Just the other day we wrote a detailed analysis of shadowy BID consultant Tara Devine’s hot mess of a public comment at last Tuesday’s City Council hearing on the establishment of that revanchist-zillionaire-instigated nightmare zombie horror show known as the Venice Beach Business Improvement District. In that essay, because we are fair, because we are balanced, because we love the truth, we noted in response to Tara Devine’s claim that her name was indeed Tara Devine that:

“We here at MK.org are as fair and as balanced as any other fair and balanced news source. When our subjects say something true, we don’t hesitate to showcase it. As far as we’ve been able to determine, her name is, in fact, Tara Devine.”

Well, long-time readers of this blog will recall that our faithful correspondent has lately been poking around in the City Ethics Commission‘s databases¹ and, besides coming up with this fascinating evidence against illegal-hotelier and BID Proponent Carl Lambert, found this unexpected item about shadowy BID consultant Tara…er…Teresa Devine. That’s right, friends, you read it here first. We tried to pay some respect to a liar by acknowledging that at least she didn’t lie about her name. And then it turned out that her name is actually Teresa rather than Tara and, therefore, that she did lie about it.

Which means that the fact that she’s called after a famed white supremacist holy shrine can’t even be blamed on her parents as we’d originally thought. She chose the moniker her own self. There is, as they say, no accounting for taste, although we’d have thought that someone whose business is so intimately reliant on public relations might have had the good sense not to advertise her non-mainstream political views so openly. Or maybe, and this just occurred, she knows her audience quite well and she’s chosen her nom de BID consultancy because it does in fact attract the right crowd. Scary thought, that.

So at this point, we’re tempted to quote former occupant of the office of the president, Ronald Reagan, who is famous for having uttered, in reference to something or other, the famous words “Trust, but verify.” But by now we don’t trust anything that we hear or think that we know. Instead, we verify. So straight to Wikipedia! It turns out Reagan copped it from the Russians: Доверяй, но проверяй. Who knows who to believe now?! Fortunately it’s clear who not to believe: Ms. Teresa Devine.

Image of Tara Devine is ©2016 MichaelKohlhaas.org. Image of Ronald Wilson Reagan III is in the public domain because of federalism and its discontents.

1. Highly recommended, by the way. There is endless interesting stuff in there.