David Kopel peddles the Kool-Aid from abroad, pointing out at this late date (hat tip: Daniel Weintraub) the same weaknesses of Arnold’s gun control platform that I raised two weeks ago and Luis Tolley, California’s top gun-grabber, raised earlier still. before. All four stem from Arnold’s August 27 interview with Sean Hannity (audio link). To recap:

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Now that Peter “Miguel” Camejo and Annoyingarianna are thinking of withdrawing from the race [UPDATE: Annoyingarianna's out], and all Republicans except a few hard-core Tomikazes are lining up against [ouch!] behind Ahnold, it now appears likely that the Governator will get more votes than Gray-Out Davis will in next week’s election. Even if that doesn’t happen, it’s almost certain that the combined Republican votes for Schwarzenegger and McClintock will dwarf Davis’s “mandate,” which in turn will also dwarf Bustamecha’s.

For this reason, I think now is an excellent time to begin publicly mocking the Taxpayers

Here’s another reason to always read the news defensively. The front-page description of an article on health insurance in today’s SF Chronicle tells the reader that “huge numbers” were uncovered showing that California “leads the nation” in residents without health insurance. Similarly, the article itself carries this headline:

State No. 1 in lack of health coverage

More uninsured — 6.4 million — than any other state

Hmm, I wonder what that is. Could it be that California has more uninsured poeple than any other state, for the same reason that it also has more SUV owners, gun owners, teachers, cops, drug dealers, doctors, lawyers and prostitutes than any other state?

The real news of the article is that California’s uninsured rate is 18.2%, which is somewhat higher than the national rate of 15.2%, assuming that the national and state numbers were computed using identical methodology. Data on other states is not included, so there’s no way to know for sure if California’s uninsured rate actually “leads the nation” in any meaninful sense. In fact, it’s not even clear from the article that our state is worse than the national average; illegal immigration alone could account for a difference of well over 3%.

Well, not quite. But close.

Otherwise, some embarrassing typos might end up on his blog. I’m assuming, of course, that these examples were in fact typos, i.e., there are no such words as “reproted,” “pary” or “gambiling.”

Fresh Potatoes fact-checks the latest effort by SacBee “ombudsman” Tony Marcano to explain away the muzzling of Daniel Weintraub. Boifromtroi notes that Marcano’s latest screed does not address the incongruity between the new editorial policy and the “Why a Blog” statement that remains on California Insider to this day. Even Justene Adamec, one of the few bloggers to defend the Bee’s new editorial policy early on, thinks that this time around, the Bee should have left bad enough alone.

So there now seems to be a solid consensus among right-thinking bloggers that if the editorial policy itself wasn’t a bad idea, Tony Marcano’s smarmy defenses of it certainly were. This view, is somewhat less popular, however, among wrong-thinking bloggers.

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Kelley’s cul-de-sac is bigger than ever (or close, anyway), and now offers a neat new feature called, um, “Features.” Check it out! Also, if you aren’t a member of the Watcher’s Council, maybe you could throw E-Claire a bone?

The latest Gallup Poll indicates a 40-25-18 split between Schwarzenegger, Bustamante and the Bustamante Enabler. This suggests that barring any last-minute bombshells, the Governator will probably do fine on October 7, despite the best efforts of the Tomikazes. This begs the question of of who, exactly, will be affected by the increasingly irrelevant McKool-Aid campaign. Up until now, the conventional wisdom was that the Tombots had the potential to ruin things for the Republican Party in California by handing the election to one of the worst, and least popular Democrats in the state. If the latest poll is any indication, though, this may be the last gasp of the paleoconservative movement in the state, and the first indication that the California GOP has finally re-invented itself. Only time will tell.

Long-time readers of this blog know that there’s no love lost between me and the Los Angeles/San Francisco Daily Urinal Journal. Still, it’s worth noting that this paper, which is basically the statewide “Daily Monopoly” of the legal profession, continues to churn out bad journalism. On September 18, it ran a huge op-ed piece, which consumed 2/3 of the main opinion page (or all of it when you count the illustration that appeared above it), which called on Joe Davis to “resign from office and turn over the keys of government to Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante,” thereby obviating the need for a recall election. Apparently, the lawyer who wrote that piece had plenty of time to write a very long op-ed piece, and the Urinal editors had plenty of time to edit it for size, space, style, etc., but neither of them had the had the time to do enough basic research to find out that it doesn’t work that way.

Then, on September 25, the Urinal ran another story on blogs. This one was much nicer than last December’s piece, and, to its credit, gave a favorable mention to other Xrlq on his fine blog. Nevertheless, the mind boggles as to how un-versed the Urinal must have been to write a story on the role of blogs in the recall, yet make no mention of Dan Weintraub, or how one could write a story about BLAP, without mentioning the blogger who invented the concept or even the fact that only two bloggers formally subscribe to it. But at least they’re trying.

Just when I thought the whole “do not call” frenzy could not get any more surreal, I read this article. Quotable:

Some telemarketers said they wondered if they could comply with the list even if they wanted to.

“The judge said it was illegal to create the list. By implication, it’s possible it’s illegal to use the list,” said Tim Searcy, executive director of the American Teleservices Association, one of the groups that brought the Denver lawsuit.

Yeah, Timbulb, that’s exactly right. If a judge says it’s illegal for Congress to make you telespammers stop harassing people in their own homes, then by God, it must also be illegal for you to stop harassing us of your own volition. And to think, this guy was on the winning side of the court case…