California primary voters go to the polls on Tuesday, June 8 to pick their party’s candidates. Republicans will choose Carly Fiorina, Tom Campbell, or Chuck DeVore. for their US Senate candidate. Late polling suggests that Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, will be the nominee to run against incumbant Senator Barbara Boxer.

The following is from an L.A. Times story by Seema Mehta. Money and Anger Dominate California’s … Contests

Pushing forward

Near Sacramento, a confident Fiorina rallied her troops in the Senate race, thanking them for bypassing the beautiful weather to call voters on her behalf.

“With your help, we’ll be having a hell of a party on Tuesday night,” she said, flashing two thumbs up to about 30 volunteers gathered at a recreation center in Gold River.

Speaking to reporters, she criticized Boxer’s positions on national security, terrorism and immigration. “Her policies are part of what’s driving this state into bankruptcy,” Fiorina said.

Fierce battles ahead

With their lineup unofficially set, top-of-the-ticket Democrats and their allies in organized labor were also gearing up Saturday for a bruising general election battle against opponents with unprecedented amounts of personal money to spend.

With the battles brewing, “Boxer and Brown both realize they have real contests and are not going to wait,” according to Jack Pitney a Claremont McKenna College government professor and former national GOP official.

“For all practical purposes, the general election campaign has already started,” said Dan Schnur, head of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. “It doesn’t look like many people on either side are going to be taking summer vacations.”

Boxer proved that Saturday. After touring a new $13.5-million aircraft rescue and firefighting facility at Los Angeles International Airport that was funded mostly by federal stimulus money, the senator lashed out at Fiorina. She let fly a host of criticisms: Fiorina laid off tens of thousands of workers and shipped jobs overseas as head of Hewlett-Packard; she failed to vote for much of her life; she opposes abortion rights and supports offshore drilling – the opposite of most Californians’ views – and would allow people on the no-fly terrorism watch list to purchase handguns. See our previous article about Carly’s failure to vote.

“This is the clearest choice in the nation,” Boxer said. “She is so out of step with California voters.”

mailto: seema.mehta@latimes.com

Times staff writers Robin Abcarian, Cathleen Decker, Shane Goldmacher and Maeve Reston contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Posted by Gypsy Chief

reliably snarky

On November 7, 2009, the US House of Representatives passed HR3961, its version of comprehensive health care reform. The late Saturday night vote came after an all day debate which played out for the American people on C-Span.

For C-Span this was like the first game of the World Series.

The very next morning on his Sunday talk show, Reliable Sources, Kurtz quipped that the vote had come late on Saturday night ‘when no one was watching’.

I think this means that the vote came when Howard wasn’t watching. Sorry, Howard, real people out here in the hinterlands were watching. I put in a supply of low fat popcorn, took a break from reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Bright Sided” and planned my day around this event. For those of us in the Mountain time zone the vote came early enough.

I feel that Mr. Kurtz is not a reliable source on the C-Span’s audience size since he represents a commercial network, CNN, which competes with C-Span for attention.

I’m posting this now because, once again, we have a Saturday night event, this time in the US Senate, and this time on C-Span2, as Senate Democrats got exactly the 60 votes they neeed to bring their version up for floor debate. Will Kurtz display a similar degree of snarkyiness on his show this morning?

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Santa loading toys produced by slave labor.

Senator Max Baucus [D-MT] has introduced a bill, S1631, which among other things would ban the import of goods produced by child labor, convict labor, or slave labor.

The bill is co-sponsored by Senator Charles Grassley [R-IA] the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee.

Business groups and the Heritage Foundation are working to relax this ban. A story by David Sirota gives the details. Search the Library of Congress website for text of the bill and its status.

Thanks to Rachel Maddow TRMS for bringing this to our attention.

The American people are smart enough to know that the goods they buy come from the store. So how could they be produced in any of these bad ways?

If you have moral objections to goods produced with child, convict, or slave labor, you might want to support this bill. If you believe goods produced this way compete unfairly with American workers, you might want to support this bill.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Death Panel Idol

Dog days, mid August. Congress is out, health care reform is a hot topic. This is a great time to scare seniors with talk of death panels and euthanasia. These imaginary death panels seem to be the work of Betsy McCaughey, a thinktanker at the right-leaning Hudson Institute.

There is a provision in one of the health care bills that says doctors may be compensated by Medicare for the time they spend counselling patients on end of life decisions like Living Wills, Advanced Health Care Directives and such. It takes an evil imagination to twist a noncontroversial idea – seniors should make end of life decisions ahead of time – into some sinister plot to have the government pick who gets health care or not.

Your Gypsy Chief blogger will be 73 next month. Procrastination has been a life issue with me. But the bullshit being foisted off on seniors by Betsy McCaughey, Sarah Palin, Chuck Grassley and friends didn’t make me scared – it made me mad.

Mad enough to do something about it. First thing is we’re all going to die. Recognize that fact. Make it easier on those you leave behind by making your wishes known now, before you fall into a vegatative state.

Second, I don’t feel that I need counselling by a doctor in order to determine what end of life options are best for me.

For me, a consideration is do I want to live a little longer with tubes sticking out until the money is gone, or would I rather leave something for my kids to inherit.

I am so mad about this death panel stuff that I decided to stop procrasting and make a Living Will. I went to LegalZoom.com . The proces is very easy and straightforward. You can save a partially completed worksheet and return to it later. It took me less than half an hour to get the whole thing done.

That is how I beat the Betsy McCaughey – Sarah Palin – Chuck Grassley death panel.

Two other points to be made. People who deliberately make stuff up like these false death panels should not be considered as having a credible voice in the health care debate. I think that news directors make a huge mistake by allowing folks like Betsy McCaughey to have any air time when they have proved they do not deserve it. News directors do so to ‘present the other side of the story’. But that is just nonsense. The story is do we or do we not want to provide Medicare reimbursement for doctors to consult with patients on end of life decisions like Living Wills.

Final point. People think they can scare seniors by using loaded terms like death panels and forced euthanasia. Not all seniors are dumb enough or so poorly informed as to fall for such tactics.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Photo Credit: Paula Abdul Death Panel photo is the work of Mike Licht. See http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/

Sen. Saxby Chambliss [R-GA] appeared in Federal District Court in Atlanta to defend a lawsuit brought against him by a group of animals.

The lead plaintiff in the suit is a giraffe living at the Rome, GA municipal zoo. Other plaintiffs include three elephants, an ostrich, four dogs, and a boa constrictor.

They are represented by well-known Atlanta attorney Ami B. Lanschaser. Ms. Lanschaser said that her clients are upset by the defendent’s hold on President Obama’s candidate for regulation czar, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, simply because he, Chambliss, opposes the right of animals to sue humans in court.

Plaintiff’s rights have been violated, Lanschaser said. “As we move toward interspecies equality it is vital to preserve these rights”, she said.

Plaintiffs are seeking class action status for their suit.

More Information at The Hill Newspaper

Update

The Senate filibuster on Cass Sunstein was broken on September 9. The vote was 63 – 35. See The Washington Independent . Several Republicans joined the Democrats in voting for cloture. Democrats voting against cloture were Blanche Lincoln [AR] and James Webb [VA].

Sunstein was confirmed as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on September 10, 2009. The vote was 57 – 40. Democratic Senators James Webb [VA] and Blanche Lincoln [AR] votes no as did Independent Senator Bernie Sanders [VT]. Again, The Washington Independent has the story

The animals were so happy about these developments that they voted by unrecorded voice vote to drop their class-action against Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Justice For All

This week’s Book of the Week is “Justice For All: Earl Warren and The Nation He Made”. The author is Jim Newton. This book was featured on Book TV on C-Span2 on Saturday, April 25, 2009.

Ask anyone what are the three most lasting achievements of the Eisenhower Administration. The Interstate Highway System is one, another is Eisenhower’s farewell address, the most memorable since George Washington. Eisenhower warned about the power of a military-industrial complex. The third, though President Eisenhower didn’t think so, was his appointment of Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Earl Warren was the longest serving governor of California. He was, as Governor, a moderate centrist Republican in the tradition of Hiram Johnson. Warren won reelection as governor one time by winning both Republican and Democratic party nominations.

On the Supreme Court, Warren used his considerable political skills to build consensus. In the larger society the Warren Court was characterized by some on the right as a liberal activist court intent on legislating from the bench. Gideon vs. Wainwright (372 U.S. 335) for example extended Sixth Amendment right to counsel to states under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Then Miranda vs. Arizona (384 U.S. 436) required notifications regarding right to silence, right to an attorney, etc. in cases involving police interrogations and confessions.

As a demonstration of Warren’s consensus building skill Newton cites the 9-0 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka (347 U.S. 483). Warren got Justice Reed to concur in the opinion.

Was the Warren Court liberal, activist, intent on legislating from the bench? Newton says no. He says that Earl Warren believed in conservative reform not liberal activism.

Gradual, conservative constitutional reform has a long tradion in thought. See, for example, Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France”.

The subject is timely for today because President Obama may have more than one Supreme Court nomination to make. Warren believed that the Court exists to strike a balance between the weak and powerless versus the rich and powerful.

Posted by Gypsy Chief