I am crazy busy between all of the projects I am working on, but this is too amusing to me not to write up. Fred Thompson has now hired both Todd Harris and Karen Hanretty for his now official, not illegal presidential run. Those two were key consultants on Arnold's disastrous 2005 special election. It was his aides that convinced him that a bunch of power grab measures and attacking labor was a good idea. Wrong. Oh so wrong.
Arnold is doing much better since he dropped the DC Navigators crew. Indeed his former re-elect staffers were snapped up by other campaigns, way before Frederick got Harris and Hanretty. BTW, anything that Mike Murphy says about Thompson should be considered coming from the campaign. Todd Harris is a principle at Murphy's firm DC Navigators.
Who knew that Marinucci's story a week ago on the hiring of Canadian Christopher Matthews to be the California Republican Party's deputy political director would lead to his colleague resigning and accusations of breaking the federal law? Here we are with yet another A1 story at the Chron. Today's story breaks the news that the CRP may have violated federal law by failing to demand to see Kamburowski's green card.
Break out the popcorn folks. The Republicans are writing each other nasty letters and using the Chronicle to lob shots at one another over the CRP's hiring of a Canadian to become their director of research and political technology. On one side you have mouthpieces of the CRP and on the other, former CRP official spokeswoman Karen Hanretty. She has become a reliable quote against her party, in much the way that Gary South has become from the other direction. I really have to side with Hanretty on this one. There are plenty of qualified people to take that job already in the country and the move is embarrassing to the party.
Michael Kamburowski, the Australian who was recently hired as the CRP's COO, shot off a letter to the party's executive board, from which John Wildermuth is quoting over at the Chron Blog.
Kamburowski generally suggested that Hanretty will never be able to eat lunch in Washington again.
