Fiorina’s spokeswoman, Julie Soderlund, said Fiorina did what was necessary to ensure the long-term health of her company and was proud of her record.

“She has been very up front about the fact that politics exist in the board just as much as they do in the U.S. Senate,” she said of Fiorina’s dismissal, which the candidate wrote about in her memoirs.

Faulting Boxer for supporting tax increases and “job-killing legislation,” Soderlund said the California Democrat had been unwilling to make the same kinds of “tough choices” in her handling of taxpayer dollars over more than three decades in politics.
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Barbara Boxer will try to demonize Carly Fiorina but what about her own record?

Michael Steele, who committed the notorious “Essex Boys” gangland killings, claimed that being refused adequate treatment at Britain's highest security jails left him in pain for seven years.

He even said his suffering was made worse by being locked up all day because he had “nothing to do other than think about his toothache”.
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Gold filing for a murderer? How about a painful extraction?

WaPo blogger Dave Weigel resigned today, after a slew of his anti-conservative comments and emails from the newly-defunct JournoList were leaked to FishbowlDC and the Daily Caller. However, by focusing on his invective and profanity, most of his detractors and defenders are overlooking Weigel’s biggest offense.

Weigel used JournoList for exactly the purpose its critics suspected it would be used, i.e., to attempt to shape media coverage for the benefit of the Left.
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Read it all and indeed

A milestone on the legal front occurred in Orange County in May when a three-judge appellate panel, in a published decision, declared that red-light camera photos are hearsay, rather than direct, evidence and therefore inadmissible.

"The person or persons who maintain the system did not testify," the judges declared. "No one with personal knowledge testified about how often the system is maintained."

As word of the decision circulates, more motorists with red-light camera tickets are contesting them, cities that had been planning to install the cameras are delaying action, and the adverse reaction is taking root in the state Capitol.

The Senate has approved, 31-1, legislation by Democratic Sen. Joe Simitian of Palo Alto to impose much tighter standards on local governments that contract with the private firms for the cameras.
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A waste of government resources that protects very few

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh famously said he hoped President Obama would “fail” in January, 2009. Almost a year later, when Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital with chest pains, Washington Post reporter David Weigel had a wish of his own. “I hope he fails,” Weigel cracked to fellow liberal reporters on the “Journolist” email list-serv.

“Too soon?” he wondered.

Weigel was hired this spring by the Post to cover the conservative movement. Almost from the beginning there have been complaints that his coverage betrays a personal animus toward conservatives. E-mails obtained by the Daily Caller suggest those complaints have merit.
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Ezra Klein has taken down JournoList.

I began Journolist in February of 2007. It was an idea born from disagreement. Weeks, or maybe months, earlier, I had criticized Time's Joe Klein over some comments he made about the Iraq War. He e-mailed a long and searching reply, and the subsequent conversation was educational for us both. Taking the conversation out of the public eye made us less defensive, less interested in scoring points. I learned about his position, and why he held it, in ways that I wouldn't have if our argument had remained in front of an audience.
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But, the unintended cinsequences

The Republican National Committee chairman showed up Thursday in one of the nation's least GOP-friendly cities, expressing confidence that his party was in strong position to win a U.S. Senate seat and the governor's office in November.

"You've already begun to see here in California an enormous and I think important groundswell of support for Meg and Carly and a host of folks out there who are running," Michael Steele said, referring to Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina — the Republican nominees for governor and Senate, respectively. "We are competitive in California for the first ti

There’s word that Dave Weigel has resigned from the Washington Post.

I’ve known Dave Weigel since when he was an intern at USA Today and used to send me e-mails to the Kerry Spot on how I might be overestimating Bush’s chances.

The last time there was a big brouhaha about Weigel, it seemed that everybody noted that they liked him personally, and then tore into what he wrote.

I’m sure there are readers out there exclaiming, “so what if he’s a nice guy when you run into him?” but it’s worth noting that there are a lot of folks in this world whose political views somehow drive them to uncontrollable, overt nastiness or hostility to those with different views. The world probably could use more of Dave’s trait of being personally amiable with those with whom he disagrees.

At least to their faces; his comments on Journo-List are nasty stuff.
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A proud member of Right Blogs but you won't be seeing my vitriol there.

FishbowlDC has confirmed that WaPo conservative-beat blogger Dave Weigel has resigned after a slew of his anti-conservative comments and emails surfaced on FishbowlDC and Daily Caller over the past two days.

A spokesperson for the Post said the paper will not offer additional comments but confirmed that the writer's resignation was accepted.
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A good writer but see Althouse on why he had to go

Washington Post reporter/blogger Dave Weigel, who is tasked with covering conservatives, has come under fire in the past several days for derisive comments he's made about some conservatives on the liberal listserv JournoList. You could read more background on the story here. I should disclose at the outset of this post that I consider Dave a good friend. So you can dismiss what I have to say if you want, but I felt compelled to add some broader context to this latest media controversy.
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I know you are friends Phil but he was hired to cover the Right. Put a fork in him – He's done at WAPO – or at least should be.

Consider poor, conflicted David Weigel. Hired by the Washington Post, he had the trappings of prestige and therefore he deserved the admiration of the cool young journalists of Washington, D.C. But his assignment was to cover the conservative movement, and that threatened to make him toxic, a man to be shunned. He needed a way to wriggle — to wiggle-Weigel — into the good graces of the cool kids. He had to show that he was covering conservatives, but he was not one of them.

He could try to do that subtly, and without deviating from the good-faith performance of his assigned task, perhaps by writing in a neutral, questioning style about what was going on with the righties these days and carefully raising doubts, undermining foundations, and strategically inserting a knife blade now and then. But would they get it? Didn't he need something a little more emphatic… and a little hipper?
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So True. Read it all

But passionate green campaigner Sir Paul McCartney believes the environmental disaster may have a silver lining, with the search for clean, renewable energy now being pushed forward.

The Beatles legend said: "Sadly we need disasters like this to show people. Some people don't believe in climate warming – like those who don't believe there was a Holocaust.

"But the facts indicate that there's something going on and we've got to be aware of it if we want our kids to inherit a decent world, not a complete nightmare of a planet – clean, renewable energy is for starters."
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Sometimes celebrity people should just stick to their trade. And, what science degree does McCartney hold?

In the last couple of years, many of us have been laid off, worked at places where people have been laid off, had friends who were laid off, or had to lay people off. It is tough, but often it has to be done by management for them to be responsible stewards of the organization. Last week, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles (and former Speaker of the California Assembly) Antonio Villaraigosa described the “tough decisions” that he had to make in “extricat[ing]” the people of LA from 3,500 government employees. n Villaraigosa’s own words, “we’re doing furloughs and layoffs, we’re doing everything we can, including early retirement, to reduce the size of our payroll.” Sometimes a responsible leader in the private sector or the public sector has to do this. But that isn’t what you are going to hear from Democrats this year. Democrats like Barbara “Ma’am” Boxer are going to demonize Republicans, like Carly Fiorina, who were involved in layoffs because it was the responsible thing to do.

FishbowlDC has obtained e-mails written by WaPo's conservative-beat blogger Dave Weigel, that the scribe sent to JournoList, a listserv for liberal journalists. (Read up on JournoList with Yahoo! News's Michael Calderone's 2009 story that he wrote for Politico).

Seems Weigel doesn't like (and that would be putting it mildly) at least some of the conservatives he covers. Poor Drudge – Weigel wants him to light himself on fire.

Weigel's Words:

•"This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire."
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And, Weigel's apology is well lame…..

In a bizarre statement to police, the Oregon woman who claims that Al Gore fondled and groped her during a massage session described the former Vice President as a giggling "sex crazed poodle" who gave a "come hither" look before pouncing on her in a Portland hotel suite. In a taped January 2009 interview with cops, the 54-year-old woman, a licensed masseuse whose name has been redacted from police records, read from a lengthy prepared statement that detailed her alleged October 2006 encounter with Gore at the Hotel Lucia.
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Al Gore better get in front of this story or it will be John Edwards all over again

According to L.A. Weekly's calculations, Villaraigosa has taken tickets worth $50,000, and perhaps as much as $100,000 — a staggering amount for an American politician at any level, and more than he could cover with his $223,000 salary and extensive family obligations.

The top-end value of those tickets is impossible to determine because, as the mayor's office admitted in a Los Angeles Times article June 12 by Phil Willon, Villaraigosa failed to keep track of his free tickets for the past five years. If true, there is no way to know whether he took single tickets or frequently received multiple tickets to also accommodate dates and family members.

If he did in fact take two or three tickets to events, the value could rise substantially, perhaps reaching or topping $100,000.
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So, what else is new?

L.A. Weekly is publishing below its exclusive ticket price list for the 80 events to which Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa accepted free seats.

Villaraigosa lost or threw away paperwork showing who gave him the freebies, how many tickets he accepted to each show, ceremony or game, and the value of free alcohol, food and valet parking he was provided.

His take is worth $50,000 to $100,000 or more, the Weekly has found. (For more on the blowback to this scandal, see our story, "Villaraigosa's Five-Year Free Ticket Spree,"
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Caught again

Americans are more pessimistic about the state of the country and less confident in President Barack Obama’s leadership than at any point since Mr. Obama entered the White House, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. Sixty-two percent of adults in the survey feel the country is on the wrong track, the highest level since before the 2008 election. Just one-third think the economy will get better over the next year, a 7-point drop from a month ago and the low point of Mr. Obama’s tenure. Amid anxiety over the nation’s course, support for Mr. Obama and other incumbents is eroding. For the first time, more people disapprove of Mr. Obama’s job performance than approve.
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And, the GOP has not yet gone into attack mode. Obama is self-destructing…..

California welfare recipients are able to use state-issued debit cards to withdraw cash on gaming floors in more than half of the casinos in the state, a Los Angeles Times review of records found.

The cards, provided by the Department of Social Services to help recipients feed and clothe their families, work in automated teller machines at 32 of 58 tribal casinos and 47 of 90 state-licensed poker rooms, the review found.

State officials said Wednesday they were working to determine how much money had been withdrawn from casino ATMs by people using the welfare debit cards.
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Big government strikes again while Arnold snores at the helm

Americans are more pessimistic about the state of the country and less confident in President Barack Obama's leadership than at any point since Mr. Obama entered the White House, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

The survey also shows grave and growing concerns about the Gulf oil spill, with overwhelming majorities of adults favoring stronger regulation of the oil industry and believing that the spill will affect the nation's economy and environment.

Sixty-two percent of adults in the survey feel the country is on the wrong track, the highest level since before the 2008 election. Just one-third think the economy will get better over the next year, a 7-point drop from a month ago and the low point of Mr. Obama's tenure.
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Watch the GOP Presiential hopefuls – when they start to pile on, then you know that game is on for 2012