As Arnold’s Political Career Dies, How Many Californians Will He And DiFi Sacrifice To His Three Big Lies?

-by Dr Kirk Murphy

As Arnold Schwarzenegger's failed political career flames out, he's demanding California sacrifice thousands of human lives for his Three Big Lies. Arnold's First Big Lie was the one he used to win office in 2003: he used all his celebrity star power to promise voters he could slash CA's revenues by $4 billion and everything would be great. In the real world, Arnold's cut did exactly what CA's budget analyst predicted: starve the state budget and grow deficits. Over the next years, the annual loss from Arnold's First Big Lie grew to $6 Billion. With the state's deficit now swollen to $24 billion (thanks to Prop 13 and Arnold's First Big Lie), in the May 19 California voters overwhelmingly rejected Arnold's special election, rejecting his stealth attempt to further destroy California's public sector. Arnold's Second Big Lie pretends that when CA voters refused the Rethugs' plan to smash public services for the future, they actually wanted to slash those services. Before that election, Arnold vetoed the Legislature's budget: a budget that partly restored the revenue cuts the Rethugs created to destroy public services. Arnold's Third Big Lie is to pretend he never vetoed non-lethal budget solutions, and to pretend the only solution for thirty years of the Rethugs' war on California's government is Shock Doctrine.

With a personal net worth somewhere between $100 and $800 million, Arnold's demanding the rest of us allow him to sacrifice thousands of Califonians' lives. Yep, when it comes to Grover Norquist's Chub Club For Growth, movie-hero Arnold shows his inner girly-man: he'd rather kill off sick people and seniors than stand up and fight. How many Californians will this real-life coward sacrifice to fan the embers of his dying career?

On Thursday a panel of California's legislators heard from one of Arnold's intended victims:

[T]hey heard from a woman named Lynnea Garbutt who has lived with AIDS all of her 24 years.

She has survived with the help of a state program that provides the expensive antiviral drugs she takes. Now, with that program facing elimination, she pleaded with lawmakers to save it -- and her life.

"If these cuts take place, you're not just cutting money from the program -- you're cutting my life," she told the panel, her voice shaking and tears falling. "I choose to live. Please don't make me die. My choice is life."

You see, unlike Arnold with his personal Gulfstream, the desperately poor patients who rely on California for the medications they require to stay alive can't just jet off to find better services in some other state. From working with those patients, I know most of them don't even have the money to pay for new substandard housing somewhere else, much less the funds to travel there.

But hey, why stop with killing off young people? To keep on the good side of the Rethug lunatics who've spent the last three decades waging open warfare on California, movie-hero Arnold also demands California kill off seniors. When hundreds of thousands of disabled folks and seniors rely on in home health workers (IHSS) to remain alive and to stay out of nursing homes (where their care would cost the state even more), Arnold will deny in home health assistance to most of California's disabled people:

Limit IHSS Domestic and Related Services To the Most Functionally "Impaired" - Governor proposes, effective October 1, 2009 (if Legislature approves), to limit the provision of domestic and related services to persons with the "highest level of need" in the IHSS Program.

Matthew Yi from the SF Chronicle's Sacramento bureau describes the real consequences:

Restrict the In Home Support Services program to the most severely disabled such as those who can't breathe on their own and are partially paralyzed.

What will this do to seniors and the disabled?

Gary Passmore, who represents the Congress of California Seniors, an advocacy group for the elderly, said the cuts would be life threatening.

"These cuts and the ones that were announced earlier this week are cruel, they are heartless, and they will literally kill people," he said. "It's no longer a question about whether these folks will end up in nursing homes. There aren't enough beds in nursing homes. They will end up on the streets and die."

While they're sacrificing seniors and the disabled, movie-hero Arnold and the deadly radicals who run CA's Rethug party also want to go after pregnant mothers. His Shock Doctrine attack demands

Elimination of remaining General Fund for Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health

Rather than stand up to Grover Norquist's death cult, Arnold wants to sacrifice women with cancer...and people with kidney failure:

Cuts Medi-Cal coverage for breast and cervical cancer treatment and dialysis.

Arnold and the Rethugs' Cult For Death even want to destroy Californians' future:

Schwarzenegger's plan to dismantle the Cal Grant program - considered one of the nation's best programs to help poorer students cover full fees or tuition at public colleges - would make California the first US state to eliminate student financial aid while raising tuition....A CalWorks program providing medical, dental, and vision care to 90,000 children will be eliminated.

Why stop with killing off people and their futures? Arnold's death wish for California's budget includes special hell for our pets:

Kiska Icard, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said suspending the state requirement on animal shelters to hold strays at least six days to save the state $24.6 million would result in euthanizing more animals.

In order to kill off California's people and government with his Shock Doctrine on steroids, Arnold's frantically repeating his Second Big Lie: the voters made him do it. Brian Leubitz and his colleagues at Calitics explode the lie:

The people did not say anything about cuts. In fact, they spoke out strongly against cuts by rejecting Props 1D and 1E that cut social services for children and the mentally ill, respectively. The people are saying they want a functional government that is responsive, not demanding, of the people.

Brian Leubitz also spotlights how SF Gate's Carla Marinucci caught DiFi parroting Arnold's Second Big Lie

"And what [the voters] said is, in so many words, take the cuts, because that's the alternative. And nobody wants them, but people have to understand.''

Marlinucci also caught DiFi parroting Arnold's Third Big Lie: California's only choice is the Shock Doctrine.

And the hard part of it is where the cuts have to come from. People don't like it. But they didn't seem to know that when they voted no on these propositions, so it left the Governor and the State Legislature with really no alternative other than to make the cuts.

Hey, why should a California Democratic Senator remember California's Republican Governor vetoed the anti-Shock Doctrine budget her fellow Democrats passed out of the State's Legislature?

In the real world, a few months ago California's beleaguered Legislature did an end run around the Rethug's Cult For Death and passed a budget with choices that don't kill people: Arnold vetoed it. In the world where DiFi, Arnold and CA's Rethugs rush to please the Club For Growth's suicide cult, why bother with reality?

In the real world the rest of us live in, how many Californians' lives will Arnold sacrifice as his political career dies? And how many Democrats in Sacramento and Washington will spin the Big Lies required to make Shock Doctrine his weapon?

[h/t Calitics for their coverage, which this post uses extensively.]

UPDATE: A Rescue Plan

Aeolus has a great idea which is elucidated over at Daily Kos. President Obama needs to ask Schwarzenegger to resign as a condition for loan guarantees for short-term debt. The Governator has failed California and failed the nation.