Tag: Republicans

The Trump Re-Election Campaign in Los Angeles.

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

On foot to LA Fitness on Sepulveda this morning, I passed Wendy’s near Erwin. 

It was about 7:30 AM, and the restaurant wasn’t opened yet. There were no cars in the takeout lane. 

But there, in the alley, sitting along the curb, across from the takeout window, was an old woman squatting and peeing. Her urine came out and ran down towards the sidewalk. I just kept walking.

Later on, after the gym, she was asleep on the bus bench.

A temporary home.

There are no adequate words to describe the degradation and humiliation that public defecation brings to both the perpetrator and the witness.

Her normal biological action did not rank up there with the tens of thousands who live in group tents, in trash camps, along sidewalks, under bridges, within public parks in the City of Angels on Hiatus.

Just one of many living in the filth and neglect of our city.

But this is reality in LA and in so many other cities like Seattle, Portland and San Francisco that once thought such acts unthinkable. All these cities hate Trump. And all these cities call themselves sanctuaries.

A sanctuary to me is a holy place, a reverent place, a place kept scrupulously clean because people worship there and respect the ideals that make a place a sanctuary from all the evils of life, all the injustices. Inside a sanctuary there is quiet, and calm and peace and you go there to pray and find solace. There are churches, there are mosques, there are synagogues, there are temples, there are parks and courtyards that are sanctuaries all over the world.

What kind of sanctuary is present day Los Angeles?

We don’t have a single public park un-desecrated by trash, shopping baskets, sleeping drunks, tents. Perhaps 30% of the bus stops are makeshift homeless homes, pushing out legitimate bus riders who wait on their feet in the blistering sun.

Woodley Park, 2018.
  • Bus Bench: Sepulveda at Victory.

We have a hapless and synthetic mayor, Mr. Garbageciti, whose public pronouncements are so ineffective that they carry the weight of a meme.

In every car and in every kitchen across Los Angeles people of every political persuasion are asking: how can this be happening?

As hated as Trump is in this state, with every illegality and breakdown of law and order, ordinary liberal minded and tolerant people in California are moving away from the Democratic Party ideals of understanding, empathy, government regulation or government program, and hankering for a strong man or woman who will take drastic, emergency and militant steps to stop the disease of allowing people to live and do everything publicly they should be doing privately. 

The surprise that awaits liberals in 2020 is that anyone should be surprised when Trump is re-elected. .

1964: When Republicans Still Roamed The Valley.

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , 1 Comment

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Some remarkable photographs from 1964 show openly Republican women, out and proud, at Sportsman’s Lodge in Studio City. They had gathered to support the candidacy of George Murphy for the US Senate. Dressed in flowered hats, mink stoles and gloves, the ladies, as they were referred to back then, held a luncheon in the heart of the now 100% liberal district.

Mr. Murphy won the election and served from 1965-71.

A Wikipedia entry describes a Reaganesque sounding entertainer:

“George Lloyd Murphy (July 4, 1902 – May 3, 1992) was an American dancer, actor, and politician. Murphy was a song-and-dance leading man in many big-budget Hollywood musicals from 1930 to 1952. He was the president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1944 to 1946, and was awarded an honorary Academy Award in 1951. Murphy served from 1965 to 1971 as U.S. Senator from California, the first notable U.S. actor to make the successful transition to elected official in California, predating Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.[1] He is the only United States Senator represented by a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.”

At the time, marijuana and homosexuality were illegal,  a woman needed her husband’s permission for a bank loan, a drunk sleeping on the street would be arrested, almost nobody was obese, tattoos were for sailors and people in the circus, and the Republican Party was the sworn enemy of Russia.  Children walked to school and rode bikes, and most adults smoked at home, in the office, in movie theaters, and while driving in their cars.

How most Californians survived growing up with free tuition, plentiful jobs and cheap housing is beyond our imagination. We are fortunate to be living in a much more progressive and kinder era with homeless encampments and marijuana dispensaries in every neighborhood.

Courtesy of the Valey Times and the LAPL:

Photograph article dated January 28, 1964 reads, “At the kick-off of 1964 campaign activities of the Laurel Oaks Republican Women’s Club, more than 300 political leaders and Valley Republican women gathered to hear George Murphy, candidate for the United States Senate. Mrs. Edward Gephart was general chairman of the tea, which was held at Sportsmen’s Lodge, Studio City. Honored guests were California leaders of the Republican Women and Valley government officials. John Willis, television and radio newscaster, was master of ceremonies.” Mrs. Ben Reddick, wife of Valley Times publisher, serves tea to Mrs. Allen K. Wood, Sherman Oaks. Mrs. Wood also poured at the tea table.

Nobody’s Dummy: Paglia Discusses Palin.

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Note: at an Obama fund raiser last week, I brought up my view that Palin is like Ronald Reagan in 1964. She is a fresh voice, a fresh face, who will not be going away very soon. Despite the fact that I disagree with her on almost every philosophical and political viewpoint, her magnetism is undeniable.


I just pray she and her running-mate do not win the next election. Here is Camille Paglia’s take on Palin from the pages of Salon Magazine:
Nobody’s dummy


Liberals underestimate Sarah Palin’s vitality and — yes — smarts at their own peril. Plus: Obama’s presidential air, Biden’s condescending mugging, feminism’s lost sisters.

By Camille Paglia

Although nothing will sway my vote for Obama, I continue to enjoy Sarah Palin’s performance on the national stage. During her vice-presidential debate last week with Joe Biden (whose conspiratorial smiles with moderator Gwen Ifill were outrageous and condescending toward his opponent), I laughed heartily at Palin’s digs and slams and marveled at the way she slowly took over the entire event. I was sorry when it ended! But Biden wasn’t — judging by his Gore-like sighs and his slow sinking like a punctured blimp. Of course Biden won on points, but TV (a visual medium) never cares about that.

The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin’s brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don’t we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.

And where is all that lurid sexual fantasy coming from? When I watch Sarah Palin, I don’t think sex — I think Amazon warrior! I admire her competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal. The question that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry — including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked.

One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is “dumb.” Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can’t see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism — the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.

As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English — beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.

Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse — which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant.

The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism. But I am convinced that Palin’s bracing mix of male and female voices, as well as her grounding in frontier grit and audacity, will prove to be a galvanizing influence on aspiring Democratic women politicians too, from the municipal level on up. Palin has shown a brand-new way of defining female ambition — without losing femininity, spontaneity or humor. She’s no pre-programmed wonk of the backstage Hillary Clinton school; she’s pugnacious and self-created, the product of no educational or political elite — which is why her outsider style has been so hard for media lemmings to comprehend. And by the way, I think Tina Fey’s witty impersonations of Palin have been fabulous. But while Fey has nailed Palin’s cadences and charm, she can’t capture the energy, which is a force of nature.