By: Ivan A. Lopakhin, special to Cathedral City Observed
Summary: Julian Assange, the problematic houseguest of Ecuador’s London embassy, finally outstayed his welcome and was expelled from the Embassy this morning. The process of British justice against the WikiLeaks cofounder has creaked into motion, while on both sides of the pond, conspiracy theorists and irate supporters of “Democratic” presidential wannabe Bernard Sanders are whipping themselves into a frenzy and waxing wroth against Her Majesty’s Government, and against the American intelligence communities. For votaries of the cult of personality that is the Sanders campaign, this morning’s news cannot have been welcome.
----------------------------------------------------
A little bit before 11 this morning, London time, just as bankers in The City, bureaucrats in Whitehall, barristers at the Inns of Court, and Billingsgate fishwives were preparing for their Elevenses, British police, acting at the express request of the Ecuadorian Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, entered Ecuador’s embassy in Knightsbridge, hard by Harrods, and seized the person of WikiLeaks co-founder and doubtless Russian asset Julian Assange.
The explosion of anger from the Sanders left in the United States was immediate and utterly predictable. However, while American Sanders “progressives” may be waxing wroth and spinning ever more Baroque and Byzantine conspiracy theories, it is significant that there has been relatively little reaction from the Kremlin or the intelligence apparat of the Russian State. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, an experienced KGB case officer, knows when to cut his losses and burn an asset.
While there may not be a lot of schadenfreude within the confines of the Moscow Kremlin, there is certainly some palatable schadenfreude among Hillary Clinton loyalists and supporters of the Democratic National Committee. After all, Gospodin Assange, whose Russian connections are an open secret, positioned himself as an eager adversary of Hillary Clinton. Indeed, so obvious was Assange’s misogynistic disdain for Hillary Clinton, that it was impossible not to infer that he was acting on behalf of Donald Trump, the Russian state, or both.
Indeed, after the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in 2016, many angry Sanders supporters, drifting ineluctably in the direction of Donald Trump and the Russian state, looked to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to vindicate their failed cause. The comment threads of nearly every article concerning Hillary Clinton, Bernard Sanders, or WikiLeaks, contained either predictions that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks would sooner or later bring down the Clinton campaign and “expose” how the primary election process had been “rigged” against Bernard Sanders.
Indeed, the #neverHillary and “Bernie or bust” movements, with the active, knowing, complicity of Gospodin Zuckerberg and Facebook, eagerly and uncritically disseminated both Trump campaign talking points and disinformation from WikiLeaks, treating the latter as if it were gospel. Never once did the #neverHillary or “Bernie or bust” cultists ever once undertake any due diligence whatsoever. Instead, they eagerly repeated what Gospodin Assange chose to release.
Now, of course, the Sanders intransigents, the Japanese-holdout-on-Pacific-island-sore-losers, the followers of the Bernie personality cult, have begun to fabricate a congenial, if cynical, mythology of Assange as some kind of “journalistic martyr for freedom of expression.”
Never mind that Gospodin Assange has never, not even once, disclosed any material embarrassing to the interests of the Russian State, or to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin himself.
Never mind that in his ill-advised interview with Gospodin Assange, Bill Maher extracted a promise from Gospodin Assange that Gospodin Assange would secure and release Donald Trump’s tax returns, a promise Gospodin Assange ostentatiously did not keep.
Never mind that Gospodin Assange sued the very Ecuadorian State which had offered him asylum and refuge, and smeared feces on the walls of the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Never mind that Julian Assange has never been a credentialed journalist, and that he has never written a single article for any journalistic outlet.
Never mind all that. The gullible and easily manipulated votaries and fellow travelers of the Sanders left, foolish people who managed to make Joe McCarthy look good, will whinge and wail, ball and squall, and sling snot and spittle in their outrage that Julian Assange, wanted on charges of bail jumping, rape of an underage minor, and criminal computer hacking, in three separate countries, will finally be brought to account for the brazen way in which he has thumbed his nose at the Royal Government of Sweden, at Her Majesty’s Government in the UK, and at the American people.
The Komsomoltsy of the Bernie Sanders cult and the foolish followers of Gospodin Trump should perhaps stop waxing wroth and start worrying about what Julian Assange may have to say should he decide either to start cooperating or instruct his followers to try to burn down the world in some kind of Götterdämmerung orgy of Assange–ish narcissism. For what Assange knows and may be prepared to make public could very well be more than enough to destroy both Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders.
Karma, it seems, is ineluctable.
-xxx-
Ivan Arkadyevich Lopakhin, who posts occasionally in this blog is, like Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, a hybrid. Of Russo-American parentage, he has been a critic and gadfly of the governments of the Russian State since he was a Young Pioneer and aspiring Komsomolets in Leningrad. Since his widowed mom brought him back from the Soviet Union to Southern California, Ivan has been a devoted American, surfer, husband, father, and occasional yente for American companies wanting to risk doing business in Russkiy Otechestvo. The views set forth herein are entirely his own.
Thursday, April 11, 2019
Friday, March 1, 2019
SOME DAMNED FOOLISH THING IN PALM DESERT: Was There a Plot to Pack the Council in Cathedral City?
Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans
-Prince Otto v. Bismarck-Schönhausen, Duke of Lauenburg, some time Imperial Chancellor of Germany, predicting the cause of the outbreak of the Great War
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!
-W. Scott, Marmion (1808),Canto VI, stanza XVI
“Council members are elected to make decisions on City business not to listen to disgruntled citizens, Appointment is the only fiscally responsible way to fill vacancy.shame on you for change of mind!”
-Jean Benson, former Palm Desert councilwoman, Facebook comment, February 28, 1919, on the Cathedral City city Council’s decision to call a special election for District 1.
Summary: A snarky series of Facebook comments from former Palm Desert councilwoman Jean Benson may very well have exposed further evidence of a plot to pack the Cathedral City city Council. Benson’s comment, lamenting the Council’s decision to call a special election, and implying that there had existed a contrary consensus, may very well constitute probable cause to believe that criminal violations have been committed, and that at least two of the members of the Cathedral City city Council committed them. Jean needs to think seriously about shutting her yap and lawyering up. Some damned foolish thing in Palm Desert may have blown the lid off a real scandal.
Great wars and crises always seem to begin with small, foolish things. Germany’s Iron Chancellor, not Angela Merkel but Otto v. Bismarck-Schönhausen, predicted, in 1888, the famous “Dreikaiserjahre,” that the next general European war would begin as a result of “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” Just two and half decades later, Bismarck’s prediction was borne out on that thrice-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914, when teenaged Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, setting in train of the series of events which led to the outbreak of the Great War.
Similarly, a tweet describing the self-immolation of a merchant in Tunis triggered the events of the Arab spring, a sociopolitical phenomenon which has yet to play itself out.
On a more local level, it was an indiscreet exchange of emails between Cathedral city Mayor pro tem John Aguilar and former Mayor Stan Henry which exposed, and led to the foiling of, an apparently well laid plan to appoint Mr. Henry to serve out the unexpired term of the late Mayor Gregory Pettis.
The particulars of what we may call the “Plan for Stan” are not yet fully known. That information will only be developed if the Riverside County District Attorney’s office undertakes the investigation so critically necessary to determine whether there may have been criminal wrongdoing connected not only with the “Plan for Stan,” but also with Mayor Pettis’ death itself.
That there may have been criminality involved in the “Plan for Stan” might have been nothing more than a conspiracy theory even 24 hours ago. However, in an ill considered Facebook post, former Palm Desert councilwoman Jean Benson may have inadvertently provided evidence that the “Plan for Stan” was in fact the result of a carefully orchestrated, violative-of-the-Ralph M. Brown Act, plan, scheme, and artifice to foist Mr. Henry, a resident of District 3, on to the resistant residents of District 1. This would be not only a conspiracy to violate the Brown act, but to perpetrate a voter fraud, and a violation of California law requiring elected representatives to live in their constituency.
Again, this is a matter for the Public Integrity unit of the Riverside County District Attorney’s office.
Ms. Benson’s incontinent Facebook comment read:
“Council members are elected to make decisions on City business not to listen to disgruntled citizens, Appointment is the only fiscally responsible way to fill vacancy. [ S]hame on you for change of mind!” (emphasis added)
Aside from demonstrating Ms. Benson’s utter, hubristic, and arrogant disregard for the constitutional rights of constituents to petition for redress of grievances, and to instruct their representatives, it also displays what we in the legal profession refer to as “guilty knowledge.” By saying “shame on you for change of mind,” Ms. Benson has raised the inferential possibility that there was indeed a carefully orchestrated “Plan for Stan” developed either by Mr. Henry or on his behalf, possibly by former mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa and her right wing, conservative claque of loyalists and fellow travelers, presumptively in the aid of laying foundation for a DeRosa comeback.
At all events, Ms. Benson’s post, like so many of the tweets from Mr. Trump, like so many of the damned foolish utterances of Mr. Trump’s mouthpiece Rudy Giuliani, and like Mr. Aguilar’s “butt dumb” emails that gave the game away, will not serve to shorten any potential DA or unofficial investigation of this process; as former Trump campaign advisor and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has put it, in the context of the investigation by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, they will only serve to lengthen such investigations.
Now while defenders of Ms. Benson may point out that she’s well north of 90, people don’t usually age out of arrogance and hubris. Ms. Benson has a reputation for having a sharp tongue, and equally for being a close friend and something of a loyalist of Kathleen Joan DeRosa. Thus, the first question that anyone should ask seeking to get to the bottom of what is now fairly obviously a conspiracy to violate the rights of the residents of District 1, is: what did Jean Benson know and when did Jean Benson know it? Where did she come by her information? What was decided out of public view, by whom, and what minds were changed?
For by suggesting that there existed some consensus, of which Ms. Benson had been aware, which was departed from to her evident annoyance, Ms. Benson has suggested the existence of not only a conspiracy to violate the Ralph M. Brown Act, but an actual, knowing, and deliberate violation of the Act itself. To the extent that there exists probable cause to believe that a Brown Act violation has occurred, Ms. Benson may very well be either a material witness or a co-conspirator. She may want to think carefully about shutting her arrogant yap and lawyering up.
Some damned foolish thing in Palm Desert may blow wide open a criminal conspiracy to stack the Council in Cathedral City. Let and investigation be opened and let it go wherever the evidence takes it.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand lives in Cathedral City and practices law in Rancho Mirage. He has been a member of the legal profession for 30 years as of this spring, and has little patience for bumbling, fumbling, ill-informed laypeople who think they are qualified to practice law. The views contained herein are his own, and should not be construed as legal advice.
-Prince Otto v. Bismarck-Schönhausen, Duke of Lauenburg, some time Imperial Chancellor of Germany, predicting the cause of the outbreak of the Great War
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!
-W. Scott, Marmion (1808),Canto VI, stanza XVI
“Council members are elected to make decisions on City business not to listen to disgruntled citizens, Appointment is the only fiscally responsible way to fill vacancy.shame on you for change of mind!”
-Jean Benson, former Palm Desert councilwoman, Facebook comment, February 28, 1919, on the Cathedral City city Council’s decision to call a special election for District 1.
Summary: A snarky series of Facebook comments from former Palm Desert councilwoman Jean Benson may very well have exposed further evidence of a plot to pack the Cathedral City city Council. Benson’s comment, lamenting the Council’s decision to call a special election, and implying that there had existed a contrary consensus, may very well constitute probable cause to believe that criminal violations have been committed, and that at least two of the members of the Cathedral City city Council committed them. Jean needs to think seriously about shutting her yap and lawyering up. Some damned foolish thing in Palm Desert may have blown the lid off a real scandal.
Great wars and crises always seem to begin with small, foolish things. Germany’s Iron Chancellor, not Angela Merkel but Otto v. Bismarck-Schönhausen, predicted, in 1888, the famous “Dreikaiserjahre,” that the next general European war would begin as a result of “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” Just two and half decades later, Bismarck’s prediction was borne out on that thrice-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914, when teenaged Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, setting in train of the series of events which led to the outbreak of the Great War.
Similarly, a tweet describing the self-immolation of a merchant in Tunis triggered the events of the Arab spring, a sociopolitical phenomenon which has yet to play itself out.
On a more local level, it was an indiscreet exchange of emails between Cathedral city Mayor pro tem John Aguilar and former Mayor Stan Henry which exposed, and led to the foiling of, an apparently well laid plan to appoint Mr. Henry to serve out the unexpired term of the late Mayor Gregory Pettis.
The particulars of what we may call the “Plan for Stan” are not yet fully known. That information will only be developed if the Riverside County District Attorney’s office undertakes the investigation so critically necessary to determine whether there may have been criminal wrongdoing connected not only with the “Plan for Stan,” but also with Mayor Pettis’ death itself.
That there may have been criminality involved in the “Plan for Stan” might have been nothing more than a conspiracy theory even 24 hours ago. However, in an ill considered Facebook post, former Palm Desert councilwoman Jean Benson may have inadvertently provided evidence that the “Plan for Stan” was in fact the result of a carefully orchestrated, violative-of-the-Ralph M. Brown Act, plan, scheme, and artifice to foist Mr. Henry, a resident of District 3, on to the resistant residents of District 1. This would be not only a conspiracy to violate the Brown act, but to perpetrate a voter fraud, and a violation of California law requiring elected representatives to live in their constituency.
Ms. Benson’s incontinent Facebook comment read:
“Council members are elected to make decisions on City business not to listen to disgruntled citizens, Appointment is the only fiscally responsible way to fill vacancy. [ S]hame on you for change of mind!” (emphasis added)
Aside from demonstrating Ms. Benson’s utter, hubristic, and arrogant disregard for the constitutional rights of constituents to petition for redress of grievances, and to instruct their representatives, it also displays what we in the legal profession refer to as “guilty knowledge.” By saying “shame on you for change of mind,” Ms. Benson has raised the inferential possibility that there was indeed a carefully orchestrated “Plan for Stan” developed either by Mr. Henry or on his behalf, possibly by former mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa and her right wing, conservative claque of loyalists and fellow travelers, presumptively in the aid of laying foundation for a DeRosa comeback.
At all events, Ms. Benson’s post, like so many of the tweets from Mr. Trump, like so many of the damned foolish utterances of Mr. Trump’s mouthpiece Rudy Giuliani, and like Mr. Aguilar’s “butt dumb” emails that gave the game away, will not serve to shorten any potential DA or unofficial investigation of this process; as former Trump campaign advisor and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has put it, in the context of the investigation by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, they will only serve to lengthen such investigations.
Now while defenders of Ms. Benson may point out that she’s well north of 90, people don’t usually age out of arrogance and hubris. Ms. Benson has a reputation for having a sharp tongue, and equally for being a close friend and something of a loyalist of Kathleen Joan DeRosa. Thus, the first question that anyone should ask seeking to get to the bottom of what is now fairly obviously a conspiracy to violate the rights of the residents of District 1, is: what did Jean Benson know and when did Jean Benson know it? Where did she come by her information? What was decided out of public view, by whom, and what minds were changed?
For by suggesting that there existed some consensus, of which Ms. Benson had been aware, which was departed from to her evident annoyance, Ms. Benson has suggested the existence of not only a conspiracy to violate the Ralph M. Brown Act, but an actual, knowing, and deliberate violation of the Act itself. To the extent that there exists probable cause to believe that a Brown Act violation has occurred, Ms. Benson may very well be either a material witness or a co-conspirator. She may want to think carefully about shutting her arrogant yap and lawyering up.
Some damned foolish thing in Palm Desert may blow wide open a criminal conspiracy to stack the Council in Cathedral City. Let and investigation be opened and let it go wherever the evidence takes it.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand lives in Cathedral City and practices law in Rancho Mirage. He has been a member of the legal profession for 30 years as of this spring, and has little patience for bumbling, fumbling, ill-informed laypeople who think they are qualified to practice law. The views contained herein are his own, and should not be construed as legal advice.
Thursday, February 28, 2019
HOW THE COUNCIL MAY HAVE SAVED ITS OWN BACON
Summary: Last night, the Cathedral City city Council did the right thing and abandoned its butt dumb plan to appoint an at-large councilmember to fill out the unexpired term of the late Mayor Greg Pettis. The appointment plan, apparently cooked up by former mayor Kathleen DeRosa and her loyalists, and apparently inadvertently exposed by Mayor pro tem John Aguilar, envisioned the Council appointing former mayor Stan Henry, not a resident of the constituency, to fill out Mayor Pettis’s unexpired term. As word got out that this seemed to be a “done deal,” voters in the district 1 constituency in question and throughout the city rose up in righteous indignation. Last night, the Council felt the chill wind of Wintry Disapproval, and retreated from its butt dumb plan, opting instead to call a special election limited to candidates and voters in District 1.
Cathedral City, February 28, 2019 -- Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas once observed that “[i]n politics more than in anything else, the beginning of everything lies in moral indignation.” Last night, in abandoning its butt dumb plan to appoint an at-large member of the Council to represent District 1 and fill out the unexpired term of the late Mayor Greg Pettis, the Council bowed to the moral indignation and Wintry Disapproval of the residents of District 1 and of the larger electorate of Cathedral City. In doing so, the Council may just have saved its own bacon.
Most revolutions begin with small things. The Xinhai (Hsin-hai) Revolution, which led to the overthrow of China’s Qing Dynasty in 1911-1912 began with the inadvertent explosion of the package bomb in the Yangtze Valley City of Wuhan. The Arab Spring began with a small merchant immolating himself in the city of Tunis, and our own American Revolution, our protean national liberation struggle that has become the model for all which followed, began when a bunch of pissed off farmers at Lexington and Concord stood up to a landing party composed of Royal Marines. As John Parker, commanding the Minutemen on Lexington Green said, "Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here."
The residents of District 1, like the Minutemen on Lexington Green on April 19, 1775, three days after Easter, confronting a plan to impose upon them a councilmember from outside their own district, felt the moral indignation that is the heritage and birthright of every American whom any government proposes to tax without representation. The city Council’s butt dumb, apparently done deal to appoint Stan Henry to Greg Pettis’s seat would have left District 3 with double representation, while bereaving District 1 of any voice or representation whatsoever on the city Council for the next 20 months. The residents of District 1 weren’t having it.
As the situation developed, there emerged evidence to suggest that this was a plan that had been cooked up by former mayor Kathleen DeRosa and her political cronies. DeRosa, who for ten bitter winters served as the worst mayor in Cathedral City’s history, showing the same kind of Trumpian, Outer Boroughs, bridge-and-tunnel pettiness, vindictiveness, thin-skinnedness, and sheer nastiness as The Donald himself, mixed with an almost sexual desire for power and a political comeback, induced her cronies to start beating the drums for an appointment of Stan Henry to the Council. DeRosa, clever enough to know that her name in this community is still mud induced car salesman Andy Jessup to belabor the Council with a lengthy email extolling the ostensible virtues and qualifications of Mr. Henry.
The apparent target of one of these emails was Mayor pro tem John Aguilar, who first came to the Council as an appointed protégé of former Mayor Pettis. Mr. Aguilar apparently, either out of foolishness or deep fatigue (don’t you think he looks tired?) did not appreciate the dangerous position into which he was about to place himself, and emailed Mr. Henry with a series of missives which created an unmistakable and ultimately undeniable impression that Mr. Henry was a shoo-in, and that his appointment to the Council was an inevitability. What is more interesting is that Mr. Aguilar apparently sent these emails from his municipal email account, and that he attempted unsuccessfully to delete them after discovering that a Public Records Act request have been filed demanding their production.
That is in and of itself actionable criminal misconduct, and also demonstrates the existence of what in the criminal law is referred to as “a consciousness of guilt.” In plain, non-Vulcan English, that means that to all intents and purposes, Mr. Aguilar had not just dropped, but had hurled, a big malodorous turd into the municipal punch bowl. It was a foolish, ill-considered, and potentially criminal act. The email was itself a public record, and California law frowns with Wintry Disapproval on destruction or falsification of public records. Worse for Mr. Aguilar, it does not matter that the attempt is not successful. The crime is complete at the time the attempt is made. What Mr. Aguilar did was not just dumb, it was butt dumb.
By engaging in such conduct, Mr. Aguilar not only exposed himself to potential investigation by District Attorney Mike Hestrin, he may also have exposed himself to a further investigation by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and possibly by the Legislature itself. At all events, Mr. Aguilar has exposed himself as a political lightweight with no sense of optics and no understanding of the often exquisitely complex compliance mandates under which public officials are supposed to govern themselves. At all events, Mr. Aguilar fatally tainted the whole appointment process.
When the Council met last night to determine whether to appoint someone, this blogger and a number of other individuals within the community, including Cindy Uken of the Uken Report, and Casey Dolan of Cactus Hugs, as well as local activists Simeon Den, his husband Peter Palladino, Lynne O’Neill, Alan Carvalho and his husband former councilmember Shelley Kaplan, and a number of other morally indignant residents, had sounded the alarm.
The general gist of our “polemic” was that the Council needed to abandon any appointment and call a special election, limited to voters and candidates in District 1. We packed the Council chamber. After nearly 2 hours of public comment, which hit the Council like a cast iron skillet upside its collective head, and with the Council looking stunned that the apparent “shoo-in Stan” plan was threatening to create an enormous political crisis that might subject each of them to a recall, and might subject the city to lawsuits whose defense would exceed in cost the maximum amount a special election could be expected to cost, councilmember Ray Gregory, who had already seen the light, offered a motion to call a special election for District 1 limited to electors and candidates from that district.
After several agonizing seconds, during which it appeared that the motion might die for want of a second, Mr. Aguilar, finally understanding that Mr. Gregory had thrown him a lifeline, seconded the motion, though not before chastising supporters of an election as “thugs” who had presumably cooked up their objections to his plan to shoo-in Stan Henry solely to hurt his feelings.
Now from my own experience as a former councilmember of eight years, I know that as a general rule when one seconds a motion, unless one seconds it “for the purposes of discussion,” using those so-called magic words, one has in effect committed to vote in favor of the motion. Either Mr. Aguilar lacked the experience to understand that, or he was truly seconding the motion and conveying an unmistakable tell that he intended to vote in favor. In the end, the Council saved its own bacon and voted 3-1 in favor of the motion.
Councilmember Ernesto Gutierrez, a nasty, Trumpian little piece of work, a small fingered vulgarian, known for his bush league behavior, his fealty to The Donald, his dislike of the queer nation, and his conviction that women should not enjoy reproductive choice, voted against the motion. Already, community activist sources are telling me that they are preparing to lodge recall paperwork against Mr. Gutierrez at the earliest legal moment, i.e., on the 91st day after Mr. Gutierrez was sworn into office (see, e.g., Elections Code § 11007).
The apparent theory of any recall against Ernesto Gutierrez will be that his “no” vote on calling a special election is 1) a violation of his Article XX constitutional oath of office, 2) a violation of democratic norms, and 3) evidence of his possible participation in a violation of, or conspiracy to violate, the Ralph M. Brown Act, which denounces private meetings by representative bodies.
Mr. Gutierrez and the rest of the Council need to be reminded that we do not work for them, but that they work for us. Last night may have represented a distinct and palpable change in the political power dynamics of Cathedral City. Activated residents are no longer prepared to tolerate the presence of the Council that ignores the manifest and evident will of the electorate. It is reasonably safe to infer that the three councilmembers who voted in favor of the special election had had the fear of God put into them that they might be the targets of a recall had they gone ahead and appointed Stan Henry to the Council. Mr. Gutierrez apparently has yet to learn that lesson.
At all events, however, the shift in the power dynamic on the Council, and between the Council and the community hopefully betokens the emergence of a Council that will be more responsive to its respective constituencies and to the community as a whole. We have come a long way from the 10 sour, dour, gray, Leonid Brezhnev-like winters when the city languished under the lackluster leadership of bridge-and-tunnel Kathleen DeRosa. We cannot afford to go back. Our future is progressive, and we must make it clear that we expect, nay, demand progressive representation on the city Council. Moreover, we must make it very clear to our elected representatives that they will pay a heavy political price for crossing us again. We’re prepared to be “thuggish” and to put an awful lot of hurt on the delicate feelings of city councilmembers who ignore their constituents and attempt to inflict upon them the horrors of taxation without representation. The revolution continues.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq., is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He served for eight years as a member of the Cathedral City city Council. The views contained herein are his own, though he has probable cause to believe that they are shared by a substantial number of voters throughout Cathedral City.
Cathedral City, February 28, 2019 -- Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas once observed that “[i]n politics more than in anything else, the beginning of everything lies in moral indignation.” Last night, in abandoning its butt dumb plan to appoint an at-large member of the Council to represent District 1 and fill out the unexpired term of the late Mayor Greg Pettis, the Council bowed to the moral indignation and Wintry Disapproval of the residents of District 1 and of the larger electorate of Cathedral City. In doing so, the Council may just have saved its own bacon.
Most revolutions begin with small things. The Xinhai (Hsin-hai) Revolution, which led to the overthrow of China’s Qing Dynasty in 1911-1912 began with the inadvertent explosion of the package bomb in the Yangtze Valley City of Wuhan. The Arab Spring began with a small merchant immolating himself in the city of Tunis, and our own American Revolution, our protean national liberation struggle that has become the model for all which followed, began when a bunch of pissed off farmers at Lexington and Concord stood up to a landing party composed of Royal Marines. As John Parker, commanding the Minutemen on Lexington Green said, "Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here."
The residents of District 1, like the Minutemen on Lexington Green on April 19, 1775, three days after Easter, confronting a plan to impose upon them a councilmember from outside their own district, felt the moral indignation that is the heritage and birthright of every American whom any government proposes to tax without representation. The city Council’s butt dumb, apparently done deal to appoint Stan Henry to Greg Pettis’s seat would have left District 3 with double representation, while bereaving District 1 of any voice or representation whatsoever on the city Council for the next 20 months. The residents of District 1 weren’t having it.
As the situation developed, there emerged evidence to suggest that this was a plan that had been cooked up by former mayor Kathleen DeRosa and her political cronies. DeRosa, who for ten bitter winters served as the worst mayor in Cathedral City’s history, showing the same kind of Trumpian, Outer Boroughs, bridge-and-tunnel pettiness, vindictiveness, thin-skinnedness, and sheer nastiness as The Donald himself, mixed with an almost sexual desire for power and a political comeback, induced her cronies to start beating the drums for an appointment of Stan Henry to the Council. DeRosa, clever enough to know that her name in this community is still mud induced car salesman Andy Jessup to belabor the Council with a lengthy email extolling the ostensible virtues and qualifications of Mr. Henry.
The apparent target of one of these emails was Mayor pro tem John Aguilar, who first came to the Council as an appointed protégé of former Mayor Pettis. Mr. Aguilar apparently, either out of foolishness or deep fatigue (don’t you think he looks tired?) did not appreciate the dangerous position into which he was about to place himself, and emailed Mr. Henry with a series of missives which created an unmistakable and ultimately undeniable impression that Mr. Henry was a shoo-in, and that his appointment to the Council was an inevitability. What is more interesting is that Mr. Aguilar apparently sent these emails from his municipal email account, and that he attempted unsuccessfully to delete them after discovering that a Public Records Act request have been filed demanding their production.
That is in and of itself actionable criminal misconduct, and also demonstrates the existence of what in the criminal law is referred to as “a consciousness of guilt.” In plain, non-Vulcan English, that means that to all intents and purposes, Mr. Aguilar had not just dropped, but had hurled, a big malodorous turd into the municipal punch bowl. It was a foolish, ill-considered, and potentially criminal act. The email was itself a public record, and California law frowns with Wintry Disapproval on destruction or falsification of public records. Worse for Mr. Aguilar, it does not matter that the attempt is not successful. The crime is complete at the time the attempt is made. What Mr. Aguilar did was not just dumb, it was butt dumb.
By engaging in such conduct, Mr. Aguilar not only exposed himself to potential investigation by District Attorney Mike Hestrin, he may also have exposed himself to a further investigation by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and possibly by the Legislature itself. At all events, Mr. Aguilar has exposed himself as a political lightweight with no sense of optics and no understanding of the often exquisitely complex compliance mandates under which public officials are supposed to govern themselves. At all events, Mr. Aguilar fatally tainted the whole appointment process.
When the Council met last night to determine whether to appoint someone, this blogger and a number of other individuals within the community, including Cindy Uken of the Uken Report, and Casey Dolan of Cactus Hugs, as well as local activists Simeon Den, his husband Peter Palladino, Lynne O’Neill, Alan Carvalho and his husband former councilmember Shelley Kaplan, and a number of other morally indignant residents, had sounded the alarm.
The general gist of our “polemic” was that the Council needed to abandon any appointment and call a special election, limited to voters and candidates in District 1. We packed the Council chamber. After nearly 2 hours of public comment, which hit the Council like a cast iron skillet upside its collective head, and with the Council looking stunned that the apparent “shoo-in Stan” plan was threatening to create an enormous political crisis that might subject each of them to a recall, and might subject the city to lawsuits whose defense would exceed in cost the maximum amount a special election could be expected to cost, councilmember Ray Gregory, who had already seen the light, offered a motion to call a special election for District 1 limited to electors and candidates from that district.
After several agonizing seconds, during which it appeared that the motion might die for want of a second, Mr. Aguilar, finally understanding that Mr. Gregory had thrown him a lifeline, seconded the motion, though not before chastising supporters of an election as “thugs” who had presumably cooked up their objections to his plan to shoo-in Stan Henry solely to hurt his feelings.
Now from my own experience as a former councilmember of eight years, I know that as a general rule when one seconds a motion, unless one seconds it “for the purposes of discussion,” using those so-called magic words, one has in effect committed to vote in favor of the motion. Either Mr. Aguilar lacked the experience to understand that, or he was truly seconding the motion and conveying an unmistakable tell that he intended to vote in favor. In the end, the Council saved its own bacon and voted 3-1 in favor of the motion.
Councilmember Ernesto Gutierrez, a nasty, Trumpian little piece of work, a small fingered vulgarian, known for his bush league behavior, his fealty to The Donald, his dislike of the queer nation, and his conviction that women should not enjoy reproductive choice, voted against the motion. Already, community activist sources are telling me that they are preparing to lodge recall paperwork against Mr. Gutierrez at the earliest legal moment, i.e., on the 91st day after Mr. Gutierrez was sworn into office (see, e.g., Elections Code § 11007).
The apparent theory of any recall against Ernesto Gutierrez will be that his “no” vote on calling a special election is 1) a violation of his Article XX constitutional oath of office, 2) a violation of democratic norms, and 3) evidence of his possible participation in a violation of, or conspiracy to violate, the Ralph M. Brown Act, which denounces private meetings by representative bodies.
Mr. Gutierrez and the rest of the Council need to be reminded that we do not work for them, but that they work for us. Last night may have represented a distinct and palpable change in the political power dynamics of Cathedral City. Activated residents are no longer prepared to tolerate the presence of the Council that ignores the manifest and evident will of the electorate. It is reasonably safe to infer that the three councilmembers who voted in favor of the special election had had the fear of God put into them that they might be the targets of a recall had they gone ahead and appointed Stan Henry to the Council. Mr. Gutierrez apparently has yet to learn that lesson.
At all events, however, the shift in the power dynamic on the Council, and between the Council and the community hopefully betokens the emergence of a Council that will be more responsive to its respective constituencies and to the community as a whole. We have come a long way from the 10 sour, dour, gray, Leonid Brezhnev-like winters when the city languished under the lackluster leadership of bridge-and-tunnel Kathleen DeRosa. We cannot afford to go back. Our future is progressive, and we must make it clear that we expect, nay, demand progressive representation on the city Council. Moreover, we must make it very clear to our elected representatives that they will pay a heavy political price for crossing us again. We’re prepared to be “thuggish” and to put an awful lot of hurt on the delicate feelings of city councilmembers who ignore their constituents and attempt to inflict upon them the horrors of taxation without representation. The revolution continues.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq., is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He served for eight years as a member of the Cathedral City city Council. The views contained herein are his own, though he has probable cause to believe that they are shared by a substantial number of voters throughout Cathedral City.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
DUMB, AND BUTT DUMB: the Cathedral City city Council’s Rookie Mishandling of the Council Vacancy.
Summary: The Cathedral City city Council has mishandled from Alpha to Omega the filling of the vacancy created by the death of the late mayor Greg Pettis. From Councilman John Aguilar’s butt dumb emails to city Council applicant and former mayor Stan Henry, to the city’s shortsighted refusal to hold a special election, to the threats being murmured by city “cheerleaders,” and loyalists of former mayor Kathleen DeRosa, this process has bereaved the city Council of much of the trust it once enjoyed in the community. My own communications with Mayor Mark Carnevale, in which I urged upon him the abandonment of the appointment process and the calling of a special election have brought many angry people out of the woodwork, and I expect to be doxxed, threatened, and perhaps even referred to the State Bar for having had the temerity to exercise my First Amendment guaranteed right of petition.
--------------------------------------------------------------
My late grandfather, the one from El Paso, Texas, never suffered fools well. When someone did something spectacularly foolish, he would turn to me, and addressing the by my childhood, say “Curly; that fellow isn’t just dumb, he’s butt dumb.”
Butt dumb soon came to represent for me an expression of utter disdain, far beyond even wintry disapproval.
Right now, Cathedral city has availed itself of a process described by blogger Casey Dolan as a “dumb plan.” to try to fill the vacancy on the city Council created by the death of former mayor Greg Pettis.
Instead of honoring the manifest sense of the voters that the city should be divided into electoral districts for the city Council, and instead of letting a normal democratic process play out, the four surviving members of the Council decided to substitute their wisdom for that of the 10,000+ residents in District 1, where late mayor Pettis had resided.
The council’s butt dumb idea might have worked but for a number of serious flaws in the execution. The Council, guided by legal advice that ---in the view of this attorney of 30 years experience— comes close to constituting, if not constituting, gross legal malpractice, chose to open the process up to at-large applicants from the entire city, rather than doing the right thing and restricting it to applicants from District 1.
The Council then compounded its error by accepting a variety of solicitations concerning the identity of the prospective appointee. Former mayor Kathleen DeRosa, easily the worst mayor in the city’s history, and her claque of intransigent loyalists, including particularly auto dealer Andy Jessup, began banging the drums on behalf of former mayor Stan Henry.
At this point, the “draft Henry” campaign might have looked like nothing more than exercise in poor form and political grandstanding. That was before Councilman John Aguilar stuck his oar into the process, and in so doing, fatally tainted it. In a series of ill considered emails, Aguilar reached out to former mayor Henry with what appeared to be an implied representation that there existed three votes on the Council to appoint Henry to the vacant seat.
In doing so, Aguilar ---who owes his initial arrival on the Council to the partisanship and support of the late mayor, who secured his appointment to succeed Councilmember Sam Toles, who left the Council in the middle of his first term to take a more lucrative position in Manhattan— managed to cast significant doubt on his own integrity and to raise a very real possibility that there may have been criminal wrongdoing involved.
At all events, Councilman Aguilar has behaved in a manner entirely inconsistent with his obligations to the public, and, given that we now live in a #metoo-influenced political culture in which a single tweet or inconsiderate utterance constitutes grounds for removal, he should, once the special election is over, tender his resignation from the Council. The Council is not a place for politicians with actual or apparent ethical compromise.
After Aguilar’s emails became known in response to a Public Records Act request from a resident, the metaphorical defecation hit the ventilation. Full disclosure: I myself am one of the 14 applicants who put in an application to be appointed to the vacant seat. I am declaring, and will reiterate that declaration this evening, that I will not accept an appointment which may be proffered by the Council as a result of this tainted process, and I call on each of the thirteen other applicants to do the same thing.
In the meantime, blogger Cindy Uken, reporting in the Uken Report, reported on an email sent by “a resident” late yesterday evening to embattled Mayor Mark Carnevale. Immediately speculation began to swirl as the identity of the resident. KESQ/KPSP on air weather personality Patrick Evans, a resident of the same district as Mr. Henry, asked on Facebook, in a sort of nice-car-you’ve-got-there-it-would-be-terrible-if-anything-happened–to-it tone of vague and implicit menace, who the “resident” in question happened to be. The obvious impression of Mr. Evans’ request, and of the tone in which it was couched, suggested that it was Mr. Evans’ intent to “doxx” the resident in question, i.e., to make public disclosure of private information, after the manner of Fox News and the Bernard Sanders campaign during the 2016 Nevada state Democratic convention.
Let me preempt Mr. Evans, end the speculation, and put Mr. Evans’ employer on inquiry notice.
I am the resident who wrote the email to Mayor Carnevale.
The email, which, the truth be told, was a difficult document to write, was written from one friend to another, from the man who first encouraged Mayor Carnevale to seek elective office, and supported him in that initial bid.
The email was, in truth, somewhat remonstrative in its tone; as Mark’s friend, I felt I had earned the right to speak with absolute candor on an issue where the Council clearly needed to hear from someone with institutional memory who has served two terms on the city Council himself. It usually takes a friend to convey an unwelcome or inconvenient truth: “it takes an enemy to speak ill of you and a friend to tell you about it.”
In my email, the text of which is set forth below, I pulled no punches, spared no rods, and set forth for Mark what I thought the consequences of going forward with an appointment might be. I urged upon him the course of action I urged in a previous post in this blog on the necessity for a special election. Specifically, I urged him and his colleagues to abandon the appointment process, call a special election, and limit that special election to candidates and voters within District 1 itself. Anything else, I suggested, would be a slap in the face of the approximately 10,000 residents of District 1, and an equal insult to the democratic process.
The members of any body politic, from the Mayflower Compact of 1620 to the city of Cathedral City nearly 400 years later, must be able to have confidence in the integrity of the processes by which policy is developed and implemented, and by which representative vacancies are filled in our public institutions of self-government. Like the United States itself, Cathedral city enjoys a republican municipal form of government. Our elected representatives are temporary custodians of the res publica, the public thing that is the joint possession and inheritance of every single member of the body politic.
Unfortunately, Councilman Aguilar has forgotten the duties incident to his custodianship of our public thing. He seems to have forgotten the responsibilities laid upon him, indeed he voluntarily assumed, when he took the oath of office prescribed by Article XX of the Constitution of California, subscription to which is a nonnegotiable precondition for executing any public office in the state of California.
In my email, which I will stipulate was written with ill-disguised passion, I spoke with candor and unease about the situation in the city that, until now, I have been proud to call home. I have been implicitly threatened on Facebook by Patrick Evans, I have been called an asshole by Haddon Libby of the Chamber of Commerce, also on social media, and I expect further such threats or possible State Bar referrals following the publication of this post. It pains me to think that I may never again enjoy the good food and hospitality of Mayor Carnevale’s Italian restaurant, with which I became so well acquainted when my offices were located immediately above his kitchen, and where the aroma of calamari and other Italian goodies used to rise to torment the tastebuds of an overweight man starting about 3 o’clock in the afternoon.
Yet, when all is howled and done, as much as I might not want to, the recent testimony of disbarred attorney Michael Cohen before Congress today has reminded me that sometimes ethics must come before social considerations. I wrote my email to Mark Carnevale as an anguished friend, not as a political rival seeking to score points. The ball is in Mark’s court: either he and his colleagues can do the right thing, abandon this feckless and now fatally tainted appointment process, and call a special election limited to candidates and voters in District 1, or they can face the voter revolt and possible recalls I predicted in last night’s email. I hope, for the sake of all of us in this public thing we all call home, that Mayor Carnevale and his three colleagues will do what is right, even if it is not expedient.
The text of my email follows:
Mark, old friend, this is a hard email to write.
I think you’ve seen the coverage of the donnybrook that has blown up over the appointments process to fill Greg’s seat. It is a donnybrook for which you and your colleagues must take responsibility, or potentially face a revolt from the citizens of Cathedral City
Unfortunately, John Aguilar -who owes his initial incumbency to an appointment that you opposed- has really screwed things up. Frankly, old friend, I think John needs to leave the Council after a special election to fill the vacancy in District 1.
John has arrogantly and foolishly placed the entire Council in an untenable legal and political position.
Unfortunately also, Mark, I don’t think your remarks to KESQ today helped to clarify the situation.
The coverage shows you saying “If you're asking me is it unethical -- I wouldn't have done it I I don't think I was probably the proper thing to do but by no means that it show which way he's going," while you also steadfastly maintained that there was “no collusion.” Mark, your denial of any “collusion,” does not appear credible in light of what we know transpired between John and Stan. (emphasis added)
Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of understanding of basic political optics on the part of you and your colleagues.
When we originally spoke about this matter over luncheon, for which by the way Sonja and I are deeply appreciative, you expressed to me a desire to move this process along as quickly as possible. However, the method chosen by the Council has led the Council into a zone filled with landmines which John has apparently insisted on stamping on and dancing on, which has now blown up in your faces.
I am also concerned that what has happened constitutes probable cause for a possible criminal Brown Act investigation either by Dist. Atty. Mike Hestrin or by Attorney General Xavier Becerra. An investigation by either the district attorney or the Attorney General can be expected to expose the city to all of the embarrassment of a criminal probe, together with substantial unnecessary expenditure. Additionally, the city must also consider the possibility that the same Malibu law firm that threatened litigation to force us to adopt districts will seek to file a civil suit against the city sounding in fraud and in bad faith.
Moreover, the costs of defending either a Brown Act lawsuit, a lawsuit challenging Stan Henry’s right to serve, or a lawsuit from the Malibu attorneys will probably exceed, by orders of magnitude, the estimated cost of the special election. As a local taxpayer, I know what my preference would be under such circumstances, and I, together with many taxpayers, would object to the spending or our dollars on such litigation defense.
Also, if members of the Council had institutional memory that only Greg Pettis, Bud England (who is keeping a very low profile nowadays) and I have, you all might have realized that the city Council can function effectively for a number of months as a body of four. Permit me to recall to your remembrance how in 2004, when Kathleen DeRosa was elected mayor, her council seat became vacant. The Council had initially thought to fill the vacancy by appointment, but deadlocked 2-2. We therefore called a special election in 2005, wherein the late Chuck Vasquez was elected. Between December, 2004, and June, 2005, we met, and governed, as a Council of four. This precedent should have been before you, and it should have turned you from the error of wanting to fill the Council vacancy with foolish haste. This is what I tried to warn you about at our luncheon. Too soon old, too late smart.
Old friend, what the city Council seems to have forgotten is that there are people in this community who have served it before, who have institutional memory, who have never brought upon the city a whiff of scandal, but whose knowledge and institutional memory the city scorns. Your appointment of Sergio Espericueta as Mosquito and Vector Control District trustee was an insult. Gary Howell or I, as former trustees, would have made much better trustees then a Walmart mechanic with no knowledge or experience.
Unfortunately, old friend, you and your colleagues have created a perception that this city Council is nothing more than an old boys club seeking to perpetuate its membership by co-optation. That itself is an insult to democracy, and it is an insult to the voters in District 1, to whom you should be giving a preferential option.
I am disappointed, old friend, in John and in the rest of you as well. You are better than this; you should not have allowed this kind of nonsense to occur on your watch.
In all friendship, Mark, I think it is my duty to warn you that from what I have heard, there is substantial sentiment for a recall of the entire Council. In order to avoid the messiness of a potential recall effort against the four of you, you should immediately abandon the appointment process.
Instead, you should call a special election at the earliest possible time for the earliest possible date. That election should be limited to candidates from District 1. Further, John Aguilar needs to be referred to the District Attorney or the Attorney General for ethics violations.
I would prefer to see Cathedral city know continuity of government rather than experience the chaos of a recall of the entire Council. But given the apparent indifference of the Council to the voters of District 1, any course of action that does not include an immediate abandonment of the appointment process and the calling of the special election limited to voters and candidates in District 1 will probably result in exactly the chaos many of us fear.
Do the right thing, old friend. Abandon the appointment, call a special election, and secure John Aguilar’s resignation from the Council once the election is over.
Yours,
Paul S. Marchand, Esq.
--------------------------------------------------------------
My late grandfather, the one from El Paso, Texas, never suffered fools well. When someone did something spectacularly foolish, he would turn to me, and addressing the by my childhood, say “Curly; that fellow isn’t just dumb, he’s butt dumb.”
Butt dumb soon came to represent for me an expression of utter disdain, far beyond even wintry disapproval.
Right now, Cathedral city has availed itself of a process described by blogger Casey Dolan as a “dumb plan.” to try to fill the vacancy on the city Council created by the death of former mayor Greg Pettis.
Instead of honoring the manifest sense of the voters that the city should be divided into electoral districts for the city Council, and instead of letting a normal democratic process play out, the four surviving members of the Council decided to substitute their wisdom for that of the 10,000+ residents in District 1, where late mayor Pettis had resided.
The council’s butt dumb idea might have worked but for a number of serious flaws in the execution. The Council, guided by legal advice that ---in the view of this attorney of 30 years experience— comes close to constituting, if not constituting, gross legal malpractice, chose to open the process up to at-large applicants from the entire city, rather than doing the right thing and restricting it to applicants from District 1.
The Council then compounded its error by accepting a variety of solicitations concerning the identity of the prospective appointee. Former mayor Kathleen DeRosa, easily the worst mayor in the city’s history, and her claque of intransigent loyalists, including particularly auto dealer Andy Jessup, began banging the drums on behalf of former mayor Stan Henry.
At this point, the “draft Henry” campaign might have looked like nothing more than exercise in poor form and political grandstanding. That was before Councilman John Aguilar stuck his oar into the process, and in so doing, fatally tainted it. In a series of ill considered emails, Aguilar reached out to former mayor Henry with what appeared to be an implied representation that there existed three votes on the Council to appoint Henry to the vacant seat.
In doing so, Aguilar ---who owes his initial arrival on the Council to the partisanship and support of the late mayor, who secured his appointment to succeed Councilmember Sam Toles, who left the Council in the middle of his first term to take a more lucrative position in Manhattan— managed to cast significant doubt on his own integrity and to raise a very real possibility that there may have been criminal wrongdoing involved.
At all events, Councilman Aguilar has behaved in a manner entirely inconsistent with his obligations to the public, and, given that we now live in a #metoo-influenced political culture in which a single tweet or inconsiderate utterance constitutes grounds for removal, he should, once the special election is over, tender his resignation from the Council. The Council is not a place for politicians with actual or apparent ethical compromise.
After Aguilar’s emails became known in response to a Public Records Act request from a resident, the metaphorical defecation hit the ventilation. Full disclosure: I myself am one of the 14 applicants who put in an application to be appointed to the vacant seat. I am declaring, and will reiterate that declaration this evening, that I will not accept an appointment which may be proffered by the Council as a result of this tainted process, and I call on each of the thirteen other applicants to do the same thing.
In the meantime, blogger Cindy Uken, reporting in the Uken Report, reported on an email sent by “a resident” late yesterday evening to embattled Mayor Mark Carnevale. Immediately speculation began to swirl as the identity of the resident. KESQ/KPSP on air weather personality Patrick Evans, a resident of the same district as Mr. Henry, asked on Facebook, in a sort of nice-car-you’ve-got-there-it-would-be-terrible-if-anything-happened–to-it tone of vague and implicit menace, who the “resident” in question happened to be. The obvious impression of Mr. Evans’ request, and of the tone in which it was couched, suggested that it was Mr. Evans’ intent to “doxx” the resident in question, i.e., to make public disclosure of private information, after the manner of Fox News and the Bernard Sanders campaign during the 2016 Nevada state Democratic convention.
Let me preempt Mr. Evans, end the speculation, and put Mr. Evans’ employer on inquiry notice.
I am the resident who wrote the email to Mayor Carnevale.
The email, which, the truth be told, was a difficult document to write, was written from one friend to another, from the man who first encouraged Mayor Carnevale to seek elective office, and supported him in that initial bid.
The email was, in truth, somewhat remonstrative in its tone; as Mark’s friend, I felt I had earned the right to speak with absolute candor on an issue where the Council clearly needed to hear from someone with institutional memory who has served two terms on the city Council himself. It usually takes a friend to convey an unwelcome or inconvenient truth: “it takes an enemy to speak ill of you and a friend to tell you about it.”
In my email, the text of which is set forth below, I pulled no punches, spared no rods, and set forth for Mark what I thought the consequences of going forward with an appointment might be. I urged upon him the course of action I urged in a previous post in this blog on the necessity for a special election. Specifically, I urged him and his colleagues to abandon the appointment process, call a special election, and limit that special election to candidates and voters within District 1 itself. Anything else, I suggested, would be a slap in the face of the approximately 10,000 residents of District 1, and an equal insult to the democratic process.
The members of any body politic, from the Mayflower Compact of 1620 to the city of Cathedral City nearly 400 years later, must be able to have confidence in the integrity of the processes by which policy is developed and implemented, and by which representative vacancies are filled in our public institutions of self-government. Like the United States itself, Cathedral city enjoys a republican municipal form of government. Our elected representatives are temporary custodians of the res publica, the public thing that is the joint possession and inheritance of every single member of the body politic.
Unfortunately, Councilman Aguilar has forgotten the duties incident to his custodianship of our public thing. He seems to have forgotten the responsibilities laid upon him, indeed he voluntarily assumed, when he took the oath of office prescribed by Article XX of the Constitution of California, subscription to which is a nonnegotiable precondition for executing any public office in the state of California.
In my email, which I will stipulate was written with ill-disguised passion, I spoke with candor and unease about the situation in the city that, until now, I have been proud to call home. I have been implicitly threatened on Facebook by Patrick Evans, I have been called an asshole by Haddon Libby of the Chamber of Commerce, also on social media, and I expect further such threats or possible State Bar referrals following the publication of this post. It pains me to think that I may never again enjoy the good food and hospitality of Mayor Carnevale’s Italian restaurant, with which I became so well acquainted when my offices were located immediately above his kitchen, and where the aroma of calamari and other Italian goodies used to rise to torment the tastebuds of an overweight man starting about 3 o’clock in the afternoon.
Yet, when all is howled and done, as much as I might not want to, the recent testimony of disbarred attorney Michael Cohen before Congress today has reminded me that sometimes ethics must come before social considerations. I wrote my email to Mark Carnevale as an anguished friend, not as a political rival seeking to score points. The ball is in Mark’s court: either he and his colleagues can do the right thing, abandon this feckless and now fatally tainted appointment process, and call a special election limited to candidates and voters in District 1, or they can face the voter revolt and possible recalls I predicted in last night’s email. I hope, for the sake of all of us in this public thing we all call home, that Mayor Carnevale and his three colleagues will do what is right, even if it is not expedient.
The text of my email follows:
Mark, old friend, this is a hard email to write.
I think you’ve seen the coverage of the donnybrook that has blown up over the appointments process to fill Greg’s seat. It is a donnybrook for which you and your colleagues must take responsibility, or potentially face a revolt from the citizens of Cathedral City
Unfortunately, John Aguilar -who owes his initial incumbency to an appointment that you opposed- has really screwed things up. Frankly, old friend, I think John needs to leave the Council after a special election to fill the vacancy in District 1.
John has arrogantly and foolishly placed the entire Council in an untenable legal and political position.
Unfortunately also, Mark, I don’t think your remarks to KESQ today helped to clarify the situation.
The coverage shows you saying “If you're asking me is it unethical -- I wouldn't have done it I I don't think I was probably the proper thing to do but by no means that it show which way he's going," while you also steadfastly maintained that there was “no collusion.” Mark, your denial of any “collusion,” does not appear credible in light of what we know transpired between John and Stan. (emphasis added)
Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of understanding of basic political optics on the part of you and your colleagues.
When we originally spoke about this matter over luncheon, for which by the way Sonja and I are deeply appreciative, you expressed to me a desire to move this process along as quickly as possible. However, the method chosen by the Council has led the Council into a zone filled with landmines which John has apparently insisted on stamping on and dancing on, which has now blown up in your faces.
I am also concerned that what has happened constitutes probable cause for a possible criminal Brown Act investigation either by Dist. Atty. Mike Hestrin or by Attorney General Xavier Becerra. An investigation by either the district attorney or the Attorney General can be expected to expose the city to all of the embarrassment of a criminal probe, together with substantial unnecessary expenditure. Additionally, the city must also consider the possibility that the same Malibu law firm that threatened litigation to force us to adopt districts will seek to file a civil suit against the city sounding in fraud and in bad faith.
Moreover, the costs of defending either a Brown Act lawsuit, a lawsuit challenging Stan Henry’s right to serve, or a lawsuit from the Malibu attorneys will probably exceed, by orders of magnitude, the estimated cost of the special election. As a local taxpayer, I know what my preference would be under such circumstances, and I, together with many taxpayers, would object to the spending or our dollars on such litigation defense.
Also, if members of the Council had institutional memory that only Greg Pettis, Bud England (who is keeping a very low profile nowadays) and I have, you all might have realized that the city Council can function effectively for a number of months as a body of four. Permit me to recall to your remembrance how in 2004, when Kathleen DeRosa was elected mayor, her council seat became vacant. The Council had initially thought to fill the vacancy by appointment, but deadlocked 2-2. We therefore called a special election in 2005, wherein the late Chuck Vasquez was elected. Between December, 2004, and June, 2005, we met, and governed, as a Council of four. This precedent should have been before you, and it should have turned you from the error of wanting to fill the Council vacancy with foolish haste. This is what I tried to warn you about at our luncheon. Too soon old, too late smart.
Old friend, what the city Council seems to have forgotten is that there are people in this community who have served it before, who have institutional memory, who have never brought upon the city a whiff of scandal, but whose knowledge and institutional memory the city scorns. Your appointment of Sergio Espericueta as Mosquito and Vector Control District trustee was an insult. Gary Howell or I, as former trustees, would have made much better trustees then a Walmart mechanic with no knowledge or experience.
Unfortunately, old friend, you and your colleagues have created a perception that this city Council is nothing more than an old boys club seeking to perpetuate its membership by co-optation. That itself is an insult to democracy, and it is an insult to the voters in District 1, to whom you should be giving a preferential option.
I am disappointed, old friend, in John and in the rest of you as well. You are better than this; you should not have allowed this kind of nonsense to occur on your watch.
In all friendship, Mark, I think it is my duty to warn you that from what I have heard, there is substantial sentiment for a recall of the entire Council. In order to avoid the messiness of a potential recall effort against the four of you, you should immediately abandon the appointment process.
Instead, you should call a special election at the earliest possible time for the earliest possible date. That election should be limited to candidates from District 1. Further, John Aguilar needs to be referred to the District Attorney or the Attorney General for ethics violations.
I would prefer to see Cathedral city know continuity of government rather than experience the chaos of a recall of the entire Council. But given the apparent indifference of the Council to the voters of District 1, any course of action that does not include an immediate abandonment of the appointment process and the calling of the special election limited to voters and candidates in District 1 will probably result in exactly the chaos many of us fear.
Do the right thing, old friend. Abandon the appointment, call a special election, and secure John Aguilar’s resignation from the Council once the election is over.
Yours,
Paul S. Marchand, Esq.
Tuesday, February 5, 2019
How Ralph Northam Got His Tit in the Ringer: Another Example of Democrats Eating Their Own
Summary: Ralph Northam has managed to get his tit into the ringer. The 73rd governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia has come under heavy attack for a picture in his 1984 medical school yearbook. Though the story of the photograph was published originally by a Republican website with ties to the right wing Internet, Democrats have practically wet themselves in their haste to virtue-signal and to demand Gov. Northam’s resignation.
The cowardice of the Democrats, though contemptible, is not surprising. Democrats have a tendency to fall into a crouch and wet themselves, drifting away on waves of their own fear pee every time a Republican says “boo.” By seeking to impose “zero-tolerance” policies on a remote, if tacky, conduct, and by seeking to “distinguish themselves the Republicans” on these kinds of issues, Democrats are doing nothing more than seeking “moral high ground” on which to engage in their customary enterprise of abject and unconditional surrender.It is time for Democrats to stop behaving so spinelessly in the face of obvious Republican dirty tricks.
-------------------------------
The cowardice of the Democratic Party has been on full display again in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Democrats, mistaking cowardice for “moral high ground,” and conflating our cowardice with self-righteous, virtue-signaling “zero tolerance” attitudes that contain zero common sense, have been all over Gov. Ralph Northam, demanding that he resign because of a racially insensitive posting in his 1984 medical school yearbook.
Oh, please! Let’s consider first of all that this is an obvious hit piece orchestrated by a right wing website which is also trying to allege that the Commonwealth’s lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, is somehow guilty of a sexual assault more than a decade ago.
Democrats need to strap on their balls and realize that this is a Republican attempt, or should we say a Republican dirty trick in the style of Roger Stone, to decapitate the Democratic leadership of the Commonwealth.
The blunt fact is that while Northam’s yearbook page from 1984 is, by the standards of 2019, “problematic,” it was not so when it was created in 1984. And it is by the standards of 1984 that we must judge Gov. Northam’s tacky picture, which was apparently not unique in the yearbook of his medical school.
The criticism of Gov. Northam seems to be coming from a lot of people outside the American South, or from people who have no experience with the often unfathomable social mores that obtained in the American South in the early years of the 1980s. Though we must acknowledge that standards have changed in the last 35 years, the fact still remains that those of us who did our undergraduate or graduate work in the South in the 1980s stand, frankly, in a far better position to evaluate in the context of its time Ralph Northam’s vulgar, but not resignation-worthy, yearbook page.
For those of us who were in college in the American South in 1984, facts on the ground were far different than they are today. Let us shame the devil, tell the truth, and acknowledge that in 1984, white privilege was so endemic and pervasive in higher education in the South that capers like those of Ralph Northam --and others-- in their medical school yearbook were simply the kind of thing that went without discussion.
And in such a climate of pervasive, endemic white privilege pulling a caper like dressing up in blackface or wearing a faux Ku Klux Klan costume (which actually resembles the costumes worn by penitents in Seville during Holy Week far more than any KKK regalia) was simply not considered morally blameworthy. Among the Tidewater and Belle Meade ladies I knew when I was in college, such a display, like the Kappa Alpha Order's "Old South Week," with callow frat boy undergraduates gallivanting around in Confederate uniforms, might have been considered borderline vulgar, or the sort of gaffes to be expected from white southern males, or "boys," of a certain age.
Beyond that, however, it would not have been considered anything worthy of clutching pearls, having vapors, or demanding resignations over. At most, it might have called forth a private reproval and the deployment of that dreaded Southern adjective of disapprobation: "tacky," or a Stare of Wintry Disapproval from the formidable Tidewater matriarchs, both Black and White, who still set many of the standards by which Virginia society evaluates appropriate behavior.
Indeed, the Democratic vapors, pearl clutching, and theatrical demands for Northam’s resignation are exactly the kind of thing the Republicans expect and plan for. Democrats have had a history for too long now of trying to “stake out moral high ground,” presumably by accepting uncomplainingly and uncritically every Republican double standard which the Republican Party, those masters of transactional politics, seeks to set.
Let’s be real, if this kind of caper had come from a Republican governor, the right wing website which rushed the current Northam narrative into circulation would have killed the story. If the story had come out, no Republican politician would have been caught dead calling for such a Republican governor’s resignation. Republicans prefer to leave it to the Democrats to eat their own, while rallying behind the most morally compromised, and potentially treasonable Republican president in the history of the Republic. Thus, when vocal Bernard Sanders-supporter Michael Moore appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and theatrically demanded that Northam resign within the hour, Moore was falling into every Republican trap known to political operatives in this country. (It should be recalled that the Vermont Senator himself, also morally compromised, by the way, was a vocal supporter of Tom Periello, Northam's opponent in the Virginia gubernatorial primary.)
Democrats tend to be transformational, which unfortunately means the Democrats tend to stake out moral high ground on which to surrender unconditionally to thugs and dirty tricksters. The Republican leaning website that broke the story, Big League Politics, is run by a 29-year-old activist/dirty trickster with a long history of work for lashups like Breitbart, InfoWars, and The Daily Caller, all of which have a reputation for Republican dirty tricks.
Unfortunately, the so-called “Zero Tolerance Policy” the Democratic Party has apparently adopted, means that just about every Democrat alive is vulnerable to such Republican dirty tricks. Democrats, in their haste to seem “virtuous,” have managed to ignore one of the most important principles of our constitutional liberty and rule of law: no ex post facto laws or policies are permissible in our constitutional politics.
More simply put, the constitutional prohibition on ex post facto laws means that one cannot be punished at a later date for an act not criminal when committed. By insisting on a “zero tolerance” policy for indiscretions that were, quite frankly, not considered blameworthy at the time they were engaged in, the Democratic Party has left its commitment to the rule of law very much open to doubt. It is simply not defensible in our politics to engage in ex post facto or retroactive blame casting.
Let us take, hypothetically, the case of an out gay Democratic activist in California who attended a southern institution of higher learning in the 1980s, when sexual intimacy between two males was stigmatized in most southern states as “the abominable and detestable crime against nature,” with a mandatory 10 year to life prison sentence of incarceration in the state penitentiary. Would the Democratic Party choose to range itself on the side of right-wing homophobes by invoking its so-called “zero tolerance” policy against such an activist?
The Democratic Party has become a prisoner of a profoundly neo-Victorian, neo-Puritan, censorious approach to its political activists which will have the effect of driving good, but imperfect, people out of the political world altogether. As much as one should prefer an imperfect friend to a deadly enemy, one should also accept that our chiefs are human beings with a whole range of human imperfections.
We should really make an effort to be more like the French, who have an entirely civilized attitude toward personal indiscretions. When French Pres. François Mitterrand, who had had children by both his wife and his mistress, died, his funeral was attended by both his families. His official wife and children stood on one side of the grave; the maîtresse-en-titre and her children stood on the other. There was no moral judgment from the French press or from most mainstream French politicians.
Unfortunately, America, and particularly the Democratic Party, remains tainted by her original sins of Calvinism, Puritanism, and Protestant Nonconformity. We Democrats demand a kind of perfection from our politicians which we should think twice about expecting. Ralph Northam has feet of clay. Ralph Northam came of age at a time and in a place where tacky capers based on white privilege were routine, and where his caper was not unique. We should be loath to assign the counsels of perfection of 2019 to the feckless, but at the time unexceptionable acts of a young man of 24 which occurred a generation and a half ago.
If the Democrats live down to their traditional cowardly stereotype and hound Ralph Northam from the governorship of the Commonwealth of Virginia on the basis of a story published by a Republican-leaning website run by an habitué of the seemiest underside of the Republican Internet, and if the Democrats do the predictable next thing of hounding Lieutenant Governor Julian Fairfax out of office on the strength of an unproven sexual assault republished by the same Republican website as well, they will have only themselves to blame for losing the Commonwealth for a generation.
Democrats need to be transactional and stop insisting on moralizing transformationalism. The hypocrisy needs to end. The surrender to Republican efforts to hold Democrats to standards to which the Republicans will never hold themselves must end. Democrats need to learn how to fight back. Democrats need to take the counsel of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: "they pull a knife, [we] pull a gun; they send one of [ours] to the hospital, [we] send one of theirs the morgue!"
It’s time for Democrats to get over their spinelessness in the face of dirty tricks and rally behind Ralph Northam.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in Rancho Mirage. He has been an official of the California Democratic Party and served eight years as a city councilmember in Cathedral City. He is also a 1984 graduate of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee. He has a personal recollection of the pervasive and endemic white privilege present at the time in institutions of higher education in the American South. He and Gov. Northam are fairly close contemporaries.
The cowardice of the Democrats, though contemptible, is not surprising. Democrats have a tendency to fall into a crouch and wet themselves, drifting away on waves of their own fear pee every time a Republican says “boo.” By seeking to impose “zero-tolerance” policies on a remote, if tacky, conduct, and by seeking to “distinguish themselves the Republicans” on these kinds of issues, Democrats are doing nothing more than seeking “moral high ground” on which to engage in their customary enterprise of abject and unconditional surrender.It is time for Democrats to stop behaving so spinelessly in the face of obvious Republican dirty tricks.
-------------------------------
The cowardice of the Democratic Party has been on full display again in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Democrats, mistaking cowardice for “moral high ground,” and conflating our cowardice with self-righteous, virtue-signaling “zero tolerance” attitudes that contain zero common sense, have been all over Gov. Ralph Northam, demanding that he resign because of a racially insensitive posting in his 1984 medical school yearbook.
Oh, please! Let’s consider first of all that this is an obvious hit piece orchestrated by a right wing website which is also trying to allege that the Commonwealth’s lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, is somehow guilty of a sexual assault more than a decade ago.
Democrats need to strap on their balls and realize that this is a Republican attempt, or should we say a Republican dirty trick in the style of Roger Stone, to decapitate the Democratic leadership of the Commonwealth.
The blunt fact is that while Northam’s yearbook page from 1984 is, by the standards of 2019, “problematic,” it was not so when it was created in 1984. And it is by the standards of 1984 that we must judge Gov. Northam’s tacky picture, which was apparently not unique in the yearbook of his medical school.
The criticism of Gov. Northam seems to be coming from a lot of people outside the American South, or from people who have no experience with the often unfathomable social mores that obtained in the American South in the early years of the 1980s. Though we must acknowledge that standards have changed in the last 35 years, the fact still remains that those of us who did our undergraduate or graduate work in the South in the 1980s stand, frankly, in a far better position to evaluate in the context of its time Ralph Northam’s vulgar, but not resignation-worthy, yearbook page.
For those of us who were in college in the American South in 1984, facts on the ground were far different than they are today. Let us shame the devil, tell the truth, and acknowledge that in 1984, white privilege was so endemic and pervasive in higher education in the South that capers like those of Ralph Northam --and others-- in their medical school yearbook were simply the kind of thing that went without discussion.
And in such a climate of pervasive, endemic white privilege pulling a caper like dressing up in blackface or wearing a faux Ku Klux Klan costume (which actually resembles the costumes worn by penitents in Seville during Holy Week far more than any KKK regalia) was simply not considered morally blameworthy. Among the Tidewater and Belle Meade ladies I knew when I was in college, such a display, like the Kappa Alpha Order's "Old South Week," with callow frat boy undergraduates gallivanting around in Confederate uniforms, might have been considered borderline vulgar, or the sort of gaffes to be expected from white southern males, or "boys," of a certain age.
Beyond that, however, it would not have been considered anything worthy of clutching pearls, having vapors, or demanding resignations over. At most, it might have called forth a private reproval and the deployment of that dreaded Southern adjective of disapprobation: "tacky," or a Stare of Wintry Disapproval from the formidable Tidewater matriarchs, both Black and White, who still set many of the standards by which Virginia society evaluates appropriate behavior.
Indeed, the Democratic vapors, pearl clutching, and theatrical demands for Northam’s resignation are exactly the kind of thing the Republicans expect and plan for. Democrats have had a history for too long now of trying to “stake out moral high ground,” presumably by accepting uncomplainingly and uncritically every Republican double standard which the Republican Party, those masters of transactional politics, seeks to set.
Let’s be real, if this kind of caper had come from a Republican governor, the right wing website which rushed the current Northam narrative into circulation would have killed the story. If the story had come out, no Republican politician would have been caught dead calling for such a Republican governor’s resignation. Republicans prefer to leave it to the Democrats to eat their own, while rallying behind the most morally compromised, and potentially treasonable Republican president in the history of the Republic. Thus, when vocal Bernard Sanders-supporter Michael Moore appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and theatrically demanded that Northam resign within the hour, Moore was falling into every Republican trap known to political operatives in this country. (It should be recalled that the Vermont Senator himself, also morally compromised, by the way, was a vocal supporter of Tom Periello, Northam's opponent in the Virginia gubernatorial primary.)
Democrats tend to be transformational, which unfortunately means the Democrats tend to stake out moral high ground on which to surrender unconditionally to thugs and dirty tricksters. The Republican leaning website that broke the story, Big League Politics, is run by a 29-year-old activist/dirty trickster with a long history of work for lashups like Breitbart, InfoWars, and The Daily Caller, all of which have a reputation for Republican dirty tricks.
Unfortunately, the so-called “Zero Tolerance Policy” the Democratic Party has apparently adopted, means that just about every Democrat alive is vulnerable to such Republican dirty tricks. Democrats, in their haste to seem “virtuous,” have managed to ignore one of the most important principles of our constitutional liberty and rule of law: no ex post facto laws or policies are permissible in our constitutional politics.
More simply put, the constitutional prohibition on ex post facto laws means that one cannot be punished at a later date for an act not criminal when committed. By insisting on a “zero tolerance” policy for indiscretions that were, quite frankly, not considered blameworthy at the time they were engaged in, the Democratic Party has left its commitment to the rule of law very much open to doubt. It is simply not defensible in our politics to engage in ex post facto or retroactive blame casting.
Let us take, hypothetically, the case of an out gay Democratic activist in California who attended a southern institution of higher learning in the 1980s, when sexual intimacy between two males was stigmatized in most southern states as “the abominable and detestable crime against nature,” with a mandatory 10 year to life prison sentence of incarceration in the state penitentiary. Would the Democratic Party choose to range itself on the side of right-wing homophobes by invoking its so-called “zero tolerance” policy against such an activist?
The Democratic Party has become a prisoner of a profoundly neo-Victorian, neo-Puritan, censorious approach to its political activists which will have the effect of driving good, but imperfect, people out of the political world altogether. As much as one should prefer an imperfect friend to a deadly enemy, one should also accept that our chiefs are human beings with a whole range of human imperfections.
We should really make an effort to be more like the French, who have an entirely civilized attitude toward personal indiscretions. When French Pres. François Mitterrand, who had had children by both his wife and his mistress, died, his funeral was attended by both his families. His official wife and children stood on one side of the grave; the maîtresse-en-titre and her children stood on the other. There was no moral judgment from the French press or from most mainstream French politicians.
Unfortunately, America, and particularly the Democratic Party, remains tainted by her original sins of Calvinism, Puritanism, and Protestant Nonconformity. We Democrats demand a kind of perfection from our politicians which we should think twice about expecting. Ralph Northam has feet of clay. Ralph Northam came of age at a time and in a place where tacky capers based on white privilege were routine, and where his caper was not unique. We should be loath to assign the counsels of perfection of 2019 to the feckless, but at the time unexceptionable acts of a young man of 24 which occurred a generation and a half ago.
If the Democrats live down to their traditional cowardly stereotype and hound Ralph Northam from the governorship of the Commonwealth of Virginia on the basis of a story published by a Republican-leaning website run by an habitué of the seemiest underside of the Republican Internet, and if the Democrats do the predictable next thing of hounding Lieutenant Governor Julian Fairfax out of office on the strength of an unproven sexual assault republished by the same Republican website as well, they will have only themselves to blame for losing the Commonwealth for a generation.
Democrats need to be transactional and stop insisting on moralizing transformationalism. The hypocrisy needs to end. The surrender to Republican efforts to hold Democrats to standards to which the Republicans will never hold themselves must end. Democrats need to learn how to fight back. Democrats need to take the counsel of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: "they pull a knife, [we] pull a gun; they send one of [ours] to the hospital, [we] send one of theirs the morgue!"
It’s time for Democrats to get over their spinelessness in the face of dirty tricks and rally behind Ralph Northam.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in Rancho Mirage. He has been an official of the California Democratic Party and served eight years as a city councilmember in Cathedral City. He is also a 1984 graduate of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee. He has a personal recollection of the pervasive and endemic white privilege present at the time in institutions of higher education in the American South. He and Gov. Northam are fairly close contemporaries.
Thursday, January 31, 2019
TIME FOR A SPECIAL ELECTION IN CATHEDRAL CITY.
Summary: The passing of Cathedral City Mayor Greg Pettis, a little more than a month into his mayoralty, has provoked a bit of a political donnybrook in the community. Pettis, the first of Cathedral City’s rotating mayors was also the Council member representing District 1 under the newly adopted district map by which councilmembers are now elected in Cathedral City.
The Council seems inclined to want to adopt the not-entirely-Democratic expedient of appointing a successor to fill out the remainder of the late Mayor’s turn. Already two candidates are being heavily urged on the Council by various not-disinterested political players. Unsuccessful district 4 Council candidate and former planning Commissioner John Rivera is urging the appointment of former councilmember Shelley Kaplan. Former mayor Kathleen DeRosa is throwing her support behind former mayor and district 3 resident Stan Henry. Both sides need to knock it off. The Council should not presume to substitute the wisdom of five for the wisdom of thousands. The only honest resolution to this issue is a special election.
-----------------------------------------
When the late Mayor Greg Pettis took office on December 10, 2018, his ascension to the mayoralty was greeted with more hope, and more general goodwill then the ascension of almost any mayor of Cathedral city since incorporation. His death, attributed to complications from bariatric weight loss surgery barely a month into his term, seemed like a vitiation of that promise. It certainly bears a suspicious resemblance to the death of Soviet War Commissar Mikhail Frunze following routine ulcer surgery on October 31, 1925. It is widely believed in both Russia and the West that the Frunze surgery was intentionally botched on orders from Soviet dictator Iosif Stalin.
Whether Mayor Pettis’s passing was the result of explainable complications from his gastric bypass surgery or a Stalin-esque hit, the result has been to leave the Council seat representing District 1 vacant.
The Council, apparently uncomfortable with the idea of letting the people of District 1 elect their representative, appears intent on appointing someone to fill out the unexpired term created by the vacancy. Already, two contenders have emerged. One is former councilmember Shelley Kaplan, who does happen to live in the district, but who was defeated in his unsuccessful bid for election to the governing board of the Desert Healthcare District in November of last year. It is worth questioning whether it would be altogether wise to treat a seat on the Cathedral City City Council as a “consolation prize” for an unsuccessful candidate for another office. We may infer from Mr. Kaplan’s unsuccessful bid for a seat on the Desert Healthcare District board that he feels that his talents could be better employed elsewhere. Certainly his remarks at the swearing-in of the new Council on December 10, 2018, suggest that he is no longer interested in serving on the Council.
The other candidate being put forward to fill Mayor Pettis’s unexpired term is former Mayor Stan Henry. And here the situation becomes even more problematic. Not only is Henry’s candidacy tainted, fatally in my view, by the active support of former mayor Kathleen DeRosa, but Mr. Henry himself does not reside in District 1. From a legal standpoint Henry’s candidacy may be barred for a number of reasons. The most obvious is his non-residency in the district he would be representing. California law requires councilmembers in a districted city be resident in the district they represent. Former Los Angeles councilmembers Roderick Wright and Richard Alarcon both found themselves in serious trouble because they were alleged to be nonresidents of their constituencies.
In addition, given that Cathedral city adopted Council districts under threat of litigation, appointing a Disctrict 3 resident, giving District 3 two representatives on the Council while depriving District 1 of any representation whatsoever would create a situation not merely of “taxation without representation,” but it would also open up the city to litigation under the California Voting Rights Act and possibly under Baker v. Carr (1962) 369 U.S. 186, in which the Supreme Court, in the first great “one person, one vote" decision of our recent history, struck down unequal representation and unequal constituencies. Though Henry’s candidacy is supported -and tainted- by former mayor Kathleen DeRosa, her support of his candidacy demonstrates that Ms. Rosa has no understanding of either the requirements of the California Voting Rights Act, or of the law is the Supreme Court laid it down in Baker. Unfortunately, we must conclude that DeRosa’s support of Stan Henry’s candidacy is a crassly cynical political ploy, being undertaken for partisan purposes, presumably to undercut current Cathedral City Mayor Mark Carnevale.
Consequently, with a presumptively uninterested candidate and with a presumptively unqualified candidate, the city Council should not pursue the undemocratic expedient of an appointment. It should not presume to substitute the wisdom of five for the wisdom of thousands. Appointments might have been acceptable when the Council was elected at large. No more. In order to comply with the spirit and the letter of the California Voting Rights Act and the Supreme Court’s clear instruction in Baker, the Council should call a special election as swiftly as is legally permissible.
If it does not, I expect that at least one resident of District 1 will put him- or herself forward as a plaintiff in a litigation to force a special election. That case may very well prove meritorious and expensive for the city and its ratepayers. The only legally correct course of action is to call a special election to fill the seat vacated by the untimely passing of the late Mayor Greg Pettis.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand lives in Cathedral city and practices law in Rancho Mirage. He spent two terms as a member of the city Council when it was elected at large. He does not live in district 1 or in district 3, so he has no personal dog in this hunt. The views contained herein are his own.
The Council seems inclined to want to adopt the not-entirely-Democratic expedient of appointing a successor to fill out the remainder of the late Mayor’s turn. Already two candidates are being heavily urged on the Council by various not-disinterested political players. Unsuccessful district 4 Council candidate and former planning Commissioner John Rivera is urging the appointment of former councilmember Shelley Kaplan. Former mayor Kathleen DeRosa is throwing her support behind former mayor and district 3 resident Stan Henry. Both sides need to knock it off. The Council should not presume to substitute the wisdom of five for the wisdom of thousands. The only honest resolution to this issue is a special election.
-----------------------------------------
When the late Mayor Greg Pettis took office on December 10, 2018, his ascension to the mayoralty was greeted with more hope, and more general goodwill then the ascension of almost any mayor of Cathedral city since incorporation. His death, attributed to complications from bariatric weight loss surgery barely a month into his term, seemed like a vitiation of that promise. It certainly bears a suspicious resemblance to the death of Soviet War Commissar Mikhail Frunze following routine ulcer surgery on October 31, 1925. It is widely believed in both Russia and the West that the Frunze surgery was intentionally botched on orders from Soviet dictator Iosif Stalin.
Whether Mayor Pettis’s passing was the result of explainable complications from his gastric bypass surgery or a Stalin-esque hit, the result has been to leave the Council seat representing District 1 vacant.
The Council, apparently uncomfortable with the idea of letting the people of District 1 elect their representative, appears intent on appointing someone to fill out the unexpired term created by the vacancy. Already, two contenders have emerged. One is former councilmember Shelley Kaplan, who does happen to live in the district, but who was defeated in his unsuccessful bid for election to the governing board of the Desert Healthcare District in November of last year. It is worth questioning whether it would be altogether wise to treat a seat on the Cathedral City City Council as a “consolation prize” for an unsuccessful candidate for another office. We may infer from Mr. Kaplan’s unsuccessful bid for a seat on the Desert Healthcare District board that he feels that his talents could be better employed elsewhere. Certainly his remarks at the swearing-in of the new Council on December 10, 2018, suggest that he is no longer interested in serving on the Council.
The other candidate being put forward to fill Mayor Pettis’s unexpired term is former Mayor Stan Henry. And here the situation becomes even more problematic. Not only is Henry’s candidacy tainted, fatally in my view, by the active support of former mayor Kathleen DeRosa, but Mr. Henry himself does not reside in District 1. From a legal standpoint Henry’s candidacy may be barred for a number of reasons. The most obvious is his non-residency in the district he would be representing. California law requires councilmembers in a districted city be resident in the district they represent. Former Los Angeles councilmembers Roderick Wright and Richard Alarcon both found themselves in serious trouble because they were alleged to be nonresidents of their constituencies.
In addition, given that Cathedral city adopted Council districts under threat of litigation, appointing a Disctrict 3 resident, giving District 3 two representatives on the Council while depriving District 1 of any representation whatsoever would create a situation not merely of “taxation without representation,” but it would also open up the city to litigation under the California Voting Rights Act and possibly under Baker v. Carr (1962) 369 U.S. 186, in which the Supreme Court, in the first great “one person, one vote" decision of our recent history, struck down unequal representation and unequal constituencies. Though Henry’s candidacy is supported -and tainted- by former mayor Kathleen DeRosa, her support of his candidacy demonstrates that Ms. Rosa has no understanding of either the requirements of the California Voting Rights Act, or of the law is the Supreme Court laid it down in Baker. Unfortunately, we must conclude that DeRosa’s support of Stan Henry’s candidacy is a crassly cynical political ploy, being undertaken for partisan purposes, presumably to undercut current Cathedral City Mayor Mark Carnevale.
Consequently, with a presumptively uninterested candidate and with a presumptively unqualified candidate, the city Council should not pursue the undemocratic expedient of an appointment. It should not presume to substitute the wisdom of five for the wisdom of thousands. Appointments might have been acceptable when the Council was elected at large. No more. In order to comply with the spirit and the letter of the California Voting Rights Act and the Supreme Court’s clear instruction in Baker, the Council should call a special election as swiftly as is legally permissible.
If it does not, I expect that at least one resident of District 1 will put him- or herself forward as a plaintiff in a litigation to force a special election. That case may very well prove meritorious and expensive for the city and its ratepayers. The only legally correct course of action is to call a special election to fill the seat vacated by the untimely passing of the late Mayor Greg Pettis.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand lives in Cathedral city and practices law in Rancho Mirage. He spent two terms as a member of the city Council when it was elected at large. He does not live in district 1 or in district 3, so he has no personal dog in this hunt. The views contained herein are his own.
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
COME, LET US ADORE THE SAVIOR OF OUR FUCKTANGULAR WORLD
Summary: Once again, Christmas finds me in the office honoring what has become a shibboleth for me. By going into the office, I can escape some of the seasonal ridiculousness of the kind of nastiness into which Christmas has degenerated.
Yet, in the silence of the office, insulated from The Donald’s objectionable and nasty cultural appropriation of this holy incarnation season, And his recasting of it is some kind of political Festivus, I’m reminded not only that God’s passionate love for us is passionately expressed in the Incarnation, Passion, death, and Resurrection of our Savior, but also that God and God’s holy church remind us that we ought to have a preferential option for the poor, the oppressed, and those who have no place to lay their heads. God will come again in glory to judge the quick and the dead, and will take note of how we have treated the least among us.
-----------------------------------------------
In the nearly 30 years since I was admitted to the practice of law, I have maintained a more or less constant shibboleth of coming into the office on Christmas Day. In the silence of the office, with no phone calls, no interruptions, no unwanted human interaction, I actually find a place to get some work done, but perhaps more importantly, to find a quiet place for meditation in this Incarnation season.
I came across a new word recently, coined by a high school student who shows what his teacher called “signs of greatness.” The word in question, used to describe our current situation, was “fucktangular.” Certainly, with the traitor-in-chief Donald Trump at the head of our affairs, the situation this Christmas can only be described fucktangular.
What, after all, can we say when Gospodin Trump, in a fit of pique, holds the United States government to ransom for his ridiculous border wall? What can we say one Gospodin Trump treats Christmas like Seinfeld’s Festivus, subjecting us all to a recitation of his usual diet of lies, falsehoods, and childish grievances? What can we say as we learn that on this Christmas day, another child, this one a boy of eight, died in the custody of the United States government?
Moreover, what can one say when one sees a homeless person, with all his worldly possessions crammed into a shopping cart, making his way with a kind of sad, weary dignity, from one side of the street to the other? It came home to me forcibly in that moment that, as a Christian, a Catholic, an Anglican, an Episcopalian, I profess and confess a deep and abiding faith in a God Who took human form that we sinful humans might be reconciled to God. God made for that holy purpose an icon of Godself to draw all humankind to God. So, too was I reminded of God’s ineffable presence looking out into the Whitewater Wash and seeing another homeless person sharing his or her meager foodstuff with a murder of crows, in a kind of Franciscan feast of the impoverished.
It reminded me then and there that there is something fucktangular in the way modern American society tends to organize itself. It reminded me that there is something indeed fucktangular about the heresies implicit in the so-called prosperity gospel beloved of so many evangelical Protestant Nonconformists. It reminded me that there is something fucktangular in the way we have appropriated the Christmas narrative and twisted it into something I don’t think God ever intended the Incarnation of the Savior ever to represent.
In a time when Gospodin Trump has emboldened all of us to live down to the worst aspects of our Originally Sinful human nature, we should, instead of accepting his invitation, which is, after all, an invitation to live according to the perverse “gospel” of Antichrist, try to get in touch with the eternal truths contained in our Christian Incarnation narrative.
For when we examine the Lucan infancy narrative, the one we hear about at every Christmastide, the one that has become such a treasured possession of the Western mind and the Christian Republic, it’s easy to gloss over a very simple, foundational, reality. Simply put, our Savior, his mother Mary, and Joseph were situationally homeless. Worse, the Lucan infancy narrative also reminds us that they became refugees fleeing Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents.
In short, the Holy Family represented precisely the kind of people against whom Gospodin Trump and his supporters are holding the government hostage to build their absurd border wall, to go Qin Shihuangdi one better. Yet, as I pointed out in my last post, Wanli Changcheng (The Great Wall of China) did not keep out the barbarians whom China desired to exclude. Instead, the Manchu turned Wanli Changcheng at Shangaiguan, conquered China, and, in the end, became more Chinese than the Chinese themselves.
And if Wanli Changcheng proved unavailing, so, too, will Gospodin Trump’s border wall. Indeed, we have the assurances of the Savior Himself that Gospodin Trump, and all his minions of Antichrist will not prevail. For when the Savior comes, he brings with him what Gandhiji called the power of powerlessness, the ability of nonviolence to overcome all terrors. For we who are Christian, we who are Catholic, we who are Anglican, we who are Episcopalian, preach the faith of God Incarnate, of God among humanity, of God crucified, of God conquering death by death.
The baby in the manger or the mature man with his disciples supping for the last time in the upper room may not have been much to look upon, but the power of God is ineluctable; the power of God can turn every wall, it can reduce every fortification, and it can do so in the manner in which French playwright Edmund Rostand described a beautiful young girl gaining access to a grim fortress by convincing the sentries to grant her entry: “she smiled at them.”
On this Day when we commemorate the Incarnation of the Savior of the World in that manger in Bethlehem more than 2000 years ago, we acknowledge His conquest of our sinful hearts by acknowledging the smile of that beautiful Child.
The Savior of the World is at hand!
Oh! Come let us adore Him!
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney. He lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council, and he practices law in Rancho Mirage. He is a religiously Conformist member of the Episcopal Church, that denomination of Christians who like to eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and drink tea with her pinkies extended. The views contained in this post are his own, unless you like them, in which case, they can be yours, too.
Yet, in the silence of the office, insulated from The Donald’s objectionable and nasty cultural appropriation of this holy incarnation season, And his recasting of it is some kind of political Festivus, I’m reminded not only that God’s passionate love for us is passionately expressed in the Incarnation, Passion, death, and Resurrection of our Savior, but also that God and God’s holy church remind us that we ought to have a preferential option for the poor, the oppressed, and those who have no place to lay their heads. God will come again in glory to judge the quick and the dead, and will take note of how we have treated the least among us.
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In the nearly 30 years since I was admitted to the practice of law, I have maintained a more or less constant shibboleth of coming into the office on Christmas Day. In the silence of the office, with no phone calls, no interruptions, no unwanted human interaction, I actually find a place to get some work done, but perhaps more importantly, to find a quiet place for meditation in this Incarnation season.
I came across a new word recently, coined by a high school student who shows what his teacher called “signs of greatness.” The word in question, used to describe our current situation, was “fucktangular.” Certainly, with the traitor-in-chief Donald Trump at the head of our affairs, the situation this Christmas can only be described fucktangular.
What, after all, can we say when Gospodin Trump, in a fit of pique, holds the United States government to ransom for his ridiculous border wall? What can we say one Gospodin Trump treats Christmas like Seinfeld’s Festivus, subjecting us all to a recitation of his usual diet of lies, falsehoods, and childish grievances? What can we say as we learn that on this Christmas day, another child, this one a boy of eight, died in the custody of the United States government?
Moreover, what can one say when one sees a homeless person, with all his worldly possessions crammed into a shopping cart, making his way with a kind of sad, weary dignity, from one side of the street to the other? It came home to me forcibly in that moment that, as a Christian, a Catholic, an Anglican, an Episcopalian, I profess and confess a deep and abiding faith in a God Who took human form that we sinful humans might be reconciled to God. God made for that holy purpose an icon of Godself to draw all humankind to God. So, too was I reminded of God’s ineffable presence looking out into the Whitewater Wash and seeing another homeless person sharing his or her meager foodstuff with a murder of crows, in a kind of Franciscan feast of the impoverished.
It reminded me then and there that there is something fucktangular in the way modern American society tends to organize itself. It reminded me that there is something indeed fucktangular about the heresies implicit in the so-called prosperity gospel beloved of so many evangelical Protestant Nonconformists. It reminded me that there is something fucktangular in the way we have appropriated the Christmas narrative and twisted it into something I don’t think God ever intended the Incarnation of the Savior ever to represent.
In a time when Gospodin Trump has emboldened all of us to live down to the worst aspects of our Originally Sinful human nature, we should, instead of accepting his invitation, which is, after all, an invitation to live according to the perverse “gospel” of Antichrist, try to get in touch with the eternal truths contained in our Christian Incarnation narrative.
For when we examine the Lucan infancy narrative, the one we hear about at every Christmastide, the one that has become such a treasured possession of the Western mind and the Christian Republic, it’s easy to gloss over a very simple, foundational, reality. Simply put, our Savior, his mother Mary, and Joseph were situationally homeless. Worse, the Lucan infancy narrative also reminds us that they became refugees fleeing Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents.
In short, the Holy Family represented precisely the kind of people against whom Gospodin Trump and his supporters are holding the government hostage to build their absurd border wall, to go Qin Shihuangdi one better. Yet, as I pointed out in my last post, Wanli Changcheng (The Great Wall of China) did not keep out the barbarians whom China desired to exclude. Instead, the Manchu turned Wanli Changcheng at Shangaiguan, conquered China, and, in the end, became more Chinese than the Chinese themselves.
And if Wanli Changcheng proved unavailing, so, too, will Gospodin Trump’s border wall. Indeed, we have the assurances of the Savior Himself that Gospodin Trump, and all his minions of Antichrist will not prevail. For when the Savior comes, he brings with him what Gandhiji called the power of powerlessness, the ability of nonviolence to overcome all terrors. For we who are Christian, we who are Catholic, we who are Anglican, we who are Episcopalian, preach the faith of God Incarnate, of God among humanity, of God crucified, of God conquering death by death.
The baby in the manger or the mature man with his disciples supping for the last time in the upper room may not have been much to look upon, but the power of God is ineluctable; the power of God can turn every wall, it can reduce every fortification, and it can do so in the manner in which French playwright Edmund Rostand described a beautiful young girl gaining access to a grim fortress by convincing the sentries to grant her entry: “she smiled at them.”
On this Day when we commemorate the Incarnation of the Savior of the World in that manger in Bethlehem more than 2000 years ago, we acknowledge His conquest of our sinful hearts by acknowledging the smile of that beautiful Child.
The Savior of the World is at hand!
Oh! Come let us adore Him!
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney. He lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council, and he practices law in Rancho Mirage. He is a religiously Conformist member of the Episcopal Church, that denomination of Christians who like to eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and drink tea with her pinkies extended. The views contained in this post are his own, unless you like them, in which case, they can be yours, too.
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