Assemblyman Don Wagner, that silver-tongued devil, offends Italian Americans, nearly causes a fist fight

LA Times

Fight Breaks out on California Assembly Floor during Budget Talks (KTXL.TV Sacramento)

See also SacBee's VIDEO

Don "Mad Dog" Wagner

     Two lawmakers got into an argument on the California Assembly Floor while debating redevelopment bills.
     It all started when Assemblyman Don Wagner, R-Irvine, compared the bill to the HBO hit “The Sopranos.” He said, “Let’s not buy the insurance policy that Tony Soprano is selling us.”
     Then, Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-La Cañada Flintridge, stood up, saying he was offended by Wagner’s comments. “As a proud Italian-American, I resent that and would respectfully ask the commenter to make an apology to Italian-Americans in California.”
     Wagner took the bait, saying, “I will apologize to any Italian-Americans that are not in the Mafia and engaged in insurance scams.”
     That comment brought murmuring from the Assembly floor, prompting Wagner to go even further. “My apology is sincere,” said Assemblyman Wagner. “My reference is not lost on anyone here. This is not an attack on anyone. This bill is a bait-and-switch.”
     The speaker tried to move the conversation on, but then Assemblyman Warren Furutani confronted Assemblyman Wagner. The two had to be broken up by colleagues.
     Eventually, the redevelopment bills were passed and handed over to Governor Jerry Brown.
     The state Legislature plowed through a package of majority-vote budget bills Wednesday afternoon, approving a plan to close the $9.6 billion deficit with more than seven hours left until the deadline for both houses to pass a budget.
     You can watch the scuffle in the [above] video. The comments begin about 3 minutes in.

See also:

SacBee

LA Times

SF Chronicle

Fuentes, cancer, and “tumor” rhetoric

     Today, an OC Reg editorial notes that

     More than 800 Republican activists, donors, Tea Partiers and elected officials gathered Monday at the Irvine Hyatt to commemorate Flag Day, June 14, and bolster support for local Republican efforts. It was an evening to celebrate, look into the future of the party and honor a long-term activist. If there were a coordinated theme for the evening, it might as well have been "battle on."

     The editorial ends with this:

     But the show-stopper for the evening was the speech given by the county GOP's Chairman Emeritus Thomas A. Fuentes, who, for the first time, publicly acknowledged his battle with cancer. "Yes, your old chairman has cancer," Mr. Fuentes told the silent room. But his brief speech had little to do with him and more to do with the ideas and battles of the GOP – past and present.
     "Many of you have stood with me when we have battled cancers within our party, cancers from the left. Tumors like Arnold Schwarzenegger," he said, prompting the biggest cheer of the evening. "In the long run, we have won these battles. I will stand with you in our ideals until I can stand no longer."

     Meanwhile, OC Weekly’s Gustavo Arellano pounced all over Fuentes’ speech:

     Kudos to former OC GOP head Tom Fuentes for cracking jokes about his terminal cancer last night during the local Reeps' annual Flag Day dinner … in Irvine. Of course, for him—who supported more pedophiles, corrupt politicians, and plain old scum than the entirety of Law and Order: SVU has ever featured—the deadly disease is liberal!
     "Many of you have stood with me when we have battled cancers within our party, cancers from the left," he told his seals. "Tumors like Arnold Schwarzenegger," at which point, the audience laughed.
     Oh, how quick those pendejos forget.
     If you're to believe Fuentes that Arnie is a tumor, then the OC GOP just might be the only case in human history where a group of people willingly infected themselves with cancer just for shits. ... Let's remember that Schwarzenegger found his most loyal donors here, pulled his most enthusiastic ground troops from the rank-and-file of the OC GOP, and that the recall of then-Gov. Gray Davis was mostly orchestrated by activists and funders from OC.
     Fuentes, amazingly, stood on the right (as opposed to Right) side when it came to Schwarzenegger, famously disallowing his campaign from keeping 5,000 "Join Arnold" signs at county party headquarters and always distrusting him as too liberal. Richard Nixon would've been too liberal for Fuentes, but his fellow party [members] didn't heed their in-house Cassandra—and we all know what happened next.
     It would've been great to see Fuentes, the aging lion, admonish his party for the disaster that he warned would come, but he'll never be that truthful. Instead, the rest of wrecked California waits for an apology from the OC GOP for Schwarzenegger, an apology that'll come right after they apologize for Arnold's pal, Mike Carona...

     Gustavo might have mentioned that Fuentes was one of Carona’s biggest boosters.
     Reg political reporter Martin Wisckol covered the same event, providing a truly fluffy story designed to raise a Fuentean smile:

     Fuentes, who faced his share of controversies as GOP chairman, has been active in the Catholic Church as well, received a papal Knight of Malta honor, and was a founder of the Second Harvest Food Bank. He was also known for his fundraising abilities.
     “Tonight, I can only ask for your prayers,” he said Monday.

     That sounds pretty bad.
     Leave it to Fuentes to have loyal friends who stand out for their ability to inspire the moniker, “Prince of Darkness.” You remember the execrable Pal-o'-Fuentes "Bob" Novak? Good Lord. And then there's Mike Schroeder.
     And then there’s the equally execrable Bruce Herschensohn:

     [At the flag day dinner,] Bruce Herschensohn… preceded Fuentes to the podium with a tribute to the Lake Forest resident.
     “He’s the man who put Orange County on the map by making it the best-known Republican county,” Herschensohn said. “Republican presidents always wanted Tom Fuentes to sit next to him.”

     Yep.
     Speaking of loathsome creeps, check out who’s lurking in the background in the article's accompanying photo:

     That's right. It's Dave "the Quisling" Lang.

The “slush fund” story lives ($26k for Saddleback College coaches?)

The Voice of OC reports this morning that

     The Orange County Sheriff's Department expects to open a formal investigation into allegations that some high school and college coaches received kickbacks in the form of personal checks from a sporting goods company, in addition to maintaining accounts their districts were not aware of, according to a sheriff's spokesman.
     The investigation follows a request from Orange County Superintendent of Schools Bill Habermehl.
. . .
     Habermehl's request came after an Irvine couple provided him with a detailed list of what they say were off-the-books accounts held by coaches outside of district oversight, as well as company checks written to coaches.

     Geoff and Teresa Sando, who acquired Lapes Athletic Team Sales as it was going out of business, say the company orchestrated a kickback scheme with coaches across Southern California from 1992 until it closed down in 2008.
     The Sandos say the company maintained "slush" accounts that school districts were not aware of, and that the company's former owner, Bill Lapes, made payments to coaches to reward them for their business.
. . .
     The Sandos say they've been seeking a criminal investigation of the alleged "slush" accounts and kickbacks for more than three years. Teresa said she first provided evidence of the "slush" funds to the sheriff's department in 2008, and last July sent a sheriff's investigator copies of checks made out to Patton….

     VOC provides a link “to view the Sandos' list of "slush" account totals.”
     By my count, eight community colleges appear on the list:

Saddleback College -- $26,272.49 (from 1994 to 2006)
Orange Coast College -- $3,335.70 (from 1995 to 2002)
Fullerton College -- $2,706.13 (from 2003 to 2003)
Cerritos College -- $410.00 (from 2007 to 2007)
East Los Angeles College -- $2,300.00 (from 2005 to 2005)
Palomar College -- $2,658.58 (from 2005 to 2005)
Rio Hondo College -- $139.00 (from 1995 to 1995)
Victor Valley College -- $7,043.75 (from 2002 to 2004)

Loose ends

     Just wanted to mention that, in Poland, when you get a receipt, it's really tiny, like some kind of Barbie receipt. See examples above. Found 'em in my jacket pocket today.

     Oh yeah, and I wanted to mention, too, that our favorite Polish tour guide was Agnes. She's way knowledgeable, she's a good driver, and she's cute. Plus she manages to convey just the right amount of contempt for the Soviets, who did so much to mess up her country. It's all implicit, you understand. Nudge nudge, wink wink.

Agnes and my folks, Sopot, Poland

Just a cool old building along the canal, Gdansk

The same old irrational exuberance

     This morning, I noticed the above video posted at the Orange Juice Blog. It is a brief and interesting presentation by Internet guru Jim Gilliam entitled, “The Internet is my Religion.”
     Well, I watched it and left the comment below:

     I enjoyed Gilliam’s presentation and will acknowledge that he has quite a story to tell, but I do wonder about the label “humanism” applied to him and, frankly, about his philosophy also. Humanism—yes, a notoriously ambiguous term—is often viewed as a non-theistic (godless) philosophy that embraces the notion of the power of human faculties—especially reason. Gilliam has surely abandoned theism and embraced human capability, but his embrace of reason is questionable, for he does seem to embrace “faith,” or something very like it, and it is faith (one might argue) that makes religion religion more than does embrace of the supernatural. Yes, Gilliam was saved in part by internet activists, but his rescue had more to do with medicine and the phenomenon of individuals choosing to make their organs available to others—both pre-dating the Internet. And so why does he attribute the miracle of his rescue to the Internet and not to these other things, which surely are more fundamental to the event? At a certain point, Gilliam reminds one of the charismatic preacher who, having roused his audience with stories of happy accident, human kindness, and whatnot, commits the usual non sequitur: it’s Jeeeeeesus.
     Gilliam simply replaces Jesus with the Internet. So, what we have here is not humanism but a new, but a typical, religion—a thing with an utter failure of logic at its core.

     (Note: someone with a sounder training in the Humanities would not have made Gilliam's mistake—namely, conceiving and exhorting his godless, human-centered philosophy as a religion—something relying on "faith.")

Hey, wait! Wasn’t the world supposed to end? Tom Fuentes jokes about Asian drivers

     TOM FUENTES’ final days will be noisy and difficult.
     I know nothing about his family life. I’m thinking only of his “public” life—his life as Tom Fuentes, Political Animal.
     It appears that this animal is dying fast.
     The local political machine he helped develop and maintain is in trouble.
     Some of the Fuentesphere’s more prominent champions of rectitude have fallen spectacularly, leaving decent people to wonder just who would ally themselves with them in the first place?
     And, during this endlessly-shocking post-Bell era, the system of mutually-supporting leech-leadership with which Tom is so closely associated is coming into public view. The public, still unclear about what it sees, is initially aghast.
     But there’s more: Fuentes’s curious private affairs—his peculiar “consulting” gigs and their relation to public service, and even his private business (etc.) relationships—are themselves under scrutiny, revealing, well, disturbing darkness.
     My guess is that the full Dark Serpent that is Tom will only become clear some time after his passing.

     Today, I came across a little speech Tom made about a year ago during an event of the ultra-conservative Pacific Research Institute. It reveals one head of Thomas the Hydra.
     (You remember PRI. Just a few years ago, Fuentes protégé, Raghu P. Mathur, invited PRI’s Lance Izumi to give an address during a Chancellor’s Opening Session. The address came after the prayer.)

The event:

Leechleadership: writhing &
thriving(?) in the Fuentesphere

The Politics of Aspiration
How to Bring the Gold back to the Golden State

Saturday, March 20, 2010
Island Hotel
690 Newport Center Drive
Newport Beach

Moderator: Steven Hayward

Introductory Speaker: John Eastman
. . .
Keynote Lunch Speaker:
Hugh Hewitt
Short Discussion: Can the California GOP Regroup and Save the State?

Moderator: Tom Fuentes

Panel:

Duf Sundheim
Jon Fleischman,
Bill Mundell
Brian Calle

Well, here are Tom’s remarks (listen to them yourself, starting at 6:04):

…Once again, our topic is, “Can the GOP regroup and save the state?”
     The bottom line is of course: we need to win elections.
     Presently, Republican voter registration has reached a low of near 30% in California. Less than one out of three Californians declare themselves to be members of the GOP.
     A party needs people.
     We meet today in Orange County, where our neighbors include some 800,000 Hispanics, reflective of the ever-growing Latino population statewide. You know, we know, in Orange County, when we have many, many new Asian neighbors, we Latinos begin to buy car insurance. [Uncomfortable laughter?]
     Nearly one out of three Orange Countians—some of you are little slow on [getting the joke]—nearly one out of every three Orange Countians is a Roman Catholic. Black and Hispanic voters voted “yes” on proposition 8 [i.e., the Eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry act of 2008]. Yet some suggest that our party should move way from the traditional, conservative social values so appealing to these communities and to the growing Asian population as well.
     Earlier this week, in this same county, a few here attended the first debate by the two leading Republican candidates for governor. It was hosted in an invitation-only exclusive setting at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Samueli Theater, where the public and the general membership of our party was excluded. Members of the New Majority PAC, who pay $10,000 a year as dues, were invited to the exclusion of rank and file Republicans. [The New Majority is “Orange County's group of supposedly progressive millionaire and billionaire Republicans” (see) who have sought to moderate OC’s image. Starting in the 90s, they sought to unseat Fuentes as chair of the local party. By 2004, they succeeded.]
     The state is in a fiscal and political crises as we come to the end of the failed Swarzen-Jaeger [sic] administration. [Fuentes has always hated the former Governator: See.] Unemployment is skyrocketing, businesses are leaving California every day. Multimillionaire candidates are vying to carry our party’s banner in November.
     While the Tea Parties are growing in the streets, the old specter of a boardroom-controlled Republican Party of the rich is being raised again. And all of this is happening amid the deepest recession in our memory.
     Moneyed special interests have ever-greater influence in the affair of our party. No debate between the top candidates for governor was presented at the California Republican Party convention. The control and direction of our party have left the floor of the convention, with its volunteers and activists, and founds its ways into the offices of a governor–a governor who has a liberal Democrat chief of staff. [Fuentes had his start as a grass-roots organizer, in the 60s, when OC was more notorious for its right-wing conservatism.]
     He who controls the purse strings controls the party.
     High paid consultants have their say. Outside PACs raise money from the business community and little of the money finds its way into the coffers of the official party. PAC directors collect large salaries while the candidates and the local party operations are under-funded. The Governors’s appointee for the Lieutenant Governor seeks to allow Democrats to select our Republican nominees.
     So the question that we put to you gentlemen is: can the California GOP regroup and save the state?

Back

Nearing L.A.

     Finally got back to Southern California--about 6:00 p.m. last night. Had a snafu with our shuttle service, so we didn't get home until maybe 10 or 11. Sheesh.
     Looking forward to normality. Right now, owing I suppose to all those hours in those sardine-can 757-200s, I feel like 40 miles of bad road. But it was a great trip.
     I was happy to read the news about John Williams. There are things brewing with Tom Fuentes as well. All will be revealed soon enough.
     Later.

These are the "anonymous" street musicians we happened to catch near Alexanderplatz in Berlin—on Monday. We enjoyed them very much. I'm not sure what to make of them. Some kind of world music, I guess. I hear some New Orleans Jazz, but certainly not only that. Some of their music reflected Spanish or Middle Eastern influences. (Here one finds them playing Hava Nagila.) Still more of their hotness can be experienced here.