HOAs Are Evil

This may come as a shock, but I really hate homeowners associations, especially my own one Turtle Rock Meadows. Granted, we had to sign the stupid agreement when we moved in here in our Turtle Rock neighborhood, but if you don't sign it you can't live here. The reason I post this now is there was an article in this mornings Register about a family down in Aliso Viejo that got fined for keeping a van enabled to transport an elderly woman in the residence. They HOA has fined the family over $1400 and they recently slapped a $5500 lien on their property to force them to pay up. This is typical of every HOA group I have ever lived under. The Boards are usually made up of older people who have nothing better to do than to pry into their neighbors lives and nitpick every little thing to death. I recently applied for a parking permit because I added a roof rack on my truck and it won't fit into the garage. They won't issue me a permit because they said I shouldn't have put the rack on my truck and I should have known better. Excuse me? Last time I checked, I live in America...land of the free/home of the brave. If I want to put a freakin rack on my truck, I should have the right to do it and park outside of my house. Steven Greenhut also has a good post up over at Orange Punch regarding this article. Nazis strike again

Ron Paul's Daily Show Appearance

This is a great clip of Ron's appearance with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. Watch it and get a good laugh, especially at Jon's Rudy Guiliani joke.

If You Google Ron Paul

This is another excellent catchy Ron Paul You Tube video.

Got A Traffic Ticket Lately In OC ???

If you did there is a good chance that your personal information from the ticket has been sent to Mexico for data entry/processing. Truckloads of personal data have been shipped to Mexico for the past few years to a company in Nogales that was sub contracted out by the Orange County Superior Court System. Apparently some law enforcement personnel tipped off John & Ken that a lot of these tickets have been coming back with wrong info because the tickets got lost in translation. This is a very disturbing story. I do not want my personal info in the hands of any foreigners(just an aside...I haven't received a traffic ticket in years), especially Mexico with all the identity theft, fraud, & corruption that goes on down there. How easy would it be for some low level data entry person down there to steal this info and sell it to the drug cartels who basically run that country. This contract needs to be stopped ASAP. The people to call are either

Alan Slater, Chief Adminstrative Officer
(714) 834-3141

or

Gwen Vieau, Public Information Officer
(714) 834-2717

Nice Slow Day In The Stock Market

Not. For those who haven't heard, the stock market is having its worst day since 9/11 today. At one point the Dow was down almost 500 points. The S&P was down over fifty points. The day of reckoning has arrived for all the easy money in the mortgage market the last few years. It's going to get very ugly going forward. There are rumors that liquidity is just not there for all the junk subprime debt that a lot of hedge funds and institutions are holding. Hold onto your hats because it is going to get wild.

Janet Nguyen's New Campaign Office

Janet Nguyen's new campaign office is open for business courtesy of Supervisors Bill Campbell and Pat Bates. Janet is calling it a "district office, help center, community customer service center or whatever, but let's be honest here. It's a move by Janet subsidized by the OC taxpayer for her political benefit. Not only that, but it's going to cost $128k per year for this office. She might as well put out a shingle calling it the "Janet Nguyen For Supervisor Re-election Office". Sure it will be used for some official business, but the real reason to have a "district office" is to be close to where she got most of her votes last time around. This is not rocket science. It's a very shrewd move on her part. I have no problem with her having a campaign office, but pay for it with your own bling Janet. Don't ask me to foot the bill. My feeling for the reason she did this is that she knows she is behind the eight ball already for re-election. She didn't have much to lose by proposing this "district office". Now that she will have this office, she should be required to report this involuntary $128k donation from us taxpayers as an in kind contribution on her campaign finance reports.

This is setting a bad precedent. Are now all the other four Sups entitled to an office of their own in their district? By Janet's logic they should be. I think this is the last straw for me. I was neutral during this past special election campaign for Supervisor,but not anymore.

I guess I can also add another demerit for my Supervisor Bill Campbell. Between him enriching the unions and voting for more stupid spending like this campaign office, it's a wonder the county has any money left.

Newt Gingrich Launches A Scud At Current GOP Nominees

It's been nice to take a little break from blogging the past week. I was going to continue on my little hiatus, but I saw this news item about Newt Gingrich on Drudge just now and I have a few comments. Newt went off on the GOP "pathetic bunch of pygmies" currently in the race for President. He said if none of them show they can beat Hillary in the polls by October, he would jump in the race to save the day. Uhh Newt, that isn't going to happen my friend. I loved you as Speaker and I think you're great with ideas, but you have just a wee bit to much baggage to run for President. I loved your crackback on Chris Matthews and the first GOP debate though.

You're watching an utterly irrelevant, shallow television celebrity dominate everybody who claimed they want to lead the most powerful nation in the world...

the idea of 10 or 11 people standing passively at microphones," and said he refused to "shrink to the level of 40-second answers, standing like a trained seal, waiting for someone to throw me a fish...

These are not debates, these are auditions. By definition, the psychology of an audition reduces the person auditioning and raises the status, for example, of Chris Matthews

Yes! That is some good smack Newt. You are not the man to take up the mantle though. He also raised an excellent point that the Democrat nominees have outraised the GOP nominees by a huge margin of over $100 million. That right there should cause alarm bells across Republicanland.

I'll close with my Ron Paul elevator pitch to everyone:

If you want four more years of war, inflation, and the systematic destruction of the Bill of Rights, you can vote for Rudy McRomney or Hillary Clobama. If you want peace, commerce, honest friendship with all nations, our borders secured, and government according to our Constitution, you can vote for Ron Paul

Ron Paul At Google Headquarters Last Friday

I'm a huge Ron Paul fan & supporter. Many of you who read my blog probably know this by now. Ron was at Google headquarters last Friday and this is a video on You Tube of the event. It's long(about an hour). I recommend to all my GOP friends and anyone else who is dissatisfied with the current crop of candidates on both sides of the political aisle to take a hard look at the Ron Paul for President campaign. Watching this video will go a long way towards that.

L.A. Archdiocese to Pay $600M to Victims

Well it finally happened. It's being posted on the AP wire that the LA Archdiocese is going to pay out over $600M to over 500 priest abuse victims. I knew about this yesterday that this was going to happen. I was told that the settlement talks were in the final stages. I'm really happy for all the victims. A lot of their lives have been ruined by priests. At least with the money they get, maybe it will ease some of their pain. I guess Cardinal Mahony will not have to take the stand after all. I was really looking forward to that. I hope the LA Grand Jury still will find a way to hold him criminally liable. He can rot in hell as far as I'm concerned. His days are numbered at the LA Archdiocese from what I'm told. He holds dual citizenship for the US and the Vatican. He is going to get a cushy job at the Vatican a la Boston Cardinal Law and that will end his reign of terror in California.

State To Irvine: Add Projects Or Else We'll Sue You

So I'm flipping through the Register this morning and I came across this gem of an article. Panel Recommends Irvine Add Low Income Units. This is a polite way of saying we need to add more poor people to our city. This should be a slam dunk for the current liberal majority on the council. One of Larry Agran's long term goals is to import their type of voter demographic and make Irvine more Democratic. What better way to do this than to add thousands of new projects to the city. Let's pack em in like sardines to North Irvine where there is still land left to build. While they're at it, why don't they make Irvine a sanctuary city as well. Let's roll out the welcome mat for illegal aliens. The only problem with that is all the new Irvine residents who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to move to North Irvine so they could enjoy the quality type of life they expected when they moved here. I'm sure they didn't envision being surrounded by projects/low income/goverment subsidized Section XIII housing. This should be real interesting.

Prized UCLA Recruit Kevin Love Arrives In LA

A lot of pro basketball scouts are talking about UCLA recruit Kevin Love about being the next Bill Walton/Lew Alcindor. Kevin recently arrived down in socal to begin his college basketball career and Boi From Troy's Scott Schmidt caught up with him yesterday before the start of the ESPY Awards at the Kodak Theatre.

What Do Jerry Lewis And $500K In Earmarks For Flowers Have In Common?

The answer: Congressman Lewis asked for the earmark to beautify a park close to where he lives in DC. This is really the height of arrogance. He's not even using this earmark to bribe some campaign contributer like what is normal for earmarks, he's just blantly flipping the bird to all of us taxpayers. This is right up there with Don Young's "bridge to nowhere" earmark. I'd like to hear from Phil Paule, Shawn Steel, or some other Lewis cool aid drinkers explain this earmark to my readers. $500k....wow, for flowers! WTF? This guy has to go. There is no excuse for this abuse of the process & taxpayer money.

I'd also like my Congressman, John Campbell to look into to this. He has been rightly hammering Jesse Jackson Jr over at Flashreport over a $200k earmark for an "invisible airport" as he calls it that is not even in his district. Let's get to the bottom of this Cong. Campbell.

H/T to Claudio over at Orange Juice who tipped me off to this.

An Update On My Sister Amy

As most who read the blog know, my sister Amy was diagnosed back in March with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. She has recently completed her fifth chemo treatment. There is great news. The tumor by her lung has been vaporized by the chemo and is not showing up at all on her most recent PET scan. So while the chemo has taken a toll on her body, she is almost through it. She's well on the road to recovery.

This brings me to my wife Lynn. She decided that she would take up a challenge and run in the upcoming San Francisco Marathon as a tribute to my sister this October and raise money for the Lymphoma Society through the excellent Team In Training organization. Her goal was to raise $3000, but I think we can do way better than that. She's already raised over $2k and we still have a few months to go. So this is a shout out to all my devoted readers. I'd like to raise $5k more than we already have by marathon time. I know this is possible. Thanks in advance to all who contribute. Here is the link for Lynn's Team In Training site to make a donation.

Power For California

I want to salute my Assemblyman Chuck DeVore for his great leadership on California energy policy. He has been trying to lift the ban on building new nuclear power plants for the past year. In doing that, he has jump started the dialogue on this energy issue.

So I just got an email/press release from Chuck about his new power initiative that he will trying to qualify for the next election. Here's his email:

We've been very busy. Yesterday I filed an initiative with the Attorney General’s office to lift California’s 31 year ban on the construction of new nuclear power plants. They have 60 days to give it a ballot title and summary. If all goes according to schedule, we’ll be able to gather petition signatures by September. We will need over 500,000 of them to get the initiative on the June 2008 ballot.

I also created www.PowerForCalifornia.com as a site to share information about the effort. We sent out our first news release yesterday as well (see below).

I’ll be amending the initiative slightly today to correct a minor drafting error, but the entire initiative can be seen at: http://www.powerforcalifornia.com/images/2007-07-10_07-0027_Initiative.pdf

All the best,

Chuck DeVore

State Assemblyman, 70th District

www.ChuckDeVore.com

New Springsteen Album Due Out Later This Year

It's been a while since Bruce put out an album. The last one he did with the full E-Street Band was "The Rising", an epic tome about 9/11. According to his label Sony, a new album has already been cut and it's due out later this year. If the next one is even half as good as The Rising, it will be great. Through the years I have been to probably over 20 live Bruce concerts. It is an experience that lives with you forever. My first show I went to was at the Coliseum in 1985 for the Born in the USA Tour. And yeah he sometimes goes off on his liberal rants from time to time, but his music is what keeps me coming back for more. It's also great to work out to.

Larry Agran Loves Choo Choo's

Today the liberal majority on the Irvine City Council will vote to waste over $280 million dollars on a light rail boondogle for the Great Pork. The vote is not in doubt. Larry wants choo choo trains, so Suhkee and Beth will not stand in his way. It doesn't matter that hardly anyone will ride it. I mean, it's not like there's any traffic Larry on the surface streets during rush hour is there? That 280 million probably wouldn't help people commuting by cars to their jobs & appointments would it? Let's build a big expensive train set while rank & file Irvine residents cool their heels on our surface streets. Steven Greenhut says they might as well have a bonfire and throw dollar bills in it. Excellent point. I'll bring the marshmellows and hot dogs and we can all sing kumbaya that we built a big glorified Lionel set

***************7/11/07 Morning UPDATE**********************

The choo choos were unanimously approved last night. I'm very disappointed in Christina Shea & Dr. Choi.

Bush Approval Rating Hits A Fresh Low

Down and down he goes, where it will stop nobody knows. Today the USA Today/Gallop Poll has Bush at his lowest rating ever...29%. Ouch. I'll see ya at the bill signing. Among some of the key findings:

Bush's support is eroding among Republicans: 68% approve of him, down from an average 92% in his first term, 82% in his second. Nearly 4 in 10 Republicans say the immigration debate, which ended in defeat for Bush's overhaul proposal, caused them to lose confidence in him

Well I'll be damned, four in ten Republicans lost confidence because of Bush's amnesty stance. I didn't see or predict that would happen.

Sixty-two percent say the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq, the first time that number has topped 60%. Six in 10 say the economy is worse than it was five years ago, and the same number predict that economic conditions are getting worse

This reminds me of great line from the movie Animal House when Dean Wormer is telling the Delta boys how bad their grades are. Delta President Robert Hoover then deadpanned...

"Well sir, we're hoping that our midterm grades will really help out our averages"

It ain't gonna happen. Bush is the lamest duck of any President I can ever remember.

Cindy Sheehan vs. Nancy Pelosi???

I'm very intrigued by this potential matchup. Ms. Sheehan, who said last month she was quitting her anti-war activities is now considering whether to take on the Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the 2008 elections. This would be the ultimate steel cage match to see who could out liberal the other. Obviously Speaker Pelosi would have a huge advantage in this potential matchup, but her district is so looney liberal that stranger things could happen. I wouldn't be popping champagne corks though if I were a code pinker.

Ms. Sheehan is upset that the Democrats haven't delivered on one of their campaign promises to get us out of Iraq. She's going to take her frustrations out by running against Pelosi. Whether running on this one issue is enough to win against a sitting Speaker remains to be seen. I'm just going to sit back and watch from afar.

Irvine Ron Paul Meetup

I just signed on to start helping Ron Paul organize in Irvine through the great site at Meetup. We already have over 100 members at this point. As California campaign guru Phil Paule noted in a comment below on my last Ron Paul post...

I think that many of the mainstream candidates have underestimated the Paul campaign. I believe that it may be possible for him to pull an upset in New Hampshire and come in second, then the MSM would be forced to pay attention

Damn straight they are underestimating him. I hope they keep up their smugness, especially the Guiliani & McCain campaigns. I'm encouraging all readers of my blog to get involved now. Let's make a difference in this upcoming 2008 Presidential campaign. The Republican party & the nation for that matter are at a critical junction in history. If Ron Paul gets elected as President, you can take it to the bank that it will never be business as usual for government like it has been for the past decades.

In Meetup, they ask you what your elevator pitch would be to persuade others to vote for Ron. Here is mine:

If you want four more years of war, inflation, and the systematic destruction of the Bill of Rights, you can vote for Rudy McRomney or Hillary Clobama. If you want peace, commerce, honest friendship with all nations, our borders secured, and government according to our Constitution, you can vote for Ron Paul

Ron Paul Has More Cash On Hand Than Sen. McCain

I saw this story and it just warmed my heart. Ron Paul now has more cash on hand than John McCain. Ron's campaign is on the upswing and Sen McCain's is on a crash & burn mission. Ron now is in third place for cash on hand. This is truly a grassroots campaign at its finest. People are fed up with the usual Republican & Democratic nominees they are getting served up.

Happy 4th of July

To honor the 4th of July, I thought I would post a link to the greatest baseball play ever in Major League history. Here is Rick Monday saving Old Glory from a couple of losers trying to set fire to our flag.

Al Gore Jr. Arrested In OC

Man this is a rich news day. Al Gore III was pulled over early this morning for DUI somewhere in OC. He was going 100 mph in a Toyota Prius(isn't this ironic?) and he had some hippie lettuce, Valium, Xanax, Vicodin and Adderall to keep him company. Man this guy is his own drugstore. I always wonder why kids of politicians turn out so bad. He sounds like a troubled kid or just a raging party animal. The thing that caught me most about this story though was that who knew a Toyota Prius could go 100 mph. Too funny. Oh yeah and doesn't going 100 mph use a lot more gas? I guess in liberal parlance, this is better known as being "carbon neutral", LOL. He's trying to save the planet and destroy his own life at the same time! I can't wait to see his irie booking photo.

Here's the Register story

Here's a must see South Park clip about hybrid cars. It's hilarious

Pat Buchanan En Fuego

This is such a great column that I am reprinting here in its entirety.

"I'll see you at the bill signing," said a cocky George W. Bush in Bulgaria, when he heard the Senate had just fallen 15 votes short of voting cloture on the Kennedy-Kyl immigration bill he had embraced.

Bush returned home, went to the Hill and implored the Senate Republicans to resurrect his bill. They did, only to have it go down to crushing defeat a second time, 46 to 53, last Thursday.

Bush has sustained a major humiliation. But he is not alone.

Routed, too, were Teddy Kennedy and John McCain, the Chamber of Commerce and La Raza, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. For this proposed amnesty for 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens ignited a spontaneous uprising against the leadership of both parties, corporate America and the mainstream media, as well.


A defeat like this is almost unheard of in Washington. For when the establishment unites -- as it did behind the Panama Canal giveaway and NAFTA -- it almost always wins.

Indeed, just as it is a defining mark of a superpower that when it commits to war it wins, so it is a defining feature of an establishment that when it commits to a political course, it prevails. When the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan, it ceased to be a superpower and soon ceased to exist. Our establishment has suffered a comparable defeat.

The Beltway was routed by a coalition of TV and radio talk show hosts, grass-roots activists and backbenchers with the courage to defy their masters. The regime was run off the hill by the country that it claims to represent.

Repercussions will be far-reaching, as they were from that Panama Canal debate. Ronald Reagan led the opposition in that fight, and though he lost, it propelled him to the presidency.

Consider McCain. Once thought to be the runaway favorite for the GOP nomination, he has fallen to sixth in Iowa, dropped out of the Aug. 11 straw poll, plunged to single digits in South Carolina and may see his campaign crash before January.

Among GOP senators, Jim DeMint, David Vitter, Jeff Sessions and Tom Coburn have emerged as lions, while Jon Kyl, Lindsey Graham and Mel Martinez have likely suffered enduring damage for having chartered a Teddy Kennedy Republican Club.

Among Democratic senators, newcomers Jim Webb of Virginia, John Tester of Montana and Claire McCaskill of Missouri joined a dozen others to vote down the bill. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist, also voted no.

In this vote are the makings of a new coalition. On one side, Reid-Kennedy liberal Democrats joined K Street Republicans to vote for amnesty. On the other, Red State Democrats joined the conviction conservatives of the GOP. Upon what were they united? Call it a policy of putting country and community before commerce.

Eighteen months before Bush departs, it is clear that his open-borders, free-trade globalism is no longer unchallenged dogma in the GOP. Three of every four Senate Republicans rejected amnesty. And fast track, by which Congress surrenders its right to amend Bush trade bills, expired Saturday. The Doha Round of global trade negotiations is as dead as the immigration bill.

If there is a rising sentiment in America today, it is nationalism.

Americans are growing weary of seeing their sons die in wars to bring democracy to people who do not seem all that appreciative. They are tired of reading of factories going to China and jobs going to India, while illegal aliens march in their cities under foreign flags to demand their "civil rights." They are tired of reading about new billionaires as their wages fail to rise to compensate for soaring gas prices and the falling value of their homes.

The establishment is losing the trust of the people, who are coming to believe that establishment is looking out for its own interests, not theirs -- and the two are no longer the same.

About President Bush, there are two questions: Does he see what is happening? Is he flexible and skillful enough to dump the Kennedy-Bush alliance and take up the leadership of the new center-right coalition that is forming?

In the Harriet Miers affair, he showed that skill. When the right raged against the nomination of his White House counsel to the Supreme Court, Bush skillfully withdrew it, sent up Sam Alito, reunited his coalition and won one of the signal victories of his second term. Reconstituting the Supreme Court could be a Bush legacy. The left is terrified at the prospect.

What should Bush do today? Graciously accept the "thumping" on amnesty, and seize the leadership of the border-security coalition -- 90 percent of the nation -- with a tough new bill that liberal Democrats will choke on, but the country will unite around. And kiss Kennedy goodbye.

Bush Pardons Libby....What About Agents Compean & Ramos???

I don't know what else is left to say about our President. The ink is barely dry from Scooter Libby's conviction and he gets Bush to commute his sentence, but Agents Ramos & Compean are rotting away in federal prison for doing their job & defending our borders from violent drug runners. This is not justice, it's absolutely despicable. It goes without saying that any normal average Joe would never get this kind of extra special treatment that Scooter just received. Time to head lower in those approval ratings Jorge.

The conviction of Libby I'll admit was a little dubious, but I'm pissed off at the special treatment he gets and Ramos & Compean are having to dodge convicted illegal alien felons in prison while Bush ponders whether to grant clemency for them.

************4:45pm UPDATE**************************

I just got off the phone with Nacho Ramos's father-in-law Joe Loya and he is not a happy camper either right now. He has lost all faith in George Bush to do the right thing in this case. He told me the family is focusing on the Congressional hearing on this case July 31th and on their appeal.