Today as Independent Sources investigated an unsolicited message received from Senator Barbara Boxer we learned that the Los Angeles mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa had not secured the Internet domains Villaraigosa2009.com and Antonio2009.com. This raised a number of interesting questions concerning his campaign, including:

• Does the lack of securing the 2009 domains reveal a critical lack of foresight among his staff — or a lack of confidence in Tuesday’s result?
• Will this lack of planning extend to his mayoral duties (should we forget about long-term traffic planning? Airport expansion?)
• Against all expectations, is the campaign running out of funds — or were they caught a little short when they had to refund the Florida money?

To insure that these questions wouldn’t be buried by a last minute acquisition the domain names by someone in the Villaraigosa camp, we secured them both.

However, after Villaraigosa wins the Los Angeles mayoral runoff election on Tuesday, we have to figure out what to do with them. Possibilities range from giving them to the mayor in exchange for an LAX concession contract (whoops, wrong candidate) to holding on to them until Bernard Parks makes us an offer in 2008.

So that we don’t get mistaken for Hahn operatives (we’re not), we are simultaneously announcing our much-anticipated endorsement of Villaraigosa (after all, we now have a stake in his success — if he loses, the value of our newly acquired domains drops like a dot-com in 2001).

We’d like to thank Sen. Barbara Boxer for spamming us with email in the first place and sparking the notion of securing the 2009 domain names. Barbara’s email came from the domain Antonio2005.com, which spurred the question whether the campaign had bought Antonio2009.com.

By the way, for anyone betting on the comeback of the century, Hahn2009.com is available, but we elected to save our $11 registration fee and use it for takeout tonight. It’ll have a longer shelf life.

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In February we used domain registration records to prove for the first time anywhere that Barbara Boxer plans to retire from the Senate in 2016 … we’ve also posted stories about the iPod class action suits, high speed train pork, shaking down Apple, diplomas that mean nothing, hugging smokers, and much more. Bookmark us, subscribe to our feed, and visit again!

Technorati Tags: Hahn, Los Angeles, politics, Southern California, Villaraigosa

This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 10:39 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under California Schemin', Brilliant, but uncategorizable, All Time Favorite Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.