Tuesday Drive-bys: Mustard Meg Meets Redneck Joe
No excuses eMeg: The time has come for someone (are you listening, Jarrod Agen?) to strap on a chicken suit and start following Meg Whitman around the state. The chicken costume sight gag, which reached its zenith in 1992, when Team Clinton tormented Bush I with “Chicken George” at rallies across America, seems the logical next step to try to flush eMeg out from hiding and force her to engage her rivals in the race for governor.
Given the perilous state of California, and the stakes of the 2010 campaign, the escalation to fowl play seems justified, as Whitman’s already cheesy excuse for being the only major contender to duck the big Silicon Valley Leadership Group confab tomorrow has now turned totally rancid.
Loyal rea
ders recall that Her Megness insisted she just can’t make the event because of her loyal commitment to offer her special brand of charisma to Fortune Magazine at its “Most Powerful Women In Business” conference in San Diego this week. But now it turns out that eMeg is not even on the list of the magazine’s Most Powerful Women, having been dumped when Fortune released the new lineup a few days ago.
Undeterred by this humiliation, she’s going anyway, choosing a 20-minute rump speaking slot on the afternoon of the last day of the conference, when most attendees will be grabbing a cab or hurrying to pack to avoid paying an extra day room charge, rather than standing with the other wannabe governors before an audience of actual California decision makers to discuss the economy, taxes, budget, water, political reform and other such vaguely important matters.
Yo! Meg! You don’t look so good in yellow. Bawk, bawk, bawk!
Gamecock h
ypocrite: CB’s Department of Unctuous Outrage has had a hard time building up a full head of steam over South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s rude “You Lie” outburst during President Obama’s big health care speech to Congress, perhaps because at least half of us have been known from time to time to make loud, bellicose fools of ourselves in public, especially after, oh, 13 or 14 alcoholic beverages.
No, the real outrage coming from this red-nosed, redneck, neo-Confederate cracker is the fact that his crusade against government-run health care is one of the most hog-puking cases of sheer hypocrisy since Demosthenes’ takedown of Aeschines.
It seems re
tired Army National Guard colonel Wilson receives lifetime, Cadillac quality, government-run health care coverage known as TRICARE, which is rated one of “the best health insurers in the nation.” It’s worth noting that all four of Wilson’s sons, who are in the armed services, also get TRICARE government-run health care as well.
So as Newsweek, which popped the story, notes, Wilson is against government run health care – “just not when it comes to his own flesh and blood.”
Speaking of racist jackasses: Tim Noah over at Slate cuts to the nut of the matter in explaining the attraction to Fox News viewers of the repulsive Glenn Beck.
All you can eat: Nice work by Phillip Reese on the SacBee in putting together a data base derived from thousands of lobbyist reports detailing the freebies, gifts and handouts that legislators and statewides grabbed over the last 18 months.
For those keeping score at home: Sacramento solons scarfed down 8,000 free meals during that span, for an average of one dinner on the arm per legislator per week. No word yet on how many pairs of eyepatch panties or lobbyist-sponsored free spankings they enjoyed, though Mike Duvall’s disclosure statements are still being peered at intensely.
Not with a bang but a whimper: Flashreporter and state GOP mucky-muck Jon Fleischman has withdrawn his controversial plan to ban decline-to-state voters from Republican primaries.
Although his proposal seemed as popular as a Spanky Duvall sermon at High Mass, the idea was significant because it marked the first effort by either party to address the steadily soaring numbers of independent voters in California, in inverse proportion to the declining popularity of Democrats and Republicans alike. The irrepressible Fleischman insisted he pulled the rules change out of team loyalty, not because it was doomed to lose:
“To make a long story short, while I am confident that the votes were there to pass the change at the convention, the matter was becoming extremely divisive due to a lot of misinformation being spread about the proposal, and its effects…
The reality is that as long as someone can register Decline To State and elect to vote in either major party’s primary, we will continue to see the percentage of DTS voters steadily increase at the expense of party registration. Both political parties are going to eventually have to confront this issue head on.”
Is it just our imagination, or does his concession blog post sort of read like an apology from Joe Wilson?
Knuckledraggers Against Carly? Meanwhile, over at the ever-entertaining Redstate.com we came across a great big fat juicy item suggesting that Hurricane Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett Packard exec, is NOT planning to self-fund her bid to capture the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in hopes of taking out Barbara Boxperson. According to the sages at Redstate:
“Given that the NRSC and Senator Cornyn, in public and private, have touted Carly’s self-funding potential as the major reason for supporting her — despite her record of political non-participation, despite her emerging Iran scandal, despite her lackluster corporate record, and despite her series of foot-in-mouth moments — this is a big deal. We have Cornyn and the NRSC telling donors and big names, “Screw Chuck DeVore and the conservative grassroots, we want Carly’s cash,” and we have Carly telling potential hires, “My cash ain’t coming.”
The Chron’s Joe Garofoli checked all this out with Hurricane Carly’s spokesperson du jour. Fiorina will spend “an undetermined amount” of her own money, Beth Miller told Garofoli. But, “She’s not going to write big checks for her campaign like Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner,” Miller said. “She has never made any statement that she would self-fund her campaign.”
I’m no fan of eMeg but to be fair, you present no evidence as to when she learned she was not on the list and therefore not needed at Fortune mag confab. Until such evidence is forthcoming, case not made.