Deliberative body delivered: The next time Senator Kent Conrad starts holding forth on the tube about why Americans are not allowed to choose a public option for their health care insurance, remember this name: Kelly Candaele.
Conrad is the four-eyed, hose-nosed twit from North Dakota whose self-important pronouncements that there will be no public option in health care reform are eagerly sought and duly recorded by the badge-sniffing stenographers of the Beltway MSM. Conrad was last elected to the Senate with 150,416 votes.
Candaele is a four-term member of the Los Angeles Community College Disrict Board of Trustees.* One of seven members, he was last elected with 151,218 votes – 802 more than Senator Dufus.
The fact that Conrad, an alleged Democrat who has bogged down health care reform legislation along with his buddy, Landslide Max Baucus (who won his seat with one-third fewer votes than President Obama scored in Alameda County – 345,937 to 489,106 – fercrineoutloud) suggests that The Framers weren’t exactly planning ahead when they came up with this whole bicameral, one-house-represents-land-instead-of- people notion.
That cheap suit characters like Conrad and Baucus have the power to hold hostage a health insurance policy that 77 percent of Americans favor is an authentic outrage that makes Calbuzz wonder exactly what a Willie Brown – not to mention Lyndon Johnson – would do to these wigglers, after grabbing them up by the scruff of the neck and tossing them and their office furniture out the window to somewhere south of the Watergate parking garage.
We’re just sayin’.
*As for Kelly Candaele, who mysteriously – oooh – shares initials with Kent Conrad, Calbuzz was unsuccessful in repeated efforts to reach him to seek his views on health care reform, which seem to us at least as important as those of Mr. Dork from North Dakota. We strongly suspect that Candaele, a journalist, filmmaker and former labor organizer, (whose mother batted .290 in the women’s professional baseball league memorialized in “A League of Their Own” – you could look it up) is more of a single payer, public option kind of guy.
Parsky Channelling Nixon? Calbuzz is picking up grumblings from some members of the Commission on the 21st Century Economy who are not happy with the Nixonian tendencies of the group’s chairman – Gerry Parsky the investment firm chairman who once served in (you guessed it) the Nixon administration.
Seems the commission’s agenda doesn’t give anyone a clue about what’s coming up for discussion, members have no time to read position papers or analytical documents before they’re released at or just before meetings and Parsky doesn’t even respond to some pretty credible people trying to stay on top of what’s going on with the commission.
For example, see the agenda for the Commission Workshop on the commission website. See if you can figure out what’s being discussed at that meeting.
Or check out the correspondence from Steve Levy from the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy. Steve, one of the smartest guys in California, suggests to Parsky et. al. ways to evaluate various tax proposals and asks how the commission intends to do this. But has Parsky or anyone responded to Levy? Nope.
Meanwhile, they’re talking about scrapping most of California’s tax structure and replacing it with a net business receipts tax – a monumentally complex idea which no other state has attempted. Does anyone on that commission actually understand the implications? We don’t think so.
Will She or Won’t She: Kudos to Chapman University for pulling together an October 28 debate with the Republican candidates for governor. Oh wait, make that most of the Republican candidates for governor.
Tom Campbell and Steve Poizner, who share the quaint idea that candidates for office who want the voters to hire them ought to subject themselves to standing face-to-face with their rivals for the job, both accepted the invite with alacrity. Not so fast for Meg Whitman, who acts like it’s five days before the election and she’s sitting on some precious two-point lead.
As Poizner reliably banged on eMeg for running and hiding on her earlier promise to participate in three debates this fall, a spokeswoman for Whitman offered this, uh, explanation:
“As you know, Meg has made it very clear she is looking forward to debating the issues in the upcoming election, having sent a letter stating those intentions over 2 months ago,” campaign press secretary Sarah Pompei told Calbuzz via email. “She is committed to ensuring Californians know her plans to create jobs, cut spending, and fix education. Right now, we are looking at the various debate options to see what will work best in our schedule.”
All righty, then.
Gossip: A well-informed, reliable and top-rank California Republican pol whispers that Her Megness, with the aid and comfort of long-time coat holder Henry Gomez, has decided that this whole politics thing isn’t all that different from running a business and so is pretty much directing her own campaign, despite the 87 gazillion dollars a month she’s forking out for consultants. Watch for what you wish for, eMeg.
Health Care Must-Reads: Media critic Jason Linkins, who can be quite tiresome when live blogging the Sunday shows for Huffpost, absolutely nails it in this piece holding the WashPost to account for a dog-ass story packed with anonymous sources attacking “the left” for its hang-tough position on including a public option in health care reform.
And in another morsel of what seems a concerted White House effort to distance themselves from the policy that Obama, um, campaigned on – “We’re shocked! Shocked that these liberals would be wedded to such a thing! – that old mischievous nameless source show up in this nice piece about former DNC chief Howard Dean doing the Lord’s work on health care.
Paging Rodney King: Calbuzz readers gave major props and style points to Garry South, Gavin Newsom’s chief consultant, for his well-honed one liner in our post about Jerry Brown’s expansive views on abortion the other day.
“This guy’s had more incarnations than Zelig and he’s taken more positions than there are in the Kama Sutra,” South said, to the wild applause of the Croatian judge – “9.9, 9.8, 9.9” – and many others.
While some Democrat critics scold and wag their fingers at South and Newsom for refusing to sign a no-negative-attacks pledge for the primary, others believe in a more positive approach.
Thus, a longtime party loyalist spent several hours Google searching for a quote in which South actually had something nice to say about Brown:
“I never got to know Jerry very well,” South said in 2007. “But he did a very effective job of becoming a pragmatic mayor in Oakland.”
Ommm….
