Under intense security, Air Force One and Barack Obama landed late this afternoon at Los Angeles International Airport for the president's ninth trip to Southern California and, during a series of fund-raising events, touted his administration's accomplishments, including a repeal of “Don't Ask; Don't Tell.”
Obama also blasted Republicans for favoring the ultra-rich.
Republicans are working legislatively to make sure “just a few do well,” the president told a Los Angeles crowd including actor George Clooney, according to a White House media pool report provided to OC Weekly by Michael Finnegan of the Los Angeles Times.
The attack on the rich is, of course, ironic because following tonight's private parties with LA's richest residents, the Democratic president will travel for another fundraiser on Thursday morning in Orange County's most wealthy, elite oceanfront neighborhood: obscenely Republican Corona del Mar.
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According to White House reports, the president is expected to leave his LA hotel, the same one where singer Whitney Houston recently died, about mid-morning on Thursday and fly his Marine One helicopter to Orange County in advance of a motorcade trip to a private home in Corona del Mar.
For
those of you who don't live here, know this: OC historically has been a
hotbed of right-wing activism that considers liberals worthy of
unrelenting ridicule. In addition to our fine citizenry, we have Holocaust deniers, mischievous grannies, bizarre anti-gay fanatics, big-haired televangelists, angry white supremacists, Bible-thumping closet gay pedophiles and foaming-at-the-mouth Mexican haters.
For example, within weeks of Bill Clinton moving
into the White House in 1993, bitter Newport Beach residents took
“Impeach Clinton” banners to the beach during family outings. This is also a place where the broadcasting of Lee Harvey Oswald's explosive, fatal head shot to President John F. Kennedy still wins happy cheers. Orly Taitz, a local dentist, is a relentless leader in the national movement to expose Obama as an African-born communist plant.
(Trivia: Oswald was stationed as a U.S. Marine in Orange County before he killed Kennedy.)
The county has moved slightly to the left in recent years, though. In the 2008 election Obama pulled off a near miracle: he almost beat Republican John McCain here. Arguably, OC's most powerful member of Congress is Anaheim's Loretta Sanchez, the lone Democrat in the county's congressional delegation that includes a shameless freak, Dana Rohrabacher—the plump, career politician who can't surf but hilariously calls himself the “Surfin' Congressman.”
(Note: Perhaps Rohrabacher's disingenuous PR spin is nothing more than . . . Internet surfing.)
For
the traveling, fly-by press corps, Corona del Mar has made news on the
racial insensitivity front in recent years after a Newport Beach city
councilman espoused public policies to
discourage all Latinos from visiting local public beaches.
And, of
course, there is this: A steakhouse located just blocks after from the
president's fundraising event in Corona del Mar settled a lawsuit after
an employee repeatedly disgraced a loyal African American patron by
calling him “McStinkyNigger” and “McNigShit” on bill receipts.
During the president's last OC visit, the Secret Service must have been worried about potential attacks. The extraordinary protective service had a whopping five helicopters–including two Blackhawk combat helicopters–fly from LA to OC. To trick the public, Obama didn't board any of the three Marine One helicopters in the fleet flying south. He rode on one of the Blackhawk's that was flying in a flanking position.
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–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
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.