Is a marine morally obliged to remain a Republican for life?

A Newspaper Frets Over Fletcher and the GOP Brand
May 3, 2012
By Scott Lewis
Voice of San Diego

On Sunday, U-T San Diego implied in an editorial that Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher's integrity as a Marine was in question after he abandoned the Republican Party in the middle of his run for mayor. While that point seemed to get the most attention in the discussion the editorial provoked, it was the part right before that I found most intriguing (emphasis added):

And in leaving the Republican Party as he did, criticizing it as equally to blame for political dysfunction, he essentially left his colleagues behind, harming Republicans running for office. Does this demonstrate a Marine’s loyalty?

I asked U-T editorial page editor Bill Osborne, over Twitter, how Fletcher was hurting other local Republican candidates. His answer: "... the editorial was saying he damaged the GOP brand."

The paper also says he's got some questions to answer.

Fletcher has decided to hit the U-T back, saying he already answered them in an interview shortly after leaving the party.

His campaign released the audio and a transcript of a March 29 on-the-record interview he did with the editorial board. Here's a link to the transcript of it, produced by Fletcher's campaign team. And here's audio (mp3).

The conversation opens a window into the newspaper's worry about the Republican Party and a broader confusion in the community between party and principle.

As people discuss Fletcher's defection from the party, these two concepts seem to have become interchangeable. They are not.

And if we can understand them better, we might be able to understand what's going on.

Take this question from U-T editor Jeff Light to Fletcher during the interview:

I think this whole thing is interesting. Let me ask you this. I think you’ve put us sort of in a tough position. We as an editorial board do not want to see Bob Filner get through to the general election, because the environment around the general election is much more favorable to Bob Filner. So we certainly want to keep that from happening. On the other hand, some of the things you said, it was a little more than just 'hey I just want to be an independent voice.' And I think this was what Pete Wilson was reacting to. It was sort of that message that 'well, the Republican Party is bad.' How can we get behind you given that we've got a lot of Republican backing and Republican tradition? I think that puts us in a tough position.

Fletcher's response:

Well I think you’ve got to go and look at what I actually said. And what I said is that I’m rejecting the partisan environment of today. People say ‘well did you ever consider becoming a Democrat.’ I didn’t. Because I think there’s unwillingness on that side as well to step out and solve problems, whether we’re talking about pensions or managed competition or some of these other types of issues.

And the other thing is that there’s not one position of mine that’s changed. There’s not one issue that’s changed. There’s not one principle that’s changed. The only thing that’s changed is the party label. And folks that have a tremendous amount of consternation in the move, it’s more of an adherence to that label than to what I represent and what I’ve been. I’m the exact same person today as I was yesterday as I was the day before.

Many folks have struggled with this point and say things like "But he's still a Republican! His wife worked for George W. Bush!" Even Tony Krvaric, the chairman of the San Diego County Republican Party, put it this way in a recent U-T story: "This is somebody who was a partisan Republican and is trying to sell himself as something different."

Actually, a partisan, with its strict definition, is exactly what he no longer is.

A party in this country is a collection of individuals and interests who organize together in order to gain power. Here, our parties are not ideologically pure.

What Fletcher was doing was not saying he was becoming more liberal or more like the Democratic Party. What he was just saying was that he was sick of working with the Republican Party and trying to please them.

And what the U-T appears to be saying, in many, many words, is that it is now partisan above other considerations. I know, it's not exactly news that the U-T prefers Republicans. But it wasn't that long ago that the paper endorsed a Democrat named Mike Aguirre for city attorney. It has endorsed others.

Fealty to the GOP would be a new litmus test for support from the paper.

Liberals who are suspicious that Fletcher has not actually become more progressive in the last two months should be. He insists time and time again, in this extraordinary discussion with the U-T, that he has not changed his positions...

GOP headquarters abandoned, left in 'mind-boggling' disarray, landlord says

Jan 26, 2011
Whine and chocolates
GOP headquarters abandoned, left in 'mind-boggling' disarray, landlord says
By John R. Lamb
City Beat

“No one wants to quit when he’s losing and no one wants to quit when he’s winning.” —Richard Strauss

These are shaky times for our beloved friends over at San Diego Republican headquarters, wherever that might be now...

“You wouldn’t believe what they ditched in the trash bin!” said Antoine Georges, who’s owned the building for 20 years. “Thousands of things. Office supplies, staplers— maybe 30 or 40 staplers, the big kind for campaign work—pots and pans, boxes and boxes of stuff, even brand-new live plants! It was just mind-boggling.”

A lively 62-year-old Lebanese man who considers himself fiscally conservative but socially liberal (he says he’s friends with Republican Congressmember Darrell Issa and a cousin of Ralph Nader), Georges told Spin Cycle that he had grown suspicious of his tenants in Suite 107 for some time.

He’d heard rumors that the tenant had wanted to break the lease. Georges said the head honcho of the local GOP, Tony Krvaric, had asked him on several occasions if he’d consider donating the rent as a party gift. Georges said he declined.

Rent checks of roughly $4,500, he said, started coming later and later in the month. The December lease payment, for example, while due Dec. 1, arrived more than three weeks late on Christmas Eve.
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But the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, activity in the suite seemed to pick up, despite it being a typically down time for campaign events. Over previous weeks, Georges said the local GOP “made up some story” that they were going to remodel the 2,700-square-foot office space. Soon, trucks would show up to haul away office materials, Georges said.

Georges said a truck associated with a paper-shredding company appeared one day and hauled off what he described as “20 or 30 boxes of files.” Added Georges: “I have no idea what was in the boxes. I just know there were a lot of them.”

The final move came just before New Year’s Day, when a GOP employee removed a Republican sign that had been bolted to a wall, placed it in a truck and drove off.

A few days later, Georges said he got a letter from Krvaric, claiming the landlord had breached the lease and that the GOP would like its security deposit back.

Georges laughed. “The place is trashed!” he said. “It needs new carpet. The walls need to be repaired because they literally glued campaign signs to the wallpaper. And they still left a bunch of stuff behind! Empty file cabinets, furniture. And they never returned the keys, so now I have to have all the locks changed.”...

Randy "Duke" Cunningham regrets guilty plea

Disgraced ex-congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham regrets guilty plea
Nov 22, 2010
CBS Channel 8 San Diego

SAN DIEGO (CNS) - In his first media interview since going to prison, Randy "Duke" Cunningham said he regrets pleading guilty almost five years ago to conspiracy and tax evasion charges, and that he did so on the advice of his lawyers when he was physically and emotionally weakened.

The former GOP congressman from Rancho Santa Fe is serving eight years and four months in the Federal Corrections Institution in Tucson after admitting to taking $2.4 million in bribes from two defense contractors in exchange for steering government contracts their way.

During the nearly hourlong interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune, he also said his visitors have included former Republican Reps. Duncan Hunter of Alpine and Ron Packard of Carlsbad but his only family member who has come is his son. He said his wife, whom is in the process of divorcing him, and their two daughters do not communicate with him.

The 68-year-old former Navy fighter pilot also told the newspaper he fears the prostate cancer that caused him to drop nearly 100 pounds during the scandal has returned.

Upon his sentencing in 2006, Cunningham told a judge his decision to plea guilty was not made under duress. But to the Union-Tribune this month, he said he was pressured by lawyers who said it would costs millions to fight the charges and he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Those lawyers could not be reached for comment, according to the newspaper.

San Diego sheriff's department raids Francine Busby fundraiser

Okay, Bonnie Dumanis, this is getting to be a bit one-sided. You prosecuted a young man for trying to take a picture at Republican Cheryl Cox's fundraiser. Let's see how you handle a case of far greater abuse at a Democratic fundraiser. The very least that should be done is to make the caller (who was not a neighbor) pay for the cost of the helicopter and charge him with making a false police report.

Why were a canine unit and helicopter deemed necessary for this action? What on earth did the caller say, if anything, to make the sheriff's department pull out all the stops? Or was it the sheriff's department that overreacted?

Who Was Busby's Party Pooper?
Voice of San Diego
By WILL CARLESS
July 2, 2009

On June 26, at 9 p.m. someone called the San Diego Sheriff's Department and made what the department has described as a "noise complaint." The call resulted in several deputies, a K-9 unit and a helicopter being deployed to a private residence where a political fundraiser was being held for congressional candidate Francine Busby.

The evening ended in chaos, with the host of the fundraiser in jail accused of obstructing a peace officer and battery on a peace officer and several middle-aged guests alleging excessive force by a deputy who they claim shot pepper spray indiscriminately at a crowd of guests.

Of all the questions to surface since that evening, the identity of the mystery caller to the Sheriff's Department, and the nature of his or her complaint remain perhaps the most perplexing. Because the department won’t reveal any information about the caller and won't release any documents or recordings of the incident, the public has no way of knowing if the caller was a disgruntled neighbor, upset about noise from the party, or a political saboteur, intent on disrupting Busby's fundraiser.

For her part, Busby wants to know if the caller was the same person who hid in some bushes on a plot adjacent to the home where the fundraiser was held and heckled her while she made a speech to supporters. She has asked the Sheriff's Department to clear the air by releasing a recording of the phone complaint.

The Sheriff's Department issued a statement saying that it received a noise complaint from an individual regarding the fundraising event. But the department has refused to elaborate on the incident because it is currently under internal investigation.

Sanford Toyen, a Sheriff's Department legal advisor, said the records are exempt from disclosure under the California Public Records Act because they are records of a law enforcement investigation.

But public records law expert Terry Francke disagreed. Francke said while the department may keep the identity of the complainer secret, it is required to make public the basic facts of the complaint under the CPRA.

"Merely using a label like 'noise complaint' is insufficient," Francke said.

Kevin Keenan, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties, said the Sheriff's Department has to play a delicate balancing act between releasing information about what could be a malicious complaint and protecting the privacy of the individual who made the call.

But Keenan said the department could release certain information about the incident -- for example, whether the complaint was made by a neighbor or someone who did not live near the party and could not legitimately make the claim that they were disturbed by it.

"When there's a vacuum of information and a lot of legitimate concerns, it's usually the best policy to get the information out there," Keenan said.

According to the Sheriff's Department, a deputy based in Encinitas was called to the residence on Rubenstein Avenue in Cardiff after the department received the noise complaint at about 9 p.m. on July 26.

About an hour before the deputy showed up, Busby had made a brief speech on the back patio of the large house where the fundraiser was being held.

That speech prompted the mystery heckler to launch his reported tirade.

As Busby spoke to the crowd through a public address system, a man hidden behind trees and bushes on a neighboring lot started to shout obscenities and insults about her policies, said four people who attended the party. The profanity-laced invective went on for several minutes before one of Busby's supporters decided to shout back, Busby said.

"Somebody yelled back at him. Whoever he was, he was hidden in the bushes, we couldn't see him," Busby said.

There are three homes whose gardens back onto the yard where the fundraiser was being held. In interviews, the residents of all three of those homes said they had no idea who might have shouted at the group gathered for the fundraiser. All of the residents said they were Democrats and said they had not heard any noise from the party until the Sheriff's Department helicopter showed up...

A reminder of odd bedfellows (unions and Republicans) created by the pension crisis

Why did unions in San Diego support Republican Brian Maienschein for the City Council? It was a match made when Republican Mayor Dick Murphy made his pact with city unions that unions would be granted extremely generous pension benefits in return for helping cover up the fact that the pension system was underfunded. Today I saw a reminder of the bizarreness of these strange bedfellows:

Voice of San Diego
by Scott Lewis
Link
You might remember my discussion of the potential awkwardness that would come up when Brian Maienschein funded his city attorney campaign.

To refresh, he's going to use the stash of funds left over from his 2004 campaign for City Council. Today the city clerk posted his latest financial disclosures and sure enough, the transfer is complete. Now, all those donors to his 2004 campaign are listed, essentially, as donors to his city attorney campaign...

One of them listed, for example, is attorney Karen Heumann. She, of course, is now one of the most important people in City Attorney Mike Aguirre's administration.

The second name that really stood out was Tony Krvaric -- the head of the Republican Party of San Diego County. It's fair to say Krvaric is not a supporter of Maienschein's bid for city attorney...


Ironic that Krvaric might have helped pay for that mailer.

The list of people who also are now funding Maienschein's city attorney campaign includes Murray Galinson, who is actually counted as a supporter of Scott Peters.

The list itself is a who's who:

Jerry Butkiewicz, who until recently was the Secretary-Treasurer of the San Diego Imperial Counties Labor Council...

Fred Sainz, the mayor's spokesman

Judie Italiano, general manager of the city employees' white collar union

City Councilman Kevin Faulconer

Phil Thalheimer, who's running for City Council District 1

Ronne Froman, the former COO of the city

Joe Craver, the head of the local Red Cross...