Kevin Shelley, the secretary of state and the busiest guy in California when the polls close Tuesday evening, took time last week to speak to the Los Angeles League of Women Voters at its launch of a get-out-the-youth-vote drive.
Under-30s are more inclined to go along with the idea of civil unions and same-sex marriages than their elders -- with the possible exception of a certain waitress in Banning.
Shelley and his campaign manager, Eric Jaye, both heterosexually married men, were in Banning, conferring at a coffee shop, when the waitress chattily asked where they were from.
"San Francisco," they answered.
She hesitated, glanced at their wedding rings, and asked. "Y'all come down here for your honeymoon?"
At Least He Didn't Come Over and Sing
The DMV registration fee refund check is in the mail.
And so is the birthday card, whether you want it or not.
A voter in the 47th Assembly District race to succeed termed-out Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson was astonished to open her mailbox last week and find birthday greetings.
Oh, it was her birthday all right; that wasn't the source of astonishment. It was that she had never met the sender, who had included a photo of himself, his wife and daughter. It was from Assembly candidate Rickey Ivie, and it left the voter a little rattled that her birthday had become the grist of campaigning.
For Jones, Accusation Becomes a Boomerang
Make that oops-osition research, not opposition.
Bill Jones' campaign to become the Republican nominee to take on U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer in November did a little "opposition research" on opponent Rosario Marin, and posted a "dis" on the campaign website, accusing her of not voting in 1998. That was based on an L.A. County registrar's certified list of Marin's voting record.
But the dis came boomeranging back when Marin said, no way, she certainly did vote that year -- and Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack's office acknowledged that a computer glitch could have omitted the 1998 record. A firm that buys voter lists from registrars shows that Marin did vote in 1998, her campaign reported.
Jones spokesman Sean Walsh responded that the campaign would remove the accusation if Marin could prove she voted. This is the same Sean Walsh being sued by Rhonda Miller, the stuntwoman who claimed she was sexually harassed by Arnold Schwarzenegger and then defamed by his campaign as a convicted prostitute and addict when in fact the criminal record belonged to someone else of the same name.
