For a while I’d been doing this feature on FACEBOOK, “Ten Years Ago on the Orange Juice Blog,” where I’d post the best of our decade-old stories. But I got too busy to do that these past three months, so now here’s a whole bunch of our great stories from the FALL OF 2014. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, “Are we self-indulgent? Very well then, we are self-indulgent.” But don’t worry we’ll have some new hard-hitting stories when December rolls in!
Ah, the Fall of 2014, when we were all 50-something! A time of tumult and turmoil, triumph and tragedy. We were still fighting the Poseidon boondoggle (and would be for 8 more years till the Coastal Commission put a stake in its heart.) We were still fighting the OCTA/CalTrans plan to put Toll Lanes on the 405, a fight we lost. We were fighting a lot in Anaheim – the first attempted giveaway of the Angels Stadium (for Arte to lease for $1 a year), what looked like an endless stream of hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars of subsidies to luxury hoteliers, and we were fighting for District Elections, a fight we won that year.
Mayor Tom Tait, a notably honest Republican, was running for re-election, and being challenged by both Lucille Kring (with the backing of the corrupt Chamber and Angels) and the vastly problematic yet comedic Lorri Galloway. On Council, kleptocrats Kris Murray and Gail Eastman were being challenged by the painfully honest James Vanderbilt as well as Jose Moreno, the architect of our District Elections. NOW do you remember?
Let’s start with a Greg Diamond story from…
September 2014
Here Greg makes a distinction between his support for labor and workers’ rights in general, versus his constant criticism of OC’s most powerful, greedy and short-sighted unions, which were pushing for all the bad projects we were fighting. I don’t recall if this was before or after these unions helped to push Greg out of his position at the County Democratic Party (but I did show up to try to support him, and got yelled at a lot.)
That was the year that corrupt Republican Janet Nguyen and corporate Democrat Jose Solorio were running against each other for an opening in the state Senate. (Janet went on to win overwhelmingly – I don’t think Solorio tried real hard.) I got to attend a “forum” between the two, for a crowd of lobbyists, at the invitation of lobbyist George Urch, who has always been oddly friendly to me, and I wrote about it. I was inspired, as I have been many times, to wrap it all up with the final sentence of Orwell’s “Animal Farm” – “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Back in Anaheim, Mayor Tait and Lucille Kring had a little debate over district elections – Tait in favor, Kring opposed. Now I think of it, I was still registered as a Republican, which began as sort of a joke, but it allowed me to attend this Anaheim Republican Assembly event! A lot of people liked my description of Lucille as “a pint-sized packmule unburdened by conscience or scruple.” (Amazingly, while Tom is very happy leading his non-political life, Lucille is now somehow in charge of the Planning Commission, where she is as corrupt and dumb as ever.)
Remember Doug Pettibone? He and Vanderbilt were Tait’s choices for Council that year, but so much mud, unfairly and falsely, was thrown at Doug, that he withdrew. Greg covered that:
This brings us to…
October 2014
Ah, Fitzgerald. Always embarrassing us with his vitriol, some of which was beyond the pale, to the point we’d avoid him for a while. And then, you never knew when he was suddenly gonna do something good. (Fitzgerald died in ’22. I wrote this as “Anaheim Insider,” a pseudonym I stole from one of Matt Cunningham’s hangers-on. Also, this was back when Yesenia Rojas was still a rebel.)
In Huntington Beach I was backing the great environmentalists Joe Shaw and Connie Boardman for re-election. They had been the first to vote against the huge new high-density projects in Surf City that didn’t provide enough parking and burdened our infrastructure and traffic. Yet, Orwellianly, come election time, they were blamed for these monstrosities. Here’s my tour-de-force of HB’s high-density in 2014 – my original story seems to have disappeared (I’ll restore it through the Wayback Machine today) but thankfully Greg copied it over here. (As a bonus, see the Condom Revolution, practically next door to Dilday Brothers, just down the street from Phuket Thai, and not far from Mandic Motors!)
Matt Cunningham was very busy with his Anaheim Blog that year (which later became the Anaheim Independent and then the Anaheim Observer, now apparently moribund) – propaganda paid for by Todd Ament‘s boundlessly corrupt Chamber of Commerce. (Huh, how many of these folks we fought with are prison-bound now?) The blog had a comment section, but Matt would censor comments he didn’t like. Therefore Ryan Cantor created this “Censortopia Open Thread,” which got… wow! … 139 comments, well worth reading!
The other nightmare in OC’s blogosphere, then as now, was Dan “Chumley” Chmielewski of the so-called “Liberal OC.” Here, Greg memorialized and reacted to some words me and Dan had with each other in his comments section. Marvel at the nastiness of the faux-liberal blogger (and diehard Galloway fan.) Worth a chuckle, an eyeroll, and a shake of the head at least..
Wow, more “Censortopia?” Well, as Ryan said, “Anaheim Blog is the gift that keeps giving.” 113 comments on this baby!
Let’s get out of Anaheim for a moment, to marvel over the wasteful “legal wars” of Costa Mesa Mayor Jim Righeimer, with our Goat Hill correspondent “Gericault“…
And we were STILL trying to get Buena Park’s young Jesus Aguirre out of prison – the 16-year old sent away to LIFE in PELICAN BAY, for something that shoulda been a couple years – as part of Tony Rackauckas’ out-of-control war on gangs. Later we would win, when Governor Brown commuted Jesus’ sentence (and he’s free and productive now) – but T-Rack tried his best to exaggerate Jesus’ terrifying criminal past – which included letting a girl ride on his bike’s handlebars.
A guest piece from Alicia Rojas, a Santa Ana artist putting herself on the line for freedom of speech, freedom to criticize the police at a Council meeting:
As the mid-term election drew near, Greg posted one of his encyclopedic voters’ guides (which I preceded with a short version.)
Well, Greg himself wrote, “This is probably the most important piece you will read about the current election, and what it describes affects more than just Anaheim itself,” so I’d better include it.
The Republican Party had just started using the Trans thing against Democrats, as Young Kim did that year (successfully) against Sharon Quirk-Silva, AND they were sending out ultra-queenish caricatures of the great, openly gay Joe Shaw, who was running for re-election to HB City Council. Just had to document the atrocities:
This was the year of the great Proposition 47, which aimed to reform California’s War on Drugs and Prison-Industrial System (and passed.) I banged the drum for it here:
Forgot this: Michelle Steel’s husband GOP bigwig Shawn Steel (a couple who FINALLY LOST THIS YEAR) ridiculed Jose Solorio for being a vegan, saying “What a freak! That’s like a fascist! That’s like ISIS.” Good catch, Greg:
In Huntington Beach, as I said, I was backing the re-election of the two great Council environmentalists Joe Shaw and Connie Boardman. But Lucy Dunn, who’d run the kleptocratic OC Business Council for decades, just had to come out for their kleptocratic, Poseidon-backing opponents. The OCBC and Dunn had been strongly supporting everything we opposed – including Poseidon and the 405 Toll Lanes – and HB voters with any memory remembered Lucy trying to put housing on the beloved Bolsa Chica Wetlands, so you’d think her endorsement woulda hurt, but it didn’t. (She was very nice to me when I met her a few years later though…)
And before we knew it, it was…
NOVEMBER 2014!
MORE CENSORTOPIA, RYAN??? This one got 109 comments. Really, they’re a blast
“Democrats” Jordan Brandman and Lou Correa surprised nobody but disgusted many by endorsing, at the last moment, the kleptocratic Anaheim Republicans Kris Murray and Gail Eastman. And the DPOC didn’t have much to say about it. Greg:
I’d mentioned our fifteen-year fight against Poseidon – well, looks like I was taking a break from that over the fall with all the election distraction, but our good friend John Earl (now at SoCal Water Wars) was picking up the slack – here he demolishes a typical phony Probolsky push-poll that aimed to prove that OC’s people WANTED this boondoggle (if they knew next-to-nothing about it), and hence candidates BETTER SUPPORT IT. BS. Did I mention we won that fight? And both Probolsky brothers are and remain useless vendidos:
Hadn’t mentioned that, during this time, Greg & Cynthia’s CATER was in the middle of a couple of David-vs-Goliath lawsuits against the city of Anaheim for its corruption – suits they lost, which our detractors find endlessly hilarious AND suspicious. Anyway this story of Greg’s, which references these suits, came out on Election Day, November 4:
I also didn’t mention, but at this time Tyler in Irvine (click there to read all his pieces) was covering The City of Beige for us, in what we thought was a very fair and nonpartisan way. Here’s Tyler on Election Day:
My own summary of the election results – mostly depressing, except, MIXED in Anaheim. (District Elections passed by nearly 70%; Mayor Tait won overwhelmingly, and gained one ally in James Vanderbilt who beat Gail Eastman – but a klepto majority of Brandman, Murray and Kring remained to make everybody’s life hell except the wealthiest special interests.)
Cynthia Ward‘s reaction to the Anaheim results!
Remember Ricardo Toro? He used to write for us about Anaheim back then too…
Another Cynthia – that’s right, during all this time, we were also fighting the Disney Streetcar! (We won that fight too, thanks to honest folks on the OCTA who listened to us, but the Zombie Streetcar will come back, we’re sure.)
We were glad, in Anaheim, that there hadn’t been any police killings, unnecessary unjust ones, since the dark times of 2011-12… but nationally the issue was just starting to get attention with the killing in Missouri of unarmed Michael Brown. “Hands up, don’t shoot!” people were beginning to chant. And Greg had to cover that here:
Well, that’s it, for the Fall of 2014. Believe it or not I left out most of our stories from that period. But it leaves one asking, where would we be without the Orange Juice Blog? No wonder people call it “Orange County’s Only Political Blog” – at least, the only one not run by the regrettable Cunningham and Chmielewski. Okay, back to work. Back to grim 2024.
a pathetic review of events by you losers
looks like we won as often as not!
Speaking of Zombie Streetcars, the utterly useless line between DT Santa Ana and, wherever, now stops dead at Harbor Boulevard after a ridiculously expensive overpass at Westminster. She’s gone about as fer as she kin go, at leas for now. But Euclid Ave in GG beckons.
A tribute to the stupid and the corrupt folks at OCTA who in effect are answerable to nobody.
And it’s to fund projects like that that they turned two of our new “free” 405 lanes (paid for with our Measure M $1.5 billion) into expensive toll lanes. With the aggressive backing of the Labor Trades and Teamsters.
OCTA is an agency crying out to be disbanded and returned to a bus company.
That Santa Ana Streetcar was Miguel Pulido’s baby. At those OCTA meetings 10 years ago, he (and others) would completely ignore the injustice of making taxpayers pay a hefty toll to drive on two lanes that they had already paid $1.5 billion to build, and instead rhapsodize on the wonderful Streetcar these tolls would fund.
I’ll always remember Ernesto Medrano running away from me at one of those meetings. He had discoursed passionately about how badly “his truckdrivers” needed the toll lanes because they’re always stuck in such bad traffic. I approached him afterwards protesting, “Ernesto, your truckdrivers are not going to be able to drive in the toll lanes, they’ll be stuck in the exact same traffic!” He shouted over his shoulder, “I’ll talk to you later, Vern!” and scurried off as fast as his chubby little legs would carry him.
Almost all of them went along over the years.
The dumbass thing must have been lubricated with lots of campaign dough from the usual engineering and environmental “consultants.”
Then there is the chaos on 4th Street that caused havoc with businesses (Latino ones, too) so Miguel could run his little toys down the middle of the street.
And in the end – dead end at Euclid in GG – if they can get over the 22 Freeway.