I see it written as Valadao, but it could be “Americanization” of his last name. His parents did immigrate from Portugal. Valadao is Republican, but a fairly reasonable one. Huerta is the son of Dolores and has a lot of great attributes, in addition to his parentage. If I lived in that district, I would vote for Huerta but could be reconciled with Valadao. I do hope that Issa goes down in flames, though. He was behind the Gray Davis recall upheaval and has been deplorable ever since.
Might want to go back and read Valadao’s signature piece of legislation. McNerney fought the bill tooth-and-nail, because it was so bad. Only blue dog Jim Costa crossed party lines to support it. One provision allowed for increased dumping of fracking production water on land that would have affected nearly 27,000 acres. Also, this is not a simple redistribution scheme. The salmon populations crashed already before the drought, so in the midst of this, scientist have to battle the extinction of critical, once commercial, species. David Packard, the billionaire, gave researchers money to survey conditions in the ocean, on the continental shelf, in the Monterey Trench and out to the deep ocean sea bottom. What has been monitored since the 1960s is a steady decline in sea life. The deep sea floor, once quite active, is now a desert. More close to home, the Great Tulare Lake, the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi, was drained by the now incredibly rich Boswells to grow cotton. As a result, many key migratory bird species have just vanished or are grealy diminished by the removal of a critical stop in the Great Western Flyway. Valadao couldn’t give a shit about this. “Liberal environmentalists” are the enemy. Whether it’s economic opportunity in California’s poorest district or doing something about the Sixth Great Extinction Event, Valadao would rather maintain the reckless habits of the past 130 years.