Orange County News Blog

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"Hit the Bitch" suffers a black eye.

​The furor over "Hit the Bitch" now prevents you from visiting the supposed "anti-violence website" out of Denmark that allows a mouse-powered (and male-looking) hand to repeatedly smack and slap a young woman.

Courtesy of Macy's

"Is that a pout, the gout or the mumps?"

​NEWS ITEM: 'Tis the season of H1N1, so Santas are being told to remove the gloves and wash their hands as much as possible ("Every time you hear a bell, Santa should pump a shot of Purell"), while warnings are being issued about flu buggies and other germs that can live for hours in the jolly fat men's suits, laps and flowing white beards.

INSTA-PUNDITRY: Can you imagine what kind of crap the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade Santa will trudge from New York City when his 25-city tour stops at the Mission Viejo Macy's on Dec. 5? All kids are encouraged to come meet Herr Kringle, and it is for a good cause--a month's worth of Macy's events benefitting the Make a Wish Foundation. Still, better dress the little ones in Hazmat gear, moms.

HarpersBazaar.com

Mary Lou Stockwell (second from the right), appears with other Fabulous at Every Age winners and fembot Elizabeth Hurley, who handled the introductions at a swanky party in New York City.

​The old money may be on the East Coast, but when it comes to the most, erm, mature of "America's chicest women," the honor goes to Balboa Island. Or, more specifically, the real estate on Newport Beach's artificial-island triumvirate lorded over by Mary Lou Stockwell, the "60s and up" winner of Harper's Bazaar's "Fabulous at Every Age" contest.

Photo by Russ Roca

Chief Anthony Morales came up empty at November 2008 California Coastal Commission hearing.

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UPDATE: Jaimee Lynn Fletcher reports in Orange County Register: HUNTINGTON BEACH--The city will absorb an unincorporated county island that some environmentalists believe is an American Indian burial ground that dates back more than 8,000 years.

A proposal goes before the Huntington Beach City Council tonight to have the city annex 6.2 acres of land on the Bolsa Chica Mesa that the owner wants to sell to developers and Native Americans want preserved because it's considered sacred.

​NEWS ITEM:  Author, former Earth First activist and clean-water advocate Patrick Mitchell, who hired on at Silverado Canyon's Carbondale Ranch in June, wants to use the tons of manure produced there to make electricity. 

INSTA-PUNDITRY: Wouldn't they collect much more of the, uh, potential energy source inside the Board of Supervisors chambers in Santa Ana?

Some just write themselves, folks.

Seal Beach Daily publisher Donna Wares

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Foes of journalism, information dissemination and the written word will be happy to know it's not just behemoths like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register that are suffering. Nor is it solely the purveyors of reportage distributed via the printed page.

Seal Beach Daily, which launched as "an experiment in hyper-local community blogging" a year ago this month, will cease "publishing" on Nov. 30.

Criminy, is there no commercial-editorial model that is safe? Should we go back to investing in town criers? Without print or digital hyper-local news, how will gadflies occupy the hours they are not at city council speaker podiums?

Beats Donna Wares and Kate Cohen. Wares, a writer, editor and college lecturer who worked at the LA Times and Orange County Register, is editor and publisher of Seal Beach Daily, while her co-publisher Cohen, an artist, writer and web designer who also has the Register on her resume, also served as the site's producer. They started SealBeachDaily.com as "one of the new breed of hyper-local news websites--created by professional journalists, serving the community where we live and work." They claim "the response has been tremendous in Seal Beach and far beyond." Looking at the site right now, it's chock full of ads, content and links to other sources of local interest.

Maybe that response was too tremendous.

​NEWS ITEM: Anaheim is considering a monorail that runs not just through Disneyland but through Anaheim to the theme park.

INSTA-PUNDITRY FROM LYLE LANLEY: Well, sir, the Happiest Place on Earth . . .

Monica Hesse has an interesting story in today's Washington Post on ​a new breach of etiquette sweeping this great land of ours: the secondhand porn that travelers are subjected to as they, well, sweep across this great land of ours.

Continue reading " Just in Time for the"...

UCI Biology Department

A brown pelican acts all pelecanus occidentalis-y along our coast.

​A neighbor of yours is getting either an assist or a death sentence from the federal government.

Where's your teabagger now, brown pelican?

U.S. Navy

The late Petty Officer Second Class (SEAL) Michael Mansoor of Long Beach.

​Conservatives accuse a New York Times reporter of employing "a journalistic sleight-of-hand" when it came to including a dead Catholic Navy hero who grew up in Garden Grove in a piece about complications facing Muslims serving in the U.S. armed forces in light of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan's alleged shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, last week.

AP pool photo

Three blind vice.

​NEWS ITEM: A pro-rape Facebook page that was set up by past and current "anti-consent" students of an elite Australian college has been taken down amid widespread condemnation.

INSTA-PUNDITRY: Guess that leaves Kyle Nachreiner, Keith Spann and Gregory Haidl hanging with their pending friend requests.

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Eight Orange County adults died of swine flu last week, reports the Orange County Register via the county Health Care Agency. That 33 percent increase in local deaths brings the total H1N1-related fatalities in this blessed region of ours to 32. Most of those suffered pre-existing conditions ranging from obesity to cancer to diabetes. Three, including one of those who died last week, were pregnant and four were children.

None, as near as we can tell, were cats.

Photo by John Gilhooley

Chief David Belardes with tribal manager Joyce Perry of the Juaneno Band of Mission Indians.

​When the Weekly was covering the conflict between Mission San Juan Capistrano and a faction of the Juaneno Band of Mission Indians earlier this year, it appeared at times that Chief David Belardes would not be able to participate. In the end, he graciously gave way more face time than the reporter and photographers deserved, especially considering he met with us in between taking his beloved wife Aurora "Cha Cha" Belardes to cancer treatments.Sadly, Mrs. Belardes has lost her battle to the deadly disease.

Continue reading " Juaneno Chief's Wife Cha Cha"...

​Officials from Irvine-based Freedom Communications, whose flagship newspaper is the Orange County Register, told employees of Arizona's East Valley Tribune newspapers that they will cease operations on Dec. 31.

Freedom's official announcement is contained in this company news release. It's also backed into in the second paragraph of this Register blog post, which leads instead with their corporate overlords saying they expect to see a profit by 2012.

Perhaps they are applying the Bob Dylan Law of Economics, which holds that if you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose.

The OC Register has unveiled a redesign for its website. Preview it here or check the advanced before-and-after screenshot graphic we assembled below:

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They're asking for your feedback, so give it to 'em. But let's talk first here.

​The publisher whose vision defined the Orange County Register for much of this decade will become publisher of The Oregonian.

N. Christian Anderson helmed Freedom Orange County Information from 1999 to 2007. During his tenure, the paper grabbed a clutch of Pulitzer nominations, but also saw the launches and eventual shutterings of spin-offs like OC Post and Squeeze OC. He was named Publisher of the Year by Editor & Publisher in 2007 -- the same year he left the paper.

Meanwhile, former Freedom president Scott Flanders is presumably settling into his new post at Playboy while would-be-Anderson-successor Marti Buscaglia, we imagine, is finally getting that degree from Lima University.

Look familiar?

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Probolsky: Let's blame OC Weekly!

​Desiree Mouzoon, the Orange County Republican fundraiser salaciously tied to disgraced ex-state assemblyman Mike Duvall in a Wednesday KCBS-KCAL report, has finally spoken.

Well, not exactly.

Mouzoon apparently has hired Jones Day--the law firm that unsuccessfully defended dirty ex-Sheriff Mike Carona for his crimes in office--to threaten local news outlets which mention the report that the woman had been caught in a "compromising position" with Duvall.

In a letter to Art Pedroza, editor of Orange Juice blog, lawyer Thomas R. Malcolm asserted that the KCBS report is "absolutely false and [has] caused irreparable harm" to Mouzoon. Malcolm, a heavyweight in local political/legal circles, demanded that Pedroza "immediately" remove his blog post from the Internet or he would be "aggressively" attacked in future litigation.

Pedroza--a feisty blogger who attempts to keep officials with both major political parties honest--told me tonight that he removed his original blog entry and then wrote a new posting about Malcolm's threat.

A joint September KCBS/OC Weekly probe caught Duvall, the powerful vice chairman of a state utilities committee graphically bragging about having sex with a Sempra Energy lobbyist. An outraged Assembly Speaker Karen Bass immediately removed him from his committee assignments. Shortly thereafter, Duvall--a self-described Christian conservative who had strenuously claimed gay marriage would wreck family values--resigned his seat.

In an October 21 follow-up investigation that had nothing to do with the Weekly, KCBS reporter Dave Lopez, a hard-charging, award-winning veteran of 37 years, reported that he'd discovered that Duvall's indiscretions may have extended to Mouzoon. At a Tuesday political fundraiser in Fullerton, Lopez confronted her with the allegation because she is now working for Linda Ackerman, a candidate seeking to replace Duvall. (Ackerman has made sexual ethics an issue in the campaign.) Mouzoon refused to answer any questions.  

Despite the blatantly obvious source of the report, Mouzoon's allies--which include boyfriend and local Republican Party pollster Adam Probolsky, a longtime Carona apologist--spent today attacking me and the Weekly in an shamelessly deceitful and misguided effort to discredit Lopez's story.

--R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly

Paradise Bay: drink it in.

​Sarah Tulley posts on Orange County Register's Around Disney blog today that Paradise Bay lagoon at California Adventure in Anaheim will soon be refilled with 16 million gallons of water that was recycled through central Orange County's Groundwater Replenishment System, which converts sewage into drinking water. Disneyland Resort won a state award last month for the project, which has already replenished the Rivers of America water at Disneyland. An Orange County Water District flack says in the post, "It's visionary what they are doing."

So, would that make polluting air, land and water with the same cancer-causing chemical compound Erin Brockovich exposed make Disney un-visionary?

​As the Federal Communications Commission meets today to develop some "rules of the road" for the Internet, U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Sarah Palin) has thrown up a roadblock.

The bitter, defeated presidential nominee today introduced legislation that would block the FCC from creating new "net neutrality" rules.

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A Huntington Beach man who apparently had grown disenchanted with Church of Christ in Irvine has been arrested for a series of fires set there this month, police announced today.

Officers who had the church under surveillance watched a man trying to burn papers near the  doors at 10 Goodyear on Wednesday night before taking him into custody. He was identified as 30-year-old Izad Chavoshan.

Bad weekend for Adolf lovers.

​Neo-Nazis rallying in Riverside--which was previously referred to here and here--were vastly outnumbered by counterprotesters Saturday.

A morning counterprotest sponsored by 32 community organizations, including some with Orange County members, drew 200 people to Riverside City Hall. Their enthusiasm--and numbers--carried over to an anti-immigration rally staged later that day by eight Neo-Nazis in front of a Madison Avenue Farmer Boys restaurant that is adjacent to a Home Depot where day laborers gather.

The Heil Hitlerers never knew what hit them.

Linda Ackerman uses Dick to rub Norby

​It's potentially the most lethal weapon in Linda Ackerman's campaign to defeat Republican county Supervisor Chris Norby for Mike Duvall's open state Assembly seat: sexual misconduct innuendo.

The reason is simple. Duvall resigned in September after the Weekly and KCAL revealed that the self-styled Christian conservative and vice chairman of the Assembly utilities committee had bragged about having sloppy sex with two Sacramento-based lobbyists--one of whom worked for utility giant Sempra. Voters in the 72nd district surely don't want to be embarrassed again, right?

But some grassroots activists in Fullerton, the heart of the district, are outraged not just at Ackerman's tactics but at Orange County Register columnist Frank Mickadeit for, in their view, regurgitating a smear campaign in advance of the Jan. 12 special election.

​Congratulations to Orange County web pioneer Len Kranser. Fourteen years ago this month, Kranser created one of the nation's first well-respected blogs, www.eltoroairport.org. Though the  battle over converting the old military air base at El Toro (Irvine) into a commercial airport is long over, this award-winning site continues to be a sometimes controversial, always must-read for folks interested in local airport issues--thanks to Kranser's meticulous efforts.

Local Republicans are gunning for Assemblyman Anthony Adams (R-Hesperia).

Assemblyman Anthony Adams (R-Hesperia), who has been targeted for a recall election because he voted for a state budget that included billions of dollars in new taxes, swung back at his opponents today, blaming "Orange County Republicans" and "Newport Beach activists" for his current predicament.

These Real Housewives' are real!

​Fox News has just broken this jaw-dropping exclusive:

Gretchen Rossi will not get a boob job.

REPEAT: NO NEW BOOBS FOR GRETCHEN ROSSI!

Oh, the humanity!

Seriously, what happened to humanity?

Perhaps this art photo by Nick Gaines is an example of the porn the newspaper company is trying to hide.

​Orange County Register business writer Mary Ann Milbourn boldly got out front of the story about her corporate overlords at Irvine-based Freedom Communications being accused of trying to keep documents away from their creditors.

"Freedom Communications Inc. is throwing up roadblocks in its bankruptcy case by designating more than 1 million documents as confidential, including a Dodgers baseball game schedule and poetry, said the unsecured creditors committee in a court filing in Delaware today," Milbourn blogged.

She posted that on the Register site at 3:38 p.m. Friday, and by Monday the same report had been picked up by many of Freedom's 32 other daily newspapers, 77 weeklies and other publications and eight television stations around the country. But having a newspaper that hates secrecy being owned by a company trying to keep its operations secret was too much for outside journos to resist. So they took a look at the creditors' filing themselves, and what did they also find among the million documents Freedom was hiding?

Pornography.

Mike Duvall before . . . you know.

​"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

Al Pacino famously said that in Godfather III, but former Assemblyman Mike Duvall (R-Yorba Linda) could just as easily be muttering that to himself now.

That's because the Orange County Register's Total Buzz politics blog reports that Legislative Counsel, the attorneys for the State Legislature, issued an opinion today saying that the Assembly Ethics Committee doesn't have jurisdiction to investigate Duvall because he is no longer a member of the Assembly.

All's well that ends in shambles? Not so fast. Turns out that wasn't the only potential probe of Big Mike.

The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace (now Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum) opened in 1990 and for nearly that long there has been a permanent Hall of World Leaders exhibit featuring life-size statues of such history-shapers as Winston Churchill, Charles deGaulle and Mao Tse-Tung.

It's the inclusion of that last fellow--China's deceased "Chairman Mao" of the Long March, Little Red Book and Beatles "Revolution" fame--that has finally sparked a protest against the Yorba Linda fun zone. 

Los Angeles-based, Chinese-American activist Kai Chen is organizing the demonstration scheduled for Thursday, after which he plans to hand museum officials signed petitions demanding the Mao statue be removed.

Chen's got no one to blame but the guy whose name is chiseled onto the front of the joint.