Hey kids! Remember Lorie Zapf, the homo-hatin’ housewife running for City Council in San Diego? Well, the Party of Fiscal Responsibility (that would be the Republicans) is helping pay for her campaign because Laurie can’t dump her own personal fortune into her run like all the other cool Republican candidates in California are doing.

And this is good news for Lorie because it is very important to her that she gets San Diego’s fiscal house in order:

Balancing the city budget by delivering important services in a financially responsible manner.

…unlike her own:

As CityBeat reported on May 19, the Zapfs stopped paying the interest on a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC), a sort of second mortgage on their home, in September 2009. As of this March, they had racked up more than $7,000 in debt and the bank had filed a 90-day foreclosure notice, called a “notice of default.”

Lorie Zapf’s explanations to the press have been vague and contradictory. In some versions of the story, she has cast her family as downtrodden victims of the mortgage crisis, while in other accounts, the campaign claims that the default is something that “often” happens when homeowners try to renegotiate their loans.

Not everyone’s buying that.

Local mortgage-fraud investigator Curt Novy told CityBeat, “I can definitely state [that] the filing of [a notice of default] is not consistent, normal or a standard procedure in changing loan terms from an adjustable to a fixed-rate.”

Attorney Gil Cabrera, who formerly chaired the San Diego Ethics Commission, agreed. Via Twitter, he wrote: “She’s defaulting on a HELOC?! Yea, that’s just bad management.”

[...]

The current notice of default isn’t the first on the Zapfs’ financial record. In Nevada, Eric Zapf defaulted twice on a mortgage on a second home and was cited three times as a delinquent taxpayer.

Yet, even as he missed mortgage and tax payments, Eric Zapf started giving money to politicians, including $270 to DeMaio in 2007 and $125 to District 1 City Council candidate Phil Thalheimer’s campaign in 2008.

Eric Zapf purchased the second home in a brand-new development in Henderson, Nev., near Las Vegas in 2004. As the subprime mortgage crisis unfolded, he stopped paying his mortgage payments twice, once in 2007 and again in 2008.

He also defaulted on his taxes: On three occasions between 2007 and 2008, the city of Henderson put his property on a list of homes that would be sold because their owners were delinquent in paying “Local Improvement District” assessments, the taxes used to finance infrastructure associated with developments such as housing tracts.

Eric Zapf paid back the debt on the first two occasions, but his lender, Countrywide, eventually paid off Zapf’s final tax debt in order to unload the property at a cut-rate price, known as a “short sale,” to recoup at least a portion of the loan.

So Lorie really needs that sweet $75K salary that the City Council pays because she can’t make it on the $50K she makes at the phony baloney San Diego Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse she runs when she and her husband aren’t… suing people:

She said she became interested in so-called lawsuit abuse after the small business she ran with her husband Eric—Boulder Bar Endurance—was sued in 1998 in a case she says was frivolous and abusive.

“I realized how important it was to protect citizens and small businesses from these suits,” she told CityBeat. “You get hit with one lawsuit and it can cripple or put you right out of business.”

That hasn’t stopped the Zapfs from hitting back.

They settled that lawsuit on the courthouse steps, Zapf said, but the next year, in 1999, filed a suit of their own against the plaintiff. A few months later, they sued him again for breach of contract. All told, between 1998 and 2002, the Zapfs filed seven suits related to their business alone. Eventually, they sold the company and stayed out of the courts until Eric Zapf sued Pioneer Electronics in 2007. He filed another suit in 2008 against a real-estate agent he says defamed him. That case is set to go to trial this week.

San Diego politics: not as sexy as South Carolina.