Arnold Schwarzenegger is not a Democrat

Well, the proprietor of the Great Orange Satan has come back from his sebbatical with a, um, new perspective. Apparently Arnold Schwarzenegger is a progressive Democrat, and his evidence for this is a three-month-old Meet the Press appearance, a four-month-old political speech, and spin from a Democratic legislator. It's sad to see the so-called "leader" of the progressive blogosphere be turned around that easily.

In the past several months, the governor has:

• added 53,000 beds to our prisons, to the extent that the state government is paying more to incarcerate people than it does on higher education...

• refused to do anything about sentencing guidelines which have put us into such a mess that we have these overstuffed prisons in the first place and the nation's highest recidivism rate (he's also refused to fund a voter-approved drug treatment program that would alleviate this)...

• eliminated $1.3 billion in public transit funds so he won't have to raise taxes to balance the budget, preferring to continue to put bond issues on the state credit card to keep the budget artificially solvent until he gets to leave and it all crashes down for the next governor...

• tried to cut funding for the poor and the elderly in his mean-spirited budget proposal, and is deliberately fudging the numbers to make the state budget look better than it is...

• vowed to privatize the lottery to get a short-term cash infusion, again risking long-term loss of revenue...

• formulated a health care plan that's so completely ridiculous and unworkable that nobody, Democrat or Republican, will carry it into the Legislature...

• appointed every lackey he knows to state oversight boards, including his personal dentist and personal chiropractor, even though they have no experience in the boards on which they now sit...

Need I go on? Even his "signature" bill, the global warming initiative, is all talk and no action. He's not following through with tough standards to match the hype. Schwarzenegger has completely bamboozled a lot of Democrats in California whule they were busy paying attention to the national scene. That the state Republicans don't like him speaks more to the cruelty and batshittitude of our state Republicans (as exemplified by Duke Cunningham, Jerry Lewis, Gary Miller, Ken Calvert, Richard Pombo and John Doolittle) more than anything else.

Arnold RELIES on people who are only paying half-attention. He has no interest in policy whatsoever, and he's mainly concerned with appearances over reality.

I know Kos isn't much of a policy wonk, but this is really poor judgment.