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.

Quote of the Day; or, How NOT to Show your Independence...

There has been a lot of questions about the representation of Gloria Allred of Nicky Diaz Santillan, the former maid of Meg Whitman.  I agree the whole thing looks bad.  I mean this woman is a mother of two children who is risking prison (for falsifying documents) and deportation (for being an illegal alien) by putting a giant target on her head.  Certainly from a financial perspective this makes just about no sense.  But I have argued with others that you can’t really file ethics charges against Allred because she has a ready defense.  She can say that the maid was so mad at Whitman and so wanted to ruin her political career she didn’t care about those potential negative consequences she would personally suffer.  Its dubious but just plausible enough that I don’t think the disciplinary board would even be interested in investigating her.

But you still have to wonder how much Allred truly pushed her in this direction.  So Allred being asked about this several times apparently felt it was time for her client to respond to the cliam that Allred or others are manipulating her.  And the result is unintentional hilarity:

Nicky Diaz Santillan, a Mexican who Whitman says used a fraudulently obtained Social Security card and California driver’s license, dismissed claims by the GOP nominee that she was part of a Democratic smear intended to damage Whitman’s standing with voters, particularly Latinos.

“I make my own decisions and I am not anyone’s puppet,” Diaz Santillan said in a prepared statement she read at the Los Angeles office of her attorney, Gloria Allred. “Nobody made me do it.”

(emphasis added).  I don’t know if the AP writer was intentionally snarking or what.  I mean the AP article goes on to mention a few other harsh facts.  But yeah, that doesn’t exactly help the case to read a prepared statement that you are not being controlled by anyone.  It’s reminiscent of that classic scene in Monty Python and the Life of Brian when the crowd says, in unison, “we are all individuals.”  And yeah, I will post a link to a video of that later.

That being said I have come to think that Whitman should absolutely sue Allred.  Someone needs to hold this woman accountable for her antics.  And I think the malice standard for defamation—necessary in this kind of case—is easily met.  As Greta said the other day, her reading of the facts borders on delusional.

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.

When Political Correctness Distorts the Story (Update X4: lots of interesting updates, just scroll down)

So by now you probably know about Meg Whitman having an illegal alien as a maid.  Mind you, no one has credibly proven that she knew she was an illegal alien.  And in fact if you listen to the maid’s story, instead of her lawyer, Gloria Allred the complete fame whore, you realize that she is only saying that when Whitman was told she was illegal, she first sought legal advice seeking to find a way to make her into a legal resident.  And when that failed, she then fired her.  So Whitman was as compassionate as she could be, and then when it was clear she couldn’t legally employ her by any means, she fired her.

But I want to point out to you this hilarious blog entry from the LA times: “Union ad to highlight Whitman’s undocumented former employee.”  Of course we all know that the left has taken to calling an illegal immigrant as an “undocumented immigrant” because it sounds better.  Only there is a problem.  As Whitman has shown, her maid was very well documented.  She had a social security card, and a driver’s license.  The problem was these documents were fraudulent.

So by using the euphemism “undocumented” they are implying that Whitman hired her without proof that she was here legally and eligible to work.  That is simply not true.  I am sure this implication is an oversight, but it shows you just what happens when you start using bullshit euphemisms, instead of just telling it like it is.  She is an illegal immigrant.  You might not like the laws that declare her to be one, but she broke the law by coming and working here.  And it is actually dishonest to call her anything else.

As Michelle Malkin has pointed out, these supposedly undocumented immigrants actually very often have tons of documents, only fraudulent.

And to get to the merits of the discussion, why exactly would anyone believe either this woman or Gloria Allred?