Infamous ex-HB councilman Shaw joins OVSD supporters – apparently unaware they helped oust him from office

Former Huntington Beach councilman Joe Shaw, unceremoniously booted from office by voters in 2014, was chiming in last night on the “Comunidad” forum, the Facebook home of the local radical leftwing activists that go by the same name.

Shaw, who relocated to the midwest immediately after voters showed him the door, was joining the local social media fray over the controversial, embattled Ocean View School Board President Gina Clayton Tarvin.

Which is ironic, given that Tarvin, along with at least one of her supporters, a local activist named Janice Ugland, actually played parts in helping to unseat the shrill, polarizing Shaw, who once infamously arranged an OC Register photo shoot which provided plenty of fodder for political opponents.

I’ve never disclosed this publicly before, but in the weeks leading up to the election, Tarvin (whom I’d never even heard of at that point) began reaching out to me with emails that evidently were meant to portray Shaw in a negative light and serve as political ammo against his campaign. A friend of Tarvin’s, another local activist named Stephanie Green (according to Tarvin) suggested she get in touch with me.

I never used any of the material, and to be honest, once I learned who Tarvin was, the idea of a school board trustee trying to influence the council election struck me as highly inappropriate. At first I was intrigued, because I certainly wanted Shaw voted out, but in the end I wasn’t willing to play ball with a dirty politician to do so.

Here is a header from one of the emails:

Janice Ugland, who was also in last night’s Comunidad Facebook discussion, also helped to thwart Shaw’s campaign, by digging deep into his online past to reveal a series of vulgar, questionable public comments that she later shared (and as one prominent Republican operative told me back then, the comments discovered were a huge part of Shaw’s political undoing).  A sample:

:

While it is nice to have Shaw back on the local political scene, even if from afar, it does seem funny that some of the people he is choosing to be with, and even support, are part of the reason he is no longer here.