This morning’s surprising news downtown at the mordant County Board of Supervisors — or the Marx Brothers Cemetery, as it sometimes is called — is that Bernie Parks is almost 2 to1 ahead of the Man With Three Names in fundraising as they race for Yvonne Brathwaite Burke’s seat.
Given Mark Ridley-Thomas’s ties to union thugs and their patented underhanded methods of separating working slaves from their money, how do you figure the state senator is so far behind?
In the significant Cash on Hand category, Mr. Parks is holding onto more than twice as much money, $387,000 to $171,000.
At least this is good news for the alleged Speaker-to-be of the Assembly, that noted cartographer Karen (Gee Whillickers, Where in the World Did I Put Culver City?) Bass.
She is panting, our sources say, to fill the job shoes of whichever gentleman wins the seat of the retiring Ms. Burke on June 3. Hangers-on around the Board of Sups want to see how the dainty, fashion-aware Ms. Bass walks when wearing Mr. Parks’s outsized gunboats.
Please, the City Council
Ms. Bass would much rather go for Mr. Parks’s chair on the Los Angeles City Council — and then the Mayor’s job — than to make a lateral shift to the dreary state Senate if the less likely Mr. Ridley-Thomas prevails.
Ms. Bass would reap much more juicy-ripe publicity in the far-flung neighborhoods of Los Angeles, while serving on the City Council, than she would by being farmed back to Cow Town again.
Not that it makes a whole lot of difference in Culver City, a community these tone-deaf slugs are supposed to represent.
Two Days Short of Forever
Doesn’t it seem to you, too, that Ms. Burke has been around since shortly before the Revolutionary War started?
I mean, Democrats are telling us that Fibber Obama invented baseball in 1839 and that Fibber Clinton was present at Appomattox in April 1865 when Lee surrendered to Grant, and that Mrs. Fibber helped barter Civil War peace just as she did a few years later in Ireland.
I am confident that neither Mr. Parks nor Mr. Ridley-Thomas will be able to find Culver City with both hands anymore than the Culver City-useless Ms. Bass did when she made a remarkably ill-timed, impotent appearance before the City Council last week. But when you are competing for three jobs simultaneously and focusing an additional eye on two others, how can Culver City-useless Ms. Bass be responsible for her hollow helter-skelter actions?
Rhythms About to Change
What we do know is that once the Board of Sups race is decided, former Mayor Albert Vera will have to surrender his monopoly on bragging rights.
For parts of two centuries, Mr. Vera has been boasting that Culver City is central to the daily business of the presumably broadly influential, generous and virtuous Ms. Burke, given his relationship with her, her seat of honor at his right hand.
The auto-fabled Ms. Burke is in a dead heat for first place as Mr. Vera’s bestest-ever friend with 1,769 other persons of varying stature.
If Culver City is on the radar of Mr. Parks or Mr. Ridley-Thomas, both candidates have done a Sherlock Holmes-type job of disguising their knowledge of and interest in. Perhaps they could consult the cartographer Ms. Bass, and she could draw a map for them.