Poll: Brown up 20 percent on Newsom
State AG now has a huge advantage over the S.F. mayor in guv's race. On GOP side, dark horse Campbell runs even with Whitman.
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Regular readers may recall my lament that despite the many, many times pollsters have asked Americans to react to descriptions of the so-called "public option" in health care reform, very few have attempted to probe the depth of Americans' knowledge about the proposal.
The point of debate is often whether Americans "want" a public option. These arguments sometimes get expressed in the context of representative democracy. "65% of Americans are begging Congress for an inclusive public option," wrote one Daily Kos diarist a few weeks ago, yet "our Representatives in the Senate are REFUSING to give The People what they overwhelmingly want." Poll questions like the one cited by the diarist typically measure how Americans react to a brief description of the Public Option concept. Those are helpful, but if Americans are really "begging" for a public option, we might also want to measure how many know what the public option is before hearing the pollster's description.
Unless I've missed it, the only effort to tackle this question was an opt-in internet panel survey sponsored by AARP (an organization that has not taken a formal position on the public option) and conducted by Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates. They found that only 37% of their adult sample could correctly identify the Public Option from a list of three possible choices. As Nate Silver pointed out, if the respondents had picked randomly, a third (33%) would have chosen correctly.
Don't get me wrong. I favor a public option of some kind. But supporters are only fooling themselves with such talk.
Arnold Schwarzenegger at Democrat Fundraiser
By now, I'm sure you've all seen or heard about the cell phone video of our state Assemblyman Tom Ammiano yelling out for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to "kiss my gay ass."
And as usual when something this bad happens, everyone is pointing the finger at me.
Yes, I was the emcee at the Democratic Central Committee event. And yes, I did invite Arnold to say a few words.
But the truth is, the first I knew about Arnold's presence was when committee Chairman Aaron Peskin leaned over and said, "Hey, your buddy is coming in through the door."
"You gotta be kidding me," I said. "What would the governor be doing here?"
Beats me, Peskin said, but you should introduce him.
I did, and with that, Ammiano became the Democrats' version of Rep. Joe "You Lie" Wilson, leading the chorus of boos before he and his buddies walked out.
To be honest, by that point you couldn't tell who was walking in, who was walking out or much else, because people had been drinking since 5 in the afternoon.
After the dinner I went to the bar and I got a tap on the shoulder.
It was Arnold, insisting that I join him. He was completely unfazed by what had happened. The only reference he made was to ask me jokingly, "Hey, what are you doing with all those crazies?"
"Picking up stuff for my column," I replied.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/11/BAFF1A39BI.DTL#ixzz0TduMvCNK
Poll: Brown up 20 percent on Newsom
State AG now has a huge advantage over the S.F. mayor in guv's race. On GOP side, dark horse Campbell runs even with Whitman.
Meg Whitman, the 2010 GOP gubernatorial candidate already on the defensive for her embarrassingly poor voting record, once endorsed and actively supported Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, one of the most proudly liberal politicians in California.
Whitman not only endorsed Boxer and donated the maximum $4,000 to the junior California senator's 2004 re-election campaign, but the former eBay CEO also served on an exclusive committee of Technology Leaders for Boxer in her re-election battle against Republican California Secretary of State Bill Jones, according to election records obtained by The Chronicle.
• US to adopt much tougher line over Iran's nuclear ambitions
• Israel to freeze construction of settlements on West Bank
• France and Russia offer to host Middle East peace conference
The Third Stage: Being There]]>All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.
Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."
This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.
This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.