Showing posts with label meg whitman. 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.

At Whit's End: The Last Word on the Gloria Allred Smear

Looks like people have concluded that Meg Whitman's "illegal alien maid" scandal will blow over, not least because of Gloria Allred's overwrought advocacy on behalf of her client, Jerry Brown, er, Nicki Diaz. Before we go, here's video of Allred on Greta Van Sustern's show last night. Allred probably thought this was a safe haven, since Greta is always willing to showcase Allred's battery of sleazy mistresses on the make, but not this time:

It’s every bit as good as rumored from the Twitter stream. Greta van Susteren calls Gloria Allred “insane” and “delusional,” and even gets Allred to admit at one point that her client, illegal immigrant Nicki Santillan, won’t ever end up in court on this complaint. Susteren calls Allred’s ethics into question for exposing the woman and her children — “putting a big neon sign” on them, in van Susteren’s words — for a case that Allred not only admits she can’t win but won’t even survive to an actual trial. Meanwhile, Allred keeps insisting that Meg Whitman lied about the letter that her husband saw seven years ago, and van Susteren keeps insisting that any judge or jury would laugh her out of court for that assertion on the basis of a quick note scribbled on the letter by her spouse:

Now, credit where credit's due: in pushing this story, Allred dove headfirst into some hostile media interviews, including Hugh Hewitt's and, especially, Mark Levin. She could have as easily gone the safe route: softball interviews with the LA Times, plus sob sister TV appearances on MSNBC. But Allred went toe-to-toe with the best the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy could throw at her. She might be wrong, but she's also a warrior. That's something you can't say about Jerry Brown, and the other male politicians for whom Allred is working so hard.

Witless Over Whitman: The Meg Whitman Maid Story Falls To Pieces

The San Francisco Chronicle is a typical liberal newspaper in one of the most liberal cities in the US. Immigration attorneys, as a group, tend to be leftist in their politics. So what do you suppose happened when the Chron called a bunch of immigration attorneys to ask if Meg Whitman had broken the law?

Whether or not Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman received a letter from the Social Security Administration saying her former housekeeper's false documents did not match its records, Whitman did not act unlawfully by keeping the housekeeper employed, immigration lawyers said Thursday.
In fact, had she gone ahead and fired Nicandra Diaz Santillan based on such a letter, she would have exposed herself to potential anti-discrimination violations, lawyers said.
Whitman says she wasn't aware of receiving a "no-match" letter.
Lawyers said an employer's obligation upon receiving a no-match letter from the Social Security Administration is to check their own records for typographical or other errors, inform the employee that the records do not match and tell the employee to correct them.
"There is no additional legal obligation for an employer to follow up or respond to SSA with new information," said Gening Liao, a labor and employment attorney at the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles, which defends immigrants.
Liao added that it is "very important that the employer does not take adverse action against the employee" merely based on a letter from Social Security.

I'm sure it kills Liao to have to say that, but that's the legal situation that immigration rights advocates have helped create.

That's really the problem with this October Surprise: Whitman hasn't done anything wrong, except maybe that she made Nicki Diaz cry. In fact, Whitman's case is an example of how horribly the politics of immigration has screwed up America's immigration laws.

I keep hearing that this story will hurt because Latino voters will be turned off by Whitman's treatment of her housekeeper. Could be, but I don't see how it could hurt within the illegal immigrant community since they're not *supposed* to be voting in the first place. As for eligible Hispanic voters, Democrats appear to be hoping to whip up a combination of class resentment, anti-white bias, and soap opera tears to cause the "community" to turn decisively against Whitman. Just what you would expect from the party of the "scary smart" Jerry Brown.

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.

California Polls

There's been some early polling in CA's major state races. With one exception, all are dead heats. Since this has been a left-liberal state since the mid-Nineties (and the state's large independent vote has a default setting which could be described as "public school liberalism"), that is quite a change. Must be some sort of devious Republican plot.

First off there's the governor's race between Jerry Brown (D) and Meg Whitman (R ca. 2008). Brown has a miniscule one point lead, combined with moderately high unfavorables. Personally, I've been saying Brown thinks he's going to lose because he's already prepping his "I was outspent/it was all advertising/voters are idiots" concession speech. Looks like the CA MSM has reached the same conclusion: Meg Whitman, Jerry Brown In Virtual Tie

California's race for governor is a dead heat, as Republican Meg Whitman's massive advertising blitz coupled with Democrat Jerry Brown's lo-fi campaign have raised doubts about Brown and cut his lead among Latino voters and other key Democratic constituencies, a Field Poll released today shows.
Brown leads Whitman 44 to 43 percent in the poll, with 13 percent undecided, according to Field's survey of 1,005 likely voters. The poll, conducted June 22 to July 5, has a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points.
But billionaire Whitman's relentless advertising campaign has helped sour voters' views of Brown, with 40 percent holding an unfavorable opinion of him - up from 25 percent in March 2009. Still, 42 percent view him favorably.
Voters feel similarly mixed about Whitman, with 40 percent viewing her favorably. But 42 percent view her unfavorably, up from 27 percent in March 2010, largely because of her bruising GOP primary against Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and attacks on her from union-backed independent expenditure groups.

Advertising? That's your analysis? The real problem for Brown is that CA has been living through a crisis of Big Government for the last 2 years brought on by an unholy combination of gold-plated pensions, out of control budgeting, a hostile business climate, uncontrolled illegal immigration, and sub-prime lending. None of these were "Republican" phenomenon. They are exactly the sort of results you get when you elect Democrats into the vast majority of state offices. More of the same isn't going to cut it this year.

But, sure, it's the advertising.

The race for Barbara Boxer's Senate seat is also all tied up, with The Box weighed down by an emphatic 52% disapproval rating. It could be that this is because she is one of the worst Democrats in the state, a shrill loudmouth who thinks she's smart because she's a liberal. That's not the spin coming out of the state run media, however:

One of Boxer's more vexing problems, analysts say, is that opposition to her is not just about her. She has become an avatar for broader voter frustrations about the struggling economy, President Obama and the growth of the federal government.
"It's a reflection of the effectiveness of a Republican strategy to characterize Sen. Boxer as everything that's wrong with the government," said Larry Berman, a professor of political science at UC Davis. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., another longtime Democrat facing a tough re-election challenge, faces a similar predicament, Berman said.

Sorry, La Box is the face of progressive government in all its nannying "call me ma'am" glory. That's not a Republican talking point. It's a fact of life.

In the attorney's general race, Republican Steve Cooley enjoys a slight lead over SF's very own DA Kamala Harris. Of course, 70% of the poll's respondents said they'd never heard of Cooley or Harris, which is par for course for down ticket races. If Cooley has half a brain, he will make sure voters know what a terrible district attorney Harris has been. I mean, take your pick. There's her refusal to seek the death penalty for a cop killer. There's the on-going problem in the drug lab. There's her office's apparent failure to turn over evidence of impeachment evidence to defense attorneys. There's their pitifully small conviction rate. And there's the program that managed to protect illegal alien juveniles from ICE, at least one of whom went on to murder a local butcher and his sons. The one thing Harris has going for her is that she presents well; she's cool, professional and always looks good in her suit. Still, I can't shake the nagging feeling that Cooley's one of those guys who likes to pompously reject "negative campaigning."

The only race that is a rout so far is the one for Lieutenant Governor, where SF mayor Gavin Newsom has a 9 point lead over moderate Republican - and incumbent LG - Abel Maldonado.

The Field Poll shows Newsom leading incumbent Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado - who took office as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's appointee in April - by nine percentage points, with 23 percent of likely voters undecided.
"It's still early. Relatively few people are aware of any of the candidates except Newsom," said Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo. "His lead is based on name recognition - it's not really a level playing field yet, but it will be before we get to the election."
While Newsom is much better known than Maldonado, a former state senator, the poll shows that he also has far higher negatives: 67 percent of voters know of the San Francisco mayor, but 41 percent of those polled hold a negative image of him and just 26 percent have a favorable opinion. Those negatives skyrocket among Republicans: 66 percent of GOP voters polled have an unfavorable opinion, while 42 percent of Democrats view him positively.
Newsom's challenge, DiCamillo said, will be to reinforce his positive image but also attempt to define Maldonado before the Republican can define himself.

I'm honestly torn about this one. On the one hand, Newsom is a SF Democrat. On the other, Maldonado is practically the poster boy for the sort of moderate Republican squishes who have enabled so much of the destructive policies wrought by the state's progressive politicians. He provided the crucial third GOP vote for the "Debt & Taxes" budget deal that was rejected in last year's Special Election. He was also behind the open primaries initiative from last month. The man simply can't be trusted to stand firm for anything beyond his own re-election. At least I know where Newsom's coming from.

Clearly, the closeness of most of these races testifies to the major opportunity Republicans have in a state that really hasn't voted in large numbers of Republicans in a long time. As with Scott Brown's election, the job of the GOP candidates is to convince the many millions of people who have been lazily voting for Democrats for the past decade that, no, Republicans are not evil and that voting for one won't cause you to burst into flame. We're probably lucky that this year the GOP did not nominate any "social conservative with mistress" types. But Whitman and (especially) Fiorina have the chance to do some real good this year. Hopefully, they won't blow it.

Smiles, everybody! Smiles!

Springtime for Moonbeam: Jerry Brown Calls Meg Whitman a Nazi

We've all heard, by now, about how Jerry Brown called Meg Whitman a Nazi while talking to a journalist during a jog. Nice how that works. Last year, Whitman would probably been in Brown's fund raising Rolo-dex, and her actual "right wing" pronouncements can be counted on one hand. Now, she's a Nazi: Who's Angry Now?

Politico reports that, in a conversation with a reporter, Brown compared his Republican opponent, Meg Whitman, the former eBay chief who triumphed in this week’s GOP primary, to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda. According to KCBS’s Doug Sovern, Brown claimed that:
She’ll have people believing whatever she wants about me. It’s like Goebbels. … Goebbels invented this kind of propaganda. He took control of the whole world. She wants to be president. That’s her ambition, the first woman president. That’s what this is all about.

Notice how easily Brown slipped into a "GOP = Nazi" discussion while talking with a prominent Bay Area journalist. Why, it's almost as if Brown expected the guy to agree with him implicitly! Also, notice how he can't believe the electorate might support Whitman over him without the intervening hand of "propaganda." No, the crisis of progressive Big Government that the state has suffered through the last couple years has nothing to do with it! (and it's not like the state's public sector unions won't spend millions on ads in the fall!)

Mostly, notice how easily this supposedly sophisticated, scary-smart progressive politician slipped into the most hackneyed of insults,"Nazi." Let's at least update our mass murderers here. "She's just like Pol Pot!" "It's Hutu time out there!" "She'll have people believing whatever she wants. It's like Ratko Mladic!" Etc. But Nazi? Come on, Jerry!

All of this makes me think Brown doesn't think he's going to win the election. He's already declared Whitman to be banal and dumb. Now, he's calling her a Nazi and declared her effective advertising campaign to be propaganda. Those are the sounds of the liberal loser.

Morning After: Reflections on the Primary

Actually, it's a little after lunchtime. Too late for a real "morning after."

Now that Meg Whitman has won the GOP nomination, a surprising number of commentators have declared the election to be hers to lose. That may be, but she will still have to wade through millions of dollars worth of union funded ads declaring her to be a heartless CEO who starves babies and fire-fighters for fun. She will also have to deal with a state-wide MSM that will happily parrot the liberal talking point of the day. Jerry Brown is Big Government's last line of defense, and they will drag him across the finish line, if need be.

Yeah, it's disappointing that Chuck DeVore didn't win the Senate nomination, coming in third with about 18% of the vote. That's about how much Tom McClintock got when he ran in the 2003 recall election. I think we can safely say that the population of the truly "doctrinaire" California conservatives is not too big.

I've been critical of Carly Fiorina these past few months, but credit where credit's due. She ran a good campaign and beat one of those watery California moderates, which is a good thing. She'll need to run a gaffe-proof campaign to beat The Boxer, though.

Ugh. John Eastman lost. Too bad.

The DA from San Francisco (Kamala Harris) and the DA from Los Angeles (Steve Cooley) will face off for the attorney general job. Harris is good looking and exudes a sense of competence and command. But, her tenure as SF's DA has been a disaster complete with crime lab scandals, mass dismissals of criminal complaints, the shielding of murderous illegal aliens, and the inevitable refusal to seek the death penalty against a cop killer. Hopefully, whoever is running Cooley's campaign can read the newspapers, but I can't shake the feeling that he's one of those guys who doesn't like "negative campaigning."

Apparently, MSNBC and some other MSM outlets got overly excited about GOP Secretary of State candidate Orly Taitz who is (a) Birther (b) a vexatious litigant and (c) a cougar with a crazy eye. Grow up, and how about profiling Damon Dunn, the guy who won going away? He's as impressive as Taitz is deranged. But, we all know the MSM hates covering guys like Dunn.

The turn-out in SF was a measly 23%, which works out to about 100,000 people. 83,000 of them approved Prop. G, which makes it official City policy that the high speed rail terminus will be located at the Transbay Terminal in downtown SF. Ten years from now, when you have to spend months on end sitting in traffic (after sitting in Bay Bridge construction traffic for most of the 2000's) while the high speed rail lines are laid, just remember that it's because of a relative handful of voters voting in a low-turnout election, approving something that City politicos didn't want to have to go on the record as supporting. Direct democracy simply doesn't result in good public policy.

I've seen some hopeful commentary to the effect that Blanche Lincoln's primary victory shows that the anti-incumbent wave has crested. You wish. The real anti-incumbent wave is coming from the Right and the Center. Lincoln was being hit from her Left by a public union sector that has lost all credibility with the voters. They were hardly representative of the sort of voters who are "anti-incumbent."

I've seen a lot of talk about how the many GOP women who won last night are a sign that this is some sort of Year of the Woman. I'd say it's a reflection of something that has been an open secret on the Right: the most conservative people tend to be the women. Who are the male equivalents to Sarah Palin, Phyllis Shlafely or Ann Coulter, for example? More important, the male Republicans who have been in office the last 15 years, and who have been the face of the party, have made a real hash of things. Just off the top of my head, I'm thinking of:

Trent Lott

Tom DeLay

Jack Abramoff

Dennis Hastert

Bill Frist

Ed Gillespie

Henry Paulson

Alberto Gonzalez

Paul O'Neil

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Mark Foley

Mark Sanford

Everyone else in South Carolina, except Jim DeMint

Bernard Kerick

Mitt Romney (for Romneycare)

Scott McClellan

Richard Armitage

Colin Powell

Tom Cambell

Chris Cox

Bob Livingstone

Duke Cunningham

___________________ (write in your favorite here)

Like the management at GM, the men in the GOP Establishment started from a position of strength and frittered it away in a cloud of Big Government and "moderation." The women who won last night are not some sort of gender vanguard. They are merely the public face of the GOP's strongest supporters, who are now taking back the party.

7thriv