Rearranging the Cow Tails on the Titanic

Matt Welch | July 2, 2009

I may have written and edited a few critical things about Arnold Schwarzenegger over the years, but I find him among the smartest and most interesting politicians I've ever covered. Unlike most pols, he can be pretty damned funny, especially during those increasingly frequent (of late, anyway) occasions when he says something with which I agree. For instance:

Follow Arnold on Twitter! And the You-Tube! Listen to David Bowie pronounce "Warhol" the same way Schwarzie pronounces "cow tails!" And read Reason's archive on the cyborg here.

Comments

|7.2.09 @ 11:48AM|#

Never mind the cows. Get some new squirrels!

Arnold = Another disappointing, campaigned as candidate of change, governed as same as the old boss.

Warty|7.2.09 @ 12:03PM|#

I love when idiots presume to tell farmers how to farm.

Tim Cavanaugh|7.2.09 @ 12:18PM|#

First they came for the cow tails and I did not object. Isn't it better that they spend their time on this rather than on the whatever horror the budget will be?

Hugh Akston|7.2.09 @ 12:22PM|#

Tim makes a good point. I'd rather see legislators spend their sessions debating petty, unenforceable nuisance laws than passing bills that actually affect people.

I think it's time for the Movement to make cow tails a federal issue.

LibertyMark|7.2.09 @ 12:35PM|#

Fuck 'em all.

JB|7.2.09 @ 1:49PM|#

The CA legislature is full of nothing but cow shit.

Good to see Arnold bend them over.

|7.2.09 @ 2:16PM|#

Cyborgs!

24AheadDotCom|7.2.09 @ 2:30PM|#

I'm sure it's a wonderfully cute video!

Unfortunately, what Reason yet again fails to note is that the very policies they espouse led to a major part of CA's problems. The far-left legislators in CA support MassiveImmigration in order to build up their power base. And, they use that additional power to push for more spending over and above the additional costs caused by the MassiveImmigration that Reason supports.

|7.2.09 @ 2:35PM|#

I'd rather see legislators spend their sessions debating petty, unenforceable nuisance laws than passing bills that actually affect people.

Good in theory, but not in practive. Laws are only truly unenforceable once the street cops learn that charges based on those laws are always dismissed -- this takes a lot of learning, and doesn't do any good for the people arrested for violating BS laws who still have to spend the weekend in the slammer. Basically, these laws just give the cops an almost endless variety of pretexts for arresting anyone anywhere at any time.

Just once I'd like to hear a legislator brag about how many laws he'd taken off the books.

proud libitard|7.2.09 @ 2:52PM|#

Not Tony,

you give me an idea (I'm sure not original) but what about a class of politician voted on that's job was actually to remove laws instead of passing them. We could call it some stupid Roman name like Praetor or Quaestor. They could then use that in their campaign about how many laws they've repealed...

I know it's not practical nor possible but a boy can dream!

|7.2.09 @ 3:54PM|#

I'd rather see legislators spend their sessions debating petty, unenforceable nuisance laws than passing bills that actually affect people.

Just couldn't resist trotting that one out could you? Drop and give me thirty.

|7.2.09 @ 3:55PM|#

Oh I get it now. Ha! suck.com yadda yadda ok I follow.

Hugh Akston|7.2.09 @ 4:04PM|#

LoneWhacko sat on the upended milk carton situated before his brand-new PentiumII laptop (an IllegalImmigrant had been using it as a doorstop only the week before) and fired it up.

Fifteen minutes and two restarts later, he had successfully activated Internet Explorer. He braced himself for the usual onslaught of popup ads and malware, but it seemed that his new system was not sophisticated enough to run most current viruses. He smiled to himself, revealing the tinfoil fillings dotting the desolation of his mouth; another victory over the beltway insiders at Reason.

He made his way to Prodigy to check his e-mail, deleting two rejection notices and a cease-and-desist request from the Russian mailorder bride site. Still no responses to his scathing indictment of the secret INS-Juarez cartel negotiations. Clearly his e-mail server, along with the traffic meter on his Angelfire site, was broken. Coincidence? Hardly. More like a concerted mainstream media effort to block out the truth.

He briefly girded himself for the visit to his nemesis: reason.com. The proliferation of graphics and content sent the processor under his keyboard into a high whine while rivulets of smoke curled up around the screen. Before IE crashed he had read something about California and an error message indicating an embedded movie file.

He thumbed through a remaindered copy of Angela's Ashes (for research for his masterwork on the negative effects of the immigration periods of the early 20th century) while his computer cooled down enough to reboot. He felt a slight sting at the back of his neck, perhaps a doubt as to whether the world had left his kind of xenophobic ludditism behind.

No, he scratched and sighed in relief. Just a silverfish.

|7.2.09 @ 4:53PM|#

you give me an idea (I'm sure not original) but what about a class of politician voted on that's job was actually to remove laws instead of passing them

Believe that my first encounter with that idea was through Heinlein, but not sure if the idea was original to him.

Hugh: Brilliant. Thanks.

|7.2.09 @ 5:40PM|#

Sorry folks, but mutilating animals should be illegal.

perilisk|7.2.09 @ 9:09PM|#

"Sorry folks, but mutilating animals should be illegal."

Sarcasm, or expressing a desire for legally-mandated vegetarianism?

|7.2.09 @ 11:10PM|#

"Sorry folks, but mutilating animals should be illegal."

Granted. But does that need debate in the legislature of a state that hasn't got a plan to function past last week?

|7.3.09 @ 2:18PM|#

The legislators show why we need a part time legislature.

|7.3.09 @ 7:17PM|#

As a CA resident, I can assure the rest of you out there in other parts of the world that we are being held hostage to the most ignorant, stupid, incompetent group of fools in our State Legislature that you can imagine.

They just LOST TWO BILLION DOLLARS by missing a simple deadline... which by the way.... they miss each year even though they are violating our own State Constitution.

Now, they're issuing State IOU's (" i owe you " ) for money owed to people who do business with the state. The really absurd of that is as follows: the state is gleeful to hand private people an IOU... but the state will not accept them back in payment for debts that people owe the state !

The clowns in Sacramento snivel that "need more time" even though this mess has been growing daily for months.

Oh, and they claim they just can't make do with the revenue they get from us even though, by our State Constitution, they are allowed and they actually DO raise our property taxes a full 2% each year.

Then, as you see in the latest news, they sit around and pretend to be conducting business as the state fails financially.... but their "business" isn't how to CUT the budget.... its chatter about changes to state law regarding animal tails.

Seriously, if I were called to jury duty to hear any case where a citizen had shot or murdered a politician in a rage over this, I'D VOTE 'NOT GUILTY' AND I'D STICK TO THAT VOTE REGARDLESS OF WHAT THE JUDGE & DA SAID.

The clowns in Sacramento deserve anything and I mean ANYTHING that they get from angry people.

Androka Faradofay|7.3.09 @ 9:10PM|#

They gave you a chance to stop this madness. You cannot pass reasonable and timely budgets when you are required to obtain a supermajority. We've just hit 55% of Californians deciding that its a good idea to change this, however, voters refused to back this 5 years ago.

From Sacramento Bee:
The Proposition 56 vote was 34 percent yes and 66 percent no, with majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents voting against this change, according to a Los Angeles Times exit poll.

And yet, they can make constitutional changes ( Prop 8 anyone? ) with only a simple majority vote. This is the reason we have had 16 of the last 20 budgets overdue.

Citizen Paine|7.3.09 @ 9:33PM|#

Matt -- this is just standard-issue demagoguery on the Budget crisis. The clip was obviously a committee hearing -- who's to say these folks missed anything of substance on the general floor?

Sorry, Arnie -- but throwing mud across the capitol building earns you a cowpie from this Colliefoornian.

I'm also sorry he chose an animal welfare issue on which to heap his derision. That makes him a body part that's only slightly south of the cow tail.

|7.3.09 @ 10:33PM|#

Isn't the real problem here a matter of bureaucratic recidivism, that despite whatever input the voters might or might not be able to add to the goings-on, that the people that administrate CA and other states just have this chronic selective hearing problem, and their own ideas and philosophies about government that they're more than happy to inflict on the public, at-will?

There's only one way that any state can get into deficit spending, and that's when the comptroller fails to march into the state office with the Bad News with a laundry list of service/function cuts so that they can be enacted immediately. Politics rears its' ugly head, and lots of special interests have their sacred cows, and nevermind bobbing their tails, it's time for a couple of them to land in the freezer and then on to the Big Legislative Barbecue.

CA boasts many schools and universities which are supposed to be reputed for quality and calibre of their faculty and staff, in theory, at least, between all their campuses combined, there should be enough computing power to use distributed computing a la SETI to get a firm grasp of just exactly what DOES happen to the state's funds, and what to do in order to re-balance their state budget. In other words, it's not so much a matter of 'cant', as it is a matter of 'wont', or alternatively, 'just plain too stupid', and any of the three possibilities represent a liability to any person or business residing in California.

CA is just one state in economic hot water, these days. The housing speculators and wildcat lenders had their fun, now it's a matter of trying to put the pieces back together, and also trying to ensure that CA doesn't become the Mother Of All Socialist Welfare States in the process. People without money eventually become wards of the state, by one means or another. What needs to happen to put affordability back into the average CA standard of living, so that people can support themselves sans government grants etc?