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This year,  We are holding Charlie’s Football

Gentle Readers, volunteers, and fans of one of the most beautiful districts in the nation, CA- 04, this one’s for you.  You walked, you talked, you called, you organized, you typed, you wrote, you attended, you spoke, you applauded,  you got up in the morning and you did it all again. And again.

You saw what was wrong, you wanted to make it right, and that meant you had to pick it up.  You couldn’t let the the Charlie Brown down. And that meant volunteering.  It makes a difference.  (more over the fold)

He doesn’t look too happy, does he ?  McClintock’s 3rd Quarter fling from Oct 15 shows his campaign is broke and in debt.    Charlie Brown (D) and Tom McClintock(R, seated)  in Oroville on Oct 2, 2008.  

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Our District:

In 2006, the White House threw a life preserver to the last Republican in Congress who could have implicated George Bush in the Jack Abramoff scandal.  

In 2008, they tried to run a Fox Faux News and White House and Move America Forward guy in the Republican Primary, and the Republicans said no.

They tried to run an old retread from another district, who helped impeach Clinton, and the Republicans said no.  They tried running an ex state senator with enough baggage to fill a 18 wheeler, and the Republicans said no.  They tried running a Libertarian Ron Paulian Republican named Terbolizard, and the Republicans said no. Then they brought in the Republican Icon from a district 400 miles away in Southern California, who was terming out of state office.  And the Republicans said…..  yes.  We’ll take that one.  

Fox News and MAF,  Literally Looking Over His Shoulder, March 2008, Auburn

Because these fools don’t deserve any better.    

And a few of you worried, but you don’t win by worrying. You just get up, and you get ready, and you go out there, and you do it again, because all of you know somebody who is in a world of hurt right now, and these people are depending on us.  People who are hungry. And can’t afford to buy food. People who were downsized. People who lost their jobs. People who lost their houses. Or their rental place.  People who are sick.  People who can’t afford medicine. People who served their country overseas, but they got hurt.  People who are wondering what happens next.

So you looked that Republican Icon in the eye, and you said NOT THIS TIME. NOT HERE. NOT NOW.  ENOUGH.  We need a local Representative. We have to do this.  We can’t rely on the pundits or the experts.  We have a huge task ahead of us.

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Volunteers for Charlie Brown, April 26 Day of Action

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And now we’re in that home stretch.  Today is October 16.   We have 19 days to get this done.

And we cannot get complacent.   You saw the title.  Tom McClintock, the Republican Icon, is broke. He has more debt than cash on hand.    http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-b…  

By my rough estimate, only about 5% of his itemized individual donations come from inside the district on this latest FEC filing.  Schedule of upcoming events on his webpage today. None.    http://www.tommcclintock.com/e…

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 Will work for per Diem.

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Charlie Brown, the Democratic candidate for CA- 04,  is not broke.  And he’s busy meeting and talking to people.  http://www.charliebrownforcong…    Considering the district demographics, and the tough economic times, and the fact that he’s supported by so many individual donors instead of Big Money Interest PACs, it’s a miracle.

This does not mean it’s over.   Those out of state corporate interests are going to throw the kitchen sink AND the garbage disposal at us.  This is a BIG district geographically, and it’s so important because the mountains on the west side catch the winter snows and then that snow feeds us in the summer, literally. Water flows down to the areas of population and commerce to the State Capitol and to the Bay area and her port cities.  Where the water goes affects all of us.  And it effects all living things, plants and animals.  We cannot kill the delta without killing both the city and the fish and wildlife and farmland that depend on it having an inflow of fresh water.

When Charlie Brown first started running for Congress, he was running as a reformer against the corruption of the Republican Party.  He led by example and by hard work.  There wasn’t a lot of fancy rhetoric. You don’t get stuff done in the military by pointing fingers, bringing up wedge issues to try to divide people and make them mad at each other,  and hiring lobbyists to tell you you’re wonderful.  You define the problem, pick a solution, improvise if necessary, and just do it.  Charlie Brown wanted accountability in government, so he decided to run for office.  Just by the act of running, he forced the current Congressman to come out of Washington DC and interact with the district he was supposed to be representing.  Just by running, he helped other Democrats get elected, because the 50- state strategy works.  We stood there in the Opera House in Roseville in November 2006 and screamed ourselves silly every time an election return came back showing another Democrat had taken the lead, even if they were from out of state. I remember telling another kossack that Pombo was going down. She didn’t believe me at first.  I remember coming up the stairs at one point, taking one glance at the screen, and seeing the total number of House seats hit the magic number to guarantee a Democratic majority.  I knew right then we had changed things, no matter what the final count was for us.

This is what Dr Bill Durston     http://www.durstonforcongress….     (CA- 03, Lungren ,R) and Jeff Morris   http://www.jeffmorrisforcongre…  (CA-02, Herger, R) are doing for us now, by taking on these other Republican incumbents. And they actually do have a chance of winning. That’s what is so incredible.

In our district, the incumbent decided not to run against him again, after he won by only 3 percentage points.  They brought in the ringer. If you have read my past series of diaries, you can see that the ghost of Doolittle is still haunting Tom McClintock.  They may not have appeared together on stage anywhere, but McClintock took John Doolittle’s old playbook of hate politics, the one with the yellow highlights drawn over the talking points of creating fear and loathing, and tucked it under his pillow at night.  But even worse, he took his campaign financial technique of deficit spending, and he thought the lobbyists would come through for him, just like they kept coming through for John Doolittle.  And it seemed to work, at first. He forgot one thing.

Even John Doolittle has better people skills than Tom McClintock.   I hate saying that, but it seems to be true.  Look at him, he’s not in jail yet. That took some serious talent on his part.  

But Charlie Brown is still going to need our help to finish this task he started, of changing how we interact with government.  

As I said, the entrenched Republican establishment is going to throw the kitchen sink AND garbage disposal at us. They are using organizations with non profit tax status to push these horrible wedge issue propositions at the voters as hard as they can.  There has been a lot of ugly subtext going on under the surface.  

We need grace.  We need patience.  We need grit.  Because we can’t let up now.  And we need to run ads.  And these propositions have extraordinary amounts of lobbyist money supporting them.  They give it to the state assembly and state assembly accounts, and the state candidates go crazy paying for all these alleged non profits affiliated with politicians and consultants to run advertisements and slate mailers and the radio and the television and the blogger letters to the editor comment sections. That’s why I wrote about McClintock’s account yesterday.  http://www.dailykos.com/story/…  “Dear Treasurer” (McClintock’s)        People don’t see that.  They don’t see they’re being used.   They’re sincere, but this election is not about those issues.    And McClintock’s other campaigns have had a history of getting very large last minute donations.  Don’t take anything for granted.

It’s about the economy.  And the economy went into the drainpipe because George W. Bush didn’t learn a damn thing at college because he was too busy partying, and all of his life, when he screwed up, somebody related to the family bailed him out.  He thought our nation should be run like any other business.  But he has no business sense.  Screw up? Oh well ! Start a war, borrow some cash, take another mortgage, sow the seeds of fear and divisiveness. Terror alert.  Drown a city, blow away another.  Problems? Go shopping. No money? Too bad. You should have been a Republican.

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Summer 2008 in Lincoln. Get your free list of foreclosures here.

Enough.

Enough.

Enough.

This district is NOT going to send another Southern CA carpetbagger to Washington DC who is just using us as a mailing address with snowmelt.  We are going to send somebody who cares about the district because this is his home and these are his neighbors. And that person is Charlie Brown.

Now you know what we need to do.  Stay on the real issues. Volunteer.  http://www.charliebrownforcong…   Donate. https://www.charliebrownforcon…   http://www.actblue.com/entity/…     Talk. Walk.  Write.  Whatever.  Don’t give in to the temptation to be dragged into the muck.  The Republicans are frantic at this point.  They can’t see the future.  We can.  It’s going to be okay. A little rough, but okay.  Hang in there. Now let’s get out there and bring this one home.

Howie Klein has a look at the state of congressional races in California as voters are heading to the polls in what should be a tsunami year for Democrats.

Over the flip…

The most likely district to go from Republican to Democrat this year is CA-04 where corrupt Republican incumbent John Doolittle– along with the equally corrupt Mrs. Doolittle– will soon be headed for prison and the GOP is trying to slip in an ideological doppelganger in the form of L.A. right wing extremist Tom McClintock. First McClintock, widely seen as an interloper and carpetbagger, will have to get by the Democrat who came close to beating Doolittle in 2006, local boy Charlie Brown, a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel known for standing up for working families.

There are two other Blue America candidates running strong races, Russ Warner in CA-26 and Debbie Cook in CA-46, both awakening red districts represented by entrenched rubber stamp Republicans David Dreier and Dana Rohrabacher. No one ever mentions the two most glaring anomalies about the two Republicans: Dreier is a hypocritical, self-loathing closet queen who takes his lover/overpaid chief of staff on exotic vacations all over the world at taxpayer expense; and Rohrabacher is out of his mind and the biggest– probably only— supporter of Taliban terrorists in Congress. Instead, battles in both districts are being fought on familiar turf– both incumbents have taken massive amounts of “donations” from special interests like Big Oil and commercial banking and insurance and have always voted for their interests instead of the interests of the working families in their districts.

Three other California Democrats are making credible cases to displace out of touch incumbents. Up near Sacramento, far right extremist Dan Lungren is facing his stiffest challenge ever from Bill Durston. Meanwhile Mary Bono Mack, who doesn’t have any connect to her district any longer, is getting a run for her (big corporate contributors’) money from Julie Bornstein. The sixth challenger with a real shot at winning is Nick Liebham who’s taking on corrupt rubber stamp lobbyist Brian Bilbray in Northern San Diego County. This afternoon Nick talked with me about Bilbray’s shameful record concerning veterans. “Bibray’s voting record as it concerns veterans really speaks to his distorted priorities and values,” said Nick. “Irrespective of how you feel about the war, and I have called for a timeline to withdraw our troops, we as a nation have an obligation to provide for our heroes when they return home.  Brian Bilbray will send them to a war into perpetuity but wont send them to college.  He is a disgrace.” Nick’s campaign got a tremendous boost in the last couple of weeks when a local hero, former Marine Gen. Joe Hoar not only endorsed Nick, but started campaigning for him and cut a devastating TV commercial as well.

As Howie notes, the disgusting decision by Democrats to focus on an incumbent protection redistricting following the 2000 census means that we are in the second cycle in a row where it is unbelievably difficult for Democrats to take advantage of a nation that has realized Republicans are an awful choice. While it is important to talk to your parents about voting Republican, it is quite difficult to beat them in California. So if you live in a competitive district, please do all you can to help out. And since it is likely you don’t live in a competitive district, sending money is helpful. And hopefully, following the 2010 census, Democrats will follow a Burton redistricting model that is far more Phil than John.

A lot to cover today:

General: I suspended the monthly ratings because it was ridiculously time-consuming and better to get the information out more timely, but in case you’re wondering, here is my impression of the top targets in California for the Congressional races as we stand with 22 days out.  My considered opinion is that no incumbent Democrat is in trouble, including Jerry McNerney.  As for the Republican-held seats:

1) CA-04: Lean Dem. Charlie Brown has been ahead in multiple polls and actually has a ground game, unlike Tom McClintock.

2) CA-03: Tilt Repub. Bill Durston’s poll showing the race as a dead heat raised a lot of eyebrows.  Unfortunately people discovered this race too late, but by Election Day I’ll bet that the registration numbers are virtually tied and there will not be an immediate call.  The smart money for progressives wanting to impact a race should go to Dr. Durston against Dan Lungren.

3) CA-46: Tilt Repub.  Debbie Cook is replicating the Loretta Sanchez strategy of ground mobilization that she used to defeat B-1 Bob Dornan.  We’ll see if she can pull it off against Crazy Dana Rohrabacher.

4) CA-26: Tilt Repub. Russ Warner has been doing a decent enough job and there’s a bit of outside support, but David Dreier has a wall of money.

5) CA-45: Lean Repub. This race has also been under the radar, but the district is either #1 or #2 in the COUNTRY for foreclosures, and affordable housing expert Julie Bornstein can stand to benefit from movement toward Democratic solutions on the economy in her race against Mary Bono Mack.

6) CA-50: Lean Repub. This is the permanent tease district in California, and despite Nick Leibham’s efforts to shake up the race, I’m not seeing Brian Bilbray taken down right now, especially because he’s likely to whip up populist support in his base with his vote against the bailout.

7) CA-52: Likely Repub. It was always going to be an uphill battle for Mike Lumpkin in his race against Duncan Hunter’s son running for Duncan Hunter’s old seat.  I’d like to see better signs here, but I’m coming up empty.

I rate everything else as Safe Republican at the moment.  I’ll do a legislative targeting in the next campaign update.  Now, to the news (on the flip):

• CA-03: Faced with a tie race, Dan Lungren’s campaign has decided that the smart thing to do is name calling.

A spokesman for U.S. Rep. Dan Lungren’s (R-Gold River) congressional campaign said Bill Durston was mischaracterizing Lungren’s absence from a candidate forum last weekend.

On top of that, he referred to Durston, a Democrat from Gold River, as a “knucklehead.”

They actually don’t believe Durston’s viable.  Hilariously, Lungren gave out a bunch of tickets to a Bonnie Raitt concert in the district, and during the show Raitt endorsed Durston and urged people to vote.

This would be such a delicious upset, and the contours of it remind me exactly of Carol Shea-Porter’s improbable victory in New Hampshire in 2006.

• CA-04: The competitors actually showed up at a 4th District debate last week, and Charlie Brown got off a great line:

In the heavily Republican district, where he narrowly lost to Doolittle two years ago, Brown faced an audience question over whether he would “stand up to Nancy Pelosi” and her “liberal positions.” […]

While Brown said he disagreed with the Democratic house speaker from San Francisco on rights of gun owners, McClintock went after him.

“This issue of marching in lockstep with her on every major issue in the campaign speaks to the fact that she has targeted your congressional district as one of those seats they want to cement a permanent Democratic majority,” McClintock said. “And I think they’re counting on your vote, Charlie.”

Brown, a district resident in Roseville, answered back with a poke at McClintock for running in a district 400 miles north of his Senate seat in Thousand Oaks.

“Tom, if you want to run against Nancy Pelosi (in San Francisco),” Brown said, “that district is actually closer than this one to your home.”

• CA-45: Julie Bornstein, on the other hand, debated an empty chair recently in Rancho Mirage.  Mary Bono Mack has refused any effort to get her to debate Bornstein.  Perhaps she’s busy with her husband in Florida.

Bornstein came prepared. When she was given the opportunity to address the absentee incumbent in her closing remarks, Bornstein came out firing.

“This is a job interview,” she said, asking Bono Mack, “How is it that you feel that you do not need to meet with your constituents?”

“There is no sense of entitlement here,” Bornstein told voters, “that somehow your vote is already predetermined, that you owe it to a party or a person. One of the first lessons I learned when I became a working person is that you have to show up. You have to be here. And my question to my opponent is, where are you?”

They tracked Bono Mack down at a party during the forum.  Bornstein, who this weekend welcomed Barbara Boxer in for a fundraiser, parried a Republican attempt to protest that event in much the same way, by saying that she “welcomed debate.”  Often these debate-baiting tactics aren’t that successful, but I don’t think this is a good year to be an absentee incumbent.

• CA-11: Another duo got together for a little chat this weekend, Dean Andal and Jerry McNerney.  There’s some interesting stuff in there – Andal apparently thinks it’s “immoral” to support a safe and responsible withdrawal of troops from Iraq.  But what’s more interesting is that Andal finally, two weeks after the bailout, came up with an opinion on it.  He was opposed, in case you were wondering.  Talk about political cowardice, waiting that long to express an opinion.

• CA-46: Debbie Cook has a new ad.

I have to say that I kind of like it.  The “asteroids” thing is kind of tacked on, but the rest of it is sufficiently hard-hitting and affixes Dana Rohrabacher to the problems created by 8 long years of Republican failure.  The Cook campaign has Jim Dean from DFA coming into the district for a fundraising breakfast and precinct walk this Sunday.  More information here.

Perennial candidate Tom McClintock is a beloved figure on the far right.  We just didn’t know how far.

It turns out that in 2003, when McClintock was running for his eleventy-teenth political office in the California governor recall election, he was endorsed by none other than the KKK.

Dateline: September 27, 2003

Ku Klux Klan Announces support for Tom McClintock

The Imperial Klans of America, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (IKA) have announced their full support for Tom

McClintock’s bid for the governorship of California. Their support is announced in what they term “the

lesser of all evil candidates.”

When interviewed, Mr. Chris Johnson (Grand Dragon or State Director of the IKA’s California chapter) had this to say regarding the announcement, “While Mr. McClintock is not the perfect candidate for California Governor, we have more in common with his ideology than any of the other candidates. We are in congruence with his stand on illegal aliens infecting our land and his courage in standing up to the invasion.” Mr. Johnson went on to say that, “Mr. McClintock echoes our anti-abortion stand, and our opposition to oppressive taxation.”

I guess the McClintock campaign can spin this by saying that at least the KKK called him evil, even if he was the lesser of all the rest?

Here’s the thing: organizations can choose to endorse anybody they want, and the candidates have no control over that.  But McClintock never said a peep five years ago when he got this endorsement.  And there’s a Chris Johnson on McClintock’s donor list from that 2003 gubernatorial race.  Chris Johnson is obviously a common name, and the donation is $100, so take it with a grain of salt.  But certainly, McClintock needs to answer the question of why he never rejected the endorsement and why they never sought out and returned money that would even have the appearance of coming from the Klan.

More to the point, McClintock is just the kind of guy to demonize an opponent’s associations.  In fact, when running for governor in 2003, McClintock compared then-Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante’s association with the Hispanic student group MEChA to, you guessed it, the KKK.

State Sen. Tom McClintock, a conservative Republican rival, recently likened the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, also known as MEChA, to the Ku Klux Klan.

“It’s like saying, ‘Oh, I was a moderate member of the Klan,'” McClintock said last month on the San Diego radio station KOGO. “It’s incumbent on Cruz Bustamante to clearly and completely renounce …

The idea that the KKK finds ideological kinship with McClintock is pretty much a no-brainer.  His demonization of illegal immigrants as the cause of so much of the nation’s economic woes plays to the baser instincts of the racist right.  He’s running a campaign against Charlie Brown that has recently seized on Brown’s appearance at an anti-war rally before the invasion of Iraq as somehow un-American.  It’s really not too much of a logical leap here.

Stay tuned for more on this…

And away we, er, go.

• CA-03: Bill Durston, who is showing lots of strength in his race against Dan Lungren, has earned the support of the Alliance of Retired Americans, a 3.5 million-member group of retirees.  Clearly this came on the heels of Durston’s strong support for a not-for-profit health care system:

Dr. Durston has also been a strong proponent of universal health care. “It’s always been my philosophy that access to necessary medical care is a basic human right, not a privilege based on one’s ability to pay. We’re the only western industrialized country in the world that doesn’t have some form of universal health care, yet we pay twice as much per capita as the other countries for medical care.”

Durston is starting to get some major attention after that last poll.  Expect him to attack Lungren on his vote for the bailout over the next 27 days.

• CA-04: Lots going on here.  After vowing to shut down his account for 2010 statewide races, professional politician Tom McClintock just couldn’t close the door.

But four weeks before the Nov. 4 election, McClintock’s account remains open and active, as the Thousand Oaks lawmaker has doled out thousands of dollars to fellow Republicans in the last week.

McClintock made $3,600 donations, the maximum allowed under state law, to a trio of Republican candidates for the Legislature: Senate candidates Tony Strickland and Greg Aghazarian and Assembly hopeful Jack Sieglock.

His Democratic opponent, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Charlie Brown, made hay of McClintock’s multiple accounts over the summer, calling him a career politician in search of a job.

“What office are you running for?” Brown said in a July statement.

I just find it interesting that Republicans are that worried about Jack Sieglock.  Go Alyson Huber!  Of course, the other half of this is that McClintock is a huge hypocrite, but you knew that.

In other news, Charlie Brown has a new ad out comparing professional politician McClintock to his record of service.  Truth Fights Back, John Kerry’s group, is getting Charlie’s back over that ridiculous anti-military smear of McClintock’s.  Brown also signed the Children’s Defense Council’s Pledge to ensure affordable health care for every child and every pregnant woman.  I very much liked this strong take in the press release:

“Tom McClintock gets free healthcare, a free car, free gas, and tax free per diems he’s not entitled to, yet has voted to restrict the ability of Californians to see a doctor of their choice and fought against helping our most vulnerable citizens  access meaningful healthcare coverage,” said Retired USAF Lt. Col. Charlie Brown  “His record of inaction has not only helped drive up the cost of healthcare for every Californian, it’s illustrative of a career politician hypocrite who would rather serve himself, than solve problems.”

Earlier this year, McClintock authored SB 1669, which would have made it easier for health insurance companies to deny the health claims of Californians on the basis of pre-existing condition.  In fact, SB 1669 would have extended the period that insurers could look back in your medical history from 12 months to 10 years.  

“Tom McClintock’s idea of healthcare reform is writing a law that says if you have a medical problem, you can’t get healthcare coverage,” Brown said.  “This misguided bill  could have literally cost millions of Californians who have battled and overcome ailments ranging from diabetes, to mild cardiac conditions or cancer their lives.  It was so misguided, it never came up for a floor vote and not a single healthcare organization or institution signed on to support it.

Also, Mcjoan at the Great Orange Satan had a good piece based on some of her time in the district recently.  This is big:

The campaign has seven offices across the nine counties in the huge district, one of the most beautiful in the country, spanning the Sierras. With four regional field directors, seven organizers and 25 paid canvassers, the campaign has knocked on more than 120,000 doors and made over 300,000 phone calls. Hundreds of new Democrats have been registered. This is the kind of retail politics that allows Democrats to win in Republican districts, in fact it’s about the only way to run successfully in a tough district. McClintock, by contrast, has basically no field operation.

That ground game is going to win it for Charlie.

• CA-11: Continuing his quest to be the most overhyped Republican challenger this cycle, Dean Andal continues to dodge the question of whether or not he supported the Paulson bailout plan.  He literally has no idea how to handle it, preferring to hide behind the idea that it would be inappropriate to comment because he’s not in office.  Yeah, uh, that’s kind of the point.  You say how you would be different from the current office-holder as a means to get the job.  What a loser.

• CA-41, CA-45: Haven’t written much about Tim Prince’s race in San Bernardino County against Jerry “Lobbyists Are Funding My Congressional Portrait” Lewis, but somehow his campaign got the local paper to call it a tough race.

Prince criticized Lewis’ use of earmarks, the pet projects that lawmakers attach to spending bills, in some cases without a vote.

“Jerry Lewis is totally void of morality when it comes to earmarks,” he said, pointing to Lewis’ ties to Bill Lowery, a longtime friend and lobbyist. “When I’m congressman, the mayor of Beaumont and the mayor of Apple Valley can pick up the phone and call me for help. They don’t have to call a lobbyist who happens to be my best friend.”

One thing that Prince would be better advised to focus on is that his district has one of the highest rates of foreclosures in the entire country.  The highest?  CA-45, where Mary Bono-Mack is facing affordable housing expert Julie Bornstein.  If there was ever a reason to create a single-issue candidacy, this is it, and for Bornstein, who has an easier time of it with a less partisan electorate, that could be a real opening in the final month.

• SD-19: Calitics Match candidate Hannah-Beth Jackson is attacking Tony Strickland for greenwashing his environmental credentials in a very, shall we say, familiar way:

Of course, I’m happy to have provided the template for calling out Strickland on this nonsense.  There are in addition lots of IE attacks in this race as it nears the home stretch.

There’s a weekly feature from now through the election on Daily Kos that’s called “Hell to Pay”, in which a contest is held among candidates from the Orange to Blue ActBlue page.  The winner of the contest has a special fundraising drive held for them on DailyKos on Saturday night.  The winner can usually count on racking up donations into the five figures.

Calitics favorite and CA-04 Congressional candidate Charlie Brown is one of this week’s contestants.  Voting is open right now, so if you have a DKos account, go vote.

P.S. I absolutely love Dan Seals, the candidate in IL-10.  Personable, friendly, wickedly smart, very receptive to the netroots, and an all around good guy.  It’s a Chicago suburb that we should be able to win and hold.  I hope he wins next week.  But right now, let’s get Charlie Brown an extra boost and send Tom McClintock back down to my neighborhood to go lose an election for some other office.

Here are some things happening around the state:

• CA-04: The most important debate evah is tonight!  No, not that Biden-Palin thing, it’s Calitics Match candidate Charlie Brown and Tom McClintock in Oroville.    Meanwhile, the air war has begun in earnest.  Brown is up with a 60-second ad featuring a local family as a third-party endorser, explaining their struggles to stay ahead in this economy and how Brown is the right choice.  I think it’ll play well (Brown has an American Jobs Plan which includes investments in infrastructure and green jobs, which is key to the needed reindustrialization of society).  On the other hand, Tom McClintock has decided to use Grandpa Fred.

“The financial crisis our nation faces is complicated, and I don’t think anybody’s got all the answers,” Thompson, a well-known actor and former U.S. senator from Tennessee, says in the commercial. “But I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll feel a lot more confident with Tom McClintock working on it, rather than some amateur.”

Shorter Grandpa Fred: “All this book-learnin’ and financializin’ is hard to figger.  Pick the guy who’s never voted Yes on a budget in his entire career.”

• CA-11: If you want to know why Dean Andal isn’t getting any traction in his race against Rep. Jerry McNerney, this quote says it all:

Elected in 2006, McNerney is in a better position for reelection than many expected. But he sits in a district that gave President Bush 54 percent of the vote in 2004, a sure sign that the freshman Democrat ought to be looking over his shoulder.

His Republican opponent, former state Assemblyman Dean Andal, may not be in a position to capitalize, though. The Lodi News-Sentinel reported that an Andal spokesman took the curious position that “it would be inappropriate of Andal to comment on the bailout bill, because he is not in office.”

Yes, it would be terrible to actually give your viewpoints on national issues during a political campaign.

• CA-46: You know that Calitics Match candidate Debbie Cook is gaining traction in her race against nutjob Dana Rohrabacher by this – Rohrabacher has gone negative.  He’s sent an attack mailer that takes a Cook comment about gas prices out of context and really goes to great lengths to greenwash himself.  He mentions his sponsorship of a bill to completely eliminate environmental review for solar projects, which is irresponsible but which he is trying to cynically use as proof of his green energy bona fides.  It also calls Cook an extremist liberal who opposes drilling.

What’s hysterical is that Rohrabacher sent the mailer to everyone in the district but Democrats, meaning that Greens got it.  And I’m told by the Cook campaign that they received numerous calls from Green Party members saying that they were voting for Debbie BECAUSE of the mailer!

In other news, Rohrabacher is certifiably crazy.

According to a September 25, 2008, Pasadena Weekly article by Carl Kozlowski, Rohrabacher believes that the Los Angeles Police Department has for 40 years hidden the fact that Sirhan Sirhan, the lone man convicted of shooting Kennedy, worked as part of a “real conspiracy” of Arabs […]

In early 2007–39 years after the killing and right around the time that he blamed global warming on dinosaur flatulence, Rohrabacher decided to solve his murder mystery for “the Kennedy family.”

Anyone familiar with Rohrabacher knows this story is now headed for unadulterated, wacky bliss.

At some point, Sirhan sent Summer Reese, one of his lawyers, a letter telling her that “a Diana was coming to see him.”

Reese told Kozlowski, “Sirhan didn’t know it was the congressman because his visitor was presented as a woman.”

Rohrabacher. Undercover. In drag. Using the name Diana?

Perhaps this sheds light on why ex-Congressman Bob Dornan (R-Garden Grove) liked to call Rohrabacher “a fruitcake.”

I actually know Carl, maybe I’ll track him down and interview him about this.

• AD-26: I’ve noticed a lot of Republicans afraid to debate this year.  Here’s another example.

Stretching from Turlock to Stocton, the 26th Assembly District is fairly even in voter registration and is a target on both party’s lists. So why would one candidate take a pass on a critical opportunity to face his opponent and make his case to voters? That is the question being asked by Democratic candidate John Eisenhut who was at a League of Women Voters debate in Modesto Friday night. His Republican opponent, Bill Berryhill, had a “scheduling conflict.”

In a conversation with Eisenhut the night after the debate he said that Berryhill didn’t want to debate him. This in spite of Berryhill being quoted by the Modesto Bee saying,

“People deserve some dialogue and to know where we both stand.”

• AD-30: Fran Florez runs against Sacramento  in this solid new ad.  Is she also running against her own son, State Sen. Dean Florez?