California 2010 elections: Hunger For Destruction

Starting the thread early, because someone who I hate (seriously! pure hatred!) just announced her bid to run for Senate.

Hahaha I so knew it would be her you're talking about.

The Dems just have to chill, I guess. The GOP primaries are going to be hilarious.

New West looks at Carly Fiorina's tenure at HP and by proxy, Boise

In her announcement editorial, Fiorina wrote, “Our most pressing problems today are too few jobs for Americans and too much spending in Washington. As California’s senator, economic recovery and fiscal accountability will be my priorities. I will not settle for a jobless recovery.”

Wasn’t it Fiorina who sent thousands of jobs at HP offshore – to India, for example?

“Throughout my career I’ve brought people together, and I’ve solved problems. And that is what is needed in our government today. People who are willing to set aside ego and partisanship and instead work to develop solutions to our problems,” she said.

“Brought people together”? As a longtime resident of Boise with friends who worked at HP, I’ve sat at many a dinner party where people told tales of how she used egotistical, divisive and manipulatory tactics. One of her biographers, Michael Malone, said Fiorina “created a pestilential culture” and “a poisonous stew.” Solved problems? Company stock went down by 60 percent, Fiorina was forced out by the board, and while 28,000 HP employees were fired or laid off, she slinked out of town with $21 million – some reports say much more - in her pocket.

The San Jose Mercury News reported that in the past 12 years, which includes years Fiorina ran HP, the company used a Middle East distributor to sell millions of dollars’ worth of merchandise to Iran, which is illegal.

At a company famous for its innovation and its strategy of encouraging employees to pursue ideas, Fiorina left thousands of people bemoaning the loss of the “HP Way” in which they had a moral investment. Fighting with the founding families throughout her tenure, she angered employees who had a genuine love and respect for them.

After she was fired, Fiorina make the rounds of talk shows in 2005, flogging her book and trying to paint herself as a victim of a conspiracy.

The GOP primaries are going to be hilarious.

Countdown to the Meg Whitman implosion in 5... 4... 3...

Their amount of voting records combined = mine...at 21 or so.

Didn't Fiorina force that shitty ass HP/Compaq? merger that didn't accomplish much of anything and then got a sweet golden parachute once all was said and done? Yeah good luck.

Still having a lot of trouble taking the notion of Candidate Fiorina seriously.

Meg Whitman at least saw the writing on the wall and left eBay with her narrative intact.

so looks inexcusable. so that makes her a shoe-in right?

Didn't Fiorina force that shitty ass HP/Compaq? merger that didn't accomplish much of anything and then got a sweet golden parachute once all was said and done? Yeah good luck.

She sure did. She single-handedly ruined HP - alienated it's core business of high-end electronics (HP is much more than cheap computers and printers), and devalued the company by about 60%.

This is getting a lot of meme attention over the past couple of days, but it's worth seeing again as it's a bucketful of crazy. Here's Carly Fiorina's new attack ad on Tom Campbell. Special guest star... the Demon Sheep.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRY7wBuCcBY

I'll probably regret starting this since I usually avoid politics threads like the plague. But the primary is June 8 and I'm trying to parse all the obfuscatory proposition language and my head hurts. I'm thinking "no" on 14-17 and I'm undecided on 13, which I'll admit I have reactionary ideological qualms about because of the original Prop 13 -- but if it passed, I probably wouldn't care.

Yeah.

http://www.smartvoter.org/

Oh whoops, I was going to start a thread and the nice prompt told me Elvis T had already started one and it helpfully posted what I was going to post on the other thread.

The GOP primaries are going to be hilarious.

― Ned Raggett, Friday, November 6, 2009 1:53 PM (6 months ago)

I called this and then some.

Anyway I'm with you on the propositions here -- head-spinning stuff.

OMG, the Poizner v Whitman attack ad showdown is vicious.

For a while there I thought Poizner's approach to wait until closer to the election was giving everything to Whitman on a plate, but he didn't disappoint, as it were. Jerry Brown's sitting back and laughing his ass off on this one.

That said the REAL 'winner' as such might be Tom Campbell -- if he can pull it off he'll be the only one on the GOP side who made anything close to a truly smart move these past six months.

Also, major entertainment at a slew of Sarah Palin freaks crying and wetting themselves when their darling endorsed Fiorina instead of DeVore.

Jerry Brown's sitting back and laughing his ass off on this one.

My thoughts exactly. He actually knows how to play this game, so it'll be fun to see how he plays it.

For sure. Any further intensification in the ad campaign between now and the primaries:

* wastes more of the winner's time/energy/money

* even more importantly wastes the winner's organization's time etc.

* makes it seem to the electorate at large that whoever wins is a complete mental case

Boxer has it a little harder in that Campbell would be a tougher if not truly tough opponent -- Fiorina would be dead meat. (DeVore is of course a non-starter.)

Haha and speaking of which:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-governor20-20100520,0,2589100.story

Meg Whitman, the billionaire Republican candidate for governor, has plunged in polls as rapidly as she once ascended, dropping from a 50-point lead in March to single digits in a poll released Wednesday.

Whitman's rise earlier this year relied largely on a single overwhelming factor — a personal fortune she has tapped for $68 million so far, allowing her to flood the airwaves for months. But her decline stems from a host of factors, according to political analysts and strategists.

Her opponent Steve Poizner's attack on her as being too liberal on illegal immigration lacked traction for weeks, then found footing with the passage of a tough new Arizona law that Whitman opposed.

The business background that was an early advantage for the former EBay chief turned into a liability with publicity about her ties to a controversial Wall Street firm.

Attacks from both the right, via Poizner, and the left, from Democrats, left Whitman whipsawed. Anti-establishment voters may have taken their angst out on a high-flying frontrunner.

The result: According to a new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, Whitman's once-massive lead over state Insurance Commissioner Poizner has dwindled to nine points, 38% to 29%. Whitman's support dropped 23 points in two months, the survey showed, while Poizner gained 18 points. Democrat Jerry Brown now narrowly leads Whitman in a general election matchup, a reversal of their standing in March.

Meanwhile, I'll be watching http://wwwDOTorlytaitzesqDOTcom/ with great interest.

Her official campaign site is http://wwwDOTrunorlyrunDOTorg/ (URL masked to keep birther weirdos from showing up here).

One of Orly's stated campaign issues is to have an "Educated Populous."

why would you do that?

xp

Hahaha.

It all makes me glad this phrase exists:

Recent article by Washington burro correspondent Stephanie Mencimer

Taitz: "Our existing stewards of this office hardly address the growing problem of elections as popularity contests rather than a battle of ideas and philosophies."

So elections shouldn't be popularity contests? I thought that was kinda the point of democratic governance.

Fun fun!

http://hermosabeach.patch.com/articles/accusations-interrupt-tea-party-meeting

get out there and vote!

Will be doing that after work!

OMG ORLY

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_06/024156.php

I had no idea her candidacy was anything less than a joke. I guess we'll see who's laughing tonight.

any other Bay Area folks having major cognitive dissonance at voting for guys you loathed as mayor for statewide offices?

Well, as an Oakland resident I've never had the pleasure of voting for Gavin, and my residency in Oakland postdates JB's tenure as mayor, so I'm nonplussed about either. Of course, you do have the option of going for Janice Hahn, who has received the newspaper endorsements. Now if Ron Dellums and Chris Daly were running for Gov / Lt. Gov, I would stay home.

i voted, fules. (and i did vote for hahn over newsom, but it was a toss-up.)

I'll admit to my chagrin I'm won over by Gavin's rakish charm.

I figure i'd be doing my friends who live in SF a favor by voting for him -- then they might get a less douchey mayor

polls are closed. let the carnage begin!

wow, with 7.4% of precincts reporting, jerry brown has 84% of the dem vote. i'm not surprised, but daaaamn.

i'm kinda scared that orly taitz is getting any votes at all.

http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/sec/59.htm

Wasn't Brown the only candidate of note anyway?

I'm neither scared nor surprised at Taitz getting votes, as there will always be morons.

proposition results as bleak as always

i had to watch the demon sheep ad again. sounds like carly exhumed the corpse of orson welles to record the male voice-over.

cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH1PJTY9AVA

ha yeah i somehow missed that ad entirely. her 'terrorism kills' ad is the most punchable of the election season so far

AP is saying Prop 14 passes.

i love how news sources like AP can just "call" elections with fewer than 15 percent of the precincts reporting.

no surprise but ugh gavin ran away with lt. gov. la weekly went after janice hahn hard last week (fwiw, their political agenda gets more suspect by the minute) but this is one case personality def. wins me over i just can't trust that dude.

prop 16 and prop 17 results are pissing me off... are we really this easy to dupe?

(don't answer that)

I was going to say.

The other day I got a mailer from Whitman -- at what clearly is my rented apartment in a large building full of rented apartments -- warning me that Jerry Brown is going to ruin Prop 13 for me. I didn't know whether to laugh or punch a wall.

^^ yeah exactly - i've argued about Prop 13 with my mom - i think i ended up winning the argument because property taxes are public, and I looked up my parents' on their county assessor's website.

basically, my parents live in the house they bought in 1975, and pay way less than 1% of the value of their house in property taxes.

jerry brown used to look like a character from a doonesbury strip

http://www.ronstadt-linda.com/nwk79.jpg

my parents both instilled me with a loathing for Prop 13

why did your parents loathe it?

Within a year of its passing the apocalypticly deleterious effect it had on California schools was visible even to a fourth grader (me).

why did your parents loathe it?

both hardcore liberals who worked for the public education system well aware of the ways it would - and continues to - cripple the state budget

You still learned how to use 'deleterious' properly so maybe you're overreacting.

i think it actually took longer to sink in - but definitely almost every year I spent in the CA public school (except for the 3 years I was in a magnet program) it just got worse and worse - this was 1980 - 1992. I think one could also blame a decade of conservative Republican governors, and also Ronald Reagan.

My time in the public school system was more recent than yours but I are still purty smart.

Did we really need to devote that much class time and financial resources to learning to say no to drugs?

100% of precincts are in, harris still up by 15,000, prob enough to prevail versus any further ballots/recounts

that "100% reporting" can represent partial results tho.......weird

Did we really need to devote that much class time and financial resources to seeing Soleil Moon Frye up close? y

Another failed remake of the "Come to Daddy" video:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef013488afebef970c-800wi

100% of precincts are in, harris still up by 15,000, prob enough to prevail versus any further ballots/recounts

i think that might be considered statistically insignificant -- i wouldn't fault anyone for wanting a recount.

Did we really need to devote that much class time and financial resources to learning to say no to drugs?

I said no to drugs but they didn't listen.

yeah, i just doubt cooley can make up the diff in whatever recount scenario comes into play, not saying he should throw in the towel. it is ridiculously close.

Right now it's only 14,838 votes to her favor.

LOL at the photo but at the same time I assume he always looks this fake:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef013488ac2a0d970c-600wi

hate him so much

he's the quintessential stuffed suit - stuffed with slime

That's just his smile, actually, though he is a bit of a ham.

a slimy ham

Hi, mama sly!

yeah xxp there is an endearing shiteatingness to that smile, in amongst the slime

He looked genuinely elated in today's parade and I doubt it had much to do with electoral politics.

cute ladies in the crowd, huh?

;)

He was dutifully with his wife and kid and waving at the crowd. It was a pretty joyous, raucous moment in SF.

The parade I mean, not necessarily his participation therein

how drunk was he

haha, how old was his wife?

this is the wife whose humanitarian cred involved saving drowning bees, right?

not declaring victory yet, but declaring "confidence"...

http://sfappeal.com/news/2010/11/kamala-harris-declares-victory-in-ca-attorney-general-race.php

next stop: "dry and secure"

Harris/Cooley still up in the air, lawyering up already happening, etc. Don't hold your breath.

Fun post-mortem on where Whitman's money all went:

http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/how_the_west_was_lost.php

http://californiawatch.org/watchblog/how-losing-campaigns-spent-225-million-6395

Numbers as of this morning:

Kamala D. Harris (Dem) 3,349,613 45.9%
Steve Cooley (Rep) 3,332,598 45.7%

eric garcetti sez:

Kamala Harris needs volunteers to monitor vote counting for AG--http://www.tinyurl.com/KamalaVote lawyers and non-lawyers. Sign-up now!

cooley up by 35,000 now, don't really know what to make of it except lots of votes still to be counted
http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/attorney-general/

Still back and forth with Harris/Cooley. Harris up 32,000 votes at this point but there's about 3/4 of a million votes left to review.

http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2010/11/steve_cooley_loses.php

Kamala Harris Defeats Steve Cooley For California Attorney General
By Gene Maddaus
published: Tue., Nov. 23 2010 @ 2:52PM

Steve Cooley went with his gut and declared victory on Election Night. His gut let him down.
​We've been saying for a while that the math didn't look good for Steve Cooley. But now we can go ahead and make it official.

Steve Cooley has lost. Kamala Harris will be the next attorney general of California.

Out of an abundance of laziness caution, we've held off until now. But we're getting tired of waiting for the AP to call this thing, and Eric Garcetti has already beaten us to the punch anyway.

A mathematical explanation/justification after the jump.

The Secretary of State's office has been keeping track of the uncounted ballots on its website. That report lists 394,000 untabulated votes as of this morning, but that's out of date. There are no more than 154,000 ballots remaining, and there are probably less. Update at 2:50 p.m.: With updates from four counties, there are now 124,000 ballots left, at most. (Explanation below.)

The county websites have more up-to-date figures in some cases than the Secretary of State. Using those numbers, we can say that Harris is leading by 49,535 votes. (2:50 update: 51,141 votes.) Given the geographic breakdown of the remaining uncounted ballots, we expect her to expand her lead by another 10,000 votes or so, ending up with a margin of six tenths of a percent (46.0-45.4).

In order to win the race, Cooley would have to win the remaining uncounted votes by a margin of 66-26. (Update at 2:50: Cooley would now have to win by 72-20.) The likelihood of that happening is extremely close to zero. One of his best counties was Orange County, and his margin there was only 60-31.

​If we knew nothing about the remaining ballots, you might say that Cooley has at least a chance. But we do know where the ballots are coming from -- they're mostly from counties that favored Harris -- and we know that they're mostly provisionals, which have also favored Harris.

We'd expect Harris to win the remaining votes by a tally of about 50-42. That's just based on geography and doesn't factor in her advantage from provisionals.

We now have much more information about how this race will end up than the AP and the L.A. Times did when they called the governor's race for Jerry Brown at the stroke of 8 p.m. on Election Night.

It's time to call it. Harris has won.

At this point, it's less a question of math than of psychology. How long does Cooley want to go before conceding? Does Harris want to wait for him to concede before declaring victory?

The rest we're going to mark as for nerds only.

A lot of folks -- us, Garcetti, Swing State Project, and no doubt both campaigns -- have expended a lot of effort on projecting ballots county-by-county based on each candidate's performance in that county. But a much simpler and more accurate way to do it would have been to multiply the total number of uncounted ballots statewide on Election Day by 2.5%. That was Harris' margin of victory among ballots cast on Election Day.

When we did that back on Nov. 5, we came up with Harris picking up 58,349 votes on her then-lead of 12,000 votes. All along, that's been a much more accurate guess than the county-by-county estimates, because it ignored geography and focused instead on the character of ballots. As it turned out, the uncounted ballots were more or less evenly distributed throughout the state. The important difference between them and the counted ballots was that they were all cast on or near Election Day.

A word on how we arrived at the estimate of 154,000 124,000 remaining ballots. The uncounted ballot report gives the time and date that each county last reported its remaining ballots. But in most cases, counties have added ballots to the count since last reporting their remaining ballots. So we went back and looked at what their tally was when they last reported uncounted ballots, and then subtracted the number of ballots that they've counted since then from their uncounted ballot figure. That's a somewhat crude method, but it's a lot more accurate than relying on the Secretary of State's out-of-date estimate.

Using that method, we can say that the largest chunk of uncounted votes is now in Sonoma County, where they're sitting on 35,500 ballots. Just to be sure that's right, we called the Sonoma Registrar's office and were assured that they're working on it and they do intend to get those 35,500 ballots counted by the deadline. (Harris won Sonoma 57-33.)

Full disclosure for the three or four people who could possibly care: We also estimated that only 94% of remaining ballots will have a vote for attorney general (based on how it looks so far in the counties that give that figure), and that 15% of the remaining ballots will be thrown out because they're provisionals.

Update at 2:50: To the question about why 15%: We had to go with something, and 80-85% is a commonly used estimate for the percentage of provisionals that end up counting. This assumption is a relatively small source of error compared to the error we know is in the remaining ballot tally. If we change it from 85% to 100% -- which would be the assumption most favorable to Cooley at this point -- then the margin he needs drops from 72-20 to 68-24. Still an impossible hurdle. (We can tweak it in the other direction, too. At 80%, it goes to 73-18.)

Good news to have that in the bag at this point. For my money one of the key upshots is that the Prop 8 people will be left twisting in the wind again without the state backing them up.

cooley concedes, kamala wins!

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/11/steve-cooley-kamala-harris-attorney-general.html

*cheers*

I love how most of the California GOP grousing is now essentially 'well we just have to be even MORE batshit now!' Have fun with that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_Z1i8dbZcI

raising taxes is fun I wish I could actually raise taxes

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/budget/

wow a $10b surplus without cutting a single program

annoying that you can only raise the gas tax up to a dollar

Holy shit the clear answer is to raise the fuck out of those taxes.