CM PRESS # 446

WHAT A WASTE OF OUR MONEY

WEDNESDAY, March 23, 7:00 PM--I just came from the no-Parks and Recreation Commission Meeting at City Hall. 

There were 5 Commissioners, 6 staff members in the chambers, and 1 staff member in the TV control room. That's 12 people being paid to be there for almost no reason.

Oh, the public was well represented.  There was exactly one person from the public there.  That's right, just one.  That one person was me.  I was the only non-paid person there.

I've called before to do away with this Commission and have the no-Planning Commission take the extra half hour or so to do what this Commission does.

Why isn't the City Council taking my suggestion? 

There are two reasons.

First, these are patronage seats.  To pay back donors and supporters, elected City Council members put some of them on this Commission.

Second, this Commission (just as with the no-Planning Commission) acts as the farm team for those who may want to run for office in a couple of years, and the City Council puts people on the Commission who they feel share their politics and world view and who might be good on the Council.

So, yes, we understand the reasons.  It's still a waste of money.

[Note: We wanted readers to see the above, so we changed our previously stated plan to put the Costa Taxpayers Association notice first on this page.]
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YOU'RE INVITED--BE THERE OR BE SQUARE

The Costa Mesa Taxpayers Association inaugural meeting kicks off this Thursday, March 24th, at 6:30 p.m. at Skosh Monahan's.

There'll be free appetizers and plenty of great socializing as this important group is launched in Costa Mesa.

The organizers say it's all free and they want you and your family to join them.

The group's website: http://www.cmtax.org/.

[NOTE: Because we think this may become a very important group in Costa Mesa, we're going to leave this information at the top of the CM PRESS for today and tomorrow as a reminder to readers. New stories will be below.]

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IS KATRINA FOLEY BECOMING A FISCAL CONSERVATIVE AND A WATCHDOG FOR  CITIZENS ON THE NMUSD?
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Foley is the only member of the NMUSD board who tried to save some of our money. We really need to make some changes to this board in the next election to bring in more 'outsiders' (like Foley) who won't treat the board as some sort of private club.
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BLACK WOMAN BLUDGEONS WHITE FEMALE COWORKER TO DEATH
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Violent crime is not an equal opportunity employer.  If the White victim had known this, she might have been more wary and still be alive.
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IT LOOKS LIKE THE DAILY PILOT HAS REMOVED THE HATE COMMENTS OF ONE LOON WHO CALLS ITSELF 'UTTERLYDISGUSTED'
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WHEN IS THE COSTA MESA CITY COUNCIL GOING TO USE E-VERIFY?
Link to an article about some other California cities that are using it right now.
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SOMETIMES TRANSPARENCY NEEDS A LITTLE NUDGE

We noticed that Bill Lobdell seems to have added a line to his published column about becoming Costa Mesa's PR flak that now tells readers how much dough he's going to make. 

As we say in the biz:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Unless,er, it writ what it wrote on the Internet.
Or maybe on the back wall of Mr. Jones' barn.

Anyway, if you missed the newly inserted toss away line buried (an old PR trick) down near the end of the column, Lobdell just affirms what we wrote before (in fact, we think we broke the story). He'll be making
$ 75 clams an hour with a cap of 40 hours per week. [Counting toes now] This adds up to $ 3,000 simoleons per week. 

That ain't chump change in this down economy. Why, we've heard that many people are even getting pink slips.
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MY OWN PR STORY

Speaking of burying things where they may not be seen (as I just did speaketh, above), here's a little more about what being a PR flak entails.

Back when I was acting in New York, one of my jobs to pay the rent was in PR/sales with a major steam ship line. [Hey, not all actors are waiters, you know. And, a seventh floor walk-up may be relatively cheap, but you still have to pay the rent.]

Other than wining and dining travel agents aboard our ships, my job mostly involved writing letters and other material to be sent to travel agents to spur them on to help fill the firm's three ships for Caribbean cruises and to convince them that booking their clients on our ships was a better choice than booking them on the ships of our many competitors.

In other words, I had to spin the positives and bury the negatives better than the guys doing my job in the other steam ship lines.

Anyway, down the hall from my office was a PR firm whose major client was a European airline.

I got friendly with some of the people in that PR firm.  Their proudest moments were when they were able to kill stories or get them buried in the back of newspapers when airplane parts (like engines) fell off their planes. Assorted falling parts apparently happened with enough regularity that these guys stayed pretty busy.

Say, back on ships. Have you ever read about all the people who get sick on ships while on Caribbean cruises?  You know you have, but you probably ignore them. Nothing seems to jump out to alarm you. 

In fact, most of these sick passenger stories seem to get buried, and if you do read them, doesn't it seem that the finger is often pointed toward some sort of "flu" outbreak or maybe it points in the direction of the passengers having ingested some bad food or water ashore in some exotic port?

[Pssst.  I have ten words that you may never see in one of those sick passenger stories:  Drinking water tanks aboard the ships are difficult to clean.]

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DETROIT'S POPULATION HAS DROPPED NEAR 1910 LEVELS
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Whites almost non-existent in Motown (except for Eminem). 

We imagine: A future History Channel program about archaeologists finding the lost city of Detroit in the middle of the jungle.

Cue voice over:  "Local natives roasting rats over an open fire tell us that they didn't build this once magnificent city. They say there was a White tribe that once lived here and they built it. No one knows where they went or why."

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2,200 MARINES FROM THE 26TH MARINE EXPEDITIONARY UNIT ON THEIR WAY TO LIBYA

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A Marine MEU landing on hostile territory is a beautiful thing to see for its speed, efficiency and destruction of the bad guys.

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Those are our opinions.  Thanks for reading them.