California Republicans Set Their Budget Priorities

And those priorities are...

Leaving poor people on their own to die:

After holding up the state budget nearly a month past deadline, Senate Republicans offered Tuesday to end the impasse if Democrats would move tens of thousands of poor families off welfare and make dozens of additional program cuts.

The linchpin of the plan, Ackerman said, is a $324-million cut in the state's welfare program. The cut was initially proposed by the governor in January, but Schwarzenegger had not been aggressively pushing for its inclusion in the spending plan adopted by the Legislature [...]

Advocates for the poor were alarmed to see the governor's January proposal revived. They said it would result in as many as 40,000 families losing state assistance.

... and ensuring that the planet continued to be destroyed by man-made causes:

Several Republican Party Senators have threatened to block the entire state budget unless the California Legislature accepts a recent polluters’ plea to ignore global warming pollution when assessing a project’s environmental impacts under CEQA. This “ostrich exemption” would allow polluters to continue sticking their heads in the sand, pretending that projects like oil refineries, freeways, and suburban sprawl simply don’t create greenhouse gases. It’s dangerously loopy logic, but if they can convince the Senate to play along, we could see California’s bourgeoning fight against global warming come to a skidding halt.

Hey, at least we know where they stand, right? Now I know why they were hiding their criticisms for so long...