While grumblings about a recall of Arnold remain, the wind behind such an effort was impeded by Arnold's strong showing in the recall election. Had he received less votes than Davis, it might've been a different story. But that's not what ultimately happened.
Still, Arnold is treading on thin ice, and he's already breaking campaign promises as the reality of governance hits home.
During his campaign, he promised to balance the budget by "cutting waste". He promised to protect education from budget cuts. Reality was that there wasn't much "waste" to cut. And as for children and education programs?
During his campaign, Schwarzenegger vowed to protect children and education as he plugged the deficit. Democrats noted Tuesday, however, that he had already proposed more than $100 million in cuts during the next 19 months to state universities and that the health care proposals would affect hundreds of thousands of children.
"I think we're finally seeing the collision of promises and reality,'' Laird said
And the worse part of these new sets of cuts? They would only save $2 billion -- only half the $4 billion cost of the car tax Arnold repealed as his first act as governor. And that's not getting into the $14 billion in additional deficit the state faces.
Pro-Schwarzenegger Sacramento Bee columnist/blogger lays out the ugly situation:
Even if the Legislature accepted every proposal, and early reaction suggests that is very unlikely, Schwarzenegger would still have to do this six more times, with deeper and deeper cuts, if he is to balance next year's budget with spending reductions alone. He is facing a $14 billion gap between projected spending and revenues. This gets him one-seventh of the way there - and that's assuming he can find enough cuts in this year's budget to pay for the first installment of his car tax rollback.
Too bad Weintraub and the majority of the press was too star-struck to see that Arnold
had no plan to deal with the state's dire budget picture. Vague platitudes and entraties to "cutting waste" may get one elected, but they don't solve real problems. And cutting taxes is great, but irresponsible when it helps grow the deficit from $14 billion to $18 billion (and no solution in sight).
Meanwhile, we still have the Gropenfuhrer's laughable self-investigation into whether he sexually assaulted a whole host of women. Results of that whitewash "investigation" are still pending.