My trusted advisers were unanimous in condemning this draft ad — so few appreciate a true artist! — but it’s probably too late to hurt me now!
To some extent, this post is just an excuse to post an ad I made up a few weeks ago (when the news had just come out) that I thought was pretty hilarious. Everyone I showed it to thought that it might help my campaign less than I thought, so I didn’t use it. If I somehow fail to win tonight, that may be why. But I don’t want to dwell on might-have-beens, especially with turnout so low that conceivably the Occupy Orange County vote alone might be enough to elect me.
Two serious — or maybe more like “not entirely fanciful” — items of note.
(1) When do people make up their minds? It may be later than you think!
I have new data to offer about when people made up their minds about whom to support. Its existence is almost a total accident — but it’s pretty interesting.
We’ll never know how many hits there were on our June Primary Voter Guide — because after I posted it on May 8 (which I can tell because Vern posted the first comment that day at 4:08 PM), Vern revised it substantially — and in doing so somehow erased the data for the first 11 days. (Usually, I am the one to do something like that here.) In fact, he did it twice! I had been monitoring its readership, though, and as best I can recall it got something like 1000 views in the first few days and another 1000 between then and his (admittedly superior) revision on May 19. As of about 5 p.m. today, it stood at 3,555 views, so add 2,000 from before and we have PRECISELY 5,555 views (at least if you discount the statistical noise included by my wild-ass guess of “2,000.”) Based on this, we can conclude that a whole lot of people read their voter guides on Election Day and the day before — toss in June 1 and it’s about as many as the last 13 days of May.
But that — if you can believe it — is not what’s really interesting!
Way back on March 22, when I was trying to put together my information on all of the candidates for Attorney General (because I just couldn’t believe that the Republicans had forgotten to run anyone of any stature), I found that there was a seventh candidate in the race who had been heretofore unknown to me (and, more importantly, to Scott Lay, on whose research I rely.) His name was David King.
So I decided to write a bit about him, in a story entitled “Republican Attorney General Candidate David King is Serious But Stupid.” I did this because:
- on first read, I thought that he WAS the long-expected respectable Republican White Knight who would take on Kamala Harris, and
- he deserved a swat on the nose for stupidly calling the Employment Development Department “a useless agency,” which it isn’t — and if he thinks that it is it just shows how out of touch he is.
On closer examination I decided that he wasn’t really so serious after all, so I lost interest in him. Vern — my own Editor in Chief! — made fun of me in the first comment:
And in other important breaking news…
To which I, affronted, said:
Currently #1 on Google for “California Attorney General ‘David King’.” How often do we get that sort of thing done?
The weird thing is, though, that it has stayed right around there. It’s now #2 on Google, right after his campaign website. And that means that a lot of people wanting a more “objective” view of David King came here and learned something about the EDD.
As I write, the thing has gotten almost 2200 views — and the way things are going about 20-25% of them will have been yesterday and today. So I can give you real data of how Republicans desperate to find someone worth voting for in the Attorney General race have behaved — and here’s a graphic representation of it.
Because David King is one of five not-famous (non-Kamala and non-Orly) candidates for Attorney General, and because this was perhaps the first place people would look for information on the Web after his own site and maybe smartvoter.com, this gives you a reasonable estimate of when, and how intensively, people start seriously researching candidates in a statewide race. You don’t start to show a real bump until right around the time that absentee voting begins — and except for one bump a week ago today it’s not until the day before the election that people really got serious. Like I said — to me, that’s interesting!
(Must cite OJB by the way!)
(2) So you want to come to my “victory party”? OK, meet me at Costa Mesa City Hall!
Obviously, if I didn’t have enough money to mail everyone around copies of THAT FANTASTIC WATCHCAT GRAPHIC up there at the top, I wasn’t going to have money to host a victory party either. So I’m letting the City of Costa Mesa hold it for me — and you’re welcome to come along! Here — Geoff “Pot Stirrer” West tells you how important it is over on his site A Bubbling Cauldron.
I’m there, as you may surmise from my prior behavior, to tell the Costa Mesa City Council that I am contemplating suing them over Brown Act violations if they don’t get their house in order — something which is not the Costa Mesa Council majority’s strong suit — which is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I also plan to remind them that the City Charter that they’re looking at tonight is a bad, bad, bad, offensive, dangerous, and unworkable document — one that voters should reject out of hand!
If watching that is your idea of fun, then maybe I’ll see you there! I’m aiming for maybe 6:30. And if we feel like it, if the meeting ends early enough maybe afterwards we’ll go out for garlic pizza while we watch the returns come in!
Well you gotta do what you gotta do when you’re a Government Accountability Attorney! Good to see you in Costa Mesa. I think I told you, more than once, that I believe you used to have Fullerton confused with Costa Mesa, and Bushala confused with Righeimer. THESE are the people to fight!
he didn’t come across well at city council. tried to conjure up a violation with his first words and was quickly set straight and then he was off kilter for the rest of his speech. sort of standing eight count.
I’ll have to check the video, deadster, but my recollection is that I got some (intended) laughs, some good swipes, and among the biggest rounds of applause. Nor was I “corrected”: I started out by explaining that I didn’t use my name to make the point that one can’t legally be required to do so. Riggy’s “correction” was “oh, everyone here already knows that.” Well, the City employee who kept trying to get me to write in my name when she gave me the form didn’t seem to! And the expression on Riggy’s face when he read it was rather precious too!
We’ll play the video here when it’s available, and then we can all happily judge deadster’s credibility together, like one big happy family!
applause and laughs from that audience mean nothing Mr. Diamond. It isn’t a talent show you know. It is government business.
that audience doesn’t know how to behave in public and hasn’t for years, reminiscent of patrons of a cantina that operated in the city Air Avab on the planet Genarius during the waning years of the Galactic Republic. It is their Tuesday night theatre they practice for all week, get their hair done, and come on down to get on tv to see who can throw the “funniest” insults and claim false “secret meeting” “brown act violations” , “conflicts” and other unsubstantiated charges or “swipes” as you call them. check out you tube videos by art vandeley showing them at their “funniest”. Ha.
feel free to join them first and third Tuesdays of every month. their popcorn they used to bring for their big night out has been banned but you can eat treats outside the chambers and join in with the complainers 8 real work gets done inside.
Did I somehow inadvertently give you the impression that I cared about your opinion?
In getting across a message and whipping up the populace to overthrow a thug — which is what your man Riggy is — applause and laughs are very useful, which is why you’re donning your deadwhite costume to try to drag down my performance. If you had any sense whatsoever, you’d realize that this is not the way to get me to stay away, so go ahead and jump to Step 2 and pretend that that’s what you wanted all along.
Like I said, we’ll show the video here and then you and I can discuss it like man and ghost.
Riggy is thuggy. He flouts the rules, he has installed a complaisant staff, and his grasp of policy is atrocious — I would love to engage him on it more as time permits. He’s neither unusual nor especially gifted, just an OC thug, and holding him to the rules will be a pleasure.
OK, have you accomplished what you set out to do tonight, deadster? Then I bid you good evening.
only twice did you give me the impression you cared about my opinion: 1)while groveling for votes for DA, as if you would represent us all, and 2) when you responded to my post. other than those two, no. No, don’t stay away, start attending the CC meetings.
They have been a graveyard for many antagonistic souls who ride in with a smirk, snarky comments and a sword and leave after the election wondering why no one listened to their denigrating remarks and went ahead and elected everyone they smeared.
Oh, that last one is easy: because in OC, the big money is almost always lined up on the side of the thugs and money often buys elections. Don’t overcomplicate it. Of course, last time the voters didn’t elect EVERYONE you wanted, did they? And you only barely retained the majority.
Did I focus on you personally while “groveling for votes” or were you just taking my general pitch for votes extremely personally?
I think it’s charming that you think that the Council meetings are where I fight the thugs. It’s like you don’t know me at all.
no they didn’t elect everyone I wanted, just, as I stated, the ones that the real thugs smeared: Monahan and Mensinger (our next Mayor in December). They didn’t bother with McCarthy who still almost won without the anti smear vote going for him.
“Smeared”? They just told the truth about them. But I can see how someone afraid to use their own name when sucking up to power as you do might get the two of those confused. The truth is so scary for some people.
oh really? saying they caused the death of a city employee is sort of a smear. thousands of people are laid off in the private sector without killing themselves and this guy wasn’t even being laid off but was going to be given a six month notice that his job was going to be studied vs. outsourcing costs. add in that he had been counseled for troubles at work including sleeping on the job and that he had traces of cocaine in his system and it is Monahans fault? pleez………
I was about to write that you’re going to embarrass yourself if you keep this up, but you’re anonymous so that’s impossible.
I wouldn’t put much value in what you tell me anyway. are you oblivious to what has happened to you in the last month?
Pretty much. I think that it looks much worse from a perspective of fearful supplication like yours than it does from a position of long-term activism like mine. If you’re talking about the sinus/lung infection, though, that does seem pretty bad!