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The Alameda County Board of Supervisors reign
as champions of local entrenched poltics may
come to end on June 7.
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JUNE PRIMARY PREVIEW |
1. I think Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley is scared to the point that he cries at bedtime.
2. I think other supervisors, especially Scott Haggerty and Wilma Chan are feeling indigestion-level discomfort over the possibility of Miley being overthrown. They could be next because Parker has shown the emperor has no clothes by exposing Miley’s shenanigans as a supervisor. In almost every allegation against Miley, you could simply swapped out his name for another supervisor.
3. I think you should ask yourself this question: When was the last time Oakland political consultant Larry Tramutola won a meaningful campaign that included human candidates? I can’t. Tramutola is still effective for local ballot measures, for sure, but for $40,000, Miley is getting ripped off. I would have asked for a refund after seeing that mailer last week that looked like it was created using Microsoft Word. Who uses Times New Roman for a font on a mailer? It seems trivial, but indicative of a sloppy campaign.
4. I think if Bryan Parker wins next week, he will have no problem getting up to speed as a county supervisor, despite what Miley thinks. Everybody believes their job is too difficult to learn just before they get canned.
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| Without many hiccups in his primary election campaign, Rep. Mike Honda has been able to lean back and relax. |
5. I think Rep. Mike Honda is coasting into the June 7 primary without much stress and that’s a big miscalculation on Khanna’s part. Make him sweat a little bit, Ro.
6. I think the corporate media is too focused on his ethics investigation because they’re not covering the day-to-day race. It’s easy and lazy for outside reporters to swoop in and cover the race for a day with this gloomy ethics lede. But the true analysis is that Ro Khanna should have brought the heat to Honda in the last few weeks. In addition, outside of the ethics talking point, what exactly is the fall narrative that is going to deliver a result for Khanna in November that is different than 2014?
7. I think Khanna didn’t spend the money in late May because he doesn’t want to run out of cash in the last month of the November election like he did in 2014.
8. I think that KPIX/SurveyUSA was shoddy and Honda’s post-primary spread will be somewhere under 15 points. That’s means we still have an competitive race in November.
9. I think CA-17 Republican Ron Cohen should win plaudits for being media savvy and doing what it takes to bring attention to candidacy despite having no money. He latched onto the Donald Trump Train and then shrewdly called on Khanna to withdraw from the race because of a canceled check. Cohen never had a chance, but other unfunded candidates on the city council level should borrow from his playbook.
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Nancy Skinner, right, and Sandre Swanson are
almost certainly going to meet in November, but
what will be the defining issue in the fall?
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10. I think Nancy Skinner will be the East Bay’s next state senator by merely laying low from now to November. She’s got the money to send out reams of positive mailers and there doesn’t seem to be a defining issue for Sandre Swanson to argue he’s the better choice.
11. I think the IE, Alliance for California’s Tomorrow, which is supporting Swanson’s campaign, will only make you more cynical about politics. It’s not affiliated with campaign but conveniently arrives to likely spend heavily through November while Skinner currently holds a whopping 10-to-1 money advantage.
12. I think many, many local officials are regretting their early support for Swanson, but it was the easy, politically-expedient decision to make. Just like how they all support Hillary Clinton despite the fact you know they are progressives more in line with Bernie Sanders.
13. I think Katherine Welch squandered an opportunity here to challenge Swanson for second in the primary. She’s a first-time candidate, but her anti-government message should have been more consistent. She also didn’t seem to improve her rhetorical skills through the course of the campaign.
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Despite their tough talk, SEIU Local 1021 isn’t
make much progress on its threat to remove
councilmembers who voted for the imposition.
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14. I think the people of Hayward are cursed. A second straight Hayward City Council election is going to show how impotent the Services Employees International Union Local 1021 really is in that city. This is a council that utterly punked city employees three years ago with a vicious wage imposition. Later, the decision was found illegal by a state personnel board.
15. I think, in all likelihood, councilmembers who voted for the imposition, Al Mendall, Francisco Zermeno and Mark Salinas will win three of four open seats next week.
16. I think the main reason is because the union simply cannot find a good candidate to run for these seats. They didn’t in 2014, despite angry threats to the sitting council, and they are going to fail again this June.
17. I think if you harbor great political aspirations, you should definitely move to Hayward. If you have any brain in your head, you could be mayor within four years and representing the area in the Assembly within eight. Folks, the political bench in Hayward is that bad.
18. I think you should vote against every tax-raising ballot measure on the ballot. Yes, that includes Measure AA to save the bay. Anyone who witnessed the Plan Bay Area meetings ending two years ago knows there is no way nine Bay Area counties can agree on anything. Those northernmost counties often play very anti-government, Tea Party-like riffs that are incompatible with the Greater Bay Area. Making nice with this group is as likely as House Republicans and Democrats agreeing on anything.
19. I think Measure A, the Chabot-Las Positas Community College District’s $1 billion bond is outrageous. Think of it this way, the amount of graft related to education in the Hayward area is one day lead to people going to prison. And I’m talking about federal crimes. I guarantee it.
20. I think you should make sure you vote on June 7.
ebcitizen.com 
By MW:
In regard to items 1 & 2:
Even if Miley manages to win in the looming election, still the discussions about him and his “ethics” this election battle has caused will cause him huge damage in the future. In other words, politics, and especially elections, often does not in the long run and in the end finally turn out the way it seems it will.
For instance in the 1976 Presidential election, a major, and extremely successful part of Jimmy Carter's campaign against incumbent Gerald Ford was Carter constantly referring to what he referred to as the “misery index.”
In other words since both the unemployment rate and the inflation rate during the time Ford was president seemed to be on the high side, Carter then added the two together to get what he referred to as the “misery index,” and which was then a major factor in Carter defeating Ford in the election.
However after four years of Carter being in office, both the inflation rate and the unemployment rate had increased a lot, and which therefore meant the grammatical term Carter had invented four years earlier to defeat Ford now guaranteed that Carter would lose to Reagan, since Reagan emphasized the point that most people were not better off after four years of Carter then when Carter had taken office.
And good old Richard Nixon, and with the assistance of his sleazy Watergate trickery, defeated George McGovern extremely convincingly in 1972, in other words 61% to 37%, and with about 2% going to independents and third party candidates. However after his overwhelming 1972 election victory, and which was partly fueled by his Watergate trickery, in a very short time Nixon went from overwhelming victor to extreme bum and was forced to resign.
So in the long run, and especially in politics, sometimes what seems like a victory actually ends up as a huge defeat. So even if Miley manages to survive this time, still I think he and some his sleazy co-conspirators are on borrowed time, and especially since for at least ten years now more and more of the general public seems to be waking up to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the politicians who portray themselves as great liberals and wonderful humanitarians are actually phonies, parasites, scumbags, scam artists, and bloodsucking leeches.
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All the candidates for Hayward city council talk about how diverse Hayward is. Hayward is so diverse that we have historically only have had white mayors. How about more representation of the actual populace of the entire city of Hayward, not just the hills and mobile home parks. Even the poor folks are paying for that high falluting 21st century library so they should benefit from good governance instead of talking heads with hidden agendas. We need leaders who serve the people, not themselves and their big egos.
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Bad decisions keep costing Hayward tax payers money. Wasteful spending on lawsuits. Time to clean house and vote them out.
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By MW:
In regard to item #19, how can Steven Tavares even slightly possibly suspect that we might have bigtime graft and bribery in Bay area politics and government.
In other words, anyone who pays even the tiniest bit of attention to the PR the Bay area's politicians and major newspapers constantly put out would realize that the Bay area is the world's capital and headquarters for intelligence, enlightenment, and commitment to human rights. So therefore unless most of our politicians are actually nothing but big sleazy phonies, parasites, and bloodsucking leeches, and not really the great liberals and wonderful humanitarians they present them as, certainly they would never tolerate graft, bribery, and ripoffs.
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Fran David should move to the Hayward Hills, if she ever retires and run for city council. Since she knows how to balance a budget, attract new businesses and all the other horse shit the incumbents are claiming they did. She's another spendthrift idiot city manager who's stupid mistakes keep getting swept under the rug. She can follow in Greg Jones snail trail right up to the dais.
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Barbara Halliday has no brain and she is our mayor. Yes, Hayward is cursed.
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