This headline is actually a headline on Fox “News”:

You know the old saying: if you can’t beat em, change the rules. That’s the new motto of the California Republican Party. Taking a break from complaining about their governor, who as usual is right where they’re wrong, and who is also, not coincidentally, the only Republican in state-wide office in California, they’ve decided to try to change the rules for electing the next president to make it more difficult for a Democrat to win.

The CA GOP just jumped the shark. Here are three things you can do:

1. Sign the Petition

2. Support Bloggers and the Courage Campaign by making a donation

3. Tell Arnold to read the initiative

Turns out, Schwarzenegger thinks the California GOP is heading in the wrong direction and needs to bring more moderates and centrists into the party.

Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to play too well in Indian Wells.

The L.A. Times has a wrap up of Schwarzenegger’s speech to the GOP masses from Friday night.

Poor guy, looks like the speech didn’t go over well.

While some Republicans sat quietly during the speech, others interrupted Schwarzenegger more than a dozen times with applause. At the end of the 17-minute address, he received a sustained but not unanimous standing ovation — highlighting the split within the party itself.

And even more galling:

Conservative Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who followed Schwarzenegger to the stage, received a more enthusiastic reception with a liberal-baiting speech.

Governor Good Hair was better received than Governor Terminator!
I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling too bad for him.

I found an interesting stat in the article:
the number of registered Republicans in California has dropped by 370,000 since 2005. So, since, Schwarzenegger’s been in office, fewer Californians want to consider themselves Republicans. Huh!

juls and dday have previously mentioned Kamburowski.  I believe today’s SF Chronicle moves the ball forward with more info on him.

Lead paragraph:

Michael Kamburowski, the Australian immigrant hired as a top official in the California Republican Party, was ordered deported in 2001, jailed three years later for visa violations — and has filed a $5 million wrongful arrest lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to U.S. District Court documents.

The immigration story is a real doozy – that that isn’t the only thing about this guy.

According to the article, his previous boss said he was a complete failure at his job:

But Kamburowski’s former boss in the Dominican Republic resort town of Punta Cana — where Kamburowski worked until February — expressed astonishment that the Australian was hired for such an important financial job in a major political party.

“I wouldn’t give him my company to run, I can tell you that,” said Rico Pester, the owner of Re/Max Island Realty in the fashionable Caribbean beach region.

Pester said Kamburowski arrived in Punta Cana in the summer of 2006 and “was so successful that he couldn’t sell anything the whole time he was here — and we provided him with clients. He didn’t rent anything and he didn’t sell anything. … I have no idea what he was doing.”

Then, in February, Kamburowski “ran away without mentioning anything to us,” he said.

But in the GOP, of course, incompetence and problems with the law don’t matter – connections and loyalty are paramount.

Kamburowski’s resume states that he worked from November 1995 until December 2000 on a series of projects for Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform — including lobbying on issues of immigration reform and H1B visas, and tort reform. News stories from 1999 cite his work at the Norquist group with Nehring to push for “paycheck protection” measures that would bar the collection of union dues for political purposes.

For three years, from 1997 until 2000, Kamburowski said he was executive director of the Norquist-affiliated Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which aimed to name major monuments after the late president in all 50 states.

I’m glad they’re running their own organization into the ground and not just the governmental bodies that they manage to get control of.