Several editorials have appeared around the State criticizing the Schwarzenegger administration for the loss of the Tesla electric sports car company. This is from the San Francisco Chronicle:

PayPal, eBay and Tesla Motors are all Bay Area success stories. Tesla was seriously weighing the possibility of establishing its first factory close at hand in Pittsburg, along the East Bay manufacturing belt. Instead, construction on the $35 million, 150,000-square-foot plant will begin this April in Albuquerque, N.M. The 400 new jobs will pay between $24,000 and $100,000 a year, plus full benefits and stock options… Putting it bluntly, this state should have done better. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger actually test-drove a Tesla last November and told the Los Angeles Auto Show, ‘It was hot.’ And why doesn’t the Bay Area have its own regional lobbying office to push Sacramento into being more competitive about retaining companies already here and looking to expand? Meanwhile, at least the 160-employee Tesla headquarters is remaining in San Carlos, where its main function apparently will be to add more venture capital to the $60 million that has already come from Silicon Valley — funding that will now mostly be spent out-of-state.

“Aligning himself with congressional Democrats in the debate on the Iraq war, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger reiterated Sunday that the U.S. needs to set clear timelines for bringing troops home, lest Iraq devolve into a quagmire with no end in sight. Republican Schwarzenegger, speaking on CBS’ ‘Face the Nation,’ said Americans won’t support a war that becomes an open-ended commitment — a point, he said, that needs to be made to the Iraqis. ‘We should let the Iraqis know that we are here until this time. And then we’re going to draw back,’ Schwarzenegger said. ‘We’re going to draw our troops out of Iraq. I think a timeline is absolutely important because I think that the people in America don’t want to see another Korean War, another Vietnam War, where it’s an open-ended thing’. “

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine approved nearly $45 million in research grants on Friday to about 72 human stem cell research projects around the state. This amount far exceeds the U.S. government’s spending on this type of research making California the biggest financial backer of human embryonic stem cell research in the nation and possibly the world. President Bush had slowed American progress in this research area by limiting federal funding on the research. He and his supporters believe that blastocysts- microscopic embryos that are sometimes destroyed as during this research, are human life and have successfully blocked or delayed these projects. Proponents, however, point to the multitude of human diseases that have the potential to be treated by this technology including leukemia, cancer, parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injuries.

The California stem cell initiative, known as Proposition 71, passed 59 percent to 41 percent in November 2004, but the state’s ability to issue the bonds to support that research has been blocked for two years by lawsuits challenging its legality. While some legal issues remain to be settled, Governor Schwarzenegger authorized a $150 million state loan to the institute so it could begin funding grants without being delayed further by legal complications. The institutes’s board had originally expected to award 30 grants, for a total of about $24 million but a working group reviewing the applications was so impressed with the proposed research that it recommended raising the total to $45 million.

Governor Schwarzenegger, making a brief appearance at the board meeting thanked California scientists and doctors who will use grant money to try to unravel the mystery of stem cells’ ability to morph into the many different cell types in the body. “They are the new action heroes,” Schwarzenegger said, drawing laughs from the board members standing behind him and from people in wheelchairs flanking his lectern. “Thanks to the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine for making California a world leader in stem cell research,” the governor said, “Today, we are making history”

An opt-ed piece in the New York Times has raised some provocative issues about California and the future of the United States:

SOMETHING interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation — not even the United States — can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale. Moreover, the bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure.

Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that California is not simply another state. “We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta,” he recently declared. “We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state.” In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger proclaimed, “We are a good and global commonwealth.”

Political rhetoric? Maybe. But California’s governor has also put his finger on a little discussed flaw in America’s constitutional formula. The United States is almost certainly too big to be a meaningful democracy. What does “participatory democracy” mean in a continent? Sooner or later, a profound, probably regional, decentralization of the federal system may be all but inevitable.

Outrage, both real and staged, is growing as a result of the private recordings Governor Schwarzenegger made with his speech writer last year. A six-minute excerpt was first made public in September where Schwarzenegger and his Chief of Staff Susan Kennedy debated ethnic background of state Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia. After trying to decide whether she is Cuban or Puerto Rican, Schwarzenegger says: “They are all very hot. They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it”. Assemblywoman Garcia later said she was not offended by the remarks.

The tapes had been discovered on the Governor’s website by an aide to Democratic rival Phil Angelides, and Schwarzenegger clearly did not want any more of this information released. He essentially “called the cops” on Angelides by asking the State Police to investigate. Apparently as a result of the Police conclusion that no laws were broken in downloading material from a public government website, an additional remaining 3 1/2 hours has been made available from sources of the Los Angeles Times. Possibly the most damaging is where the Governor compare illegal immigrants to a guest who come into a family home where everyone is working, but who refuses to contribute and instead lays around reading a novel.

We see protesters carrying the Mexican flag, and stepping on the American flag, and speaking in Spanish and talking about, “We are going to stay”. So now imagine someone coming to your place and he has no place because his house burned down next door. Now, he comes to your house because of the misery he went through, or she went through, comes to your house now and you say, “Come on in for a week or two weeks until you get going.” And that person comes out and says, “I’m not going to move anymore. You know something, Gary? I’m here to fucking stay”.

The recordings are part of a brainstorming session, and in addition to saying things that might offend Latinos, he said some things they might like. He is apparently not in favor of any kind of mass deportations and doesn’t like the idea of a border wall.

In disclosures filed with the state this week, AT&T reported donating $25,000 to Governor Schwarzenegger’s campaign on Nov. 14 of last year. Four days later, on Nov. 18, Susan Kennedy, then a Public Utility Commission PUC member, voted to approve AT&T’s merger with SBC Communications. Twenty one days later, on December 5th, Governor Schwarzenegger paid that exact amount- $25,000- to Susan Kennedy claiming she was a “campaign consultant”. At the time, he had already announced that Kennedy would become his chief of staff, although she stayed on the PUC for the final month of 2005.

Consumer activists have rebuked the Governor and Kennedy because of the strongly suspected “quid pro quo” nature of this decision that was made in AT&T’s favor. Bob Finkelstein, executive director of the Utility Reform Network of San Francisco, said: “The timeline is pretty damning.” TURN, a group that advocates on behalf of consumers, also opposed the way the PUC approved SBC’s purchase of AT&T, and says the decision will cost consumers more than $330 million. Doug Heller, of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica, called on Kennedy to return the $25,000 she took from Schwarzenegger: “The PUC ought to throw out any votes that involved her on this telecommunications rule,” Heller said. “It is an absolute conflict that goes to the heart of what’s wrong with use of public officials in campaign functions”. A spokesman for the Governor denied any connection between the donations and Kennedy’s actions in her final days as a Public Utility commissioner.

Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee has expressed the opinion that the most interesting part of the Governor’s private recordings is his “earthy, blunt assessment of the immigration issue”. This discussion, he thought, was “rare glimpse at a politician working through a tough issue, one on which he is conflicted, and seeing how his mind works” and, Weintraud says, “it wasn’t very pretty”. The Governor was speaking to his speechwriter Gary Delsohn at the time and said that the the 1986 amnesty had: “fucked the American people” because it legalized millions of immigrants while promising better enforcement of the border and employer sanctions, which never materialized”.

Governor Schwarzenegger compared the situation of illegal immigrants to “squatters” in Zimbabwe. “They come and land, you can’t then get rid of them”, he says. He then rather harshly compared them to house guests that come for a visit but don’t work and don’t leave, and he marveled at the “Plasa de Mexico” shopping mall that has been built in Linwood. “I was down there” he said, “Everyone only spoke Spanish, every shop was in Spanish, every sign was in Spanish. They create a Mexico within California”.

Schwarzenegger also said that it makes no sense to try to round up 12 million illegal immigrants or to split up extended families, and said he didn’t think the border fence would work because people could tunnel under it but he didn’t like it anyway because it reminds him of the Berlin Wall. “I come from a country where we had walls around castles, we had walls around houses, and we had walls around– we had the Berlin Wall- we had walls everywhere. But we always looked at the wall as kind of like the outside of the wall is the enemy. Are we looking at Mexico as the enemy? No, it’s not. These are our trading partners.”

The Sacramento Bee has publish transcripts of the Governor’s wide ranging opinions in these recording at this link.

“Personal income tax receipts coming into the state in January fell $1.3 billion below Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s revenue estimates in the spending plan he released last month, the state controller said Tuesday… ‘Tax payments are down about $1 billion, and we don’t yet have the source of that decrease’, said Controller John Chiang, holding a news conference at the state’s tax-collection center, where 2006 tax returns have begun to trickle in. Chiang speculated that the state’s slumping housing market might be a cause of the revenue decline.”

The health care plan proposed by Governor Schwarzenegger and similar plans proposed by the legislature will not provide universal health care coverage, according to an analysis in New American Media. “instead of a solution that will really solve the crisis the plan… primarily serves to expand the role of the insurance industry in health care, and would force millions of Californians to accept substandard, unaffordable health plans. With no check on rising premiums… many Californians may end up saddled with bare-bones plans with limited benefits that, Schwarzenegger suggests, include out-of-pocket deductibles of up to $7,500 per individual and $10,000 per family. In other words, the average Californian may well have to pay for all their medical expenses in addition to the premiums the law forces them to buy. Or many could just forgo preventive care and other medical visits, resulting in more pain and suffering and greater costs down the road.

“The former Democratic gubernatorial candidate’s campaign did not commit a crime when it downloaded an audio file of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger saying Cubans and Puerto Ricans are feisty because of their mixed black and Latino blood, the state police said Friday. The campaign of former state Treasurer Phil Angelides said it obtained the file from a public portion of the Republican governor’s Web site, but Schwarzenegger’s staff said the audio files were obtained without authorization from a password-protected area and asked the Police to investigate. The California Highway Patrol concluded in a report released Friday that the administration itself put the recording on a Web site devoted to Schwarzenegger’s speeches, and that a password was not necessary to access the file. Cathy Calfo, who was Angelides’ campaign manager, said in an e-mail statement that the investigation ‘confirms what we stated from the outset: The governor’s taped remarks were publicly available on a publicly funded state Web site.’ She called the CHP investigation ‘phony’ and said it was launched ‘to intimidate.’ “

The Los Angeles Times has reported that Governor Schwarzenegger racked up more than $2 million in campaign debt in last year’s election. In spite of this, the Governor paid huge “bonuses” to his staff for moonlighting work on the campaign while on the state payroll. After his victory on Nov. 7 the governor paid more than a quarter million dollars in bonuses to four of his senior staff members including a payment of $100,000 to Susan Kennedy, his Chief of Staff. A spokeswoman for the Governor said, “They put in a tremendous amount of hours on the campaign trail before and after work and on weekends, and they were compensated for that time.”

Do they really expect us to believe this nonsense? Even private sector salaried workers are expected to be dedicated to their jobs and are not paid for overtime work. Government employees are never supposed to use their jobs to collect pay offs like this- especially when they involve the obvious potential for conflict of interest. With the responsibilities associated with being senior officials in the California government, exactly how much free time do these guys have? The Governor and his staff are on extremely shaky ground here. As anyone who has tried to contact the Governor’s Office knows, unless you are a big shot they are just not interested.

As the Times reported, the Governor won’t have to struggle to cover his campaign debt, “Now that Schwarzenegger is embarked on another four-year term, he can tap businesses and other special interests whose fortunes depend on state action”. This is just one baby step removed from total corruption. Every decision made by the Governor’s office involving these campaign contributors must now be considered to be tainted. This is just plain wrong, and the money should be returned without delay.

The California Building Standards Commission has unanimously approved the use of PVC piping in home construction. Chlorinated polyvinyl chloride pipes are much less expensive than copper piping but have been criticized because of the possibility that toxic chemicals could leach into the soil or water. California is one of the last States to approve these pipes but the timing of this decision has raised suspicions. The building industry’s has made more than $16 million dollars in contributions to Governor Schwarzenegger since 2003 and nine of the 10 commission members who approved the pipe change are Schwarzenegger appointees.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Four senior aides to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger were paid nearly a quarter-million dollars in bonuses for political work they performed during the governor’s race – money that came from insurers, oil companies, real estate developers and other private interests that contributed to the governor’s campaign. Chief of staff Susan Kennedy received a $100,000 bonus as a reward for the time she devoted to Schwarzenegger’s reelection bid, the governor’s office said Friday. With that bonus, Kennedy has collected $323,500 in campaign and taxpayer money in her year as Schwarzenegger’s top aide.

Now that big Corporations are greasing the palms of people in our Government, small business and everyday citizens no longer stand much of a chance to influence the policies of this administration. Maybe the Governor should give them another bonus for doing their normal administrative duties- or better yet, dock their pay for all the things they ignored while they were playing politics. Like for example, responding to letters written to them by ordinary citizens.

The Orange County Register has reported that Governor Schwarzenegger completely ignored the existence of a private sector database on school performance when he made the call in his state-of-the-State address for a public sector database that does exactly the same thing. Since we have not been able to learn anything about the State’s information technology plans (if any) for international business development, this report gave us pause. The state of California has an almost unbelievably bad track record in information technology projects, and some absolutely huge failures. Even though some of the same staff members were involved in some of those failures, we remained hopeful that they would consider doing things differently.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has formally invited California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to visit Canada. Harper and Schwarzenegger met in December at the airport in Mexico, where they were both attending the inauguration of President Felipe Calderon. The governor told Harper he wanted to come to Canada on a trade mission and the prime minister “encouraged him to come,” said Genevieve Desjardins, spokeswoman for the prime minister.
The Vancouver Sun