Public offenders

How does Bites offend thee? An anonymous Sacramento Bites reader is not a happy camper. At issue is this space’s defense of the rights of paroled sex offenders to use the public library (see “Don’t go away mad,” SN&R Bites, June 29), which were recently stripped by the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors. The board was worried that local pedophiles might be trolling the stacks for young victims, causing Bites to pose the skeptical question, “Are libraries really designed for children?”

According to the caller, a 20-year-old exotic dancer, they’re not. Instead, she told the Bites Hotline ((916) 498-1234, ext. 3333; <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"> </script>) that libraries are in fact designed for perverts. Or so it seemed to the caller, who as a rather precocious 7-year-old preferred to while away the after-school hours at the library instead of the mall. It was there that a man in running shorts exposed his private parts to her and taught her a painful lesson: The library is the perfect hangout for “weird artsy people … outcasts who are more artistic and articulate who prefer to be alone.”

In other words, your average sex offender. Hmm … considering the strange, amoral behavior exhibited by weird, artsy loners like Lewis Carroll, Michael Jackson and Gary Glitter, who is Bites to argue?

Let us count the ways: Speaking of rowdy movie sets, the Bubengrabber, a.k.a. Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is on a roll. According to a recent poll conducted by the Survey & Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University, the governor leads Democrat challenger Phil Angelides 44 percent to 37 percent in the gubernatorial race.

However, as the Los Angeles Times noted, there were a few kernels of doubt sown within the poll results. For one, 63 percent of Californians disapprove of President George W. Bush, particularly of the way he’s handling the economy. That could bode ill for Schwarzenegger, the Times reported, if the Democrats can tie him to Bush.

That shouldn’t be all that hard. A quick glance at Arnold’s campaign team will more than suffice.

First, there’s Schwarzenegger campaign manager Steve Schmidt, former Dick Cheney spokesman, Karl Rove pivot man and architect of the phony incident in which Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s wife burst into tears during her husband’s confirmation hearing.

Then there’s Matthew Dowd, the top to Rove’s bottom, Bush’s 2004 campaign strategist and therefore at least partly responsible for tactics that include denying African-Americans and other minorities the vote and smearing a Vietnam War hero, John Kerry, with fake charges of cowardice.

Last and definitely least is Schwarzenegger ad man Alex Castellanos, who can be thanked for extending North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms’ career in 1990 with the infamous “White Hands” commercial, which depicted a white worker losing his job to a minority thanks to affirmative action.

Forget all that talk about bipartisanship and compromise and protecting California’s dream. It doesn’t get any uglier than this.

But it just got uglier: Needless to say, Bites is concerned about this nightmarish team of ex-Bush advisers and their attempted California coup. However, this concern is apparently not shared by the Angelides campaign, which has unveiled its latest secret campaign weapon, Phil’s very own page on MySpace.

Here, at www.myspace.com/angelides, we learn that Phil is married; is a Gemini; and has (as of this writing) 3110 friends, including 17-year-old Caitlyn (who likes to “Get buzzed, get drunk, get crunked, get fuUUUUcked up!!!!!!!!”), some guy named Teddy who’s photographed in front of a statue of Karl Marx (Teddy insists that “Phil MANgelides is gonna show Arnie who the real girlie man is come November!”) and electro-gothic punk band Darvoset (whose members sport 7-foot-tall Mohawks and eye patches because “we don’t try to be different, we just are”).

Can Caitlyn and Teddy and Darvoset and Phil’s 3107 other MySpace friends push the campaign over the top? It doesn’t seem likely, which is why Bites recommends that the Angelides campaign repeat the theme iterated in its first TV commercial as often and as loudly as possible. “Just like George Bush, Schwarzenegger …” Fill in the blank and hang on. Caitlyn turns 18 in 10 months.