Bolsavik.com

The Bolsavik received Long Pham’s campaign mailer yesterday. Long Kim Pham, Ph.D., is running for the Orange County Board of Education, First District. Read more about the man here.

The mailer is a two-sided page, Vietnamese bio on one side, and an English statement on the other. The English side is the same candidate statement he filed with the County Registrar of Voters more than a month ago.

What’s interesting is the envelope: Both the return address and the postage permit are ink-stamped, not printed.

During the protests against Nguoi Viet, the protesters distributed photos of the newspaper’s late founder and publisher Yen Do meeting with communist hotshots.

The story took bizarre turns as the protesters accused Yen Do of being a communist spy, and then the newspaper in turn published accounts insinuating that Yen Do was a CIA informant. Read more here.

One particular photo, below, has become the source of even more rumor mongering ever since the death of one participant.

The paper’s current publisher, in public appearances and on television, has acknowledged that Mr. Do did travel to San Francisco to meet high-ranking communist officials, with the prior knowledge and approval of other major shareholders of Nguoi Viet.

Even though the meeting did happen, though, others have questioned that this one photo may be faked, because the way Yen Do’s (third from left) belt buckle reflects on the desk. (Photo sleuths can check the larger photo here.)

Fake or not, this photo has provided fodder for even nastier rumors, ever since the person to the left-most of the picture died of an auto accident in Hanoi on April 6, a few weeks after the photo surfaced.

That person, Le Quy Bien, victim of either an accident or something more nefarious, was an American citizen who had been living in Vietnam for several years. The person second from left is Nguyen Xuan Phong, at the time the Consul General of Vietnam in San Francisco.