•Larry Agran. From his role in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the mid-'60s, at the head of the county's '80s slow-growth movement, and a '90s Democratic presidential candidate to this: a real-estate developer front man who shamelessly aligned himself in a campaign mailer with Republican George W. Bush.
•Garden Grove Rednecks. The next time you snicker and mimic the accent of a Vietnamese candidate like school-board hopeful Lan Nguyen, remember that recent immigrants have a valid excuse for their lack of English fluency. Why don't you?
•Bill Simon. You can legitimately accuse Gray Davis of many misdeeds, Bill, but is he really personally responsible for California's traffic congestion? In your last TV ad, you vaguely asked if we'd had enough. The answer is yes.
•Loretta Sanchez. In a pre-Halloween interview with NBC News, the county's sole Republocrat congressional representative once again demonstrated her heartwarming charm. “I go to women, and I say, you know, 'I'm running for Congress. I need you to write me a $1,000 check,'” she said. “Now, they've got a $1,000 pair of shoes on their feet, but they look at me like I asked for the world.”
•Todd Spitzer. Proving that party loyalty now supercedes good judgment, the incoming OC assemblyman ignored Superior Court candidate John Adams' rsum “enhancements” and sent out a last-minute election mailer vouching for his fellow Republican. But Spitzer didn't explain how Adams' biggest life accomplishment—he owned muffler shops in Costa Mesa and Santa Ana—qualifies him for the bench.
•Christopher Cox. Okay. Okay. We already know how brilliant you think you are, but did you really need to portray yourself in campaign mailers as “one of the intellectual leaders” in Washington, D.C.? And with colleagues such as Dana Rohrabacher, Tom DeLay and Mary Bono, is that really saying anything?
•Wylie Aitken. The multimillionaire head of the Democratic Foundation and a trial lawyer who parties with GOP big shots, he ignored most of his own party's candidates. In local partisan races, Dems lost 15 of 18 contests. Nevertheless, Aitken told a reporter he was “pleased” with the results.
•Jeff Chavez. He won the Republican primary to challenge Loretta Sanchez and abandoned the race without legitimate explanation. Then he re-entered the election with a month to go and sent out a press release encouraging reporters to “probe” why he left. When a reporter took the bait, Chavez played coy again. He did, however, volunteer without prompting that he has never been a homosexual. The gay community is relieved.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.