Photo: Muffett

Meg Whitman, former CEO of the reprehensible EBay corporation is trying to turn the California governor's race into an auction. (San Jose Mercury 4/5/10)

Whitman, the front-runner for the Republican nomination for governor, will announce today that she contributed $20 million more to her war chest late Monday, the Mercury News has learned.

That means the former eBay chief executive has donated $59 million to her campaign so far, with two months to go before the primary and seven months left before the general election.

The $39 million Whitman donated previously had already set a California political record for self-funding. But her ubiquitous radio and TV ad campaign led to her spending $27.2 million in the first 11 weeks of the year — an average of $358,439 a day. So her campaign kitty had been running on empty.

Whitman has vowed to shell out as much as $150 million in her quest to become California's next governor. The current record for political self-funding is held by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who ponied up $108 million of his own money for his 2009 re-election bid.

When Whitman was CEO of the infamous EBay, the corporation allowed scam artists to keep doing auctions because sellers were the one who paid the fees. Now, she is trying to turn the California governor's race into a sleazy EBay deal.

I'm surprised that she isn't paying for the governorship on the EBay subsidiary, PayPal.

Here in NYC, we have seen what a pathetic excuse for a Mayor Michael Bloomberg is. All he does is cut services and fine the middle class and the poor so he can give city money to his rich friends. He hasn't made a significant contribution to any of the biggest problems facing the city: inadequate public transportation, poverty, AIDS, and the housing shortage. With housing, he has shifted money that was supposed to go to building affordable housing towards subsidizing luxury condos that were going to be built anyway.

Rich people who buy offices use them as their personal playthings, trying to enhance their social standing among their rich peers, screwing over the rest of us in the process.