Zelda Gilroy meltdown

Sheila Kuehl is a California state senator from Santa Monica, representing the seat formerly held by Tom Hayden. She’s an especially virulent hater of heterosexual men, the leader in writing the nastiest of all the laws in the nation on child support, alimony (for life), gender-based custody, domestic violence, and anything else she can use as a weapon. Before coming to Sacramento as an office-holder, she was a law professor at Loyola and a child TV star, playing Zelda Gilroy in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (of which she wasn’t one). Sheila kicked off her first campaign with a high-profile press conference manufacturing the myth that tons of women get beat up on Superbowl Sunday by fans of the winning team.

When Pete Wilson was governor, most of her bills were promptly vetoed, so she made extra-nice with Gray as soon as he announced on the theory that a man with so few evident principles would be a perfect foil for her toxic agenda. And sure enough, Gray never vetoed a one of her bills, and followed her advice on vetoing those she didn’t like, such as Rod Wright’s bill letting men falsely identified as the fathers of children off the child support hook.

She’s pissed about Gray’s humiliating defeat, knowing Arnie’s gonna send her back to the veto pound, so she unloaded to Daniel Weintraub about her feelings on the election last night:

KUEHL: I am really sad. I’m more angry than anything. And I haven’t even started thinking about what the Senate will need to do in order to save the state.

DW: Save the state from what?

KUEHL: From ignorance. This guy has no idea how to run a state. One of two things will happen. He’ll have his own ideas and no way to carry them out. I mean he has already proposed three things that the governor cannot do. He wants to roll back the car tax on his own by fiat, which he can t do. He wants to tax the Indians, which he can’t do. He doesn’t know anything about running the state. So either he will propose a lot of stuff he can’t do and we’ll have to govern, or he’ll be pretty well manipulated by people who have an agenda, very much the way I think the president of the United States has been handled by people who are really telling him how to do these things. In which case we may have to counteract things that are worse than things he proposed on his own. His handlers will probably be more conservative than he is, or in the Republican Party line. Convince him he’ll bring businesses back to the state by cutting more benefits to workers, by unraveling anti-discrimination statutes which they call job killers.

Here you see Sheila’s arrogance in full bloom, but I’ve seen it worse — the way to piss her off is to suggest there might be something she doesn’t know. She turned red and shouted at Jackie Goldberg’s brother Art in a hearing once just because he said that some of the poor are men, too. Art’s a veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the ’60s, a guy who runs a law center for poor people, and a proponent of the Rod Wright bill mentioned above. Art’s offense, according to Sheila, was suggesting the legislators who opposed his bill were “dumb as a post”. His sister is Jackie Goldberg, one of Sheila’s bosom buddies in the Lesbian Caucus.

Sheila’s my negative barometer, so the fact that she sees dark days ahead convinces me that the California recovery is right around the corner. Well, that and some of the e-mail I’m getting from employers in California today. Ha.

(Incidentally, Oregon gets 25% off the top of Indian casino revenues. It’s not impossible.)