Opinion

On Monday it will have been three years since the O’Malley family paid a few thousand dollars for the name and distribution boxes of the original version of the Berkeley Daily Planet. A few old Macs and some horrendous metal desks were thrown in gratis. -more-

So Gov. Schwarzenegger has hired Susan Kennedy, formerly a top aide to Gray Davis as cabinet secretary and deputy chief of staff, to be his own chief of staff. And in a little noticed corollary move, his wife and political confidant Maria Shriver has hired Daniel Zingale, another Davis deputy, to be her chief of staff. Sacramento is a pretty cozy place, isn’t it? Why are we not surprised? Well, for one thing, Justin DeFreitas did a prize-winning cartoon for this page, way back when, around the time of the recall election, which depicted Davis morphing into Schwarzenegger in the space of eight panels. We should just re-run that one reversed. As they say in France, plus ça change, plus la même chose: the more things change, the more they remain the same. -more-