The Democratic candidates at the top of the ticket in the California primary ran mostly unopposed, so turnout on Tuesday should have been driven by the purportedly intense “energy on the right” that the national media has been promoting.
Calbuzz has done the math and figured out that Whitman spent about $90 per vote in the primary, while Jerry Brown — who barely campaigned at all — spent just 20 cents per vote.
If voter turnout is a gauge, however, the right-wing’s “energy” fizzled in California. With all but a few mail-in ballots counted, it appears that voter turnout on Tuesday was about 25 percent, which makes it the lowest turnout in almost a century. The last time only a quarter of California voters showed up at the polls was 1914.
Until now, the lowest recent turnout was in 2006, when, as a solidly Democratic state that already had a majority Democratic congressional delegation, California merely ratified the wave that swept Democrats into power on Capitol Hill. The turnout that year was 33.6 percent.
FIORINA: [Lawter?] saw Barbara Boxer briefly on television this morning and said what everyone says, “God, what is that hair? (Cackles) Soo yesterday.”
Earlier, at the top of the video, she says she’s puzzled that her frenemy Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO who won the GOP gubernatorial spot on Tuesday, had scheduled an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
FIORINA: I find it surprising that on the first day of the general, Meg Whitman’s going on Sean Hannity. Did you hear that?
OFF-CAMERA VOICE: That’s weird.
FIORINA: It’s bizarre. I mean, she’s never been on Sean Hannity.
OFF-CAMERA VOICE: [Indistinct.]
FIORINA: I think it’s a very bad choice, actually. You know how he is.
This is so bad it’s like an unguarded moment “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” diary-cam. So much for the “year of the woman.”
A gaffe like this on day one of her campaign does not bode well for Fiorina, a political novice who is funding her campaign with the $21 million she received when she was fired as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard in 2005. […]
Orly TaitzThe results at the top of the ticket in the California primary yesterday were a foregone conclusion going in — the Democrats, Jerry Brown, the gubernatorial nominee, and Sen. Barbara Boxer, mostly ran unopposed and the top two GOP candidates — Meg Whitman (governor) and Carly Fiorina (U.S. Senate) literally bought their wins by outspending their opponents — Whitman, the former eBay CEO, spent $80 million of her own money on the primary, and Fiorina spent $7 million of the $21 million golden parachute she received when she was fired as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
There was one contest in doubt, however. And with results in, the only bad news for the state’s liberal majority is that Birther queen Orly Taitz lost her bid to run as the Republican candidate against incumbent Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a Democrat, in November.
Taitz received 368,210 votes, but her opponent won with over 1 million votes. (Now we know that the approximate number of certifiable nutcases in California is 368,000, or about 1 percent of the state’s population.)
Taitz’ loss is also another sign of the weakness of the tea party mob phenomenon in California — as was the loss of tea bagger Chuck DeVore in the U.S. Senate Race. DeVore received just 19 percent of the Republican vote.
USC/L.A. Times says Obama is seen favorably by 59 percent and unfavorably by 36 percent. Fifty-four percent want to elect a senator that will support his policies (with 44 percent “strongly” holding that view) while 35 percent don’t, with 11 percent undecided.
Rasmussen says that 55 percent approve of Obama’s performance while 42 percent do not.
Research 2000 says Obama is seen favorably by 62 percent and unfavorably by 33 percent with 5 percent undecided. Fifty-two percent say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate that supports or would work to improve the new health care plan while 37 percent would be more likely to vote for someone who would repeal it completely.
PPIC says 59 percent approve of the way Obama is doing his job while 37 percent disapprove, with 4 percent undecided. That’s 13 point drop in his approval rating since a year ago.
By a whopping 27 points, California independent voters want a U.S. senator who supports Pres. Obama. In the governor’s race, independents support Brown over eMeg, 48%-30%.
When it comes to elections, as far as the national media is concerned, if there’s no horse race, there’s no story — so take with large measures of salt the punditry you hear on cable news tomorrow night about the supposed vulnerability of Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., or the surging popularity of eMeg Whitman, the eBay billionaire who’s spent $500,000 a day in the Republican gubernatorial primary campaign.
Tea bagging has not caught on in California like it has in other parts of the country, in spite of the fact that Russo Marsh + Rogers, the Republican Party consulting firm that operates Tea Party Express, is based in Sacramento.
Granted, all the energy going into the vote tomorrow at the top of the ballot is among the Republicans, but this is because their Democratic opponents are running virtually unopposed. Other than fundraising, both Sen. Boxer and Attorney General Jerry Brown, the former governor who’s running for governor again, have hardly begun campaigning. Neither of them has yet to spend a dime on television ads, the only vehicle for getting political messages out statewide.
Based on recent polling it appears that the Republicans’ two biggest spenders, eMeg, one-time CEO of eBay, and disgraced former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, will trounce their opponents tomorrow and become the GOP candidates for governor and senator, respectively, in the general. Whitman has spent nearly $80 million of her own money, so far, and Fiorina has spent a third of the $21 million fortune she received as golden parachute when the HP board fired her in 2005.
Despite the well-publicized unrest and anger in the fly-over states, internals in a Los Angeles Times-USC poll that came out around Memorial Day show that Brown and Boxer have the wind at their backs heading into the general election:
Carly FiorinaSupport for Tea Party’s DeVore Nearly Doubled to 16% After Sarah Palin Endorsed Fiorina
With the California primary election in less than a week, the race to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer has taken a harrowing turn for Republicans. It appears that failed former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina now has an insurmountable lead over former Rep. Tom Campbell. The Campbell campaign reportedly ceased television advertising as of June 1.
In the 2000 U.S. Senate race, Campbell lost to incumbent Sen. Dianne Feinstein by 19 points, but Democrats considered him to be much more electable against Boxer this year than Fiorina, a self-financed political novice who was fired from Hewlett-Packard after a scandal that included allegations she wiretapped members of the HP board of directors.
Interestingly, in the month or so since right-wing celebrity Sarah Palin dissed the tea bagger candidate Chuck DeVore by giving her kiss-of-death endorsement to Fiorina, his polling has almost doubled, from 9 percent in early April to 16 percent now.
It’s hard to prove that Palin’s endorsement of Fiorina — whose gaffes as a McCain-Palin surrogate often dominated headlines in the 2008 campaign — has helped DeVore. It’s just as likely he’s gotten a bump among extreme right-wing voters from a web ad in which he compared himself to Jack Bauer, the lead character in the Fox terror-porn series “24.” […]
Just two weeks after the California Republican Party was rocked by the revelation that its anointed candidate for governor, former eBay executive Meg Whitman, did not register to vote until she was 46 years old, a new statewide poll finds Whitman tied with former Rep. Tom Campbell, who until now had trailed in his race against Whitman and state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner.
The poll results are most dire for Poizner, who came out aggressively against Whitman during the state Republican convention two weeks ago over her failure to vote for 28 years after she became eligible. In a straw poll among delegates at the convention, Poizner took 78 percent of the vote, trouncing both Whitman (14 percent) and Campbell (8 percent).
Mike DuvallJust when it appeared that the fortunes of the California Republican Party had scraped bottom — a decline in GOP voter registrations has reduced it to third in the state behind Democrats and independents, and last November Republicans actually lost a few seats in the legislature, even though Prop 8, a nationally publicized anti-gay initiative, won — now Mike Duvall, a married assemblyman from Orange County who was rated by a morals-policing organization with a 100 percent voting record on “family values” issues, has been caught on a live microphone bragging about the sex he’s been having with two women, at least one of whom was allegedly an energy company lobbyist with business before the Utilities & Commerce committee on which Duvall served as vice chairman.
Duvall resigned his seat within hours after the controversy was reported on cable news nationwide.
But while the corporate media has referenced Duvall’s claim that he spanked one of his mistresses, Duvall’s comments were much more vivid and are definitely not safe for work:
“She wears little eye-patch underwear. So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And so, we had made love Wednesday — a lot! And so she’ll, she’s all, ‘I am going up and down the stairs, and you’re dripping out of me!’ So messy! … So, I am getting into spanking her. Yeah, I like it. I like spanking her. She goes, ‘I know you like spanking me.’ I said, ‘Yeah! Because you’re such a bad girl!’ …
And so her birthday was Monday. I was 54 on June 14, so for a month, she was 19 years younger than me. I said, ‘Now, you’re getting old. I am going to have to trade you in.’ And she goes, ‘[I’m] 36.’ She is 18 years younger than me. And so I keep? teasing her, and she goes, ‘I know you French men. You divide your age by two and add seven, and if you’re older than that, you dump us.'”
But he can’t quite remember his other girlfriend’s name:
“Oh, yeah, Sher, Shar, Shar,” Duvall said. “Oh, she is hot! I talked to her yesterday. She goes, ‘So are we finished?’ I go, ‘No, we’re not finished.’ I go, ‘You know about the other one [Barsuglia], but she doesn’t know about you!’”
(Note to Duvall’s wife, Cher-Shar and other possible mistresses: he engages in unprotected sex.)
The O.C. Weekly did a little research and discovered that Heidi DeJong Barsuglia, a lobbyist for Sempra Energy, turned 36 years old on Monday, July 6:
In April — two months after Duvall became vice chairman of the Utilities & Commerce committee — privately owned California utility giant Sempra Energy hired Barsuglia as one of its top lobbyists, according to Secretary of State records.
Barsuglia, who has a law degree and once worked as a speechwriter for Governor Pete Wilson, had previously worked at the California Retailers Association (CRA). During 25 months of work at CRA, she reported that she incurred no reportable lobbying expenses. She joined Sempra after the departure of another lobbyist: David Hayes, who was named deputy director of the Interior Department by President Barack Obama.
The San Diego-based utility conglomerate isn’t shy about lobbying lawmakers for favorable treatment. This session, they gave Duvall $1,500 in campaign contributions. In May, the assemblyman officially adopted the company’s negative view on Assembly Bill 64, which proposes increasing the percentage of electricity the utilities must procure from environmentally sensitive sources.
So exactly how big a hypocrite is Mike Duvall?
In 2008, Duvall blasted efforts to condone gay marriage. Legislatively, he has proposed bills to aid the insurance industry and government contractors feeding off the state’s massive transportation kitty. He has offered a law to alter the First Amendment rights of Americans by banning anti-war activists from putting the names of fallen soldiers on T-shirts with messages such as “Bush lied” on the front and “They died” on the back; he observed that the dead soldiers fought to protect freedom, and “opportunists” should not be allowed to “exploit” the sacrifices with political messages opposing war.
As noted, he has received a 100 percent rating for his “family values” voting record from the Capitol Resource Institute, an anti-gay lobbying group based in Sacramento.
Duvall lives in the northern Orange County exurb Yorba Linda, where he served on the city council and as mayor. In December, Duvall created a stir back home during a visit to the city council when a live microphone caught him saying, “I don’t know what to tell you, but I sure got all kinds of fucking phone calls about it.”
Finally — at the risk of channeling our inner “Wayne’s World” — can’t help pointing out in the context of this story that the current mayor of Duvall’s hometown is named Mark Schwing.
For all her histrionics about not accepting stimulus money, guess whose state got the most, per capita? According to a fascinating resource, Alaska is receiving $1,024.28 for each of its 686,293 Alaskans.
California is (obviously) getting the largest total amount: a whopping $15,719,496,704 to be exact. But that only breaks down to $427.66 for each of its many residents. My own Florida got $7,215,011,328, or $393.65 for each of us. I’ll take mine now, please.
So who got the least? The Northeast didn’t do too well. Poor little New Jersey will only be getting $2,143,010,560, or $246.81 per person. Vermont got the least total dollars: $298,910,336. Makes Alaska’s more than double figure of $702,954,752 seem hoggish, when you consider the Green Mountain State’s population is 621,270, or only about 9 percent fewer folks.
See where you own state and county ranks, and specifically where the money went at ProPublica.org.
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
“The man is afraid of the voice of the people and that the people understand and know what he’s doing. He’s trying to stifle the ability of journalists to let the people of America know what’s really going on with their government.”
— “Kamala Harris called President Donald Trump’s ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House ‘absolutely abhorrent,’” The Wrap reports.
“Not one of them is trained in technical skills. Not one research PhD, as opposed to China, where half the cabinet is science and technology PhDs. We’re led by grifters and fools.”
— Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, on X, on President Trump’s 35-person cabinet.
“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far… The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”
— Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), breaking with President Trump in a direct-to-camera video.
“Donald Trump made over a thousand stock sales and purchases worth between $79m and $270m in July,” The Guardian reports. “His two largest sales were of Amazon and Microsoft stock, selling between $5m and $25m each on 20 July. That same day, he also sold up to $5m worth of Oracle and Costco stock, $500,000 to $1m in Nvidia, and bought up to $5m worth of shares in Intuit and Salesforce, among dozens of other transactions.”
“The unprecedented spate of mid-decade redistricting for the U.S. House has changed the congressional districts for one-tenth of Americans and significantly altered the makeup of at least one-fifth of districts, according to a new study,” the Associated Press reports.
A new Fox News Poll finds 71% of voters think the Trump administration lacks a clear strategy for ending the Iran War, including 95% of Democrats, 83% of independents, and 43% of Republicans. Sixty percent say U.S. military action against Iran was the wrong decision, while just 37% say it was right.
“The Trump administration last year spent $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave for federal workers as part of its plan to shrink the government and save taxpayers money, according to a new estimate by a congressional watchdog,” CNN reports.
Reuters has documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. The list illuminates the sweeping effort by the president and his administration to punish dissent and reshape the government.
