batiste was challenging Anaheim Councilman Steve Faessel, gives me mixed feelings. I think Steve cares about certain things and people, and he helped bring Be Well to Anaheim, but in 95% of his most important votes on Council he sided loyally with Sidhu, with the rich and powerful, following the orders of Flint, Ament and the Chamber. And as I remember this particular sign was inspired by the above topic – how he always stubbornly sided with the (Saunders-funded) Sidhu majority in denying any rent-cap relief to endangered mobile home owners.
When Covid hit, within a few months nearly every OC city was conducting its meetings via Zoom or Webex so the public could still participate and watch their representatives discuss and vote. NOT Harry Sidhu’s Anaheim though! Members would teleconference in with painfully bad audio, and the only way the public could comment was by e-mail which we were sure most of the members never read.
THAT’s a prescient question we had in 2020-21, eh? But back to the topic of opening meetings to Zoom – when council chambers started re-opening as Covid receded, ALL THOSE OC CITIES who had started using Zoom/Webex kept that service and started doing “Hybrid meetings” where anyone could watch & comment if they had health, transportation, family, or any other problems keeping them away from chambers. BUT NOT SIDHU’S ANAHEIM! And let’s not just pick on Sidhu – the NEW “reform” council has not responded to any of our calls for hybrid meetings either. (Faessel told me he’d “look into what Santa Ana is doing” – that’s around the last time I heard from him.)
Councilman Trevor O’Neil, after the FBI revelations, thought he could just throw his old ally Sidhu under the bus, and run for Mayor himself in 2022. Didn’t work out too well, but we were a little worried about it for a while. We picketed him outside the Westin…
I see that the next six SEVEN signs in a row (from that water-damaged pile of ours) are also 2022 Mayor-race-related – Lorri Galloway was ONCE AGAIN running as a “Democrat” spoiler candidate to take votes away from Ashleigh Aitken. In 2018 she had succeeded in just that, and we have her to thank for Sidhu’s narrow victory (472 votes.) In 2022 it wasn’t even hidden – her largest contributor and only advertiser was the hapless but well-heeled Republican PAC Lincoln Club, who at the same time had endorsed O’Neil! (While telling DEMOCRATS to vote for Lorri!)
Beyond that, there were a few of us in Anaheim whom Lorri had done terrible things to. And we called ourselves the….
We were very cognizant though that we were just the most recent in a LONG LINE of people harmed by the Galloways over the decades…
Hopefully we won’t need any of these signs again, in 2026.
Dan’s 2014 Liberal OC story to which Donna was referring in her sign above, is STILL ONLINE. I guess every time Lorri comes in short in her Mayoral races, we run out of interest and motivation to sue her.
Yeah, haven’t written about this yet but when she lost her first Mayor race in 2014, Lorri panicked and determined that she had to immediately make nice with Curt Pringle (whom she’d been trashing for years) and his one demand was that she fire her long-time, wonderful, hard-working top aide Joanne Sosa. Which she of course did, with no cause. Joanne was part of the “Galloway Truth Squad” with us, or, as Lorri called us, “the LYING SACKS.”
Well, she was always attuned to the “Voice of God,” so I thought that argument MIGHT work. Probably shouldn’t-a chosen Monty Python’s God picture though.
Yeah, that was weird. 2017 before she started her second run, the Lawyers’ Guild gave the Eli Home that amount; and within days that same amount appeared in Lorri’s campaign coffers as a personal loan. How the hell does that happen? Oh well, enough about Lorri…
This was from my “open up with Zoom” campaign, and stolen from the Washington Post’s masthead, and I thought it was good to end this piece with. We must have three times as many old signs somewhere else in the garage. But Times New Roman blown up real big sure looks authoritative, huh?
THIS IS YOUR OPEN THREAD UNTIL THE NEXT ONE. You know what, forget about “Weekend Open Threads” – that’s a Daily Kos conceit. Greg and I will make open threads whenever the inspiration hits us. Now, HAVE AT IT!
https://www.latimes.com/sports/angels/story/2023-03-20/anaheim-mayor-angel-stadium-deal-arte-moreno
You know how they say “leaves us with more questions than answers?” Yeah, this story too. Leave aside that it’s badly written (or edited) and has plenty of mistakes/lies that come straight from the Chamber, Arte, and Anaheim Blog.
Leave aside that apparently the Times’ Mr. Shaikin always thought the deal Sidhu struck with Arte was a really good one for Anaheim – who knew? We used to sit with Shaikin at the Brown Act hearings.
What a lot of my friends find disturbing is Mayor Ashleigh’s statements (near the end.) But did Shaikin even get that right?
After quoting Campaign-Ashleigh calling the Sidhu deal a “corrupt, no-bid deal,” and after Shaikin raving about the “whole raft of city objectives” the Sidhu deal would’ve “accomplished, he writes:
Aitken said she was “not committed” to that plan, although she said she would be willing to consider it as a basis to start talks with the Angels. “I will be very happy to talk to them and do a current analysis of the deal and see,” she said. “I bet we have more common ground than we disagree on.”
Who agrees with me that the Sidhu Angels deal is NOWHERE NEAR a starting point for any new deals? And doesn’t the Surplus Land Act make all of this a moot discussion anyhow? I think we’d better see what Ashleigh REALLY thinks and plans at this Tuesday’s meeting!
The more I read and think about it, this Shaikin piece is pure Arte propaganda. I’m going to have to totally “fisk” it on this blog, and in tomorrow’s speech. Who knows if enough context was given to Ashleigh’s quotes, but the writer obviously had a strong opinion that Sidhu’s dirty deal was a great one, and was apparently trying to get her to agree.
Thank you for the public exposure you have given to Assembly Member Muratsuchi’s AB1035. Hopefully your entire presentation here motivates the multitudes to gather in united efforts to shine the brightest spotlight on DEMOCRACY. We the people, have before and can again come out on top.
Good news for us Barbara Lee for Senate supporters today as progressive northern-California Congressman Ro Khanna, whom many expected to run, decided against it and has endorsed Barbara instead.
I’m rooting for Barbara as you know. If the polls look bad for her next year I might switch to Katie who would also be a good senator. But Sarmiento said something at Barbara’s Anaheim Democrats Club appearance, without mentioning any names: “There are work horses, Barbara, and there are show horses. You’re a work horse.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/us/ro-khanna-barbara-lee-senate-california.html
Of course Ro did that. Barbara Lee will turn 77 on July 16 — literally just 12 years younger than Sen. Feinstein. She might serve a term, maybe two; when she leaves, Ro (who is 46) will still be young enough to run for this seat. If Schiff, who is 60, wins then Ro would probably never get a chance to run for the seat (unless he becomes Secretary of State); if Katie, who is 49, gets the seat, he will literally never get a chance to run for it (unless she runs for President once Warren is done or becomes Secretary of the Treasury.) He’d have to join the line waiting for Alex Padilla (who is 50) to leave, maybe to become someone’s VP.
If elected, Lee is going to be at the bottom of the seniority ladder and she will not have much time to climb it. I don’t know what she even wants to abandon her seniority in the House. She’s the fifth ranking member in the minority of a really lackluster Appropriations Committee, where she can be effective for the remainder of her career as a dissident voice there. She’s got a good seat on the Budget Committee — where she somehow slipped down the seniority latter one Congress ago after having been the second ranking member — and she can be an important part of their debates.
I don’t understand her motivation, unless she intends to be a placeholder candidate. But the problems are that (1) a Democrat worse than anyone mentioned above) will be able to run against a split progressive vote, up against a Republican, or (2) it’s possible that two Republicans could grab the Top Two spots and shut Dems out entirely.
I know that I’ve said this before; I realize that I’m in total Cassandra mode here. But I foresee disaster coming if Democrats are all wishing for a pony and won’t get out of each others’ way.
I guess, in your view, no Democrat politician does what they think is good for the country without selfish reasons. I didn’t know that about Ro.
They do lots of things for unselfish reasons. But an open Senate seat in California is such a rare occurrence that many rules of gentility go out the window.
Ashleigh never ceases to not disappoint me.
LA Press Club finds Armenian, gives her an award.
https://mobile.twitter.com/LAPressClub/status/1638308117716029440?cxt=HHwWgMDS0bGjuLwtAAAA
Has anyone ever seen Councilmember Treseder and Jane Stoever, Min’s wife, in the same room? They look eerily alike.
https://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/stoever/
https://www.kathleentreseder.com/
Totally different jawlines. Those of us who aren’t myopic can distinguish them.
#BOOM
Is it antisemitic for Israelis to protest and strike against their own government?? Doh!!! So much for anti-bds being antisemitic.
Of course it isn’t. But they’re neither boycotting, divesting, nor sanctioning.
Not true. IDF reserves boycotted the military oh myopic booby one over the threatened judicial overhaul. And the people were striking against their government which is a form of boycott. Blah, blah, blah, yada, yada. You blew it again numbnuts.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/hundreds-of-elite-idf-reservists-stop-showing-up-for-duty-over-judicial-overhaul/
Look, Lippy: if you don’t know what a “boycott” is, in the context of “BDS,” you could just say so.
(Hint: it’s in the domain of commercial activity.)
Wahwahwahwah. You are wrong.
I really hope that you try that sort of “rebuttal” in court.
He did have a longer “rebuttal” but I didn’t approve it because he was mostly calling you a bunch of names.
Eric claims that “Refusing to do something is a strike which is a boycott. The military personnel refused to appear for duty. Boycotts are not limited to commercial activity.”
I’ve now looked around and found that “boycott” is generally used in the economic sense, but some benighted sources say that it can be used in the social sense. This can mean a kind of shunning, as with “Lou Correa boycotts progressives,” which is an odd usage, or rejecting, such as “strict vegetarians boycott meat products,” which misses the point. (I decline to consume meat, for example, but I buy it routinely for my family, which means that I literally do not boycott it. I do not do the dishes when my wife makes something like “dinoguan,” but that refusal doesn’t seem like a “boycott” to me, as I an entirely in favor of one of our kids or grandkids doing the dishes.)
One can argue that a boycott like refusing to attend a sports event sponsored by a disfavored country or to play against a team from that country is a “boycott,” but I think that that does fall within the realm of economic activity. It would be better characterized as a “sanction.”
Regardless, because I stipulated “in the context of ‘BDS'” above, no sane argument exists that this is kind of disdain was one of the group activities that led to attacks on people who favor BDS. We’ve not yet devolved to the point where people seriously argue that Americans are not entitled even to dislike and criticize the actions of Israel — the anti-BDS movements is concerned with concerted economic activity (including politically generated sanctions of such activity. And, sane though he may personally be, I admit that Eric is supremely qualified to make an insane argument.
Ashleigh will prove to be as bad as Sidhu. Guaranteed.
No doubt. She’s smarter than him.
Dude the guy had his own “off the books” helicopter.
*For the 10 thousant time: Stop Mass Shootings? Try Mandatory Drug Testing for all NEW Purchases and Transfers through a licensed FFL Dealer with deep background checks for all those with a history of Mental Illness, Domestic Abuse or Crimes of any kind.
Take a look at my reply from when you suggested that for the 9,999th time. It still goes.
Drug abuse is not even one of the top 10 problems causing mass shootings. Go ahead and offer some evidence to the contrary if you can find. Otherwise, it’s just your intuition/obsession.
*At least we don’t have to hear their Poseidon boosting thanks to a sensible Coastal Commission doing its job.
Oh myopic Booby one was the US boycott of the 1980
Summer olympics and economic boycott or… face it you are wrong. The boycott in BDS is not limited to boycotts only in the economic sense as evinced by Israeli reservists refusing to appear for duty in protest of proposed Israeli government policies. Face it, I wiped the floor with you.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/08/history-olympic-games-boycotts/
BDS was a term introduced in the United States. Shockingly, it was not intended to apply to the actions of Israeli soldiers. It was intended to apply to Americans, who had no Israeli Army duty to resist.
Seriously, your overconfidence would be pathetic if it weren’t so goldarn funny. Better myopic than blind with crazed rage.
BDS as a term which just recognized existing tools for political protest.
It was coined by Palestinians and modeled after the South African anti-apartheid movement and was introduced In South Africa circa 2001.
Although it may have been subsequently coined, people and countries have been boycotting, sanctioning or divesting from one another since they have existed.
The fact that Israelis have usurped bds to protest Israel is of no surprise. Israel prevented their citizens from supporting the South African anti-apartheid movement. Do you think South African Jews were involved in apartheid in South Africa or was it the similarity between Israel and South Africa that concerned the Israeli government?
You have to split hairs to win an argument oh myopic Booby one.
https://amp.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/the-state-worker/article230902804.html
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/boycott-divestment-and-sanctions/
Ironic, a Jew helped form Artists Against Apartheid.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2013/12/10/anti-apartheid-music
Flashback.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/adolf-hitler-zionism-zionist-nazis-haavara-agreement-ken-livingstone-labour-antisemitism-row-a7009981.html?amp