The campaigns for the Senate District 7 special election and building a Los Angeles area football stadium are two rough and tumble affairs that have something in common – the need to throw a penalty flag on deceptive plays in the campaigns.
Much attention has been paid to the disingenuous nature of mailings by the Asian American Business PAC supporting the candidacy of withdrawn Republican candidate Michaela Hertle funded by the public employee unions who hope to cripple the chances of Democrat Steve Glazer who is willing to take on the unions.
Judy Lloyd commented on the mailings sent to Republicans on this site. Many others have also commented as well. A couple of examples: Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association writing in FlashReport that the funding of the mailers reveals the “powerful public sector labor organizations will stop at nothing to advance their narrow interests”; Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee wondering if the plan will backfire because of all the heavy media attention.
The state Republican Party is suing over the use of a logo on the mailer that the lawsuit says is representative of the party, which does not endorse the mailing.
Maybe the court will throw a flag with the lawsuit. But the use of the logo is a narrow issue related to the misinformation campaign. The big penalty comes if the voters show their contempt for these shenanigans by ignoring the mailers and voting for the candidates who are still in the race.
In Los Angeles, the AEG corporation, which has the rights to build a downtown Los Angeles football stadium (if they can secure an NFL team), tried to undercut a leading rival who planned to develop the old Hollywood Park racetrack site.
AEG paid for a couple of studies that claimed the site was a hazard because it was on the approach to the Los Angeles International Airport—LAX. According to former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, a terrorist attack could bring down a plane on a stadium full of people. If that wasn’t enough, the former head of the National Transportation Safety Board, Mark Rosenker, produced a second study for AEG that warned of possible airplane debris falling from the sky onto the football players and fans.
The studies’ warnings were rejected or simply laughed off by other experts. I suppose accidents could happen anywhere airplanes land but I’m not aware of one horse injured by falling debris from the sky in Hollywood Park’s 75 years of horse racing.
It appears AEG threw the penalty flag on itself. With no NFL team lined up, other venues advancing forward, and the effort to scare the community with the studies falling flat, AEG announced it was not going to keep its expiring option alive on the downtown stadium.