Orange County News Blog

Politico, which is a good, important publication, caught up with our Santa Ana/Garden Grove/Fullerton/Anaheim U.S. Representative Loretta Sanchez to find out what's in her purse.

Red County's Matt Cunningham zinged the piece, saying the Democrat "must have left her 'Handy Guide To Increasing Federal Control Over Americans' Lives' at home." He's probably right! But we watched nearly one minute of accompanying six-minute video and think that Cunningham missed a few important details:

​If Chuck DeVore, the State Assemblyman from Irvine, wins the seat he seeks in the U.S. Senate, can he fix the financial woes of California and the country?

All signs point to yes, given his campaign's latest innovation: ChuckBucks.

The dollar is kind of done, don't you agree? DeVore might be on to something by inventing his own currency.

Sure, right now, the value of ChuckBucks are supposedly pegged to the dollar. Buy ten ChuckBucks, and DeVore gets ten dollars -- enough to print some campaign bumper stickers, apparently.

But think of the possibilities.

Ed Royce

​Yuh oh. A Washington Post poll published last week said that  57% of American support a public option as part of health insurance reform. This has appeared to unnerve U.S. Representative Ed Royce -- or at least pique his curiosity.

"The Washington Post claims that 57% of all Americans support a public option," he wrote in his e-mail newsletter. "I want to hear from my constituents. Do you support government run health care?"

You can then click the "yes" or "no" option. There's no mention of the fact that what the named poll refers to -- a public option -- is a much narrower concept than "government run health care."

But there is the implication that the results of a volunteer survey filled out by people on Royce's mailing list -- which is presumably comprised mainly of his core supporters, conservative Republicans -- holds can compete with a Washington Post poll.

​Matt Coker already did a nice job previewing the Western Conservative Political Action Conference taking place today and tomorrow at the Radisson in Newport Beach. But the Washington Independent's David Weigel--who loves Orly Taitz as much as we do--points out that  this conference isn't just for the best and brightest stars of mainstream GOP like Chuck DeVore, Meg Whitman, Steve Poizner, Tim Pawlenty and Andrew Breitbart.

There'll also be birthers!

Clockwork Coker sent me this Photoshop job he saw posted on Crooks and Liars:

​

Gustavo's always ragging on Laguna Niguel as being the lamest city in the county. I live in a neighboring town, and I gotta say, it's not so bad. Laguna Niguel has some good fast food!

Real people do live in Laguna Niguel, and they do like it. How do we know? Twitter, duh. Here's a not-so-random sampling of recent tweets re: LN. Let's see what we can learn.

Less one: It's pretty.

SimplyJavi Good morning my lil twitters... Such a beautiful day in the hills of Laguna Niguel :)

alieinna What I love about Laguna Niguel is that you can hear birds chirping outside at all times.

ljmorefield Gorgeous day in Laguna Niguel...cool breeze, sun coming out from the morning fog. And Golf today!

Lesson two: These people like their burritos.

djchuang: yes! Chipotle coming closer to me neck of the hills (Laguna Niguel) this September http://bit.ly/T2dg

 
Lesson three:  Ok, actually, this is less of a lesson than a question. Why would our mom's generation's premier lesbian comic ever perform somewhere off Moulton Parkway?

KimFBlevins @TheEllenShow Ellen, can you come to Laguna Niguel in Orange County??

Lesson four: A plurality of the Twitter mentions of Laguna Niguel are in connection to the St. Regis Laguna Niguel -- which is actually in Dana Point.

JonetteJordan I knew this question was coming. Not married, but if I were 2 get married..hands down The Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel! My fav location EVER!

Lesson five: The official Laguna Niguel Twitter account (LagunaNiguelCA) is crazy proactive. Whoever runs it is quick to message new followers, retweet positive mentions of the city and pimp out info about the new anti-mooning ordinance.

LagunaNiguelCA @KimFBlevins @theEllenShow We think thats a great idea!

LagunaNiguelCA RT @timebandit: Dog walking in Crown Valley Community Park, Laguna Niguel is always fun. (Thanks! What other parks in LN do you like?!)

LagunaNiguelCA @CapoDispatch - thanks for spreading the word on the new ordinances for the mooning event! more info can be found on our website as well!

Lesson six: Aww, dreams come true in Laguna Niguel.

RayStendall Am very happy that I found a great house to live in Laguna Niguel 5 miles from the ocean...so happy what a house! OC here we come

Lesson seven: As is the case with all boring places, residents liven things up with libations.

ssoun126 Friends inviting to laguna niguel for another nite of drinking. I'm fucking tired butvim also bored- what to do what to do.

Final lesson: There are... drawbacks.


drewrx Laguna niguel....so ghetto, I cud die.

Whoa! They're moving the Sydney Opera House to Anaheim!

Oh wait, no. That's the newly approved design for the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center, a.k.a. ARTIC.

On Tuesday, the Anaheim City Council awarded architecture firm Parsons Brinckerhoff/HOK with the contract to design and lay the groundwork for ARTIC, a regional transportation hub that's been more than 15 years in the making. The dollar total for the job could reach $24.3 million. According to the Register, Parsons Brinckerhoff beat out other "heavy hitter" companies, such as the one owned by icon-making architecture legend Frank Gehry.

Isn't that great? An independent, underdog firm besting the glitzy name brand?

Actually, Parsons Brinckerhoff is something of the anti-underdog. Founded in 1885 (yes, it's 124 years old), PB has helmed some of the world's biggest civil engineering projects.

This has, of course, included a few BOONDOGGLES, as the Weekly pointed out in 2003. The biggest eyebrow-raiser came from the Boston Dig project, which is to be expected given the fact that it was the most expensive highway construction project in American history. Brinckerhoff ended up paying $407 million in restitution for subcontracting screw-ups that led to a tunnel collapse and the death of a motorist.

In Orange County, the firm has made some bucks off of two of the biggest transportation money sinks in the county's history. In 2003, Parsons Brinckerhoff was awarded $9.6 for preliminary engineering of the CenterLine light rail plan (remember that thing?), a plan that died a death of a thousand cuts and a million Steven Greenhut columns. Before that, the firm oversaw the construction of Orange County's brand-new toll-road network, including the Eastern, Foothill and San Joaquin corridors. As Moxley has exhaustively chronicled, Orange County's toll roads have essentially served as cash furnaces for the state, local and federal governments and are, to this day, swimming in debt.

Of course, neither of those things were necessarily the fault of the firm. Then again: Would it matter if they were? A glance of at the California Secretary of State's website shows that the company has sunk big bucks into political campaigns all over the state. And they've been peppering Orange County races with $249 contributions to all sorts of candidates over the past decade:  Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido, County Supervisor Chris Norby, State Senator Lou Correa and State Senator Mimi Walters, Lou Correa and Dick Ackerman are among the OC-familiar names to get little love grants from Parsons Brinckerhoff.

That's how politics is played, and there's nothing inherently wrong with a company helping elect politicians who share their interests. You should see the amount of money heaped on candidates from local waste management companies. But when you read in the Register that Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle is "thrilled" about the latest ARTIC development, it can't hurt to know that Pringle has taken money from the firm that made that development possible.

Ed Piskor / OC Weekly

As I just posted: In Dana Point, when you use state and federal grants to fund a $7 million beautification project disguised as congestion relief, you don't have to worry a whole lot about public scrutiny and can expect a crowd of impressed citizens when you complete the project.

But in nearby Mission Viejo, if you want to try and use grant money to build some decorative signs, you better be ready for holy hell to be raised at city council meetings and the local blogosphere.

Witness the brouhaha over informational kiosks that have been approved to be put along Oso Creek Trail in Mission Viejo. The federal government is ponying up $285,000 for the kiosks to be built, and the city has to foot the additional $40,000. The city council approved that plan in April, but after public outcry, Mayor Frank Ury kicked the proposal back to the city's community services commission for further study. On Monday, the members of the commission voted 6-1 to go ahead  with the kiosks.

This has drawn a chorus of complaints from the populace, objecting to both finances and asthetics. Check the comments on a Mission Viejo Dispatch post: "Stupid and disgusting," "so dissapointed in this decision I can barely find words," "PORK," and... drumroll... ""Bridge to Nowhere."

Similar complaints have been raised in the past about easles, a rose parade float, street widenings and pretty much everything Councilman Lance MacLean has ever done. I'm not saying whether anyone is right or wrong on this stuff. Just, after considering the case of that bridge in my Dana Point, thought I might take a moment to imagine how much more entertaining the building process would have been if it had happened in Mission Viejo.

Giant ceremonial scissors made an appearance along Pacific Coast Highway in Dana Point this morning, as members of the city council and OC Board of Supervisors member Pat Bates dedicated a brand new pedestrian bridge.

It's not just a pedestrian bridge, though. It's "beautification." It's a "great work of art." It's "part of a traffic congestion relief project." Those were the words of Mayor Lisa Bartlett -- and it's easy to understand what she meant with the first two. The bridge, which I drive under every day, is plenty pretty. As part of this morning's ceremony, city staffers unveiled four local-themed mosaics, each one shiny, colorful and detailed.

But how much congestion does this bridge relieve? Brad Fowler, the Dana Point's director of public works, told the Weekly that the city doesn't have any estimates about the impact of the bridge on traffic. It was approved by the city council in 2006, as part of an estimated $7 million grant-funded improvements project that would widen Pacific Coast Highway (the cost so far has penciled out to $6.7 million according to the Register). Widening has already had an impact on traffic flow, but it's not clear the extent to which the bridge will. Fowler said the bridge allowed the city to remove a cross-walk at the intersection of PCH and Dana Point Harbor Drive, which lengthened the red-light time for through traffic by 15 seconds every time someone needed to cross that side of the street. But... how much does that add up to?  Does the bridge's impact on traffic justify its cost?

The reason I'm wondering about this stuff is that I've heard this thing be called -- and I've called it -- a bridge to nowhere. But, it does go somewhere. Traffic relief doesn't seem like a big part of that destination, though. Ruminations from a local ahead...

For a while there yesterday, it looked like that whole UCI rifleman scare might have all been over a paintball gun. It wasn't -- instead, it was over a similarly non-lethal airsoft gun.

The incident reminds us of an important issue: Paintballing is pretty fun. Or at least, it was in middle school. To revisit memories, I checked out the website of the paintballing park at OC-adjacent Camp Pendleton marine base, and found... this:

Flick / Creative Commons / **Mary**

Whenever I have to describe the publication I work for to anyone only vaguely familiar with OC media, I usually start innocuous: "It's that free paper you pick up at the car wash or coffee shop."

But that often gets a blank stare. So...

"You know, the one with the sex ads."

Ahhhh. That usually does it.

Even so, it's  been weird sitting in Weekly World Headquarters, scrolling through the "exotic services" section of Orange County's Craigslist, where any colleague passing by might glimpse "Come DUNK your Cookies in this tall glass of MILF ; )" over my shoulder. But I endure the risks. This is journalism.

Craigslist has announced that tomorrow it will shut down its "erotic" section and replacing it with a more-heavily regulated "adult" services area. The move came in response to criticism (documented in our cover story here) that Craigslist erotic services had essentially become an online whorehouse. And whorehouses, we all know, are illegal.

So, let's see what we can learn from the soon-to-be deleted OC "erotic services" marketplace...

From a Martin Wisckol story in the Register yesterday:

One indicator is that the county Republican Party pitched in $666,000 last year to help out campaigns, while the Democratic Party here came up with just $90,000, according to campaign disclosure reports.

That's right, the Number of the Beast plus a few zeros is amount OC Republicans raised last year. "What a stupid thing to point out," you may be saying. Well, yes, but if Barack Obama was associated with that number in any way, you know Barbara Coe would be all over it.

Anyways, while Republicans' fundraising numbers may raise anti-Christ suspicions, the Democrat's 90k in campaign cash confirms another suspicion: When it comes to winning the county, despite a few promising signs in the Wisckol story, Dems still don't have a chance in Hell.

Let's get the obvious out of the way. Someone over at the Register took my advice. How else to explain that their headlines about Dana Point Festival of Whales have evolved from the predictably punny triteness of last week's "Whale of a Festival" to yesterday's far more excellent "Festival of Whales isn't fin-ished"? This really represents a sea change for the newspaper.

Diane Harkey. This is the best the Weekly paparazzi (me) could do.

Anyways, at the kick-off for the festival last Saturday, your reporter spotted the white whale of South County politics at the local pub. Well, actually, "white whale" is totally the wrong descriptor. Were state assembly-woman Diane Harkey any sort of marine mammal, she'd be a dolphin: small, chipper and eager for human approval.

The sighting of Harkey, Dana Point's former mayor, smiling widely and chatting with current mayor Lisa Bartlett reminded me to refresh my memory on the reasons why there's a dedicated contingent of locals who seem to want Ms. Harkey sold to Sea World and never seen again. So I pulled out the packet of literature handed to the Weekly by one of the Harkey-haters a few years ago and start reading.

The only thing worth noting at the moment is a Jan. 2007 Register article that went out over the national business wires. It's about trust-deed investment, and about half-way through it quotes Dan Harkey, the politician's husband. His company, which specialized in trust deeds (whatever that means), was accused last month of running a Ponzi scheme that helped raise funds for Diane's campaigns (leading to an entirely new website devoted to Harkey-hating).  Which is funny, because the article warned that something like this might happen:

SparkyLeigh / Flickr / Creative Commons

Brighten up your baleen and brush your blowhole, because for the next two weekends, Dana Point hosts its 38th annual Festival of Whales. Despite the fact that I've lived in that silly little seaport for some two decades, I have exactly zero memories of this event ever taking place (My parents claim to have taken me for whale-shaped pancakes when I was three, but I don't believe it. How could you ever forget whale pancakes?). But that should change this year, according to the Dana Point Times, because 2009's festival is supposed to be bigger, better and more blubbery.

Joining the traditional array of too-early-in-the-morning parade and art-walk-type things, there'll be a movie in the harbor, a 5k run, some music, some classic cars and some food. But I say that if you really want to revitalize this thing, just watch your language. "Whale Of A Time." That's what is says on city banners, in this week's DP Times (pdf) and in LA Times articles about Dana Point dating back to the nineties. Not only is it the go-to phrase for anyone who wants to write an aquatic-mammal-themed headline, it's also the grammatical construction used for just about every single effing amenity at this year's festival. Witness:

• Whale of a Pancake Breakfast  (Alright, my folks may not have been lying.)
• Whale of a Concert (It is unclear what elevates a Jimmy Buffett cover-band's performance to the same genus of the largest creature on earth.)
• Whale of a View (The "view" is of a documentary about Mark Richard Hillburn. Just kidding. It's about whales.)
• Whale of a Deal (This year only, it's $8 per person on whale-watching excursions. Actually is a pretty good deal).
• Ocean Institute Whale of a Tale (A book-reading performance thing, for only $36 per adult! Cancels out Whale of a Deal.)
  
• "Whale of a Shoe" Horseshoe Tournament (Legitimately makes no sense; not a single person has ever worn a whale for a shoe. Oh wait, never mind.)

 
Not too long ago, the city rebranded itself with the pun-tastic city motto, "Harboring the Good Life." So it's not that Dana Point isn't creative. Why no seminars on the "Porpoise-Driven Life?" Why no "Whale-Meat-Again Barbecue and Kissing Booth?" Ok, those are horrible, but not as horrible if we were to try a similar exercise with the nearby Swallows Parade.

From Roger Butow, Laguna Beach's world renowned fighter of ca-ca (in all its forms):

Where's the Relief Beef?
Let's see, Congress is amenable to a $400 per year tax decrease for individual working slobs like me, about $1.10 per day. Meanwhile, this State is going to increase certain taxes so I'll be forced to pay more each day to cover budget deficits. Undoubtedly canceling each other out (probably worse here in California), where is the promised relief for those average American household income earners, those of us making under $46,000 per year? Are we having fun yet?

This reminds me of my first job at a daily newspaper. The editor would call me into his office, shake my hand and reward my hard work with a 4 percent raise. Then the next day I'd get a memo from HR saying my health insurance premium was rising 6 percent. And so it goes ...

It wasn't long after I moved to OC that I got the news that Cathy Seipp had died. I got it almost instantaneously -- Cathy was so hooked into the blogosphere that her last moments, much like many of her days, were obsessively chronicled online by friends and colleagues.

That was a year ago today.

Born in Canada but raised in OC (Los Alamitos, to be precise), Cathy was a conservative pundit of sorts, but not the predictable kind. Yes, she wrote for National Review Online, but also L.A. CityBeat, at least until they stopped paying her what she felt she was worth.

When I heard that Dragon Ball Z would be a movie, I was more than excited. For years, I dreamed of a live-action Dragon Ball flick, but then I was the guy who owned all the mangas and watched that ancient cheap live-action version of Dragon Ball: The Spirits Within. I used to watch the show before it hit Cartoon Network and became popular. Waaay back when it was on KCAL 9 and you had to wake up at 5 a.m. to catch a Saturday morning episode. Everything was great until I visited IMDB and checked out the message boards. Instead of excitement from the fans twittering about the movie, I found THIS:

"Wow, it looks like they are using Asians for just about every role. . .except the main character. Who do we blame for this racism, Hollywood or the American audience? Perhaps, both? Some people like to make the argument that Goku is an alien and not Asian. Well Superman is also an alien, but he is still white! If you're going to have a white guy play Goku, then why not let an Asian play Clark in the next Superman movie? Oh, that's right, because Asians aren't white."