How Crazy is Running For Manteca City Council?

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A recent comment on the Manteca Bulletin Online system was made by someone who appeared to be a first-level student from the Rex Osborn Office of Double-Tongued Spin-Doctoring and Character Assassination, a city-paid position. There was an echo, a repetition, a redundant enunciation, another insinuation of the perjorative innuendo and slander leveled at me during Rex's clever misrepresentation of city (in)actions regarding my case and his intentional sowing of deprecatory seeds during the forty-minute public abortion at the March 3, 2009 City Council meeting. The subject was supposed to be the illegal activities of my neighbors and the city administration's refusal to enforce city codes - or even to review their own shirked responsibility for the whole sorry, sordid affair.

The commenter suggested I get counseling. Counseling?! Oh, I sought counseling, all right - legal counsel! Many, many dollars of legal counsel. Much more than I will spend on this campaign for city council.

Credentials? I am totally blown away by the inadequacies and irregularities that have surfaced in this so-called city during my three-year "campaign" against both my ignorant, nasty, noisy Neighbors From Hell and City Hall. I have graduated - pummelled, bloody, still standing - from a crash course offered by the Manteca Citizens College of Do-It-Yourself. I am the proud recipient of a Lifetime Go-To-Hell Degree, with gratuitous endorsements from the Police Department (Code Enforcement) and Community Development (Zoning).

The city folks I've dealt with on the other side of the cute, lily-white picket fence at 1001 W Center Street, Manteca, were all trained and graduated with a

B.S. degree in Bumbling Bureaucratic Bufoonery (BS_B3)
(The "Practical Machiavelli" honors endorsement is available for a small fee)

Lower Division courses (All tracks)
   Basic and Intermediate Finger-Pointing
   Basic Shifting of Responsibility
   Plan A: Maintaining Effective Deniability
   Plan B: The Bald-Faced Denial (only for those with Performing Arts aspirations)
   Disarming Irate Citizens: Those Records Are In Storage
   Disarming Irate Citizens: Blame It On the Computer System
   Disarming Irate Citizens: Blame It On the Economy
   Disarming Irate Citizens: Are We Supposed to Know the Codes?

Upper Division courses (Management track)
   Wig-Making and Disguise: How to Look and Speak Like an Official
   Bathtub Cooking and Applying of Black Market Teflon
   Intermediate Shifting of Responsibility and Assigning Blame Elsewhere
   Laundering Public Funds [Semi-]Legally
   Back-Scratching for the Career-Minded Municipal Professional
   Jurisdiction Changes: She's Old - She Must Be Grandfathered
       (prerequisite: Disarming Irate Citizens: Those Records Are In Storage)
   How To Write Official Looking Reports and Letters:
        Section 1: Saying a Whole Lot of Nothing With Words
        Section 2: Using Boilerplate Effectively (for those who fail Section 1)
        Section 3: Scaring The Hell Out of Docile Citizens

Senior Seminars in Special Administrative or Elective Skills (Choose any or all)
   Quid Pro Quo, Vigorish and Other Sometimes Useful Latin/Italian Terms
   Working Your Boss' Reelection Campaign: Pitfalls, Evasions and Workarounds
   Bright-Lining With the Malleable Underpaid City Attorney (bring hand sanitizer)
   City Contracts v. the Brown Act (Art elective)
   Driving Semi's Through California's RDA Loopholes, and Other Shortcuts
   Media Questions: The Side-Step and William Henry Lane Tap Dance (P.E. credit)
   (Call for full selection and details)

Selected sample of collected Master Theses (How To's) and Doctoral Dissertations (Time-Tested Propaganda Manuals - extra charge applies) available for checkout. .pdf upon request. 

• The Joys of Inbreeding: When One of "Us" Gets Elected (Career development for retired administrators)

• Rigging, Deploying and Repacking Golden Parachutes (high profile users only, please)

• Writing (and Rewriting) Employment Contracts For Fun and Profit Cost Savings

• Rubles From Rubes: Painless and Almost Undetectible Taxpayer Shakedowns

• Empire Building as Preface to World Domination: Manufacturing and Exploiting Natural and Man-Made Crises To Enlarge Government Intervention and Control in Markets, Industries, and Communities (as Well as Back Yards, Bedrooms, and Bank Accounts)

• Political Accounting: Taking Credits, Deflecting Debits (media sound-bytes)

• Political Calculus: Trading Favors (fun scavenger hunt format covers wines, cigars, dives, dames (or...), and many other items of interest to those seeking to cozy up to other self-inflated politicos and self-important big shots)

• Tactical and Strategic Retreats: Keeping a Weather Eye on the Rivers and Fords

• Rex Osborn's Bible: The Courtly Art of Character Assassination (private tutorials only; call author for rates - but if you call, he will not accept you as a student because an artful practitioner does not leave such tracks. See? Your first ninja lesson for free!)

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More credentials? Try reading the Manteca Bulletin announcement from last October.
Or, call the Elections Officer after the filing deadline, August 6th, and get the information required to be made public by candidates.
Or, call me for a brief chat (phone number in the public filings.)
Or, go to a city council meeting; I'm usually there.
Or, toss me one of your credentials, then I'll toss you one of mine. (Hint: I'm not a rocket scientist.)

One commenter gets it: "Bottom line, it's because this city will not lift a finger to assist him about these terrible neighbors."

And another: "Behling became interested in running because of the problems he's had with his neighbors and code enforcement but he's not a government employee or a career politician and seems to be smart enough so I'm going to vote for him."

And, to be fair and balanced, I include a back-handed endorsement by my ex-catering truck driver, pot-smoking neighbor, Mellow Yellow Lynda:

Ms. Allen: ... He has nothing else to do or he would not have written those two big books.
Mayor Weatherford: I don't think we want to get into the personal issues here.
Ms. Allen: Well, I try not to do that, but I'm just saying that somebody has a little extra time on their hands. (audience laughs)

Gotta love Lynda's gravelly voice, the Pinole-girl accent and her redneck humor. (Hey! That's HER word. "We like rednecks.")

The bottom bottom line is: These pathetic $^%$&^s next door and downtown are what it took to overcome my inertia, which inertia besets ANYONE who contemplates offering himself up for public office. It is the spark; it is NOT the whole explosion.

Hit the polls on November 2nd. Take all your friends, if any, with you. Vote for whomever you believe will give you the most responsive government to your wants  desires  welfare needs  legitimate needs. Between you and the few other voters who bother to show up that day, you will get the government you elect. You will get the government you deserve, whether you vote or not.
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