links for 2010-03-01

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner is set to unveil his first television spot of the campaign Tuesday — painting himself as the race's true conservative and dissing his Republican rival Meg Whitman.

The ad refers to Poizner as a Ronald Reagan-style supply-side tax-cutter, and offering him as the best hope to save California "from liberal failure."

The ad berates Whitman for "false negative attacks on Republican Steve Poizner's conservative solutions."

Poizner also vows to "Save billions by cutting taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal aliens."
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Jut the start of the ad wars

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger threatened last week to veto a bill that would reduce a corporate tax break, calling it a tax increase. He says requiring Amazon.com to collect tax dollars already owed is a new tax burden.

But he believes a new surcharge on property insurance is a "fee" that Californians ought to pay.

The Republican governor has pledged not to raise taxes in his final year in office, but whether that holds true depends on what your definition of a tax is. Legislative counsel already has drafted the insurance fee as a tax bill.
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And, guess who voted for some of these fees – why, Chuck DeVore has.

Can there be more California political news dropping Tuesday? On the day that Jerry Brown will make the obvious official, GOP guv candidate Steve Poizner finally launches his ad campaign with TWO 30-second TV spots going statewide Tuesday. We say finally because every political dork in the state has been asking him when he's going to launch for months.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett advised President Barack Obama on Monday to scrap the health care bill and start over.

In an interview with CNBC, Buffett said the current bill does not focus on controlling costs, which he sees as the central problem that must be addressed to reform the system. He added that while he does not like the Senate bill, he’d vote for it in preference to doing nothing.

“What we have now is untenable over time,” said Buffett, an early supporter of Obama’s candidacy. “That kind of a cost compared to the rest of the world is really like a tapeworm eating, you know, at our economic body.”

“We have a health system that, in terms of costs, is really out of control,” he added. “And if you take this line and you project what has been happening into the future, we will get less and less competitive. So we need something else.”
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Obamacare definitely does not control costs

But in the Al-Arian case, Campbell defenders can claim that when he defended Al-Arian on civil rights and academic freedom grounds, Campbell didn't know the full extent of the evidence that would later link Al-Arian to terrorism. It's much harder to make that excuse, however, in the case of many other radicals with whom Campbell was connected. Let's take the example of another supporter, Abdurahman Alamoudi of the American Muslim Council, whose views in support of Hamas and Hezbollah were well known — and captured on videotape back in 2000. Yet Campbell was still defending him even as other politicians were running for cover.
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Tom Campbell and his merry Islamic extremists. Certainly, I will never vote for him – EVER.