Jerry Brown Demonstrates He Doesn’t Know How to Do His Own Job

So they had the last debate between Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman in California and Brown was asked about his staffer saying the word “whore” in that now infamous recording.  Mary Catherine Ham has a pretty good blow-by-blow over at Hot Air.  It is pretty clear that when Brown denied that calling a woman a whore was as bad as calling a black person the n-word, that was a bad misstep, because the audience really started to boo him.  And Whitman lost points by trying to distinguish it from someone on her staff calling congress a gaggle of whores (because it is truth in advertisement?).  But I think he got the worst of that exchange.

But  let me pause for a moment to say that in all honesty I never got all riled up about it.  That’s why it never made the blog, because I was like, “meh, who cares?”  I wouldn’t do it myself, but I am not shocked and appalled by it either.  Now if women feel this is really offensive to them I ain’t gonna begrudge them of that.  And if people just feel that our discourse needs to be more civil, I can get on board with that, too.  But I am not personally all that appalled.

But what I can’t stand is bullshit, so when he said this, I started to get annoyed:

“It’s unfortunate. It was a private conversation,” Brown said. “I’m not even sure it’s legal ’cause you have to get the consent of all the parties and there’s lots of people talking, so again, Ms. Whitman, I’m sorry it happened.”

Well, Moonbeam let me break it down for you, because apparently you don’t understand the criminal law of your own state at all.

First, who caused that conversation to be recorded?  You did.  You caused a recording device to record, and failed to turn it off, but gave everyone the impression that you had, vitiating any consent.  So if it was illegal, you would be the criminal.

Second, you pathetic excuse for a lawyer, if you actually bothered to crack open your statute books, this is what you read:

Every person who, intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication, by means of any electronic amplifying or recording device, eavesdrops upon or records the confidential communication

It goes on telling us that it is a crime and what the punishment is, but Jerry, did you notice that little word right at the beginning?  “Intentionally.”  This isn’t legal mumbo-jumbo, Jerry.  If you accidentally leave it on, you are not intentionally committing that crime and so thankfully, you can clear yourself of all wrongdoing.

Now a reasonable person might say, “well, can you really expect him to know every statute off the top of his head.”  And if he was just a regular lawyer on the civil side, sure, I would agree.  But you, Jerry Brown, are the top criminal prosecutor in the state, and I expect that issues of surveillance by police comes up all the time.  Therefore I think it is perfectly reasonable to expect you to know this law backwards and forwards.  So if you don’t know for a fact that your conduct was legal, I consider it a confession that you are incompetent at your current job.

And besides all that, there are two other things that irritate me about his comments on that subject.

Is this Paid-For Sexist, Homophobic, Lying, Comment Spam by the Jerry Brown Campaign?

Update: I corresponded with Patterico and long story short, it appears that this guy is a freelancer with serious OCD.  He has done this sort of thing on a myriad of causes, many of which have no obvious link, besides the fact he seems to be pretty liberal.

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No sure yet, but it sure looks suspicious...

I was commenting back and forth about Meg Whitman and the nanny controversy over at Patterico, when I find a comment saying the following:

Griff Harsh, the husband of California gubernatorial candidate Nutneg Whitman, acknowledged in a statement on Thursday that “it is possible” he received and wrote notes on a letter from the Social Security Administration back in 2003, regarding the former housekeeper. The Whitman/ Harsh household then fired their housekeeper in June 2009 (after nine years of service), when Nutmeg handlers decided that she was an election liability.

Meg, Meg, Meg, where do I start, you have reportedly spent $119 million of your own money to get elected Governor but you couldn’t use some of it to get your housekeeper (after nine years of service) some legal help to get her papers, and worse you lied about it. Wow, what a WITCH, of course I meant it with a “B”.

It goes on and on, in similar mendacious fashion.  But something about this comment just set my “spider sense” off.  It just struck me as “canned.”  So I googled a specific phrase from it: “Meg, Meg, Meg, where do I start, you have reportedly spent $119” and guess what I got?  Well, take a look.  Yep, someone has repeated that exact phrase over 300 times—really more like 400 times.

Now just to show my work, let me tell you how I generated that search.  You go to google.  Then you type in that phrase exactly as I did this including the quotation marks.  The quotation marks are important because it tells google you want to find only that phrase.  The first time you hit the search key you will get 7 results as of this writing.  But then it will say at the bottom that

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 7 already displayed.

If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

If you select the option to include the omitted results, then that large result is what you get.

Also if you search for a phrase that appears later in the comment “but what puzzles many is if you real cared and loved California then why not do your civic duty and vote” with a grammatical error, you get 30 results.  Interesting.  I couldn’t click on every one of the 300 results, but it appears that the comment was evolving and expanding as time went on.

Now I lack the expertise to really investigate this, but I bet if we followed the ip address, it would lead us right back to brown, or someone hired by him.

And notice some of the features about it.  It falsely suggests that Whitman could have made her maid legal.  I can tell you there is no way to do that short of congressional legislation.  The commenter calls her a bitch.  He calls her a liar, without evidence.  He refers to the republicans as the “Gay Old Party”—which is interesting, homophobia from the left.

So lying, sexism and homophobia.  Anyone interested in seeing if this can be connected to the Brown campaign?  Because like I said, I lack the expertise to figure it out.

Update: I was curious about the specifically anti-gay portion of the message.  First I searched for a large chunk of the phrase and got like four results.  I tried googling this: +montana "Gay old Party (GOP)" and this is what I got.  There are like two false positives toward the end and but every other one seems to be more cut and pasting--about 45 hits at this posting.

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Sidebar: it is fair to note that I spoke out against someone investigating a commenter in the past.  But here is the distinction.  The Joe My God comment was just, as far as anyone could tell, a one-off comment which had all the appearances of being someone’s genuine, albeit stupid, opinion.  By comparison, this is someone who is either paid or OCD.  If this is in fact a paid-for message, by the Brown campaign, this would be significant.