Mansoor's Self-adoration And Deception

MANSOOR HEAPS PRAISE - ON HIMSELF
Our young jailer/former mayor, Allan Mansoor, scratched out an opinion piece for the Daily Pilot which was entitled "Improvers living up to namesake" and was published in print on Sunday, February 17th. It can be read in all it's glowing entirety HERE. After I finished reading it I feared for Mansoor's well-being. I mean, how is it possible to pat one's self on the back like that without getting at least a cramp or pulled muscle?

POLITICAL POSTURING
As you read it you'll see that Mansoor is obviously setting up Eric Bever's candidacy for re-election in November. Such obvious political posturing is laughable.

SLOGANEERING - GAG ME!
No one can deny that some good things have happened during Mansoor's tenure on the City Council. Much of that would have happened if he wasn't there - like the improvement of many of our major thoroughfares, for example. He does go to great lengths to quantify the "accomplishments" of his cadre of buddies - the self-anointed "improvers". And, it appears that he's coined Bever's new campaign slogan, "Action taken, results delivered". I suspect that in the summer we will see signs all over town in stunning red, white and blue bearing Bever's name and that little bit of political tripe.

MANSOOR'S DECEPTION
Mansoor attempts to explain the genesis of the "improver movement" by telling us that, "..there is no organized group with some type of official membership." Hogwash! Like much of what he has tried to tell the residents in this city over the years he's been an active politician, it's untrue. There have, in fact, been many official groups attempting to "improve" the city - mainly the Westside - well before he became a politician. These dated back into the late 1980s, when the Wallace Area Improvement Group was formed. In the late 1990s the Westside Improvement Association was formed, which included many current familiar names - Mike and Judi Berry, Christian and Kathleen Eric, Eleanor Egan, Paul Bunney and our very own mayor, Eric Bever.

JANICE BAILS AND WAILS
Very shortly thereafter Janice Davidson split from the group - apparently in a disagreement about it's direction - and formed Citizens for the Improvement of Costa Mesa. As part of that activity the Concerned Costa Mesa Citizens website was created, on which many activists vented about ways to improve the city, including Allan Mansoor. He, in fact, precipitated the demise of that web site when he posted an anti-homosexual entry he ripped from Focus on the Family. That got the folks from the Orange County Human Relations Commission snooping around. The site quickly shut down and the participants scurried back under their respective rocks.

WHO?
One of the most prolific posters on that site will be a name familiar to most who read these entries. He's the fellow in town, who doesn't live on the Westside, by the way, that has his own blog and has recently referred to himself as "Mr. U. Know-Who". I refer to him as "Your Neighbor". While the site was still active I logged on and had a chance to read many of the archived 6,000 posts. Some were boring, but many - especially those by Your Neighbor - were enlightening and provocative. It was my encounter with those posts that got me curious about his other writings and subsequently discovered his closet full of racist rants as published on many far, far right-wing sites throughout the World Wide Web.

MORE ORGANIZATIONS
Other organizations have also existed with the avowed intent to "improve" our city. Among them are the Latino Advisory Committee the Latino Business Council, Latino Business Network, the Coalition of Auto Repair and Service Professionals and Bob Graham's 19th To The Beach group. And this doesn't count the official, city-sponsored groups - CRAC and WROC.

CHECK THE ARCHIVES
If you wish to review some entries from the Daily Pilot archives that address the activities of these various groups you can find articles and letters to the editor HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT
So, Mansoor continues to deceive the populace - there were plenty of identifiable, organized groups with membership lists and agendas in place that have, in fact, formed the nucleus of the so-called "improver movement".

THE REAL PLAN
With few exceptions, under the guise of making our city "better", the thrust of the "improvement movement" has been to harass and displace nearly a third of our population - the Latinos. The closure of the Job Center, the disbanding of the city's Human Relations Committee, the attempts to defund and dislodge charities on the Westside, the failed attempt to close down the Orange Coast College Swap Meet and the pervasive drumbeat of criticism of the impact the Latinos are having on our school system are clear examples of this Latinophobic attempt to "improve" the "look" of our city.

HE WRITES THE SONGS....
And, of course, the music and lyrics for this little opera have been written by Your Neighbor. This council majority and many other "improvers" echo his writings and comments with regularity, including in Mansoor's commentary.

CHANGE THE NAME
Yes, many good things have been accomplished in this city during Mansoor's tenure, but most of those were unanimous votes by all the council members - not just the "improvers" among them. We're going to see this kind of shameless political posturing from now until November as the "improvers" try to perpetuate their stranglehold on the city and their relentless move to "de-latinize" Costa Mesa - ironically, a city with a Latino name. Maybe we should just rename the city "Nobrownsville" and be done with it.