State Senator Tom Umberg has done something admirable enough to earn my endorsement for the fall. (Admittedly, he may have had other motivations.) His statement reads:
I’m shocked and disappointed that the State Assembly sided with special interests in Orange County and California to essentially gut SB 361. The purpose of SB 361 was to further the intent of the Surplus Land Act by insuring that future sales of public property reaped the highest value and provided additional housing. The Assembly amendments make a mockery of the seriousness of the needed strengthening of the law.
Despite assertions by both the author of the Surplus Lands Act (SLA), Assemblymember Phil Ting, and the outrage of the people of Anaheim and the local elected delegation, the Assembly Appropriations Committee chose to narrow this bill to one city and remove the enforcement mechanism. The agencies and governments opposed to SB 361 threw every excuse in the book at the wall to try to find something that would stick in an attempt to stall this effort. This should speak volumes to the public about why we haven’t seen a major uptick in affordable housing and the ‘roadblocks’ instituted by local governments in this effort.
SB 361 now, as amended, does nothing to address the collusion in the Anaheim stadium sale. My constituents and those in similar localities across the state can rest assured that, if re-elected I will reintroduce a bill to address the problem illustrated by the attempted sale – the current law does little to protect taxpayers from the city colluding with a purchaser to short change the taxpayers.
I hope that Sen. Umberg will also explore the applicability of the Sustainable Communities Act, which I wrote about here, about which Anaheim Planning Commissioner Steve White spent months running around with his hair on fire — just an expression, especially as regards Steve — as it pertained to the Anaheim Stadium grounds sale.
We’ll try to get in touch with Sen. Umberg for more details about these legislative shenanigans and who on the Appropriations Committee helped to spike it — I know who I hope it wasn’t! — as well what movers and shakedowners were opposed to the bill and what excuses they threw at the wall.
Credit on this story goes to — well, I was going to say The Liberal OC, but on closer examination all that that site did was to reprint an entire story, verbatim, from the Associated Press.
Now it may be that Chumley has a subscription to the Associated Press feed that allows him to print entire stories — he’s welcome to come here and say so, unlike Vern’s and my ability to go there — in which case we’ll correct this … but that explanation seems completely implausible. If Chumley had a subscription to AP news, why wouldn’t he use it more often rather than publishing the dreck that he usually offers up, when he publishes at all? I don’t see how this could not be a classic, prototypical, Fair Use violation, but maybe the Associated Press has other ideas about it.
(I guess I can just ask the AP if this is acceptable Fair Use. They’ll probably know!)
Anyway, kudos to Sen. Umberg! Ya did good!
I’d seen that on Liberal OC, and was impressed with Umberg’s statement. I was planning to call him or his peeps myself for more details. But never assume that anything well-written on the Liberal OC, posted by Dan under his own name, is written by him. More than half is press releases.
Oh, I don’t presume that he writes his own stuff (except the ridiculous parts.) But this apparent theft was over the top.
Yeah, please do interview Umberg about this!
Oh, dreary. Thanks for nothing.
I went to read the ChemTrailski commentary and suddenly Business of Baseball has concluded the latest deal was somehow a rip off on the good folks of Anaheim – after years of supporting giving away the store to Moreno when his boy-crush Brandman was backing it.
Who knows what ChemLew thinks, all he did was copy and paste something from Umberg. Who knows if Dan even read it.
It’s funny about Umberg though. I remember I think it was a little before the Sept 2020 vote on stadium lot development details, he showed up on a Zoom thing and sounded puzzled that there were any objections or concerns; all he could think of was hoping that there would be plenty of union construction work.
Seems like he’s learned a lot about it since then.
No, only three paragraphs in the story he posted are from Umberg. The rest is Associated press commentary.
Yeah, that reminds me of why I have been meh about him. Hopefully he is now fully and permanently attuned to these matters.
Oh, now he says that the entire thing was a press release from Umberg’s office and therefore not a fair use violation. But it’s not labeled as a press release!, so how is anyone to know that? It looks exactly like an AP story!
Here’s now it begins (recognizing that he may not change it and lie about doing so):
That something was sent out as a press release does not insulate it from the tender mercies of the Digital Millennial Copyright Act — especially if not identified as such. If a campaign sent out an entire NY Times best-seller as a “press release,” that doesn’t mean that I can republish it! That would be a loophole large enough to fit … well, I won’t finish that thought.
He mentions that I was similarly wrong (apparently meaning “right”) about something else recently: that I didn’t know what a “DDOS” attack was. Stay with me here, I promise it will be fun.
Chumley has argued that while Vern is banned from his site, I am merely “in moderation” because I sometimes say things that he finds objectionable. (I think that by that he means “well-reasoned and incisive,” but who knows with him?) So, when some sewer troll commented about my using comments here to send messages to the FBI — sneering “as if they follow that blog” (paraphrasing) — I posted that they sure do seem to have followed out blog prior to the affidavit and indictment and so I wouldn’t be surprised if they continued to do so!
As I explained — and Vern will remember this well — during the last week of this past April the number of hits on our home page (which is also labeled “Archives”) suddenly shot up very substantially. In a panic, I contacted Vern late at night to report what looked like a DDOS — because that sort of sudden jump in hits (page views) is a likely sign of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. To explain for Chumley’s benefit (because he himself doesn’t seem to know, unless he was gaslighting again): this occurs when outside actors try to impair the operation of a website by having people distributed across the internet try to deny the site’s ability to provide its service to the public by keeping it too busy handling these requests to do much of anything else. Vern told me to just sit tight and see what happened.
Vern’s ridiculously short-sighted advice turned out to be pretty good: unlike an actual DDOS attack — which tends to increase exponentially as more computers (some of which may have been hijacked by a virus) become involved in the attack — this one was showing a different pattern. It started out with a gigantic number of hits on individual files and their number reduced over the course of several hours or more.
I dove into our daily records of hits to see what they were looking at, and found that our number of hits going to “Other Posts” was up even more dramatically. Archived stories in our “Other Posts” category generally have only one hit apiece — it’s sort of the “cosmic background radiation” of the web — but that day the number of them was huge. I checked out what they were and realized that they were largely from articles that virtually never appeared there, like ones remaining from the Pedroza regime. But all had just one hit apiece. Whoever was doing this was looking at everything — literally every story we had ever posted and retained in our archive (meaning virtually all of them). I refreshed often, watching the Home Page and “Other Posts” figures explode in real time as I had never seem before, hoping that the site would survive this.
After a while, things returned to normal, but I was hypervigilant for a while about a recurrence. Then about two weeks later, on May 12, Special Agent Brian C. Adkins’s affidavit was signed. When it came out, then (as an attorney myself) I realized what must have happened. Everything in our archive — at least the stories, but I hope that they got the comments too, because they’re often the best part! — had been downloaded into what I presumed was a searchable database.
I don’t think that this was the “Wayback Machine” archiving our posts; the timing strongly suggests that it was the FBI. We had lots of material there that was reflected in the indictment. I don’t know how much of a difference we made — but whatever it was, I’m proud of it.
As I said (and what I think may have prompted the anonymous attack on LibOC): I hope that the FBI also searched that site, including IP addresses and other identifiers — and will also look at Chumley’s (that’s “Chmielewski,” FBI) email history with Matt Cunningham, Kris Murray, Jordan Brandman, and others — as well as who other than his PR clients has been paying him. He may finally end up doing something useful for OC — even if unintentionally!
P.S. Chumley always using the same photo of me, my friend with Michael Kinslow peeking out from the dais behind me. Mike died on Boxing Day of 2014, and I always enjoy seeing that photo to be reminded of him. Having admitted that publicly, I’ll probably never see it there again, which is a real shame.
Chumley is right about one thing – we think about him (and Matt) too much. Donna is learning to tell me the same thing Zenger does: “Don’t touch the pink toad!”
I suppose our temperaments yearn for an adversary. If only there were worthier ones!
I’ll touch the pink toad if I think it’s worthwhile; the hallucinogenic poison is pretty much metaphorical.
And Donna, for all of her virtues, really isn’t my target audience. My target audience knows who it is.
You’re wrong; he just posted the press release and it verifies what he said. And he clarified what your claimed DDOS is. Dan is more trustworthy than you are. But you won’t run this comment because it makes you look bad Or you will edit it. Which is it asshole?
It is really weird that this comment appears to be from Chumley himself — but that can’t be because why would he freakishly refer to himself in the third person?
Chumley first said that I don’t know what a DDOS attack is — although I defined it in this comment before he did — and although this site has had to deal with actual DDOS attacks before. He’s now retreated to the position that this didn’t act like a DDOS attack. Not all such attacks act the same way (do they include Trojan Horses or other malware? How large is the network of people who may be trying to do this manually) — although at the very early stages (I caught it almost as soon as it started) this sort of aggressive scraping would not necessarily be distinguishable from a true DDOS.
Personally, I don’t believe that Chumley has worked “in cybersecurity” for 30 years. He might have been cybersecurity adjacent — as I was when the modern internet was in large part being created by people including many of my friends at the University of Michigan when I was in graduate school — but I would not say that that made me anything like an expert. Chumley’s role is getting mentions of his clients (such as they are) out where they can do them some good — based on what seems to be a glib and client-biased understanding of the matters at hand — and I’ve seen no indication that he’s particularly good at that either. It’s like his claiming that he’s been in major league baseball for thirty years because he’s been a fan of it and occasionally writes about “the business” of it.
Why didn’t we get on the press list for Umberg’s office? We don’t ask to get on press lists, that why. I can’t think of even one that we’re on. We’re not a PR outfit; we don’t generally reprint press releases the way Chumley does, in stories showing himself to be an author. We will sometimes reprint statements that appear on social media, but we generally use our own brains to analyze things — with more depth than a knee-jerk and self-interested take like one finds at his shoddy joint.
As for trying to convince candidates that they shouldn’t want our endorsement — and we don’t invite candidates to seek our endorsements. We just review available information about them and do the sort of analysis that we think that our readers would do if they had the time, energy, expertise, and inclination. But let’s be clear — candidates who don’t want our endorsement are welcome to write a comment here and say so, and we’ll try to honor that unless they truly are the better candidate, in which event it’s just too bad for them. (I expect that most candidates who’s write in would have been in no danger of an endorsement anyway.)
Chumley fancies himself as living rent-free in our heads. It’s like a piece of dog shit that we inadvertently stepped on bragging about “living rent free on our shoes.” Only until we wipe it off!
(N.b.: I wasn’t actually going to ask the Associated Press for their position on Chumley’s article –but now I suppose I might as well. It’ll be interesting!)
I assumed that he approved of the editorial message he posted . You are right, of course.
As to Umberg (and Daly) they are both highly transactional cats and I suspect their opposition to the stadium rip-off was based on something other than the salutary effects of
good government.
Leave my hair (or lack thereof) out of this!
Too late, good sir!
I still think that the point you made was quite smart — and could have been decisive!
What collusion?
I presume that Umberg meant collusion between Sidhu and people associated with Arte or within his corporation, or the Angels or outside allies, agents, etc.
If you’re going to be campaigning on a “Leave Arte Alone!” campaign, like that one bawling kid did with Britney Spears, we’ll be glad to post your video!
You and Tommy assume quite a bit.
You need to work on being less vague. You sound like a 1990s-era bot. Flesh it out, candidate! Give more than the conclusion!
Aw, c’mon dude. Are you that dense? Sidu appoints himself sole negotiator (ahem) then shares sensitive City data with those whom he is supposed to be negotiating.
At this point Sidhu is committing a crime. It’s called honest services fraud (although to his way of thinking what’s good for him must be good for everybody else). And since the Angel’s negotiators (I mean the ones not named Sidhu) know this they are part of a conspiracy – another crime.
Right. Nobody has been charged; yet. The obvious remains obvious.
Zenger – The affidavit states that it is not necessarily a bad thing to divulge such information – that to do so can help move negotiations along.
Being a Sidhu apologist in the run-up to an election is a bold choice, Mike.
I’m going to have too start monitoring you financials to see who is donating to you — and who suddenly starts.
Not a Sidhu apologist. His helicopter tax thing appears to have been illegal. I wouldn’t want him as a public official just for that. I am on the side of accuracy in journalism and transparency in politics.
I’ve never heard of a poker player showing his hand being a “good” thing; except for the guy he’s betting against. Tell me again what you’re running for?
I made a comment here responding to Diamond about a request for OJB to not endorse me. I haven’t seen that comment posted.
It’s in this very comments section, Tardif.
I still suspect that you’re trying to use reverse psychology on me. I’m not falling for it!
Orange Juice Blog Please ask to all #ShameHateOC would humbly request of you to ring Janice Hahn (213)974-4444 and say #RemoveHinduphobe
#BanJamesMai #StopHinduphobia #HinduphobicVandal #HindusUnderAttackinUS
HindusUnderAttackbyJamesMai
#JamesMai call Mr Jay Chang racist, but is all false. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02PhKGZFXfoy8MjjFMEJZ2UuCE273NwEAbPz1MvekiB7TbgyDBtQDaEMaQ15TQZPopl&id=100083848666531
http://www.facebook.com⁄shamehate
I’m guessing he means Jay Chen?
Probably, but I’m not sure. The link seems to be to a story about Janice Hahn.
That said: this seems like a worthy request, so even though this is an Orange County-focused blog, go ahead and tell Janice Hahn to oppose Hinduphobia. I think that message would be stronger with a bit more background of why she’s being chosen as a target for the request, and precisely what prompts the request (she’s nowhere near Irvine), but maybe we’ll get that information in a follow-up.
(This reminds me that I haven’t been to Norwalk since pre-Covid times; I really have to go there soon!)
To encapsulate one of Greg’s long DDOS comments above (which readers may not make it thru), it looks likely that what appeared to be a two-to-three day DDOS attack in late April was actually the FBI searching and archiving every story and comment in this blog’s nearly 20-year history.
Which makes us proud, and not feel at all foolish.
Or maybe it was Pacific Strategies NEW Newport Beach based subsidiary doing opposition research for….Trevor, Gloria, The Natalie’s and Valencia etc all.
Your past is POISIONESS and will come back to haunt you and ANY collateral damage… [bla bla bla etc…]
Diamond: ” But let’s be clear — candidates who don’t want our endorsement are welcome to write a comment here and say so ..”
I don’t want your endorsement. Although, I have heard that some Bernie-crats would prefer me over the other guy.
Mike Tardif
Candidate CA AD68
Are you using reverse psychology on me, Tardif? Like “oh, if I endorse Tardif, he’ll be miserable, so I’ll do it”? Very clever, but not clever enough!