Arnold is fond of telling anybody with a microphone about how he wants a complete solution, none of this halfway stuff that would only help the situation. He wants a full solution now!

The problem is that even his ever-changing “plan” isn’t actually complete. Not only are there 0, count ’em 0, votes for the plan in the Legislature and there is no actual legislation, but the plan they have has big holes:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget package, which he has touted as a way to solve the state’s entire deficit, has a glitch that may jeopardize $10 billion in federal stimulus funds for California’s public schools, colleges and prisons. (SF Chronicle 7/9/09)

Basically, the stimulus tried to prevent the actions of 50 little Hoovers from counteracting the additional funding by cutting their own spending.  So, they have maintenance of efforts clauses.  Unfortunately, the Governor’s cuts slash into those requirements.

However, with some fiddling with the numbers, Arnold’s plan could adjust some of the way the dollars borrowed from the local governments are spent in order to meet some of these requirements.  If there is anything that our politicians are good at, it must be fiddling with accounting numbers. I think that particular skill is part of the freshman orientation for new legislators, and the governor’s people are basically PhDs in the subject.

But Sen. Steinberg points out the sheer lunacy of the Governor’s position: Get me a complete solution…never mind the fact that I don’t have one.

“It just shows that there’s rhetoric and reality,” said Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento. “He’s made these bold pronouncements that even he can’t deliver on in many cases, and this is a good example.” (SF Chronicle 7/9/09)

See, actually having a plan would be something Arnold is less familiar with: Real Leadership.

Really, an alternate reality is the only possibility for the nonsense coming out of the Horseshoe.  First, he rejects the Assembly’s payment deferrals that would keep the state from issuing IOUs.  That, apparently, messes with his games of brinskmanship, or as Sen. Steinberg calls them, “machismo game-playing.” In this reality, while the package is essentially a placeholder for the real cuts, it averts a mess next week.  Sure, it’s not beautiful in any way, but it needs to get done.  Even the Assembly Republicans acknowledge this.

But, the real clue that Arnold is stuck in an alternate dimension? He apparently thinks the federal courts were just kidding around with this whole prison medical constitutional issue:

Also on Thursday, the governor rejected a tentative deal his prisons chief struck last month with a court-appointed receiver in long-running federal lawsuits brought by inmates seeking better healthcare. The deal would have required the state to spend nearly $2 billion constructing prison medical facilities. “We cannot agree to spend $2 billion on state-of-the-art medical facilities for prisoners while we are cutting billions of dollars from schools and healthcare programs for children and seniors,” Schwarzenegger said.

The governor’s decision sets up a potential confrontation with federal judges who have sharply criticized his administration for moving too slowly. The judges have linked inmate healthcare problems to prison overcrowding and have said they intend to relieve it by ordering the release of about 50,000 inmates. (LAT6/26/09)  

The $2 Billion deal was in place of the plan that federal receiver J. Clark Kelso wanted to implement.  The cost of that plan? $8 billion. The thing is that Arnold really has no say as to whether he wants to spend the $2 Billion.  We have been deficient under the constitutional guide lines, and now we must pay the piper.  If we really want to lock up 165,000 people, we have to pay the price.

Given that Kelso has so scaled back his plans from what he originally had conceived, it is hard to imagine the federal court siding with the state here.  They have shown quite a bit of frustration with the Governor’s resistance. When AG Brown and Schwarzenegger tried to get the receivership lifted, well, smackdown seems a fitting word:

U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson in San Francisco said that although health care has improved under federal management since 2006, he has “no confidence that such improvements would continue, or even be maintained,” if the state regained control now. (SF Chronicle 5/25/09)

Now why would Judge Henderson be a skeptic of the state’s prison policies? Oh right, because of stuff like what is coming out of Arnold’s mouth right now.  For some reason, Arnold fails to grasp the situation that the prison mess has put us in. And he is unwilling to either deal with it by reforming the sentencing system, and releasing prisoners, or by providing more resources for the overcrowded prisons.

Whatever the reason for Arnold’s delusions, it would be far more helpful to have a governor who deals with the reality on the ground, rather than a reality as he would like to be.

In an interview with KQED’s John Myers, Arnold makes his usual level of sense, which is to say very little. As I understand his point, if you cut from one area, you can spend it in another.  Of course, this doesn’t really address the overall structural deficit, but, um, that’s Arnold for you.

He spends quite a while discussing privatizing prisons. He’s wanted to do it for a long time, partly because he’s no fan of the CCPOA (California Correction and Peace Officers Association), but also because he’s just really into privatization.  I love how he talks about all of the great (??) aspects of prisons being cheaper per prisoner, but ignores the failings of private prisons. Like this:

For-profit prison companies like CCA have always presented themselves as both cheaper and better than the traditional publicly owned prisons, staffed by state employees. However, from the mayhem and murders at the prison in Youngstown, Ohio, which eventually led to the company paying $1.6 million to prisoners to settle a lawsuit, to a series of wrongful death civil suits, and numerous disturbances and escapes, the authors document in detail a staggering range of failures of prison management.

• failure to provide adequate medical care to prisoners;
• failure to control violence in its prisons;
• substandard conditions that have resulted in prisoner protests and uprisings;
  
  criminal activity on the part of some CCA employees, including the sale of illegal drugs to prisoners; and
• escapes, which in the case of at least two facilities include inadvertent releases of prisoners who were supposed to remain in custody.

Many of the company’s problems are blamed on its labor policies. Because prisons are very labor intensive institutions, the only way a company like CCA can sell itself to government as a cheaper option than public prisons while still making a profit, is by using as few staff as possible, paying them as little as possible, and not spending much on training. (Alternet 12/15/2003)

So, ya, privatizing prisons is totally teh Awesome! That Arnold and all of his genius ideas!

You can listen to the whole interview at KQED here.

Now, it’s not clear that the Governor has the power to close the state government, but Arnold is threatening it.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed Wednesday to let California government come to a “grinding halt” rather than agree to a high-interest loan to keep the state afloat if he and the Legislature do not close the yawning budget gap in coming weeks.

*  *  *

State finance officials say California coffers will be empty in late July unless the projected $24-billion budget shortfall is resolved quickly. Schwarzenegger said that emergency borrowing would be too expensive and that his threat to block it was necessary to prod lawmakers into swift action.

A loan would only “give them another reason why we don’t have to do it now,” the governor said. “What we need to do is just to basically cut off all the funding and just let them have a taste of what it is like when the state comes to a shutdown — grinding halt.”(LAT 6/11/09)

Of course, the Governor is “challenging” the Democrats to make the cuts. Does he challenge the Republicans to be reasonable and take Tom Campbell’s idea of increasing the gas tax to raise $6 Billion? Or allow counties to raise their own vehicle license fees? Or to charge oil companies for the oil they take out of the ground? Why of course not, he’s too busy trying to shock doctrine the state.

And, oh, by the way, apparently everything Arnold has ever learned, it’s come from sports.  He points to the Lakers, and their teamwork.  For my part, I’ll point to a bodybuilder in the late ’70s, who didn’t mind cheating by using steroids. An “athlete” that defended the use of said drugs. Yes, this man is our Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He had no principles then, and he has none now.