A former California Governor and U.S. President once quipped that “facts are pesky things.”

Well it seems California billionaire and gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has found herself a solution: Fudge them.

Steve Poizner is rich. Just not as rich as Meg Whitman. So, instead of buying as much media time as money can buy, he’s attacking her for not running away from the public.

From Poizner’s perspective, Whitman is running towards the center, and he’s hoping to gather the Republican base.  But the troubling thing is that if you are to listen to what Whitman is saying, you would have no clue which direction she would take the state.  And frankly, her ads don’t help very much either.  So far all we know is that she wants to lay off 40,000 state workers, but has no plan on how to maintain services or actually fix the budget issues.

Oh, and right, she would toss the environment to the mercy of the corporations, because regulating for environmental protection is too long-sighted. You know, we have to think for the now.

Any way, props to the Poizner campaign, this video is way more slick than I could have cobbled together with my aging MacBook.

This morning we launched WikiMeg, the first open source, political research site of its kind – open to all, by all and for all. At Level The Playing Field 2010, we are embarking on a bold new experiment in democracy. (Check out this morning’s front pager in the Chronicle here)

We hope the WikiMeg space will serve as a digital laboratory for free speech. It’s based on the idea that by harnessing the collective brainpower of millions of Californians, we can help level the playing field against Meg Whitman’s $200 million television campaign.

We are asking everyone and anyone with factual information to share – from laid off eBay workers and those frustrated with Whitman’s eBay policies towards sellers to shareholders to regular voters – to help us fully vet Meg Whitman’s job application.

And as the campaign goes forward, we’re asking you to help us track what she says, where she says it and make sure it is correct. And if not, we’ll – well, you actually – will call her on it.

Help shed light on the choices Whitman made and the values she demonstrated over a lifetime in the corporate boardroom. Together we can get to the bottom of what Whitman is hiding by refusing to release her income tax returns as nearly every other gubernatorial candidate has done for the last 30 years.

Of course, free speech and civil discourse go hand in hand. We are asking all those participating in WikiMeg to help set an example for how virtual tools can promote genuine democracy. Please be respectful to others. Be factual and always hyperlink to your source. If you are the source of first-hand information, say who you are and how you know what you know.

Here’s how it works:

All pages on the site are open for public editing and the community of users will also review them. If you have information that you would like to share about Meg Whitman, please feel free to edit the pages where the information is categorized or to post new information.

Each page has its own discussion tab where comments and thoughts can be left in a threaded discussion style forum. Live chat is also available for real time conversations.

The initial categories are eBay Stories, Meg History, Meg Sightings, Meg’s Campaign and Videos.

Thanks for participating in the democratic process. Have fun and good hunting…WikiMeg

(Ah, eMeg… – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

Forget the fact the Whitman does not take questions from the press. Forget the fact that she almost never appears at event that is free and open to the public. Forget the fact she is spending millions and millions of corporate dollars to craft a perfect "made for TV" image for the voters that we are supposed to buy, no questions asked.

Remember this: paying someone $3 million dollars for "campaign consulting" and then having them appear in your TV ad as a nuetral 3rd party validator is beyond the pale and not acceptable.    Not too mention – everyone else in the spot used to work for her and made millions of dollars during the dot.com boom as well. Where's the validation in that? How about someone from a charity you helped fund or create?  

If a politician put one of their staff or former staff in a commercial telling people how great they were – it would be roundly criticized and then some. What's the difference here?    

Judge for yourself. Below is our version of Meg's new TV spot with a little truth in advertising. After you watch the video, remember to post it to Facebook or twitter and share it with your friends – we may not have $150 million but we have a lot of friends we did not pay for.  

Meg Whitman hasn’t had the best history with knowing what she’s talking about in the governor’s race.  And her latest approach to save $15 Billion, by wishing it were so, isn’t exactly going to win any Big Thinker prizes. Basically she plans on cutting 40,000 state jobs, but doesn’t exactly explain where the other 12.5 billion or so will come from:

“What everyone agrees on is that we have a government we can no longer afford,” said Whitman, a billionaire who has donated nearly $40 million to her campaign. “We have to take a different approach.”

Asked how that message would play in San Bernardino, where state and county government agencies are some of the largest employers, Whitman said many public employees agree that something has to change. She also said she would try to cut most of those 40,000 jobs through retirement and attrition.

“Not everyone will be supportive,” she said. “But my obligation (as governor) is to run the state efficiently.”

She later added, “This is a tough job – you haven’t have a huge need to be liked.”

Other than by cutting the state’s payroll, Whitman said she wants to cut state spending by finding fraud and abuse in public assistance programs – something that’s already been a focus for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – and by privatizing parts of the state government, possibly including prisons. (SB Sun)

Ah yes, waste fraud and abuse. The right-wing panacea when you don’t have anything real to say. It must be waste fraud and abuse. Not people who can’t find jobs. Or students trying to get an education. But waste fraud and abuse.  Despite every audit showing that “waste, fraud, and abuse” accounts for a very small percentage of the budget, Whitman’s still going to go there.  Perhaps she has no personal experience with defrauding the government, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising opposition researcher came up with some juicy morsel. But, you can’t deny that Meg Whitman has personal experience with mass layoffs. Now, there’s a leader with experience that California can really use: a layoff artist. I wonder if George Clooney’s character from Up in the Air is available too.

More puzzling is this web video trying to position herself as the more conservative of the two Republican candidates.  If I read this right, Meg Whitman is anti-choice and opposes stem cell research. I wonder if Whitman knows anything about the position of vast majorities of Californians on those two issues.  If not, Meg Whitman  should look back to some of the elections in which she did not participate. Perhaps the one that sold bonds for stem cell research, or the three constitutional amendments to endanger the lives of children. (Props 73, 85 and 4)

But, I guess you’d have to vote to be up on those issues. And voting is for the plebes.

The move by republicans and polluters to suspend/kill AB 32, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act that seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and spur green job growth, was dealt a devastating blow on Friday — one of the authors of the much-cited (and much-criticized) Varshney/Tootelian report (VTR), which predicts an economic catastrophe if California implements AB 32, is now backing away from the report’s claims.

Facing yet another round of criticism — this time in a report by Stanford University economist Jim Sweeney that found VTR to be “highly biased…based on poor logic and unsound economic analysis” and overstates the costs of AB 32 “by a factor of at least 10” — Sanjay Varshney has refused to defend his report’s claims. When asked by a reporter for the Sacramento Business Journal to respond to Sweeney’s criticism, Varshney, who is Dean of the Business School at California State University Sacramento, would only say, “I haven’t really kept up with the debate. It will be very difficult for me to comment.” (You need to be a subscriber to see the full article.)

Hardly what you’d call a full-throated defense, or even a boilerplate response about his confidence in both his methods and his conclusions. And Varshney should be well-prepared to address the kind of criticism found in the Stanford report since it echoes criticisms found by other economists, as well as the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The main and most obvious criticism of VTR is that it only looks at the projected costs of implementing AB 32 ($24.9 billion) while purposefully omitting any of the savings that AB 32 would generate ($40.4 billion) — a net savings of $15.5 billion.  

It is a methodology that literally makes no sense. How can you account for the cost of buying a more fuel-efficient car, then not account for the money drivers would save at the pump by driving a more fuel-efficient car? How can you include the cost of building a home so it uses no net energy, then not include the savings for a family living in that home who no longer has to pay energy bills? Yet that is exactly what VTR does, a methodology the Stanford report calls “highly biased and has no credibility.”

Virtually all of VTR’s conclusions are based on this decision to look only at costs without savings, which the Stanford report estimates causes the results of VTR to be inaccurate by a factor of ten or greater. The authors of VTR try to justify their methodology by claiming that the estimated savings generated by AB 32 are “too speculative to consider at this time,” an explanation the Stanford report says has “little credibility” since VTR has no problem citing the costs of implementing AB 32, many of which are also speculative. And, as said before, it makes no sense to include the cost of increasing energy efficiency without including the savings from using energy more efficiently. The Stanford report goes on to highlight more errors and flawed methodology used in VTR, like claiming that saving $30/month by driving a new fuel-efficient car amounts to a $30/month increase in gas costs for those who stick with their current cars. It’s no wonder economists Christopher Thornberg and Jon Haveman of Beacon Economics called VTR “one of the worst examples of schlock science we’ve ever seen.”

Yet VTR — for which Varshney and Dennis Tootelian were paid $54,000 by the California Small Business Roundtable — is virtually the only evidence that AB 32 opponents give for their doomsday predictions that AB 32 will ruin California’s economy, cost the state a whopping 1.1 million jobs (more than have been lost as a result of the current recession) and raise consumer prices. Republican Meg Whitman has mentioned its findings as a reason why she has promised to suspend AB 32 if she is elected governor, as has a representative for her republican opponent, Steve Poizner. VTR has also been cited by numerous newspapers, including the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, who heralded its findings as proof that there would be no “free green lunch” in California if AB 32 is implemented.

The fact that candidates like Poizner and Whitman (along with anti-AB 32 groups like the AB 32 Implementation Group) would put so much stake in a fatally flawed report that makes no secret of its most glaring failure is telling. But what are AB 32 opponents to do now when even one of VTR’s principal authors won’t defend its findings? Will they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund a petition drive calling for the suspension of AB 32 when their main justification for suspending it — the conclusions of the VTR report — no longer applies? And considering the numerous studies that have found that AB 32 would create jobs, position California as a leader in the growing green/clean energy economy, reduce costs for businesses and consumers, and improve the health of Californians while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, what justification can AB 32 opponents give for defending a status quo that enriches the state’s worst polluters?