Notebook: TVSB Honors Hap; Padilla Manhandling Followed Noem's Tyrannical Rant; Historic Roots of Salud vs. Hegseth
Three takeaways from the tsunami of Santa Barbra, state and national political news that keeps on comin'...
TV Santa Barbara, our town’s venerable nonprofit media access center, celebrated its 50th anniversary on Friday, and appropriately honored Newsmakers’ co-founder Hap Freund with its, um, Founder’s Award.
A splendid bash to mark the station’s Golden Anniversary, the party cranked up at Soho, where famed surf documentary producer Ira Opper, the erstwhile hippie pioneer of local public access TV, led the guests in a stroll down memory lane with a narrated slide show recounting the station’s origin story.
Many celebrants (who feasted on filet and Baja shrimp in honor of the disco-era dinner at which Opper finagled financing for the nascent station out of a Cox Cable suit) complied with the call by party organizers to wear “1970s-themed” attire.
Or what we like to call “our clothes.”
Why Hap matters. Until Hap came along in 2001, TVSB remained a poor step-child of Cox, which kept the culturally florescent station alive fiscally as a condition of holding the town’s monopoly cable franchise.
He had worked in public media for 20 years – in Honolulu, Oregon and Seattle – when he arrived in Santa Barbara, hired with the mission to – literally -- create a nonprofit station, that was to be spun off, economically and legally, from Cox.
Hap not only accomplished this complex assignment in four months – shout-out Channel 17 -- he also created a second – Channel 21 – focused on culture and education. Soon, both became award-winning operations.
He also made a second crucial, long-term contribution: scouting, recruiting, assembling, training and a nurturing a talented, energetic and diverse crew, a top-notch team that included, among many other luminaries, now-SB council member Oscar Gutierrez (the long-ago first director of Newsmakers TV), and J.P. Montalvo, a hugely talented production guru who has remained a TVSB mainstay and was properly saluted on Friday with the “Golden Milestone of Merit Award.”
Aptly, that award presentation was made by Hap, who also deserves everlasting credit for standing up to intense and vile pressure and vicious invective from Santa Barbara’s morning paper during and after the so-called meltdown of that now-deceased outfit. Its editorial attack dog went after him hard, for having the audacity to air — and to let the community see and hear — the extraordinary events as they unfolded in real time during that historic local summer of 2006.
There’s a word in Yiddish that perfectly describes Hap: the word is “mensch.”
As every school child knows, a mensch is a person of great integrity and honor, a stand-up guy, whose qualities and values one hopes for in a friend, a colleague, or a partner.
Henry “Hap” Freund not only is a TVSB trailblazer and an SB community hero but also a true mensch. Mega-kudos, bro.
(YouTube super content creator Rebecca Brand, a TVSB pillar and the winner of its “Community Advocacy Award,” has more on the big event over at her Facebook page).
The face of fascism. George Skelton, the ageless wonder political columnist of the Los Angeles Times, churned out the best takeout we read about last week’s sickening and scandalous manhandling of California U.S. Senator Alex Padilla at the hands of goons surrounding Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Skelton deftly dispensed with the bad faith, disinformation spin that Fox News and MAGA’s toxic echo chamber ginned up in defense of ICE Barbie, pointing to a key point overshadowed in much mainstream media coverage: Noem’s disgraceful remarks at the press event, where she ostensibly served as a government official but in truth performed as a Trump trained seal.
The unprecedented act of disrespecting and roughing up a U.S. senator occurred at the Westwood federal building during a Noem news conference Thursday. Padilla, a Democrat, was standing behind reporters when the secretary said federal agents would continue to conduct immigration raids in Los Angeles indefinitely.
“[We’ll] continue to sustain and increase our operations in this city,” Noem said.
“We are not going away,” she emphasized. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor have placed on this country.”
Definitely fighting words.
“Liberate” the city? That’s the sort of language used by dictators — fascist, Communist or any Third World despot.
“Socialist” leadership? A pejorative straight out of the right-wing playbook of political talking points.
Was Noem saying the Trump administration’s real goal is to overthrow Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass because of their “burdensome” regimes?
Sadly, that’s exactly what she was saying, as Trump made clear himself in an unhinged social media post on Sunday, in which he once again spoke the quiet part out loud, vowing to bring the full force of state power to bear on communities led by those who dare disagree with him.
Salud vs Hegseth. Fans of democracy last week cheered Salud Carbajal, Santa Barbara’s man in Congress, after he displayed, for the first time since Trump’s inauguration, displayed some fire and public outrage befitting what the radical right-wing extremist president is doing to the country.
With Pete Hegseth, the Fox weekend host tapped by the reality TV show president to serve as his DUI hire Secretary of Defense, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, Salud called out Secretary Kegstand’s multiple scandals and declared him unfit to lead. Then this happened.
Not long after, of course, we received a Carbajal campaign email fundraising appeal, with the clip embedded. Cringey stuff, sure, but also the social media cesspool in which he and every other elected politician in America now has to swim.
A loyal reader later sent us video of a similar confrontation, between Ted Kennedy and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, both now deceased, during which the Massachusetts Senator in 2005 reamed the Pentagon chief over the Iraq War and called on him to resign.
"This war has been consistently and grossly mismanaged. And we are now in a seemingly intractable quagmire. Our troops are dying. And there really is no end in sight," Kennedy said, as Rumsfeld sat opposite at the Armed Services Committee.
"In baseball, it's three strikes you're out," Kennedy told the Defense Secretary. "Isn't it time for you to resign?"
(The dramatic clip is copyrighted by ABC News — you can view it here).
Taking place in Washington just 20 years ago, the Kennedy-Rumsfeld encounter feels like it’s transmitted from a parallel universe in a different millennium.
The differences are stark. For starters, the players in 2005, were truly serious people; Hegseth is a drunk and a clown and, no offense to Salud, but we knew Ted Kennedy, and he’s no Ted Kennedy.
Beyond that, however, the differences on display in 2005, while fierce and of the highest stakes, are substantive and sober-minded disagreements over policy, compared to the shabby endless stream of performative partisan slop and swill that defines politics in the Trump Era.
Bottom line. It may be coincidence, not causation, but almost exactly two years later, the iPhone came to market, triggering two decades defined by the decline, decay, and now, death of truth in U.S. political life, hastened by the wonderful tools of social media that have degraded, debased and diseased our culture.
72 Tuesdays until the mid-term elections.
Images: Hap Freund (R) celebrates his honor with Dr. Victor Rios, who was awarded the “Podcast Pioneer Award.” TVSB Executive Director Erik Davis can be seen over his right shoulder, onstage at the gala.
“ICE Barbie” is some of her cosplay costumes (The Daily Beast).
Carbajal vs. Hegseth (CBS News).