See update at the end of this post clarifying that Gary Kreep won the judge's race outright.
Batshit birthers Gary Kreep and Orly Taitz famously split like Dick and Liz while trying to prove Barack Obama was born outside the U.S. While South County's birfer queen went on to lose her recent bid for a California U.S. Senate seat, Kreep survived the primary election and remains on the ballot for won a San Diego County judgeship.
But questions are being raised about whether Kreep was helped by an OC dirty trickster.
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After Kreep, a very right-wing candidate with Minuteman leanings, received the majority of votes in the primary for the Superior Court race, the Voice of San Diego analyzed precinct data and discovered he did very well in southern San Diego, which is composed mostly of Democrats, Latinos and Democratic Latinos.
OC Weekly Gary Kreep-Orly Taitz Feud Archives
Tipped by an anonymous source, San Diego City Beat's Dave Maass is reporting last-minute robocalls were made by a political action committee (PAC) called Taxpayers for Safer Neighborhoods against Kreep's opponent, Deputy District Attorney Garland Peed. Maass includes in his online report this audio of such a call, which claims Peed would be “the worst kind of county judge” because he used plea bargains to put a drug dealers back on the streets.
The call cites the case of a criminal named Brian Moore, but as Maass reports the group conflates the prison sentences of two inmates with the same first and last name. Robocalls in elections are outlawed in California anyway if they are not introduced by a real person. The one slamming Peed was not, according to the City Beater.
If this sounds like the kind of Election Day crap that's born in Orange County, you'll be happy to know the PAC has slimy right-wing Orange County politics all over it.
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The PAC lists as one of its directors James Lacy, a former Dana Point city councilman, constitutional-law attorney and onetime national chairman of Young Americans for Freedom. Lacy is also chairman of Western Conservative Political Action Conference, whose vice chairman and counsel is . . . drum roll, please . . . Gary Kreep!
Lacy, who once engineered a failed recall against then-councilwoman, now-Assemblywoman Diane Harkey, is one of campaign-finance reform's most lethal enemies. But as our Nick Schou reported in a story a decade ago, Republican Lacy already had an affinity for playing with the enemy party to win elections.
Slate Nailer:
Conservative James Lacy plays turncoat to sway elections
In a 2002 Santa Monica city election, Lacy's PAC sent out slate mailers on behalf of prominent Democrats who support liberal causes
such as abortion rights and education. There must've been an ulterior motive, right? Of course! The same last-minute mailers also urged no votes on an ordinance to pay a living wage in Santa Monica. Indeed, Lacy's mailers were blamed for confusing the left-leaning electorate and causing the measure's narrow loss at the polls.
So, yeah, you're welcome, San Diego . . .
UPDATE, JULY 19, 6 P.M.: San Diego City Beat reporter Dave Maass contacted the Weekly with a correction: Kreep won the judge race outright!
Maass also graciously thanked us for the mention of his piece.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.