Lucas: sink or really sink?/ Photo by Russ Roca
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Did we cover each of the legion local races here? Don't be ridiculous. There are 33 cities or something in Orange County—what's that? There are 39?—not to mention school boards (Anaheim alone has five school districts) and Assembly and state Senate seats. Just vote a straight ticket, and you'll be fine. Here, though, are just a couple that caught our eye.
68th Assembly District: Paul Lucas.
If our calculations are correct, Paul Lucas should be losing his Assembly race against Van Tran roughly 70-30. But it doesn't have to be that way. Tran is smug, oily and none too bright. When we've seen him address a community breakfast, he was factually wrong in almost every question he answered. (Not just morally wrong, like when he sneered about the need to save sea otters with a voluntary tax check-off, but factually.) Lucas is a rough-edged (okay, uncouth) roughneck who nonetheless is deeply committed to quality of life issues for families and the middle class. He's bright and well-educated, with a degree in urban and environmental planning from UCI. And he's not married to a felon.
Anaheim City Council: Richard Chavez and Bill Dalati.
There's a sick-making scene in the just-out Borat where an old rodeo clown advises Borat to shave his mustache so he can look Italian maybe, instead of like a Muslim who's got a bomb strapped to him—because, the scary old man says, all Muslims have bombs strapped to them. Enter Shawn Steel. When Steel, the immediate past president of the California Republican Party, took on his own fellow Republican Bill Dalati, trumpeting that he was a Muslim extremist, it pretty much guaranteed our vote. We have never, to our knowledge, pulled the lever for a Republican but, thanks to the Shawn Steel, that's about to change.
Richard Chavez, meanwhile, currently sits on the council; he's a retired firefighter and a labor guy, perfect for a working-class city like Anaheim.
Anaheim Union High School District: Jordan Brandman, Annemarie Randle-Trejo and Anna Piercy.
We're sorry to make you sit through a discussion of the Anaheim Union High School District, but did you know Harald Martin is running again? Blame him.
Martin is the man who once railed, about Mexicans, "The fact of the matter is that when you allow millions upon millions of people to come into this country, their objective is no different than Osama bin Laden's"—in a district where 59 percent of the children are Latino. He also predicted a Turner Diaries-style racial apocalypse in Southern California, a nightmare scenario he blamed on "diversity" and illegal immigration. "We're going to have an enclave of Muslims here, an enclave of radical Hispanics here, an enclave of blacks here—and everyone will be fighting for what should have been voted for," he said. "But there will no longer be votes; there will be bullets."
So, we're going to agree with Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle (!) and endorse the Pringle- and teachers-union-backed slate of Brandman, Randle-Trejo and Piercy—although it makes us sad we can't vote for a woman named "Denise Jane Mansfield-Reinking," which we almost dressed up as for a Dead Hollywood party this Halloween. She's a Republican, anyway.
