Posts Tagged ‘Politico’

« Older Entries


Meyer Dings Bell, Carly Snarls & Snarks, Press Picks

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

Before the City of Bell (“promoting a healthy, balanced and moral lifestyle”)  became a global  symbol of greed, rapacity and plunder by scumbag public officials, the town was best known as the site of the heist of 55 Oscar statuettes from a loading dock on March 8, 2000.

Although three trucking company employees were sentenced to probation in the case, all of them pleaded “no contest,” and their professions of innocence at various points in the proceedings suggested to Some Observers – we name no names – that they were set up to take the fall for the caper, while the real culprits remained at large.

Today Tom Meyer, internationally renowned editorial cartoonist, fashion plate and world class Calbuzzer, tackles the lingering mystery of the case, and with uncanny Holmesian intuition, solves it at last.

Not available in stores: Calbuzzers interested in purchasing a full color print of a Meyer cartoon can email Tom at tom@meyertoons.

Don’t be a jerk: Shortly after Roger Simon returned to work at Politico last month after a dreadful illness, he wrote a lovely little column on the subject of civility, specifically the lack of it in politics, called “Impolite Pols Face Doom.”

Perhaps inspired by his experience in cheating death, Simon riffed on a recent survey showing people across the nation rank “politics and government” as the most uncivil arena in American life,  with 72 percent of those polled saying it’s more rude and disrespectful than talk radio and high school, at 59 percent, Hollywood at 56 percent and even blogs, at 51 percent, all perceived as bastions of greater civility than The Game.

“Listen up, you morons,” Simon began:

We, as a people, pay a price for the jerks among us: Nearly half of all Americans say they are “tuning out” of government and politics, 46 percent are tuning out of opinion pieces and editorials in the media, and 38 percent are tuning out of news coverage and reporting.

His piece, and others on the same subject, came to mind when we received the latest copy of “Boxer Bites,” a regular emailed attack feature of Carly Fiorina’s campaign for Senate, and decided that, in a campaign year when spending millions on the low road is just table stakes, Hurricane Carly hands down wins the prize for absolute pure nastiness.

We’ve certainly done our share of ripping Babs for her arrogance and sense of entitlement, true that, but still, there’s  something vaguely creepy about the unrelentingly toxic tone of the constant ad hominem attacks coming out of iCarly’s corner.

From the Mean Girls cattiness she accidentally revealed with her comments about Boxer’s hair, to the sophomoric sarcasm of “Boxer Bites” and her overall habit of making criticisms more personal than political, Fiorina’s attitudes and language echo the caustic corrosiveness of Sarah Palin, even as  they recall the personal viciousness with which Carly set about to smash the civility and respectfulness of the “H-P Way” corporate culture when she moved in as CEO. An excerpt from Friday’s eblast:

Perhaps it’s good that Barbara Boxer is visiting an employment-training center today. As a career politician who has been in elected office for more than three decades, the transition back into the real world is likely to be a rocky one. Boxer may very well need some job-skills training in order to find new employment after the people of California fire her on Election Day. (After all, bitter partisanship and election-year grandstanding aren’t exactly marketable job skills in the real world).

As you would know better than almost anyone, Carly.

Notes from the cutting room floor

A young and hotly talented political writer looks at the 15th SD race.

A nice and nicely restrained conservative takedown of Obama.

Memo to Meg: Washpost’s conventional wisdom on self-funders.

Tom Friedman watch: A mere eight uses of “I” in 800 word column.

The smartest meta political piece in a while on culture and ideology.

Why didn’t somebody warn us Obama has a David Brooks fetish?

What makes Dick Blum run?

The Girl with the Seriously Dead Author.

And speaking of civility…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Barbara Boxer, Bell scandal, California Politics, California Senate Race, Carly Fiorina, Senate race | 5 Comments »

eMeg Asks: What Does Jerry Have to Hide?

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

In the summer silly season of California’s 1990 campaign for governor, a  strategist for Dianne Feinstein used to say that running against Pete Wilson  was like “getting up every morning and having somebody throw marbles in front of you” all day.

The description perfectly expressed the challenge of facing the aggressive, always-on-offense style of Republican Wilson’s camp, which worked assiduously to keep Democrat Difi constantly off balance before defeating her in November.

The phrase came to mind Tuesday with word that Meg Whitman’s campaign  has filed a Public Records Act request seeking reams of documents at the state Department of Justice, ostensibly to discover if Attorney General Jerry Brown has been nefariously using state employees or resources to advance his bid for governor against eMeg.

The request, formally made by Sacramento GOP oppo research consultant Mark Bogetich, came one day after Seema Metha did a feature in the L.A. Times, which examined the line that Brown must walk between his official duties and campaign activities; the piece presented no evidence that he’d crossed it, nefariously or otherwise.

Rising with its usual, over-inflated self-righteousness, the eMeg Empire nonetheless pointed to Mehta’s story to explain its PRA demand, a cheap head fake used to justify a smart political play.

The demand, which Brown’s office has 10 days to answer, is a tactical move to strew marbles in Krusty’s path, a distraction that interferes with his effort to gain some traction, let alone momentum, in at least three ways:

1-It pushes out the idea that Brown must be guilty of something – planting the suggestion that he’s committed some kind of official misconduct into both the campaign debate and the public consciousness (especially if Team Whitman throws some advertising dough behind it).

By putting Brown in the position of having to prove a negative, in a year when politicians are more subject than ever to perceptions of chicanery, it sets up a new line of attack over his character, at a time when his camp is trying to push a narrative that questions her personal integrity; as the money quote from eMeg spokeshuman Sarah Pompei announcing the PRA request  clearly shows, Whitman is already treating her so-far baseless suspicions as proven fact:

After 40 years in politics, Governor Brown appears to be someone who will try to take advantage of his incumbency, even if it costs taxpayers money. Voters deserve to know what they’re spending on Jerry Brown’s personal P.R. campaign.”

Deserve to know “what they’re spending,” not “whether they’re spending,” mind you.

2-It opens the possibility that the records search might actually reveal something embarrassing or, at least, something commonplace that can be twisted to seem embarrassing.

The PRA letter from Bogetich  is actually pretty mundane: asking for hiring and payroll records, calendars and travel expense sheets (have a blast reading those maintenance logs for state cars, man) for DOJ employees who work on communications matters. Given Brown’s experience in office, and the micromanaging he does over anything involving media, it’s unlikely there are any bombshells there, but, hey, a girl can always hope.

Whatever else the PRA demand does, it creates a tiresome, day job distraction for Brown, his professional staff and his Merry Band of campaigners to locate, pull, examine and assess thousands of pages of boring documents, all of it time not spent plotting and running against eMeg.

3-It’s a brush back pitch that serves to warn Brown that he needs to be extremely careful in wielding the most effective weapon of his el cheapo campaign – the constant free publicity he receives from weighing in on every high-profile case, from Anna Nicole Smith to the Grim Sleeper, and suing every populist target from investment firms to health care insurers.

In putting Brown into a defensive posture, the move seeks to transform his greatest strength into a potential liability and make it harder for Krusty to frame the election as a referendum on Meg – and easier for her to make it about him.

It’s worth noting that Bogetich markets his firm by offering “political vulnerability research” that “helps clients…de-position opponents.” Orwell would be proud.

It’s also telling that he’s part of a broader oppo research division within the mighty Empire: in describing the operation a few months ago, Politico quoted an inside source who made a point we keep harping on:

We believe that (Brown) hasn’t undergone the rigors of modern campaigning. He hasn’t run a competitive race at this level since the early eighties. It’s a different news cycle than he has experienced. He’s incredibly skilled and incredibly talented. But this is a new challenge for him.

Not to worry Gandolf fans: he’ll gets things cranked up on the fax, as soon as the typeball gets replaced on the Selectric.

P.S. Things could be worse for Democrats.

If they had nominated Gavin Newsom instead of Brown, they would have had to contend with “vulnerability research” Bogetich was doing a while back on the cost of the only-in-San Francisco “Healthy Penis” campaign. (Answer: $122,575).

In case you missed it: Slate’s mashup of Mel Gibson’s abusive phone calls to Oksana Grigorieva and the trailer for his movie, “What Women Want,” is a must-see. Fair warning: X-rated and strictly not for the easily offended.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in California Governor's Race, California Politics, Campaign Advertising, Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown, Meg Whitman, Pete Wilson | No Comments »

Jerry Brown: Grasshopper or Lotus Flower?

Saturday, July 17th, 2010

Today, Calbuzzard cartoonist Tom Meyer provides a rare, behind-the-scenes peek inside the inner sanctum of the state Attorney General’s campaign headquarters, and finds the Democratic nominee for governor… sitting on his ass. With anxious Democrats from one end of the state to the other wetting the bed over Krusty the General’s Sun Tzu fight-by-indirection approach to the battle for governor (“He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious” ) to be disquieting, if not downright scary. Meyer reports that Brown is nothing if not focused. What exactly it is he’s focused on is another issue.

Just in time for Christmas! Calbuzzers interested in owning a full color print of a Meyer cartoon (suitable for framing) should email Tom at tom@meyertoons.com .

As the world of eMeg turns: It’s a close call whether Meg Whitman’s performance on the campaign trail this week bore more resemblance to a) one of those old Saturday Night Live skits where Chevy Chase falls down a flight of stairs, trips, knocks over a full banquet table and lands flat on his ass or b) Professor Irwin Corey explaining the meaning of life:

One of the things that you’ve got to understand is that we’ve got to develop a continuity in order to relate to exacerbate those whose curiosity has not been defended, yet the information given can no longer be used as allegoric because the defendant does not use the evidence which can be substantiated by…What was the question?

While endlessly entertaining for the California press corps, eMeg’s inability to keep straight what she said a day or two before, let alone the primary, about immigration or immigration or immigration or state worker furloughs put her at times in Sarah Palin territory, if not quite at the level of Michelle Bachmann.

Given eMeg’s proven inability to speak consistently, if not coherently, about major issues that you’d like to think she was catching on about by now, it’s no surprise that Calbuzz hears on the street that she’s doubling down on her current L.A. TV buys – putting her in the neighborhood of $1.2 million a week – a quick and nifty way to make sure voters hear what her handlers want her message to be, even if she’s not quite capable of saying it herself.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

P.S. We also hear that the next round of eMeg ads will include a batch of new positives. Concerned about the unfavorable image voters have of her, look for her well-paid and well-fed Svengalis to roll out the Meg Whitman Charm Offensive before long.

Anonymous sources always welcome here: A mere 28 months before the presidential election, coat holders for eMeg mentor Mitt Romney and potential rival Palin are already trading cheap insults under cover of anonymity granted them by national political reporters who just can’t wait to get things going.

It started when Time’s Mark Halperin quoted a couple of Romney advisers: “If she’s standing up there in a debate and the answers are more than 15 seconds long, she’s in trouble,” said one. “She’s not a serious human being,” chipped in another.

Then Politico joined the fray, quoting an unnamed Palin partisan returning fire. And Huffpost media writer Jason Linkins is the only reporter to date to notice the circle-within-circles absurdity of Politico’s sourcing of this blind quote:

“For Washington consultants to sit around and personally disparage the governor anonymously to reporters is unfortunate and counterproductive and frankly immature,” said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

As Linkins noted: “It’s as if words have no meaning at all.”

How many times do we have to tell you guys to hire a copy editor: Speaking of linguistic nullity, the Empire of eMeg struck again after the big California Nurses Association protest outside her Atherton spread, when a newly-anointed member of the Meg Whitman Nurses Advisory Committee snarled that “this partisan union is going to obscene lengths to win Jerry Brown’s third term,” and then concluded with this clunker, captured forever by the Coco Times:

“The CNA is shamelessly misrepresenting a respected profession for partisan political gain and it’s a shame.”

Shamefully, their shamelessness apparently still has a shame. For shame.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in California Economy, California Governor's Race, California Politics, Immigration, Jerry Brown, Meg Whitman | 2 Comments »

Chicken eMeg Ducks; Primary Winners and Losers

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Jerry Brown kicked off his general election campaign for governor by reprising the Call-Meg-Out-to-Debate gambit he played at the California Democratic state convention. And eMeg, true to form, repeated her Chicken Little with a Fat Checkbook routine, refusing to meet Krusty on neutral turf.

So began the race to November: Brown moved to maximize his big advantage as a skillful debater while minimizing her great strength as a world-class spender, as she pooh-poohed his invitation to a series of 10 town hall joint appearances, clearly recognizing the pitch as that of a poor man desperate to substitute free airtime for the countless TV ads only she can afford.

“I’m inviting Meg Whitman to join with me to run a campaign that will put the focus on town halls where each of us in an unscripted manner will discuss our positions and answer questions,” Brown said Wednesday, in a move that echoed his call in April for three-way gubernatorial debates that included the now-vanquished Steve Poizner.

“Let’s tell people how we’ll manage their tax dollars, how we’ll hold down taxes, how we’ll make government work better and more efficiently, how we’ll fix our schools and how we’ll create jobs,” he added.

Whitman ducked and hid behind Mike Murphy’s clown pants while turning the rhetorical tables back on Krusty the General whom, she quite correctly noted, has not laid out plans for managing the state budget, taxes and spending:

“There will be plenty of debates in the future,” Whitman told reporters (hmmm, where have we heard that before?).  “But in the present what I recommend to Jerry Brown, instead of playing political games, is to lay out his plan for California.

“His website has virtually nothing on it and he hasn’t told Californians much of anything. I put out a 48-page policy book and detailed the plans that I have to turn California around.  I call on Jerry Brown to lay out a plan for California, and then at least we’ll have something to debate about.”

The elbow exchanges began on Tuesday night, within moments of confirmation that they were their parties’ nominees  for governor.

“It’s not enough for someone rich and restless to look in the mirror one morning and decide, ‘Hey, it’s time to be governor of California,’” Brown said, in the best line of the night. “We tried that [nudge, nudge, wink, wink Gov. Schwarzmuscle]. It didn’t work. Puffery, platitudes and promises won’t balance our budget, won’t fix our schools and won’t create any new jobs.”

“Career politicians in Sacramento and Washington be warned [take a note Babs],” Whitman replied, joining herself at the hip with U.S. Senate nominee Carly Fiorina. “You now face your worst nightmare; two businesswomen from the real world who know how to create jobs, balance budgets and get things done.”

“Jerry Brown has spent a lifetime in politics and the results have not been good. Failure seems to follow Jerry Brown everywhere,” eMeg added.

God, we love the smell of sniping in the morning.

The bottom line: The Green Eyeshade Division of the Calbuzz Department of Weights and Measures has concluded – after several shots of espresso and rubber covers on our fingertips – that Whitman spent about $90 per vote in the primary while Brown spent about 20 cents per vote. So if the debate going forward is partly about who knows how to wring results out of a scarce dollar, well, you gotta give the edge to Krusty.

Pressing the populist income equality point, Brown flackster Sterling Clifford responded to Meg’s refusal to debate:  “Whitman is acting as though she’s the queen of California and wants to be crowned without the need to face her subjects. . .Since Meg Whitman only has a record of not voting, it’s time for her to get out from behind her gilded curtain and engage in a open exchange about how we can get California working again.”

Brown himself got a little steamed when asked about Whitman’s repeated charge that his record shows he would tax and spend too much.

“Look, she wasn’t here most of the time, and she wasn’t voting or paying attention,” he said, a reference to the fact that Whitman has only a passing acquaintance with civic engagement. “When I was governor of California, we built up the largest surplus in history — $4.5 billion. We created 1.9 million jobs. We reduced taxes by billions, OK?”

True that, but when Brown started as governor in January 1975, Whitman was still attending just out of Cold Spring Harbor High School in Long Island and studying at Princeton, where she might have learned about Brown’s tax and spending practices  in a class on ancient and medieval history.

Election pool results: The breathtakingly close race for second place in the Democratic primary for governor, matching retired San Diego Realtor Richard Aguirre and Sacramento-based parole board judge Charles “Chuck” Pineda Jr., had our team of polling officials working into the  early morning hours Wednesday to determine the election pool winners.

Secretary of State Deborah Bowen reported the photo finish result this way:

Aguirre 71,493  (0.0406288%)
Pineda 71,484  (0.0406237%)

As of noon Wednesday, we hadn’t heard of Pineda calling for a recount, so although these are the unofficial, not- for-the-record-books-not-exactly-final numbers, the Calbuzz Department of Close Enough for Government Work & Election Returns made a command decision to give  Aguirre 2nd place for pool purposes. Because, after all, why not?

That said, the winners, with number of Right and Wrong answers are:

1st Place – Brian Kraft       6R 1W
2nd Place – Jeremy Wolf   5R 2W (won tiebreaker*)
3rd Place – Justin Salenik 5R 2W (2nd tiebreaker)

*The tiebreaker question was how many votes birther screwball Orly Taitz would capture in the Secretary of State race. Players were all over the lot on this, with Michael Tamariz estimating a low-ball 7,845 and Andrew Westall and Alex Hirsch both projecting 1.1 million for the widely known whack job. In the end, the demented loon won 359,490 Republican votes. Which is pretty scary, if you think about it.

Thanks to everyone for playing.

Damn the iceberg, I’m in charge here: Speaking of knuckleheads, Chris Matthews made an even bigger fool of himself than usual Tuesday night when he ranted on MSNBC air for several hours about the damage that was going to be inflicted upon the California Republican ticket because GOP voters were about to nominate Taitz – even though GOP voters never came close to nominating her and she badly trailed nominee Damon Dunn all night long, starting with the first vote dump.

Starting well before the polls closed in California at 8 p.m. and continuing until after 9 p.m., Matthews kept putting on a frightful frown to repeatedly raise the subject of Taitz and thunder that she was a “malignancy” for Republicans who was likely to “drag down” Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, as if her nomination was an accomplished fact, rather than the headline on a  lazy speculation piece that he’d read on Politico the day before.

Just when it appeared his tweety bird head would surely explode, NBC political director Chuck Todd saved the day by gently pointing out to Matthews that what he was saying lacked what you like to call your factual foundation.

Nonplussed by having uttered utter nonsense for hours, Matthews quickly moved on to his next imaginary opinion.

Unsung heroine: Progressives, populists and all right-thinking people everywhere owe a big Ooh Rah to Gale Kaufman, who worked pro bono managing the David-Goliath upset campaign against Prop. 16.

While Pacific Greed & Extortion Co. spent $46 million of ratepayers money on its cynical scheme to block local governments from contracting for cheap public power around the state, Kaufman had a campaign budget of $90,000 which she expertly deployed to foil the evil corporate plot.

Final score:

Good guys 2,015,297   $  0.04 per vote.
Bad guys 1,830,278   $ 25.13 per vote.

Mwahaha.

We’re just sayin’: Our Department of So Ten Minutes Ago Cliches and Worn Out Slang is calling for a moratorium on the use of the phrase “Game On” in all California political stories between now and the November election. Don’t make us use your names.

Year of the Woman meets Mean Girls: Hurricane Carly, who was bald fercrineoutloud after chemo for breast cancer and got a pass from everyone about her ravaged looks, now has dyed her growback hair black with some greasy product she got at Target and while she’s waiting to do an interview on KXTV in Sacramento, she makes a crack about Barbara Boxer’s hair! (Not to mention her [jealous?] trash talking of eMeg for going on Sean Hannity). CNN has the outtake. This is the kind of stuff that makes her so repulsive to some people (we name no names).

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in California Governor's Race, California Politics, California Senate Race, Campaign Advertising, Carly Fiorina, Jerry Brown, Meg Whitman | 6 Comments »

Press Clips: Balz, Hearst Shine; eMeg Still Ducks

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Postman delivers: For political reporters, the most memorable scene in “The Boys on the Bus,” Tim Crouse’s classic chronicle of campaign coverage of the 1972 presidential race, comes at the close of a dreary candidate debate in California: “Walter, Walter, what’s our lead?” one of the reporting pack shouts at the great Walter Mears, of the Associated Press.

The now-retired Mears is known as one of the best ever at performing what Crouse described as “the parlor trick” of instantly finding the lede of a political story – recognizing and honing in on the most important, precisely correct point with which to begin a clear, concise and rational account of what is often a sprawling, complicated and uncertain event.

Amid the countless trees killed in the service of covering President Obama’s first State of the Union this week, the Washpost’s Dan Balz proved anew why he’s the premier political scribe among the Beltway Wise Men, by nailing a Mears-like lede in his thumb sucker on the speech, one of the toughest deadline stories on the beat.

After the theatrics and the rhetoric and the canned responses, two questions remain from President Obama’s first State of the Union address: Did he succeed in persuading nervous Democrats not to cut and run on his presidency; and will he succeed in making Republicans think twice about their united opposition to almost all things Obama?

Our old friend Dan next pulled out and featured, high up in his yarn, the key money quotes from Obama’s hour-plus oratory, focusing on the president’s effort at shaming congressional GOPers into doing something beyond trying to trash and de-legitimize his presidency:

After last week, it is clear that campaign fever has come even earlier than usual. But we still need to govern. To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills. And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town, a super-majority, then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership.

Unfortunately for Obama, the answers to the questions Balz raised in his lede are:

a) most likely not
b) NFW.

Limbering up for punditry: While Balz won top Calbuzz honors for Instant Analysis, Richard Dunham of the Hearst Washington Bureau captured the award for print’s Best Pre-Game Show, posting a series of Harper’s Index-style, by-the-numbers measures on Obama’s first-year as president.

Put up on the Chron’s “Politics Blog,” Dunham’s report was a terrific, value-added, online element that provided advance perspective on the speech, on everything from Afghanistan to the anger of voters, as measured by official stats and top-rank national polls.

There was great sadness in the newsrooms of the Chron, and of other Hearst papers, when the mother ship folded local Washington bureaus into a consolidated D.C. operation, but Dunham’s good work on the SOTU offers a case study of how journalistic efficiencies of scale can sometimes work.

eMeg speaks – but not to you! In her unstinting effort to be elected Governor of the United States, Meg Whitman hit her talking points sat for interviews with three national outlets on her big book tour this week, once again stiffing the media organizations that actually cover the California governor’s race.

Breathlessly gushing about her appearances with Today’s Matt Lauer , Neil Cavuto on Fox and NPR’s Morning Edition, her press shop offered this dreck –

Meg has been doing a series of interviews over the past few days, and doing a great job explaining how she will be a different kind of leader for California

– apparently utterly oblivious to the irony that she’s explaining what a swell leader she’d be to REPORTERS WHO ARE NOT IN CALIFORNIA.

Breaking news: 150 days and counting since Calbuzz extended its dinner invite to eMeg.

What difference does it make what he says? Ben Smith at Politico got into an interesting beef with Senator John Cornyn, who accused the journo of being “blatantly unethical” after Smith posted a press release the Texas Republican put out commenting on Obama’s speech – hours before it was given.

I understand why Cornyn and his office are unhappy about the item and that they intended the early release as a convenience. I respectfully disagree on both the news value and the ethics. My blog item didn’t suggest that the mild deception in which his office was asking reporters to participate was some kind of major crime. It was just an opportunity to lift the curtain on a bit of Washington artifice and cast a little light on the way the parties actually interact.

And traditional ground rules, which I’ve been clear about in the past, are that you can’t put something off the record or under embargo without a reporter’s consent.

Amen, brother.

Hurricane anticipation: Cornyn wasn’t the only one to engage in a little crystal ball gazing about the speech. Carly Fiorina opined that Obama was offering “gimmicks, not real solutions” in the speech nearly seven hours before Obama started talking.

“Carly on anticipated SOTU content,” read a release eblasted by her campaign at 11:07 a.m (PDT), recounting her interview with some radio windbag from San Diego. A mere eight hours and 34 minutes later, iCarly shared her thoughts on the actual speech on You Tube.

She said that Obama had offered “gimmicks, not real solutions.”

(Memo to Carly handlers: You really should let her know not to keep looking down at the script when she’s on camera, which makes her look, um, kinda shifty. Also: that buzz cut is looking a little poofy around the ears, no? We’re just sayin’).

This just in: Sarah Palin has arrived to help with the relief effort in Tahiti.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Barack Obama, California Politics, Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman | 6 Comments »

« Older Entries