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THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE:

Assemblyman Van Tran signaled Wednesday that he may run for Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez’s seat in the house in 2010 by forming an exploratory committee.

Sanchez trounced her last Republican opponent, Santa Ana School Board member Rosie Avila, by getting almost three times as many votes, and has held the seat since 1996, winning handily through most of her tenure.

Tran’s campaign attributes this to a lack of experience and community contacts on the part of past challengers, citing the fact that George W. Bush won the district in 2004 (although by a razor-thin margin) and Schwarzenegger won it again in 2006 (by a wider margin).

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“Congresswoman Sanchez has not had a serious competitor since the first time she ran for office,” said Tran spokesman Paul Hegyi.

The Tran camp is also touting the region’s comparatively large Vietnamese population as a boon, given that the candidate was born in Saigon.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee thinks that Sanchez’s margins of victory speak for themselves, and don’t seem all that worried about the prospect of Tran running.

“The numbers are clear ... Assemblyman Tran’s been office shopping for quite a while now while Congresswoman Sanchez has been working to be an independent voice for her Orange County constituents, even co-founding the Congressional Caucus on Vietnam,” said Andy Stone, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman.

As of the most recent count by the secretary of state’s office in March, there are about 26,000 more Democrats than Republicans in the district of roughly 210,000. The district encompasses Santa Ana, Garden Grove, Fullerton and Anaheim and Latinos make up the vast majority of the population, outnumbering the next biggest demographics, whites and Asians, combined, according to 2000 census data.

Tran won his third bid for the Assembly in 2008. His Assembly district includes some of the cities in the congressional district he wants to take, but the Assembly district has some Republican bastions that are cut out of the congressional district and replaced with heavily Democratic regions.

Job creation is bound to be one of the biggest platforms on both sides of the aisle, as the area has particularly high unemployment numbers.

Tran disagrees that government bailouts and spending packages are the best way to go about it and thinks that giving people tax breaks is a better way to stimulate the economy, Hegyi said.

Moorlach skeptical of stimulus funds

County Supervisor John Moorlach is among the skeptics of federal stimulus money.

Although millions of dollars from President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan have been awarded to projects in Moorlach’s district, the supervisor still wonders who will pay in the long run.

“It makes me nervous because of the debt situation at the federal level,” Moorlach said Wednesday. “It’s really funny, when people dole out money, you just don’t ask questions.”

Just last week, the Army Corps of Engineers unveiled plans to use part of its share of stimulus money for flood control along the Santa Ana River and wrap up dredging in Upper Newport Bay.

The corps will portion out $27.5 million for the Santa Ana River project and $17.3 million for dredging in the Upper Bay.

“I can say this certainly resolves an issue of keeping the dredging project going in the Back Bay,” Moorlach said. “In the local picture, that’s great, but in the global and national scene, the current president has to make it all work.”

Attorney Criticizes Don Henley Lawsuit

Assemblyman Chuck DeVore’s attorney lashed out against Don Henley this week, saying the rocker’s lawsuit against DeVore over an online parody of the tune “Boys of Summer” flies in the face of the 1st Amendment.

In a new commentary published on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog, intellectual property attorney Chris Arledge accuses Henley of “[exploiting] his music to advance a liberal, political agenda.”

Henley sued DeVore earlier this year over a YouTube parody of his hit song “Boys of Summer,” alleging copyright infringement.

With new lyrics sang to the tune of the 1984 song, DeVore’s parody takes a critical look at the first weeks of the Obama administration.

“Nobody wants to be mocked. And if you’re a rock star, surrounded by sycophants for the better part of 35 years, it must be especially hard to deal with being mocked,” Arledge wrote. “It makes sense, then, that Don Henley does not like the parody of his song ‘Boys of Summer.’”


Reporter ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at [email protected]. Reporter BRIANNA BAILEY may be reached at (714) 966-4625 or at [email protected].

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