Author: RB

Jeff Jarvis has the inside dope on rushing Rush:

What joy: Rush Limbaugh is a big, fat hypocrite, too. The National Enquirer broke the story: Rush’s ex-cleaning lady said she was his contact to a black-market drug ring from which Rush allegedly bought thousands — thousands — of prescription painkillers: OxyContin, Lorcet, and hydrocodone.

My prediction: teary apologies, a trip to Betty Ford, and a slow fade-out to oblivion.

The estimable Mickey Kaus predicted Tuesday that the long-anticipated LA Times hit piece on Arnold would have to run Wednesday to have any effect (Shoe-Drop Day tomorrow?):

Tomorrow would be about the logical last day for the Los Angeles Times to drop its bomb on Arnold Schwarzenegger. If editor John Carroll waits any longer it will look like a late hit designed to stampede the electorate.

And sure enough, Kaus has his finger on the pulse of the Times, as we see from the breath-takingly bizarre string of allegations of decades-old groping incidents reported by the always-reliable anonymous complainers:

Four of the six women told their stories on condition that they not be named. Three work in Hollywood and said they were worried that, if they were identified, their careers would be in jeopardy for speaking out against Schwarzenegger, the onetime bodybuilding champion and box-office star who is now the front-runner in the Oct. 7 gubernatorial recall election.

The other unnamed woman said she feared public ridicule and possible damage to her husband’s business.

In the four cases in which the women would not let their names be published, friends or relatives said that the women had told them about the incidents long before Schwarzenegger’s run for governor.

None of the six women who gave their accounts to The Times filed any legal action against him.

Is this a new journalistic low for the Times or what? It’s bad enough they’re so desperate to keep Davis in office they fudge a poll by overloading it with members of groups favorable to Davis, but when you offer a platform to anonymous sources to complain about thirty-year-old tit-squeezing incidents you’ve sunk to a level considerably lower in the credibility department than your average rad-fem blog.

Do they really think anybody is going to be fooled by this?

UPDATE: Arnold apologizes for mistreating women, at the same time that he denies these particular charges. The man clearly has some good advisers on the sexual stuff, probably on the Kennedy side. This was probably the right way to play it, and you’d expect it to be well-played given how long the rumors have been circulating. It strikes me that this story hurts the LA Times more than it hurts Arnie.

Doc Searls mentions that Reynolds and Volokh say Novak’s not protected from being compelled to reveal his sources:

Yet two alpha bloggers (constitutional blawgers, no less), Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh, both say Novak is in fact unprotected on the matter.

…which is obvious, but Doc’s fellow professional journalist Ed Cone is upset that Glenn’s not all over the Plame outing:

Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds are just a couple of guys messing around on the web. They are amateurs writing what pleases them. They have no responsibility to their readers to cover the uncovering of Valerie Plame:

That’s all true, and at the same time it is total bullshit. These guys aren’t lawyers for nothing.

To skip the CIA story is to declare it unimportant. It’s a lie to their audiences. Yet Reynolds is devoting limited energy to the matter, Volokh even less.

And Reynolds is defending himself for not sharing Ed’s obsession with a story that’s still emerging:

I don’t have much trouble resisting people’s efforts to bully me into advancing their agendas. What worries me more, in a way, are the friendly emails from people saying that they get all their news from InstaPundit.

Don’t do that! It’s “InstaPundit,” not “InstaNews Service.” And this is, as Eugene properly notes, an amateur activity. I don’t even get to blog all the stuff that interests me — I’ve really fallen behind on space, guns, and even nanotechnology lately– much less stuff that’s important, but that doesn’t interest me.

It appears that Ed Cone is mostly ticked-off with Reynolds for his pointing out that journalists don’t have immunity from the laws that govern withholding evidence and the like, saying “if we’re no different, why don’t you cover what I cover?”

I’m sure that hit counter envy doesn’t have anything to do with it. At all. But the larger issue is that we have a highly partisan guy – Ed – who’s supposed to be impartial, complaining about a highly partisan guy – Glenn – who’s actually more impartial in the present circumstance, even though he’s an amateur journalist.

Blogs are weird things, wherein 90% of the people make the other 10% look bad, to lift a phrase.

The new LA Times poll, just released tonight, shows Majority Now Favors Recall; Schwarzenegger Leads Rivals. Republicans are learning to vote with their heads and not with their hearts as they’ve been doing since nominating Lundgren. In the old days, McClintock could have won major Republican support from people thinking about purity and not about winning. In this election, where primary and general are compressed and they have to consider consequences, things are different:

For McClintock, the poll shows widespread admiration but erosion nonetheless. He is well ahead of Schwarzenegger and Bustamante on whether he has the character and integrity to be governor; three out of four voters say that he does. Voters say McClintock did the best job in the Sacramento debate.

But nearly half of likely voters say McClintock is too conservative to have a realistic chance of winning. Moreover, Schwarzenegger, a moderate, has picked off much of McClintock’s base of support among conservative Republicans. As McClintock’s support in that group dropped from 40% to 31%, Schwarzenegger’s jumped from 45% to 64%.

That shift appears to reflect a sentiment, shared by the state GOP establishment, that a Republican governor who supports legal abortion, gay rights and gun control — anathema to many party loyalists — is still preferable to a Democrat.

“My preference is McClintock,” said Keller, who cited his “pro-life” stand as evidence that he shares her values. “But I understand if the vote is split, we can get something worse, like Bustamante, which would be as bad as Gray or maybe worse.”

She plans to vote for Schwarzenegger.

Democrats held their noses and nominated Davis, and now Republicans are learning to do likewise. Let’s hope the results are better.

If this poll holds up, Arnie will be elected by more voters than those who elected Gray last year. Whether that’s enough to silence those who’ve claimed this recall is “anti-democratic” remains to be seen, but I’m guessing not.

After the recall, the three loneliest men in California are going to be Gray Davis, Cruz Bustamante, and Tom McClintock, and they’ll be so far out in the cold the only people willing to drink with them will be Arianna Huffington and Bill Maher. For Davis, this will be a merciful end, as the man completely lacks the emotional traits that make for a good politician and his performance has been so abysmal that he can’t be enjoying this career. Bustamante is a man of modest gifts who’s unjustly not modest about them, and one whose vocabulary is too limited to serve as governor. He doesn’t know the word “illegal”, for example, and governors have to sign or veto hundreds of bills each year with that word in them. Better he’d gone into butchery as he initially planned at the outset of his community college career. McClintock, I hope, will be the last of the Kool-Aid Konservatives, a nice talk radio host, and a regular guest on Maher’s HBO show.

The rest of California will muddle through somehow.

Watching the California recall debate tonight, I learned some things about the candidates:

1. Bustamante is a sleaze who’ll say or do anything to get elected.

2. Tom McClintock would make a great governor for Nevada.

3. Arianna’s ambition in life is to be Howard Dean’s running mate.

4. Arnie is the second coming of Ronald Reagan.

Dean really should give Arianna a call – she’s the only person in American politics with the potential to make him look almost sane, and she needs a mate so bad a running one will do.

The format was fine, by the way.