A Sad, Pathetic Man

Arnold Schwarzenegger thinks he's got a "hook" for the budget crisis. It's so stupid it'll probably work.

In between vetoing acceptable solutions for the budget crisis, Schwarzenegger directed his staff to create a YouTube video of a Senate hearing held today on SB 135, which would ban animal cruelty and the practice of tail docking of dairy cows. Simply because it's mildly annoying to have a tail in their faces while working, farmers chop them off of cows, for no material benefit to hygeine or anything else, and to the potential detriment of milk production by increasing stress. It's illegal in much of Europe and opposed by the American Veterinary Medical Association. There's an article here.

Apparently the 63% of the voters who passed Prop. 2 last November were wrong - animal cruelty is a secondary issue to the very important work of wasting billions of dollars through stubbornness.

So in the YouTube video Schwarzenegger cuts back and forth from the hearing to his schoolmarmish denunciation in his press conference to create the impression that "in the midst of the budget crisis, the Senate is debating cow tails."

Hey Arnold, this is something called "governing." I know you know nothing about it, since you spent a month dithering with different budget solutions while the legislature was holding a month's worth of public sessions on the budget. But lawmakers actually can do more than one thing at a time. Some have standing committees, while others, in the leadership, can run into the brick wall that is the California budget process over and over, a brick wall you just applied with a new coat of paint by vetoing real solutions that would have stopped $7 billion dollars in additional cuts and the issuance of IOUs. For anyone who has been this much of a failure to say one word about how OTHER people govern is absurd.

By the way, Darrell Steinberg has already cancelled all future policy committee hearings to focus on the budget, which I think is a silly and unnecessary reaction to the rantings of a dullard Governor. But as long as we're going down this road, here are a few tweets I contributed exposing the Governor's horrible inattention in the midst of a budget crisis:

Right now, in the midst of a budget crisis @Schwarzenegger actually slept for EIGHT HOURS! That's not leadership #cabudget
19 minutes ago from web

Right now, in the midst of a budget crisis @Schwarzenegger had dinner... at a restaurant! That's not leadership #cabudget
19 minutes ago from web

Right now, in the midst of a budget crisis @Schwarzenegger excused himself to go to the bathroom! That's not leadership #cabudget
19 minutes ago from web

Right now, in the midst of a budget crisis @Schwarzenegger breathed both in and out! That's not leadership #cabudget
18 minutes ago from web

Join in with your own if you want.

This is just idiotic grandstanding from the Governor, who appears to know nothing about public policy or the American system of government. Any reporter who runs with this should be ashamed of themselves.

Prop Watch

Welcome to a probably not-so-regular feature, offering the latest news on the ballot propositions. The Calitics Editorial Board will be out with their endorsements on these initiatives sometime next week.

• Prop. 1A: A lot of good stuff on this race at Robert Cruickshank's California High Speed Rail blog. For instance, Arnold has come forward with his support:

There is far more economic opportunity in fighting global warming than economic risk....We shouldn't let the budget crisis hold back good things for the future. 20 years from now you can't look back and say "well they had a budget crisis so we didn't do it." Just because we had a problem with the budget does not mean that people should vote "no" on high speed rail. Our rail system in America is so old, we're driving the same speed as 100 years ago, the same system as 100 years ago. We should modernize, we should do what other countries do...We should start in this state, we should show leadership.

Absolutely, especially when you consider that initiatives which reduce emissions routinely save money and improve quality of life. A recent study showed that HSR would be a tremendous economic benefit to the Central Valley, with $3 billion in direct benefits and the creation of over 40,000 new construction jobs. You can add that to the reduction of billions of pounds of CO2 annually, which would be significant in that region at a time where interest groups are successfully suing the city of Fresno for its failure to curb pollution and protect the environment.

In other news, The LA Times has come out in favor, and check out this neat little graphic anticipating the train route.

• Prop. 2: You can see it by clicking on the ad on the side, but, you know, Piggy Wonder deserves some main-page love. Joe Trippi is apparently involved in the Prop. 2 campaign, which would help stop animal cruelty; I got an email from him promoting this video.

• Prop. 5: The LA Times has a series of profiles on all the propositions, and here's their edition on Prop. 5, which would finally increase treatment for nonviolent offenders like drug users instead of warehousing them at our overstuffed prisons. Opponents are smearing this by saying its true intent is to legalize drugs, but the failed Drug War is the great unmentionable sinkhole in state and national budgets, and a smart policy emphasizing rehabilitation is desperately needed, especially in California. The No on 5 people must have better spinmeisters, however, as most of the newspapers in the state have come out against the measure. Right, because the policymakers have done such a stellar job in sentencing law, we should just leave it to them.

• Prop. 8: An update on those million yard signs that were "in route" from China to the Yes on 8 campaign: they're still not here.

It seems that the signs, some of them outsourced overseas, didn't all arrive in time for the September event. And many still haven't reached supporters of the measure that would amend the state Constitution to ban gay marriage.

"It takes longer to get a million than we thought," said Sonja Eddings Brown, deputy communications director for the Protect Marriage coalition [...]

Brown tried to spin the production glitch as a positive thing for the campaign -- a sign, so to speak, of the overwhelming demand for lawn signs by voters who wanted to participate in "the most unprecedented and largest grass-roots effort ever attempted in California."

Oh that's just a FAIL.

Meanwhile, when the most reactionary editorial board in the state, the Orange County Register, comes out against your proposition, you know you're having a tough time selling it. As for the right-wing boycott of Google for opposing Prop. 8, the website orchestrating it advises its supporters to follow the fate of the proposition - on Google News.

I think I'm going to miss this initiative, it's been hilarious so far.

E. Coli Conservatism

By now you've heard about the 134 million pound recall of beef, after a Humane Society video showed employees at a slaughterhouse abusing downer cows and forcing them into the food supply.

The recall applies to beef slaughtered at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. since Feb. 1, 2006. The company has produced no meat since Feb. 4 of this year, when operations were suspended.

The action came nearly three weeks after the Humane Society of the United States released a video showing workers at the plant using forklifts and water hoses, among other methods, to rouse cattle too weak to walk. In addition to issues of animal cruelty, the video raised questions about whether so-called downer cattle were entering the food chain in violation of federal regulations.

Although the Humane Society said at least four non-ambulatory cattle had been slaughtered for food, the USDA had repeatedly said it had no such evidence. On Sunday, federal officials said for the first time that they had evidence such cattle from Hallmark had been processed for food.

There have been enough of these videos made by PETA, the Humane Society, and other groups, that you have to figure that this kind of animal cruelty is the norm. Businesses want to maximize their profit and that means using every animal as meat, regardless of their physical health or disease. And the reason is very simple: there aren't enough resources for the USDA to inspect all of the plants. They have too few inspectors and not enough funding. With little oversight comes many opportunities for abuse, because there won't be any consequences. Democrats can investigate the process all they want; like the pet food recall, like the toy recall, they'll discover that nobody's doing any overwatch.

This is how the "drown government in the bathtub" ideology of conservatism ends up impacting everyone's real life. Their goal is to strip as much regulation as possible for business, and you can only infer that they don't care about the results. Just another thing at stake in this election.

Son Of Huckabee

I think it's wrong to go after family members of a political candidate. It wasn't proper for the right to highlight Bill Carter or Chelsea Clinton, and I don't think it has any place in our political debate.

But Radar Online doesn't, and since they've already shown this picture of Mike Huckabee's son...



What is he, the tag-team partner of Macho Man Savage?

Incidentally, he's also been arrested for carrying a loaded Glock through airport security, and he was involved in an incident that let to the killing of a stray dog. What's with all of the Michael Vick Republicans? Bill Frist, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush...

Atlanta Falcons Become America's Least Favorite Team

I don't know what kind of unfeeling soul you have to be to fight dogs in pits against one another like Michael Vick did, and apparently the indictment has even worse cruelties in it:

Vick and his codefendants killed no less than 8 dogs that either lost fights or failed fight tests. The method of killing ranged from electrocution, drowning, hanging to slamming a dog’s body to the ground until dead.

Unfathomable, and I say that not just as a dog owner but as a human being.

I don't think this kind of sadism is an outgrowth of football itself, but more from a position of privilege, where the perpetrator thinks he cannot be touched or held accountable. We take kids out of junior high school and pamper them, slide them easily through school, give them tens of millions of dollars, and cover up for them if anything goes wrong. It's the lack of consequences for actions that's the problem.

Thus ends my obligatory monthly sports post.

New 527

I am not affiliated with this campaign. Just passing it along.

Whoops, There Was A Debate?

I completely forgot that there was a Democratic debate tonight, and ended up watching the NBA draft (and seeing my 76ers get a bunch of solid but unspectacular players to add to their unspectacular roster. By the way, why does anybody think the Knicks did well to get Zack Randolph? They already have Curry in the middle, so that'll be clogged, and the whole roster is still a bunch of malcontents. Francis for Randolph seems to me like cancer for cancer.)

Reuters has a recap of the debate, which sounds like it was pretty substantive. The issues certainly were more geared towards working people, in addition to blacks and Hispanics. And all of the candidates, from what I've read, were well-received and well-versed on the issues.

It certainly is a far cry from the Animal Cruelty Party:

The behavior of K'Lo's beloved Oven Mitt does raise the issue of why so many Republican politicians have a defective chip in their brains if not an outright cruel streak when it comes to animals. It's a most disturbing pattern.

For wholesome backyard summertime fun, George Bush used to blow up frogs with firecrackers.

His vice president, Dick Cheney, takes part in canned hunts and slaughters anything that flies in a maestrom of exploding feathers.

Former blight on the landscape Bill Frist earned the nicknames "the Kitty Kevorkian" and the "Meow-Mix Mengele" because of his exploits as a medical student: "Frist disclosed that he went to animal shelters and pretended to adopt the cats, telling shelter personnel he intended to keep them as pets. Instead he used them to sharpen his surgical skills, killing them in the process."

Rudy Giuliani was so possessed of rabid ferretphobia that he pathologized the entire lovable race of pet companions and their devotees.

Of the Republican contestants, the most pet-friendly by far is John McCain, whose sinking poll numbers indicate that the modern Republican party has no place for someone who practices kindness to animals as a way of life.

Democrats '08: We Love Puppies!

With only 60 million dog owners in the US, this won't be a problem

There's no other way to describe this other than sadist.

Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family's hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon's roof rack. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog [...]

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ''Dad!'' he yelled. ''Gross!'' A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.

(h/t)

Look, we already know that Romney doesn't think impersonating a police officer is a crime, why would he think animal cruelty is one?

Also, say what you will about George Bush, but when he tortures his dogs, at least he does it by accident. This guy apparently has pre-meditated plans of sadomasochism.