UPDATE: 6:30am – Reliable sources tell us that former Governor Pete Wilson will be announced as Whitman’s Campaign Chairman.

ORIGINAL POST: 12:01am… Deborah Perry Piscione, CEO of BettyConfidential.com spoke with Meg Whitman over the weekend, who told her that she would announce her campaign for California Governor today, Monday, on her campaign website. Check it out here. Her local papers – the Chronicle and the Mercury News, heck, the FlashReport — we all got scooped in terms of getting the official word from the candidate herself, and getting it up online.

Well, I guess it’s off to the races sometime today!… Read More

The Chronicle’s Matier and Ross say there is a budget deal to be announced today. There isn’t.… Read More

Late last week, Congressman Campbell shared that he was undergoing major surgery….

The Whitman for Governor Campaign has released the following list of campaign team members:

Meg Whitman for Governor 2010 Exploratory Committee Team Leadership Team

Jeff Randle – Senior Advisor Jeff Randle is one of California’s most respected political strategists. He has played a leadership role in each of the last four victorious California Republican gubernatorial campaigns, including both of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s victories and both of Governor Pete Wilson’s campaigns. Randle has been Meg’s top political advisor since the summer 2007 and helped build the Whitman team.… Read More

Meg Whitman has opened an exploratory committee for Governor — no surprise. I just got word on my PDA – I’m out of the office. More to follow — though I can tell you her Campaign Chairman, as I reported earlier, is former Governor Pete Wilson. Some of her Co-Chairs include Congressman Kevin McCarthy, Congresswoman Mary Bono-Mack, State Senator Tony Strickland, and Assemblymembers Nathan Fletcher and Sharon Runner. More later if someone doesn’t beat me to it.… Read More

In the whirlwind that followed the qualification of the recall election of 2003, I was faced with a number of choices. My choice for Governor, Darrell Issa decided to drop out of the race, after qualifying the recall. Tom McClintock, who is a committed and principled conservative, did not have the horses (so to speak) to win, and I was concerned with the entry of Cruz Bustamante into the Governor’s race. Conservatives started the recall. We couldn’t hand the seat to Bustamante, who would give us another seven years of Davis without the brakes on liberalism. Schwarzenegger appeared the only choice.

So I met with him, in a hotel room in the Mission Inn in Riverside, and I asked him a number of questions. One of those questions was how he would approach the question of life. He said California was "a pro-choice state" and that being pro-life was political suicide. He "agreed with the principles of the pro-life" movement, after all, he said, "I am Catholic" but there was "nothing a Governor could do about the issues of life." He followed up saying "You will like the judges I appoint. They will be… Read More

As I mentioned below, Meg Whitman has launched her campaign – and she has also launched MegWhitman.com (a URL that she does own). You can check it out – to answer everyone’s OBVIOUS first question – green is the campaign color with some orange thrown in. Below are two videos featured on the site – the first of which is an introduction by Whitman, and the second is that one is one of those videos that you could imagine being played to a Silicon Valley audience before Whitman makes her entrance – you see these kind of videos at major tech conference. Makes sense, right? I don’t know about you — but as a blogging commentator, I’m looking forward to this primary!

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Acting I am sure in his capacity as a private individual and not as Chairman of the Placer County Central Committee, Tom Hudson today filed a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission where, if I can try to summarize the charges in one sentence, Hudson asserts that Whitman, prior to today, has been running (and spending money in support of) a de facto Gubernatorial campaign for which she did not report income or expenditures. It goes on from there. Here is Hudson’s press release, and attached are the documents filed with the FPPC.

Needless to say, the timing of the complaint is hardly coincidental.

It will be up to smarter people than me to look into the allegations and sort them out. I pass this along in the interests of passing along "news" that comes across my e-mail folder.

I will close by saying that it seems like whenever the FPPC acts, it is always way after the fact and a fine is… Read More