All except one: "Friends of Long Beach, a Committee Supporting Vice Mayor Robert Garcia for Mayor." It surfaced in late January 2014 and its funders to date have been a handful of major donors (most not allowed to vote in LB elections because they aren't people or don't live here.) Asked about his role in the outfit, Mayor Foster told LBRegister's Joshua Stewart and LBREPORT.com's Bill Pearl in February: "You don't see my name on it."

No matter what the election results on April 8, Mayor Foster's "you don't see my name on it" thumbnose response is in our opinion his political legacy.

Photo above right, "The Unknown Comic" (Murray Langston, photo used with permission).

Mayor Foster made a number of claims at a February 25 event endorsing Garcia that in our view don't survive scrutiny. In January, he made a number of the same claims in his final "State of the City" message which went mainly unscrutinized elsewhere.

In our opinion, the record shows that other cities weathered the "Great Recession" without decimating their police and fire services. Other Mayors and City Councils didn't leave their taxpayers with roughly 200 fewer police officers after their Mayor won election by promising 100 more and then erased most of the police field anti-gang unit in a city infested with gangs.

Officials in other cities don't say "crime is down" when the facts and impacts on neighborhoods are, at best, mixed. (LBREPORT.com coverage here). Over the past weekend, two people were shot in a Wrigley neighborhood. (LBREPORT.com coverage here.) A few weeks earlier, four people were shot -- one of whom was killed -- outside a business in downtown Long Beach in Garcia's Council district. (LBREPORT.com coverage, here.) Residential burglaries citywide -- in which ELB neighborhoods are now the primary victims -- are roughly 34% higher than they were in 2010. (LBREPORT.com coverage here.)

Their Mayors and City Council majorities in other cities didn't leave some of their fire stations without fire engines, shrugging as residents across the street from a fire station watched their home burn until a fire engine arrived from a further location to douse the flames. (LBREPORT.com coverage here.)

Their Mayors and City Council majorities in other cities didn't pretend their actions produced a budget surplus when the surplus wouldn't have occurred without a one-year cash windfall from Sacramento's statewide dissolution of Redevelopment, which LB's Mayor and Council opposed. (LBREPORT.com coverage here)

Their Mayors and City Councils in other cities didn't approve unbudgeted double-digit raises (including for management) knowing pension costs were expected to increase in coming years. They didn't call it "pension reform" when they belatedly implemented overdue pension changes that taxpayers are paying for with raises to cover the employees' pension costs.

Their Mayors and Council majority (dissent by Schipske) didn't agree to spend roughly $1 million (to start) to invite proposals from developer/operators to build/operate a new Civic Center for the private firm's profits without first inviting bids that might show a lesser cost to seismically retrofit LB's City Hall.

Their Mayors and Council majorities in other cities didn't tout transparency while blocking discussion of a proposal (from Schipske) to provide public access and transparency in elected officials' communications that currently evade public records disclosure.

Thus far, the "you don't see my name on it" committee's most visible contribution to this election cycle (apart from some mailers) has been what you see below on the properties of various Long Beach businesses. Does what you see look to you like it was done with the property owners' consent?

Some of the signs are at street level.

Yes, Garcia and his campaign say he's not responsible for this since it's done by an "independent" committee with which neither he nor his campaign can legally coordinate activities.

On April 8, Long Beach voters will show whether any of the items above are important to them in casting their votes.

To the above we simply add: on their worst days, we have more respect for what Beverly O'Neill and Bob Foster did while in office than for what others in this city have done and are doing when, to borrow a Bob Dylan phrase from the '60s, they turn their heads and pretend that they just don't see.