Schwarzenegger’s office denies using coded obscenity in veto letter
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office denies that it used a coded veto message to send the f-bomb to San Francisco assemblyman Tom Ammiano.
According to Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross:
A straight reading of the guv’s letter laments “the fact that major issues are overlooked while many unnecessary bills come to me for consideration,” and concludes, “I believe it is unnecessary to sign this measure at this time.”
But a vertical read of the far-left-hand letters in each of the missive’s eight lines offers a more blunt explanation…”
Those first letters spell out a three-word sentence containing the obscenity.
From the Chronicle columnists:
Schwarzenegger’s press secretary, Aaron McLear, insisted Tuesday it was simply a “weird coincidence.” He sent us veto messages the governor sent out in the past with linguistic lineups such as “soap” and “poet,” which he said were also unintended.
“Something like this was bound to happen,” McLear said.
NPR blogger Frank James reports:
But as we heard from a cryptology expert and mathematic professor Robert Lewand of Goucher College in Baltimore who All Things Considered host Melissa Block interviewed Wednesday, the odds the letters on the page aligned themselves in such a way as to create the lewd message were fairly astronomical, along the lines of 5.5 in one trillion. So not very likely.
The SF Chronicle columnists say this about the “weird coincidence” claim:
Maybe. But the veto message came after Ammiano called the governor a liar and shouted from the audience to “kiss my gay ass” when Schwarzenegger unexpectedly showed up at a Democratic Party dinner in San Francisco on Oct. 7.
Ammiano later called Schwarzenegger’s attendance at the event a “cheap publicity stunt” that wasn’t at all amusing, in light of the governor’s cuts in social services, ordered furloughs of state workers and failure to act on some gay-rights issues.
The governor’s veto letter was in response to Ammiano’s AB1176 — a rather mundane bill meant to help San Francisco’s port with finance issues. The “coincidence” was first picked up on Tuesday by the Bay Guardian newspaper.
Steve Parker is the deputy managing editor for news, and oversees the Post-Dispatch's front page. STLtoday's online news editors are on his newsroom team. Parker has been at the paper since September 1980. 
“Three word”? Are they including the “I” as part of the phrase? Really, 2 words is enough.
And Arnie… there has to be a better way to create a “K” without fabricating that “kicks the can down the alley” shtick.
That’s funny!!
I approve. There should be more of this in politics.
Geeze, talk about fiddling while Sacramento burns…
The two of them probably should be focusing on the state’s problems.
Oiy!
Boy Oh Boy!
Alrighty then!
My Oh My!
Alls well that ends well!
Sucks to be him!
Ugh!
Clever!
Keystone cops if you ask me!
Silly!
My guess is that it was a harmless mistake.
a thing of beauty. Im going to spend some extra time crafting the language in my yearly xmas card
The Gov and his party are death merchants plainly speaking. They are on the wrong side of law on every human life issue facing the country. They give freedom a bad name with their pursuit of profit at the expense of human life. The republicans are on the wrong side when it comes to 100,000 yearly deaths caused by alcohol, 435,000 yearly deaths caused by tobacco, 30,000 yearly deaths caused by coal and gas emissions, and now they are on the wrong side about text messaging machines. The Republicans attempt to protect the profits generated by these substances and machines at the expense of human life. This is a repeated position taken by the Republican party. We need to permanently disable these madmen from harming anyone else.