Maybe it’s the water in Sacramento,
but it only seems to affect North Bay
senators if it is.

We still don’t know what prompted the outburst by state Sen.
Pat Wiggins, D-Santa Rosa, who became an unwitting YouTube star when she used a barnyard epithet to dismiss the testimony
of a Sacramento
minister at a committee hearing a couple weeks ago.

Now comes word of a blow-up by state Sen. Carole Migden,
whose brusque personality was among the issues in her unsuccessful re-election
bid this year. According to capitolalert.com, the Sacramento Bee Web site that
broke the Wiggins story, Migden’s entire staff was escorted from the
Capitol on Thursday after she was overheard shouting at them from a hallway.

It’s not clear from the initial report if Migden fired her
staff en masse and had them removed from the building or if Senate officials
stepped in on their behalf. (Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, no one was talking Friday.) There is precedent for legislative leaders getting involved, however. Kevin Shelley, a former assemblyman
and secretary of state, also from San
Francisco, was notorious for tirades targeting
staffers. Finally, a staffer from the speaker’s office was dispatched to serve as a buffer between
Shelley and his shell-shocked employees.

We’ll be curious to learn more as this story plays out.

Migden’s term, by the way, ends in December.

Here’s a link to the capitolalert.com story.

— Jim Sweeney

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