Thursday, November 08, 2007

The Mike Carona mess

It's never a bad week when a public official gets indicted. The federal indictment of Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona last week caused a good deal of excitement at the newspaper and around the county. Innocent until proven guilty, of course, and some of the charges seem kind of ticky-tack. But as personable and likeable as Mike Carona is -- he's always been more than pleasant to me -- a whiff of corruption has hung around his office for a long time. His two top aides -- friends forever -- have been convicted of various malfeasances already, and he was known to enjoy the perks of the office and some perks that looked more like abuse of power then responsible use of it.

However, a proposal that the Board of Supervisors, if four of five agreed, should be able to remove any other countywide elected official from office, was ill-advised (even if John Moorlach, who's normally one of the good guys as politicians go, proposed it), as the Register argued in this editorial. Miike stepped aside for 60 days and the resolution was defeated. Expect a lot more fireworks.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

John and Ken are having a fiesta with this. Carona's guys sex life could hardly be more entertaining.

I live in SoCal, but I manage to avoid this part of the the SoCal life style.

It must be hard sometimes to work for the "respectable" newspaper as the OC weekly has been hammering Carona for years.

I would think that at some point the so called mainstream press has to start picking up on issues like this, because you could have seen this coming a *long* time ago.

You might as well link to this picture in your blog. It can't hurt the number of hits you get.

Erica Hill

Also see,

OC Weekly

Brian said...

Heh, what a classic so-Cal bimbo!

This is like the family from San Diego that was wife swapping and had their poor child kidnapped.

Well, not that bad, but you get the idea.

Alan, you show great restraint.