Monday, January 3, 2011

I Wont Be Back

I Wont Be Back

For seven years Arnold has been California Governor. Has it been a good run? Well, let's be honest.. Not a shit lot got better. In fact, Arnold is leaving Sacramento with a 28 billion dollar budget shortfall. How the fuck did he get elected in the first place? Well, we need to go back to the 2003 re-call elections. Davis was doing a shitty job (just as shitty as Arnold is leaving with) and we decided to recall him. To be perfectly honest, I voted for him.

And for those of you who claim that people like me were stupid for voting for Arnold, I have one thing to say to you... What the fuck were the options? There was 135 bad candidates to choose from and Arnold was probably the only decent one. Oh, who did you want me to vote for? That fucking porn star? The weed attorney? Gary fuckin' Coleman? He's dead you know. You wanted a dead midget to run our state into the ground? I think not.



Even though Arnold leaves office today with only a 22% approval rating, the same rating that Gary Davis had that kicked off the whole process to get him recalled, Arnold has at least tried... and failing.

He went into this whole thing with the Meg Whitman stance that he wasn't in the pocket of anyone large business and he was going to handle the office like a business. Welp, look at how that turned out. His main goal was to target those bureaucratic "boxes" and much like in the Terminator film, you can't really change history. They still remain.

Though Schwarzenegger did successfully collaborate with the mainly democratic legislature to pass a landmark greenhouse-gas emissions law, which will probably be his crowning achievement. He did fail terribly at solving the state's fiscal crisis. Leaving Jerry Brown $28 billion in the red.



The biggest downfall that Arnold faced was trying to have the people love him by not laying down the honest truth that our state can not function without higher taxes. Look at how our school systems are in such a mess because he didn't want to do the hard choice and raise taxes. The UC system is at least triple the cost with far less of a budget to hire proper professors. The Cal State system is a complete mess right now. You know, there's people in other countries rioting over far less.

It's sort of sad but I do see a lot of similarities with Obama that I do with Arnold. He's charismatic, knows how to get the people voting, but when it came down to the tough choices, they're just pandering to the public instead of actually, you know, enacting the change they campaigned upon.



At least with Jerry Brown gets sworn into office today, he's more than willing to pull us off the tit and make those tough choices be faced. The scary truth is that we need more taxes. Especially if we want to keep the social services and schools properly funded. But then again, Californians hate paying taxes. We even set up new laws so that it's even harder to get taxes approved. Which I'm not sure how much of a help it is to Jerry Brown.

Isn't that the damn truth. We finally get someone who isn't afraid to raise the taxes to meet the high cost of living in California and yet we have to deal with a slew of new hurdles to get those taxes approved by the people. Which of course they'll never want to face the music on and have to deal with them.

Might I add, it's not like most of you did much to stop him during his re-election. Shit, he easily won that one in 2006. At one point his approval rating was around 60%. The truth of the matter is that once California hit the housing bubble, it didn't matter who was in the drivers seat - there was shit all that could be done about it. We were going to ride that crazy train into the ground regardless of who was at the controls.



The state faced a massive budget shortfall and its those lack of taxes and the ability to get them passed that was going to be harming us far more than a former actor governor. Yeah, sure. He borrowed heavily from the budget gaps during his first tenure, but if he didn't then he would have faced a budget shortfall much earlier in his term as governor.

If there's anyone you want to blame for California's shitty position, just blame the economy. That's the real problem.

Arnold does leave office doing one good thing. He granted clemency to a woman who killed her pimp when she was 16. So she will no longer be serving life and is now faced with only 25 years to life with chance of parole.

A woman who was 16 when she ambushed and killed her former pimp in a Southern California motel room has been granted clemency by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in his last full day in office.

Sara Kruzan, now 32, was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole for the 1994 shooting death of George Gilbert Howard.

Prosecutors said Kruzan was no longer working for Howard when she killed him.

Calling her life sentence "excessive", Mr Schwarzenegger commuted Kruzan's sentence to 25 years to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Her clemency petition cited years of abuse and psychiatric reports saying she suffered from battered women's syndrome.

So what's next for former Governor Schwarzenegger? Well, he may go back to acting if the right script comes his way. But at 63 years old, I'm not sure how much action he can handle.

"Will I still have the patience to sit on the set and to do a movie for three months or for six months, all of those things? I don't know,"
So it's really a toss up on what he may do. He really doesn't have much in the way of plans. I guess one plan is to drive his eco-friendly hummer out of Sacramento and not go back for a very long time.

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