Showing posts with label california governors race. Show all posts

Union Dues: CA Nurses Union Admits To Setting Up Whitman's Illegal Alien Maid

The Media-approved story: "brave" illegal immigrant confronts fat-cat billionaire Republican trying to "buy" a political office with the selfless assistance of a womens' rights advocate and is a factor in said fat-cat's election loss. When asked how an unemployed high school drop out can afford to pay the attorneys fees for one of the most expensive lawyers in the state, the response is the inevitable "attorney-client privilege."

The amazing reality: illegal immigrant maid to moderate Republican candidate for governor, who was fired after revealing she had lied about her immigration status for 10 years, links up with a media-savvy leftist with a JD and a bar card. Who made the introductions between an obscure Northern Californian maid and a celebrity litigator in LA? The CA Nurses Union, of course:

In early September, Diaz turned to a friend who knew a member of the powerful, Oakland-based California Nurses Association, The Chronicle has learned.
The union called in two lawyers for Diaz: Marc Van Der Hout, a longtime immigration attorney in San Francisco, and celebrity feminist attorney Gloria Allred, a fierce workplace rights litigator who arranged for Diaz to tell her story in a live-webcast news conference.
Asked to confirm her organization's role in Diaz's case, Rose Ann DeMoro, the nurses union executive director, said Monday, "I won't deny it, but I prefer not to comment directly on the case."
Whitman, a former eBay CEO, has alleged that Diaz was used by unions backing her Democratic opponent, Jerry Brown, and engaged in "the politics of personal destruction." Her campaign said the California Nurses Association's role was suspected after its spokesman, Chuck Idelson, turned up at a widely watched Diaz news conference - and refused comment on the matter.
But several sources close to the matter, speaking on condition that they not be named, have now confirmed the union's role in Diaz's emergence, a moment labor leaders hailed as a watershed in the immigrant-rights movement - and political opponents have called a classic campaign dirty trick.

The Nurses Union was also one of the forces behind the defeat of The Governator's 2005 reform propositions. Something to keep in mind next time you hear about how Big Business is trying to buy democracy. It's obvious they've already been outbid.

Oracle: California's Governor's and Senate Races

The election is one week away, but the conventional wisdom in California's two headline races is beginning to harden, if not curdle. Meg Whitman is going down in the governor's race, while Carly Fiorina is still in position to grab Barbara Boxer's Senate seat away.

The Republican woman who has the best chance to win in California on Nov. 2 is not billionaire Meg Whitman, who has spent more than $140 million of her own money to make sure every living thing knows who she is. It's Carly Fiorina, another former Silicon Valley CEO with thinner pockets but a looser campaign style who has drawn incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer into a dead heat.
The two Republican candidates have not campaigned together, but when they have appeared at the same event, it has been Fiorina who gets the attention, pounding a shot of Tequila and letting loose a rolled-r trill at the Hispanic 100 Lifetime Achievement Award dinner in Newport Beach (Orange County) this month.
Even as Fiorina piggybacks on Whitman's high-tech ground operation to mobilize voters, her campaign is betting that she won't be sucked down with Whitman should the former eBay CEO lose the race for governor to Democrat Jerry Brown.

Well, if I had to choose one, I would definitely take Fiorina beating Boxer over Whitman beating Brown. Sure, Jerry Brown is a doctrinaire liberal who has managed to hide his most liberal tendencies through a combination of strategic inaction and MSM cover, but Brown is also an impressive person: smart, thoughtful, and idealistic. Even the Free Will mother, a real Goldwater Girl and Reaganite, likes Jerry (she likes him personally, I hasten to add. She would never vote for him). There's an outside chance that Jerry very well could reform and shrink California government because he's too honest to keep papering over the state's unsustainable budgets. It could happen, but he's going to lack any real Republican foil with whom to strike any kind of grand bargains. Instead, Brown will be working to reform state government with the very interest groups, especially unions, environmentalists, and open borders types, who have done so much damage already.

Barbara Boxer, on the other hand? No redeeming qualities. Not only is she obnoxiously partisan. Not only has she embraced the farthest left-wing causes imaginable up to the unthinkable: assisting the treasonous Code Pink in their efforts to give aid and comfort to the enemy. Not only is she not nearly as smart as she thinks she is. She has done real harm to the state with her endless championing of hard-line environmental laws, often based on faulty politicized science. Defeating Boxer would not just be a necessary tonic for civil discourse. It can also provide the gentrified environmental movement with a rare, and much needed, defeat.

BTW, the pre-mortem on the governor's race is solidifying around something like this: sure Jerry Brown is a tired re-tread who will have trouble surviving the next 4 years, but it was fatal for Meg Whitman that the person presently in the governor's chair is a Republican widely seen as a failure. That only tells half the story and should be a real wake-up call to would-be moderate Republicans. The Governator - it can be hard to remember this - was the beneficiary of a recall campaign that was a real grassroots awakening in reaction to a liberal elite in Sacramento that was seen as too spend-happy and tied to the unions. While things weren't quite like the Tea Party, it was very similar both in enthusiasm and motivation. There was genuine excitement in state politics for a couple years, but ultimately Schwarzenegger lost his nerve. It was one of the great missed opportunities in living memory, and it hopelessly muddled if not ruined the GOP's reputation in CA, no matter how many times conservatives roll their eyes and make little rabbit ear motions with their fingers when they call Schwarzenegger a "Republican."

Government wants to grow and accumulate power to itself. When Republicans manages to win majorities on a promise to shrink government, the window is often pitifully small. And when they choose to moderate in pursuit of ephemeral compromise with foes who would never offer the same in return, they lose. November 3 Republicans would do well to remember that.

(Don't) Do It Again: Attacking Jerry Brown's Record

Jeffrey Lord, in an article offering attack ad fodder to a number of GOP candidates, gives Meg Whitman advice on the best line of attack against Jerry Brown in the three weeks left before the election: attack his record as Governor. It's so crazy it just might work!

Given his record, it should be easy for Meg Whitman to defeat the gent who the late Mike Royko labeled "Governor Moonbeam." But the last time Jerry Brown served as California's governor was thirty years ago, and memories -- even bad ones -- fade over time. So it'd be a good time for Ms. Whitman to remind Californians of Brown's other nickname -- Governor Medfly -- and how he earned it.
In 1980 California was beset simultaneously with Brown sitting in the governor's chair and an infestation of the Mediterranean fruit fly (the two creatures being easily confused). On November 24, 1980, the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared the state's effort at medfly eradication inadequate. Gov. Medfly fumbled and fussed, working anxiously to avoid using environmentally unfriendly pesticides against the environmentally destructive fly. Eight months later -- on July 10, 1981, after threats of boycotts of California agricultural products came from Japan and Mexico -- Brown finally ordered aerial spraying. State ag officials used malathion, a very powerful chemical. But because the infestation had spread so widely by the time Brown acted, the spray had to be applied across a huge area, close to many populated places. The malathion promptly melted the paint off of hundreds of cars. Californians may want to vote "green", but not if they have green-painted cars.

Lord doesn't even mention Brown's biggest vulnerability from the old days: Rose Bird, and the legacy of judicial activism that she represents. In fact, Brown's conduct as State Attorney General has been a big flashing neon sign signaling that he will happily use the courts to achieve far left goals that he could never win through the normal political process (i.e. elections and legislation). He failed to defend against the Prop. 8 lawsuit, leading to the anomalous sight of private litigants acting on behalf of the state. He has participated in a willful neglect of California's death penalty measures (including a failure to stockpile parts of the death chamber's chemical cocktail), resulting in the de facto extension of the state's death penalty moratorium. And so on. That's the thing about Jerry Brown. Like any professional politician, he's skilled at create a hub-bub of activity, but his real talent lies in knowing when not to act - and knowing that the state's MSM will never call him out on his nonfeasance.

But, here's the thing that's frustrating: I don't see any indication that Meg Whitman is expending much effort on making these points. Instead, she's running an (admittedly admirable) positive campaign about reviving the state and setting the stage for future growth. Great stuff, but that's only good enough for a dead heat, and a dead heat would seem to benefit Brown more than Whitman.

For those of us over 40, Jerry Brown is a familiar figure, and his negatives equally familiar. But, many of California's voters are not over 40, and were not around during Brown's previous reign of error. They are instead left with the image Brown likes to project: that of a competent "public servant" - and Brown, for all of his faults, is a very smart and capable man - with a long resume. He's also got a ton of union money, cover from the state MSM, and Gloria Allred's maid who, God help us, has emerged as a symbol of something or other. In other words, without a timely reminder of what a Brown administration once was, we could easily be looking at what one will be.

Jerry The Insult Candidate

Despite the state MSM's semi-embargo of the Jerry Brown "whore" tape, news of the gaffe has managed to at least escape and find its way to the voters. Legal Insurrection notes that, despite all of the reporting that has already been done, no one else has noticed that Meg Whitman is not the only person Jerry Brown insulted:

Beginning at 3:10 of the audio, Brown and his aides begin a discussion of Whitman's proposed budget cuts. A female voice says "Yeah, Jerry, we've got to focus on the police chiefs, we got to get them [inaudible]." Another female voice in the background says "[Inaudible] I just want to make sure we talk about this." Brown then says (at 3:20):
"I'm going to hit that out of the park, not that they read."

D'oh!

The union has had the last laugh on this one, as it is the source for the tape. Jerry Brown should be embarrassed, of course, as should all of his PR agents in the media who keep telling us what a scary smart guy he is. But, the biggest embarrassment should belong to "progressive" Californians, who have provided Brown with a public career for 40 years, and increasingly looks positioned to give him a narrow victory in November.

Waiting for the Wave: GOP Candidates Falling in CA

Groan. There's at least one poll out there that shows Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina running behind their Democratic opponents. I know, I know. They're within the margin of error, and there's plenty of time, and maybe there was a crazy sample size, but still...this doesn't inspire confidence. First Meg Whitman:

In the race for the open Governor's seat, Democrat Jerry Brown clings today to a narrow 47% to 43% advantage. Brown is up a nominal point since the previous poll; Republican Meg Whitman is flat. There is little internal movement among many demographic subgroups, with Hispanics being an exception, where Brown had led by 11 points, now leads by 24. Whitman has offsetting strength among the larger population of white voters, dulling the overall impact of Brown's Hispanic gains.

And then Carly Fiorina:

In the race for US Senator, incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer clings today to a narrow 46% to 43% advantage. Compared to an identical SurveyUSA poll released 12 days ago, Boxer is down 3 points; Republican Carly Fiorina is flat. Seniors are moving toward Boxer; voters under age 50 are giving Fiorina another look.

There are millions of people in California who have a major mental hurdle to overcome in order to vote for a Republican. This has nothing to do with "wedge issues" or the "spendthrift GOP Congress." The GOP always seems to be on the outs here, and when we do manage to elect a governor ... we end up with someone who responds to a fiscal crisis by trying to raise taxes and increase debt, while ignoring the state's exploding entitlement spending. California is practically the poster child for misguided progressive overreach, yet that just doesn't seem to matter. If that sounds bitter, well, it's meant to be.

September Surprise: Meg Whitman's Illegal Alien Maid

Meg Whitman's campaign came under its first sustained media/political (but I repeat myself) attack yesterday, as Gloria Allred produced an illegal immigrant who said she had worked for Whitman for years before being abruptly fired. A wealthy Californian hiring undocumented household help?? Say it ain't so!

The latest chapter in California's gubernatorial race unfolded live on TMZ.com, just hours after Whitman finished her first televised debate with her November opponent, Democratic Attorney General Jerry Brown, a debate in which she argued that California employers must be held accountable for hiring undocumented workers.
It starred Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred, a Democratic donor who is a controversial veteran of many highly publicized cases, surrounded by a battery of cameras in her office.
Seated beside her was Mexican-born Nicandra Diaz Santillan - Whitman's nanny and housekeeper from 2000 to 2009 - who charged that Whitman had mistreated her and failed to pay her for all the hours she worked.
Allred alleged that Whitman "never asked if Nicky were here legally" when she hired her to work 15 hours a week as a $23-an-hour housekeeper in Whitman's 15,000-square-foot home, then upped her workload and responsibilities. The attorney said she would file a lawsuit demanding back wages for hours she said Diaz worked and for which she was never paid, and for years of unspecified "abuse" she took at her employer's hands.
But Whitman said she had no way of knowing Diaz was in the country illegally because the housekeeper had provided her with a phony Social Security number and signed a required statement stating that she was a legal resident of the country.
Allred charged that Whitman ignored a 2003 letter the Social Security Administration sent to her home, informing her that Diaz's Social Security number did not match her name - a red flag for an undocumented worker. She said the agency asked Whitman to provide proper documentation, and Whitman never responded. But Allred did not show such a document Wednesday to back up that claim.

The Whitman campaign's story is that the maid provided fake documentation and a false social security number at the time she applied for work. As soon as Whitman found out about Diaz's true status, she fired the lady. Sounds good, but I'm still willing to bet that Whitman learned the truth about Diaz only after someone took a second look at Diaz's papers while Whitman was preparing to run for governor. Still, Whitman was in a damned if you do, damned if you don't position here. If she fires the maid, she could end up with a Gloria Allred-fueled media frenzy. Retain the maid, and God knows when the bubble might burst.

As for Allred, she took time out to go on Hugh Hewitt's show yesterday, where legal eagle Allred failed to cite the law - immigration or employment - that Whitman had broken. In fact, Allred admitted to not knowing the relevant immigration law (!), but also claimed that Whitman's real scandal lay in her acts as Diaz's employer. Wake me up when this starts to make sense:

GA: This is not about whether she should have terminated the housekeeper or not terminated the housekeeper.
HH: Well, what should she have done?
GA: This is about her treatment of the housekeeper.
HH: I know that, but I’m asking what you would do if you had a housekeeper who had defrauded you and then came forward and said I’m not in the country legally, Gloria. Would you keep them? Would you keep employing them?
GA: This isn’t about what I would do. It’s about what Meg Whitman would, and did do.
HH: But I know, but my audience…
GA: …and what those facts are. And apparently, you want to talk about everything except the facts of what Meg Whitman did.
HH: No, I think this is what everyone would like to know, is what to do in that situation.
GA: Okay, well I’m not here to give you legal advice.
HH: What would you advise your clients?
GA: Okay, Hugh, I’m not, nor do I pretend to be, although maybe you feel that you are, an expert on immigration law. That’s not my area. I am, what we do, our main focus, is employment, plaintiffs employment cases. And you know, the Daily Journal, which is a legal newspaper, had selected us a few years ago as the number one plaintiffs employment law firm in Southern California. So I need to talk about the employment issues…
HH: Gloria, I gave you your plug. I just let you get the publicity that you crave, and that you die for, and for which reason you bring stunts like this every time a campaign comes up. But just for the benefit of the audience, is it wrong to fire someone who has defrauded you under the law? Do you have a choice? Because I don’t think you have a choice. I think you have to fire them.
GA: Okay, Hugh, you, just like Meg Whitman, you, just like the rich and the powerful person that you are defending, can only engage in personal attacks. And the reason is you cannot defend against the facts which we set forth in six pages at our statement at the news conference today. You cannot defend her conduct…
HH: Actually, I’m not trying to defend anything.
GA: …that we laid out. Instead…
HH: …I’m asking you as a lawyer who brought these allegations to just state the law.
GA: …I’m telling, no, I’m telling you…
HH: Can you state the law, Gloria?
GA: Now for example, let me just tell you this.
HH: I mean, just state the law, then I’ll give you the rest of the time.
GA: No, I’m not. I’m not. No, if you want to go state the law, you can feel free to contact an immigration lawyer to do that.

At this point, we can only hope that Whitman didn't hire Simon LeGree to supervise the cleaning staff, and that everything Whitman has said is the truth.

But, the bigger problem is this: we all know of some (admittedly minor) political careers that were derailed by these sorts of "nanny problems" as the elites like to delicately put it. But, that was back in the days when there was still a recognizable federal enforcement of the immigration laws. Now? Give me a break. There are millions of illegal immigrants, hundreds of thousands of whom live in California alone. They are all working for somebody, but it only becomes a problem when a Republican runs a competitive race for governor. This makes a mockery of the law that Gloria Allred is pompously "enforcing."

Whitman is caught in the crosshairs of two mutually exclusive legal regimes. On the one hand, it is theoretically illegal to hire undocumented employees, yet these laws are selectively enforced, mostly to satisfy election year whims. On the other hand, there is a very real sense out there that - if someone of Mexican descent presents you with seemingly proper documents - that your verification work is done, and to question that person's legality further is to invite a civil rights claim from the Gloria Allred's of the world.

I know that the Left thinks a billionaire Republican like Whitman is inherently dumb and evil; but, still, if you have situation where a person like her cannot comply with the law, then the law is no longer working.

Double Dipper: Jerry Brown's Secret Pension

Via Roger L. Simon, here's an investigation by the OC Register into the secret pension of Jerry Brown, the Democrats' candidate for governor of California. I say "secret" because the pension is part of a fund that was supposed to have been eliminated 20 years ago, and the pension administrator refuses to identify its legal basis, the method of calculating benefits, or even whether Brown is the recipient. As these are funds paid by the public, that is an odd position for a moralizing scold like Brown to take:

As Jerry Brown grabbed the spotlight with his criticism of Bell city officials and their outrageous pensions, The Watchdog got to wondering: How much will the Democrat for Governor make in retirement?
That, as it turns out, is a very difficult question to answer. After more than a month of investigation, the Watchdog can only say for certain that Brown and a handful of other top officials are eligible for generous benefits under a special pension fund so obscure that few people in government know how it works and many thought it had been eliminated 20 years ago by outraged voters.
Under the law, Brown should have accrued, at most, 16 years of service credit in this special fund, known as the Legislators’ Retirement System, or LRS. Actuarial statements produced by LRS, however, indicate that an unnamed person of Brown’s age and earning Brown’s exact salary has been credited with 25 to 29 years of service. The difference would mean tens of thousands of dollars in additional pension payments for Brown each year.
Brown’s campaign staff acknowledge the unnamed person sure looks like the gubernatorial candidate but have been unable to explain the discrepancy over service.
Officials at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which manages LRS, have similarly refused to cooperate, saying the law forbids them from answering questions about specific individuals. Meanwhile, The Watchdog has sought help from the offices of seven state lawmakers, one constitutional officer and one state department as well three outside pension experts and not one has been able to explain the discrepancy.

The immediate problem is that Brown is drawing benefits equal to 25 years of service, but he only served 16 qualifying years. CALiPERS is cagey on how 16 became 25, but the reporters surmise that Brown must have counted the year he spent as a clerk for the state Supreme Court and the 8 years he spent as mayor of Oakland, which makes sense. Speaking of Oakland, Brown is not presently drawing the pension because he is serving as State Attorney General; see, you can't double dip serving in state office. But, Brown was apparently drawing his pension during at least part of his tenure as mayor of Oakland. He became eligible for payments when he turned 60 in 1998. Double dipping isn't illegal, of course. But, it's the sort of thing that tends to rub voters the wrong way. Pensions are theoretically supposed to be for one's retirement, not part of one's annual income while they continue working.

(BTW, a Brown spokesman cheekily told the Register that if they were really worried about Brown's pension, they should vote him into office so he would continue to be barred from receiving funds. Haw Haw. Spoken like a liberal who is confident the state MSM won't ask too many questions about this.)

The pension at issue has an interesting history, and is a perfect example of how California liberals will go to great lengths to preserve their perks and power, even in the face of popular will arrayed against them. Brown's pension was supposed to have been eliminated by Prop. 140, the same proposition that established term limits for state officers. That was the understanding of the voters at the time (late 1980's) and the proposition's proponents. Indeed, Democrats like Brown were the specific targets of Prop. 14o, one of many conservative propositions that frustrated Californians have passed over the years, yet were then willfully subverted after passage. The judicial cancellation of Prop. 8 is the latest manifestation of this, but the careful preservation of Jerry Brown's pension gives you an idea of the lengths liberals will go. Meanwhile, "liberal" propositions - whether for high speed rail, K-12 education funding (which straight jackets the budget process), regulating the size of chicken coops or banning the sale of horse meat - take on the force of holy writ. Yet another reason for the initiaive process to be reformed or eliminated all together.

More broadly, this is a problem for what it says about Brown, and the wages of progressive governance that California has been buried under by his fellow libs. Brown is old enough to be drawing a pension, an apt symbol of someone past their working age, yet he is seeking to be governor of California, a state wracked by - among other things - out of control pension payments to state workers, especially those state workers who have served in management positions. Brown, and his ilk, are the ones who set this system into motion; granted to themselves lavish benefits; and now ask to be holding the levers of power when pension reform is heading towards the top of the state's agenda. If that is to be our fate, can we at least have a discussion as to whether Brown is really the man for the job?

Pension issues have not really been an issue in the campaign (yet), but Brown's fitness as someone to preside over pension reform would be questionable even under the best of conditions. He is running, after all, as the standard bearer for "progressive" Californian governance as practiced by Jerry, his dad, and countless Democrats. But, the voters, it seems, are going to be spared this history lesson. Too bad.

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