Today’s SacBee lays the smackdown on John Doolittle

In style and substance Doolittle was much like his mentor, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay: shrill, mean-spirited and divisive. Doolittle is no consensus builder on the great issues of the day. Watching him, voters could see why the atmosphere in Congress is so poisonous.

Doolittle seems not to have learned how to disagree without being disagreeable. For every question, whether on Iraq, infrastructure, tax policy, health care or ethics, he turned the issue to his opponent’s membership in the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s an odd point to focus on.

In the era after the Sept. 11 attacks, many prominent conservatives — including former Reps. Bob Barr of Georgia and Dick Armey of Texas — have joined with the ACLU. (SacBee 10/15/06)

Well folks, there you have it.  Doolittle is “no consensus-builder”, he is mean-spirited.  While the debate was produced very last minute, and few people watched it.  However, it has now been uploaded to Youtube here. (It’s in several parts) Doolittle looks pathetic with his ridiculous charges about the ACLU. He ignores the charges of corruption and says that we shouldn’t dare question his “poor wife”, who by the way worked for Jack Abramoff.

This man does not belong in Congress.

The new Datamar poll(PDF) came out today.  Now, my traditional Datamar caveat: I think it’s full of crap.  It continues to show Mountjoy only trailing Feinstein by 11 points at 50-39, Field gives her a 57-29 lead. And Datamar has Arnold with a lead slightly less than twenty points.  The day that a Democratic gubenatorial candidate gets about a third of the vote will be a cold, cold day in hell. (Or, well, a bizarre three way race or something like that.)

Datamar has some serious issues on its statewide polling.  Here’s my hypothesis:Datamar has a terrible likely voter screen that works really, really well for San Diego County, and probably the OC.  It works really poorly once you get out of those GOP enclaves. For this poll, their breakdown along party lines was 39% Dem, 41% Rep, 10% DTS, and 9% other.  My word, that’s some ridiculous breakdowns.  More Republicans than Democrats? Sorry, I call BS on that one. Here’s a more reasonable breakdown for this state from PPIC’s September statewide survey: 43 D, 35 R, 20 DTS, 2 Other.  I’m sorry, but you have to question the validity of a poll that has more Reps in California than Dems.  Additionally, where are these 9% others that Datamar has? Are they loading up on American Independent Party or something? 

But, Datamar polled all of the propositions as well.  It has most of them failing, except for a couple of the bonds, Jessica’s Law, and well, Prop 90. (That’s probably not totally right, you should double check the PDF if you’re interested in a particular prop).  According to Datamar, Prop 90 is ahead 56-30.  That’s a huge lead.  Now, the No on 90 Campaign has been largely ignored by the media, and can frequently be mistaken for a good idea.  An idea that just limits how we do eminent domain.  It’s not…check out this guest editorial against Prop 90. I’ll boil it down, instead of Prop 90 being a way to stop developers from taking your land, it’s a way to let developers do whatever they damn well please.

Now, the question that was asked was this:

Proposition 90 is the Government Acquisition, Regulation of Private Property Initiative . It will prohibit state and local governments from condemning private property for other private uses. If the election were held today, would you vote yes or no on Proposition 90?

The ballot description is this:

Bars state and local governments from condemning or damaging private property to promote other private projects or uses. Limits government’s authority to adopt certain land use, housing, consumer, environmental and workplace laws and regulations. Fiscal Impact: Increased annual government costs to pay property owners for losses to their property associated with new laws and rules, and for property acquisitions. These costs are unknown, but potentially significant on a statewide basis.

So, how exactly is Datamar’s question represnetative of what the voters will be reading when they see this question?  The answer is, of course, that it isn’t.  As far as I’m concerned the Datamar poll is about as reliable as a poll in San Francisco is for the entire state.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Angelides is substantially behind, and I don’t completely reject the theory that Prop 90 is ahead out of hand.  I think it’s very reasonable to take as a working hypothesis that 90 is ahead.  It’s probably good to motivate all the forces that are opposed to this terrible initiative.  One can only hope that the media will be spilling more ink opining against this worm of an initiative.  As far as I’m concerned, the defeat of 90 is up there with the election of Debra Bowen as SoS in terms of importance to our democracy.

However, you can’t ask this type of question and expect to get any type of reasonable answer.

So, needless to say, this poll will not make it into my Poll HQ now or in the future.  Upon the next edit to the poll HQ, I will remove all references to Datamar polls.  They are fatally flawed.