The acerbic and smart as hell Jill Stewart goes after the race for Governor, in this week’s New Times L.A.. A sample:

I don’t normally offer campaign tips to politicians, but I can’t help it after watching gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon squirm and dodge and get blasted by the media in a week when he should have easily turned reporters’ attention back to the antics of our unpopular and slimy Governor Gray Davis.
Not that I am pro-Simon. Both candidates, whom I refer to as Icky and Creepy (you figure out who’s who), so turn me off that I am perusing candidates from the Peace and Freedom, Libertarian and Green parties in hopes that one of them may offer a non-nut.
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News coverage made Simon look like an ass. I got my own licks in with Republican commentator Allen Hoffenblum on KCET’s Life & Times Tonight, where we marveled over the fact that Simon paid a sizable federal tax for 10 years — 24 percent — and should have looked fairly good. But, as Hoffenblum noted, “He managed to appear to be covering something up.”
It didn’t matter that the coverage of “Taxgate” was just plain wrong. Few newspapers that reported that journalists were given just three hours to examine the documents later corrected themselves to say that Russo dropped that rule, allowing reporters to peruse the documents for as long as they could stand. And few media outlets that initially reported that only one journalist per news organization was allowed into the room later correctly reported that that rule was dropped, too. Few mentioned that when rich Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Al Checchi released their massive returns, they too required journalists to stay in a room and adamantly refused to allow copying.
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There’s more, plus an analysis of What’s Going Wrong in the Simon campaign.
I’m still worried about the woodchipper.