Forums: Arnold Mindell

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday mobilized members of the California National Guard as part of a federal effort to deter drug trafficking and illegal immigration along the border with Mexico. His order supports President Barack Obama's plan to have 1,200 National Guard troops assist with federal border protection, customs and immigration agents.

LOS ANGELES — If the mark of a real independent is lack of friends, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the quintessential nonpartisan in American politics right now. His approval rating has not risen above 30 percent since May 2009. California remains in deep fiscal distress. He is despised by the state’s workers (whose pay he cut), Democrats (who loathe his aversion to new taxes and his desire to cut entitlements) and Republicans (who wish those respective aversions and desires were stronger), as well as college students, public school parents and people who hate the smell of cigars. As Governor Schwarzenegger prepares...

Regulation: An initiative to suspend California's draconian climate law has qualified for the November ballot. The people can now choose between jobs and junk science and fight hot air at the ballot box. Thomas Jefferson once said that when people fear the government, there is tyranny, but when government fears the people, there is liberty. And right now there are politicians and bureaucrats in Sacramento who are at least very concerned. An initiative to suspend Assembly Bill 32 officially qualified for the ballot last week by gathering more than 800,000 signatures, far more than the 433,971 required. Those who signed...

E-mails and other records of Dr. Eric Whitaker -- one of President Obama's best friends -- have been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury... The investigation involves "faith-based initiatives" and health-awareness campaigns funded by the Illinois Department of Public Health when Whitaker ran the agency for former Gov. Rod Blagojevich... Obama has said he recommended Whitaker for that job, which Whitaker landed in April 2003. The president's friend resigned in October 2007 to join Obama's wife, Michelle, as an executive at the University of Chicago Medical Center. On Friday, Whitaker defended his work as the state's former top health official,...

Conflicts Of Interest: Supporters of suspending California's climate-change law submit signatures for a November ballot initiative. Among the initiatives' opponents is an administration energy official who stands to profit from its defeat. Opponents of California's draconian global warming law, Assembly Bill 32, on Monday submitted 800,000 signatures, almost double the amount required, to put an initiative to suspend the law on the November ballot. They believe, as we do, that AB32 will, when implemented, cost California, a state with 12.6% unemployment, more jobs in an already bleak economy, while raising energy prices and driving away more business with its unfriendly...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger so far has avoided the GOP gubernatorial fray. But Schwarzenegger's office couldn't resist lashing out Tuesday at Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner after Poizner's latest TV ad takes shots at the incumbent governor in an appeal to conservative Republicans. . . . It also features a quote from conservative Rep. Tom McClintock, who says, "Whitman would be Arnold's third term." The ad's kicker is, "After Arnold, don't we deserve a Republican?"

California is doomed for two simple but profound reasons: the cost structure is too high for most businesses to survive, and a boom-dependent economy. The dysfunctions crippling California would easily fill a volume: a dysfunctional Legislature that has been gerrymandered to protect virtually every seat; a dysfunctional proposition system which enables special interests to craft Protected Fiefdoms via the ballot box; recalcitrant public unions who don't see anything wrong with public servants getting 90% of top-pay in pensions while still earning big bucks as "contract employees," an enormous population of undocumented workers who pay only sales taxes, and whose employers...

The Sacramento Bee reported distressing news that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Meg Whitman, "the leading GOP candidate to replace him," have backed away from supporting a ballot initiative to reduce government employee pension and retiree health costs. The lack of support probably means the badly needed reforms won't get on the ballot. Both Republicans know this year's monumental $20 billion state budget deficit will pale compared to the fiscal train wreck looming from these ever-increasing, unfunded obligations. As Orange County Supervisor John Moorlach puts it, these retiree costs mean California is headed toward "economic meltdown." The annual tab statewide already...

Arnold has "come out of the closet" on the Stimulus Bill, lied like a rug about jobs created, and disparaged the tea party activists. He is basically through as the governor of California. Do FReepers think he will bolt (a la Arlen Specter) for the Democratic dark side? What sayist the FReeper nation?

Cap-And-Trade: The Grand Canyon State avoids a big economic hole by suspending its participation in a multistate initiative to fight climate change. As climate fraud is exposed, economic reality sets in. Will California follow?...

Cap-And-Trade: The Grand Canyon State avoids a big economic hole by suspending its participation in a multistate initiative to fight climate change. As climate fraud is exposed, economic reality sets in. Will California follow? Not since King Canute have government officials engaged in an exercise as futile as in 2007, when seven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces got together to form something called the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative to reduce regional greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2012. Leading the charge for the pact was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who insisted, "We cannot wait for the United States government...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday offered yet another way California can save on incarcerating illegal immigrants: pay to build prisons in Mexico. Schwarzenegger said in a Sacramento Press Club speech that rather than raise taxes, the state could find money by cutting pension costs, allowing offshore oil drilling and lowering prison expenditures. His budget calls for an $880 million infusion from the federal government to pay for housing illegal immigrant prisoners who have committed crimes in California. The governor also wants to rely more on private prison companies. But he also gave an off-the-cuff suggestion that California send undocumented inmates...

Regulations: A California legislator pushes a November ballot initiative to free the state from the job-killing shackles of a 2006 law designed to fight climate change. The other choice is freezing in the unemployment line. At last report, California's unemployment rate was 12.3%, with 2.25 million residents looking for work. So one would assume the first rule of holes would apply — when you're in one, stop digging. Yet there was Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger touting his state's green initiatives in Copenhagen as California barrels toward full implementation of its own version of job-killing cap-and-trade. "The desire and hope and desperate...

Bioethics: Five years after a budget-busting $3 billion was allocated to embryonic stem cell research, there have been no cures, no therapies and little progress. So supporters are embracing research they once opposed. California's Proposition 71 was intended to create a $3 billion West Coast counterpart to the National Institutes of Health, empowered to go where the NIH could not — either because of federal policy or funding restraints on biomedical research centered on human embryonic stem cells. Supporters of the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, passed in 2004, held out hopes of imminent medical miracles that were...

The "ought" decade was one promise after another turned into trauma for California. It began with a popular Democratic governor, judging from the voter majority that put him in office. But his popularity plummeted in tandem with the state's nosediving finances. The decade ends with a Republican governor who, at first, was every bit as popular, judging from the wide voter margin that elected him. His popularity and the state's finances likewise hit bottom. The chief distinction between Democrat Gray Davis and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger may be that the former was recalled from office, and the latter will be permitted...

California got $7 billion in state grants from Porkulus, and an opportunity to catch their breath while they attacked a monstrous state budget that desperately needs pruning. Congress has now begun to consider Porkulus II, with even more block grants for states, enabling them to paper over serious budget gaps. But that’s not enough for Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wants an additional $8 billion from the feds in order to bail out a state that seems incapable of governing itself: Facing a budget deficit of more than $20 billion, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to call for deep reductions in already...

Shedding jobs that once reliably attracted new residents, California grew at a slower pace this year than all but two other years since 1900, according to state Department of Finance figures released Thursday. The number of new births dropped. The number of new immigrants dropped. And more residents left California for other states than came here. The end result: Statewide growth from July 2008 to July 2009 was 350,000 people, or less than 1 percent. During the rest of the decade, California averaged 525,000 new residents each year. The four-county Sacramento region posted even more striking numbers, adding just 21,000...

Over the past few days, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been in Copenhagen making the bizarre claim to anyone who will listen that his job destroying environmental regulations are somehow good for the economy. He also made the even more off the wall assertion that America's economy would be stronger if only the entire country followed California's lead in this area, and that Governor Palin's common sense skepticism to the man-made global warming religion was somehow wrong. All of these musings by the Governator were forthcoming despite the fact that foisting his regulations on California's economy have chased businesses and the jobs...

California: While Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger worries about rising seas, his state sinks below the waves. Don't mess with Texas, they say. But California and the nation could follow its lead. Last Wednesday, Gov. Schwarzenegger released a new report based on research compiled by the California Energy Commission claiming that by 2100 San Francisco Bay would be more bay than San Francisco, with Fisherman's Wharf and Treasure Island under the rising waters of climate change. His show-and-tell, which included a new Google Earth application the commission spent $150,000 to help develop, goes a long way toward explaining the once-Golden State's slide...

Leadership: Alaska's ex-governor asks a question we'd like answered: Why is California's current governor pushing the same policies in Copenhagen that helped drive his state into record deficits and unemployment? The movie series that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name involved cyborgs traveling through time to alternately try to destroy or save one John Connor, who would grow up to be the leader of the resistance against a race of machines that ruled the planet. Prominent in the series was his tough cookie of a mom, Sarah Connor. Another Sarah has taken the lead in another resistance against another group...

fter Arnold Schwarzenegger criticized Sarah Palin’s stance on global warming yesterday, few thought it would take long for Palin to respond. She launched a broadside on her Facebook page, and reminded California’s governor that the “grain of salt” the Governator recommended should be taken with economic advice from the leader of a state in free-fall and unable to budget its money properly. Even if the world is warming, it doesn’t mean that the warming is either anthropogenic or catastrophic — and conservation doesn’t mean killing the economy: Why is Governor Schwarzenegger pushing for the same sorts of policies in Copenhagen...

<p>"Why is Governor Schwarzenegger pushing for the same sorts of policies in Copenhagen that have helped drive his state into record deficits and unemployment?" Palin wrote on her Facebook page. "Perhaps he will recall that I live in our nation's only Arctic state and that I was among the first governors to create a sub-cabinet to deal specifically with climate change."</p>

Why is Governor Schwarzenegger pushing for the same sorts of policies in Copenhagen that have helped drive his state into record deficits and unemployment? Perhaps he will recall that I live in our nation’s only Arctic state and that I was among the first governors to create a sub-cabinet to deal specifically with climate change. While I and all Alaskans witness the impacts of changes in weather patterns firsthand, I have repeatedly said that we can’t primarily blame man’s activities for those changes. And while I did look for practical responses to those changes, what I didn’t do was hamstring...

I’m paraphrasing, albeit only slightly. Not that he has many fans left among grassroots conservatives, but in case there are still one or two, this ought to finish them off: The California governor has become an environmental standard bearer for the Republican party, which is split on the merits of curbing emissions. Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, has attacked cap and trade and questioned any link between man-made emissions and global warming. “You have to ask: what was she trying to accomplish?” said Mr Schwarzenegger. “Is she really interested in this subject or is...

Those hoping to ride the state's high-speed train next decade will have to dig much deeper into their wallets than officials originally thought, a harsh reality that will chase away millions of passengers, according to an updated business plan released Monday. The average ticket on the bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles is now estimated to cost about $105, or 83 percent of comparable airfare. Last year, the state said prices would be set at 50 percent of comparable airfare and predicted a ticket from San Francisco to Los Angeles would cost $55. As a result of the...