Poll: Impact from Maid-gate; & those Irritating Robocalls
Orange County based pollster Adam Probolsky released a poll stating Meg Whitman’s illegal immigrant maid controversy is having only a small impact on the race.
Testing 519 voters, the poll reveals nearly 65% of the voters say the issue makes no difference in their voting decision. Of those who said it did make a difference, the poll found those voters who said the situation made it less likely they would vote for Whitman out polled those who said it was more likely to vote for her by about 6%.
The Great Big Green Lie
The San Francisco Chronicle has uncovered a scathing error at the California Air Resources Board (CARB). The newspaper has just published that the California Air Resources Board has “grossly miscalculated pollution levels” that were being used to further crack down on the state’s air standards.
The California Air Resources Board didn’t miss the mark slightly. They miscalculated California’s air pollution levels by a stunning 340 percent. That’s 340%.
The Chronicle reports that the stark errors in the Air Resources Board’s research “raise questions about the performance of the agency as it is in the midst of implementing the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 – or AB 32 as it is commonly called.”
This error comes after the Air Resources Board vastly overinflated the number of diesel-related deaths in 2009, suggesting that 18,000 Californians had died prematurely when the number was actually a fraction of that.
If we can’t trust the state’s most powerful environmental board to calculate basic statistics correctly, what can we trust them to do?
Latino Dems Should Rethink Loyalty
Cross Posted on NewGeography.com.
Given the awful state of the economy, it’s no surprise that Democrats are losing some support among Latinos. But they can still consider the ethnic group to be in their pocket. Though Latinos have not displayed the lock-step party loyalty of African-Americans, they still favor President Barack Obama by 57 percent, according to one Gallup Poll — down just 10 percentage points from his high number early in the administration.
This support is particularly unusual, given that probably no large ethnic group in America has suffered more than Latinos from the Great Recession. This is true, in large part, because Latino employment is heavily concentrated in manufacturing, and even more so in construction.
A half-million Latino workers in the construction sector — in which their share of the work force is double what it is in the broader economy — have lost their jobs since the start of the recession.
Unfortunately, the Obama stimulus plan was light on physical infrastructure. It favored Wall Street, public-sector unions and large research universities. Big winners included education and health services — in which Latinos are under-represented.
Cowboy at the Off Ramp is For Prop 19
Getting off the California Ave. exit from the 99 Freeway in Bakersfield, I came across a man in cowboy hat sitting astride a horse and carrying two Vote Yes on Prop 19 signs. I couldn’t resist. I pulled over and talked to him.
The cowboy was named Howard Woolridge; the horse was named Misty. A retired police officer from Lansing, Michigan who now lives in Fort Worth, Texas, Woolridge is a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an organization in favor of legalizing marijuana.
Woolridge told me now that he’s retired he can “shout his mouth off” about what he sees as a waste of resources against the use of marijuana when those dollars could be used against serious crime.
The retired officer argued that the reason police departments line up against legalization is because the war on drugs brings money to the departments. He also acknowledged an emotional reason the officers don’t want to end the war on drugs. He said the police don’t want to believe that those officers killed in the line of duty in the drug war died in vain.