Californians in November passed Proposition 2, which requires animals raised for food be provided sufficient space to turn around and stretch their limbs. Now a group calling itself Operation Prop 2 Follow-Through wants to extend the protections to include not eating the critters as well. Its slogan? "You favored Prop2 - Now Go Vegan Too!" 

The campaign is spreading the word through bus cards, billboards and "coordinated massive leafleting and tabling in California's metropolitan areas." It hopes to get a big boost from Saturday's 25th anniversary Meatout, the world's largest annual grassroots diet education campaign.

In an email to the Weekly, Costa Mesa resident Christopher Tait says he joined Operation Prop 2 Follow-Through because though the voter initiative made living in cages more comfortable for the animals we eat, "the new law does not prevent deprivation, mutilation, suffocation and other atrocities perpetrated in factory farms and slaughterhouses." Read more about the campaign here.

Nine days after R. Scott Moxley, with an assist from TheLiberalOC.com, blogged that Irvine City Councilwoman Beth Krom was "putting the pieces together" to seek the 48th Congressional District seat occupied by Republican John Campbell, Krom made it official.

"On issues that matter to this district, the economy, jobs and economic development, education, the environment, public safety and transportation, John Campbell has no record of accomplishment either as a congressman or as a state legislator. My record on these issues is clear and one with multiple accomplishments. I hope to bring my experience as a accessible public official at Irvine City Hall to the halls of Congress," Krom says in what is characterized as a preliminary announcement.

A formal one will coincide with an official campaign kickoff event from 2-4 p.m. Sunday, March 22, at the Shady Canyon home of Dr. Mansoor Shah. Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove), the only other woman or Democrat among OC's congressional delegation, is scheduled to attend. More details are here. More >>

Local and statewide proponents of Proposition 8, the same-sex marriage ban approved by voters last November, have a message for local and statewide politicians: stop trying to overturn the election results and get back to work fixing your cities and/or California.

State senators and Assembly members "are authoring meaningless nonbinding resolutions that take up the time of legislators and legislative staff who should be focused on appropriate legislative priorities such as solving the state deficit," claims ProtectMarriage.com--Yes on 8 Campaign.

"Proposition 8 was adopted with over a 600,000 vote margin, gaining approximately the same vote percentage as Barack Obama did nationally," said Ron Prentice, chairman of the group that takes credit for the measure's success, in a press statement. "It passed in 42 out of California's 58 counties, including the five largest counties in California. It is wrong for legislators to disrespect the vote of the people and attempt to substitute their values for the decision of over 7 million voters."

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The Register's John Gittelsohn blogs on Mathew Padilla's Mortgage Insider about House of Cards, a CNBC documentary that names Orange County as the birthplace of the sub-prime loans that infected the world financial system. Gittelsohn notes that among the locals featured in the 90-minute program, which first airs Thursday, are Bill Dallas, founder of Ownit; Lou Pacific, a Mission Viejo real estate consultant; Daniel Sadek, founder of Quick Loan Funding; and . . . drum roll, please . . . John Gittelsohn.

Mr. Gittelsohn, when it comes to shameless self promotion, I remember Gustavo Arellano. I know Gustavo Arellano. You, sir, are no Gustavo Arellano!

More interestingly is the fact that Gittelsohn's post got linked to lefty Atrios' Eschaton blog. And what's more interesting than that are some of the 188 comments (at this writing) the Atrios post generated.

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Krom: DON'T read my lips

At the Oct. 21 Irvine City Council candidates forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters, Councilwoman Christina Shea, in the middle of an unsuccessful campaign for mayor, said that Lennar Corp., which is building homes ringing the future Great Park, would be allowed to triple the 3,200 units called for in its original agreement with the city to develop parts of the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

Termed-out mayor Beth Krom, a political foe of Shea's who was in the middle of a successful campaign for a council seat, later that same evening denied there were plans to triple the number of Lennar units, characterizing the claim as a late campaign fear tactic. Remember this Krom quote, it's why Clockwork bolded it: "We are working with 3,200 homes and that's what there will be."

Two days after the Nov. 4 election, the Irvine Planning Commission – which is packed with Krom cronies -- backed Lennar's plan to up by 1,200 the number of Great Park Neighborhoods units. No, even using new math 4,900 units are not triple the original 3,200. But neither does it represent “3,200 homes and that's what there will be."

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Is your activist streak feeling unloved after watching footage of yesterday's protests in LA against the passage of Proposition 8? Well, here's your chance to vent (peacefully, people, peacefully...).

Tonight (Friday), the Long Beach Gay & Lesbian Center is organizing a protest march down Broadway, starting at 7 p.m., and beginning on the corner of Broadway & Redondo. The march will head westward along Broadway, ending at Hamburger Mary's.

Then on Sunday, an OC march/rally is being planned in, of all places, Rancho Santa Margarita - y'know, that bastion of LGBTQ culture and nightlife (sorry, but my snark just had to get a word in there). The event starts at 5 p.m. at Rancho Santa Margarita Lake.

What I wanna know is, when will Prop 8 protest fever hit Stanton? (OK, sorry, sorry, couldn't help m'self...)

Almost from the day I moved to Seal Beach four months ago, my eyes have had to endure the visual pollution of campaign signs begging for either a Yes or No vote on Measure Z. The Yes people gave the No folks a serious ass-kicking on Tuesday, as you can see:

Z-Seal Beach, Measure to Establish Uniform Height Limit on Residential Development in Old Town Area
Completed Precincts: 35 of 35
Vote Count Percentage
Yes 8,202 73.0%
No 3,029 27.0%

What this means is that the height limit on new construction projects in the city's "historic old town" area (basically the part of Seal Beach that's south of PCH) will be limited to no more than two stories, or 25 feet. Backers of the measure - the Yes peeps - have claimed that they wanted to assure that Seal Beach retains its quaint, old-fashioned charm, particularly along Main Street, which, unlike the Huntington Beach Main Street, isn't yet overpopulated with skate-logo-clad teens and meth-addled Nazi skins.

Sounds good to me, so I voted Yes. But the Yes on Z people didn't earn my vote as much as the No on Z backers convinced me what a bunch of idiots they are.

Particularly when I eyeballed a No on Z flier that called attention to a Yes on Z flier. the Yes flier had an illustration of a pair of three-story cartoon houses - they had creepy eyebrows, even! - hovering on either side of a small, terrified-looking one-story house. Scary! Yet an effective way of showing the perils of over-development - the whole point of Yes on Z.

But the No on Z flier screamed that the cartoon three-story houses were actually five-story houses, complete with full attics. They're cartoons, for chrissakes.

Strike one: No on Z people see shit that doesn't exist.

Then there was the No crowd's consistent use of deceptive and confusing wording, such as the No signs that read DON'T CHANGE SEAL BEACH and KEEP THE HEIGHT LIMIT, both slogans that you'd think would be favored by the Yes on Z backers. Even the No on Z web site addy was seemingly thought up to confuse voters: saveoursealbeach.com.

Strike two: Stop dicking around with the language, assholes.

Gradually, I also noticed on my daily dog-walking excursions that No on Z signs almost always shared lawn space in front of people's houses with McCain/Palin and Yes on 8 signs, as well as crimson and gold banners trumpeting the superiority of the University of Spoiled Children.

Strike three: USC sucks!

And, judging by all the signage and fliers and door-hangers and full-page ads I saw, it seemed that the No on Z people had endless amounts of cash to propagate their POV (local real estate agents were some of No on Z's biggest backers).

Strike four: Rich people are evil.

Final note to both Yes and No Z people: Can you please take all your signs down ASAP? Talk about lowered property values and blight - that shit's the definition.

. . . and if that happened, would the righty Red County blog have to change its name?

Final election results from OC:

PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT
Completed Precincts: 2109 of 2109
Vote Count Percentage
JOHN MCCAIN / SARAH PALIN (REP) 430,360 50.8%
BARACK OBAMA / JOE BIDEN (DEM) 401,605 47.4%
BOB BARR / WAYNE A. ROOT (LIB) 5,884 0.7%
RALPH NADER / MATT GONZALEZ (P-F) 5,470 0.6%
ALAN KEYES / WILEY S. DRAKE, SR. (AI) 2,672 0.3%
CYNTHIA MCKINNEY / ROSA CLEMENTE (GRN) 1,720 0.2%

McCain/Palin only won the county by 29,000 votes. For this former Republican stronghold we live in, that's pretty huge (or small, whatevs). Could the Dems actually win OC come 2012?

Also noted: the ticket of Alan Keyes and Buena Park preacher Wiley Drake, they of the Batshit Crazy Party ('scuse, "American Independent") garnered a mere 2,672 votes here, enough to fill a couple of theaters at your local multiplex. Orange County Register employees, meet your key demographic!

I spent my Election Night trying to find non-existent parking outside Hamburger Mary's in Long Beach. The celebration inside sure looked like fun, though, but I don't think I would have stuck around past midnight to watch all the tears turn from Obama joy to Prop 8 despair. Failing that, I instead drove up Cherry to another gay bar, Pistons, the local leather/bear hangout, to check out the scene - which really wasn't much, just a handful of guys shooting pool. I left when a couple of inebriates started hitting on me. And they weren't even cute!

About Prop 8: though the homo-hating measure looks like it's passed, no way in hell is this over. As of this writing, at least two lawsuits, one by the San Francisco City Attorney, another by the first lesbian couple married in Los Angeles County, have been filed in an attempt to block the measure from being added to the California constitution. More lawsuits are certain to follow, especially from the pool of 18,000 couples who've been legally hitched in the nearly five months since the state Supreme Court green-lighted queer nups. Are those marriages - like the one below between Rich Videgain and Jim Carroll, the first legally married gay couple in OC - valid or invalid now? All I know is, if I were married, I'd want to sue somebody over this . . .

Points of annoyance: the Yes on 8 people who are clucking about how "the people of California have spoken." Bullshit. They won by just a few percentage points, with the help of huge amounts of Mormon money imported from Utah, and a sleazy, fear-based ad campaign that brought children into the mix when the initiative itself said nothing about "teaching gay marriage" in schools. As I've said ever since I first heard about the gay marriage movement some 15 years ago, there will be speed bumps along the way, but the outcome is inevitable: gay marriage will be legally recognized, "whether ya like it or not," as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom put it in that unfortunate Yes on 8 TV ad.

How do I know this? The full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution; a younger generation of voters for whom the way which one swings just isn't a big deal; the fact that we live in a democracy and not a theocracy (why do the Yes on 8 folks always cite the Bible in their arguments - especially Leviticus - but they never get their knickers in a knot over other pesky abominations Leviticus rails against, like eating shellfish?); protection by the tyranny of the majority, which is basically the definition of the lame California initiative process (people shouldn't be able to make laws - that's what elected officials and judges are for, because if it weren't for "activist judges," we'd all still be drinking from colored- or white-only drinking fountains).

To paraphrase Tony Kushner in Angels in America, the world only spins forward - it never spins back. And if it does, it's only temporary . . .

*Update: They just announced Papi Pulido beat out Michelle Martinez for the SanTana mayoral seat. Not much cheering. Everyone's busy bumping and grinding.

*Update 2: A mean trick played by accident on congressional candidate Steve Young led him and his campaign team to believe, for a brief, exultant moment, that he'd beat incumbent John Campbell. A television blip around 10:30 p.m. flashed Young and Campbell's numbers in reverse. Champagne was popped and victory cheers were unleashed but it was all short-lived. By the end of the night the 48th Congressional District race had gone decidedly to Campbell (R-Newport Beach), 129,436 (55.4%) to Young's 95,683 (40.9%).

Loretta’s doing the shimmy-shimmy and high-fiving black guys on the dance floor. Patricia Arquette just announced that there’s a press person here from Dubai; an old Vietnamese couple was just bumpin’ to the "Obama Obama" A Milli remix and Wee Man (of Jack Ass fame) said to me not too long ago, after inhaling a big dose of oversized election-night-balloon helium: “It’s going fucking awesome!”

That's how important everyone feels right now at the drunken-hot-spot-club-party masquerading as the Democratic election night celebration. This late night entry confirms one thing: it’s definitely a party over here. No one’s paying attention to whether animals will be allowed to roam around on their farms cage-free or whether or not gay people can still get married (there is the occasional pause at one of the big screen T.V.s, a nervous sigh or two, and then back to dancing). Obama’s won and that’s all that matters right now.

For a lot of the evening gobs of Democrats with teeny “I Voted” stickers on their sweaters spilled drinks on each other as they stood, nearly crushing each other, at two different entrances waiting to get into Sutra Lounge (the lounge factor is key here, and says a lot about the confidence and yes, more than just a little smugness, the OC Dems felt going into tonight's election).

During Obama’s acceptance speech Wee Man’s friend almost got into a fight with someone who apparently pushed him. Leave it to alcohol (which people are imbibing like Moses’ tribes in the desert) to collapse the politics of unity. Anyway, the Dubai reporter (who I haven’t spotted because it’s hard to move in here) is apparently here covering not only the biggest news in U.S. presidential history, but also, and possibly more importantly for every Democrat who seems convinced of it here tonight, OC's transition from red to blue. You could hear it earlier after Obama’s speech ended, after Loretta Sanchez took the stage and you can hear it now: a collective, drunken sigh of relief. Steve Young has won. [Or so his campaign thought because of a television blip: see update above.] And, not surprisingly, so have Loretta and Jose Solorio. Debbie came not quite as close as everyone may have hoped, but the big news is that thousands of new Democrats have been registered in the county while only a handful of Republicans were registered.

“We’re opening the party all the way out to the courtyard!” Loretta screamed a short bit ago. And then, not-so-unpredictably: “I’m gonna be out there first, selling my book…!” A Vietnamese television station just interviewed Mexican Jose Solorio about the ascendancy of the country’s first black president. In Orange County? I hate to bring up the word “change” but, well, there you have it.

KCAL just did a short live broadcast. Someone's shoving mini-burgers, martinis, champagne, and the official Democratic drink of the night: a kind-of synthetic deep-sea blue mystery shot, in my face. “I’m Bringing Sexy Back” is rattling election signs off their balcony posts. At this point, everyone's reaching across the aisle, exclaiming the one resounding message of hope: "Your place or mine?"