Mr. Devon seems not to have challenged her points as much as he composed annoying one-liners. If that's his idea of debate, I think she wins hands down.

Matt,

Bless your self-deprecating heart for telling that story -- Ann would never have ratted you out, I'm sure. The look on your face when she asked you that question is a memory that I'll always cherish.

Dan,

Ann knows far, far more about California politics than I do. She certainly knows every anti-Gray Davis factoid that I could muster. She knows that he's a bad man, and still supports him because of her hard-core political beliefs. I'm hardly going to change her mind by something I leave in her ‘comments’ section. But if my one-liners annoyed you then at least they accomplished something.

Cheers -- mmd

Ms. Salisbury is awfully persuasive. I'd made up my mind to vote Simon--the parole BS was what finally pushed me over, but now I fear I'm wobbling again.

Not to dogpile on Mr. Devon, but I'll admit that his reply to Ms. Salisbury's article was persuasive too, though not as he might've intended. The knee-jerk opposition to environmental protections on the grounds that they're A> good for Democrats (funny, I thought clean water was good for everyone), and B> bad for business, serves to remind the reader that there are other important issues in play besides Davis being a first-magnitude slimeball.

I wish this were simpler. Guess it's time to do more research.

Keep in mind, y'all -- we've still got three-plus months to go!

I'm not sure I'd call the Gov a "bad man," Martin, but I will say that if I were filling his shoes, I'd do things a bit differently. :)

I guess all of his environmental initiatives cancel out the alleged payola scheme that allowed Tosco refinery to increase the amount of dioxin it dumps into San Francisco Bay. Amazing what a donation of $75K to the Governor's campaign war chest will do.

Gray sold the Bay for a fair price, Craig, so we shouldn't complain - $75,000 is all it was worth.

The funny thing about Ann's list of Gray's "accomplishments" (which she cribbed from Gray-Davis.com,) is that most of them were things he really had nothing to do with, and some of them - like the CalGrant bill of Burton's - were things he actually opposed. Davis has had the most dysfunctional relationship with the legislature of any governor in 100 years, and now he wants to take credit for measures that the legislature passed without so much as a phone call from Gray. Pete Wilson was a lot more engaged in the legislative dialog than Gray, and anybody in the Capitol can tell you that.

They phone Gray 'till they're blue in the face, and he never gets back with them, because he's too busy fundraising.

The only appeal Gray has is to single-issue voters, who are willing to forgive all of his sins for his stance on the one issue that he has absolutely no legal authority to affect. It's strange.

By the way, Matt, if you ever need a union, the Teamsters support drilling in ANWR and most Republican candidates, so they're a good choice. They're tough on crime, too: remember what they did to that crook Jimmy Hoffa.

Ho HO! Fighting tooth & nail against a bill, then claiming credit for "signing" it. That pissed me off when Bush did it two years ago (Ivins wrote a bit about it), and I suppose I should've expected that Davis would be no better.

Of that list, do you know off-hand which (besides the CalGrant thing) Davis actually opposed? That's really interesting, and it takes off a lot of the shine that Ms. Salisbury put on him.

Come to think of it, Bush claimed credit for stuff that was actually passed over his VETO. Has Davis gone that far? Wouldn't surprise me a bit, but I don't think Mr. Bennett made that specific allegation.

I was about to write something like "Hey, what difference does it make if the list was cribbed from Davis' website anyway?" and then it occurred to me that it makes a lot of difference--a researcher (outside the campaign) independently compiling such a list would probably leave off the things Davis opposed.

Of course, the question in play right now is "How does Davis stack up against Simon." So if there's a bill you like and Davis signed it but didn't do anything at all to support it, it's still a plus in his column if Simon would've fought/vetoed it, and a plus in Simon's column if he'd have pushed harder for it than Davis did.

I'm most familiar with the divorce law, and that area Davis has been a real loser. Two major bills came to his desk that he signed, which would have been vetoed by most Republican governors (one already had been by Wilson):

a) a law allowing any pre-nuptial agreement to be challenged in the event that the couple signing it eventually got a divorce; it completely undermined the ability of marrying couples to determine the nature of their ultimate separation and left it up to the court.

b) a law that effectively makes all alimony ordered after a marriage of ten years or more to continue indefinitely, instead of terminating after half the length of the marriage.

Both of these soak working men (and increasingly, women too) in order to provide lifestyle to ex-spouses who choose not to work.

Another area where Davis has done outrageous things is prison guard pay, which he increased by something like 35% when they're already better-paid than all other comparable state workers. This was a direct payoff for the $2M their union spent to get him elected.

The quid pro quos are practically endless, of course.

Gray Davis is probably the most brazenly corrupt governor that California has had post WWII. As well as the most incompetent.

Which means that Davis really has only two accomplishments: making Jerry Brown look competent and his father Pat Brown look honest. That's feeding-the-masses with loaves and fishes time, folks.