…The Governator?

He’s been a famous body builder. He’s been a killer cyborg from the future. He’s been Governor of California. And now, in this week’s exclusive cover scoop, Arnold Schwarzenegger reveals his plans for the next phase of his extraordinary career: He’s going be a cartoon superhero, known as The Governator.

“When I ran for governor back in 2003 and I started hearing people talking about ‘the Governator,’ I thought the word was so cool,” Schwarzenegger, 63, tells EW in his first press interview since leaving office last January. “The word Governator combined two worlds: the world of politics and the movie world. And [this cartoon] brings everything together. It combines the governor, the Terminator, the bodybuilding world, the True Lies…”

An animated series about a cyborg from the future who can bench-press the Golden Gate bridge and has a secret double life as a counter-terrorism operative who somehow ends up in politics and triples the debt of California? Sounds like an interesting combination.

Darnit. I was hoping his first project would be a sequel to “Hercules in New York.” The original left so many unanswered questions — one of them being, “What!?”:

Update: I’m getting tweets like this one taking issue with my use of the word “entertainment” in the title. Point taken.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Now that Arnold has some extra free time, he’s looking to get back into the movies:

Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger tweeted on Thursday that he is ready to return to show business.

“Exciting news,” he wrote. “My friends at CAA (Creative Artists Agency, his talent firm) have been asking me for 7 years when they can take offers seriously. Gave them the green light today.”

The most topical starring role for the ex-governor and current global warming activist’s return to full-time acting would be to reprise his role as Mr. Freeze, this time in a sequel to Al Gore’s movie, except not as fictional:

Just a suggestion. Feel free to weigh in with yours.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Retiring celebrity governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California was bad for the GOP in so many ways, I’ve stopped counting them.

So, how did Schwarzenegger leave office? By committing one last shameful act of back-scratching politics as usual and granting a commutation to the son of a Democrat political crony, former California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (his longtime collaborator on job-killing environmental regulations) .

Nunez’s privileged son, Esteban, was serving 16 years (already a reduced sentence resulting from a plea bargain) for his role in the vengeful stabbing/manslaughter of a college student, Luis Santos. Nunez and other defendants were involved in a conspiracy to cover up the crime, according to another member of their gang. Before he pleaded guilty, Nunez had his lawyers trying to blame the victim for his death. Oh, and there’s this damning piece of responsibility-evading crap from Nunez that was admitted as evidence before Nunez ducked trial:

“Gangsta rap made us do it.”

Schwarzenegger the movie tough guy didn’t have the balls to notify the murder victim’s family of the partial commutation, according to the L.A. Times.

For shame:

In his final night before leaving office, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger commuted the prison sentence of the son of former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez who had pleaded guilty to taking part in the slaying of a college student.

Schwarzenegger announced the move in a batch of eleventh-hour press releases e-mailed to reporters…

…Fabian Nuñez, a Democrat, grew close to the governor while speaker. The two worked together to pass the state’s landmark global warming law, which was a signature achievement of Schwarzenegger’s time in office. Fabian Nuñez is a business partner of the governor’s chief political advisor at the consulting firm Mercury Public Affairs.

“We are totally outraged,” said Fred Santos, the father of Luis Santos. “For the governor to wait until the last day in hopes it would fly under the radar is an absolute injustice.”

Santos, a software engineer in Concord in Northern California, said Esteban Nuñez “had already gotten lucky once” when prosecutors accepted a plea bargain that allowed him to avoid standing trial on murder charges, which could have led to a life sentence.

He said the family was not warned about the impending commutation and learned about it Sunday from reporters.

Arnie didn’t have time to pay the Santos family the courtesy of a heads-up. But he did have time to chum it up with Nunez at a high-powered global warming shindig in October and yuk it up together at his retirement roast last month:

This is bipartisan political cronyism at its worst.

DLTDHYOTWO, Governator.

Admittedly, it would be a perfect fit: Who’s more qualified to peddle the most expensive myth in history than a guy who made a fortune in fiction?

Is Arnold Schwarzenegger angling for a job in the Obama administration?

In an interview with editors at the Los Angeles Times, the outgoing California governor said he was in “no rush” to find a new job when his term ends next month. But asked specifically whether he’d consider a post working for President Obama, he said yes and began to “riff on his credentials,” according to the Times’ David Lauter.

Schwarzenegger, who counts legislation combating global warming as one of his signature achievements in office, suggested he might be interested in a post dealing with energy or the environment.
[...]
It’s not a far-fetched idea. Obama has often mentioned Schwarzenegger as someone he’s like to have in the Cabinet, citing his work on climate change. For months, there have been rumors in Washington that the former action star might join the administration as a climate change czar or as an adviser on energy and the environment.

Schwarzenegger would no doubt commute to this new hypothetical “get people to cut carbon emissions” job in his private Gulfstream jet, which, oddly enough, is the kind of thing Arnold says gives him credibility on environmental issues:

Schwarzenegger said he has credibility on that issue, and “people are very receptive when I talk about these things because I’m a Hummer driver … not a tree hugger.”

True, he’s not a tree hugger. Hypocrite, yes… but tree hugger, no.

*****

(h/t Moonbattery)

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

The 4th of July weekend was fast approaching, so somebody at the California Department of Transportation figured it was the perfect time to paint over a US flag mural that was painted near an expressway days after 9/11. And why? Because it was on State property, of course:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is apologizing for a decision by state transportation officials to paint over a giant American flag mural on the side of a Northern California freeway.

The 35-foot long flag was painted on a concrete slab near Interstate 680 in Sunol by three men about two weeks after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Even though the mural had been in clear view of commuters for nearly nine years, a Caltrans spokesman says it wasn’t until last month that someone in the agency asked if the flag was on state property.

Spokesman Allyn Amsk says it was covered up with grey paint Wednesday morning.

In a statement Friday, Schwarzenegger extended his “apologies to the artists whose mural inspired drivers along 680 for over eight and a half years.”

Before:

After:

I don’t know which is more surprising; The depths of bureaucratic idiocy to which many government officials have sunk, or that it took somebody in the California government nine years to get his or her shorts in a wad about this.

I’d hope that the people who decided to do this are on Arnold’s “minimum wage” hit list, but this is California we’re talking about — they’ll probably get a raise and a promotion.

Video of the story is at KTVU.

(h/t Dan Riehl)

**Written by guest-blogger Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Showing their impeccable timing, the progressives approved the bill in the Senate yesterday at a cost of $200 billion a year…just as the state controller announced that California is set to run out of cash again in April:

State Controller John Chiang issued a stern warning Friday about California’s cash reserves, telling legislative leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger they must act on nearly $9 billion in budget cuts the governor is seeking by March — or the state will run out of cash to pay its bills.

Without making those cuts — which Chiang says will pump $1.3 billion into the state’s checking account — California would be broke by April 1, no fooling.

The state wouldn’t climb back to what’s considered a safe level of cash on hand, $2.5 billion, until later that month, when tax revenues are expected to begin flowing into Sacramento.

“While our current cash condition is marginally better than it was one year ago,” Chiang wrote to leaders, “it is still precarious.”

Even with the budget cuts, the state’s cash reserve would still be far below that cushion in March and April.

To that end, Chiang is calling for an additional $2 billion in cash-flow “solutions.” Looking at previous cash crunches, that could mean some payments, like income tax refunds, would be delayed for a few weeks to keep the cushion intact.

Who do you think is going to end up bailing California out?

The Golden State is racked with 12.3 percent unemployment and a budget shortfall of $20 billion, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) warned Friday of even deeper cuts to programs without $6.9 billion in new federal funds. In unveiling an austere budget proposal, he went a giant step further with the age-old state gripe about unequal distribution of federal dollars — actually writing the federal funds in as a budget stopgap.

Some administration officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill were skeptical that the federal government would provide a bailout to close California’s budget gap, partly because it would set off a cascade of demands from other states.

Been there, doing that…

Talking on a hand-held cell phone while driving in California is illegal:

Californians are going to have to put down their cell phone and use a hands-free device starting in 2008 if they want to talk and drive at the same time under a bill Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to sign into law today.”Public safety is the governor’s No. 1 priority, and this bill make the streets and highways of California safer by making sure drivers have both hands available for driving,” said Margita Thompson, a spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger.

The Terminator needs to have a hands-free talk with wife Maria, who has been caught on tape numerous times violating his law.

TMZ has the latest video.

Looks like someone needs to be made an example of, eh, Governor?

The Taxinator may be breathing a sigh of relief over “fixing” California’s budget problems.

But darker clouds loom.

Case in point:

California’s huge government pension fund is expected to report today a whopping annual loss of an estimated $56.8 billion, almost a quarter of its investment portfolio.

The loss at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System for the fiscal year ended June 30 is the second in a row for the country’s largest fund. A year ago, CalPERS reported an $8.5-billion loss, as the severe recession began to take hold.

The tremendous drop in value is expected to have a direct effect on the amount of money that the state and about 2,000 local governments and school districts must contribute in coming years to pay for pensions and healthcare for 1.6 million government workers, retirees and their families.

As income from the pension investments fall, the governments would have to make up the difference to meet the state’s pension and healthcare obligations.

And as California goes, so goes the nation.

Flashback: The Pension Fund Problem to Come

Fleeing the Great Depression and a drought unprecedented in American history, a vast wave of Oklahomans and Texans dubbed “Okies” loaded everything they could onto crowded vehicles during the 1930s and headed west for California. Today, in huge numbers, their grandchildren are moving back…

…From 2004 through 2007, about 275,000 Californians left the Golden State for the old Dust Bowl states of Oklahoma and Texas, twice the number that left those two states for California, recent Internal Revenue Service figures show. In fact, the mid-South gained more residents from California during those four years than either Oregon, Nevada or Arizona. The trend continued into 2008.

As a result, it’s easy to find Californians – even former Sacramentans – living and working in Oklahoma City, a capital of the American heartland.

Unlike the Taxinator, the escapees won’t be back.

Hey, Gov. Schwarzenegger.

If you are still trying to convince the rest of the country to bail out your bankrupt, union-corrupted, eco-radicalized, over-regulated, spendaholic, business-hostile, illegal alien-friendly sanctuary state, this is not going to help:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he’s “happy” illegal immigrants get state services and says they’re not to blame for California’s $24.3 billion budget gap.

Schwarzenegger, an immigrant himself, says the estimated $4 billion to $5 billion the state spends on illegal immigrants annually is a “small percentage” of the deficit.

Not one dime for the self-made poster child of dysfunction.

Not one dime.

Municipal railway manager: $325,000+

“Administrative services” department head: $280,000+

And no, the figures do not include pensions and benefits.

And they want you to bail them out?

Please.

As expected, all the Taxinator’s ballot measures but one (the pay freeze) went down in flames yesterday.

As expected, the liberal establishment will characterize voters as tantrum-throwers. When initiatives go their way, voters are wise, smart, discerning citizens. When initiatives fail miserably, the electorate is a moronic mob.

Schwarzenegger was left blubbering in defense of his decision to party in Washington while California burns.

Now, it’s time for the rest of us to make sure we don’t get stuck with the bills racked up by the poster child for dysfunction.

No. Hell no.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was so preoccupied with lecturing the national GOP about the need to “rebrand” itself and move left that he forgot to mind California’s own business.

Today, his desperate tax-and-spend ballot measures are expected to all go down in flames at the polls. Tea Party activists of all political stripes have lambasted the deceptive initiatives. The intellectually and financially bankrupt state GOP is in full meltdown, having poured $650,000 into Schwarzenegger’s coffers to promote the phony spending cap measure before the state party waffled, then turned around and voted to oppose it and the other tax hikes.

So, where in the world is the Taxinator now? After making a last-ditch pitch for his $16 billion in tax increases at black churches in L.A. (hello, church/state separation activists?) and attempting to fear-monger voters into approving the measures, Arnie has fled to Washington, D.C. today for a pow-wow with Barack Obama to celebrate — what else? — new eco-regulations on cars that will result in massive new costs imposed on drivers:

Battling anger and indifference on the part of California voters, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger implored them Sunday not to make the state “the poster child for dysfunction” by defeating a host of measures on Tuesday’s ballot that seek to restructure the state’s bleak finances.

After years of binge spending, open-borders welfare expansionism, environmental extremism, unchecked unionism (read: SEIU) and hostility to businesses, it’s a little late to try to prevent California from becoming “the poster child for dysfunction,” isn’t it?

You can run, but you can’t hide:

When the going gets tough, the tough get going and that’s what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is doing tonight: going out of town.

Although the governor has been arguing for months that Tuesday’s election features a package of ballot measures that are absolutely essential to California’s financial future, Schwarzenegger is leaving on a jet plane for Washington, where he’ll spend election day. And he’s not coming home in any hurry, either.

The governor will be in DC for what his staff is billing as a major announcement: California is expected to get its long-sought waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency, which will allow the state to set higher standards for car and truck exhaust emissions.

And Schwarzenegger plans to stay in Washington Wednesday to lobby the California congressional delegation for more budget help for the state.

Important stuff. The tougher emissions standards are something Schwarzenegger has been working on for years and is an important past of his plan for the greening of California. And since California is looking at a $15.4 billion budget deficit under the best — and currently unlikely — circumstances, a chance to smooze the DC-based pols isn’t a bad thing.

Still, would Schwarzenegger be making this trip if every poll wasn’t predicting an election night disaster for the governor’s budget reform package? Things are so ugly that Budget Reform Now, Schwarzenegger’s umbrella group for support of the ballot measures, hadn’t decided by this afternoon when, where or even if they were going to have an election night party.

It will be thanks in large part to both the old guard taxpayers’ rights groups (Howard Jarvis) and the new generation of anti-Evil&Stupid Party activists from the Tea Party movement that Schwarzenegger’s ill-conceived measures go down. But the fight is far from over.

The Taxinator is in D.C. with his hands out — and his figurative gun to the head of the rest of the country’s taxpayers. As I noted last week, California wants TARP money. They’ll argue, as every other successful bailout recipient has, that the state is Too Big Too Fail.

California did itself in. It deserves to suffer the consequences.

Tell your congressional representatives to tell the muscle man looking to pump up his puny state coffers with everyone else’s money:

Not one dime.

***

Karl at Hot Air: “[M]any Americans will chafe just as much at the prospect of paying to bail out California’s decades of inept govenment as they do at paying to bail out GM’s decades of inept management. Obama would bail out California to hold onto those electoral votes, but he will have to worry about how many he loses in the process.”

CK MacLeod: Your official Cali budget initiatives guide. Har.

Barney Frank thinks it’s a peachy idea:

California Treasurer Bill Lockyer on Wednesday formally requested federal help to backstop a wave of short-term borrowing the cash-strapped state will need to undertake this summer.

In a letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, Lockyer asked the government to in effect guarantee the state’s debt against default, so that investors would be willing to provide the financing at reasonable interest rates…

…Major banks typically provide that guarantee, but Lockyer said they aren’t willing this time to do so on their own.

“The enormous size of the required funding together with the state’s current credit condition and the continued weakness of the municipal finance market . . . make it highly unlikely that the state can access the short-term market for its borrowing based on its own credit,” Lockyer told Geithner.

As the state’s cash shortage has worsened in the recession, Lockyer has for months been lobbying for some kind of federal backstop on new debt issuance, which he has said should be extended to all state and local governments to help pare their borrowing costs.

Lockyer has an ally in Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services committee.

Although Frank is in the process of drafting legislation that could create a long-term federal reinsurance program for municipal bonds, it isn’t clear what can get through Congress, or how quickly. Frank told Bloomberg News on Tuesday that he was “working with the administration now . . . to do something short-term” for California.

Lockyer said he believed that the Treasury could create a debt-backstop plan under terms of the financial-system bailout bills passed by Congress in 2008 and this year.

Under his proposal, major banks would provide their customary guarantees of the state’s short-term debt, and the Treasury then would agree to stand behind the banks: If the state couldn’t repay the debt on time the Treasury would agree to buy the debt, becoming a creditor to the state.

Although critics say U.S. help for California would discourage the state from solving its structural budget problems, Lockyer has insisted that his plan wouldn’t be a federal handout. The state would pay a fee to the Treasury for the temporary backstop, he said.

Riiiiight. And next they’ll tell us that taxpayers will actually make money off this “investment.”

Message from taxpayers to Washington: Let California fail.

***

Related: Firesale! Anyone wanna buy San Quentin prison? The L.A. Coliseum. Going, going…

Well, how d’ya like that rebranded GOP now? The Taxinator, Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, welcomed Barack Obama to southern California with open arms this afternoon — praising his courage and extolling the porkulus package.

Schwarzenegger has been busy taxing everything in sight in the once-Golden State, pouring fuel on the anti-Prop. 8 fire, and preparing to come begging for a federal handout. Is he angling for a job in the Obama administration or what?

You want to know what “rebranding” the GOP looks like? Take a look at the basket case state of California and its Obama sycophant governor.

“I’ll be back?”

Let’s hope not.