You may recall that during the 2008 Presidential campaign, John McCain was stumping at a town hall, talking to an audience, when a crazy old lady told him she couldn’t trust Obama because he was “an Arab.”

At the Coalition for a Better Oakland, we’ve worked hard to get rid of the likes of Sheng Thao, who we correctly perceived as a crass, manipulative politician, entirely owned by private interests, and with no particular moral beliefs or intellectual skills. She was one of those grifters who went along with whoever gave her the most money, especially corporations and labor unions. The result, as we’ve seen, has been disastrous for Oakland.

I’m not even going to try to out-report other media outlets on this major scandal because I can’t. I don’t have the resources of, say, Steven Tavares or KTVU or Oaklandside. What I can write is that it looks really bad for Thao, and maybe Kaplan and Kalb too; and the spillover effect could impact the entire City Council, not to mention the Pamela Price recall.

So there’s this 34-year old Ph.D in African American Studies, Casey Goonan—a white guy, if that matters. He was just arrested for firebombing a U.C. Berkeley police car and then igniting three arson fires on the Cal campus. He said he did it to support Palestinians in the Gaza War.

You know a political campaign is in trouble when it announces a major shakeup midway through election season. That’s what Price’s “Protect the Win” team just did, hiring not just one, not just two, but three new “team members”: a campaign manager, a new spokesperson, and a new volunteer coordinator. This is evidence that Price knows the recall campaign is likely to win.