What's The Chance That A Fanatic, Outspoken GOP Homophobe Is Molesting Underage Boys? EXTREMELY High-- Another One Lands In Jail

Stockton is the county seat of San Joaquin County and is sort of the outer reaches of the San Francisco Bay Area metro. When I lived in San Francisco in the 80s, I didn't know much about Stockton other than it's where Chris Isaak came from. Today the population is over 300,000 and the city has had some really bad raps in recent years:

• In a 2010 Gallup poll, Stockton was tied with Montgomery, Alabama for the most obese metro area in the US with an obesity rate of 34.6 percent.
• In the February 2012 issue of Forbes, the magazine ranked Stockton the eighth most miserable US city, largely as a result of the steep drop in home values and high unemployment.
• In 2012 the National Insurance Crime Bureau ranked Stockton seventh in auto theft rate per capita in the US.
• In 2012, Stockton was ranked as the tenth most dangerous city in America and the second most dangerous in California (behind Oakland).
• In 2013, Stockton was ranked as the third least literate city in the U.S. in a study by Central Connecticut State University, with less than 17% of adults holding a college degree, and ABC.com ranked the city as the third least literate of all U.S. cities with a population of more than 250,000 behind Bakersfield, California, and Corpus Christi, Texas.

Stockton is the heart of CA-09, Jerry McNerney's congressional district which has a PVI of D+6. Obama beat Romney there, 57.8-40.1% and last year, neither Hillary nor Trump did as well as Obama or Romney, although she beat him 56.6% to 38.0. It was a little closer when you only consider San Joaquin County, where Hillary won 53.9-41.0% (about a 20,000 vote differential).

This past November, Stockton voters changed their city's luck, electing one of the best mayors of any city in California, Michael Tubbs, at 26 the youngest mayor of any city in America with more than 100,000 people. He was an outspoken, prominent Berniecrat who beat Republican incumbent Dale Fritchen (62-38%) in his first city council race (2012) and then last November went on to beat the incumbent Republican mayor, Anthony Silva in a massive grassroots-fueled landslide, 41,998 (70.6%) to 17,486 (29.4%).

Does Anthony Silva's name sound familiar at all? It should but not even because there aren't that many Republicans elected to be mayors of cities that size and not many who decide to give God the keys to the city. Sunday Silva was arrested at San Francisco International Airport. He is charged with grand theft, embezzlement, profiteering, misappropriation of public funds and money laundering related to his running of a local non-profit kids' club. But that's only the surface of this particular-- but not atypical-- bust and Republican scandal which goes back to February of 2015 when a 13 year old boy was found shot to death with Silva's gun (which the mayor claimed had been stolen but that he hadn't reported to the police yet; the police say Silva was uncooperative in their investigation). Then this past August, Silva, president of the Stockton Kids Club, was arrested for providing alcohol to underage boys and taping them playing strip poker. Today the 42 year old Republican is sitting in the San Joaquin County jail in French Camp.

Silva was hated by the LGBT community in Stockton for his overtly homophobic posture but, like many sick, self-loathing Republican closet cases, he was molesting children instead of accepting and embracing his own humanity. The August bust wasn't the first time that Silva had been accused of inappropriate behavior with a minor. In 2004, he allegedly secretly taped male teenagers using a bathroom in his apartment. Silva was a high school water polo coach at the time. No charges were filed in that case. Sound anything like Denny Hastert?