Political sex advice

Bob Mulholland is again having fun at Republicans’ expense.

On Monday, April 8, Mulholland, a longtime state Democratic Party strategist who lives in Chico, sent an open letter to Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Jim Brulte, who chairs the California Republican Party, offering them “some friendly advice” regarding an April 10 RNC meeting in Los Angeles.

“Your meeting [at the Loews Hollywood Hotel] is only a 2.3-mile taxi ride to the Voyeur West Hollywood Club, an erotic bondage-theme sex simulating club,” he writes, “so you might want to assign monitors (or GPS anchor bracelets) on your RNC members, especially those from Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, etc., if they don’t have their wives with them.”

The Voyeur, he reminds them, was the club where, in 2010, RNC staffers spent $1,946.25 for an “outing”—much to the embarrassment of then-RNC Chairman Michael Steele when the media found out.

That wasn’t the end of Mulholland’s japery. He’d saved the best for last.

“However, if some members need to get out and ‘experience’ a club not seen at home in Kansas,” he writes, “Bruce Herschensohn and I would recommend the Seventh Veil at 7180 Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood. Bruce always thought it was a discreet club, and less than a mile from your meeting.”

People with long memories will recognize this as a nose-thumbing of historic proportions, one that goes back to the 1992 U.S. Senate race. At a Barbara Boxer campaign event in Chico just days before the election, Mulholland publicly accused her Republican opponent, Herschensohn, who was running as a family-values candidate, of frequenting Hollywood strip clubs—specifically, the Seventh Veil. The resulting media firestorm tipped the dead-heat race Boxer’s way, and she’s claimed the seat ever since.

He’s outta here: I ran into erstwhile City Council candidate Toby Schindelbeck last week at Chico Sports Club. He thanked me for my March 7 column supporting his effort to have the City Council consider his Second Amendment resolution, and we agreed that the council hadn’t handled it well. Then he told me he’d sold his two Nutrishop stores and was moving to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho—that very weekend, in fact.

On his Facebook page, he tells why he’s moving. He and his wife “really loved Chico,” he says, and “when the opportunity came for me to run for council and try to make a difference locally, I jumped on it and did my best. But, Chico does not want to change. The majority seem to be just fine with a liberal majority ruining our great city, and it was no longer the quality of life that we moved here for. Coupled with the Democrat supermajority in the Legislature that happened at the last election, I knew it was time to move on.”

I like Toby and respect his passion. He stirred things up and tried to make democracy work according to his lights. But I’ve lived here a lot longer than he did, and I’ve seen liberal councils and conservative councils come and go, and none of them have been able to ruin Chico. So far, anyway.

Robert Speer is editor of the CN&R.