Author: RB

It looks like the Wesley Clark campaign may be over before it started. Read this from the Draft Clark blog:

By the time you read these words, the bell will be tolling for Wesley Clark’s candidacy. It will be clear across the country that the campaign of Wesley Clark is nothing more than the Gore campaign with a better candidate – this will mean that activists, the people who can create a field organization that can win Iowa and New Hampshire, will know that this campaign is nothing more than a media creation.

Clark was Hillary’s best hope. What will she do now that he’s blown up?

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.)

Your final numbers on the landslide are at the Secretary of State’s place.

A lot of good stuff has been written about this already, by Dan Weintraub, Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, Roger Simon, Matt Welch and others, so I’ll just hit the high points:

1. The voters tossed Davis out on his can and replaced him with an ass-grabbing, movie-making bodybuilder with an accent because they figured Arnie couldn’t do any worse. Davis failed to deliver as governor because he has no leadership and no balls, and we know Arnie has an abundance of both — the LA Times proved it.

2. Davis wasn’t the real problem — the entrenched ultra-left wing of the Democratic Party, the Willie Brown/John Burton Frisco machine and the Berman/Waxman LA machine are the real problem — but he wasn’t strong enough to stand up to these machines and face them down. Arnie, in the people’s judgment, is better equipped to do that.

3. The crocodile tears that were especially moist on the blogs of the self-styled technical elite about the “un-democratic” nature of the recall were shot to pieces. The recall succeeded dramatically, and Arnie got more votes than Davis even after sharing his with 134 other candidates. They won’t admit it, but they were wrong, wrong, dead wrong and couldn’t have been more wrong. Was anything more sad than the MoveOn.org campaign?

4. It’s a new day for the California Republican Party, and possibly for the national one, but Arnie and Bush could hardly be more different ideologically; one’s conservative on fiscal issues but liberal socially, and the other is the reverse. But they’re both real men and that may, at the end of the day, mean more than their policies.

5. The LA Times is out of touch with California. Thinking that their last-minute sleazy hit would swing voter sentiment against Arnie was a classic mistake of the Politically Correct smug and arrogant class. Blogs and other forms of New Media have made their style of persuasion transparent and obsolete. Voters are not the oh-so-sensitive soft New Males and Aggressive Women that news rooms seem to be full of these days; they’re more like bloggers.

I think this is going to be a good thing for the Sunny South, but they’re in a deep hole and it’s going to take a lot of digging to get out of it.

Drudge:

EARLY AFTERNOON EXIT POLLS SHOW 57% VOTE ‘YES’ FOR RECALL, CAMPAIGN SOURCES TELL DRUDGE REPORT, 47% FOR SCHWARZENEGGER, 34% FOR BUSTAMANTE, 12% MCCLINTOCK… DEVELOPING…

A majority for Arnie is within reach. Imagine that.

Roger L. Simon is voting for Arnie, for the right reasons.

The bias in the LA Times’ groper stories (backed-up mainly by anonymous sources), and its simultaneous spiking of stories on Davis’ physical assaults on former employees, have prompted Times readers to cancel their subscriptions en masse. This from the horse’s mouth:

As of Saturday evening, about 1,000 readers had cancelled their subscriptions to protest the handling of the Schwarzenegger story. In addition, the newspaper had received as many as 400 phone calls critical of its coverage — many angry, some profane.

The New York Times lost subscribers under the Raines reign, and this is exactly what should happen when papers become de facto tools of puke politics.

Link via Ben Domenich.

Jill’s original story on Davis’ abuse of his office staff is on the Winds of Change blog. Here’s one lurid tale:

On the day in question, State Controller Davis was raging over an employee’s rearranging of framed artwork on his Los Angeles office walls. He stormed, red-faced, out of his office and violently shoved the woman, who we shall call K., out of his way. According to employees who were present, K. ran out clutching her purse, suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized at Cedars Sinai for a severe nervous dermatological reaction, and never returned to work again.

According to one close friend, K. refused to sue Davis, despite the advice of several friends, after a prominent Los Angeles attorney told her that Davis would ruin her. According to one state official. K. was allowed to continue her work under Davis from her home “because she refused to work in Davis’s presence.”

Why doesn’t the LA Times want you to know this?