Read “Part 1: A lesson from cephalopods”
Read “Part 2: The message isn’t medium”
Part 3: The many (actually just two) faces of Meg Whitman
Thanks in no small part to the 2/3 vote requirement for passing a state budget, this year’s is now the second latest in history — 10 weeks and counting — with no resolution in sight. But just a few weeks ago, the Sacramento Bee reported:
“About one of every 11 residents in the Sacramento region smoked pot during the last month, a usage rate roughly 30 percent higher than the statewide average, according to a new federal study. Local residents were more likely than the rest of the state to have a casual attitude toward pot use.”
This must be why passing a budget takes so long: the contact high from all that pot smoke (in and) around the Capitol just slows everything down.
The bright side to this stoner’s pace of progress is not just that slow readers like me can keep up with the news, but that I’ve been able to catch up on all the great cable TV series I don’t have time for during the rest of the year.
For instance, I got through all four seasons (so far) of “Dexter,” the grisly yet oddly touching story of a serial killer who works for the police by day and chops up the “deserving” by night. Normally, the story of a mass murderer with a government job would make me think of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, except that:
a) Dexter, unlike Arnold, is a sympathetic and principled character, living by a code that forbids killing the innocent; and
b) Michael C. Hall is a way better actor than Arnold ever was (at least before he got into office).
Then I watched both seasons of “Rome” and couldn’t help but think how the scheming, duplicitous Atia of the Julii (Polly Walker) reminded me of Meg Whitman. In their own ways, both selectively say opposite things to opposing camps, depending on which script most advances their personal power grab. That’s not new in political races, of course; the difference is that Whitman got called out all over the media this summer — and by critics both right and left — for flip-flopping her positions on immigration and the environment after the June primaries.
An open-or-shut case
Against attack-dog Republican Steve Poizner, who called her “soft” on the issue, Whitman swore to be “tough as nails” on illegal immigration; against Democrat Jerry Brown, however, she’s apparently gone soft and now claims there’s really no substantive difference in their positions (a claim Brown disputes). She conveniently forgets to mention in public that her campaign is run by former governor Pete Wilson, best known among California’s Latinos for tying his 1994 re-election bid to passage of Prop. 187, which would have banned illegal immigrants from receiving public services if a federal judge hadn’t found the proposition itself illegal.
Now she just wants to ban illegal immigrant children from receiving publicly funded higher education — the only kind they could ever possibly hope to get. Up against Brown, Meg says she opposes Arizona’s law targeting immigrants; against Poizner, she called it “right for Arizona.”
In a bruising half hour interview with Los Angeles talk show hosts John Kobylt & Ken Chiampou [on August 4], the Republican gubernatorial nominee said she’s against any path to citizenship for those who are in the country illegally, even though she seemed to be for such a path 10 months ago
reported KQED’s Capitol Notes. A spokesperson explained it away by saying Whitman hadn’t been talking about a path to citizenship back then, but a guest worker program, even though Whitman never mentioned any such program at the time.
Going for the green
Speaking to a small green-tech firm the day before the interview, Whitman called herself an environmentalist but in the very next sentence said she wants to do away with some of the environmental regulations that are “strangling” business (preferring, apparently, to let children strangle slowly from toxic emissions; at least Dexter kills quickly). She’s been wishy-washy on Prop. 23, a ballot measure to repeal California’s widely popular anti-global warming law (AB32), but said that if elected, she’d try to suspend the law anyway, just in case it might kill some jobs, a claim that only conservative Republicans and big business apologists are making.
(Brown opposes Prop. 23, and a recent PPIC poll found most Californians believe AB32 actually creates jobs, the opposite of what Whitman claims.)
“If Meg Whitman is an environmentalist, then BP is the socially responsible company of the year,” concluded the director of the Sierra Club California.
The more things change, the more they stay the same
The same day as her radio interview, union members staged a protest at the opening of Whitman’s campaign office in the largely Latino-populated East Los Angeles. Given the state’s record unemployment, cataclysmic deficit and chronically dysfunctional government, immigration is important but should not be the defining issue of the governor’s race. Meg Whitman’s two-faced politics, however, should be central. We’ll be stuck with it for four years.
That’s what’s so scary — because to be fair, there’s one issue on which Whitman has never wavered one iota: her intent to destroy public services and eviscerate, disembowel and break the backs of public employee unions. It’s why unions like mine [see my profile] are going all-out to bring back Jerry Brown as governor.
As if that weren’t enough, I’m facing another, arguably more daunting, personal task for the election season: With marijuana legalization on the ballot (Prop. 19), I’ve still got six seasons of “Weeds” to catch up on.
About me: I work for SEIU Local 1021 as (among other things) editor of its weekly e-newsletter, the 1021 NewsWire, and its political blog, the Live Wire (www.1021votes.org). I am also a vice president of the International Labor Communications Association (www.ilcaonline.org).
[The series “Queen Meg, eMeg, Nutmeg: A Summer Romance” is cross-posted on the Daily Kos.]