A 54th B-Day in the 54th AD on 5/4 at 1:54

Tonia Reyes Uranga leads organizing
meeting in Cal State Long Beach Chartroom

Youthful minds realizing adult dreams

Local politics usually isn’t my bag. I’m a long-time Long Beach townie who’s listened to a lot of broken political promises. Being more than an objective observer can be dangerous, especially for a journalist-in-waiting; physically, emotionally and “careerally.”

Except for an occasional foray into several campaign headquarters, I was never impressed with the glad-handing of local politicians. I always felt empty when I left the “party,” inevitably departing with more questions than answers. I’m one of those curious types.

I decided to slake my curiosity by visiting 54th Assembly District candidate Tonia Reyes Uranga’s campaign headquarters for her birthday party last Sunday.

I’ve known Tonia and her husband Roberto for a few years, mostly as a reporter at Long Beach City College where Roberto is a trustee. I still approach politicos with the apprehension and skepticism only a journalist can enjoy.

I half expected to see a bunch of well-heeled prehistorics clambering over each other to get next to the city councilwoman groveling, “Take my picture with Tonia.” I wasn’t expecting much, to be frank.

What I observed instead of the usual hangers-on were teenage volunteers from San Pedro High School, Long Beach Wilson High School and LBCC chomping at the bit to get Uranga’s campaign in high gear.

There was a contagion in the air among these young adults and it wasn’t all about posing for cellphone mug shots or wolfing down free pizza.

In one room students were folding brochures, while in another teens were mending “Vote for Tonia” lawn signs. The room in between had a crayoned wall mural and a group of little girls happily playing with dolls.

The teens were excited about the possibility of change. What they were craving wasn’t the change being uttered by candidates on the national stage. They want things to be immediately different in their own yards and believe Uranga will deliver.

Rather than giving a long-winded speech laden with astronomical promises, Uranga offered a brief pep talk hailing the efforts of the young volunteers. She could have offered them the moon, and set off looking for donors, but opted to celebrate her 54th birthday with family, friends and supporters.

Uranga promised them she would fight with her last breath to improve their quality of life by championing education, the environment and healthcare reform.

With a daughter about to graduate from Cal State Long Beach, a son planning on attending CSULB next year and another planning "Bruinship" at UCLA, the parental concern was very palpable.

Citing that her Democratic and Republican opponents have far stronger financial support than she does to do battle with, Uranga said, “They might have a lot of money, but I have gold,” sweeping her hands toward the teens. “I’m already a winner.”

Myself being a parent of college and high school students — and believing I know what is important to their future happiness — I couldn’t help but step astride of my ego while thinking, “Now that’s a ‘mom’ speech worthy of a piece of birthday cake.”

Flatulence flying over gas tax vacation schemes

Running on empty, running dry

All three presidential candidates are pumping hot air into the political fray over how to deal with high prices at the pumps.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain have proposed a “holiday” on fuel taxes for the upcoming summer travel season, while big oil enjoys a surreal all expenses paid vacation of its own.

Clinton’s plan is to call for a national moratorium on gasoline taxes (currently at 18.4 cents per gallon). McCain, on the other hand, hasn’t released details of his similar scheme, but both have fueled discontent among oil execs, economists and Clinton’s Dem opponent — Barack Obama.

President Bush said he would consider such a plan, but it’s certain the Texas oilman will only support fellow Republican St. Juan de Arizona’s deal, whatever that might be.

Current expectations are that gassing up the old jalopy will hit $4 per gallon in the next few weeks. Consumers are already fuming over the recent news that large oil companies recorded exorbitant profits during the ongoing fossil fuel crisis.

Obama, calling any moratorium a mere stopgap “gimmick,” said he is against a gas tax holiday, claiming it will only serve to further raise prices in the long run.

Oil companies are sure to drop an “F-bomb” on either Clinton’s or McCain’s strategy.

In the meantime, most of us will probably be pushing our cars down the road — out of cash and out of gas.

Heated run-off could turn into philosophical 'race'

Chris Chavez speaks against hatred visiting the Cal State Long Beach campus in November 2007



A campus rep with venomous tendancies
(click on picture to view a leader in action)

The recent Associated Students, Inc. student government elections were mostly positive. Not much in the way of the negative campaigning demonstrated by presidential candidates senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was visible during the Cal State Long Beach battles, except for the few campaign violations settled by the rules committee.


The unsettled race for ASI vice president, while seemingly optimistic, has begun an online flow of abusive name-calling and vitriolic accusations among supporters and detractors of the two run-off candidates, Christopher Chavez and Jason Aula.


Negative charges about each candidate have been popping up in the CSULB forum on MySpace. Many of the comments in the ongoing joust over who the best candidate may be involve racially-toned rhetoric.


One message from a Chavez supporter with the user name “Guido” calls Aula a “known Internet troll” and calls on other supporters to join him in “a fight for free and good government against the forces of idiocy and incompetence (and Jason’s resources in these areas are inexhaustible).”


One comment from “Mike” — claiming to be Aula’s “political advisor/strategist” — takes a direct attack on Chavez. He writes that Chavez isn’t fit to fill the seat because of his involvement in the La Raza Student Association, a group Aula has consistently in the past tried to evict from campus. “Mike” even ventures as far as to write that La Raza is a “latino supremacist organization.”


The hostility between both candidates’ supporters apparently emanates from the November 2007 visit to CSULB by Minuteman Project co-founder Jim Gilchrist.

Now for some brief 'non-racist' iconic amusement

As the president of the Conservative Students Union, Aula invited the controversial Gilchrist to speak on campus. The reaction among most of the CSULB Latino community was to reject Gilchrist for its perception that the Minutemen promote racially-motivated hatred and bigory against Latino people as a whole.


While Aula’s conservative champion spoke inside the near empty Beach Auditorium, the hastily formed ad hoc Campus Coalition Against Hate mustered an array of speakers and a large crowd denouncing Gilchrist’s organization. Chavez was one of the student speakers against Gilchrist’s visit.


To add to the confusion, several of Aula’s past supporters, who ask to remain anonymous, question his commitment to conservative values. Aula is a campus organizer for Tuition Relief Now, which has on its agenda pushing legislation to tax millionaires to pay for rising tuition costs — a standpoint seen by many as being far left of conservatism.


Other Aula advocates have surreptitiously accused Chavez and his supporters of removing Aula’s campaign lawn signs, a charge Chavez vehemently dismisses as false.


As the run-off this week emerges, it will be interesting to see how voters decide on which candidate should be the one projecting the image of our university, and whether or not the winner will be a positive or negative public figurehead and student representative.

Setting futile threats of litigation, cultural insensitivity, academic sloth and perceptual ignorance aside, I hold no personal animosity against either candidate, ahem.

Believed to have been posted on MySpace by one of the vice-presidential candidates.

Messin’ with rural folks’ guns is ungodly

Hunting becomes spiritual

The Democratic presidential combatants have sunk to a new low in the battle of race and gender; they’ve started courting working-class white people in Indiana. Sen. Barack Obama dipped into the Sen. John McCain treasure trove by gaining support from a diehard Republican Vietnam veteran.

Obama mentioned David Taylor in his speech at Ball State University on Saturday. Taylor, a past Muncie city councilmember (and current delegate for the elephants), said, "There are a lot of disaffected Republicans. People are frustrated with the direction George Bush has taken this country."

Now that’s an astute observation from a Republican. Most would have thought Sen. McCain had Republican war vets locked and loaded.

It’s too soon for Obama to claim scoring a coup in Muncie, though. Muncie’s Republican Mayor Sharon McShurley snubbed Obama by not showing up at the event. Instead, she made profound statements to the press.

"I am disappointed in Obama and his anti-capitalist views." Did she just call the senator from Illinois a socialist" The mayor said capitalism needs to be "alive and well" for democracy to survive. Whew, somebody had to say it.

Let's hurt each other and ourself

Both candidates are in damage control mode. Obama punk'd folks in small-town Pennsylvania when he said last week that they were "bitter" and "cling to guns and religion." Start trashing their First and Second Amendment rights in rural communities, senator, and the ruralites will be up in arms.

Sen. Hillary Clinton was accused by her husband of being old. Careful Bill, it’s taken a long time for you to build pillow credibility after Monica. Now you’re going to say the missus had a senior moment when reminiscing sniper fire at a Bosnian airport?

In his explanation last week of Mrs. Clinton's slipped memory of the 1996 non-event in Bosnia, Bill attributed her fallacious recall to geezer fatigue. "Some of them [candidates], when they're 60, they'll forget something when they're tired at 11 o'clock at night, too," he said.

It's a good thing Hillary is awake at 3 a.m.

So much for courting the youth vote, eh, Bill? Never use your wife’s — or any other woman’s age — as a talking point. No good will come from this.

Now for a brief intermission

McCain has memory lapse

Meanwhile, St. John de Arizona is being chided by The Young Turks on Air America Radio and blogs for being wishy-washy in the old soldier department. It appears McCain's 100 years in Iraq commitment is ultra conservative to his more liberal stance when Bill Clinton ran the country.

The Young Turks compiled a stack of YouTube videos showing McCain insisting that U.S. troops be immediately withdrawn from Somalia and Haiti.

Perhaps not all elephants have good memories, it seems.

Sexy bowling, lies and video tape

No pissing contest on my fence, please

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s camp is feeling the pressure from many insiders who want her to throw in the towel on her White House bid.

Pundits are asking for the stubborn senator to end the race following her miscued recollection of dodging sniper fire at an airport in Bosnia in 1996, when an actual video shows her and Chelsea taking a leisurely stroll on the tarmac.

It’s hard to comprehend why a highly-visible person would lie about such a thing, knowing there surely must be video available to the contrary.

Mrs. Clinton showed she has a sense of humor by delivering an April Fools challenge to Sen. Barack Obama. She offered the Illinois senator to settle the nomination battle with a friendly winner-takes-all bowl-off, obviously seeing a weakness in his recent pin-articulation in Pennsylvania.

Probably the least of her worries is Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, a fellow Democrat, who months ago jumped the aisle to support Sen. John McCain. Perhaps the sell-out Lieberman is running interference for McCain following the Shiite/Sunni/Iran misidentification gaffe St. Juan de Arizona made during his Iraq visit.

Lieberman told the press that the Democratic Party has, “[B]een effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me." It's ironic that Lieberman would call the Democratic nominees a "small group on the left" given his Liberal past.

It's also tragically ironic he would call them isolationist, while jumping ship to support a party insistent on erecting the "Tortilla Curtain" between the U.S. and Mexico. Lieberman probably shouldn't be billed as a coalition builder at the Democratic National Convention. He most certainly won't be the keynote speaker.

It’s easy to conceive where Sen. John McCain gets his foreign policy sensitivity. Vice President Dick Cheney effectively blew off the U.S. public with his arrogant and dismissive commentary about why the Iraq War has lasted a tad longer than he predicted in 2005.

After Cheney was told that two-thirds of Americans believe the war isn’t worth fighting, he smirked “So?” He followed that egotistical tongue wag with, “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

Nice touch, Dick.

During a speech Pres. Bush gave last week heralding the success of the Iraq War, McCain added that the U.S. and Iraq were “on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism.”

Aside from figuring out how one would lose a “major victory,” we implore McCain to stop getting his information from “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. Hopefully, Bush's past speeches aren't copyright protected so the GOP knighted one can use them again, if necessary (insert mental image of somebody seriously quoting W.) .

Not long after McCain returned from his good-neighbor junket to Iraq, it was revealed that several low-level government employees had peeked at his and senators Clinton's and Obama's passport information. While the employees got either reprimanded or fired, we might expect to see that private info offered through an online auction on or about Nov. 5.

It’s a good thing McCain had already done his soft shoe in the Middle East (and that the passport employees only "peeked"), or he could still be tap dancing at the airport, gripping a tampered-with passport, trying to convince Baghdad customs inspectors, “I AM the next president of the U.S. of A., dammit. Let me back in.”

McCain is enjoying his free ride by taking a "Service to America" nostalgia tour, visiting his old haunts, touting his military heroism and virtue, showing he’s fallible and signing copies of his memoirs. Ahhh, life is good when you don’t have to fight for your political existence, eh Senator Ol’ Soldier?

Of course, McCain's nap was interrupted when he commented about his willingness to let the Iraq War last another century. The 'donkey' party was quick to jump on McCain's statement, "We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that's fine with me." That would make McCain (drum roll please) 171 years old by the time the war ends.

Somebody needs to improve McCain's wake-up method because a mere nudge might not do the trick in a few months when his blood pressure starts fluctuating again. All of the quality face-time he's putting in now is valuable busy work, but may take its toll by the time the Dems decide who he'll battle.

Please read the headlines, St. Juan. A 'presumptive' Republican candidate-egoist can be a hard sell to an already skeptical public, unless you have an exit strategy they can witness in their lifetimes. Not having our citizens "injured or harmed or wounded or killed" would be a nice trick for some magician. Now if you only can get al Qaida and other terrorists to cooperate.

photo from movietone.com

(Actor Ray Walston, 1914-2001)

Not Sen. Joe Lieberman!!!

Is Sen. Joe Lieberman!

La revolución nunca morirá

They eat their young -- again.

If "Help" is at the grave marker's base, it's too late

Should we call it, yet?

The buzzards are circling over the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Each has had to give the axe (undoubtedly with pressure and empathy) to campaign insiders who each could stand some lip-replacement surgery.

Name-calling, back-biting, knockdown, drag-out, pastor-run-amok campaign battles are a sight to see. It’s probably even nicer to see on someone else’s pay-per-view, which is exactly what Sen. John McCain decided to do this weekend by visiting Iraq; hide and watch.

It’s time to practice a little “good ol’ boy” diplomacy, while the Democratic youngsters play nasty politics. Let their underlings implode and St. Juan de Arizona will try to establish some “street cred” across the globe.

Time-out for a tiny Texas two-step

McCain’s endorsement from Pres. Bush (which was preceded with a little jig while waiting for McCain’s morning Geritol to kick in), was merely the pilot episode of how the Republicans will run the election circus.

Gramps is playing the “presumptive Republican candidate” role to the hilt. He has months to develop the patriarchal persona the GOP will demand when and if “an incident” occurs. If you want to know what “an incident” is, read the earlier blogs, dammit.

Oh, all right, “an incident” is what Republicans need to actually pull off a victory in the outside chance that no Floridian goblins are trusted with vote-counting duties.

Something as trivial as U.S. troop movement out of Iraq just when Latin American countries (one of them our ally) are posturing to blow each other to hell, for instance, wouldn’t hurt McCain — the soldier.

Anybody up for dominoes?

As if McCain’s goodwill mission isn’t enough to build conspiracy theories on, Bear Stearns crumbles and sells to JP Morgan for a pittance. Some financial pros think it could result in a downward-zooming domestic calamity, with other banks following suit.

Now that’s being in the right place at the right time, Sen. McCain. Being elsewhere — any elsewhere — when an economy teeters is wise if you’re a candidate who doesn’t need to fight for his next meal like Clinton and Obama.