Arnie!

Californians!

As a proud member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, I can report that the coup d'etat went off perfectly last night. As Alternet warned, a coup was in the works and, voila, here we are. Over the next 30-40 days there will be a sudden and decisive change in the state government. The Constitutionally-allowed vote was of course completely illegal, despite all those legally approved signatures, that the entire procedure is outlined in the State Constitution, etc. And by the sheer force of the vote, this coup has succeeded.

Ha! Must suck being them.

60+% voter turn out, largest since 1982. 60+% of the vote going to the Republicans. Arnie doesn't win by a squeak; current count gives him 48% of the vote. His plurality is larger than what Davis got for his election or re-election. That percentage is liable to go up as the absentee ballots get counted, since those ballots tend to be convervative.

A huge percentage of Democrats abandoned the party ticket and voted for Arnie. Ditto Hispanics. Ditto unions. Ditto damn near everyone. Art Torres and the state Democrat machine must have just shit at these results, along with a muttered, "Whuhappened?"

To throw back their oft-heard refrain: Hey, stupid, it's the economy!

The next few years should prove to be interesting. For now, we get to see if Davis's staff is as gracious in defeat as he was last night with his concession speech. Mind you, I still dislike and distrust the man, but considering that he has spent a life-time in politics, that his political career very probably ended last night, he gave an excellent speech. I hope he and his backers live up to his tone and concessions.

Vote!

And speaking of direct democracy in action, if you live in California I have a single question:

HAVE YOU VOTED YET?!?

Rantings of a Loon?

One has to wonder....

AlterNet: Defeating the California Republic(an) Coup:

This isn't funny. This is a power play that could wrest control of California away from the man we elected, and hand our state to an egomaniac with no political experience. And it is happening during a time of real crisis. This isn't a circus: It's a coup d'etat.

Well, by this time the decision is pretty must made, but still, this is just a funny, funny "article". Great humor.

"It's a coup d'etat."

Oh, my aching sides, because I see that the definition of coup d'etat is "a sudden and decisive change of government illegally or by force."

Today's recall isn't illegal; it's specifically authorized by the California State Constitution. Millions of California citizens signed the petition to put the question to a vote. Many more millions are now voting. Where's the illegality?

Oh, I laugh. It is an endless source of amusement when I see alleged liberals screaming in terror at something they otherwise cry for, i.e., direct democracy. California has this process in order to avoid...

"...or by force." I don't see any firefights being reported, so that pretty much means no one is forcibly overthrowing the state government. I suppose they could all be using suppressors, but you think someone would complain about the flying lead.

So, the question becomes: What world is the author living on? Certainly not the one I inhabit. And if he does, he needs to learn to use the language better. When you overstate your case, as he does throughout, you diminish your case. Calling a recall vote a coup d'etat is about as overstatement as you can get.

Vote!

Californians!

This is the day. This is the day you decide to stop an out of control state government.

Californians!

This is the day. This is the day to send a decisive message to the thieves who have esconced themselves in state government.

Californians!

This is the day. This is the day to end the Time of Gray. Our state once stood proudly at the forefront of damn near everything. You name it, California led it. The one statistic that is always most staggering is the size of our economy: 5th or 6th (depending on who is doing the counting) largest in the world. Most nations envy us our prosperity.

But we are dying. This state is shriveling. Florida, in 2000, tried desperately to take our title of Looniest Looney Bin in the US of A, but we are staunchly hanging onto that title. If after all this effort we allow The Big D to remain in the Statehouse, we will have nailed that looney crown permanently to our collective head.

Californians!

When you journey outside our fair state you see a different world. Shocking as it may seem, not everyone thinks the same as the LA Times or SF Chronicle proclaim. It is amazing.

Believe it or not, other states have interstate highway systems that are -- brace yourself -- clean! The roads are in good repair. Lord help us, even the buses run on time! There was a time, honest, I remember it, when the same could be said here.

I am a native of California. I was born and raised in San Francisco. My parents were straight-ticket Democrats. That party has betrayed the trust my parents placed with it and sullied its own history, as well as destroyed this state.

Stop them.

This is not a right-wing coup. This is the same anger that led to the passage of Prop 13. And that was a blow that the state legislature will never forgive us for. So, it is time to strike again, to hit them hard, to rock the very foundations of the California State Legislature and the entire sick, twisted crowd.

Californians!

This is the day! This is history. Rise. VOTE! Vote to continue the insanity, or cast a vote in an attempt to stop it. The slide has begun but does not have to continue.

One guess how I intend to vote. How you vote is between you and your conscience or your god or your goddess or your animal spirit...whatever, we have them all here and that is our glory. Bear in mind a simple statistical fact: If you total up the support for Arnie with the support for McClintock you get something like 60%.

And they say we're a Democrat looney bin! Ha!

Californians!

Rise, to your polling place. You're not as stupid as the ACLU and NAACP made you out to be. You can actually find it and you can damnwell use the same stupid voting machines you used not 11 months ago! (And thank god for them, because I know all too well how persistent computer hackers are.)

Rise, vote! Vote your conscience and let the strongest voice take the day. Personally, if Gray wins the day, I'm out of here in two years or so (wanna finish law school). Because then that strong voice will be crying, "No, we like government telling us what brand and how sheets of toilet paper to use. Oh, and how often we should go so we don't overload Mother Earth."

And that's not the state (or nation) I grew up in.

VOTE! This is the day.

Kill Bill

I sooooo want to see this film....

'Kill Bill' hatched from 'little egg' / Tarantino's two-part saga pays homage to Hong Kong actioners

"As usual, Quentin was trying in vain to educate me about cinema and going on about the great roles that existed in genre filmmaking for women," [Uma] Thurman says. "I told him I had this idea about a character -- she's an assassin -- and we went back and forth, and Quentin goes, 'Yes! and the guy at the head of it all, his name is Bill! He's a pimp for assassins! He is the ultimate agent, the Mike Ovitz of assassins! He's the bad guy and the movie's called 'Kill Bill!'

"And right between us, in that conversation, this little egg was formed."

I don't think I've seen a single film this year that I had on my "must see" list. And I had some dogs on that list, too. I even managed to miss The Matrix Reloaded, which is strangely appropriate because the first time I saw The Matrix was on DVD.

I any event, I need to see Kill Bill on the big screen, the whole gory enchilada!

Obviously, to get in the mood I must review some masters of screen violence. Or, more correctly, The Master, starting with The Wild Bunch.

Old News

This is becoming old news, but since they're smearing Arnie up one wall and down the other....

Now that Democrat Cruz Bustamante is California's gubernatorial recall front-runner, we can look forward to in-depth media investigations of the Latino candidate's long-held ties to the racial separatist group MEChA, right?

Ha.

Ha is right. This has never made the LA Times, has it? Thank goodness they're an unbiased representative of the ("Oh, we're not liberal") news media.

But wait, this article seems to say that, hmm, perhaps the LA Times is a little, er, slanted.

Some politicos dub the Thursday before a big election 'Dirty Tricks Thursday.' That's the best day for an opponent to unload his bag of filth against another candidate, getting maximum headlines, while giving his stunned opponent no time to credibly investigate or respond to the charges.

It creates a Black Friday, where the candidate spends a precious business day right before the election desperately investigating the accusations, before facing a weekend in which reporters only care about further accusations that invariably spill out of the woodwork.

Dirty Tricks Thursday is not used by the media to sink a campaign.

Yet the Times managed to give every appearance of trying to do so.

Stewart goes on to report on stories she attempted to get written about Gov. Gray's not so gray temperment. But, no, let's talk about 20 year old Arnie gropes. So much more in keeping with the editorial desires of the paper.

Fooles.

Laugh of the Day

I work for the state of California. I am emphatically not a member of the California State Employees Association (CSEA). Why should I join such a ludicrously biased organization? Besides, they're affiliated with the AFL/CIO, which is more ridiculously biased. Ugh.

They are also the cause of a good laugh, however.

Gov. Gray "Not My Real Name" Davis gave state employees a 5% raise and now wants to take it back. The deal is we give up that 5% and, in exchange, PERS (the retirement system) waives collecting our retirement contribution, which is roughly 5%. So it's a wash. More, we also get a PLD, Personal Leave Day. One a month. We can take it off, or let it sit in an account and acrue. That's another 5%. So there's a potential net gain despite the pay cut.

Neat, huh? He stole that trick from Pete Wilson, who used it in 1992. Wilson saved a billion or so dollars in the state budget. The state is still paying that back. Figures have it that the $1 billion saved is right now costing around $8 billion.

Neat, huh?

But that's not the joke.

No, the joke is that I received a voting ballot to say yes or no on this contract. Only I can't really vote, because I'm not a CSEA member. Conveniently, they include the form to join with the ballot, so then I can vote, but please, no thank you. The joke is the ballot.

Remember (or learn), that leaders of the CSEA and AFL/CIO were and are some of the louder complainers about the punch-card ballot system. It's terrible. It disenfranchises people. Not all votes get counted. Blah blah blah.

Their ballot is a punch-card.

I have it pegged to my cubicle wall. Whenever they whine I will get a great laugh. Works fine for union votes, but somehow everyone else is too stupid.

Hypocritical fools.

I voted for Clinton...

...in 1992.

But now I think this guy has it right as to why I loathe Clinton:

Maybe this is true, although the Lewinsky business never bothered me; there's something endearing about Bill's taste for zaftig women. But perjury is no less a crime than burglary, and there's no question Mr. Clinton perjured himself in his deposition to Paula Jones's lawyers. If you think Nixon deserved to go down, then so too did Mr. Clinton.

But that's hardly why Clinton-haters hate Mr. Clinton. The Clinton-lovers are right; l'affaire Lewinsky was just something we could nail him with. With a different president, a different man, we might have been tempted to join the camp of apologists in saying: It's just sex, and everyone lies about sex.

But Mr. Clinton was not a different man. To his supporters, he was the shaper of the new American center, the brightest Democratic light since John F. Kennedy, the toast of European elites. To people like me, he was a hollow and posturing and feckless man who embodied that side of America that was also hollow and posturing and feckless.

Says it all.