As the Twitter kids say, #ItBegins. First came news that controversial nationalist Steve Bannon was finally being shown the White House door. Next came widespread follow-up musing on how dangerous Bannon might become to President Donald Trump from the outside (including juicy quotes like, "If he leaves, it's the French Revolution"). Then came this ominous tweet from Joel B. Pollak, senior editor at large at the organization Bannon once headed and may soon return to, Breitbart News:
— Joel B. Pollak (@joelpollak) August 18, 2017
Arriveth the first salvo:
In the article, Pollak arguest that Bannon's exit "may turn out to be the beginning of the end for the Trump administration, the moment Donald Trump became Arnold Schwarzenegger." More:
When he took office in 2003 as Governor of California, "The Terminator" carried the hopes of conservatives in the Golden State, who saw him as a vehicle for their ideas, even if he was not a doctrinaire conservative himself. The faltering California Republican Party looked to Schwarzenegger to reverse its long-term decline, and Republicans elsewhere saw his success as a model from which they could learn as they courted moderate, swing-state voters.
But after struggling with intense media criticism, and after losing a key referendum on reforms to state government, Schwarzenegger gave up on his agenda, and abandoned the political base that had brought him into office. He re-invented himself as a liberal, embracing policies such as California's controversial cap-and-trade program, which had zero effect on climate change but has chased businesses, jobs, and middle-class families out of the state.
Politically, Schwarzenegger's gambit was a success. He won re-election in 2006. But his second term was a disaster. When he left office in 2010, the state was in a financial shambles and the California Republican Party had begun a decline from which it still has not recovered.
If that argument sounds familiar, it might be because I made one similar to it not long after Trump took his oath of office, albeit without the paeans to Bannon ("a self-made man, and not a Washington climber…master strategist, the man who turned a failing campaign around in August 2016 and led one of the most remarkable come-from-behind victories in political history," etc.). Sample from my column:
Trump and Schwarzenegger have even more in common than hosting the same television show, taking the same unusual career path from celebrity to executive office, and surviving the same type of sexual allegations.
Each man was a rank outsider in the field he would come to dominate: the bodybuilder with a thick accent in Hollywood, the Queens hustler in Manhattan real estate and high society. Each would live their lives surrounded by liberal Democrats, including sometimes at home. And each exceeded skeptics' expectations at nearly every step, in large part due to a conscious cultivation of consumer fan bases.
I might also add, each is a Grade-A narcissist and competitive monster (I say the latter as a compliment), which means that they just can't pass up an opportunity to lash out at one another. Including Arnold, this week:
Where does the Trump-Schwarzenegger feud and comparison go from here? Who knows! But here are three preliminary observations:
1) Trump doesn't do humility. In order to execute the kind of heel-turn Schwarzenegger managed after 2004, it helps to be able to convincingly say, as Arnold essentially did, "The people have spoken, and I have listened to them. I was wrong." Whether it's his training as an actor, or just a West Coast/East Coast thing, Schwarzenegger can pull it off.
Trump, on the very few occasions during his political career which he as even hinted at any error, has looked like the protagonist in a hostage video.
2) Trumpism is a movement; Arnoldism never was. Schwarzenegger was a popular celebrity who was fluent in politics at a time when incumbent California governor Gray Davis was widely reviled, and the rest of the Golden State's political class (including the GOP, which, contra Pollak, was already moribund before Arnold went to Sacramento) was serially coughing up duds. But he didn't represent some new or reformulated bloc of voters finding their collective voice at the same time.
Trump, on the other hand, has been at the center of something new and large since long before Steve Bannon joined his team. Politicians, even experienced ones, who get caught up in movements larger than themselves (see Howard Dean in 2003-04, or Ron Paul's two rEVOLutions, or Bernie Sanders last election), get changed by the experience, including in directions the candidates themselves didn't intend to go. (Look at the way Trump's views on Syrian refugees evolved last fall over the course of just one month.) Such movements become life-altering experiences for the personalities at the center, making it harder for them to capriciously abandon core tenets.
Donald Trump has always been a mercantilist, nationalist, law-and-order type; even if his full-throated immigration-restrictionism is of more recent vintage, the leaked transcript of his phone conversation with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto revealed a man almost pathetically scared of his own riled-up base.
The biggest issue I could see Trump selling out on—and it's a big one—is foreign policy interventionism. With Bannon out the door, after butting heads with the various military brass within the administration, the chances of Trump being a reliable intervention-skeptic seems even more remote than before.
3) Bannon and Trump still need each other. Most Trumpworld pugilists who've been bounced from his inner orbit—Corey Lewandowski, Roger Stone, etc.—have remained valuable allies off the government payroll. Bannon may harbor dreams of a new anti-Trump nationalistic populism, but the United States is in thrall to the cult of the presidency, and it's precisely in the nationalist/populist base that the president locates his most passionate support. A war of words between the two men and their respective organizations would most likely just factionalize and shrink the existing bloc of America-Firsters.
UPDATE: Looks like I might have been onto something with #3 here:
Steve Bannon just went on the record with me about his next move (story breaking now on @TheTerminal and @bw): pic.twitter.com/EDPULg25VR
— Joshua Green (@JoshuaGreen) August 18, 2017
The post Steve Bannon's Once and Future Website Warns That Trump Could End up Like Schwarzenegger (UPDATED) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>January marked the first time in American history that a president-elect launched a Twitter feud with his celebrity replacement on a reality TV show.
"Wow, the ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got 'swamped' (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT," Donald Trump tweeted after the 2017 debut of Celebrity Apprentice, the show he long hosted before obtaining new employment. "So much for being a movie star…But who cares, he supported Kasich & Hillary."
Schwarzenegger, who governed California from 2003 until 2010, had indeed backed Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the GOP primaries, and then anti-endorsed Trump in the general election for a reason dripping with irony: groping allegations.
"For the first time since I became a citizen in 1983, I will not vote for the Republican candidate for President," the former Mr. Universe said in a statement last October, the day after a tape emerged of Donald Trump bragging about how his celebrity status allowed him to "grab" women "by the pussy" without fear of being refused.
Schwarzenegger, you will recall, was accused of far more than just bragging about having his way with the ladies: Days before his first gubernatorial election, the Los Angeles Times published testimonies from a half-dozen women that he had groped and humiliated them, accusations that prompted the actor to apologize and concede that he had "behaved badly." Within hours of the Terminator's self-distancing from the GOP nominee, Trump supporters were circulating images of Arnold pawing the nether regions of a babe on his lap.
Still, anyone who has watched the classic documentary Pumping Iron could have predicted that Schwarzenegger would find a clever way to respond to Trump's Celebrity Apprentice taunts. Sure enough: "There's nothing more important than the people's work, @realDonaldTrump," the new host tweeted out. "I wish you the best of luck and I hope you'll work for ALL of the American people as aggressively as you worked for your ratings."
Get to the chopper!
In any B-grade action movie, this is the part where the antagonist says, "We are not so different, you and I." For in fact Trump and Schwarzenegger have even more in common than hosting the same television show, taking the same unusual career path from celebrity to executive office, and surviving the same type of sexual allegations.
Each man was a rank outsider in the field he would come to dominate: the bodybuilder with a thick accent in Hollywood, the Queens hustler in Manhattan real estate and high society. Each would live their lives surrounded by liberal Democrats, including sometimes at home. And each exceeded skeptics' expectations at nearly every step, in large part due to a conscious cultivation of consumer fan bases.
It's that last commonality, as applied to politics, that provides the cautionary tale. For Schwarzenegger's connection to and reliance on "the people" ended up derailing his governorship, and Trump is already exhibiting signs that popular affection may be his Achilles heel as well.
It's hard to remember now, but the California governor came into office quoting Milton Friedman and vowing to "blow up the boxes" in Sacramento. He hoped to use his populist appeal to route around the Democratic legislature. In November 2005, he called a special election to vote on eight propositions that would have reduced the power of public sector unions (à la Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker half a decade later), capped public spending, and more. After an intense and expensive campaign—including one year of the governor being dogged at each and every public appearance by union protestors, while his popularity plummeted—all eight propositions failed.
The people had spoken. Hasta la vista, Uncle Milton.
From then on, as Los Angeles magazine would later put it, "Schwarzenegger lurched 180 degrees to his left." Bullet-train boondoggles, state-run stem-cell institutes, tax increases, emissions ratchets, mandatory sexual harassment training—it was Democratic wish-list time. The governator left the state with roughly the same godawful fiscal mess he had promised to clean up.
Trump has already demonstrated a reality-bending obsession with popularity since becoming president. His press secretary's first act was to berate journalists for not believing the administration's bogus claims about the size of the audience at the inauguration. Within days the president was vowing to investigate his own groundless claim that as many as 5 million people voted illegally last November.
And if his popularity continues to dive? Stick around!
The post Trump's Schwarzenegger Problem appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>From the Twitter feed of scientist Alice Dreger comes this…this…I don't really know what to call it, to be honest.
Jesus died for this? pic.twitter.com/Aqja9RpHr8
— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) February 2, 2017
For those who think our new president is a cold and uncaring man, this at least shows he is capable not of empathy per se but of at least taking note of other people's sufferings. And adding to them.
And there's this, from the former governor of California:
The National Prayer Breakfast? pic.twitter.com/KYUqEZbJIE
— Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) February 2, 2017
And somewhere in heaven, Jesus is tweeting smdh.
As Donald Trump once said in a different context, "These are foolish people."
The real question in these early days will be who in the Republican Party will generally stand up to and rein Trump. Folks such as Mike Lee, the Utah senator who started the Article I project to reel in executive power and put Congress back in charge of lawmaking and spending priorities, need to step up their game fast. Otherwise the GOP will be little more than waterboys for a fundamentally unserious man who can do a hell of a lot of damage to all aspects of the United States and the world. Here's Lee talking last summer about the need for a strong Congress. Judge him and his colleagues by whether they deliver, especially with a Republican in the White House.
The post Trump vs. Schwarzenegger vs. Jesus's Sacrifice appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Austrian-born former California governor and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger may still be interested in running for president. In other words, um, he'll be back?
Action star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been lobbying for support to change the law to allow him to run for president in 2016, Page Six has exclusively learned.
We're told Ahnold has been openly talking about his political ambitions while in New York to promote his new movie with Sylvester Stallone, "Escape Plan."
One source said: "Schwarzenegger has been talking openly about working on getting the constitutional rules changed so he can run for president in 2016. He is ready to file legal paperwork to challenge the rules."
It's hard to imagine how Schwarzenegger could run for president absent a constitutional amendment, but it would apparently involve the judiciary leaving the issue to the political process.
More Reason on Arnold Schwarzenegger here.
Follow these stories and more at Reason 24/7 and don't forget you can e-mail stories to us at 24_7@reason.com and tweet us at @reason247.
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]]>We're told Ahnold has been openly talking about his political ambitions while in New York to promote his new movie with Sylvester Stallone, "Escape Plan."
One source said: "Schwarzenegger has been talking openly about working on getting the constitutional rules changed so he can run for president in 2016. He is ready to file legal paperwork to challenge the rules."
The post Rumor: Arnold Schwarzenegger Still Interested Running For President appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Ferret opponents fret that the 20-inch mammals are likely to launch "vicious unprovoked attacks on humans," despite a study from California's own Research Bureau which found that ferrets don't "pose an unusual risk of bites." Others worry that escaped pet ferrets could form feral bands in the wild, but the same study found it "improbable that domestic ferrets could establish feral colonies in California."
In 2004, the popular pet was nearly legalized in California, but the bill was stopped dead by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's veto. Ferret legalization groups remain undeterred. As David Gaines of the American Ferret Association explains, "it takes people and the grassroots knocking on the door of the legislature saying 'stop laughing, this issue is important to me and I'm your constituent.'"
3 minutes. Produced by Joshua Swain. Additional help by Amanda Winkler. Narration by Todd Krainin. And special thanks to The Ferret Inn.
Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube Channel to receive automatic updates when new material goes live.
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]]>The action movie is the first starring vehicle for the larger-than-life personality since 2003's Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (not counting three cameo-style roles in the interim), after which he left the business to serve as California's governor for two terms.
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]]>When you get outside of politics, though, a thousand flowers can bloom as people go their merry ways and work to create worlds of meaning for themselves and whoever shares their values, interests, and company. That's why libertarians want to squeeze politics—and the need for unified consensus and its enforcement—down to its smallest size possible.
Think about it this way: When religion is the province of politics, it's an ongoing source of social strife, as people are forced to worship in ways they dislike—or are kept from worshipping (or not) however they see fit. When religion is removed from the political realm, it flourishes as a voluntary activity filled with everything from atheists to Zoroastrians in the mix. There are still arguments, of course, but there is also a hell of a lot of peace, tolerance, and experimentation.
Across Reason's various platforms, we try to balance the need to keep an eye on the sorts of coercive, top-down controls constantly being foisted on us with a celebration of the interesting, fun, and meaningful things people are doing far beyond the tawdry setting of Congress, state capitols, and city halls.
Here are some of Reason.com staffers' favorite and least favorite things from 2012 that have little or nothing to do with politics. – Nick Gillespie
Ronald Bailey
Least Favorite Thing: The Duchess of Cambridge, a.k.a. Kate Middleton, is going to have a baby next year. The airwaves and newsstands will be clotted.
Favorite Thing: From 1970 to 2010, global male life expectancy at birth increased from 56·4 years to 67·5 years and global female life expectancy at birth increased from 61·2 years to 73·3 years. Deaths among children younger than 5 years old have declined by almost 60 percent since 1970. Malnutrition fell from the leading cause of premature death to number eight.
Bailey is Reason's science correspondent.
Shikha Dalmia
Least Favorite Thing: Joshua Ledet, one of the best modern gospel singers, being eliminated in the penultimate round of American Idol. As if that was not bad enough, a constipated (if likeable) white boy, Philip Phillips, went on to win. It betrayed my faith in a just cosmos.
Favorite Thing: Watching Daniel Day Lewis—the best actor, living or dead—use his gaunt sexiness to give a tour de force performance in Lincoln. He looked like he was born to play the role—except that he looks like that in every role. But his portrayal of Lincoln grappling with the moral dilemma of making mincemeat out of the U.S. constitution for the sake of a just cause was fricking brilliant.
Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation.
Brian Doherty
Least Favorite Thing: Yelp commenters. I'm a confirmed cornucopian and ultimately believe more is always better in the world of choices and information, but damn Yelp (the review site for everything) brings out negative nancies that make those without preternatural self-confidence in their own judgment scared to stay in any hotel, eat in any restaurant, or shop in any store without fear that just maybe they'll have the unmitigated most horrifying experience of their lives.
Favorite Thing: While music-listening service Spotify launched in the U.S. in July 2011, I didn't catch on until this year. Spotify gives you dire powers best not used by mortals (for instance, the ability to listen to all of Kansas's post-'70s LPs) its ease of use and breadth of access makes even this vinyl junkie wonder why he's still got over 3,000 black circles in cardboard sleeves around the house. And yes, it even pays writers and labels, though not in amounts that please them.
Matthew Feeney
Least Favorite Thing: The Olympics. What was supposed to be an exhibition of athletic excellence was little more than an embarrassing PR spectacle. Ethical concerns aside, at least doping would have made events such as handball and water polo worth watching.
Favorite Thing: Felix Baumgartner's free-fall. The Austrian daredevil jumped from a record-breaking 24 miles above the Earth's surface, and became the first human to break the sound barrier without the assistance of a vehicle on his way down. The feat was streamed live on YouTube and watched by more than 8 million people. It was one of the very few genuine awe-inspiring "wow" moments of 2012.
Feeney is assistant editor at Reason 24/7 news.
Nick Gillespie
Least Favorite Thing: Arnold Schwarzenegger's autobiography, Total Recall. There was a brief, shining moment when it looked like the Austrian Oak would transform California the way he had transformed bodybuilding and helped to create a new type of cinematic action hero. But this memoir, erroneously subtitled My Unbelievably True Life Story, boasts one of the least reliable and self-deceiving narrators since Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier. Forget his hugely disappointing governorship (and his inability to explain why everything that could go wrong did -and times 1000). There's no insight here about life, love, or, truth be told, even lifting.
Favorite Thing: Ohio State football's unbeaten season while on NCAA probation. The Buckeyes were put on probation for minor infractions and banned from post-season play by an organization that is aribitrary at best and capricious at worst. They responded with the team's 10th unbeaten season, a poke in the eye to a horrible system that exploits the very players who make it so much fun to watch.
Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason TV and co-author with Matt Welch of The Declaration of Independents, now out in paperback.
Ed Krayewski
Least Favorite Thing: Fox Business canceling Freedom Watch, and not just because I worked there. Freedom Watch was one of the most libertarian shows ever on television, with Judge Andrew Napolitano providing the kind of analysis and guests rarely found elsewhere on the dial. Though it's no longer on the air, I like to think it's influenced the rest of Fox Business, and even other networks, to pay more mind to the libertarian point of view.
Favorite Thing: Johan Santana pitching the New York Mets' first franchise no-hitter; it took more than 8,000 games, but it finally happened. And against the St. Louis Cardinals and with Carlos Beltran's first return to Queens to boot.
Krayewski is an associate editor at Reason 24/7 news.
Katherine Mangu-Ward
Least Favorite Thing: Comcast, which is my Internet provider at home and at work. It is the bane of my existence. I pay them money to connect my computer to the Series of Tubes. And they do—sometimes. Comcast routinely wins "worst company of the year" awards, including the coveted Golden Poo from Consumerist a couple years back and a massive takedown in Wired in 2009.
Favorite Thing: The Uber app. It's 5 a.m. You have to get the airport. It's cold. No cabs in sight. Open the Uber app on your phone. Two clicks. Five minutes later, your driver texts that his black cab is outside. Electronic payment happens invisibly. I love living in the future.
Mangu-Ward is managing editor of Reason magazine.
Damon Root
Least Favorite Thing: The human canvasses on Ink Master. Spike TV's Ink Master features a group of tattoo artists competing against each other for a $100,000 prize and bragging rights in the skin-and-ink trade. It's like Top Chef, except on this reality TV show you can't throw every disgusting entry down the garbage disposal. What kind of person voluntarily assumes the risk of wearing a losing tattoo for life?
Favorite Thing: "Devil's Angels" by Danzig. Before starting the metal band Danzig, vocalist Glenn Danzig was the driving force behind The Misfits, a legendary New Jersey punk band that sang about zombies, ghouls, and teenagers from Mars. This new cover version of the 1967 biker movie theme song is a welcome throwback to his Misfits-era sound.
Root is managing editor of Reason.com.
Scott Shackford
Least Favorite Thing: Internet Memes.They were fun for a couple of years, with new ones popping up now and then for a good laugh. But as social media has expanded everybody is trying to make everything into a meme. Facebook walls are inundated with "One does not simply…" and "I don't always…" posts, and they're particularly unfunny when they're political.
Favorite Thing: The film Wreck-It Ralph. Gaming long ago transformed from a hobby for a particular American subculture to an entertainment option of interest to millions and shared between generations. Wreck-It Ralph was marvelously crafted with the idea of appealing across multiple generations and on the assumption that most Americans are familiar with the language and tropes that make up the culture of video games.
Shackford is an associate editor at Reason 24/7 news.
Peter Suderman
Least Favorite Thing: Apple's iOS6 Maps App, a near-total failure from a company that has made precious few missteps in recent years, and a warning sign that without founder Steve Jobs, the company may be on its way to lesser things. Thankfully, Google stepped into the breach with a far better maps app of its own.
Favorite Thing: The video game Dishonored, a surprisingly clever, stealth-action game that allows—and even subtly encourages non-violence. You play an assassin in a steampunk Victorian city filled with gears and magic. But if you look around, there's always an option to avoid killing anyone, including your target. Playing this way is harder. It's also more rewarding.
Suderman is a senior editor at Reason magazine.
Jacob Sullum
Least favorite thing: Season 1 of Elementary. I really wanted to like this new CBS show but was defeated by two things: 1) the basic premise of super-detective Sherlock Holmes as a conspicuously tattooed recovering addict and Dr. Watson as his "sober sitter" sidekick and 2) Lucy Liu as a nosy, nagging Watson. Jonny Lee Miller is good as Holmes, but Liu is more annoying in this role than in anything else I've ever seen her in (possibly because there's a new installment every week). The British update of the Holmes stories, Sherlock, is vastly superior (and no, not just because it's British).
Favorite thing: Season 3 of The Walking Dead. Still one of the week's TV highlights, the AMC zombie drama is consistently engaging, suspenseful, and surprising.
Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist.
J.D. Tuccille
Least Favorite Thing: Gangnam Style. It's not that it's so horrible in and of itself; it's just catchy enough to get inside your head, and your friends' heads, and the heads of people who ought not ever consider dancing like a horse, and completely permeate the world. It's like the Macarena, but now its various iterations can be spread on Facebook.
Favorite Thing: DIY e-book publishing. This started a few years ago, but it took off this year as publishing programs such as Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, Barnes & Noble's PubIt, Lulu, Smashwords and other outfits allowed indie authors to bring new books to readers at competitive prices (averaging around $2.99) while old-line publishing houses continued to offer books in electronic form priced as if each copy was individually hand-crafted by monks. At indie e-book prices you can afford to take a risk, and readers and writers alike win.
Tuccille is the managing editor of Reason 24/7 News.
Matt Welch
Least Favorite Thing: Brooklyn Department of Motor Vehicles. Yes, it's cliche for a libertarian to complain about the DMV. But what if I told you that every employee I met inside Brooklyn's notorious Atlantic Terminal DMV was perfectly nice and outwardly competent, that neither of my two basic procedures met any unexpected delay, and yet still the process took an unbelievable—and utterly predicted – five hours? No wonder Mayor Michael Bloomberg would rather talk about soda-cup sizes and national gun bans: He sucks at basic services.
Favorite Thing: Peter Joseph Osterhaus memorial in Koblenz, Germany. My great-great-great grandfather, Peter Joseph Osterhaus, was a German 1848er who fled revolutionary Mannheim, made his way to the United States with his young family, volunteered for the army of the North (one of 200,000 or so Germans to do so), and eventually became a major general. My mom, a retired nurse, wrote a biography of him that came out in 2010. In large part because of that, the American and German descendants of Osterhaus united this year (along with military representatives from both countries) to erect a proper memorial near his mudslide-damaged grave in Koblenz, Germany. Nothing better than 21st-century technology reuniting a family divided in the 19th, and reminding citizens of both countries about the primacy of democratic principles.
Welch is the editor in chief of Reason magazine and the co-author with Nick Gillespie of The Declaration of Independents, out in paperback.
The post Our Favorite—and Least Favorite—Things in 2012 (Non-Politics Edition) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The New York Times
has a soft-focus feature article out under the irritating and misleading headline of "Marijuana, Not Yet Legal for Californians, Might as Well Be." Among the headline-refuting words that do not appear in the story: raid, dispensary, Obama.However, the cliche-ridden article does have some newsworthiness, including this bit about California's most recent Republican governor:
Arnold Schwarzenegger […] ticked off the acceptance of open marijuana smoking in a list of reasons he thought Venice was such a wonderful place for his morning bicycle rides. With so many people smoking in so many places, he said in an interview this year, there was no reason to light up one's own joint.
"You just inhale, and you live off everyone else," said Mr. Schwarzenegger, who as governor signed a law decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana.
Giggle giggle!
Such japery is a far cry from 2010, when the then-governor argued that the pot-legalization initiative Proposition 19 would bring "risks to public safety" and "make California a "laughingstock." At the risk of reading too much into a joke, I can't help but notice that the successful, historic legalization initiatives in Colorado and Washington this year came amid the near-total absence of the kind nervous, giggly dismissals that marked the near-unanimous dismissal of Prop. 19 by the Golden State's editorial boards. Perhaps the lesson is that the first one through the door always takes the most flak, and that establishmentarians never want to be the first ones to stick their neck out.
Welcome back to the anti-establishment, Arnold!
The post Schwarzenegger Now Joking Positively About the Marijuana Whose Prohibition He Recently Supported appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Based on early reviews, it seems a more apt title for Arnold Schwarzenegger's Total Recall would be Selective Memory.
Of course, it would no longer be a play on the title of one of his most famous films, but it'd be more accurate, anyway.
The post Schwarzenegger's New Book Plays it Safe, Critics Say appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"I think it was the stupidest thing I've done in the whole relationship. It was terrible. I inflicted tremendous pain on Maria and unbelievable pain on the kids," Schwarzenegger said of the affair that led to a son who is now 14.
The post Schwarzenegger: Maid Affair "Stupidest Thing" He Did to Ex-Wife appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Judge Lloyd Connelly called Schwarzenegger's decision to cut the sentence of Esteban Nunez from 16 years to seven was distasteful and "repugnant to the bulk of the citizenry of this state," but within his executive powers as governor. Nunez is the son of the governor's political ally, Fabian Nunez.
The post Schwarzenegger Within His Rights When He Slashed Sentence appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Mr. Schwarzenegger was approached by White House officials about a cabinet position around the time he left office in January 2011, according to people familiar with the matter.
The post White House Approached Governator for Cabinet appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy will be funded with a commitment of $20 million from the former governor that will include a personal donation as well as money from his fundraising efforts. USC officials said the endowment is expected to be fully funded within two or three years. Schwarzenegger's initial gift is confidential, officials said.
The post Schwarzenegger Starting a Think Tank appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Just as a reminder that the individual mandate (which Reason's Ron Bailey made the case for way back in 2004, before women had the right to vote) was once a bipartisan fave, here's how former members of the Schwarzenegger Administration are celebrating out in California:
"Today's decision by the United States Supreme Court is an affirmation that Americans, regardless of age, income, or pre-existing condition, are entitled to and deserve quality, affordable health coverage, including the more than seven million Californians who are uninsured", said Daniel Zingale, Senior Vice President of The California Endowment. "For our state, today's decision is both a fiscal blessing and a clear signal that there should be no more excuses. Covering the uninsured currently costs our state nearly $10 billion per year and we need to continue to move full speed ahead to ensure that millions of Californians take advantage of the new options and consumer protections provided by the law."
Zingale headed up Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's unsuccessful effort to institute a universal health insurance requirement in California, though confusingly his official job was as something like a chief of staff to first lady of California Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger (a Democrat by birth and nurture).
Other Democrats in other not-too-sovereign states dance the National Federation of Business et al v. Sebelius shuffle:
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]]>Sphinx-like Secretary of Energy Steven Chu may or may not be getting closer to approaching a plan to begin the process of preparing to lay the groundwork for issuing a preliminary statement on the Solyndra bankruptcy.
TheHill.com notes that the House Energy and Commerce Committee's investigative panel is asking nicely for a comment from Chu:
Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) and other Republicans on the subcommittee have called on Chu to testify on the Solyndra loan guarantee.
Republicans on the panel wrote to Chu last week to request all communications between the Energy Department and the White House on the Solyndra loan guarantee.
The document request is part of a broader effort by Republicans to determine if the White House rushed consideration of the loan guarantee.
The committee, which launched its investigation into Solyndra in February, has already received more than 35,000 documents and has released select emails that Republicans say show that the White House tried to rush a decision on the company's financing so that the loan guarantee could be announced at the Sept. 2009 groundbreaking of the company's factory.
The administration has insisted that it thoroughly reviewed the project, and has strongly denied any wrongdoing.
In a striking example of overpromising and underdelivering, Politico takes a story that contains no new comments from Chu and some speculation about what the energy secretary might say here he inclined to say anything, then gives it the impressive title "On Solyndra, the buck stops with Secretary Steven Chu." A sample:
Chu will eventually get his chance to explain his role in the sequence of events when he appears — perhaps as early as October — at a House hearing on Solyndra. He can expect a politically charged atmosphere. Republicans, after all, have already called for Silver to be fired and haven't ruled out making the same case for Chu's dismissal.
What the lawmakers will likely hear from the Nobel Prize-winning physicist is an explanation that he's always been the key decider in the Solyndra process, with a record articulated in dozens of public statements and interviews given over the last 2½ years.
Chu's message has been clear: Hearing calls from top GOP and Democratic lawmakers, including during his Senate confirmation hearing, he wanted to break through red tape inside DOE and at rival Cabinet agencies that had resisted getting loan guarantees out the door for several years after their authorization by the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
I love that "eventually get his chance to explain." Because Cthulhu knows it's impossible for a cabinet-level department head to get any airtime to make a statement, what with the fragmentation of media and all.
As Chu spends time with his family, we may have a clue to why the FBI launched its investigation of Solyndra: an investigation into possible inaccurate financial statements.
The DoE's impeccably timed $737 million loan to the Solar Energy Project is also smelling worse by the day. It can't be a good sign when one of the most prominent beneficiaries of the loan is former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California)'s brother-in-law, and that isn't even the scandalous part. NRO's Andrew Stiles expands:
But that's not all. [Santa Monica-based SEP developer] Solar Reserve is also investment partners with Argonaut Private Equity, an arm of the (George) Kaiser Family Foundation that was a major investor in Solyndra and was involved in negotiations with the DOE to restructure the failed company's loan agreement. That agreement would ultimately give Argonaut and other private investors priority status over the American taxpayer with respect to the first $75 million recovered in the event of Solyndra's collapse. As Republicans argued at a recent House committee hearing, this arrangement was almost certainly a violation of federal statute.
Argonaut's managing director, Steven Mitchell, served on Solyndra's board when the restructuring took place, and reportedly still serves on the company's board. He is also listed as a "board participant" at Solar Reserve.
In other words: We have top men working on it right now.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that a new poll indicates few Americans are paying attention to the Solyndra scandal, and most still support so-called clean energy initiatives:
Of 650 Ohio voters surveyed after Solyndra's bankruptcy, just 11% said they had heard "a great deal" about the issue, the pollsters said. They also found that while 16% said they had heard "a little," those people couldn't talk about the issue in any detail.
California voters who participated in focus groups were more aware of the story, but still supported clean energy and considered Solyndra to be a bad apple rather than an indication of a systemic problem. Nearly two-thirds of voters in the Ohio poll expressed similar sentiment, saying their view was more aligned with a statement that problems with one failed company should not stop clean energy investments as a whole.
More surprising than the continued support for solar power is the apparent support for spending taxpayer dollars on it, which the report [pdf] from Public Opinion Strategies has at 62 percent, versus 31 percent opposed. However, I'm a little skeptical of the strongly leading questions:
I hope the remaining 7 percent answered, as I would have, "Both of these options are stupid." I don't want my taxes subsidizing private companies of any kind, and I'm aware that the amount of energy conventional solar power generates is modest. But how the hell should I know whether solar businesses can compete or succeed without government assistance?
The only way to find out whether these companies can work in the marketplace is to let them compete without government assistance. In the wake of Solyndra a few companies have in fact come forward to brag about their subsidy-free business models, and I wish them well. If anything, the stunning longevity of the Mars rovers has impressed upon me the viability of solar power, on Mars.
Finally, this video has been in wide circulation for a few weeks, but seems to be getting a lot of attention today. Joe Biden, you've done it again!
The post Steven Chu, Oh Where Are You? (Solyndra Roundup) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yesterday we had fun with the Times of New York's preposterous claim that the Obama Administration has been "forthcoming" in the House Solyndra investigation. In addition to my list of both subtle and overt efforts to cover up the White House's glaring failures of due diligence and disinterested governance, it turns out other executive-branch agencies have been doing their glacial best to avoid providing information to the American people and their elected representatives. Here's a handy timeline from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce:
Timeline of Energy and Commerce Committee Investigation
February 17, 2011—Committee Leaders submit a letter to Energy Secretary Chu seeking documents and information about the $535 million loan guarantee that the DOE Loan Guarantee Program awarded Solyndra, Inc. DOE complies with the request.
March 14, 2011—Committee Leaders submit a letter to OMB requesting key documents and information concerning the review of the Solyndra loan guarantee. A two week deadline is set.
March 17, 2011 – Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations holds a hearing on DOE Recovery Act Spending.
March 28, 2011 – OMB fails to meet the Committee deadline.
June 7, 2011 – After weeks of back and forth, an in camera review takes place with Committee staff and OMB staff. OMB selected eight emails between OMB and DOE to make available to Committee staff, and refused to produce the rest of the emails or the agreed-upon internal OMB emails and documents.
June 23, 2011—Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns responded in a letter to OMB after it refused to share requested documents by the Committee regarding the Solyndra loan guarantee investigation. Solyndra submits document to Committee, "Exceeding Expectations: Solyndra Today."
June 24, 2011—The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing regarding OMB's Role in the DOE Loan Guarantee Process. Sole witness Jeffrey Zients, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget was a no show. A full timeline of committee investigators back and forth with OMB can be found HERE.
July 11, 2011—Committee staff conduct a second in camera review. Committee staff asked OMB about the production of the other categories of documents sought by this Committee, specifically, OMB's internal communications and documents relating to Solyndra, and its communications with the White House. As the OMB had done for months, OMB staff refused to provide and answer about whether they would produce these materials, and instead maintained that the OMB-DOE communications sufficiently show whether or not OMB had has done its job with regard to Solyndra.
July 12, 2011—Energy and Commerce Committee leaders announced the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations were to hold a business meeting on Thursday, July 14, 2011 to consider a motion authorizing the issuance of a subpoena for certain records of the Office and Management andBudget relating to the Department of Energy's issuance of a loan guarantee to Solyndra, Inc. on September 2, 2009.
July 13, 2011—Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns wrote a letter to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to provide a final opportunity to avoid the issuance of a subpoena. OMB refused.
July 14, 2011—The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a business meeting to consider the issuance of the subpoena. The Subcommittee voted to issue the subpoena 14 to 8. A letter from Solyndra's CEO Harrison regarding the company's finances is entered into the hearing record.
July 15, 2011 – The subpoena is issued to OMB, setting a July 22, 2011, deadline.
July 22, 2011 – OMB fails to meet the subpoena's dealing. Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns informs OMB that they have failed to comply with thesubpoena issued on July 15, 2011 regarding the Solyndra loan guarantee. Chairman Stearns requested that OMB produce the documents no later than 9:00 a.m. Monday, July 25, 2011.
July 25, 2011 – OMB fails to produce the documents by 9:00am deadline.
August 2011 – OMB agrees to produce all documents necessary to the Committee's investigation, with appropriate safeguards relating to proprietary information. Production continues.
August 31, 2011 – Solyndra announces it will file for bankruptcy, Committee leaders comment.
September 1, 2011 – Committee leaders ramp up investigation, press White House for documents.
September 8, 2011 – Committee leaders comment on FBI raid of Solyndra.
September 10, 2011 – In an e-mail, Solyndra company lawyers assure Committee investigators that Solyndra execs would voluntarily answer Committee questions.
September 14, 2011 – Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee holds a hearing on "Solyndra and the DOE Loan Guarantee Program." Executive Director of DOE's Loans Programs Office Jonathan Silver and OMB Deputy Director Zients testify. Subcommittee investigators release emails indicating corners were cut and OMB was rushed in approving Solyndra loan. White House Press Secretary attempts to dismiss concerns that White House pressure OMB on loan guarantee as "scheduling matter."
September 20, 2011 – Committee leaders express concern to Energy Secretary Steven Chu as his agency prepared to dole out nearly $9 billion in loan guarantees by September 30, 2011. TheLeaders request financial details for 14 loan guarantees DOE is poised to award loans to.
September 21, 2011 – Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee members seek answers from Solyndra investors. In the letters to Argonaut Private Equity and Madrone Capital Partners, members are seeking all materials related to now-bankrupt Solyndra's $535 million loan guarantee, the company's cancelled initial public offering, the $75 million credit facility, the February 2011 loan restructuring, the company's bankruptcy, as well as materials related to communications with the Obama administration.
September 21, 2011 – Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee members seek all materials related to communications between the DOE and White House, as well as all communications between DOE and the Treasury Department.
September 23, 2011 – Solyndra CEO and CFO invoke the Fifth Amendment during Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing on "From DOE Loan Guarantee to Bankruptcy to FBI Raid: What Solyndra's Executives Knew."
Interesting that Solyndra's attorneys made the promise that their clients would voluntarily testify after the FBI raid. At that point you would expect any intelligent lawyer to recognize that the only viable option is to remain silent (as Solyndra execs Brian Harrison and W.G. "Bill" Stover ended up doing). This suggests that Solyndra's incompetence extends to its legal representation.
President Obama's obstructive and delaying actions are an insult to taxpayers who want to know why they were made to spend half a billion dollars on a pie-in-the-sky green-jobs company that subsequently went bankrupt. As a once and future flack I find this behavior personally offensive just for the way it ignores best practices for crisis management — with the expected result that the scandal continues to get worse while the subject fails to take control of the narrative.
For example, California (proud home of Fremont-based Solyndra) has frozen its own program of green-energy corporate welfare, with state Treasurer Bill Lockyer saying, "In light of recent events, we owe it to taxpayers to see if there is more we can do to make sure we don't give their money to companies headed for a fall, or companies that take California's money and run to other states to create jobs." You will recall that Golden State taxpayers also gave $34 bmillion to Solyndra during the Schwarzenegger administration. In Obama's U.S.A., all Americans get the government Californians deserve.
And in D.C., it turns out the Internal Revenue Service also gave Solyndra a boost in 2009. CaliforniaWatch.org has a great story that illustrates both the logrolling that is still going on under ARRA Stimulus and the absurd, pseudo-scientific micromanagement that results when the government is shoving money out the door:
The U.S. tax code has long allowed buyers of solar panels to deduct a portion of the installation cost from their taxes. Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, that credit was boosted from 10 percent to 30 percent through 2016.
But in August 2009, the IRS also determined that companies buying Solyndra products would qualify for another 30 percent tax credit – as long as they were installed on roofs painted white to reflect the sun. At the time, only Solyndra was selling products that would work on so-called "cool roofs."
Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, had been pushing the cool-roofs model as a low-cost way to adapt to global warming and reduce the so-called "urban heat island effect."
But green-job subsidies make up a beast so vast it can only die in sections. While reasonable people all over the country are moving on from this regrettable error, Chu's Energy Department today approved another $1 billion in corporate welfare for a Sempra Energy solar project in Arizona and Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project.
The post More On Obama's "Forthcoming" Solyndra Response appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>George Kaiser, who visited the White House repeatedly during the period when the Obama Department of Energy decided to grant Solyndra a half-billion-dollar taxpayer-guaranteed loan, spoke to the Rotary Club of Tulsa on July 8, 2009, highlighting his efforts to bring federal money to local beneficiaries.
The speech is getting a lot of publicity through headlines like "It's Time to Cash in on the Mother of All Government Handouts" and "We're Trying to Get as Much Stimulus Money as We Possibly Can." In fairness to Kaiser, here is the relevant text – which actually doesn't sound much better:
The last major initiative is the federal Stimulus package. [Names unclear] are working with us full-time for a while to reflect the fact that there's never been more money shoved out of the government's door in world history and probably never will be again than in the last few months and the next 18 months. And our selfish parochial goal is to get as much of it for Tulsa and Oklahoma as we possibly can.
[Applause]
So we've helped a number of entities try to make effective grant requests for this funding. We've secured more than $40 million extra for Tulsa so far. We've made multiple trips to Washington to tell the story in education and health care and energy to the respective cabinet secretaries in each of those areas and almost all the key players in the west wing of the White House. So that will be a strong effort going forward.
We're trying to get Tulsa selected as a pilot project in various programs like Promise Neighborhoods, Race To the Top, innovation initiatives, challenge grants for early childhood education and so forth. And we have the almost unique advantage in that we can say, "Whatever you do we'll match with private funding and we'll watch over it, because we don't want to be embarrassed with the way our money is spent and so we won't make you be embarrassed with the way your money is spent either."
Doing a bang-up job on that last part, George!
Note that this speech appears to have been a crowd-pleaser. That's the real problem. Another reason I objected yesterday to the criminal investigations of Solyndra is that this is a political issue to its marrow. It's filled with important lessons about ideology, public choice, and the way that parochial self-interest disguises itself as public interest. Kaiser did the country a favor by describing it so bluntly.
As Princess Amygdala or Princess Amakihi taught us all, liberty dies with thunderous applause. The crime here (in a moral sense, not a legal sense) is not just that politically connected operators do lap dances for bureaucrats and that bureaucrats reward their efforts. It's that this is presented to the public as the system working for all of us.
In other Solyndra news:
* Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), that great Lebanese-American who in 2003 wrote the check Arnold Schwarzenegger cashed, has opened a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee investigation into the practice of making government loans to big political donors, telling C-SPAN, "I want to see when the president and his cronies are picking winners and losers."
* Speaking of the former Gubernator, Solyndra has turned out to be a gift that keeps on giving for California as well as the nation:
Last November, an obscure state board agreed to give the Fremont-based company a $34.5 million tax break, the largest one handed out under an alternative-energy subsidy law signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Schwarzenegger attended Solyndra's groundbreaking in September 2009 and declared it a cause for "great celebration."
Schwarzenegger used the event to push for the tax breaks to help clean technology companies buy equipment for "design, manufacture, production, or assembly" operations in California. He said the subsidies would create new jobs for laid-off auto workers at the shuttered NUMMI plant a few miles away.
"This is why we give these tax incentives," Schwarzenegger said, because "Solyndra will be eligible for these tax incentives for this facility right here."
* Forbes draws the…um…obvious(?) conclusion from this sad tale of government involvement in the free market and misallocation of resources: "Unless private sector and government work closely together in the USA, the manufacture of solar panels will be the next sector to leave the country, probably forever." Which raises the question: What would happen if a door hit a solar panel in the ass on the way out?
* You may also have seen this chart comparing Solyndra with military "boondoggles."
The sight gag is that Solyndra is barely a lump compared to the mountains of defense waste, so click here to see the whole chart. We can concede that the F-35 counts as busy work because the era of manned warplanes has ended. Ditto the aircraft carrier and some others. Another advantage of treating Solyndra as a political issue is that it invites a hard look at all manner of public spending, with its attendant waste and corruption.
But beyond that, the comparison does not hold. Nobody pretends defense spending is about creating jobs, reviving the economy, or creating free-market products. Mayors of towns near military bases may come to believe the first and third items, and idiots like Paul Krugman may delude themselves into believing the second. But defense spending is about building the capacity to destroy the warfighting capacity of real or potential enemies. Mission creep doesn't change the fact that establishing a military is a specifically constitutional and widely recognized role of government. The Constitution is silent on solar panels.
The post George Kaiser 2009: "There's never been more money shoved out of the government's door." appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Over in California's troubled capitol, a local weekly has printed a version of a conversation with me about libertarianism, the Golden State, and The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America. Excerpt from the not-quite-a-transcript:
How can libertarian policies help California?
I highly recommend reading probably the most libertarian speech ever given by a sitting politician in America. It is Jerry Brown's second inaugural address, back in 1979. It has some fire-breathing, anti-Lord Keynes kind of comments and it will shock the modern reader. California has been spending itself into oblivion for a really long time. The more local you get, the worse it gets. It's very telling that a lot of the official thumb-sucking class in the L.A. Times and elsewhere say that the problem is the ten Republicans left in the state and if they can just get rid of these obstructionists, we'll repeal Prop. 13 and all will be good and gravy.
In the short term, it's about pensions and fixing the giveaways to public sector unions. Schwarzenegger, who was a great disappointment as a governor, finally did a little bit of reform at the tail end of his term and Brown has talked about it but hasn't really done much.
Whole interview here.
Curious about that 1979 Brown speech (which I will confess to describing hyperbolically above; there have surely been more libertarian speeches)? Though I've linked it before, I'll link it again. Here's an excerpt:
[The tax revolt] has without question inspired the hopes of many. Plain working people, the poor, the elderly, those on fixed incomes, those who cannot keep up with each new round of inflation or protect themselves from each subsequent round of recession, these are the people who are crying out for relief.
But in their name and in the name of misfortune of every kind, false prophets have risen to advocate more and more government spending as the cure – more bureaucratic programs and higher staffing ratios of professional experts. They have told us that billion dollar government increases are really deep cuts from the yet higher levels of spending they demand and that attempts to limit the inflationary growth of government derive not from wisdom but from selfishness. That disciplining government reflects not a care for the future but rather self-absorption. These false prophets, I tell you, can no longer distinguish the white horse of victory from the pale horse of death.
Reason on the always-interesting Jerry Brown here.
The post Semi-Q&A With Matt Welch in Sacto's <em>Capitol Weekly</em>, and Jerry Brown's Fire-Breathing Second Inaugural appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The post Reason Writers on Bloggingheads: Matt Welch Talks DSK, Arnold, Architecture, and Google With Ann Althouse appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"The calls are coming in," former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tells the Los Angeles Times' Geoff Boucher in a tease for the celebrated actor's return to the movie business.
Blimey, Guvnah! A bunch of those calls are from me, trying to get a new take on the pension crisis that continues to cloud California's future and your successor's administration.
The news here isn't particularly new. Schwarzenegger has not settled on his next project, but he's been suggesting he'll be back on the silver screen for some time. Here's how the voice of Stan Lee's animated hero The Governator responded when the Austrian paper Kronen Zeitung asked in January if he was thinking about returning to movies:
"Sure. Currently I'm reading three scripts! A pitch that I didn't have time to consider when I was governor intrigues me most. I would play an older German officer who gets an order at the end of the war to kill dozens of children. He disobeys, and life-and-death adventure ensues. The plot is based on a true story."
Boucher's short list of possible Arnold projects – which includes a policier and a puzzle movie – doesn't include that picture. The surest bet seems to be that of Dwayne The Rock Johnson, who predicts Schwarzenegger will "make a smart choice very soon and he'll dominate again."
Why shouldn't he? Without consulting any reference, I can name five Schwarzenegger pictures that deserve inclusion in the Great Films section at the tera-library of the giga-Vatican: True Lies, Conan the Barbarian, Terminator, Stay Hungry and Total Recall. I can also name many others that are hugely entertaining (the Terminator sequels, Commando, Predator, Kindergarten Cop a.k.a. Devil King of Children, Jingle All the Way, etc), one of the great sports documentaries (Pumping Iron), and a bunch of other movies I haven't seen, which I'm sure have their moments. (I seem to recall there's even one with Jim Belushi, where Arnold plays a Soviet Army officer.) All of these depended on his still-intact humor and fractured eloquence as much as or more than on his physical strength. Weirdly, given his two-term executive adventure, Schwarzenegger has barely any directing credits, so there's always Christmas In Connecticut II. Finally, his famous business sense comes through in this assessment of the current action-adventure market:
Still, last summer's "The Expendables," directed and starring Sylvester Stallone, pulled in $274 million in worldwide box office with its old-school commando fantasy and aging action-hero cast, including a fleeting cameo by Schwarzenegger. The 38th governor of California watched those receipts with considerable interest and he also smiled as he watched Liam Neeson, now 58, "kicking in doors" in the surprise hit "Taken" three years ago.
"The whole industry has not come up with a new line of action heroes so [people say] let's go see the mature ones — that's what I call them, the mature ones — because there's nothing new around," Schwarzenegger said. "That's good news for me."
I still say a performer who can hold a roomful of people as easily as Schwarzenegger should be doing legit theater. Damn it: Arnold needs to play Lear.
In any case there's something telling in seeing Schwarzenegger's career in politics come to resemble Michael Jordan's tenure with the Birmingham Barons. If the presidency were still on offer he would probably still be making political noises, but as it is he is returning whence he came.
And that's a rational move. What made Schwarzenegger a rarity in politics was not the outsider purity he bragged about. (His creepy friendship with a thug like Fabian Núñez easily puts that perception to rest.) It was that he is a truly interesting person with recognizable talents, able to get rich in both the relatively free market of entertainment and the completely gamed economy of California real estate. His rejection of politics, and his smiling return to the private sector, say something not just about politics but about the instinct that first brought Schwarzenegger to this country, where in his own words, "the government wasn't always breathing down your neck or standing on your shoes."
The post Arnold's Next Movie: There comes a time, thief, when the jewels cease to sparkle… appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The New York Times
has an interesting profile out of new New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Begins like this:He has clashed with unions, who he believes have helped drive his state toward bankruptcy. He has been praised by prominent conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rudolph W. Giuliani. And he has taken thousands of dollars in campaign money from the New York billionaire David H. Koch, who with his family has helped financed the Tea Party movement.
That's a newspaper that knows its readers!
Try as the NYT might, the most interesting thing about the article is not the guilt-by-Kochsociation, or the lefty griping about Cuomo's political ambitions and rejection of "a politically popular income tax surcharge on the wealthy," but rather the obvious fact that Cuomo is just not being slammed as a devil Scott Walker incarnate. The fiscal situation in New York is hosed (just like it is in the other 50 states), but there just aren't enough Republicans around to blame.
Asked to describe his own beliefs during a news conference in Albany on Saturday, Mr. Cuomo was succinct. "I am a progressive Democrat who's broke," he said, adding: "I disagree with the concept that the only way to get better services is more money, more money, more money. "We've been spending a lot more money. We're not getting better services." […]
Those close to Mr. Cuomo say that he is above all a pragmatist, bent on reshaping Albany's paralyzed government so that it can once again be an effective and credible force in New Yorkers' lives.
What, you may ask, does this have to do with the allegedly looming government shutdown? It's this: When you remove the High Noon-style red-on-blue confrontation, you're left with the same singular fact, one that affects red states, blue cities, and above all Our Nation's Crapitol–We Are Out of Money. I'm just a simple California girl, but the notion of a federal government shutdown strikes me as basically the same as Gov. Walker ramming through a public union-busting bill, and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger trying (and failing) to denude public sector unions in 2005. They're all marvelous opportunities to rally the dead-enders for another year (or 10) of denialist obsctructionism, and to shift the focus away from the underlying crisis at hand and back onto the always-more-telegenic bumfight. As Senior Editor Tim Cavanaugh wrote last month, "Scott Walker's greatest gift to the left is hidden in plain sight: He managed to turn a consensus position based on straightforward math into what looks like a partisan issue."
I personally won't sniffle on the odd chance that cowboy poetry and the Department of Agriculture will go unfunded for a few hours. But I watched up close as Arnold Schwarzenegger let a thirst for direct conflict with the opposition overwhelm his appetite for more serious (and complicated) reform, luring him into a defeat that produced four years of dreadfully disappointing governance. Wisconsin, it seems to me, is no longer talking much about reducing the size of government. I wasn't around in the mid-'90s, but I hear tell that the government shutdown then didn't turn out well for the limited-government wing of the 1994 Revolution.
This doesn't mean you fight the Class War between the public sector and the rest of us by turning the other cheek, or looking the other way when the New York Times editorial board and other progressives let their versions of fact be determined by how many right-wing oogity-boogities they can blame. But I think it does mean that distilling the Continuing Crisis into a single game of televised chicken gives unearned advantage to the guy who was already losing. Nothing improves long odds like challenging your opponent to a duel.
As Tim Cavanaugh keeps telling us, most thoroughly in his March cover story on "How public pensions killed progressive California," much of the hottest pension-reform action is now coming from Democrats, who have to grapple with the same awful math as Scott Walker. Cuomo put it best to the New York Times last year, in my new favorite quote, "Numbers are numbers….They're numbers. Forget the philosophy. Here are the numbers."
And the fact that Democrats will portray Democratic budget-cutters as "above all a pragmatist" while portraying budget-cutting Republicans as purveyors of a "death trap" is just more evidence of a partisan-intellectual decline that reminds me of nothing so much as Republicanism circa 2004. They've got a ways to go before they hit bottom.
The post What Do You Call a Governor of a State too Blue to Blame on Republicans? "A progressive Democrat who's broke" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California, you may have heard, is broker than than Steve Garvey on alimony day. Pick a horrifying number: There's the immediate $28 billion budget hole, the more than doubling of both debt and debt service since Arnold Schwarzenegger took office, or the estimated half-trillion shortfall in funding the Golden State's pension obligations. Incoming Gov. Jerry Brown has taken his first look under the hood, and declared that Californians have been living in "fantasy land."
So what are the state's leading academic lights doing to help solve this wretched state of affairs? Threatening to sue the University of California Board of Regents "unless the regents lift a $245,000 cap on how much salary can be considered when calculating pensions." I shit you not.
The demands aren't new; they're part of a pension-spiking agreement cobbled together in the annus extravangus of 1999, in which the UC would indeed peg retirement payouts to north-of-$245,000 salaries pending a waiver from the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS delivered in 2007, the perenially budget-pinched UC balked at delivering, and now the academics are holding firm. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, it would cost $5.5 million a year to fund the pensions of those 200 or so executives (of which 36 have joined the lawsuit threat), plus another $51 million to backfill to 2007. The UC's current unfunded pension liability is $21.6 billion.
Among those threatening litigation is none other than Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley, who the Chron says made a $336,511 salary in 2009. Here's how Edley defends himself:
"I accept the criticism of me personally for insisting that UC stick to a promise that is financially important to my family," Edley told The Chronicle[.] […]
"In terms of public relations, this is about a commendably frugal UC standing up to craven scum," he said. "All UC employees have made sacrifices—pay freezes, furloughs, reorganizations and layoffs. We craven scum (who signed the letter) are prepared to make further sacrifices, but disagree with UC staff about what's fair, necessary and wise."
If the regents go back on their 1999 promise to increase executive pensions, he said, the university will have trouble attracting good people to run the vast system of campuses and hospitals, whose total annual budget tops $20 billion.
"If UC is perceived as untrustworthy by senior job candidates, the damage may be significant," Edley said.
Doubtless.
University of California administrators have been telling themselves for decades that they are patriotically taking a huge paycut in order to enlist in the marvelous project of public education. This has fostered a long-notorious culture of extra-salary perks and the entitlement culture that goes along with them. Recall that the president of the UC system–who makes $591,000 a year–gets an $11,500 monthly housing allowance while the 10-acre mansion earmarked to house him goes into expensive, rat-eaten decay. They, like a lot of California's privileged class of public sector workers, are indeed contractually obligated to all kinds of goodies the state can't possibly afford.
On a wholly unrelated note, Dean Edley made a name for himself earlier this year by arguing in The New York Times that broke states should be allowed to borrow money directly from the Fed. Oh, and Edley once supported the (temporary) unhiring of Erwin Chemerinsky as founding dean of the UC Irvine law school on grounds that he was being too political in his op-ed writing. Fun quotes from back then:
"[UCI Chancellor Michael Drake] lost confidence in Erwin's willingness to subordinate his autonomy and personal profile for the good of the institution," Edley said.
Edley, who worked in the Clinton administration, said it was nothing that he had not been called to do himself.
"I was questioned explicitly by people who feared I would turn the deanship into a platform for my own ideological commitments," he said. "But it was clear to me then, and it's clear to me now, that the job requires something else."
Yes, it sure does.
Reason on the class war here; on failed states here.
The post (Upper) Class War appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reason Senior Editor Tim Cavanaugh appeared on Fox Business Channel's Varney & Company this morning, discussing the Golden State's bad budget math, the state Democratic leader's challenge to spending cuts and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent accusation that his fellow Republicans are soft on unions.
Take a gander:
Correction: The $11,000 campaign-contribution figure cited for State Sen. Bob Dutton (R-Rancho Cucamonga) was incorrect. Dutton received $50,450 in campaign contributions from public sector unions.
The post Reason on the Tube: Tim Cavanaugh Talks Calipocalypse on Varney & Co. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For months, California has been a laughingstock state, unable to pass an annual budget, facing a declaration of "fiscal emergency," fighting over pay cuts and furloughs for government employees, threatening to issue IOUs to creditors. With a "framework" budget agreement expected to pass later this week, Reason.tv looks at why this long fight over a bloated budget may be good news for California's future.
The Golden State is facing a half-trillion-dollar shortfall in funding its pension commitments to public employees. But this year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has fought the unions and lost many times, got the momentum on his side. As the public seethes over cuts to public services and excessive compensation to public employees, Schwarzenegger has used the budget negotiation as leverage to wring concessions from the Democrats and their patrons in organized labor.
The first steps toward reform have already been taken. Several government employee unions have agreed to less expensive contracts, and the budget deal reportedly includes the repeal of a 1999 law that drastically increased the unfunded pension burden on taxpayers. The termed-out Schwarzenegger won't be back. But the fight to get the state's pension crisis under control will continue.
Approximately 6:09 minutes.
Written and produced by Tim Cavanaugh. Shot and edited by Alex Manning.
Related: More Taxes or More Jobs? California Shows We Can't Have Both
Go to Reason.tv for HD, iPod, and audio verisons, and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new content is posted.
The post Reason.tv: Arnold's Last Stand—How the Lame-Duck Governor Is Fighting for One Last Win Over Government Employee Unions appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you're in Los Angeles on this rainy night, tell your bartender to turn on Channel 11, where Tim Cavanaugh will be discussing the pending California budget deal, the next step in the public pension crisis, and Gov. Schwarzenegger's win in today's court ruling on layoffs and furloughs.
Time: 10pm Pacific, 1am Eastern.
Place: KTTV channel 11, or myfoxla.com/.
The post Reason on the Tube: Tim Cavanaugh On KTTV 11 Los Angeles 10 O'Clock News appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Holding up the budget and vetoing bills are the only tools [Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger] has got," Marcia Fritz, president of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, said a while back in assessing the Gubernator's executive strengths.
Schwarzenegger's extensive veto record is one of the best cases in his favor, and the recent end of his last legislative session has produced a mixed bag of No's.
Sen. Mimi Walters, Assemblyman Chuck DeVore and the Flash Report's Jon Fleischman—all Republicans—check back on their list of 20 must-veto bills, and give Schwarzenegger a score of 14 out of 20, or C.
Not all of Fleischman's must-vetoes are of interest to this crowd. (I'm not sure whether Mark Leno's SB 906, creating a statutory civil marriage class, would have changed much, but Schwarzenegger vetoed it.)
But there are some interesting examples of the mind-numbing bureaucratic cascades the Golden State has mastered:
AB 2032 (Davis) – From the Department of Redundancy Department—Requires underage actors, artists and other entertainers to pay a new fee, which the agency collecting the fee states is required to defray the costs of collecting the fee. VETOED—9/30/10
AB 424 (Torres) – This bill spends nearly $4 million over the next three years to educate the public on the uses of the 911 system. VETOED—9/27/10
And on the Yea side, California carpet buyers can rest easy in the knowledge that a new 5-cent-per-square-yard tax will keep the state's carpet recycling program fully funded:
AB 2398 (John Perez), aka the "Carpet Product Stewardship Act," imposes a $0.05 per square yard tax on carpets sold in California through 2013 (after which, the cost will likely climb) to fund a carpet recycling program. Interestingly, California's biggest carpet recycling company, Los Angeles Fiber Co., is in the district of the bill's sponsor, Assembly Speaker Perez. SIGNED—9/30/10
Stand tall, California!
The post Arnold's Final Grade: Gentleman's C appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The loosening in legal punishments for pot got plenty of press, but his move to keep often fatal restrictions on access to needles and to help in case of overdoses only snuck out in his messages to the state legislature.
Assembly Bill 2460 would have, as the ACLU explains:
address[ed] needless drug overdose deaths that occur when witnesses to an overdose hesitate to contact emergency services because they fear arrest for themselves or for the person experiencing the overdose. Fear of police involvement and criminal punishment for themselves or their friends is statistically one of the most common reasons people cite for not calling 911 when they witness an overdose. AB 2460 would provide limited criminal immunity for only 3 low-level drug crimes (being under the influence and possession for personal use and possession of drug paraphernalia) only for persons who contact emergency services to save the life of someone experiencing an overdose, and to the person experiencing the overdose for whom emergency services are contacted.
While both houses of California's state legislature thought this made sense, Schwarzenegger thought since this humane bill to help save lives "fails to address problematic, high-risk drug use and behavior. Accountability, and the need for the legal consequences arising from such high-risk behavior, is eliminated under this bill," he had to veto it.
That such "elimination" of legal punishment for behavior that harms no one else's life or property directly comes only in the context of saving someone's life doesn't seem to matter to the Gov, though to their credit it did matter to California's legislature.
Two other bills affecting that most despised of American minorities, users of needle drugs, that passed the legislature because of their positive effects on health and safety were also vetoed this week by Schwarzenegger: SB 1029 and AB 1858.
The Drug Policy Alliance explained the good sense behind SB 1029:
California is behind much of the country when it comes to preventing HIV and hepatitis C. California is one of only three states in the country that still prohibits pharmacists from selling syringes to an adult without a prescription. Almost no other state restricts pharmacists in this way. In California thousands of people a year still contract HIV or hepatitis C from sharing injection equipment because they are unable to buy them in a pharmacy. HIV and hepatitis are both costly, deadly diseases, and the cost of caring for them often falls on public resources. A current limited pilot program is due to expire at the end of the year, despite clear evidence of success.
Fortunately, though, Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) has introduced legislation (SB 1029) that will extend the pilot and allow pharmacies to sell syringes statewide. The legislation has passed the Senate and Assembly…
"Allowing adults to spend their own money to protect their health and the health of others is a no-cost and highly effective way to prevent the spread of deadly diseases," said [the DPA's Laura] Thomas. "We hope Governor Schwarzenegger chooses to leave a legacy of expanding HIV and hepatitis C prevention in California–saving lives and saving money."
Nope, he decided to just veto it instead.
AB 1858 would have, as Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield explains
allow[ed] the California Department of Public Health to authorize community clinics or other health agencies to provide syringe exchange services in any location where the department determines that the conditions exist for the rapid spread of HIV, viral hepatitis or any other potentially deadly or disabling infections that are spread through the sharing of used syringes…..
More than 200 studies have reached the incontrovertible conclusion that syringe exchange service is a cost-effective means to reduce the spread of HIV and viral hepatitis, and that these programs do not contribute to increased drug use, drug injection, crime or unsafe discard of syringes. Most programs not only provide prevention education, but also provide referral to drug treatment and other vital health services, including screenings for HIV, hepatitis and sexually transmitted infections.
Schwarzenegger vetoed that too. While he is showing some good sense regarding legal punishments for pot, he still seems to believe, against the wishes of the elected legislature, that anyone using needle drugs deserves whatever they get. It's horribly inhumane, and bad for the state's already staggering bottom line, and just plain dumb.
[Cross-posted at my California news and politics blog, "City of Angles." Thanks to the Drug Policy Alliance's Meghan Ralston, who did heroic work on getting those vetoed bills through the legislature, for leads and info on this very non-reported story.]
The post Schwarzenegger: Potheads Can Just Pay a Small Fine, Needle Drug Users Can Die appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California's pot-smoking governor, in the course of whacking the Service Employees International Union on pension reform, delivers a quick one-two punch against legalization:
Any patrol officer, judge or district attorney will tell you that Proposition 19 is a flawed initiative that would bring about a host of legal nightmares and risks to public safety. It would also make California a laughingstock.
Any, kemosabe? How's about these guys? As for making California a "laughingstock," rest assured: That peak done already been climbed.
It's no aberration that a canny political operator like Schwarzenegger would use, in lieu of anything approaching argumentation, a word designed to inflame the insecurity of people desperate to be taken Seriously by the rest of the country, or at least New York and Washington. One of the main reasons that former (and even current) pot-smokers can support prohibition without experiencing a crippling sense of shame is that the Terrible Burden of Responsibility imbues automatic gravitas to whatever is the status quo, coupled with equally automatic suspicion of those who would disrespect and upend it. And as illustrated by the pot-smoking president of the United States dismissively laughing out loud when online questioners pestered him about legalization, the status quo on marijuana–the despicable, murderous, futile, rights-destroying, police-corrupting, minority-imprisoning apparatus in support of treating an overdoseless drug as if it was heroin, even though virtually everyone born after World War II knows that that is a ridiculous lie–almost never has to defend itself as being too absurd for adult discussion. Meanwhile those who would re-align marijuana laws even partway in the direction of reality and human liberty are by default treated like Tommy Chong at a church picnic.
Here's that peer-pressured establishmentarian derision in full flower, in a column by Editor David Little of the Enterprise-Record in Chico, a city that is certainly no stranger to the bong:
The legalization crowd would stand a much better chance if some of the stoners speaking up for Proposition 19 would just stay quiet.
To which one might respond, the Prohibition crowd would stand a much better chance IN FRONT OF A WRATHFUL, RIGHTEOUS GOD if they spent 1/100th of their lame stoner-joke energy on, at minimum, pointing out that our taxpayer-funded government at all levels has spent four decades and tens of billions of dollars lying their faces off to the American people who pay their salaries and suffer greivously from their misgovernance.
Speaking of newspapers tut-tutting at the unseriousness of legalizers (while taking the unconscionable status quo in stride), it's time to update our growing list of Golden State editorial boards coming out against Prop. 19:
Newspaper: The Modesto Bee
Sophomoric pot joke: "What were they smoking when they came up with Proposition 19?"
We-don't-like-the-Drug-War-either-but: This Valley-Girl petulance is as good as it gets: "OK, maybe it's time for California to have a serious debate on whether to legalize marijuana for personal use. And OK, if lawmakers won't confront the issue, maybe it's time for the voters to decide. But this isn't the time, and Proposition 19 on the Nov. 2 ballot isn't the way."
Legal confusion is worse than criminalizing non-violent personal activity: "Regardless of where you are on the issue of marijuana in general, Proposition 19 is poorly drafted and deeply flawed, filled with loopholes and ambiguities that would create a chaotic nightmare for law enforcement, local governments and businesses. […] A mishmash of rules would inevitably result, only multiplying the mess created by medical marijuana dispensaries that have mushroomed across California. To be effective, pot laws must be uniform across the state[.]"
Bonus random statism: "[B]y passing Proposition 19 and becoming the first state to legalize pot for recreational use, California would be in direct conflict with federal law. The Obama administration, which has taken a hands-off attitude on medicinal marijuana, says legalizing pot is 'a nonstarter.' And Gil Kerlikowske, the national drug czar, told California police chiefs that 'marijuana use is harmful' and that legalizing it would result in abuses and social costs that would far outweigh any possible benefits."
WTF: "Its supporters—many of whom are pushing to legalize other drugs as well—contend…"
Newspaper: Los Angeles Times
Sophomoric pot joke: "Snuff Out Marijuana Legalization Measure"
We-don't-like-the-Drug-War-either-but: "Seventy years of criminal prohibition, 'Just Say No' sloganeering and a federal drug war that now incarcerates 225,000 people a year have not diminished the availability or use of — or apparently the craving for — cannabis."
Legal confusion is worse than criminalizing non-violent personal activity: "Its flaws begin with the misleading title: Regulate, Control and Tax Act. Those are hefty words that suggest responsibility and order. But the proposition is in fact an invitation to chaos. It would permit each of California's 478 cities and 58 counties to create local regulations regarding the cultivation, possession and distribution of marijuana. In other words, the law could change hundreds of times from county to county. In Los Angeles County alone it could mean 88 different sets of regulations."
Bonus random statism: "The proposition would have merited more serious consideration had it created a statewide regulatory framework for local governments, residents and businesses. But it still would have contained a fatal flaw: Californians cannot legalize marijuana. Regardless of how the vote goes on Nov. 2, under federal law marijuana will remain a Schedule I drug, whose use for any reason is proscribed by Congress. Sure, California could go it alone, but that would set up an inevitable conflict with the federal government that might not end well for the state. That experiment has been tried with medical marijuana, and the outcome has not inspired confidence. Up and down the state, an untold number of residents have faced federal prosecution for actions that were allowed under California law. It's true that the Obama administration has adopted a more tolerant position on state laws regulating medical marijuana, but there's no guarantee that the next administration will. Regardless, Obama's 'drug czar,' Gil Kerlikowske, has firmly stated that the administration will not condone marijuana's legalization for recreational purposes."
WTF: "Whether marijuana should be legal is a valid subject for discussion."
Newspaper: Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/San Bernardino Sun
Sophomoric pot joke: n/a (IMO this is the best of the no-on-19 editorials I've read so far)
We-don't-like-the-Drug-War-either-but: "Some members of our editorial board, in fact, believe that marijuana should be legalized nationwide and closely regulated, controlled for quality and dosage, and heavily taxed—like alcohol and cigarettes—while other board members believe it should be an illegal substance under all circumstances. Despite the different outlooks, our editorial board agreed unanimously that Proposition 19 on the Nov. 2 ballot—the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010—is no way to legalize marijuana."
Legal confusion is worse than criminalizing non-violent personal activity: "Proposition 19 allows each city and county to pass its own regulations regarding transportation and sales of marijuana in locally licensed premises. As Fontana Police Chief Rodney Jones pointed out, a San Bernardino County sheriff's deputy could have one set of rules to enforce in Rancho Cucamonga, another in Chino Hills, and a third in unincorporated areas. That way lies madness."
Bonus random statism: "Proposition 19 would clobber many state agencies and businesses financially because it would conflict with the federal Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988, which must be complied with by any recipient of a federal grant and any entity with a federal contract in excess of $100,000. Speaking of conflict, marijuana would remain a prohibited, Schedule 1 drug under federal law, and President Obama's 'drug czar' has said the administration will not condone recreational use of marijuana and it has allowed medical use. Federal agents could arrest people who were in compliance with this state act."
By my calculation, at least 13 of the state's top 25 circulation general interest daily newspapers, with a combined circulation of 1.8 million, have editorialized against Prop. 19, and all 13 are against. Those numbers are likely a good deal higher, too, given that MediaNews Group, which owns half the dailies in the Golden State and has already broadcast the same anti-19 editorial across multiple outlets, inflicts upon the inquisitive some heroically inscrutable search engines.
What about the pro-19 camp? I've found exactly two daily newspapers: The previously celebrated Barstow Desert-Dispatch, which has the lowest circulation among all general-interest California dailies on this list, and the Morgan Hill Times, which is not even mentioned there. And the most prominent California politician to come out in favor of it is…San Francisco Assemblyman Tom Ammiano. And yet–or is it and as a result?–the initiative is still leading at the polls.
Watch Ammiano's Reason.tv interview below:
The post No-on-Prop. 19 Consensus Welcomes Arnold, <em>L.A. Times</em>, <em>Modesto Bee</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been trainspotting on his Asian junket, taking the opportunity to convene and exchange ideas with fellow railroad buffs in Shanghai and Tokyo, where the governor announced, "You have to look at which system is most alike to the California challenges that we are facing."
AFP points out that the gubernator is not just looking for new ideas for statehouse train set. He also wants yuan:
The western US state, which is China's fourth largest trading partner, is looking to build a system by 2030 that will carry 90 million passengers a year, with a Los Angeles-San Francisco line at the heart of the network.
"We want China, for instance, to invest in our high-speed rail, to build high-speed rail, to be part of this bidding process we are going to go through," Schwarzenegger said in a speech in Shanghai.
"Many countries will be bidding to build high-speed rail. And we are also looking for financing from China," he said, lauding the "great potential" for increasing trade between China and California.
And yes, that "90 million passengers" figure is fiction. It's nearly three times the total population of California and more than three times the number of passengers Amtrak carries from sea to shining sea.
To learn why California's 14-year-old high-speed rail project has gone and probably always will go nowhere, read on, and on and on.
To find out about the folly of high-speed rail at the national level, all aboard.
The post Gubernator Cuckoo for Chinese Choo-Choo appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"The pro tem needed more time to think about the appointments," says the spokesgal for Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) to the L.A. Times' Patrick McGreevey.
At stake: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's appointments of Bo Derek, Keith Brackpool, David J. Israel and Richard A. Rosenberg to something called the "California Horse Racing Board."
Steinberg has put these nominations on indefinite hold. Board members would serve beyond the end of Schwarzenegger's term.
Questions:
How much equestrian tragedy can a state bear in a single day?
Why does bankrupt California maintain a government horse racing board?
Why isn't there a boss who can scream, "Stein-BERRRG! Get in here! Why are you wasting one second of the public's time thinking about jackasses???!!!"
Could Mr. Ed beat the Dodgers?
The post Budget Two Months Overdue but Cali's Top Dem Needs Time to Think About Bo Derek appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In one of its many books of guidelines, the Los Angeles Times instructs employees to write so that a reader "cannot detect" the political views of the reporter. If there's any place where you'd expect this iron-age rule to be followed, it's in an A1, top-right-column story, which is traditionally considered the leading news story of the day.
So it's not Shane Goldmacher's opinion, just straight news, that the lame-duck governor of California is sending a "gubernatorial ransom note" and "holding the state hostage" in his budget negotiations, thus repeating a "shameful chapter in California's history" and alienating cooperative Democrats with his "ultimatums." It is furthermore objectively true that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is doing this not just from an honest desire to fix Sacramento's chronic budgeting problems but out of personal pique, that he is trying to retrofit a "fiscal system that has bedeviled California—and him—for years."
And when Goldmacher looks down on the former Mr. Olympia's shriveled, sysiphean form, it's just, you know, Crom laughing at your four winds. Here's the lede:
With fewer than 140 days left in office, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is making a final stand for goals that have eluded him for nearly seven years, clinging to an overdue state budget for a last bit of leverage before he fades from relevancy.
It goes on from there, and while some public comments from the governor are included, first-sourcing is given over to such flyblown warhorses as state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco).
Speaking of forgettable faces, Goldmacher is so churlish he even tries to hit Schwarzenegger in his Q rating. In Goldmacher's fanciful telling, "the showdown between fellow Republican Meg Whitman and Democratic state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown" is "increasingly sucking up the political oxygen in Sacramento, much as Schwarzenegger's celebrity did in his first years in office."
Hey, all you folks out there in Televisionland. To the extent that you can even fake an interest in California politics, who do you think is most likely to hold your attention: Jerry Brown, Meg Whitman, or Arnold Schwarzenegger? Put it another way: It's Friday night and your only options at the triplex are Jerry in the Hollywood remake of Monsieur Hire, Meg in an arthouse Annie Oakley biopic, or Arnold as the first male grandmother in Junior, Is That You? Which one might actually entertain you?
If there's a news story here, it is about how little oxygen the Meg and Jerry show has sucked up, and how much CO2 it has generated. As Goldmacher's colleague Anthony York explains, Whitman had to purchase six tables for her own fundraiser at the Hyatt Manchester Ballroom Friday night. And she's doing better than Brown.
Is Schwarzenegger so evil he would actually beggar widows and orphans? He is! Back to Goldmacher:
Schwarzenegger wants more cuts: elimination of California's welfare program and daycare for 142,000 children of low-income families, further paring of education funds and deep cuts in money for home health aides to help the elderly, blind and disabled.
Fair balance: The LAT did give Schwarzenegger space for an op-ed recently. But that was officially labeled as opinion.
The post L.A. Times Runs Most Biased Top Story Ever Published In Any Free-World Newspaper appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won't leave office for another five months, and I've already got breakup remorse.
Time and again, Reason has criticized the Gubernator. Time and again, I have criticized the Gubernator. But as he closes out his time in office with yet another budget cage match against the Democrats and their union backers, I feel honor-bound to present the case for Gov. Schwarzenegger. Here are some details I collected while working on an upcoming print column:
While government grew under Arnold, it didn't grow quite as fast as usual. According to the state controller's office, the total number of state employees under the discretion of the governor (i.e., not including legislative aids, University of California system employees, prison guards, etc.) is 237,654 right now, up from 222,866 in 2004, the first full year of Schwarzenegger's administration. That's about a 6 percent increase over six years.
Similarly, general fund spending, which was $71 billion in 2003, was is now around $86 billion — a relatively modest 21 percent increase over seven years. Considering net population growth that's still around 400,000 people a year, you might even make the case that general fund spending is about where it was when he took office. In keeping spending down, the governor has been a major beneficiary of the recession, which allowed him to make actual reductions in 2008 ($11.4 billion), 2009 ($31 billion) and probably 2010 (a projected $12.4 billion).
"If I were making the limited-government case for the governor, I'd probably brag about the spending," says Joe Mathews, author of California Crack-Up. "I just don't think that's a case he wants to make. I don't think there was some grand plan in the way he kept spending increases down. As a governor he's got a better record than Jeb Bush or Sarah Palin, but he doesn't want to talk about that."
In politics, the discretionary stuff is always the easy part, but Schwarzenegger also tried—and spectacularly failed—to challenge the power of public sector unions and roll back the crushing entitlements they have locked in. His 2005 slate of ballot initiatives—which I found underwhelming at the time—nevertheless threw a lot of light on the outsized political power of government employees.
On this and other battles with the unions, Schwarzenegger generally got his ass handed to him. But as Conan would say, all that matters is that two stood against many. David Crane, Schwarzenegger's advisor for "Jobs & Economic Growth," has made serious efforts to push back against the power of public employees—or at least give future Republicans and Democrats the opening to stand up.
"Once you get the voice to say no, it becomes easier the second time," says Marcia Fritz, president of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility. "He's giving the Democrats the chance to say no to the unions."
Fritz sees good things coming in Schwarzenegger's likely veto of Assembly Bill 1987—the anti-pension-spiking bill that has now become a pro-pension spiking bill—and in the governor's refusal to strike a deal on this year's budget unless it includes permanent changes to public sector pension structures.
"What happens in California is going to emanate throughout the country," says Fritz, who has been a pension hawk for many years and is optimistic that the depth of the crisis creates room for change. "We've got the worst combination of everything. It's not like Illinois where they mismanaged and overspent. We tried to manage and we still can't make it."
I will have more on all this in the upcoming print column. For now, while I can no longer say I'm a Schwarzenegger admirer, I'm still a fan. I have endured plenty of meetings with governors, generals, CEOs, senators and the current president of the United States, and by far the most engaging of them all—the only one of whom I can say "I'd still buy a ticket to see this guy"—was Arnold Schwarzenegger. In retrospect it's stunning how little his charisma helped in his fights against the state's political Integral. But I wish him luck in his last battle with the unions. It's the right fight against the right enemy, and it may yet turn out to be happening at the right time.
And finally, the ramping up of the Jerry Brown-Meg Whitman campaign makes one thing clear: No matter how bad Schwarzenegger was, his successor will be worse.
The post Was the Austrian Oak Cut Down To Size? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>* Why not just burn the money up? The $26 billion federal "jobs" bill passed today will include $2.5 billion "to help balance the state budget and pay the salaries of its schoolteachers."
* John "Cobol" Chiang, the state cotroller who is unable to fix his paycheck-cutting devices to reduce state employee payments, nevertheless reports that the state managed to spend a billion dollars more than projected during in the month of July. The numbers [pdf].
* As noted earlier, the controversy over the city of Bell's excessive pay for top officials has begun to draw in the cluster of neighboring towns. Maywood, the troubled burg that recently made a splash by outsourcing most of its city services, is cutting its close ties with Bell. That's significant because Maywood's "outsourcing" turns out to have been a cosy deal in which it allowed Bell—which seemed to be flush from ripping off its taxpayers—to take over many city functions. (Ousted Bell Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia is apparently still officially the interim city manager of Maywood, but that's expected to end soon.) Given the skill with which Bell diversified its liabilities, Maywood will not be the last place looking to get loose of Bell.
* Fish intifada! South Coast sea urchin divers spit seawater over new environmental bill that will protect the ugly and unloved sea creatures from harvesting.
* Powerless governor can't even lay people off: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appeals a Monday ruling prohibiting him from furloughing state workers.
The post California Roundup: Jobs! Jobs!! Jobs!!! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California's lame-duck governor has written an op-ed for the L.A. Times advocating budget cuts and pension reform, not new taxes, to close the Golden State's latest $20 billion budget shortfall. Excerpt:
[H]igher taxes and more debt do not grow jobs. They kill them. Let's also not forget that in last May's special election, the voters overwhelmingly rejected higher taxes. That is why I am fighting for a budget that cuts spending, does not raise taxes and finally forces government to live within its means. […]
We must also reform California's pension system for government employees, whose costs to taxpayers for just one of our major pension funds have skyrocketed from $150 million a year a decade ago to almost $4 billion this year. Private-sector workers already struggle to pay for their own retirement. Now they are being forced to pay more and more for the government workers' retirement, at the very time their own retirement accounts have declined. What is worse, in five years those pension costs will grow to well over $10 billion per year, and keep growing from there.
Over the next 30 years, the state will spend hundreds of billions of dollars just to service existing retirement benefit debt — further hammering taxpayers and crowding out funding for education, infrastructure, healthcare and other critical programs. In fact this year, for the first time ever, we will spend more on government employee retirement benefits than on higher education.
Whole thing here.
Schwarzenegger, who really should have been Chris Christie but wasn't, has had a gubernatorial career shaped like some kind inverse barbell: Great (at least rhetorically) at the beginning and end, but unfortunately the bad stuff in the middle weighs the rest of the thing down. Reason on the man here.
The post Schwarzie: "The public debt just for government employee benefits has grown so large that it is threatening to crush our private sector" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sandbagged! Plastic bag ban makes its way to Sacramento. Can a legislature that's less popular than lupus approve this new front in the war on sacks? FlashReport has a 30-gallon Hefty Steel Sak full of commentary.
I can't guarantee it: George Zimmer has given money to Proposition 19, the legalize-and-tax pot initiative on the November ballot. But George Soros, John Sperling and other supporters of past campaigns of decriminalization, are not stepping up. Is it the polling, the timing, the bad economy or the low quality of the bud? The L.A. Times John Hoeffel talks to the big donors.
Schwarzenegger post-mortems begin: The governor gets in on the action with a candid speech justifying his mixed-at-best tenure at the head of the nation's post populous state.
Another day, another city strangled by six-figure pension deals: This time it's Gilroy, that garlic-scented patch of heaven in the Santa Clara Valley. The Gilroy Dispatch pays tribute to the town's large and growing $100,000-pension club.
A good start: Modesto Bee reports that 2,300 government jobs have been cut in the San Joaquin Valley since the start of the recession.
The post California Roundup: Weed Freeloaders Won't Pay for a Good Buzz appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>* Society will always fear a strong woman: Destiny McMullen expresses herself by throwing a Taco Bell Burrito Supreme at a Sonora cop, hits her target center of mass, gets dragged off to jail.
* Dis-unions: The 4,800-member Engineers and Architects Association signs a contract allowing for slightly higher employee contributions. Service Employees International Union (which is in the process of gobbling up the architects union) tries to harpoon that "unprecedented and dangerous" deal.
* Taxpayers shell out $10,000 a month on a security detail for the former Assembly speaker. Karen Bass, a community organizer who went on to become an Assembly member and L.A. Times favorite, logged a fairly unimpressive couple of years as speaker before retiring in March in order to seek Diane Watson's seat in the 33rd Congressional District. A Bass spokeswoman says the sergeant-at-arms escort only tags along when Bass is doing legislative business.
* Grrrreat expectations: W.K. Kellogg Foundation gives $42 million grant to Cal Poly Pomona, continuing a relationship that dates back to Corn Flakes crank Will Keith Kellogg's original grant for the college. The grant is the largest in California State University history and will help fund the "12th most ethnically diverse university in the United States."
* Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he is willing to leave office without a signed budget if he can't come to terms with legislative Democrats. Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg says go ahead then if you're going to be like that. Schwarzenegger says OK I will.
The post California Roundup: If You Can't Pass a Budget, Then to HELL With You! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Cupla notes about the Failed Golden State today:
* California is still a one-party state. Not necessarily Democrat (though it still leans heavily that way), but in terms of legislative districts–you either live in District Coke or District Pepsi; the minority party rarely competes, and schlubs win office by getting 4,905 votes in a primary election. Today's primary will likely determine scores of seats that won't even get written about in tomorrow's papers.
* Wait, it gets worse! California voters, who are justifiably furious at how awful the economy (12.6 percent unemployment) and public policy ($19 billion budget deficit, with a bullet!) are going, nonetheless have almost no outlet for their frustrations in this election. This is in sharp contrast to May 2009, when a series of political establishment-backed ballot initiatives were routed in one of the biggest and most portentious electoral drubbings of our modern age. This time around, with the lifeless Democrats offering a bunch of stale political celebrities, and the Republicans likely choosing two ex-Silicon Valley CEOs for putative governor and senator who between them spent more than $75 million of their own money to win primaries that focused heavily on illegal immigration, about the only vessel for raw voter anger has been Proposition 14. Which, in grand California fashion, will likely exacerbate the problem it aims to fix, by replacing political-party primaries with open elections that graduate the top two vote-getters (from whatever party) to the November election, thereby kneecapping political competition still further.
* In the why-the-rest-of-us-have-to-care department, Reason Contributing Editor Carolyn Lochhead writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that our 50 failed states–led by you know who–are howling in protest at the inability of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to squirt another $24 billion their way:
California and most other states were counting on the money. California, facing a $19 billion budget hole, would get $1.9 billion, most of it to fund Medi-Cal. […]
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger joined 46 other governors in demanding that the Senate restore the funding when it takes up the legislation as early as today.
An additional $23 billion in federal aid to prevent teacher layoffs across the nation, pushed by the White House and Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, has been attached to an emergency war-spending bill that is exempt from "pay-as-you-go" budget rules. It also faces stiff opposition as worries about the growing national debt, which crossed the $13 trillion mark last week, have begun to trump concern about jobs.
* In case you were hopeful or worried about the California GOP morphing into something halfway effective, let alone non-crazy, consider this: Birther queen Orly Taitz has a non-trivial chance of winning the Republican primary for secretary of state.
* What impact is the Tea Party having? Mostly bupkus.
Some Reason.tv interviews with various candidates. First up, would be GOP senatorial candidate Chuck DeVore:
Next, gubernatorial candidate-turned DeVore/Carly Fiorina competitor Tom Campbell (just click on the link; embed is currently failing).
And finally, longshot Democratic primary challenger to Sen. Barbara Boxer, Mickey Kaus:
California readers, please share your pain in the comments.
The post California Election Primer appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The state of California's real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.
That's the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University's public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
To put that number in perspective, it's almost seven times greater than all the outstanding voter-approved state general obligation bonds in California.
Why should Californians care? Because this year's unfunded pension liability is next year's budget cut to important programs. For a glimpse of California's budgetary future, look no further than the $5.5 billion diverted this year from higher education, transit, parks and other programs in order to pay just a tiny bit toward current unfunded pension and healthcare promises. That figure is set to triple within 10 years and—absent reform—to continue to grow, crowding out funding for many programs vital to the overwhelming majority of Californians.
How did we get here? The answer is simple: For decades—and without voter consent—state leaders have been issuing billions of dollars of debt in the form of unfunded pension and healthcare promises, then gaming accounting rules in order to understate the size of those promises. […]
Instead of a government of the people, by the people and for the people, we have become a government of its employees, by its employees and for its employees.
That Stanford study is here [pdf]. And yes, we have been telling you so.
The Reason Foundation, which is the 501(c)(3) nonprofit (donate today!) that pays for Reason-branded journalism, also produces some boffo nuts-and-bolts public policy research and recommendations. Last week the Foundation released a roadmap for "The Next California Budget" (press release here, pdf study here), along with a plan (release here, study here) on how to save a ton of money on the union-mangled sinkhole that is the state's corrections system. There are concrete ways out of this politician-created mess, but it's going to take a category of public servant whose first response to fiscal crisis is *not* "Let's close the parks!"
The post We Are Out of Money, California Edition appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After TMZ caught first lady Maria Shriver violating the Schwarzenegger-signed law against talking on a cell-phone handset while driving, the Austrian Oak Tweeted: "Thanks for bringing her violations to my attention, @harveylevintmz. There's going to be swift action." WCBS TV asked the crucial follow-up:
Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear says that by "swift action," the governor means he'll ask his wife not to hold the phone while driving.
The non-haha part of the story, aside from how it provides yet another example that nuisance laws are made to be followed primarily by people who look like criminals, is that Schwarzenegger this week, in the midst of his state's ongoing financial free-fall, signed still another round of largely idiotic laws. A surface-scratching list:
* An anti-paparrazi law making it "a crime to take and sell unauthorized photos of celebrities in 'personal or familial activity,' and also target[ing] media outlets that purchase those photos, with violators facing fines of up to $50,000."
* A law requiring gun sellers and ammunition dealers to create and maintain a registry of all paying customers.
* A law requiring DUI convicts in four counties to install ignition-interlock breathalyzer devices on their cars.
* The Dogfighting Prevention Act, which "will substantially increase the penalties for spectators caught attending a dogfighting event to up to one year in jail and a $5,000 fine."
* A law prohibiting health insurance company from charging more for women than men.
* A law increasing the penalties for illegal fishing and poaching to "at least $5,000 and as much as $40,000 with a year in county jail."
* A law increasing by tenfold the fines for improperly using disabled placards to park in those sweet blue spots.
* A law allowing football's San Francisco 49ers to ignore the requirement that they solicit competitive construction bids for their new stadium.
* The Donda West law, making "health checks and a written clearance mandatory before being allowed to undergo plastic surgery in the state of California."
* A law reinforcing existing regulations that school buses "turn off idling engines within 100 feet of a school."
* A law creating a new "sustainable" label for seafood, contingent on fishing practices.
* A law that "increases penalties for charter bus operators who fail to comply with safety and licensing regulations."
* A law doubling the penalty for boat-abandonment.
I could go on all day–there are hundreds of the things.?
The post What Laws Will Maria Shriver Break <em>Next</em> Year? appeared first on Reason.com.
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