The sabotaging of the Schwarzenegger governorship has begun.

Aides to Sen. John Vasconcellos confirmed the liberal San Jose Democrat called Republican Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger “a boob,” said voters “made a mistake,” and announced that when the Legislature reconvenes in January, “I’m not sure I’ll go back.”

Other liberal legislators, from the Bay Area and elsewhere, apparently are thinking about skipping Schwarzenegger’s January State of the State address — his blueprint for working with the Legislature to tackle California’s deficit and other woes — because they believe he will have nothing to tell them.

How open-minded of them.

But even while saying they would try to work with Schwarzenegger, liberals among the Democrats who dominate the Legislature wound up talking about potential deadlocks with the moderate Republican.

“It depends on what the hell he wants to do,” Senate Majority Leader John Burton, D-San Francisco, said during a Capitol news conference.

“If he wants to take money away from aged, blind and disabled, or if he wants to take money away from poor women and children, I don’t think so,” Burton said. “Not while I’m around.”

Translation: “If he doesn’t tow the Democrat line, we’ll obstruct him at every turn.”

The liberal blogger Kos is trying to have it both ways, though. While he’s ignored the slings and arrows already being thrown at Arnold even before he’s sitting in the big chair, he yawns, “Expect Arnold to whine about Democratic ‘obstructionism’ in the state legislature.” Whaddya mean? If he complains about it, it’ll be perfectly justified. He’s having to face it already! Kos is displaying pure liberal partisanship; ignoring the behavior of the folks in his party while (pre-emptively) dismissing reaction to it.

He goes on to say, “Arnold has 100 days, starting the second he takes his oath.” How thoughtful of him. It took Davis 5 years to dig this hole, and he’s generously giving Schwarzenegger a liitle over 3 months to fix it all, while a blantantly obvious plan of obstruction is already being laid. California Democrat Party state spokesman Bob Mulholland said that a new recall push would begin at the end of those 100 days. Now ain’t this a classic! The recall of Davis was a grass roots effort based on performance, or lack thereof. Democrats, however, are poised to keep Schwarzenegger from getting anything done, while at the same time preparing to recall him over that very lack of progress. The former is what a recall is for, the latter is simple revenge of the sour grapes variety. That’s not public service, that’s power mongering.

Israeli forces are trying to shut down weapon-smuggling tunnels from a Palestinian refugee camp to Egypt, and it apparently didn’t go the way they planned. There were casualties, but all the numbers I’ve heard have come from Palestinian sources. These should all be taken with a grain (nay, pillar) of salt after they admitted (3 months after the fact) that Jenin was not a massacre (as they’d originally claimed) and that most of the casualties were fighters (unlike what they’d originally claimed). Always keep that in mind.

I’m a geek at heart and I peruse all my web server log files because of that. 🙂 I have been noticing that some of y’all are coming here from having bookmarked my site after visiting it via the link from NRO’s “The Corner” blog. I know that because you’re coming in to the October-2003-only archive page, which is where the link from NRO pointed you (which is how Blogger created permalinks; via the archive page since entries don’t scroll off of there vs the main page where they do).

All this to say that if you bookmarked me after coming from NRO, check your bookmark. If it says:
http://www.thepaytons.org/essays/considerettes/2003_10_01_archive.html
change it to
http://www.thepaytons.org/essays/considerettes/

And then you’ll keep seeing new posts when November comes.

(A public service announcement from Considerettes. Tax, tag, title and dealer prep extra. No log entries were harmed in the making of this blog entry. Percentage are APR with approved credit.)

Great column by Kathleen Parker today, which is a primer for folks who still insist that David Kay’s report said they’ve found nothing in Iraq, but haven’t read the actual report itself. Also Neal Boortz has a good analogy for considering what Kay did find, comparing it to raiding the home of a counterfeiter and finding all the wares of a counterfeiter (press, plates, paper, inks) but not one single fake $100 bill. Does that mean you failed?

No, and neither did Kay. And Kay’s not done yet.

Some random thoughts on the California recall:

• The influence of the Clintons is seriously waning, if it ever was all it was hyped up to be.
• It’s amazing how a law can be on the books for 92 years, and all of a sudden folks are coming out of the woodwork proclaiming it a bad law. I saw 3 people last night, as I occasionally popped over to CNBC, complain that the recall law would make America’s founding fathers roll over in their graves and that it was bad for political stability. If it was so bad, why have none of these concerned folks done anything about it, except complain once it’s used on their guy? And for concerns that this will bring about all sorts of recalls now, one merely has to remember that recalls in California has been tried before, but failed, and this is the first on in almost a century to even come to a vote. That’s pretty stable (and it doesn’t reflect well on Davis).
• In addition, a talked-about recall of Governor Schwarzenegger would be made much harder than the Davis one, thanks to Davis himself. The number of signatures required is 12% of the turnout at the last statewide election, and Davis’ governing got so many folks upset that this recall garnered record turnout. Thus the number of signatures required for a recall vote on Arnold will be significantly more.
• Spinmeister Terry McAuliffe was on FOX News Channel (and, I imagine, all the other news stations) suggesting that the success of the recall reflected poorly on Bush, and that the anger felt by Californians was due to the national economy and thus the recall of Gray Davis is not Davis’ fault. Of course, if the recall had failed, he’d be saying that reflected poorly on Bush, too. So why does anyone bother interviewing this guy? Sure he’s a cheerleader for the Democrats, but he’s got a history of utterly ignoring reality. He needs one of those captions that the ficticious Joe Isuzu used to have:

  Terry McAuliffe: DNC Chairman
  (He’s lying)

• It was most interesting to hear Democrats who defended Clinton in the Lewinsky matter go after Schwarzenegger. Maureen Dowd put it this way
  

  Now Republicans who thundered against Bill – not Arnold, who scorned impeachment as a waste of time and money – argue that peccadilloes are not relevant to governing. And feminists who backed Bill are ushering Arnold gropees up to the Democratic microphones.

  Let’s compare the two:

  • Arnold’s “peccadilloes” did not occur while he was in office, any office, and certainly not as the most powerful person on the planet (who just might be subject to a bit of blackmail should he not want news of said peccadillo to get out).
  • Clinton lied to the American people and the courts about his behavior. (Memo to Dowd: That’s what the impeachment was about.) Arnold has taken responsibility for his actions without being forced into a corner first and without having to parse the word “is”. That, I think, is the major difference between the two situations, and why people are more forgiving of Arnold than they were about Clinton.

  This is not to say that what Arnold did is “OK”. It’s just that what he did is quite a bit down the scale from what Clinton did, it didn’t happen in a situation where the power of his position might compromise a state or a nation, and he freely admitted it when confronted, asked for forgiveness, and didn’t try to brush it aside. This is why I see the change of behavior noted by Dowd differently than she sees it. For Republicans, it’s reasonable and compassionate. For Democrats, I see the change of behavior as hypocritical and as partisan as they come.

OK, Arnold. You have the power now. Use it for good.

Taranto used something I sent to him again. On today’s list of Best of the Web, the last item is entitled “The MoveOn Mob–II”. I forwarded him the column by the NY Post’s Bob McManus talking about him getting “swarmed” by calls from the group. (This time it wasn’t just a funny heading. >grin<)

After David Kay gave his preliminary report on the search for WMDs in Iraq, a number of liberal pundits asked, “So where are the WMDs?” David Kay has been responding that they’re finding them all along. As Andrew Sullivan has been saying, “read the report!” Given that the report covers only the first three months of searching for things Saddam had 10 years to hide, you’d think the same folks who thought he should have more time in power would give just a tad more time for our guys to uncover it.

From Reuters:

Wilson said it now appeared his wife’s name was actually leaked by someone outside the White House, as an act of revenge to stop him and others from questioning the intelligence used to go to war with Iraq.

“This administration apparently decided the way to do that was to leak the name of my wife,” he told NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

Are these, too, “measured words”? Is the yardstick really that flexible?

In response to those who have been saying, “See, David Kay’s report shows no WMDs in Iraq, so Bush lied”, please head on over to Snopes.com for others who have “lied” to us in the past. Snopes is a great source for checking out hoaxes or urban legends before you forward something on in E-mail, but while it usually debunks things, sometimes it…um…”bunks” them. The link goes to a page that describes an E-mail apparently making the rounds listing a host of Democrats who insisted that Hussein did in fact have WMDs (a number of whom are now saying that he didn’t). Barbara Mikkelson puts each quote in context within the speech it was given, but the quotes themselves are gems.