Category: Politics

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.

Douglas W. Kmiec on Ninth Circuit & California Recall on National Review Online:

The sun shines brighter on the golden republic today because in court, law prevailed over politics, and in so doing, allowed politics to have its appointed day.

Yup.

The WSJ was disappointed by the ruling, however:

We have to confess, though, to being a tad disappointed that the High Court won’t be heard from on this issue. The Ninth Circuit slapdown is welcome. Even better would be one from the Supreme Court, which is now deprived of the opportunity to repudiate the notion that Bush v. Gore extends beyond the 2000 Presidential election.

Silly gooses.

Links via Mr. Bashman.

From Rough and Tumble:

Recall — A federal appeals court Tuesday put the California recall race back on track for an Oct. 7 election, reversing an order to postpone the vote and setting off a 13-day sprint to a final public judgment on Gov. Gray Davis. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, who had challenged the election date, said they would not pursue the matter further. Legal experts had projected slim odds of success had the ACLU appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Michael Finnegan in the Los Angeles Times Dean Murphy and John Broder in the New York Times William Booth and Rene Sanchez in the Washington Post Bob Egelko in the San Francisco Chronicle Henry Weinstein in the Los Angeles Times Claire Cooper in the Sacramento Bee Howard Mintz in the San Jose Mercury Matt Krasnowski in the San Diego Union-Trib Harrison Sheppard in the Los Angeles Daily News — 9/24/03

Part of President Bush’s address to the UN today was a tirade against the modern slave trade:

Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the United States is using sanctions against governments to discourage human trafficking.

The victims of this industry also need help from other members of the United Nations. And this begins with clear standards and the certainty of punishment under the laws of every country. Today, some nations make it a crime to sexually abuse children abroad. Such conduct should be a crime in all nations. Governments should inform travelers of the harm this industry does, and the severe punishments that will fall on its patrons.

The American government is committing $50 million to support the good work of organizations that are rescuing women and children from exploitation, and giving them shelter, medical treatment, and the hope of a new life. I urge other governments to do their part.

We must show new energy in fighting back an old evil. Nearly two centuries after the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and more than a century after slavery was officially ended in its last strongholds, the trade in human beings for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time.

While the comments about exploiting young women may have been intended to make Bill Clinton cringe, the larger target of this tirade is Islam, as most of the slave trade today is within and among Muslim nations, just as the traders who sold African slaves to American plantation owners were Muslim.

Could it be that the decline of Muslim civilization is somehow linked to slavery? Somebody smarter than me will have to answer that one.

Here’s the opinion of the en banc panel allowing the Oct. 7th election to go forward in California. Based on yesterday’s oral arguments, they didn’t have to sweat on this one at all. Simply put, the ACLU had no case, and as good a lawyer as that Laurence Tribe character may be, he couldn’t pull a rabbit out of thin air.

Link via censored blogger Dan Weintraub, who had better get his own personal blog if he doesn’t want minders minding him mindlessly.

The absentee ballot for Santa Clara county, CA is a punch card with numbers on the holes. Since I don’t have my own Pollstar machine, I had to punch the holes out with a pen, and remove the hanging chads by hand, per the instructions. I can see that this might be hard for an illiterate to figure out, but they do give instructions in many languages and stuff.

Since there was no obsolete voting machine involved, the Ninth Circuit shouldn’t have a problem with this voting technique, eh?

At the Cal Recall debate held in LA Wednesday among candidates Bustamante, McClintock, and Camejo (with joke candidate Arianna along for laughs), candidates agreed that Arnie’s refusal to participate in anything but a scripted debate was a weak spot, so they pretty well piled-on the poor old boy. Now they’re collaborating on a joint letter of boycott:

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Arnold Schwarzenegger’s top gubernatorial opponents on Thursday considered threatening to boycott the one debate that will include Schwarzenegger unless organizers switched to an unscripted format.

As it stands, only Davis and Arnie would be in the debate, to be held in Sacramento by the Cal Broadcasters’ Assn.

Blogger Dan Weintraub suggested the scripted format, and he’s naturally defensive about the boycott threats. He’s already been bashed by Mickey Kaus for making things too easy, and when Bustamante agrees, that pretty well nails it.

Prediction: The scripted debate will happen, and they’ll all show up except Bustamante, who doesn’t need the free TV time and doesn’t want to appear on a stage with Gray. If McClintock goes along with him, he’s dumber than he looks. Debating is McClintock’s strength, and it’s Bustamante’s weakness.

“It’s time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.” — Tom Friedman, Our War With France