CA-Sen: Steel, former CRP Chair and RNCer, Trashes Campbell
Shawn Steel, a former California Republican Party chairman and currently a RNC National Committeeman, trashed Tom Campbell and his alleged associations with Sami al-Arian in a post published on the conservative Flash Report.
After Campbell's ill fated support for the atrocious Prop 1-A, last year, mercifully defeated by over 60% of the voters, helping initiate the Tea Party Movement, Campbell lost all justification for seeking higher office. Like some Republicans, Campbell thought just a few more taxes will help "solve" the budget crisis. Campbell failed to understand the first rule for solvent government. It's the Spending Stupid. [...]
Add on Campbell's foreign policy chops, and its time to duck. There probably has not been anyone so little deserving the republican senate nomination, since......well its hard to find a parallel. Tom Kuchel? William M. Gwin?
Conservatives latched onto Campbell and his credentials on foreign policy several weeks ago. The attacks irked Campbell so much that in last week's debate, it appeared the Republican hopeful's game plan for the afternoon was to establish he wasn't, in fact, anti-Israel.
CA-Gov: Whitman Dodges Questions at Press Event
Hilarious but insightful coverage from the San Francisco Bay Area's CBS affiliate, KPIX, and political editor, Hank Plante, and Meg Whitman's continued attempts to dodge questions from the media.
In a report from the San Jose Mercury News, Whitman's meeting with Union Pacific (a big-time corporate donor to her campaign) sounded like it was a field trip for elementary schoolchildren.
During that brief chat, Whitman said it had been "a really good morning for me" with "a couple of 'a-ha's'" as she learned "how important Union Pacific is" to California's economy by virtue of the huge volume of freight it moves in and out of the state.
Whitman voiced support for rolling back clean air protections. A move in which public relations director for Union Pacific, Wes Lujan, agreed with and "later said Union Pacific will be contributing to Whitman's campaign 'in the near future.'"
CA-Sen: Fiorina’s Hiring, Father’s Ruling Questioned in Book
A book due out on Tuesday notes a potentially troubling window between the time Carly Fiorina's father, a federal judge, ruled on a case heavily lobbied by the high-tech industry, and Fiorina's hiring as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
In July 1999, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Joseph Sneed, Fiorina’s father, issued a ruling that made it far more difficult for class-action lawyers to file securities lawsuits. Breaking with two other courts of appeals, Sneed said a legal reform Congress passed in 1995 at the urging of high-tech executives besieged by such suits meant plaintiffs needed solid evidence of wrongdoing before they went to court.
Seventeen days later, Fiorina was named as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard with a compensation packaged valued at the time at between $80 million and $90 million.
The proximity in time of Fiorina’s hiring and Sneed’s ruling is laid out in a book released Tuesday, “Circle of Greed,” by Patrick Dillon and Carl Cannon. The book chronicles the rise and fall of one of America’s most successful plaintiffs’ lawyers, Bill Lerach, who was a target of Congress’s 1995 reform effort but continued to win billions in settlements even after it passed.
CA-Gov: Brown Announces
Jerry Brown, former governor and the state's current attorney general, announced his candidacy via web video yesterday.
Per Brown's "lean campaign" model, the lone Democratic hopeful inexplicably had no scheduled events on the day he announced. He did, however, appear on Larry King Live.
The strongest argument Jerry Brown and California Democrats can make this fall is that Meg Whitman is more of the same. A political novice with no prior elected office experience. Californians know where that leads. Just look at the last seven years under Arnold Schwarzenegger's governance. The state is in shambles.
Read more from Calitics, including the Brown press release on the announcement.
CA-Sen: Campbell Faces Questions on Israel from Conservatives
Carly Fiorina lodged harsh attacks on Tom Campbell, branding her fellow Republican senatorial hopeful as "anti-Israel" and raising connections with a Palestinian immigrant that pleaded guilty to working with Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The charges are based on several articles published by conservative publications, Commentary Magazine and the American Spectator.
Spectator writer Philip Klein summarized:
While campaigning in 2000, U.S. Senate candidate Tom Campbell called for a Palestinian state with a capital in Jerusalem, said that Israel received too much funding from the United States, argued that President Clinton was too pro-Israel, and recalled receiving a condolence phone call from Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat after he injured himself during a visit to the region.
Campbell called the attacks "bizarre" and "desperate" in a statement and later addressed them in an interview with a conservative blog. Klein slammed Campbell's defense of his record on Israel as "lies" and "distort[ions]."
Despite a defense from David Frum, it appears conservatives are not letting go of this attack.