$22.99 / Hour

All of my co-workers are documented immigrants...one from Vietnam, one from Bangladesh, two from India, one from Germany, one from the Philippines...and the other two from Texas and Missouri. Myself? The only home-grown Sacramentan from the entire pool.

Today, one of my Indian co-workers wondered aloud regarding Meg Whitman's housekeeper -- if Meg was banned by law to ask about her housekeeper's status, how exactly will she crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants when she herself couldn't do it? How exactly can she be "tough as nails" on illegal immigration when she herself couldn't?

She won't. She can't.


This is why I love politics, especially now that we're so damn polarized. This polarization will lead to further inaction and will hopefully lead to our state and our nation falling into total chaos. This is exactly what I want. I want it...because we will come out the other side a better people...even if it means dealing with a whole lot of shit in the middle. At the moment, our governments are ineffective. Ineffective because exactly fifty percent of us think one way while the other fifty think the opposite. It so happens that we require super majorities in the most important things, and with our inability to compromise we end up doing nothing.

Which is fine with me; the less we do, the sooner we'll end up in the abyss and the sooner we might get meaningful representation, where we don't drive ourselves into debt to service the pandering of every possible constituent.

Meg knows, based upon the results of the several hundred thousand dollars she spent in pre-election surveys to find out, that she cannot win the state without approximately 27-31% of the Latino vote. I heard the other day a perspective from a Latino man who argued that her hiring of an illegal wasn't the problem -- it was that she fired her housekeeper upon learning that she was illegal. Regardless of politics, this is a fascinating viewpoint, because who of you would fire someone who had been working for you for the past decade simply because you discovered they were "undocumented?"

Would you stop going to your favorite store because the butcher in the back has been identified as illegal? Are you going to fire your pool boy or your landscaper who provided good service for the past nine years because you discovered they over-extended their original 2001 visa? The janitor at your kid's school -- would you hold a rally outside the gates demanding his/her deportation? Would you hold a press conference outside Kelly Moore Paints and demand that every undocumented house painter be jailed?

Sure, you might. But the majority of us wouldn't. We'd prolly just continue to work with them, they would work with us, and we'd go about our lives. We might even try to help them obtain legal status, depending on the circumstances. But this is where Meg differs. Just fire her and hope "it" never comes back to haunt her during the election season. Paying $23 an hour means nothing; it's insignificant to someone worth billions, and has no bearing on this issue. Thousands of us would gladly do that work for $22.99/hour.

This is the real story in all this. She has "invested" $120,000,000 for this position. Do not think that this money isn't well spent. People spend huge amounts to see favorable legislation passed their way and the purchase of the governorship is no different. There are reasons for billionaires to enter politics, reasons that go well beyond the millions to be represented.

Personally, I'll vote for Laura Wells, and see that Meg Whitman's $4 she spent to get my vote goes nowhere.