Why Is Paul Little the President of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce?

[first published: August 27, 2008]

Whoever had the idea of hiring Paul Little as the President of the Chamber of Commerce? The Chamber states as its mission to be: "an effective economic and political force for our membership".

They sure didn't listen to our own Doo Dah Parade experts. From the Star News:

For the second year in a row....Paul Little has been named the Thorny Rose of the annual Pasadena Doo Dah Parade. [Here are some of the reasons they gave]

"Every mayor and every council member in every city between Pasadena and Claremont hates his bloody guts,'" ...

"His hard- headed, obnoxious, pushy and arrogant demeanor puts him at the top of everyone's hit list.'

True, the Chamber has long had a conservative bent, and pushiness could be seen as an asset [in business]. Still, conservative never meant "crazy" and the question needs to be asked:
did Paul Little's blogging history ever come up in the interview?

For Paul Little is a blogging fiend. He was/is a regular blogger on Rene Amy's blog(s). Don't take my word for it,

Gene Maddaus wrote in 2005 in the Star News that :

"Little sometimes posts four or five times a day [on greatschools]. He has many opinions, some of them strident, but he has never sought anonymity in expressing them. Quite the contrary."

In Amy's blog, Little had found his "niche". He didn't need to worry, after-all, about raising eyebrows at the Council. "It is true" wrote Maddaus again "that many of the council members hold the PUSD administration in a degree of disdain."

Amy used the media medium as a hybrid of the diary with the tabloid - alongside a Blog's irresistible "pull" - the Comments section where readers could write in their own opinions [or, more frequently on greatschools, spew their own venom]. Despite Little's [published] claims that he wrote to the blog "to offer a second opinion", Little's true opinions jived just fine with Amy's - as this raunchy quote illustrates:

"When PUSD was asking for money,' said Councilman Paul Little, "I told people that's akin to going away and leaving your alcoholic brother-in-law with the keys to the bar." [is Little trying to be funny here? Is he "having fun" at the sake of our public schools??]

Little had no problem with the ethics of Amy's blog, ethics that would eventually get it shut down by Yahoo groups. Here he is quoted from a Star News article by Gary Scott on Rene Amy's anti-semitic Clarkowitz campaign [the Star News slapped Amy once in awhile to distance themselves from him, publicly at least].

[A posting of Rene Amy's] call[ed] for posting the words "Arbeit Macht Frei" above any expanded high school continuation campus that might be established by the district.

How does Little respond to that?

City Councilman Paul Little said although posts on Greatschools could occasionally be in "bad taste," it was an important forum.

Little has thrived in the growing conservative blog community [plenty of whom find bashing PUSD is "having fun"] of the San Gabriel Valley - visiting several blogs a day and even signing on as a Contributor for one, the Pasadena Political Underbelly [though I noticed his name is now down]. It was here I found him last Fall, only it took a little while.

While investigating the local right-wing blogs, I happened upon an astoundingly racist blog post, so racist that the anonymous blogger advocated sterilizing poor black women! It was only later I realized that one of the participants "Paul the Talker Guy" was actually Paul Little, President of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce! I wrote about it here:

And who was the "Guest" interviewee in a recent Aaron Proctor's PW column? none other than Paul Little. The two are blogging pals.