*Originally posted on March 13; moved up by Gustavo 'cause the conversation is HOT!
The hosts of KFI-AM 640 The John and Ken Show are ripping Orange County's right-tilted Red County blog once again. (You can listen here.) What set off the anti-tax crusaders–whose recent live Tax Revolt 2009 broadcast (pictured) drew 8,000 people to the Slidebar CafN in downtown Fullerton–was a post by Assemblyman Paul Cook (R-Yucca Pie) shilling for Prop 1A.
Like Cook, our Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is hitting the pavement in support of the measure. But John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou maintain that Prop 1A, which goes before state voters on May 19, is a two-year tax extension and not a chance to cut taxes as these Republicans claim. Lending credence to this view is another Republican legislator, Assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine), who told John and Ken the day before Cook's post that the GOP knows Prop 1A is a tax increase but in the waning hours of the most recent state budget crisis members of his party caved because they were tired–but not too tired to sign off on supporting it.
Cook began his missive by calling out the radio hosts as “conpiracy theorists,” but the language he used to describe what yes or no votes would mean amounted to the same thing in John and Ken's ears: another bloody tax increase.
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The motor mouths then turned their ire toward Red County, accusing it
of being a forum for “all kinds of Republican hacks who write lies,
propaganda and B.S.,” of “trying to start a groundswell” against the
popular radio team, of having “a readership in the dozens” and of
choosing as contributors “a lot of staff-holes, spokes-holes . . . and
sometimes the Assembly-holes.” I don't know which was John and which was Ken saying these things as I
have not listened to their show enough, but one of them said this of
Red County: “This is a Kool-Aid drinker website. These are guys who
don't care about how you have been screwed by the tax increase and by
the Republicans. They're just trying to defend their tribe.”
Just last year, John and Ken blasted GOP water carrier Matt Cunningham, who often posts on Red County as his Jubal alter ego, for putting up on another website the unredacted deposition of Father John Urell
in an Orange County Roman Catholic priest molestation case.
Cunningham's “Friends of Monsignor John” site was intended to help clear the name
of his parish's pastor–who covered up every sex-abuse case within the the
Diocese of Orange between 1988 and 2005–but the court document Jubal
posted included the names of molestation victims. Cunningham went on to apologize
profusely, but this has become his own Curt Pringlesque
poll-guard controversy, following him to this day on the blogosphere,
where any battle of wits with a virtual foe generally ends with, “Screw
you, Jubal, you outed sex-abuse victims.”
As you can imagine, John and Ken's latest verbal darts against Red
County delights these virtual foes. Though it was Cook who sparked the latest
skirmish, Orange
Juice blogger Art Pedroza chose to illustrate his gleeful post on the spat with a photo illustration of “Jerbal,” his pet name for Jubal/Cunningham.
Now, I don't really have a dog, Jerbal or gerbal in this fight, so
I'll let you all decide if there is any resemblance between these creatures:
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.