Monday, April 02, 2007

Clowns Abound In Our Town


Back to the business at hand after a day of fun yesterday. Did I have you going with my little April Fool's Day spoof?

As I perused the agenda for the City Council meeting Tuesday, April 3rd, I noticed that buried way down at the end of the Consent Calendar at item number 21 is the proposal for new City Council Policy #000-13, "Dais Seating For City Council". The policy states: "Authority is hereby delegated to the Mayor to assign seats at the dais."

The procedure for such decisions is prescribed as follows:

"1. Immediately following the meeting at which the declaration of the municipal election results is made and the City Council has chosen one of its members as Mayor, the newly selected Mayor shall solicit input from the remaining Council Members as to seating preferences.

2. Prior to the next regular City Council meeting, the Mayor shall provide the City Council with the new seating arrangements."

What a colossal waste of time and money! All this expenditure of staff time to simply satisfy a petulant petty tyrant on a power trip! And, you'll notice that there is no restriction in this policy for a particularly abusive mayor to make the council swap seats any old time he wants.

Speaking of petulant petty tyrants, our old pal, The-Brain-That-Ate-Costa-Mesa, on his "little newsletter", the CM Press, had an interesting weekend skulking around our city, looking for violators of whatever law he had in mind at the time. In two separate postings Saturday he did his best "Ace Reporter" impression as he cruised the area of The Farm Sports Complex, looking for illegal aliens making their way to an event at the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant in which representatives of the Mexican Consulate were supposed to be distributing Mexican Matricula Consular identification cards. This "heinous act" had our old buddy all in a tizzy.

Based on his reports, I have this image of him ducking from tree to tree, counting heads as they came and went from the church. What a schmuck! Of course, he also reported that a flock of Minutemen vigilantes and other "concerned citizens" were on hand to "peacefully" demonstrate against these meetings. A separate report on this subject indicated that the event was poorly attended and ended early.

Coincidentally, I also read that a funeral service was being conducted simultaneously at that same church for a woman named Bunny Richards, who apparently was famous as a "visiting clown", performing at any number of events over many years. News reports and photos showed several attendees attired in their clown costumes to pay homage to Ms. Richards. I'm sorry, but I just couldn't help thinking how absolutely appropriate it was that our old pal from the CM Press and those other Minutemen clowns were lurking around the premises while clowns in costume made their way to the service. I found myself wondering if any of those demonstrators had even the slightest twinge of remorse for demonstrating outside a church during the funeral service. I suspect not.

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3 Comments:

Blogger Claudio said...

Great post. I love how you throw the schmuck monicker at him. Nothing like a good Yiddish insult to really get "your neighbor" into more of a tizzy.

4/03/2007 11:13:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Clearly, one of the most disturbing parts of this and many other situations in our community is the immediate assumption that anyone who is Hispanic is here illegally. That then leads to the next step of declaring that all of our problems stem from illegal immigrants. This is a classic example of well meaning people being misled by some inaccurate assumptions proposed by a small group of people with a white supremacy agenda. Once you buy into the first assumption, the step to the next and the next and the one after that is easy to make. How can we as a community start fighting back with substantiated information that refutes the basic premise? A PR campaign needs to be formulated that shows the citizens of Costa Mesa that illegal immigration is not rampant, that the students in our schools are not here from foreign countries (or even Santa Ana). The misinformation really need to be refuted. I think we need the Pilot to do some hard analysis of our community make-up to expose this irrational propaganda for what it is

4/03/2007 01:55:00 PM  
Blogger The Pot Stirrer said...

Further on this post... I was relayed a first-hand report from a reliable source at the church Saturday who tells us that the Mexican Consulate re-located it's activity to a church in Santa Ana rather than risk a confrontation with the MinuteMorons who were demonstrating at the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. Apparently those folks who showed up at the church were subsequently transported by bus to the Santa Ana location, accompanied by a member of the CMPD to insure their safety.

According to my report, the CMPD handled the situation with great professionalism. Those demonstrators mentioned in the CM Press posts were apparently not entirely "peaceful", since one received a citation because he attempted to stop a Latino family who had attended the Orange Coast College Swap Meet from passing the location. He apparently laid his hands on a little girl, which got him the ticket.

I wonder how many of those demonstrators were Costa Mesa residents. I'm betting, based on past performance, that many were out-of-town agitators from places like Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga and Laguna Beach. I sure do wish they would butt the heck out of Costa Mesa's business.

Our young jailer/mayor was on Lou Dobbs last night again, talking about the success of the ICE man in the Costa Mesa jail and looking every bit like a guy angling for higher office downstream. Good grief!

4/03/2007 04:41:00 PM  

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