House of Eratosthenes

Girlfriend and I spent an exciting day at Rollins Reservoir, and she made a point of picking up the Sunday paper on the way home. With the car back in the garage and the shoes kicked off and the cold suds uncapped & flowing, she brought my attention to the fact that on the Sacramento Bee’s “Voters Guide” insert, Jerry Brown’s photograph makes him look like a responsible distinguished looking elder-statesman, or trusted Walter-Cronkite dude who I can rely on to bring me the evening news…and Meg Whitman looks like a mentally retarded woman who’s just been roused from a three-year-coma.

Brown and Whitman I turned to the online version so I could find an electronic copy of the image to embed. No can do…what I found there (to left) is far worse. Brown looks like a trusted envoy to be dispatched to a Middle East hotspot to defuse tensions with his wise, worldly understanding of human nature. Meg Whitman looks like a face you’d carve into a Jack O’Lantern, stick somewhere, and haul out to take a picture of it again somewhere in the second week of November when it starts reeking like sin and is bathed with little tiny maggot-flies, with all that squash-tissue sporting a generous putrid sag…

Okay, got it. The print newspaper industry wants us to vote for democrats. And I know why.

What I don’t get is, why any Californian who reads up on the issues would want to vote for Jerry Brown? I understand why a loyalist democrat would want to. I understand why a union thug would want to.

Brown was already put in this office. He sucked. It was Carter magnitudes of suckage…sucked any way he could possibly suck. Sucked like a leaf blower in reverse.

I don’t put a lot of stock in the “self made billionaire going to run this state or nation like a business and pull us out of our hole.” Haven’t fallen for that again since I got snookered into voting for Perot in ’92. I don’t see a lot that is genuinely positive about Whitman.

But she’d be better than Brown. It isn’t even a gamble. Brown is tried, tested and true — that is the problem with him.

I honestly don’t see the upside.

Sigh. That’s the trouble with our state, Morgan.

Whitman – who’s been called “Arnold in a dress” is probably as far to the right as we’re going to see here. It’s unlikely she is going to turn the state around – even with the best of intentions and 100% follow-through, she still has to contend with our far-left, moonbat-controlled State Legislature.

You know, the one that can’t pass a budget, but yet had time to consider no less than THREE additional gun-control laws at the end of the most recent session? They were the open-carry ban, the additions to the handgun ammo law passed last year, and the Canada-style long-gun registry. (All three were filibustered by the minority and subsequently died.) Yeah. Unless we’re expecting massive power-shifts at the state level as with the federal (yeah, right), this is the Legislature that a Governor Whitman would have to contend with. They wouldn’t play ball with Ah-nold, even though his requests were fairly tepid compared to what I would have proposed were I sitting behind that desk. For a real housecleaning list, go here: http://townhall.com/columnists/DebraJSaunders/2010/09/21/what_i_would_do_if_i_were_governor

A genuine rock-ribbed fiscal or social conservative gubernatorial candidate like Tom McClintock would go down in flames. (He did, back during the 2002 recall race to replace “Red” Davis.) All I can say is that I miss Pete Wilson…and the bygone days of the late 60s when someone like Reagan could win…let’s not even go there. Millions of Latino immigrants (who seem naturally predisposed to vote for socialist governments), millions more urban dwellers living in the big coastal cities – who have no idea what life is like in the north reaches, the valleys, or the mountains, and millions more who belong to some union.

There’s your lethal combination that makes it impossible for the opposition party to ever get past the “thorn in the side of the ruling class” status.

I won’t even bother trying to add to what you said about the SacBee’s left-wing bias and its hamhanded attempts to make Whitman look bad, such as playing-up the illegal-immigrant-maid “scandal.” Nuff said on that already.
- cylarz | 10/11/2010 @ 00:17
Brown looks like a trusted envoy…

Disagree. He looks like a serial killer in that pic.
- bpenni | 10/11/2010 @ 09:25
What’s the upside to Brown? Let me throw out my half-assed wacko conspiracy theory here:

He’s the flipside of Hopenchange, and the trial balloon for the Dems’ strategy in 2012 after they get shellacked this off-cycle.

Stick with me: the only problem with liberalism is, as any liberal will tell you, that sometimes the messenger just doesn’t do a good enough job with the message. Americans have never rejected socialism; in fact we love it. When we appear to reject it, as we have time and again, it’s just because we’re too stupid/ignorant/bigoted/whatever to understand the transcendent brilliance of the liberal program.

2008 seemed to prove this point. Get a somewhat telegenic mocha-skinned man with a pleasing baritone to read banalities off a teleprompter sonorously enough, and all of a sudden ideas that would seem weird and extreme in a Berkeley dorm room are perfectly sensible. In the person of Barack Obama, the medium really was the message, and so when the Boomers and the SWPLs universally got their panties wet for the Lightworker, our liberal betters naturally assumed they had the mandate to socialize the country.

But what do they do now that Holy Man’s policies seem to be toxic? It can’t be that Americans are once again rejecting socialism, since that’s impossible. Nor can it be that Substitute Jesus is to blame, since… well, actually they’ve got a point here, since even though His policies poll in the low 30s His personal popularity is still in the 60s. Therefore it must be…drumroll please…. that He’s a little too young and dynamic and charismatic and lightbringing and all-around awesome for us poor bitter clingers to grasp. And have you noticed that He’s black?

Jerry Brown is old and bland and as white as mayo on Wonderbread. He’s “safe.” He’s a little less youthfully Hopey, not quite as duskily Changey, but he’s still peddling the Hopenchange we all not-so-secretly crave.

Next election cycle I expect to see a lot of old, safe, white-haired, pinstripe-suited white guys running against the new (young, dynamic, intellectually-forward, often minority) Congressmen and Senators who will win back the House and Senate for the GOP this time around. Brown’s their test case.
- Severian | 10/11/2010 @ 10:04
Good points, Thomas, and stated brilliantly.

But none of it would really fly with the Californian in the Big Middle…out in farm country, not caring about Republicans or democrats, just tired of watching things get worse and worse, constantly hearing that California is going down the tubes and trailing the other 49 states in everything. Wanting to vote a certain way to fix it, but not wanting to pay attention long enough to figure out what the unions are doing to this once-proud state.

Buck notices Brown looks like a pedophile even in a relatively-decent head shot. Be that as it may, I fully expect to see Brown win back his old office, where history already understands him to be an irredeemable failure, in spite of the fact that Brown is “Sigourney-licious” when it comes to still photographs — have to catch him at just the right angle at just the right moment, or else things look wretched. So the visuals aren’t there, the policies aren’t there, the results aren’t there. Therefore the nostalgia cannot be there.

All across the nation the feeling is resonating: “This Berkeley hippie commie-lite stuff might be more snazzy, but we just cannot afford anymore of it.” It resonates out there, but not in here. How come that is? We’re not all a bunch of bleeding-hearts here; it’s a farm state. Are we just being outnumbered again by the maggot-infested slipper-wearing mocha-drinking ponytail crowd in the Bay Area? Or is it the illegal immigrants who shouldn’t be voting, but do anyway? Some combination of both?
- mkfreeberg | 10/11/2010 @ 10:21
The solution for California is to crash and burn. Who gets you there faster, Brown or Whitman? Bankruptcy is not a problem, bankruptcy is a solution. If Democrats were actually smart, they would put the Republican brand on the next phase of California burning, and then take credit during the bankruptcy. Brown already showed he is capable of the twistaroo in the arrests in Bell of long time machine politicians, party unmentioned.

Whitman does not even measure up to Arnold; how pathetic is that? Vote for Brown. He is so natural to California. Dog keeps chewing your shoes? Tie the shoe in its mouth until it can’t stand shoes. America is getting it, California is not.
- jamzw | 10/11/2010 @ 10:55
Jamzw,

I guess it really is my day to sound paranoid, but…though I like the elegant simplicity of your solution, can you imagine how a Greek-type meltdown situation would play out in California? You people have inner-city gangs that could take on many a European national army….
- Severian | 10/11/2010 @ 13:08
Severian – I have two questions for you:

1- What state do you live in?
2- Do you have a blog of your own? If so I’d like to read it.

Forget the gangs. Our hunters could take on many a European national army. We’re not all surfers and sandal-clad hippies out here. Some of the inner parts of our state are redder than Montana.
- cylarz | 10/11/2010 @ 13:26
I see someone has taken the time and trouble to come up with some answers to my question…
- mkfreeberg | 10/11/2010 @ 13:32
And Cylarz, I have found one candidate answer for your question (#1) here…

Severian, did I get that right?
- mkfreeberg | 10/11/2010 @ 13:34
Severian–

California is not seeking a solution, nothing of the kind, but a solution is stalking California.

We have not had a state bankrupty yet in the US, but we have had municipal bankruptcies, and the results have been miraculous. Generations of bad ideas and bad habits, gone. Bankruptcy judges are one and gone dictators who give the word its good name back. We’ll wait a bit and see how things evolve.

Cylarz is right. There are in America still a lot of very pleasant live and let live people who will surprise you when the garbage backs up. Not so different than the UK a few generations ago, or so I read.
- jamzw | 10/11/2010 @ 19:03
Cylarz / Morgan,

I don’t have a blog, unfortunately. I live in the Midwest. The reason I don’t have a blog, and don’t get more specific about where I live, is that I’m in the college racket and would really like to remain employed — you know, because academia is all about the strongest argument and the best evidence and nobody would ever violate the core assumptions of liberal education by blackballing someone who goes against goodthink.

And that’s my problem with Obama and all His works, come to think of it. I don’t really have any insights into the man that haven’t been expressed here, at greater length and better. I know the tone better than most, though. Obamaism is just grad-seminar bullshit on steroids — ten or twelve people who are absolutely convinced they’re smarter than everyone else, with approximately five months of actual wage work between them, solving all the world’s problems with fancy words….
- Severian | 10/11/2010 @ 20:01

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“The Mud Flies”Sunday, October 10th, 2010

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Sunday, October 10th, 2010