Thank goodness for small favors

The primary elections in California were yesterday, so we will get a bit of a reprieve from all the negative advertising. The election saw a lot of interesting things, but I think my favorite was the endorsement given by the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle to Pete McCloskey (who lost).

A couple of years ago when Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor during the recall election, several papers including the above mentioned ones highlighted Arnold’s father briefly being a member of the Nazi party (membership was mandatory at the time). Then the papers turn around and endorse a man that is blatantly an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier…well, at least it exposes their partisanship for what it is.

The best news from yesterday was that the statewide and county initiatives to raise taxes were defeated, including the hideous Prop 82 which would have created a billion+ dollar bureaucracy for statewide preschool. No word yet if Rob Reiner will be investigated for misusing public money to help get the proposition on the ballot.

The bad news is that Phil Angelides is running against Schwarzenegger for Governor this fall. I’m not a huge Arnold fan, but Angelides personifies everything that is mind-numbingly wrong with California politics today. Abusing his office and using public money to further his own career while endorsing wealth redistribution on a grand scale, he may just be what the state deserves. Yeah, I look at the glass and see it half-empty for the state right now. I have a feeling the negative advertising done by Angelides and his main opponent in the primary will come back to bite him in the fall election.