Friday, October 9, 2009

Meg Whitman: voting amnesia?

The billionaire former eBay CEO and early front runner for the 2010 Republican gubernatorial nomination has been criticized in the media as long having a spotty voting record going back 28 years. Now she’s aggressively pushing back with claims she’s voted.

Whitman has tried to explain the failure in a number of ways, acknowledging last month that she had “to register and vote on numerous occasions in my life.” Last February she told a state GOP convention that “I’ve been registered ‘decline to state’ voter since 1998.

On Monday, her communications director in a letter to theSacramento Bee, which first reported her voting history, requested a correction, insisting that “Meg clearly remembers voting on multiple occasions, including the 1984 and 1988 presidential elections.”

“Even if it’s true, it still reinforces the theme that this person has been fairly absent in California politics,” Larry Gerston, a political science professor at San Jose State University told theContra Costa Times. For Whitman it’s an issue that will not soon die.

L.A. politics

The Gnomes of Spring Street hear from several sources that exiting LAPD Chief Bill Bratton is pushing hard at City Hall for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to name Deputy Chief Charlie Beck as his successor. . . . For a city with about a $500 million deficit it’s shocking that Deputy Mayor S. David Freeman is being paid $6,250 per week as interim general manager of the Department of Water and Power, while the agency will also pay resigned former General Manager H. David Nahai $6,282 per week for three months. Angelenos, that’s a quick 75 grand!

Quotable

“If you can’t practice, you make a fool of yourself out there.” Tom DeLay, exiting “Dancing With The Stars,” and telling Newsweek that he still doesn’t know if Obama is a citizen.

Just how vocal was (Sonia) Sotomayor on Monday when the Supreme Court began its new term? According to McClatchyshe managed to ask more questions in an hour than the extremely taciturn Clarence Thomas has asked “over the course of several years.”

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