(Michael Zahara) – We all have our hillbilly relatives; what I don’t know yet is if Gloria and John Bonaventura are the hillbilly relations trading on their famous surname.
Ordinarily, I’m the kind of guy who has an appreciation for those political people with ambition and drive; two necessary components for public office.
I’ll make exceptions however, regarding Clark County Clerk candidate, Gloria Bonaventura; she is not only unqualified, she is also fundamentally dishonest and lacking any level of political integrity.
She’s accomplished nothing of value in that short time, and has never been a part of the party or of any of the party’s organizations or structures. No effort at all has ever been given to the party she’s now demanding support her bid against interim-Clerk and Dem superstar, Diana Alba, who has years of experience and a proven track record working as the late Shirley Parraguirre’s top deputy.
I know, I worked on a project under both some years ago.
Bonaventura can’t even articulate what she’d like to do in the office and her entire homepage is a salute to the family she married in to:
www.gloriabonaventura.com
It’s only about trading on her married name for Gloria Bonaventura, as if somehow the family’s political DNA will rub off on her. Her husband John is a long ago Assemblyman running this year for Clark County Constable against Dem powerhouse Bobby G, and John’s father is the former Constable and John’s the nephew of the respected retired judge and cousin of the current judge who end their surnames with the vowel ‘e’.
If John or Gloria’s surname were Lipshitz, no one would be paying them any attention at all.
First time politicos who don’t finish the terms we’ve elected them to are almost always in trouble at some point, and if their ambitions are so blind and so ruthless as Gloria and John Bonaventura’s are–willing to throw their names into the next available office every time–we shouldn’t be voting for them at all for anything.
They’re not the only husband and wife team this cycle either!
I wasn’t planning on writing about Gloria’s lies to us in 2008 and her fundamental duplicity and opportunism two years later, until I was downtown the other day.
I happened to turn around and read the political signs posted on the corner on Bonneville and there was Ms Bonaventura’s 3×6 campaign livery.
What caught my eye was the ‘union label’; actually saying ‘union label’ instead of identifying the Union Council membership and it is almost certainly a fake as no union print shop, anywhere in the United States that I know of, would have ever produced such exceptionally poor print work, and would not have affixed such a poor, and obviously faked, ‘union label’.
Accident or was she duped? Well, no. She’s done this before. Had she asked any person in any Democratic Party apparatus–including yours truly–any of us would have identified the legitimate union shops in town, or even out-of-state.
We’re Democrats and why we use union print shops is to ensure that illegal labor isn’t being used, that living wages are being paid, and that workplace standards of safety are being adhered to.
There are plenty of ‘fake’ shops in town willing to affix a phony ‘union label’ and plenty of people willing to support indentured foreign slave labor making their political materials, even if those people are in the United States unlawfully or the vendor isn’t even paying them Federal Minimum Wages!
We would have even told her of local non-union shops for shoestring campaigns, anything but lying and affixing an apparently faked union label.
Perhaps, I’m wrong. Perhaps her print house will be identified on her CCE’s and we can pull their union affiliations and if so, I will happily retract and apologize.
Then again, perhaps not. I sent them both an email asking who their print house was and both refused to answer my email query.
Q: Who did your outdoor print work?
A: No answer
But in the same email reply from her husband John, he stated the ‘worse than welfare’ $80 stipend, down from the original $120, that his wife has to suffer through on the Nevada State Board of Education.
Q: Is your wife employed?
A: No answer
Oh well, I guess we can extrapolate from that that Gloria Bonaventura’s run is just for the money as she has stated zero positions she’d like to implement as Clerk–she just wants the cash, I guess!
If both should win, their combined family income will be over $200,000 per year! That’s a lot of pork rinds and 40-ouncers of malt liquor!
Both John and Gloria are pursuing offices neither are qualified for. Neither tells us anything about what they’d like to do in office.
John was an Assemblyman in the early 1990’s and seemingly has held every job available including Corrections Officer, but wasn’t able to hold onto public office despite his famous surname, I guess.
Both husband and wife take the time to tell us how ‘famous’ other family members associated with the name are!
John ran for SD04 in 2008…and lost badly.
That’s all very nice and all, but his webpage goes on to describe for us his ‘affiliations’ and that he has ‘worked for’…then links the United States Treasury Department and the United States Department of Justice.
Really John?
John Bonaventura may have attended some simple training of sorts available to anyone and neither Cabinet level department has any record of his being one of theirs.
Though he certainly does leave that impression on his website though, doesn’t he?:
www.johnbonaventura.com
The USDOJ does not take kindly to anyone implying a relationship or an ‘affiliation’ with them and Mr Bonaventura is walking the very thinnest of lines per their spokesperson.
So I emailed John, and asked him this:
Q: What kind of work did you do for the Treasury and USDOJ John? How long were you employed at both?
A: No answer
It’s actually unlawful to misrepresent yourself as somehow being connected to federal law enforcement no matter how creative your verbiage and campaign rhetoric may be.
John Bonaventura included it on his website to deliberately deceive the 2010 voting public.
I questioned John’s sanity running against Bobby Gronauer–’Bobby G–who has run a tight office and kept himself and his men and women out of trouble and out of the headlines. Those others you may have read about were not under Bobby G’s office, but an ill-informed public may not know the difference.
Bonaventura and his wife have never done anything for the Democratic Party or for any charitable endeavor here that I can find–they just hope we all vote for them because we all liked the retired judge.
It will cost NVDEMS a pretty penny to defeat these two interlopers because they’re both advantaged right out of the gate with a surname that county voters are very familiar with.
That said, I did vote for the current judge despite his running only 20 minutes after graduating law school. He’s turned out to be a good judge despite he and the soon-to-be-indicted Willia Chaney of NLV being the inspiration for the recent change of the NRS requiring five years of licensing to run for judge.
Not coincidentally, Willia and Gloria sit on the same board today!
The reason I cast my vote for now Judge Joe was because he did one of the most creative campaigning I’ve ever seen here; handing out gigantic garlic bulbs at the San Gennaro Feast with his campaign livery on the packaging.
But it’s really is too bad that most people care more about who won American Idol last week, than care to get themselves informed about their own public officials.
And so goes the dynastic political families of Nevada seemingly thinking we can’t possibly go on without them in public office and the public that keeps electing them.
There’s the Donderos, the Segerblooms, the Koivistos, the Cortez-Mastos, the Reids, the Scows, the Hafens, the Sferrazzas, the Millers, any number of Leavitt family members…and that’s just off the top of my head!
With the 2010 Bonaventuras, I’m getting a vibe that they have to sit at the card table in the garage at family Thanksgiving dinners, aren’t you? The air of Trailer Park is inescapable looking at their respective campaigns which so far are designed not to inform or inspire us, but to deceive us.
In the race for Clark County Clerk, definitely cast your vote for Diana Alba, and for Clark County Constable, Robert Bobby ‘G’ Gronauer is well deserving of re-election.
I’ll be voting for both, and so should you!
(Mr. Zahara is a longtime Democrat activist who publishes the WatchdogWag.com blog)