Day: November 10, 2009

Tea Bagger Enters Primary Race Against GOP Senate Candidate in California

Jon Ponder

Well, it’s official. Carly Fiorina announced last week that she is entering the Senate race in California against Democrat Barbara Boxer.

DeVore’s chances against Boxer range from nil and nada to zippo and zilch

And — proving that Tea Baggers learned nothing from the debacle they created in last week’s special election in New York, when they drove a liberal Republican out of the race and thus handed the seat to a Democrat for the first time in over 140 years — Fiorina now has a Tea Bagger opponent in the primary election next June.

It gets better. Assemblyman Chuck DeVore is not just a run-of-the-mill Tea Bagger — he is a real whack job with ties to the Birther movement.

Even if Fiorina defeats DeVore in the primary, her chances of beating Boxer next year are, at the risk of understatement, a long shot. That said, she’s a shoo-in compared with DeVore’s chances against Boxer, which range from nil and nada to zippo and zilch.

Fiorina’s chief problem is her record. She’s known nationally and in California mainly for two things:

  • She was the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Hewlett-Packard, where she was a vocal advocate of shipping American jobs overseas. She was forced out in 2005 after she merged HP with computer giant Compaq mainly because HP’s stock had dropped over 50 percent during her four-year tenure. After her departure, it was discovered that in an effort to stop board-room leaks she had eavesdropped on board members. In April 2009, Portfolio magazine listed her as one of the 20 worst CEOs of all time.
  • After briefly being considered for John McCain’s running mate last year, her performance as a surrogate was so gaffe-ridden that the campaign sidelined her. (Wanna bet they wished they could have handled the actual VP pick the same way?)

The foolishness of DeVore’s gambit is compounded by the fact that it’s not just prospectively a repeat of the NY23 debacle last week, it’s eerily similar to the primary race for California governor in 2002, when right-winger Bill Simon, whose single claim to fame was the fact that his father had been Pres. Nixon’s Treasury Secretary three decades earlie, defeated liberal Republican Richard Riordan, the former mayor of Los Angeles. In the general, Simon lost to the unpopular incumbent, Gray Davis, by 5 percentage points.

The minefield for Fiorina is that registered Republicans 30 percent or so of the California electorate. As is true just about everywhere, that the 30 percent is comprised mostly of right wingers who are likely to agree with DeVore’s Tea Bagger extremism than Fiorini’s Guiliani-esque positions on social issues.

And then there’s the fact that Boxer is not unpopular. Last time out, in 2004, she collected the third highest number of raw votes of any candidate in the country next to the presidential candidates, George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Boxer remains popular among the state’s liberal base and not particularly unpopular among left-leaning and centrist independents, and so will probably do as well or better in November 2010 as she did six years ago.

Verbatim

Buck Banks

Palin supporters have constructed an alternative reality in which their heroine is wildly cheered by the American yeomanry, and despised only by a small coterie of sherry-drinking snobs. No contrary evidence, no matter how overwhelming and uncontradicted, can alter this view: not the collapse in Palin’s support in just 5 weeks in 2008, not the statistical studies that show her as the only vice presidential nominee in ticket to have hurt her ticket, not her rampant unpopularity with American women, not her own flinching from a second encounter with the Alaskan electorate.

— David Frum on the Frum Forum blog.

First Shot in the War on Christmas: Fake Obama “Holiday Tree” Rumor

Trish

capitoltreelgLet the games begin. There’s a poll going around on Facebook (based on a made-up email) that the Obamas have outlawed the use of the word “Christmas” to describe the green thing that holds up ornaments during the month of December, and insist on calling it a “holiday tree” instead. Anyone who is not a paranoid, gullible, racist, religious moron could smell from a mile away that this doesn’t pass the stink test but it turns out that a surprising number of my Facebook friends are paranoid, gullible, racist, religious morons.

I checked Snopes, the email rumor busting web site, and sure enough, they’ve researched this one. Not only will the Obamas refer to their decorations as being of Christmas in nature, they are even reversing previous Bush-era policies that barred the use of religious symbols on the Capitol Christmas Tree, which is set up on the West Lawn of the Capitol on the Mall.

The Capitol Christmas Trees are cut each year from a national forest, and this year the tree is being provided, ironically enough, by Arizona, Sen. John McCain’s home state. School children, Brownie troops, and retirement community residents in the Grand Canyon State have been busy making ornaments for the tree that reflect Arizona-ness, and according to the photo gallery on the tree’s web site, CapitolChristmasTree2009, we’re going to see a lot of decorated gourds, metal stars, Mr. Sun Faces and cacti. The only Forest Service imposed requirements (and the Forest Service and Architect of the U.S. Capitol are in charge here) were that ornaments had to be weather-proof, not made of glass or plastic, and meet size requirements.

I’m sure this won’t be the end of it. Every year, the “It’s O.K. to say Merry Christmas to me” folks claim to be the victims of a conspiracy of politically correct language that prohibits good Christians from using the word “Christmas.” To level the score, they go ballistic when anyone uses the word, “holiday” instead. The result is a draw. It becomes impossible to know whether it’s more politically incorrect to say “holiday” or “Christmas,” so people sit at keyboards consumed in doubt, not knowing how to proceed.

This year, what with the worked-up birthers, tea baggers, anti-taxers, death panel believers, Klan fans, gun nuts, and anti-government anarchists out there, we can expect even more idiocy.

At Pensito Review, we know exactly what to do. It’s not O.K. to say merry Christmas to us, unless you really mean it and aren’t making an angry political statement.