bill:politics

One the one hand we have my old high school chum Christopher Christie taking down the rat bastards who tried to get rich off the backs of investors and employees at Cendant with former Chairman Walter Forbes getting a 12 year jail term, former Vice Chairman E. Kirk Sheldon getting ten years and each ordered to pay restitution of $3.275 billion. They can spend their days in the pen comparing notes with the Rigas men, Jeffrey Skilling and Dennis Kozlowski, remembering the days of $15,000 shower curtains and private jets.

On the other we have the sleazy Bush team trying to quietly do what they can for supporters and allies before the Democrats run them out of DC. In this instance that means firing US Attorneys like Carol Lam in San Diego before they can bring folks like Republican congressman Jerry Lewis (who is still very popular in France, right?) to trial for giving fat government contracts to businesspeople willing to give fat lobbying and consulting contracts in return. At least Lam convicted ex-Representative Randy Duke for taking a million dollar plus home in exchange for getting a few earmarks into legislation.

I really like this quote the Times has about Lam’s dismissal from the F.B.I. chief in San Diego: “What do you expect her to do? Let corruption exist?â€Â

Update: Richard Koman reports in Silicon Valley Watcher that Kevin Ryan, the US Attorney leading the stock options backdating investigation, is another target of the Bush purge and that “[t]he Department of Justice has asked for resignations of all but one US Attorney in California and Democrats see the moves as at attempt to replace Attorneys who don’t meet the Bush Administration’s conservative litmus test.” Sad, really farking sad.

Somehow I don’t think the Dave Packard or Bill Hewlett would duck the blame for actions taken by people working directly for them. After all, this isn’t like asking a corporate chairperson to put her neck in the noose for something done four levels away. But HP Chair Patricia Dunn today defended her role in an inquiry into a boardroom leak that has led the California Attorney General to open an investigation, and said she has no plans to resign unless asked by the board.

Dunn said she did not know private investigators hired by the computer maker had used questionable tactics to access private phone records of board directors and journalists.”Our board certainly had no idea” of the privacy breaches, Dunn said in an interview on Friday, adding, “This problem won’t recur.”

The thing that smells really bad to me about this, beyond the nasty, chilling snoopery, is that Dunn and the HP board knew about the seemingly illegal behavior since at least its May board meeting–four months ago–and yet we’re just finding out now. At least one board member, Tom Kleiner (an HP executive himself before co-founding the legendary Kleiner, Perkins VC firm), had the grace and guts to resign when he learned of the misdeeds; apparently he “ratted out” Dunn and the rest, who preferred to sweep things under the rug, by informing numerous prosecutors and regulators.

Dunn may not plan to resign but I hope that someone else gets to make that decision. As we’re beginning to see in the stock options scandal, corporate leaders are no longer quite as invulnerable and unaccountable as in years past.

CNN Money: HP Chair: Lying, or incompetent. “At Enron, WorldCom, Tyco … this type of conversation probably happened in one way or another. It shouldn’t happen anymore. So which is it? You are either lying now and did actually know what was going on with the phone records … or the whole corporate upheaval of the past three years totally blew by you.”

This is really something: Support Impeachment of President Bush and Vice-President Cheney Now. Three (Democratic, obviously) candidates for the US House of Representatives are organizing a formal drive to get our Criminals-in-Chief out of DC before they can inflict any more mega-damage on America. My new heroes are Charles Coleman, Jr., Marcy Winograd and Bob McCloskey, and I sure hope they get elected.
Key Quote: “The FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) law is very clear in that the executive branch must get a warrant in order to spy on Americans on American soil. George W. Bush has repeatedly confessed to violating this law. Therefore, it is the duty of members of the House of Representatives to impeach Bush. Add to that the lies about Iraq, the treason of outing a critical CIA operative, the torture and abuse scandals, and there are enough high crimes and misdemeanors to impeach a half a dozen presidents and vice-presidents.“

A week ago I received an unsolicited, spam-ish email from the campaign of Jim Shore for DA but, okay, politicians always exempt themselves from this kind of law and it did include a polite ‘this is a one-time only unless you opt-in’ at the end. Shore is running for District Attorney of Santa Clara County, where I live at the mostly-neglected northern end.

His website was less than sparkling when I explored it; for instance, the Issues page covered only one issue. Overall I didn’t find much out of the ordinary but I guess local pols rarely go far out and DA is supposed to be mostly apolitical.

However, Jim Shore is unlikely to get my vote because no response came from an email I sent in with three simple, area-focused questions. Here are the two interesting questions:

Driving home tonight from work I notied something odd on a pickup truck in the other lane on San Antonio Rd. Though wearing commercial license plates, the identifying/marketing text included prominently the phrase “Anti-Terrorism Unit.” I should have been quicker to think of taking a picture with my phone camera. I did write down the phone number and some other details and googling 800-690-7707 turned up Viable Alternatives Corp. / San Mateo Security.

Nothing on the company website mentions this ‘unit’, and this could be an overreaction, but in these times I don’t think too highly of marking up a truck with a decal that is probably just this side of the line in looking like a governmental insignia, a lightbar across the roof and prominently displaying those words. True, the truck did also show San Mateo Security but the positioning was such that one could easily miss the commercial nature.

What is a private company in the Bay Area doing with an anti-terrorism unit anyway?

MoveOn is polling the California membership on the propositions on the November special election ballot; if 2/3rds agree on a position on a ballot measure, it will become the official MoveOn endorsement. My leanings, at this early stage, are:

Also asked: Do you oppose or support Gov. Schwarzenegger’s move to hold a special election? Oppose, big time.

The survey also asks for a brief statement on a specific measure and this is what I wrote against Prop 77: Schwarzenegger seems to be trying to game the election system, first by holding a $100 million dollar special election instead of waiting six months and second by forcing a special redistricting four years early. For a man who claims to not be bound by politics as usual his actions sure say otherwise!

After having a year to reflect on how legal same sex marriages would work on the practical level, the Massachusetts legislature voted down a bill that would be the major step towards a stage constitutional amendment overturning the court decision that gave gay and lesbian couples the same rights as us heteros. In fact the vote was taken at a joint session of the state Senate and Assembly and even the Republican party’s Senate minority leader–a co-sponsor of the bill–voted against it after hearing from constituents and talking with married couples.

One can only hope this level of understanding, and the experience in Vermont and Canada, will better inform our own state government.

Apparently Prop 22, passed five years ago by a seriously unenlightened majority of California voters, trumps the gneder-free marriage bill passed by the State Senate and Assembly this week. Arnold will get off lucky though this is another example of why our initiative and referendum system doesn’t work in an era of ubiquitous connectivity and media coverage. I remain optimistic that the State Supreme Court will come through with the necessary decision next year.

Excellent: California Legislature Approves Gay Marriage and now we’ll see just how Arnold’s self-described liberal social values do when they meet up with an issue his Republican base cannot abide.

Nothing gets me going like a good blather of hypocritical, logically inconsistent verbal diarreah from a politician and the SF Chronicle (State senate OKs bill legalizing same-sex marriage) provides just this. In an act of true goodness and possibly political courage 21 members of the California State Senate voted to approve same sex marriage legislation. We’ll see as soon as next week if enough Assemblycritters can muster it up for passage–then people will see the real Governator, if he stands behind his words or not.

For now we can laugh and marvel at men like Dennis Hollingsworth, a Republican, who claims to know what’s in the minds of his colleagues: “I don’t think there is a member in this chamber who doesn’t somewhere–either readily on the surface or somewhere deep down inside–know that this is not the right thing to do.” Sure Dennis, I guess the electoral victory made you a mindreader. LOL

The real yucks, as they so often do, come from Tom McClintock. Remember, he was so sure about being THE republican in the Grey Davvis recall I swear he was ready to ejaculate all over the Capitol steps before Arnold laid down the reality from latenight TV. Anyway, McClintock said “The reason marriage is fundamentally different from a civil contract is that marriage is formed for a fundamental purpose–that is to bring a new life into the world.â€Â

Nice of you to bring up the civil contract matter in the same sentence as childrearing, Tom. Because if those other things, like being able to visit your life partner in the hospital and make medical decisions for him or her and be treated specially in property ownership and estate matters, are so unimportant than why don’t we change the laws to separate them from marriage? Let everyone use civil contracts to arrange the relationshps. Of course that’s not something any right thinking.. hell, I can’t think of a polite name to call these mentally deficient steaming piles, anything they’d accept. The childraising, people, is a red herring, simply used to swaddle irrational bias in clean clothes.

Billable Hours is the blog of parents in Redwood City who are fed up with school budget cuts:

At the end of the school year about to start these parents intend to present a bill for services rendered to Gov. Schwarzenegger. But not for themselves, for the school districts that need the money to hire people to do the job. [via Whump]

Many people in this country (and others, but let’s focus for now) get caught up in debates over angels on a pinhead issues like whether John Roberts was a member of the Federalist Society or did Bill Clinton have sex with a White House intern. The answers are both yes but both are prime examples of how politicians distract the bulk of the voting population from the decisions taken that truly impact our lives.

If you had five minutes with George Bush, or Schwarzenegger, would you rather ask him about teaching Intelligent Design in public schools or providing funding so our kids have a complete, meaningful learning experience?