Mayor Sam's Hotsheet for Friday
Joseph Mailander has a great piece detailing how Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's re-election chances are in trouble. An interesting note that Joe makes, of the folks around town he talks to the one remark he keeps hearing over and over again is people who say they won't vote for the Mayor "again."The lawsuit against Special Order 40 is still on for now as a Judge heard arguments but took no action when attorneys for the ACLU and the City asked him to drop the suit. Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu is taking the request under advisement and may issue a ruling later in the case filed by Los Angeles resident Harold P. Sturgeon against Police Chief William Bratton and members of the Police Commission.
It's been five years since the Los Angeles Children's Museum was supposed to open in Hansen Dam and it's nowhere near ready to open. Following a series of delays and funding missteps who knows when the museum will open it's doors to children. As aptly noted by the Pasadena Star News, a child who was 9 years old when the old museum closed will be in college assuming the museum opens on the next deadline. One of the big issues is that the politics of the day forced locating the museum in Hansen Dam, far from almost all children in the City when a better location would have been adjacent to North Hollywood , Universal City or Hollywood/Highland Metro Red Line stations which would be far more central to most of the population and have a better top of mind awareness for fund raising.
The useless VICA/VEDC Valley business crowd types are on board with a sales tax increase, presumably for transit. Like the cell phone tax increase, always for a "worthy" purpose, these tax increases they bend over to the politicians to support will do nothing but harm small business and consumers and then be wasted on boondoggle products with cost overruns, budget delays and little to show for it. Next on the docket: a property tax increase for "gang" intervention.
Labels: chief william bratton, joseph mailander, mayor antonio villaraigosa, special order 40, taxes
Posted by Michael Higby @ 6/13/2008 03:00:00 AM
17 Comments:
Higby, you and Joe are doing another one of your now famous circle jerks.
Any one of us that has followed this blog know that while you profess to be a Republican, you are clearly in the tank for Hugsberg, or failing his candidacy, anyone who will take on and try to beat Antonio.
The simple truth is, no one will show up when the chips are down and you two yahoos, along with a few of your blinkered compadres, will either have to back Walter Moore of your current darling, Dave Elliott.
Whether it is Moore, Elliott, Hertzberg, Hahn, Caruso, Yaroslavsky, Alarcon or some new loser to add to the group, it won't amount to a bucket of warm spit.
Antonio will be re-elected in a landsliderk,and all the wishing in the world will not change the outcome.
So, get your hand out of your pants and go back to work.
Maybe someone should pull out a map when they decide to select a site, maybe even take a poll and have some PRACTICAL input BEFORE things start. What were the politics behind this misstep?
This should be a lesson for future projects of any kind if some benefit is supposed to be bestowed by each project.
Does anyone keep score on such things to see how productive the efforts turn out?
SIMILAR? Yes, of course they are.
Ivory tower communicators are always the most surprised when confronted with reality.
1) " . . .of the folks around town HE TALKS TO the one remark he keeps hearing over and over again is people who say they won't vote for the Mayor 'again.' (Mayor Sam paraphrasing Mailander).
2) "I DON'T KNOW ANYONE who voted for Nixon" (NY Times critic Pauline Kael, following 'Tricky Dick's' monstrous 1972 landslide victory)
(EMPHASIS added to both)
Funny, I'm a rock-rib Republican since the Reagan days, and I don't know a soul who would vote for Walter Moore.
I'm not even sure I know anyone who knows who he is.
If Antonio is re-elected, everyone can recite in unison, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice....."
but then, LA City ballot measures for "term limits" to extend terms passsed, and the later one that instituted a 9% phone tax where there would have been NONE, and also expanded the taxable items, received the majority of the votes cast. No wonder Antonio people have hope.
You can not like the Mayor all you want, but without a viable candidate to oppose him (Caruso, Zev, Huggy Boy, Connie Rice, Chick), he will get re-elected. And there is no viable candidate who has yet to announce his/her intentions to run.
It's just that simple.
Everything else is just fodder for the blog.
One thing here I agree with: location of the Children's Museum in East Valley is the problem. Alarcon, Padilla and their revolving Mexicans in that District insisted the museum go in a Latino area, and that hurts fundraising from the "anglos" who are always the ones who step up and get things done in the end when it comes to raising money.
When Alarcon brought this up in City Council again, he was told by a majority that he and the Museum Board MUST get private funding in order to get some finishing funds from the city - Alarcon had been asking tens of millions with no strings. Council noted that this sort of delay and backing out of promised fundraising had happened before, and people had no faith in the Museum's abilities by now.
You're right that it's ethnic pandering that made the Latinos insist the museum be located there, while it would have been done already if it were where the "anglos" who are supposed to fund it, visited, near some transport hub or area they're familiar with.
The Natural History Museum, LACMA and others that serve the whole city are doing well with children's programs.
Now the Mayor has tapped Riordan to pitch in. The Latinos have to stop this Entitlement Mentality fostered by Alarcon and the rest of them -- if they want something in a Latino area, be responsible for it themselves WITHOUT demanding city money (i.e., majority white homeowners) for something which is specifically intended to serve Latino kids primarily.
(Getting Alarcon/Reyes/Cardenas to change their attitudes are nil, so the voters and handful of white and black reps who aren't pandering ninnies MUST stand up to them. That is, write off Hahn the Hack, silly, confused LaBonge and leftie fool blowhard Rosendahl, who changes his mind with ever wind, and Perry -- the rest are maybe persuadable.)
Higby
You crack me the fuck up. You call Joe's blogpost a "detailed" look at why Antonio wont win? They guy put up a fucking internet poll! He even admitted he gets most of his traffic from your site, so are you really surprised?!
So now we are lead to believe that when Joe asks a handful of his "friends"(even if he spoke to 100 people, its still not even remotely close to being any real measurement of public opinion) that amounts to a detailed examination of why one of the most powerful elected officials in the region wont win re-election when he doesnt even have a real opponent? Fuck man, stop drinking your own kool-aide man its making your brain fat
Anyone out there want to comment on that private meetings where held between Riordan, Broad, Caruso and Magic Johnson?
Do you wonder why?
If you listen to Alarcon's pronuncements, like his lecture at the council meeting on the Runner bill, you already know he considers the entire city already, or soon-to-be, "a Latino area."
His pretense at promoting diversity is just camouflaging his separatist agenda that cultivates divisiveness instead of cooperation. He's a jerk, and with all his political experience, he's a well-polished jerk, at that.
Displeased constituent who happens to Latino (Latinos do not operate as a monolith, Mr. Alarcon.)
Here is the story from the link that you can't get to about the possible transit tax on the November ballot:
SFV Business Journal brief:
Sales Tax Increase Gains Support
Business and civic leaders voiced support of a proposed half cent sales tax increase to fund transportation improvements.
Meeting at the CEO Business Summit, representatives from civic and business organizations discussed the costs of congestion and the short- and long-term benefits of increased investment in public transit, roads, and highways.
A way to fund improvements is through a proposed half cent sales tax increase that goes to voters for approval in the November election.
The increase is estimated to raise $32 billion in economic activity through construction spending on local transportation projects, which would generate more than 210,000 annual equivalent jobs.
“To modernize our transportation system and reduce gridlock, it is in the interest of Los Angeles's business community to support the concept of the half cent sales tax,” said David Fleming, chairman of pro-business group BizFed and a speaker at the summit.
------
So, your position is let's just stay stuck in traffic and do nothing? I guess the $5/gallon gas doesn't faze you. And 1/2 penny more on your fatburger isn't gonna break you either.
Que lastima!
Big old smelly everyone turns the other way when he comes Bart Reed just cracked a fat joke on fellow blogger Mayor Sam.
Great way to win your argument Barto!
You know who Barto's only friend is? (besides his left hand)
Jack Hoff.
Odd.
Mayor Sam: Did you notice how some comments on these blog sure do sound like a recent CityWatch article written by a deposed Neighborhood Council president?
Thanks be to the man upstairs that Jim Alger, Jack Hoff, Bart Reed and Walter Moore will never be elected to any office.
Nah, dont'cha believe it, there's an elected city commissioner's seat in Cheyenne, Wyoming that has Walter Moore's name written all over it -- at least for one term.
He was destined to be a big fish in a little pond (where the fish are mostly all on species and fairly boring).
The smartest thing the CHildren's Museum folks can do is to take their loses, dismantle the building and rebuild in a place that makes sense. Put this near mass transit. Put the museum in a central location. Or make the ash who forced the City to put it in Hansen Dam to begin with find the funds to make this work. who was it anyway?
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