Thread: CA:Nunez cries racism over attacks on his spending

Those remarks are abolutely racist and should be aired nationwide!

Americanme , good point ! i offer also to your post that the Arnoldnator put in office by Warren Buffet (please people don't ask me how i know this , it was all over tv during Arnolds campaign) i'ld say Mr.Buffet is very quiet but getting his cheap labor for Berkshire . What i'm trying to say is lets look at all point of view with this problem of government Sedition . Some people think of Buffet as a "God" , Where as i think of him as a problem and quiet Globalist . imho

zxsaedr4ws="tencz57"]Americanme , good point ! i offer also to your post that the Arnoldnator put in office by Warren Buffet (please people don't ask me how i know this , it was all over tv during Arnolds campaign) i'ld say Mr.Buffet is very quiet but getting his cheap labor for Berkshire . What i'm trying to say is lets look at all point of view with this problem of government Sedition . Some people think of Buffet as a "God" , Where as i think of him as a problem and quiet Globalist . imho[/quote]

Interesting...'tencz57'....I had not heard about Buffett supporting Arnold, but I'm certainly not surprised! He may not be as vocal as his 'partner', Bill Gates, but between the two of them...they have the most wealth and the most power. I wonder who they will be backing in 2010!

When all else fails play the race card! They think they can shut everybody up by yelling racist.

This man is dangerous. We need to keep an eye on him and his political ambitions. He definitely wants to make California into Mexico.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Lame Duck California Politician Plays to Mexico Audience

By Barnard R. Thompson

California Assembly Speaker Fabián Núñez, the lame duck representative from Los Angeles, led a group of three (maybe four?) state legislators to Mexico City in early May, on a four day visit “to meet with Mexican President Calderón, business and political leaders.â€

Fabian Rolls Snake Eyes
Bye-bye, Vuitton, Bordeaux and once-promising career

By MARC COOPER
Tuesday, February 12, 2008 - 3:30 pm
WITH GREAT PRIDE, I ACCEPTED the honor a few months back of being labeled "the state's worst political journalist" by one of the party flacks who works for the soon-to-be ex-speaker of the Assembly, Fabian Núñez. In this business, it's all about collecting the right enemies. And now I'm just as flattered to have been among the first to have correctly predicted —way back in the summer — that Núñez's political career would come to a humiliating end, as it precisely did, in last week's election.

In spite of vigorous protests from the French national Chamber of Commerce, distraught at losing one of its most loyal and profligate consumers, it's strictly adieu Fabian, as the speaker lost his bid for a six-year term extension when the voters wisely kiboshed Proposition 93. No more $2,562 shopping sprees at Louis Vuitton's Paris outlet, no more $5,149 wine purchases from Bordeaux (and no more $2,701 gift belt buckles for Arnold) funneled out of Mr. Speaker's campaign funds. VoilÃ*! No more Mr. Speaker.

Even more satisfying for those of us ranked by his loyal staff as dwellers in the bottom drawer of political journalism, long before our poorly written and scantily read screeds are lost in cyberspace, Fabian's political legacy will be reduced to little more than an asterisk.

It's a true tragedy, I say with as much sincerity as possible. One of 12 children born to migrant Mexican workers (a maid and a gardener), who spent the first eight years of his life in Tijuana, Núñez was a prototypical American success story. He met his wife in the 1980s when they were organizing events for Cesar Chavez. Núñez earned double B.A.s from Pitzer College, and at a young age was doing God's work lobbying — uphill — for the LAUSD. By the year 2000, he took over as political director for the mighty County Federation of Labor. With labor's staunch support, he gained entrance into the state Assembly two years later at age 36. After only another two years, he was elected speaker. Núñez embodied what was most promising about a new generation of emerging Latino political clout, especially when teamed up with labor.

Problem is, power corrupts. Núñez quite literally was intoxicated — and those crates of Bordeaux were the symptom, not the cause, of his inebriation. Soon, he was nesting in a cushy $1.2 million home outside Sacramento. His wife was lavished with a six-figure state contract (benefiting corporate hospitals, not patients). He was putting his name on legislation initiated by Democratic colleagues, bigfooting them for personal glory. At times, you needed the help of a proctologist to probe the depth of his partnership with Schwarzenegger. In the middle of a hard-fought gubernatorial election, Núñez couldn't be bothered to show up for his own party's state convention. He was too busy trudging the greens with a pack of corporate lobbyists up at Pebble Beach.

This past year, he knifed his own labor allies in the back, railroading through the Legislature a package of four giveaway gambling deals with the richest Indian tribes in the state. Núñez's political logic, if not his motivation, was transparent. In fact, he didn't give a damn about the tribes. What he most wanted was to neutralize their potential opposition to the shameful Prop. 93, which was — at its core — a sham. In the name of tightening up term limits, the measure would have extended his term and that of another amateur sommelier, state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata. Worried that the deep-pocket tribes might line up against him, he greased through their deal and inflamed the unions. "The bottom line: It was all about Prop. 93 and [Núñez's] ambition to continue to be speaker and his terror that the Big Four gambling tribes would put money against [the measure] if he didn't do their bidding," Jack Gribbon, California political director of UNITE Here, a labor union that opposed the gambling deals, told the San Francisco Chronicle last month. "It was one of the coldest political calculations that I have seen in my life."

But Núñez was too smart by one-half. The Indians wound up spending $100 million to get their juicy gambling deals approved last week by guilt-ridden California voters. And just as Núñez wished, they stayed out of the term-limit fight. What the speaker didn't count on, however, was that the voters were not quite as dumb as he had hoped. There had long been promises that the term-limit measure would be paired up with much-needed and long-promised redistricting reform — a move that would at least loosen the Mafia-like grip that both parties currently hold over the drawing up of legislative districts. But Núñez and his Sacramento cronies were just too greedy to make the deal the voters (not the tribal lobbyists) wanted. The pols wanted to get to heaven without having to die, so instead they killed off any attempt at redistricting reform. And with it, any desire by voters to give these power freaks an extension of their terms. Núñez gamed himself right off the table.

Nor does he stand much of a chance of running for mayor of Los Angeles when the seat opens up in 2009. His good friend Antonio Villaraigosa has already botched what was considered a sure shot at governor by ceding front-runner status to Jerry Brown and is now likely to want to re-up at City Hall.

Almost certainly, Fabian will soon resurrect as a private-sector lobbyist, most likely with his Big Telecom friends. But as a political figure, the markers he will leave behind are 10,000 extra slot machines we never needed. The most Núñez can now expect from history is that every time someone tosses a quarter into the black void of one of those machine's bottomless bellies, he will recall how Mr. Speaker threw away his once-bright political career
http://www.laweekly.com/news/dissonance ... yes/18316/

Playing a losing race card
Fabian Nuñez's and Spike Lee's recent outbursts on racism exemplify the kind of identity politics that are fading away.
May 24, 2008

Former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez is one of California's most gifted politicians; filmmaker Spike Lee is a remarkable American artist. This week, both of them made utter fools of themselves, and understanding exactly how they did so tells us something important about where we are as a people and as a country.

There was a time, not long ago, when the worst hypocrisy in American public life was the pretense that race and ethnicity somehow didn't matter. But that's not the case any more. Although race is still a factor in our national life, it's hardly a deterministic one and, today, there are few fallacies more corrosive than the assertion that only race matters.

That's part of Sen. Barack Obama's appeal to young voters. When he discusses race, it's in a language intelligible to a generation that has grown up in a nation where two successive secretaries of State have been African American and the last U.S. attorney general was a Latino -- all appointed by a Republican president. It's a country in which black men have held the top spots in the largest financial services and communications companies and Asian Americans occupy the corner offices in many of the economy's most forward-looking corporations.

A colorblind society? Hardly. But in 2008, Americans -- and particularly young Americans -- are not prone to be sympathetic when leading figures from politics or culture play the race card, as both Nuñez and Lee did so clumsily this week.

Nuñez went on Univision's Spanish-language political program "Voz y Voto" and lashed out at reports in The Times that he had spent lavishly from his campaign funds on foreign travel and luxury goods. As you may recall, last fall this paper's Sacramento bureau reported that Nuñez had spent nearly $50,000 donated by "friends" on air travel to Europe and Argentina. He spent $5,149 for "a meeting" in the cellar of a Bordeaux wine shop. More than $2,500 went to buy "gifts" at Louis Vuitton in Paris.

One of the more interesting extravagances was the $8,745 tab the then-speaker ran up at the Hotel Arts in Barcelona, Spain. The bill included the services of a "translator." Although nobody expects the speaker of the California Assembly to speak Catalan, and although not all Catalonians speak English, they all speak Spanish, just like Nuñez. (Actually, the apogee -- or nadir, if you will -- of the former speaker's generosity was the $2,701 handmade belt buckle Nuñez bought as a gift for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The zillionaire former movie star returned it as "too lavish.")

Now that he's no longer speaker, Nuñez addressed the subject head-on this week. "Everyone's done it like this," he told his interviewer. "The difference is there are some in politics who want to judge me in a certain manner. Because of the fact I am Mexican, they think I have to sleep under a cactus and eat from taco stands. ... The only thing that really results out of this is that groups that don't like Latinos use this as a weapon to inflame anti-Mexican, anti-Latino politics."

Really? Over the last 10 years, there have been six speakers of the Assembly. Three have been Latinos -- including Antonio Villaraigosa, the current mayor of Los Angeles -- two have been African Americans and one was a white male. None of them required the services of a Catalan translator or felt the need to hold meetings surrounded by aging barrels of Bordeaux. Nuñez's attempt to attribute any objections about his thoroughly objectionable conduct to his ethnicity is a perverse moral reductionism -- a mirror image, in fact, of the sort of racist view that categorically denied a person's achievements because of his race.

People criticized Nuñez's extravagance for a simple reason: They resent seeing public office used like a personal ATM, no matter what language their parents spoke at home. Moreover, they find this sort of conduct particularly hard to accept when the elected official comes out of the labor movement, as the former speaker proudly does, and belongs to a party that claims to represent the interests of working people.

Hypocrisy, it turns out, is colorblind. While Nuñez's toss of the race card was transparent and self-serving, Lee's was both those things -- and something slightly nastier. The director was in Cannes, serving on one of the film festival's minor juries, when he took the opportunity to slam Clint Eastwood for the absence of African American characters in his critically acclaimed films on the bloodiest battle of World War II's Pacific campaign, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima."

"He did two films about Iwo Jima back to back, and there was not one black soldier in both of those films," Lee said. "Many veterans, African Americans, who survived that war are upset at Clint Eastwood. In his vision of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist. Simple as that. I have a different version."

You bet he does, which is why his next picture just happens to be the story of four soldiers serving in an all-black Army division in Italy. Controversy makes good publicity, and envy of Eastwood's success is an understandable, if not particularly admirable, trait.

There is, however, the small matter of history and dramatic storytelling. Putting aside the fact that there were no "soldiers" on Iwo Jima, only Marines, let's stipulate for the record that it might be hard to work too many African Americans into a story about the Japanese Imperial Army, which is what "Letters from Iwo Jima" was.

As far as "Flags of Our Fathers" goes, 900 of the 19,168 black Americans who served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II were among the 250,000 Americans who ultimately went ashore there. All were in rigidly segregated units. Only the black Marines of the 8th Ammunition Company came ashore during the second and third waves, which would have put them on the island in time for the flag-raising that was the subject of the film.

Moreover, the fact of the matter is that looking back over Eastwood's directorial career -- including his Oscar-winning films "Unforgiven" and "Million Dollar Baby" -- there's probably no filmmaker of similar stature in Hollywood history who has so unself-consciously created central roles for actors who just happened to be African American.

Both the outbursts we heard this week belong to the era of identity politics and culture that is now thankfully fading. From the start, the insistence that race and ethnicity were central to American identity constituted an intellectual swamp that ultimately had to drain into a moral sewer. That's why its outflow -- like the remarks Nuñez and Lee made this week -- now strike us as bilge.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com
http://tinyurl.com/3zyka4