The other night I dreamt of knives

[cyrano]

Must. Comment.
The head of the California Republican Party is live on Today right now, and has just cried and declaimed what an awful job Gray Davis has done; his first and primary complaint is that the state started with a $10m surplus and is now in a $39m deficit. And that, friends, is grounds for recalling a publically elected official. I wonder if anybody else falls under this criterium.....

There will be no commenting about the fact that, despite there being 320987432874 candidates on the ballot, only two people representing two parties (Well. One.) are allowed to comment.

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My mood has improved noticably since the installation of the car stereo.
I am now officially late for work.

Comments

[motleypolitico.livejournal.com]

Having chatted with various folks about this, I find there's almost a surprising amount of agreement in general terms.

Grey Davis is a boob. He's grossly mismanaged a bunch of situations, not the least of which is the power situation, which cost us a rather substantial chunk of the deficit, and keeps on adding to it, since it seems that nobody's willing to untie the right sets of hands to get longer term, more useful power contracts.

But I digress. As far as I can tell, the great majority of Davis' wrongdoings took place before his re-election. And the people of California were ass enough to re-elect him despite all of that. Admittedly, I give a great deal of the credit for that to Mr. Davis, who quite elegantly manipulated the Republican primary to make certain that the candidate who could (and would) have beaten him, was never on the ballot against him.

So, while I can't say that I signed the petition for the recall, I confess that given the opportunity I wish to rectify something that was subverted in the original electoral process. When Democrats put forth "Issue Based" ads clearly directed at the Republican primary, with the express purpose of discrediting one (but not all!) of the candidates, it's slimy. It's reprehensible. It's legal, but it shows the ethics of someone I don't really want in office. And it shows me that electoral laws need badly to be rewritten, to make the primary process less amenable to cross-party tampering in this way.

I don't much like the circus. But as long as it's coming to town and the tickets are free, I'm going to go watch the fray.