Tag: California

Not Content With Just California, Schwarzenegger Inspires Hatred Throughout Europe

Buck Banks

Old World anger: Calif. Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger’s failure to grant clemency to Stanley “Tookie” Williams has raised the ire of the entire European Union. The Associated Press reports that Arnold’s fellow Austrians want to remove his name from a sports stadium in his hometown and some have called for his Austrian citizenship to be revoked.

Capital punishment is illegal throughout the European Union, and many Europeans consider state-sponsored executions to be barbaric. Those feelings were amplified in the case of Williams, due to the apparent remorse they believe the Crips gang co-founder showed by writing children’s books about the dangers of gangs and violence.

Leaders of Austria’s pacifist Green Party went as far as to call for Schwarzenegger to be stripped of his Austrian citizenship – a demand that was quickly rejected by Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel despite his government’s opposition to the death penalty.

“Whoever, out of political calculation, allows the death of a person rehabilitated in such an exemplary manner has rejected the basic values of Austrian society,” said Peter Pilz, a Greens leader.

The Greens plan to start up a petition to change the name of the sports stadium in Graz, Schwarzenegger’s hometown. An Austrian Christian Group has suggested changing the name to Stanley Tookie Williams Stadium.

“Mr. Williams had converted, and unlike Mr. Schwarzenegger, opposed every form of violence,” said Richard Schadauer, the chairman of the Association of Christianity and Social Democracy.

Gangs Threaten Riots in Los Angeles: ‘Took Die, the City Fry’

Jon Ponder

UPDATE 2: Read our view of the racist blitherings left by numbskulls in the comments on this page HERE.

UPDATE: Apparently Gov. Schwarzenegger’s focus groups and polling indicated that he would derive the greatest political benefit from allowing the execution of Tookie Williams to proceed. Barring a last minute stay from the Supreme Court, Williams will receive the lethal injection tonight at 12:01 PM.

And that puts us on riot watch here in Los Angeles. Right now, I’m not feeling it. There hasn’t been a groundswell of protests, and no protests that I’m aware of that weren’t celebrity generated.

It seems very unlikely that the city is going to erupt like it did in 1992. And if it does, we have a better police force now so we can hope for the best.

From December 5, 2005:

Rage redux: The LA Weekly reports that the word is out in the “gang-osphere” that if Crips founder Tookie Williams is executed on Dec. 13, angry mobs are set to riot once again in Los Angeles:

“Took die, the city fry,” said Raymond “The Hatchet Man” Locket, a member of the West Side Harlem Crips, who says he knew Tookie back in the day. “That’s the word on the streets.”

Having lived through the riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict in 1992 and then the Northridge earthquake in 1994 (not to mention the Landers quakes and hundreds of fore- and after-shocks), I personally would take a 6.9 quake over citywide riot any day of the week.

The 1992 Riots

The ’92 riots showed how vulnerable cities are to an angry mob. Looking back, the weeklong state of emergency in Los Angeles 13 years ago also offered a preview of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans this year. There was official negligence: Police chief Darryl Gates was at a fundraiser the night the riots erupted, and purposefully stopped the LAPD from moving in to quell the violence at Florence and Normandy.

Ironically, Gates was raising money that night to fight efforts to reform his police department in the wake of the videotaped beating of Rodney King. It was the not-guilty verdict in the trial of the LAPD officers involved in the beating that sparked the riot April 29.

That night, millions of Angelenos watched local news overnight as the burning and looting escalated and spread across the city. The next morning, when Gates finally deployed the police, the LAPD was massively outnumbered by looters and malcontents. Our Thin Blue Line was a sad and pitiful joke. National coverage of the rioting apparently depicted it as being isolated to the ‘hood but in reality stores were looted Downtown, in Koreatown, Silver Lake, Hollywood, Beverly Hills and all over the city. Smoke and ashes from burning buildings blanketed the Basin and the hlls for days. Just about every Circuit City on the Westside was emptied. Molotov cocktails were tossed out of cars along Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills at the Saks and Barney’s stores. Even the famous lingerie store Fredericks of Hollywood was trashed and picked clean.

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Schwarzenegger Continues Shake Up of Senior Personnel

Jon Ponder

Los Angeles Times:

In another step toward rebuilding his government after painful defeats in the special election, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is removing one of his top deputies and installing two new aides in senior roles.

Schwarzenegger announced Friday that he was shifting his Cabinet secretary, Democrat Terry Tamminen, into a new job as an advisor on energy and environmental issues — a far less influential post. Tamminen, one of the more liberal voices in Schwarzenegger’s inner circle, is valued by the governor for a creative mind, but colleagues say he was miscast in a job that requires strong administrative skills.

He will be replaced by Fred Aguiar, a former Republican state Assemblyman from Chino now serving as Schwarzenegger’s secretary for State and Consumer Services.

Schwarzenegger also hired an executive from an insurance lobbying trade association as a deputy responsible for devising policy. Dan Dunmoyer, a 43-year-old Republican, will fill the newly created position.

The shuffle comes at a time when Schwarzenegger is recasting his administration following a disastrous result in the Nov. 8 special election. The costly and divisive campaign culminated in the defeat of four initiatives that the governor had said were crucial to California’s future.

Cunningham Bribe Figure Gave $70k to Schwarzenegger, Received Two Appointments

Jon Ponder

Los Angeles Times:

A businessman tied to the bribery scandal involving former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham donated more than $70,000 to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign committees and received two gubernatorial appointments.

At Schwarzenegger’s behest, Brent Wilkes, founder of the government contractor ADCS Inc., resigned Nov. 29 from the Del Mar Fair Board and from another panel that oversees the leasing of state land for racetracks, said Margita Thompson, the governor’s press secretary.

Schwarzenegger appointed Wilkes to the Del Mar board in April 2004 and to the State Race Track Leasing Commission last April. A seat on the Del Mar board is a sought-after post given the panel’s association with the Del Mar racetrack, among the most successful tracks in the nation…

When asked whether Wilkes’ appointments were linked to the donations, Thompson said: “Absolutely not…. There is no connection at all.”

…According to Cunningham’s plea agreement, Wilkes gave him more than $635,000 in bribes. Wilkes is not named in the Cunningham indictment or in the written plea agreement, but he is referred to as one of four unnamed co-conspirators, one of Wilkes’ attorneys has said. That lawyer, Michael Lipman, did not return phone calls Wednesday.

Wilkes’ company, ADCS, which is based in Poway, has received millions in federal contracts. According to the plea agreement, Cunningham pressured the Department of Defense to award contracts to ADCS, though it is not clear from the plea bargain that his intervention was pivotal.

Though ADCS appears to focus its efforts on winning federal contracts, the company also has done a small amount of business with the state. In 2001 and 2003, before Schwarzenegger took office, California selected ADCS as one of the vendors that could be hired to transform paper documents into computer images.

CA GOP Abandons Schwarzenegger Over Gay Hire, Threatens to Run Mel Gibson in ’06

Jon Ponder

Terminator vs Braveheart: Is there a bigger bunch of hapless fools than the folks who run the California Republican Party? They’re angry at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger because he hired an openly gay Democrat as his chief of staff, and now they’re threatening to run Mel Gibson against him next year.

In the recall election, many people voted for Arnold because they thought it would be “funny” to have the Terminator as governor. They are not laughing now.

Why Gibson? Because he produced “The Passions of the Christ,” the blockbuster homage to S&M tarted up as a passion play:

There is even a movement to draft Mel Gibson, the actor and director, to run against Schwarzenegger in the Republican primary next year — in part because the success of Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” could help his chances among religious conservatives. Raised in Australia, Gibson was born in New York and is a U.S. citizen, although he has not expressed an interest in elected politics.

“We need to have a good backup,” said Mike Spence, president of the California Republican Assembly, a grass-roots organization that is separate from the state party. Spence’s group has set up the website, http://www.melgibsonforgovernor.com . “He seems to be more consistent with the Republican message” than the governor is, Spence said.

Let’s do the numbers. As of 2004, 35 percent of California voters were registered Republicans. Let’s say half are American-Talibanis – meaning about 18 percent of voters might reflexively vote for Mel Gibson because of his extreme religious views.

Bring it on.

Sure, there are star-struck voters who might vote for Gibson just because he’s famous. However, during the election to recall of Gov. Gray Davis, many independents and even some Democrats voted for Schwarzenegger essentially because they thought it would be “funny” to have the Terminator as governor. Believe me, they’re not laughing now.

It’s hard to imagine that Californians will elect any movie star – Democrat or Republican – anytime soon. And there’s even less likelihood it would be a light-weight like Mel Gibson.

CA-48: ‘Minuteman’ Loses Big in Special Election

Jon Ponder

Anti-immigration loses again: If it’s Tuesday in California, there must be an election somewhere – or so it seems. Yesterday there was a special election in the 48th congressional district to fill the seat of Republican Chris Cox who was – not indicted! – but rather was named head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

This district is centered around Newport Beach in Orange County and is about as white and moneyed, and therefore solidly Republican, as any in California. So it was no surprise that the establishment Republican, state Sen. Tom Campbell, won with 45 percent of the vote.

But the news out of the election is that the Democrat, Steve Young, came in second, besting the darling of the Pat Buchanan wing of the GOP, Tom Gilchrist, 28 percent to 25 percent.

Gilchrist is a co-founder of the Minuteman Project which encourages wingnuts to become vigilantes at the Mexican border, sitting in beach chairs and keeping watch for illegal aliens crossing in to steal our healthcare and Social Security.

Whatever they are, Gilchrist and his ilk are not students of recent California political history. If they were, they would remember that in the early 1990’s, anti-immigrant fever enflamed the GOP in California. The party rammed through Proposition 187, which would have denied healthcare and education to illegal immigrants and thereby flooded California with hundreds of thousands of sick and uneducated children. Although the GOP won the battle for Prop 187, it sent the party into the electoral wilderness by shifting millions of Latino votes from independent or Republican into the Democratic column, giving the Dems sizeable victories in every statewide election since.

So all we can say to Mr. Gilchrist is good luck – sorry you didn’t make it but, please, keep trying!

CA-50: Can a Dem Take Dukester’s House Seat in Special Election?

Jon Ponder

Ripe for the picking? There is a good chance that a Democrat might win the special election to replace former U.S. Rep. Duke Cunningham, the Republican who resigned after admitting to taking $2.4 million in bribes from a defense contractor:

Democrat Francine Busby, the Cardiff school district board trustee and the party’s 2004 candidate for the 50th District seat … secured the endorsement of EMILY’s List late last week, ensuring she will have the financial backing to be competitive. EMILY’s List President Ellen Malcolm said Monday that Cunningham’s resignation and “the whole constellation of issues” (i.e. Iraq and rising gas prices) “could change the mood” enough to elect Busby.

House Republicans aren’t worried yet. “Busby got 36% in the last election. NOTHING has changed in this district outside of the current congressman resigning. And she is not running against the current congressman,” said Carl Forti, spokesman at the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Martha McKenna, political director of EMILY’s List, said the organization has been working with Busby for some time and believes she is a much improved candidate following a 58 percent to 36 percent defeat at the hands of Cunningham last November. (As the Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter notes, Busby underperformed John Kerry in the district by eight points in 2004, a worrisome sign for her ability to unify the Democratic base behind her candidacy.) McKenna compared Busby to Reps. Melissa Bean (D-Ill.) and Stephanie Herseth (D-S.D.), both of whom lost their first race for Congress. “[Busby] is much more serious about her campaign,” said McKenna.

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Poll: Schwarzenegger Ranks As Fifth Most Unpopular Governor

Jon Ponder

Fantastic: The new Survey USA shows the approval ratings for governors in all 50 states. The Republican governors of Connecticut and both Dakotas are at the top of the list, with ratings in the 70’s.

But you have to scroll way down the list to find Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s fifth from the bottom, and below him are Republicans Gov. Bob Taft of Ohio, with an 18 percent approval; Gov. Frank Murkowski of Alaska (26 percent); and Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky (32 percent) – and one Democrat, poor Gov. Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana, with a 34 percent approval.

And then there is Arnold, with his 35 percent.

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Potential Feinstein Opponent Drops Out, Leaving Senator Virtually Unopposed in ’06

Jon Ponder

Scared away: Sen. Dianne Feinstein is going to be tough to beat in her re-election bid next year – and the GOP knows it. But frankly, I’d never heard of Bill Mundell until today:

Bill Mundell, the only Republican making serious preparations to challenge U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s bid for reelection, said Tuesday he has decided not to run, leaving the GOP with no clear contender for one of California’s top races for 2006.

The move by Mundell, an education software executive, reflects the difficulty Republicans face in finding a strong candidate to challenge the popular Democratic incumbent.

In an interview, Mundell said he was willing to spend several million dollars of his own money on the race, but would have needed to collect much more from donors to mount a viable campaign. He said his conversations with the party’s major contributors in California made clear that donors do not plan to put substantial money behind any push to oust Feinstein, and he had no interest in running a “vanity campaign.”

Mundell, chief executive of Vidyah Inc., had raised his public profile this year as a major supporter of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Nov. 8 ballot measure to strip state lawmakers of their power to draw district maps for themselves and members of Congress.

Schwarzenegger May Appoint Dem to High Post

Jon Ponder

Too late: Apparently Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has returned from China and is now planning to reshuffle his government. I say “apparently” because there has been a virtual news black out from the governor’s office – the strategy being: Maybe they won’t hate me so much if I stay very quiet.

It also seems apparent that the governor is letting his wife, Maria Shriver, a Democrat of the highest order, make some decisions:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, launching an overhaul of his administration, is poised to hire a former Democratic Party activist and high-ranking aide to Gray Davis as his new chief of staff, sources familiar with the negotiations said Tuesday.

The hiring of Susan P. Kennedy — a former executive director of the California Democratic Party, longtime abortion rights activist and Cabinet secretary to Davis, the Democrat whom Schwarzenegger replaced — would signal a shift in direction for the Republican governor.

His political circle already includes at least two prominent Democrats: First Lady of California Maria Shriver and longtime friend and aide Bonnie Reiss. Shriver recently hired another former Cabinet secretary to Davis, Daniel Zingale, as her chief of staff…

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