UPDATE BELOW
There are two classes of people running for mayor of Los Angeles: the haves and the have-nots. Money, web sites, signatures - y'know, juice.
Updated: Copley reports on the 11 who turned in petitions. The ones who filed papers but not the petitions required by last night are struck through below.
Of these, only Dr. Addie Mae Miller has a web site and has garnered enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. The rest are - I can only surmise - having their signatures counted and petitions certified as I write this late Wednesday night. Nominating petitions were due at 5 p.m. Wednesday.
Miller's campaign site is thick with affiliations, qualifications, hobbies and a list of organizations to which she has given speeches and service.
She ran in 2001, but her site is short on specifics:
I care very much about people and I have the ability to fully understand another's feelings and experiences. I am more than willing to protect and serve all constituents of the City of Los Angeles.
As Mayor for the City of Los Angeles I will have a first-rate rapport with Washington D.C. and Sacramento to bring any help the City of Los Angeles may need to be a better City within the United States and the State of California. I am competent and qualified to achieve this whether the help will be for (Businesses, Public Safety, Development (residential/commercial) or whatever the cause may be, I accept as true, that I can do it!
Business trial lawyer Walter Moore has been campaigning on an anti-City Hall platform that includes stances against pay-to-play scandals at City Hall and illegal immigration and for increasing the number of LAPD officers and establishing a no-kill policy for the Animal Control office.
Among other things, his site says:
So what's the problem? The problem is our city is run by career politicians engaged in "pay to play" politics. Public policy is determined not by the public interest, but instead by whichever special interest group "contributes" the most to career politicians' campaign funds. L.A. is no longer a democracy. It is a "bribe-ocracy."
The result? Murder is routine; taxpayers' hard-earned dollars are squandered on boondoggles and "welfare for the rich;" schools do not educate children; businesses are over-taxed and "hassled" to the point where they flee the city; illegal aliens are straining our jails, schools and aid programs past the breaking point; people in the Valley want to secede from the city; and City Hall, instead of tackling real problems, passed a ban on Silly String!
He has a handful of campaign talks scheduled, and continues to lobby to be included in the official mayoral debates. Qualified to run.
T-shirt entrepreneur and perennial candidate Bill Wyatt seems to be collecting opinions about how Los Angeles should be run, at the same time he's collecting signatures to get onto the ballot ...
The last two days have been interesting. I’ve turned in my petitions and after they were verified I was still 41 short, not bad. The biggest problem is that you cannot collect signatures while they are validating the signatures. This means you have to turn in your paperwork before the deadline in order to allow enough time to go back out, as I and others had to do, to get more signatures. My percentage of error was about 30%, which is reasonable considering that many people don’t know if they live in LA City or not. Many people aren’t registered to vote and many others just don’t know their address or don’t write legibly. Life in the big city, eh?
I got supplemental petitions and went back out last night on the streets around my neighborhood. It was surprisingly easy to get more signatures in the misty rain. I also called my signature assistant, who promptly showed up and got to work herself. That allowed me to grab some “Bill Wyatt for Mayor” shirts and drive out to see a free gig and promote my campaign. I was excited, thinking that this is what a mayor should do, go out and support new bands. Culture starts with music and LA is a player on the international stage of music, but small time bands get no respect in the overall scheme of things.
Wyatt's campaign site offers this bio and this extremely strange virtual press briefing where an animated talking head with a computer-generated voice reads his latest campaign thoughts.
Listen through to the end, and then move your cursor. His eyes follow it around. I think it's meant to be playful, but in the end, public policy statements from a CG human are ... weird. His petition status isn't recorded yet. Qualified to run.
Meatpacker Wendy Lyons has no campaign site. She ran in 2001, representing the socialist workers party, and advocating a national revolution and the establishment of a government similar to Cuba's. Google doesn't turn up anything on her current campaign. Qualified to run.
State worker Martin Luther King Aubrey Sr. (who ran in 2001 too) has no campaign site. Qualified to run.
Information Management Director Jose Bonilla, who came in second in the race to be mayor of the doomed City of San Fernando Valley, has no campaign site. Failed to qualify.
USC student Mitchell Jackson (ne Jeff Mitchell) has no campaign site. His petition status isn't recorded yet. Failed to qualify.
James L. Thompson has no campaign site. His petition status isn't recorded yet. Failed to qualify.
Publisher Ted Crisell has no campaign site. Qualified to run.
Dr. Hector Beltran has no campaign site. His petition status isn't recorded yet. Failed to qualify.
Businessman Bruce Harry Darian has no campaign site. Qualified to run.
Filmmaker Stephen Brown has no campaign site. His petition status isn't recorded yet. Failed to qualify.
Baker Sage Jones has no campaign site. Her petition status isn't recorded yet. Failed to qualify.
Exorcist (???) Michael A. Hirt has no campaign site. His petition status isn't recorded yet. Failed to qualify.
Constitutional advocate Leonard Lenox has no campaign site. His petition status isn't recorded yet. Failed to qualify.
Oh, and Mayor James K. Hahn has no campaign site. But at least his once-dead domain name JimHahn.org now points to a server - which serves up a generic 404 page.
Geek note: If indeed it's under construction, the Hahn site might be built in outdated ColdFusion, which delivers an error message when you try to load an index URL in Java format.
If anyone has more info about these candidates - including the candidates themselves - I welcome you to post it in Comments.
