As a Californian, one of the enduring takeaways of the Schwarzenegger era is just how much latitude he is given on the national level as some kind of transformative post-partisan leader, when those same reporters know that California is crumbling into dust under, and in many cases because of, his leadership. We witnessed this again today as national media types heaped praise on the Governor issuing a letter about the Obama health care reform plan:

“As Governor, I have made significant efforts to advance health reform in California. As the Obama Administration was launching the current debate on health care reform, I hosted a bipartisan forum in our state because I believe in the vital importance of this issue, and that it should be addressed through bipartisan cooperation.

“Our principal goals, slowing the growth in costs, enhancing the quality of care delivered, improving the lives of individuals, and helping to ensure a strong economic recovery, are the same goals that the president is trying to achieve. I appreciate his partnership with the states and encourage our colleagues on both sides of the political aisle at the national level to move forward and accomplish these vital goals for the American people.”

I love the phrase "significant efforts," by the way. Others might call them "failed efforts," but YMMV.

But this "praise" for health care reform is just a piece of paper. One would think that the national media would seek to know the actions of the Governor on health care - one would be wrong, but one would still think that. And it would take about 10 seconds of Googling to figure out that the Governor has vetoed key elements of the legislation working through Congress. Last year he vetoed AB1945, which would have banned rescission, the insurance industry practice of dumping sick customers for technical violations on their applications like typos the moment that they try to use their policies for treatment. He vetoed SB840, the universal health care bill, on multiple occasions in the past. He vetoed SB1440, which would have mandated that insurance companies spend 85% of premiums on medical care. He vetoed SB973, which would have created a public insurance option by linking local and regional measures. He vetoed AB2, expanding the state's high-risk pool for people with pre-existing conditions.

He basically has vetoed many of the same provisions to be found in the current health care bill. And he is threatening to veto every bill on his desk this year, including another bill to ban rescissions so that customers who have paid insurance premiums for years aren't left to die when they want to use their policies. Anthony Wright notes some of the other bills:

* AB 119 (Jones): GENDER RATING, to prohibit insurers from charging different premium rates based on gender.

* AB 2 (De La Torre): INDEPENDENT REVIEW, to create an independent review process when an insurer wishes to rescind a consumer's health policy, create new standards and requirements for medical underwriting, and requires state review before plan approval. Also raises the standard in existing law so that coverage can only be rescinded if a consumer willfully misrepresents his health history.

* AB 98 (De La Torre): MATERNITY COVERAGE, to require all individual insurance policies to cover maternity services.

* AB 244 (Beall): MENTAL HEALTH PARITY, to require most health plans to provide coverage for all diagnosable mental illnesses.

Dan Walters, one of the few pundits left in the state, calls these bills "nothing of cosmic importance". Well sure, he's not going to have a kid, and women are charged more than men by insurance companies anyway! To an entitled white man with a good-paying job, he doesn't have to worry about losing his policy or not getting comprehensive medical coverage. But to a woman who can't afford to lose her job to have a baby, or someone with a mental health problem who can't get relief for his suffering, or someone with an individual policy living constantly in fear that his or her insurance will get revoked precisely when they need it, these are issues of "cosmic importance." Anyone saying otherwise is ignorant.

And yet the Governor will have no problem holding these bills, and these people, hostage. His buddies at the Chamber of Commerce probably don't want him to sign them at all. So he writes a pretty letter supporting health care reform, while denying the very same measures to his own constituents. And national media types call him a "bold leader."

I'm shocked it's this high really.

A new PPIC Poll in California shows Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's (R) job approval rating dropped to a new low of 28%.

The last time a California governor's approval rating was that low was in 2003 when then-Gov. Gray Davis faced a recall election and was in a budget standoff with the Legislature.
A record-low 14% of Californians believe the state is headed in the right direction.

Can we find out who the 14% are that believe CA is headed in the right direction.
Atrios reminds us about the media obbsession over Arnold.

It's important to remember just how large a role our Village media had in promoting Arnold back in the day.

I wonder how many people that wanted to change the constitution so the Terminator could run for president now are birthers.

I am so glad I don't live in California, where propositions rule, an action hero pretends to be a governor and "no new taxes" is not a guideline but a fundamentalist state religion.

Reporting from Sacramento -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday signed a budget plan sent to him by lawmakers to close the state's monumental deficit, using his veto pen to impose nearly $500 million in additional cuts.

The new reductions will affect child welfare and children's healthcare, the elderly, state parks and AIDS treatment and prevention, going beyond the dramatic cuts that were part of the deal Schwarzenegger negotiated with legislative leaders.

Democratic leaders in the Assembly and Senate reacted angrily to his use of the line-item veto, disputing the Republican governor's authority to wield that power in this situation and portraying him as callous.

Schwarzenegger's aides said the cuts were proper, and the governor said they were necessary.

"This has been a very tough budget, probably the toughest since I have been in office here in Sacramento," Schwarzenegger said. "This budget is kind of like the good, the bad and the ugly."

The good, the governor said, is that the plan does not raise taxes and includes changes he says will make government more efficient, such as reorganizing and abolishing some boards and commissions.

The bad are the deep cuts to state programs that will touch millions of Californians, particularly its most vulnerable citizens, he said.

The ugly, Schwarzenegger added, are the new reductions he made because lawmakers left town after failing to fully close the state's deficit.

The Assembly on Friday capped a 20-hour session by rejecting provisions worth $1.1 billion that had been agreed to by the governor and legislative leaders.

The extra cuts the governor made Tuesday -- $489 million -- took nearly $80 million that pays for workers who help abused and neglected children; $50 million from Healthy Families, which provides healthcare to children in low-income families; $50 million from services for developmentally delayed children under age 3; $16 million from domestic-violence programs; and $6.3 million from services for the elderly. Among other reductions was $6.2 million more from parks, which could result in the closure of 100, rather than 50, of California's 279 state parks.

In addition, Schwarzenegger effectively gutted a program that provides local governments with funding to encourage property owners to preserve open space and to use land for agriculture.

Ted Lempert, president of Children Now, an advocacy group, called the cut to Healthy Families "particularly galling." He said a coalition, including his group, is spearheading a campaign to put a universal children's healthcare measure on the fall 2010 ballot.

"A struggling family puts their kids first," Lempert said. "What the governor and what the state has done is the opposite."

It really is time for a constitutional convention in California. We can't live in this great state with such a destructive legislative process that has finally run us into the ditch.

If you want to understand how much insanity Prop 13 has wreaked on the state's revenues, just think about DisneyLand:

It's no wonder Disneyland's owners call their amusement park the "happiest place on Earth." For much of its land, Disney pays only a nickel per square foot in property taxes.

In Hollywood, Capitol Records pays a dime per square foot in taxes on the land beneath its famous tower, which resembles a stack of records on a hi-fi. In downtown Los Angeles, owners of the Wells Fargo Center pay about $1.77 a square foot.

And then the problem is compounded by having a hack like Arnold in charge.

It just gets worse and worse.

Today we witness the damage that the line-item veto causes in the hands of a right-wing governor bent on using it to achieve his long-desired destruction of public services. Arnold's vetoes include:

• An additional $6.2 million cut from state parks, which will likely cause as many as 50 more parks to be closed (potentially 1/3 of parks - 100 total - will now have to close)

• Elimination of state funding for community health clinic programs

• $80 million cut to child welfare services

• Total of about $400 million in health care cuts, including further Healthy Families cuts

• Elimination of funding for the Williamson Act programs to preserve farmland from development

• Deeper cuts to HIV/AIDS programs, as Brian noted.

• Cut 80% of funding for domestic violence shelters

• Elimination of funding for California Conservation Corps

• Cut half of Cal Grant funding, but could be restored "contingent upon enactment of legislation that authorizes the decentralization of the Cal Grant Program and other financial aid programs as warranted."

The state legislature could try and override these vetoes. But as we've seen time and again, this legislature appears to have forgotten that the override power actually exists. It would be a very good chance for Democrats to force Republicans to take a stand on these programs. Either they vote to restore the funding, or they vote to kick kids off of health care and close beaches and parks, giving Dems a set of issues to run on in 2010.

It seems doubtful that such an override will even be attempted. And so California slides deeper into ruin.

I have been considering a run at Jane Harman's seat, but seeing what's happening on the state level has really caused me many sleepless nights.

Digby weighs in:

I sure hope the wealthy won't have reason to tread beyond their gated communities for the next few years because it's going to be a disease riddled, environmental hellhole out here for the rest of us. I suppose they can have supplies helicoptered in and bring their "concierge medicine" behind the fences. They're going to need to.
It's going to be expensive, but at least the losers won't be getting things they don't deserve.

I saw Arnold Schwarzenegger being interviewed by John Harwood and he told him on CNBC I believe that " we missed the iceberg." No we didn't. The budget is a disgrace and Californians are going to learn the hard way what has happened in our state. Jobs and services will be slashed at an incredible rate and we;ll all suffer for it. Even if Arnuld thinks we missed the iceberg, the state is going to sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Calitics has more:

So the Assembly is wrapping up their budget session, and it turns out that the Assembly came up $1.1 billion dollars short of the Senate's solutions. Oil drilling failed, and the local government raid on HUTA (gas taxes) failed as well.

So where does that leave us? These bills will go to the governor, and since there isn't concurrence, it will be roughly a $23 billion solution rather than $24 billion. But, the Governor has a line-item veto. He can make various cuts with his blue pencil. But $1.1 billion? Who knows. That seems like a tall order.

Considering what Schwarzenegger did the last time a partial solution was handed to him, I guess there's an outside shot that he'll just say no and open a new extraordinary session. But he'll probably just line-item some, and maybe make up the difference by eating into what is now a $900 million dollar budget reserve.

Is everybody ready to be back here in October?

...We'll have a couple days for final analyses, but let's remember that this is a terrible budget and a dark day for California.

...Let me clarify. The Governor can make line-item cuts but he doesn't necessarily have to, because this is a budget revision. He can also shift around the size of the reserve. In the end, he doesn't actually have to be in balance for a revision; that's a Constitutional need at the beginning of the process, as I understand it, not now. Clearly from the Governor's remarks, he's not going to veto the whole thing, so this is the "solution," for now. There also may be Constitutional problems with some of the stuff passed.

Among other places, I write at Calitics, the progressive site covering California politics. This is often a punishing experience. Since 1978, Proposition 13 has tilted the very structure of government in an unassailably conservative direction - 2/3 votes are needed to raise taxes, but only a simple majority to cut. As a result, politicians invariably take the path of least resistance, and as the Norquistian right rose to prominence in the state GOP, they learned that they could simply hijack the budget process for their own ends. State leaders compensated with borrowing and various gimmicks to put off the costs until after they left office. Servicing the debt became a bigger and bigger slice of the budget pie. Stakeholders who couldn't rely on the state used the ridiculously easy initiative process to pass unfunded spending mandates for themselves and all sorts of ballot-box budgeting. In good times, this uneasy balance worked... sort of. In even the most mild recessions, it would collapse.

That sets the stage for yesterday's horrendous budget deal, which closes a $26 billion dollar deficit with almost no new revenue, making steep cuts that amount to a reinvention of government's promises to its people, along with the usual gimmickry and a harsh, counter-productive set of raids on local government resources.

A local government official made a comment Monday afternoon, a few hours before the $25 billion deficit deal was reached, that seems to encapsulate everyone's feelings.

"As this budget hits the street today and people look at it," said San Mateo County Supervisor Rich Gordon, "I think Californians are going to say, 'How did we get in this mess?'"

It relies on about $15.5 billion in cuts and $11 billion in, well, other stuff (more on that in a moment).

Almost two-thirds of the cuts are in K-12 education, colleges, and universities (though it also includes a one-time supplemental payment to K-12 and community colleges of $11.2 billion). Other sizeable cuts are in corrections ($1.2 billion), state worker salaries ($1.3 billion in the current furloughs) and Medi-Cal services ($1.3 billion). Welfare assistance, health care for low-income kids, and in-home support services (IHSS) would also see cuts.

Also cut: funding for state parks, though nowhere near the level Governor Schwarzenegger proposed in May. Legislative staffers say a few parks would close, and the ones in question will be picked by the
administration.

Continue reading »

If you didn't see John McCain's weasel defense of Sarah Palin quitting her position as Governor after he vouched for her character when he chose her to be his VP, you should. David Gregory even listed his own political history, which included scandals, personal attacks and being tortured to list a sort of character building for not quitting, and asked again, "How could she just quit?" His responses were very weird. Palin threw in the towel when it got rough and walked away from the voters of Alaska to make a fortune of doubloons.

If anybody should quit a governorship, it should be Arnold because he's led the great state of California into financial ruin in tandem with the legislature. Is California worse off than Alaska? You betcha. Did Arnold quit? No...I kinda wish he would.

This is more bad news for the state in the sun---run by Arnold.

From the WSJ: Big Banks Don't Want California's IOUs

A group of the biggest U.S. banks said they would stop accepting California's IOUs on Friday ... if California continues to issue the IOUs, creditors will be forced to hold on to them until they mature on Oct. 2, or find other banks to honor them.
...
The group of banks included Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., among others.

I guess the banks don't think the 3.75% annual interest rate is worth the risk for a "BBB" rated debtor on the Rating Watch Negative list.

What a mess.

Duncan has a plan:

As I've said, I'm not sure what the Feds should do for California, but perhaps having the Fed guarantee California's IOUs, assuming they have that authority, so that banks will cash them for their customers might not be such a bad idea. It's just a bandaid for the overall problem, but will help some pretty needy people who need the cash.

I asked for California to get a bailout from President Obama in an earlier post instead of the IMF because soon, the money will dry up completely. I know a bailout won't solve the problem because we have the most frakked up legislative process in the US and that needs to really, really, really be fixed. Conventional thinking is that if we were to receive help then we'll never fix the problem. I agree with that, but what happens when the state is broke and nobody will play with us? As for Arnold, I'll take a phrase that Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson of The Closer commonly uses: Thank you, thank you so much.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's ineptitude has led California into complete ruin. David Dayen had the latest updates from last night.

d-day: Late Night With The Legislature, End Of The World As We Know It Edition

It has been truly depressing to watch the Twitter feeds of John Myers and Scott Lay tonight, as the mood shifted from guardedly hopeful to despairing. The Senate keeps voting on things and not coming up with any solutions. They tried to pass the stop-gap solution again, and came up short of the votes needed. They passed the majority-vote budget with some fee increases, and the Governor vetoed them. Let's all please remember that. With a stroke of the pen, the Governor could have ended this.

If SB 64 and SB 80 (the stop-gap) don't pass by midnight (and actually, in an hour or so, because it takes a couple hours to prepare the necessary paperwork), the state will forfeit $3 billion in cuts to the 2008-09 budget year, which they will have to find in the following year, and a total of around $7 billion in total costs, when you add in the costs of additional borrowing, etc... read on

Keep reading if you want to get depressed. This is a great state and in Arnold's hands, it's going down the tubes and fast.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget cuts will finally finish off our state.

The cuts Mr. Schwarzenegger has proposed to make up the difference, if enacted by the Legislature, would turn California into a place that in some ways would be unrecognizable in modern America: poor children would have no health insurance, prisoners would be released by the thousands and state parks would be closed.

Nearly all of the billions of dollars in cuts the administration has proposed would affect programs for poor Californians, although prisons and schools would take hits, as well.

“Government doesn’t provide services to rich people,” Mike Genest, the state’s finance director, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday. “It doesn’t even really provide services to the middle class.” He added: “You have to cut where the money is.”

In less than two weeks, the administration has gone from warning residents that a vote against the budget measures would send the state — some $24 billion in the red — into utter turmoil to sanguine acceptance that “the people have spoken” and that the government must move on.

It gets worse.

These proposals, as well as those that would make cuts to state parks, the prison system and other state agencies, are winding their way through Sacramento now, where they will be voted on by committees and eventually the full Legislature.

If lawmakers sign off on closing the health insurance program for children whose families make too much to qualify for Medicaid, California would be the first state in the nation to close the popular program. Begun in 1997, the program, known as S-CHIP, reimburses states at a higher rate than for Medicaid to deliver health insurance to children and teenagers. With the cuts to Medicaid, the state would probably increase its number of uninsured people by nearly 2 million, the California Budget Project says.

But Gray Davis just had to be recalled.

According to Schwarzenegger biographer Joe Mathews, the Governator was seriously considering ditching the GOP a few months ago.

Daily Beast:

A few months ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a few close associates discussed whether he should leave the Republican Party, according to two people familiar with the conversation. His friend Mike Bloomberg, the New York mayor, had become an independent. Maybe Schwarzenegger should, too. But the governor and his people quickly concluded that Californians already saw him as independent of the Republican Party. So what would be the point of a switch? (A spokesman for the governor declined comment.)

Arnold is far from a model politician, but he has always struck me as far too pragmatic and insufficiently insane to be a Republican. What say you?

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The Republicans in the California legislature are trying to close down the entire state. As everyone across America watches with awe how f*&ked up these idiot Republican politicians are acting, finally we hear someone step up to the plate and get at the root of the problem.

Lt. Gov Garamendi: I've been listening to what you had to say about Republicans in the Senate and Congress, we have an infection here and it's a Republican infection that's really spreading across this nation. Just what do they propose to do? Shut everything down? They did that with Newt Gingrich. They seem to want to do that in California and we're saying no way. no how. We're gonna build, we're going to go with Obama.

He linked these dead beat Republicans to the Newt Gingrich led Congress that got embarrassed by shutting down the federal government.
And Arnold Schwarzenegger gets a free pass from the California and national media time and time again. He was Enron's chosen boy to oust Gray Davis and he's almost single handedly led us down a path to ruin. The CA media needs to start looking in the mirror on this one.

And as the Garamendi explained, California has this super majority requirement on any vote that entails raising taxes in place that stalls all legislation.

We do have a two thirds vote....And then when you have Republicans that have taken a no new tax pledge and seem to just want to throw this state and really the nation into chaos and further decline in the economy, then we have the gridlock that we see. We need to change our constitution.

We need to hold these Republicans accountable...

It's a joke. California residents need to start taking action. We can't just sit around and watch these morons sleeping in their chairs because of obstructionist Republicans.

As Julia points out:

The 2/3rds rule is the reason why we can't pass a budget. We are one of three states that requires a 2/3rds vote. If we don't change that rule we will be right back here in 2010.

Cox and Moldanado are the ones to call. Here is our Moldanado action: http://couragecampaign.org/action/229/save-california-tell-senator-abel-maldonado-to-vote-yes-on-the-budget

They've received over a thousand calls. We can do better than that. Flood their lines.

UPDATE:

Sign the pledge to repeal the 2/3rds rule to pass a budget

Garamendi's plan of a 55% vote is way off base too.
..
d-day has an excellent post up about California's situation.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is irrelevant and a failure. State Democrats are spineless jellyfish. The death-cult Republican Party is a collection of flat-earthers bent on destruction. All well and good. Yet all of these discrete groups are enabled by a political system that does violent disservice to the people of the state and the concept of democracy. We must have a return to majority rule as soon as possible. For the sake of accountability...read on

The California budget mess is rapidly turning into a full-blown crisis, thanks to being held hostage by some of the legislature's minority Republicans:

LOS ANGELES — The state of California — its deficits ballooning, its lawmakers intransigent and its governor apparently bereft of allies or influence — appears headed off the fiscal rails.

Since the fall, when lawmakers began trying to attack the gaps in the $143 billion budget that their earlier plan had not addressed, the state has fallen into deeper financial straits, with more bad news coming daily from Sacramento. The state, nearly out of cash, has laid off scores of workers and put hundreds more on unpaid furloughs. It has stopped paying counties and issuing income tax refunds and halted thousands of infrastructure projects.

Twenty-thousand layoff notices will go out on Tuesday morning, Matt David, the communications director for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said Monday night. “In the absence of a budget we need to realize this savings and the process takes six months,” Mr. David said.

And what seems to be the problem? This may sound familiar:

Democrats, who had already given into Republicans’ long-held dreams of large tax cuts for small businesses and for some of the entertainment industry and a proposed $10,000 tax break for first-time home buyers, balked at Mr. Maldonado’s request that the Legislature tuck a bill into the package that would allow voters to cross party lines in primaries.

“I think with an open primary, we would have good government that would do the people’s work,” Mr. Maldonado said.

The Party of No, faced with fiscal disaster, invariably holds out for political advantage. Faced with Solomon's decision, they will always insist on cutting the baby in half.

Paul Krugman warns:

Everyone should be paying attention to the political/fiscal catastrophe now unfolding in California. Years of neglect, followed by economic disaster — and with all reasonable responses blocked by a fanatical, irrational minority.

This could be America next.

California is about to go out of business quite literally and still these idiot tax cutting freaky Republicans like Sen. Dave Cox are doing their best to do just that. A lot of Americans don't know that California has a weird super majority vote needed whenever raising taxes is involved at any level. And Republicans refuse to raise a single thing even when we're on the brink. Read what this moron, Cox said about his no vote:

The hang-up came in trying to reach the required two-thirds majority in each house, where three Republican votes are needed. The Assembly appeared to have sufficient votes lined up, but the Senate was falling one short.

Debate halted after Republican Sen. Dave Cox told reporters he was against tax increases and would not support the two-year budget fix. Before the Legislature convened on Saturday, it was thought that Cox might have supported the plan.''You can't help the economy of the state of California by raising taxes. Yes, there's a big deficit. But in the final analysis, you're going to have to find another way to do it,'' Cox said. ''My answer is no, and I'm not looking for additional information. I've made my decision.''

What way might that be, Cox? It's time to go after these politicians that only block sh&t from getting done in California and offer no solutions.

Hullabaloo:

Conservatism has been stripped of everything but its essence --- cheap thugishness. I honestly can't remember a time in the last 30 years when they weren't holding a gun to the states' head no matter what the economic climate. If times are good they have to cut taxes. If times are bad they have to cut taxes. It's no wonder that the regular folks decided they shouldn't have to pay taxes either.

I guess it puts the federal stimulus package in perspective. The reason the Republicans didn't vote for it was simply because it didn't include enough goodies for their corporate owners. In that sense, I guess it was a huge win for liberal principles.

Oh, and in a delicious bit of irony, I'm sure you recall that Schwarzenegger won office in a recall. And that recall was based upon a hissy fit engineered by the Republicans over Gray Davis' attempt to pay the states' bills by reinstating a modest car registration fee. Now, the same man who arrogantly strutted around calling Davis a girly man has presided over the worst economy in a generation, having done absolutely nothing while times were relatively good to set the states' finances right and is now raising taxes on everything in sight.

And d-day adds:

This is what happens when the entire process is co-opted by an anti-tax jihad that's been in place for 30 years, when the media just de-camps and a state of 38 million is governed under virtual secrecy, and Republicans are emboldened to ask for more and more and more with absolutely no political consequences. If you thought national sausage-making was abhorrent, welcome to California.

(full disclosure: I work for the Courage Campaign)

California faces financial "Armageddon," as Arnold Schwarzenegger bluntly stated a few weeks ago. And yet Arnold and his fellow Republicans rejected compromises by Democrats to rescue our state from a catastrophic budget crisis, unparalleled in the history of California.

Because of the ridiculous 2/3rds budget rule -- the super-majority required to pass a budget in the California state legislature -- and Arnold's failure to deliver even one vote from a small cabal of obstructionist Republicans, Californians may be getting IOUs in the mail next month instead of financial aid checks or tax refunds.

Many Californians are so overwhelmed by this paralyzing crisis that they've just tuned it out. As a result, Arnold is not being held accountable for his failure to lead.

That's why the Courage Campaign decided to try something a bit unorthodox -- raise awareness by using humor to highlight the absurdity of these IOU's, or what we are calling "Arnoldbucks."

We asked one of our members to see what would happen if he tried to use "Arnoldbucks" as legal tender at a few businesses in the area. You won't believe what happened. It's all caught on camera -- even a few security cams.

Watch the video and then spread the word and spread the Arnoldbucks. Download your own Arnoldbucks by clicking the image for a .pdf. Got any ideas on how you would use your Arnoldbucks, or other kind of actions we should take with Arnoldbucks? Let us know!