Mayor Villaraigosa grabs spotlight on May Day event and hops on the Arizona Boycott bandwagon

And can you guess what has Mayor Villaraigosa been up to besides directing rate hikes for customers of the DWP? And wasn't the Mayor a position that takes care of CITY business? Somebody should tell Tony about this. And the rest of City Council, too, with Eric Garcetti, another who says the city is "tax starved", and include Janice Hahn who called herself the "parcel tax queen." This tells you what they are thinking about, and it's not the people of Los Angeles. But let's get back to Mayor Tony's present surfacing in today's news conference.

MAYOR VILLARAIGOSA LOOKING FORWARD TO MAY DAY.

Besides being the former Pothole King, he's the Rhetoric Prince. Another May Day is coming and he's probably going to show his face. His press conference today was a warm up but the Arizona Boycott idea provoked him to grab the spotlight again.

He is not a lawyer, not even close. His expressed views can be considered as either pedestrian, or, just the echoing of some anonymous staffer paid a lot for nothing really meaningful.

He needs an attorney to do this summary for him in order to make a better grounded legal evaluation, but as it's actually rhetoric, why bother?

The Arizona Boycott gives Tony a vehicle to come out of his May Day self-imposed exile after making his "We Clean Your Toilets" revelation to the crowd where Mexican flags were displayed in abundance throughout the scenes shown on television. (He even gave instructions for the anticipated rally-goers, including bringing plastic water bottles and bags to pick up after yourself upon leaving. He's so much the civics director- but remember that plastic bottles were taken to such events but frozen first in order to get some better distance in the water toss event that became part of that earlier day's activities that came to be called the May Day Melee. It cost L.A. a pretty penny when the claims were settled. Don't you just love rallies? Tony apparently does. Darn those pranksters.

TONY IS THE ORATOR AGAIN- He Has a Dream.

If you review the recordings of the style he's used in speaking during his first couple of "State of the City" addresses, you can see that they were over-enunciated as if he was repising the "I Have a Dream" speech of Martin Luther King. I think he actually expected to be some great mayor and was planning to have some vivid recordings for the expected archival footage of his early administration. Too bad he turned out to be, instead, and increasingly certain, "the worst mayor in the history of Los Angeles."


As that complete self-delusion began to clear from his head a bit, he started talking normally (in his case, not to impressive) and make normal speeches of vapid content.

Today, he's gotten his second wind apparently, and the product was a very contrived assortment of inflections and more conclusions that only he and his staff could believe.

TONY THE DREAMER

Does anyone read these items for him in advance to try to clear out some of the puzzling phrases.


AND GUESS WHAT?

None of this helps solve the city's budget predicament which Tony helped create while travelling most of his first 5 years in office and attending a record number of press conferences and photo opps (and some of these should really be called "photo ooops" for all the silliness involved) instead of working in his office to tend to the city business that was presumably the reason for his election.

His budget plan is in trouble- it seems he's not paying attention here, too. Tony is getting so desperate to avoid bankruptcy under his "leadership", as are the other CMs, that he will sell off any city assets he can to get his butt out of the short term jam just to avoid bankruptcy of the city. The fallout from that is that he will be leaving the city to face a heavily indebted and disastrous future, but by then, he will be long gone.

Maybe Villaraigosa will be running for the Senate, or as some think, being selected to be the Ambassador to somewhere. Ambassadors attend lots of social functions and that's probably a good fit for Villaraigosa, the party mayor. Too bad he couldn't have skipped this one stop as L.A.'s mayor on the way there.

Mayor Villaraigosa Announcement on running for Governor: Good News, Bad News.

The Mayor was on CNN with Wolf Blitzer for his big announcement on whether he will be a Democratic candidate for Governor. Good news for California is that he won't be running. The bad news for Los Angeles is that he will be here for the full second term of office and that will begin on July 1st.

The Mayor's reasons for his decision not to run and the real reasons for his decision don't match, but that's o.k., he's always had a hardtime being forthright. He still continued with the theme of his first State of the City address, "dream with me" and he should have left that phrase alone, because it leaves him open to clever plays on words like, "And he's still dreaming; we need some real work done," or "Stop dreaming and wake up and smell the coffee, Tony." There's been nothing of real accomplishment by him in the first term. L.A. has lost more population in the middle class range and continues to pick up numbers of people in lower economic status as it's sancturary city status continues to contribute to that demographic shift.

When Tony says anything about working to help the middle class and to be business friendly, he's not even close to being honest. Rising taxes and looking for more ways to charge residents is making it much more expensive to live in Los Angeles. In July, another rise of .5 % sales tax will hit L.A. County. Many people who can afford to, are leaving Los Angeles. Tony's not the cause of all of it, but much of what he's done has had the effect of worsening things in many ways.

Tony's mention of the economy and the need of the city for him to be here to see it through was mentioned as a reason not to run. Much of what he said is happening is either not within his ability to really affect, or is part of his participation in the first place to help in making the present mess. Deficit conditions in the city were sped to the current status by just over-spending and no thought was given to the possibility that the good times were headed for a reality check. Nope, the city based everything on the continuing good times and they matched the good times with their big spending.

Rainy days arrived and the DWP contract and other labor union arrangements that the Mayor and council approved helped to make things worse both financially and in terms of morale and feeling of unfairness by other unions in the city where such choice terms were not offered. Now the concessions upon which the Mayor includes in the budget still are not approved by the unions and so, it's a problem.

Well, there's more to say on the reasons for his announcement today, but maybe it's simply that Lu Parker, his new love interest and news anchor on television Channel 5, just wasn't up to a move to Sacramento in the event he would win. What Tony did say concerning anyone in the family circle was that he wanted to be in the city, to be there for his 16 year old daughter as she completed high school. Tony is a man of many stories and some of them may even be true, but it really doesn't matter. If the city can be kept out of bankruptcy, that would be a big achievement.
While Tony has continued at various press conferences to reference all the city jobs that have to be cut, there have only been only a handful of actual cuts. Many of the calculations were handled by not filling vacant positions. He never crossed into the territory where real numbers of people were laid off. Tony still was trying to hold onto his favored position with labor and has delayed any action to cut payroll by layoffs, meanwhile, things are not getting better by such holding on.

Today's announcement on running for the Governor of California would certainly have been different if Tony thought he had a better chance of winning, and all the stuff he said today would probably be the furthest thing from his mind. After all is said and done, Tony still is the "all about me" mayor.