Loose Cheeks, June 1, 2008 Primary Election Extra

Loose Cheeks, May 17, 2008

FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT

Loose Cheeks: Hot Tips
By Lucas Smithereen
Loose Cheeks Senior Editor

Got a hot tip for Loose Cheeks? Call the Loose Cheeks hot-tip line: (000) CHE-EEKS. We’ll get back to you whenever.

Item #1

Dust-up in corral behind the Slacker-Raptor Barn Dance:

Loose Cheeks’ intrepid reporter, A.J. Gangle, stepped out of the barn during the recent California Rangeland Coalition luncheon in Le Grand and noticed a huge cloud of dust rising from the corral. Through this dust cloud Gangle could hear the angry voices of Merced County Farm Bureau President Peter Koch and Executive Director Diana Westmoreland Pedrozo disputing a political matter. As the executive director and “her” president clawed and scratched each other on the ground (or was it the president and “his” executive director – one is never sure with the Farm Bureau), Gangle thought he made out yet another form, lurking over them, and another voice, saying: “How did they get here? Who invited them? Why is SHE here at all?”

Gangle, it should be noted, is a veteran on Merced County Agriculture’s perpetual auto-celebration circuit, in which the same heirs and heiresses congratulate each other in the same tedious round of events in honor of each other, in the name of something called “Agriculture,” infinitely less important than who owns the land. Gangle, a veteran of these witless events for many years, long ago concluded they had nothing to do with farming and everything to do with how much dirt you inherited. So, his ears perked up. It sounded like someone had been included in the Rangeland Coalition feed that didn’t own enough to qualify. He began connecting dots.

He’d noticed that the reception to the president of the San Joaquin Raptor Rescue Center had been real chilly at the sign-up table by the barn door. He noticed also that the cowboy president of the Rangeland Coalition had not acknowledged that the Raptor Center and the San Joaquin Valley Conservancy in his speech about the Coalition. Members of Raptor and the Conservancy helped draft the Resolution and are founding members of the Coalition of ranchers and environmentalists being celebrated that day. But no environmentalists from Merced County were celebrated because that would be an acknowledgement of a reality beyond the ownership of dirt.

Gangle also noticed that the Raptor president sat next to Claudine Sherron, running for supervisor against Deidre Kelsey, the Farm Bureau’s “champion of agriculture,” and one of Diana Westmoreland Pedrozo’s “best friends.”

(In the interest of full disclosure, Gangle owns no dirt and is not the wife of either a dope-growing aggregate miner or a new-town-developing dairyman; therefore Gangle is not one of the executive director’s “best friends.”)

At length, the Farm Bureau President Koch emerged from the dust cloud, “skalling” darkly and reentered the barn in silence. President Skal Koch, however, always the European gentlemen (north of the Beer/Wine Line, of course), in public thanked the president of the Raptor Center for attending the event.

Against one barn wall stood incumbent supervisor Deidre Kelsey, seething at the social affront of a genuine Merced County Agriculture event with her opponent in the same room. Gangle barely escaped a whistling dagger from the supe’s eyeballs that buried itself three inches above the head of a cook in the opposite wall. When the event broke up, there were burn scars on the wall where Kelsey had been leaning.

If Kelsey’s energetic denial of reality wasn’t enough, there were two slackers (deadbeats) in the room, one Farm Bureau director and one Merced Irrigation District director, who owe the despised and socially inappropriate Raptor Center a lot of money for a project. The two slackers were also busy denying reality: Raptor’s presence and their own legal debts.

All things considered, Gangle thought it was another perfect auto-celebration of the Merced County Agriculture Society of Rich Landowners, a group so incredibly impressed with themselves that they cannot acknowledge that others might oppose their political “champion” and want some of them to pay their debts. The view the Society has of its local environmentalists reminded Gangle of a story he once heard from a Polish landowner, whose property had been expropriated after WWII. “The Jewish tailors made our suits but we never paid for them until we had worn them for a year or more. That’s the only proper way to treat tailors.”

Item #2

A vote for Sanders is a vote for Pollard.

Loose Cheeks was edified by reading this morning’s local McClatchy Chain outlet, when it learned that if Merced City Councilman Jim Sanders, the born-again Mussolini freak, is elected to the County Board of Supervisors, Carl Pollard will be reappointed to the City Council because he received the second-highest number of votes while losing in the last election. As a result, Pollard, a political accident that had happened even before his first arrival on the City Council, could happen again.

Item #3

The Et Al situation.

Gangle has known for months about the rise of a powerful new social and political group in Merced, called Et Al. However, the rumors have been elusive, particularly about a mysterious flak whiz known only as “Tiko,” variously described as a Tijuana taxi driver, a Sacramento public relations ace or as a dog of great genius and eloquence in English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Basque. In short, Gangle didn’t have much to go on and therefore and none of it made sense.

However, at the most recent Merced County Planning Commission meeting (the one where Commissioner Cindy Lashbrook described the California Environmental Quality Act as a “moving target” while justifying her vote for another aggregate project), a member of the public mentioned Et Al and defined it as a group composed of “all the people who work for a living and don’t have time to attend morning meetings of the planning commission.”

Still, Gangle would have regarded Et Al as a mere rhetorical trope of the public had it not been for County Assistant Counsel Bob Gabriele, who targeted the group for special scrutiny. “You mention Et Al,” he said, addressing a member of the public. Who is Et Al? the county lawyer wanted to know.

Now this Gabriele is a wise and cunning jurist, who has the Merced County public’s interest always at heart. It was clear from his incipient interrogation that, like former Supervisor Gloria Cortez-Keene and that lion of liberty, former County Counsel Ruben Castillo, that Gabriele sensed a Homeland Security issue behind the detailed comments made by the member of the public on the environmental destruction that would be caused by the proposed expansion of the Jaxon Enterprises mining project on Mariposa Creek and the deficiencies of the environmental impact report, jointly prepared by the miner’s consultants and our own blameless and expert planning department.

Gangle had learned from other established environmental groups in Merced County that they fear the arrival of Et Al, and the mysterious “Tiko” in the region.

“We don’t know anything about them,” one local environmentalist, who wished to remain anonymous, said. “But they scare us. This Tiko is a disruptive influence. Here today, gone tomorrow. Can’t get a handle on him.”

If you personally know anything about Et Al or Tiko, please give Gangle a jingle.

Item #4

Dalhart Texas voters perplexed:

It is rumored that outside the construction site of the new Hilmar Cheese Co. (“Largest Cheese Factory in the World”) plant in Dalhart TX, there are a number of political signs urging citizens to vote for Deidre Kelsey for Supervisor. The Dalhart public is confused.

First, they don’t know what a supervisor is, at least not one to vote for, in Texas, where counties have commissioners, not supervisors, and department heads are called supervisors but you don’t get to vote for them.

But, being Texans, they have a nose for political chicanery.

“It’s some Karl Rove deal,” said a Dalhart citizen somewhere between 25 and 70 years of age, who refused to give his/her name. “This Deidre Kelsey shows up on the Internet as a member of the state Leadership Team for John McCain in California. And if that ain’t enough, they got that Merced County sheriff in it, too. What’s that about?” the Dalhart citizen asked Gangle. ‘Two out of 12 leaders from one cow county in a real estate bust?”

“I haven’t a clue,” Gangle replied.

“’Course, you ain’t going to be a cow county after we get the Largest Cheese Factory in the World built here in Dalhart,” the Dalhartian said. “What are you going to do, grow pot?”

“I haven’t a clue on that either,” Gangle replied. “Maybe the sheriff would know.”

“Well, thank the Lord we got Et Al down here is all I can say,” said the ageless and genderless Dalhartian.

“You got Et Al down there, too?” Gangle asked.

“Sure we do. You think we were all born in a barn?”

“Have you ever heard of a person named Tiko?”

“I disremember the name and don’t know a thing about him, but he’s a genius,” the citizen said, hanging up on Gangle.

Item # 5

Our intrepid reporter reported he was absolutely delighted to find the Merced County Farm Bureau was again posting its comic newsletter on its website.

Former President Louie “Long-nose” Bandoni is featured in a photo on the front page of the April edition, holding a cake shaped like the head of Pinocchio. Considering the heaps of well-known substances Bandoni and Diana Westmoreland Pedrozo shoveled the afternoon two members of a family in the Farm Bureau for more than 50 years inquired about the Farm Bureau endorsement process for Deidre Kelsey, the cake’s nose would have probably grown several inches since the picture was taken had it not been devoured by the disciples of that simple creed: “We farm. You eat.”

And how about that May edition with the big headline “Farm Bureau Board of Directors Unanimously Support Longtime Champion of Agriculture”?

Mr. Smithereen said he thought “supports” would be more grammatically correct, but understood that the agricultural heritage and the way of life of the Merced County Farm Bureau placed its editors well above mere grammar.

The editorial stated that the “Farm Bureau determined that Kelsey’s experience and commitment to agriculture is well documented” and that “Her vision, proven experience and commitment to farmers and ranchers has been proven…”

“What are they trying to prove?” Smithereen asked. “And how would the Farm Bureau know it was well documented? Nobody at the Farm Bureau reads documents. All they know is what they hear from Deidre. So, if Deidre told them her experience and commitment to agriculture was well documented and proven, they’d believe it, I guess.”

“They are trying to prove that she doesn’t have an opponent,” Gangle said. “But she does. Her name is Claudine Sherron, she has real campaign signs all over the 4th district, and walks real precincts despite the fact Kelsey and the Farm Bureau deny her existence.

“Well now,” Smithereen replied. “I think they want to prove some other things, too.

“The Merced County Farm Bureau wants to prove that the Kelsey family never contributed a dime to the San Joaquin Raptor Rescue Center for projects against Kelsey competitors in the aggregate business. Of course the Farm Bureau also wants to prove it didn’t contribute to any Raptor Center projects either.

“And what they really, really want to prove is that Kelsey wasn’t on both sides in the backroom on those projects, one foot in the petitioners’ camp, the other foot in the respondent County’s camp, playing both ends against the middle, ‘cause that sounds like the statutory definition of ‘conflict of interest.’ And what information she didn’t get herself, the Farm Bureau leaked to her.

“The Farm Bureau wants to prove that their blameless ‘champion of agriculture’ is a non-partisan county supervisor and not a high-ranking official in the state Republican Party, who is a member of the John McCain campaign leadership committee.

“The Farm Bureau wants to prove that the people that live along the river from the Crocker-Huffman Dam to the confluence (including Stevinson) don’t deserve political representation on any board that makes land-use decisions.

“The Farm Bureau wants to prove that Kelsey’s husband wasn’t one of the seven board members who unanimously endorsed her and that another member of the endorsement team was the husband of her appointee to the Planning Commission.

“But, you’re right, too,” he continued. “They want to prove Claudine Sherron doesn’t exist by not publishing her response to their questions in their comic book – I mean newsletter. They want to prove that Kelsey wasn’t originally in favor of the Riverside Motorsports Park project, either.

“The Farm Bureau also wants to prove that Kelsey does not receive contributions for her campaigns from developers in Carmel, Monterey, Danville, Del Mar, Fresno, Sacramento and Pleasanton, while she’s doing all this fine work to maintain agriculture in Merced County.

“That’s what the Merced County Farm Bureau wants to prove she didn’t do,” Smithereen summarized. “The documents say otherwise, but, like I say, the Farm Bureau wouldn’t know a document from a Narwhal. All they know is what Kelsey tells them. It’s an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny information loop.

“The other thing is,” Smithereen concluded, “Deidre Kelsey doesn’t have an original idea in her head. Sherron’s whole campaign is built on the promise of being a voice representing everyone in her district, so Kelsey steals the line for her glossy mailer. For 10 years, Kelsey has denied overwhelming evidence of backroom deals, the so-called ‘public process’ is anything but transparent, and documents are constantly suppressed. All she represents is a few large landowners and some developers. The people of Hopeton/Amsterdam and Stevinson have been asking for municipal advisory councils for seven years. Kelsey has refused to help them. Everyone knows this and she even said it in the radio debate: ‘Merced County is not for everybody.’ She thinks the County is for her and the tiny elite around her – people in such an advanced state of denial of reality they think the sky is blue and the water is clean.”

Loose Cheeks moved on to “Skal!” the column of President Peter Koch. Koch, photographed with a very trendy “Boyish Campesino” look, announced that the Merced County Farm Bureau was going to make “Water” its top issue this summer.

“Oh boy, oh boy!” gasped Gangle. “I can hardly wait! The mind staggers at the possibilities of Merced County Farm Bureau meditations on water. How much more blame can environmental law and regulations and state and federal resource agencies take, with the Merced County Farm Bureau adding its voice to those in the state making the hard, right decisions: the governor, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Westlands Water District, Congressman Devin Nunes, the Blue Ribbon Peripheral Canal Campaign Committee, Sen. Diane Feinstein and the others? Already in the president’s rhetoric, the word ‘balance’ has made its dark appearance, yet another moving target of the ambitious nouveau agricultural elite. Your heirs and heiresses don’t talk about balance much. They tend to speak with long noses about parcel splits.”