1115.org

On my last trip to the east coast, it was remarkable how poor the roads were. Growing up in Pittsburgh, potholes were a yearly ritual and you could tell where the important people lived by which ones were filled. The last car I owned suffered a pathetic demise in a hole big enough to crack its rear axle. Yearly freezes and thaws, temperatures ranging from near zero to 90, and the corrosive salt used to keep the roads drivable in the winter add up to nearly undrivable roads year ’round. So it was with a fair amount of surprise that I read a new survey that didn’t mention the 412 among the cities with the worst road conditions:

the metro areas…with the highest percentage of major roads and highways with unacceptable pavement quality are:
Kansas City - 71%
San Jose - 67%
St. Louis - 66%
Los Angeles - 64%
San Francisco-Oakland - 60%
San Diego - 58%
New Orleans - 55%
Boston - 49%
Sacramento - 49%
Oklahoma City - 47%.

Upon closer inspection, that’s six cities in California in the top 11. Maybe if the governor of California spent a little more time in California and a little less time raising money out of state, he might be moved to maybe do something about it.

Oh, that’s much better. Or it would be, had he not ripped up a useable street for a photo op:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger traveled to a quiet San Jose neighborhood Thursday, and — dogged by protesters — filled a pothole dug by city crews just a few hours before, as part of an attempt to dramatize his efforts to increase money for transportation projects.
[…]
“They just dug it out,” [a resident said]. “There was a crack. But they dug out the whole road this morning.”
[…]
[another resident] said Laguna Seca Way had “a few cracks,” which he termed “unsightly,” but they weren’t as bad as the “major potholes” a few blocks away.

A harmless media event? No.:

…the governor’s communications director, told reporters that “the staging of an event like this is paid for out of the governor’s California Recovery Team account,” which pays for many of the governor’s political activities, “so there’s no taxpayer expense.”

But [San Jose spokesman] David Vossbrink, who was in Washington on Thursday lobbying for more federal funding for BART, said the city paid the road crew and the extra security costs associated with the governor’s visit…

And with this stunt, a perfect analog for Schwarzenegger’s election and subsequent rule: a state with problems is forced to spend extra money (recall election / artificial potholes) it doesn’t have, so that a catchphrase-wielding idiot can masturbate his ego in public while ignoring the real problems around the corner.

But playing construction worker in his administration’s Village People on the citizen’s dime wasn’t the only nonsense from the Kindergarten Cop last week. Never one to pass up an opportunity to bash the California legislature, Schwarzenegger had some harsh words for legislators’new pay raise :

…an independent state commission granted legislators a 12 percent pay increase, boosting their annual salaries for the first time since 1998…the increase cannot be overturned by legislators or the governor.
[…]
“Isn’t that interesting?” Schwarzenegger said…”Instead of giving the people that really need the money — like education, health care, healthy families, the poor people, the blind people — instead of giving them more money, the legislators decided they need the money first. So they’re taking the money first.”

Now maybe it’s possible that Schwarzenegger is having another language problem, but that doesn’t make him any less of a hypocrite:

A review of Schwarzenegger’s staff salaries by The Associated Press last year showed the Republican governor spends about eight percent more on staff salaries than did his predecessor, Democratic Gov. Gray Davis. He also is paying more salaries of $100,000 or higher within his inner circle than Davis did.

But beyond the compensation of his staff, all Schwarzenegger has been doing for the past five plus months is raising money for a special election this November and trying to sell it as emergency reform. Every issue on the proposed special election ballot could be added to the June 2006 California primary, just eight months later, at a savings of $80 million. Not only do Californians not want the wasteful special election, they don’t support the governor’s initiatives either:

By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio, California adults would rather see Schwarzenegger’s government reform plan go on the ballot for the scheduled June 2006 primary election than this fall.
[…]
Schwarzenegger won’t have an easy time getting voters behind his initiative efforts. On redistricting, for example, while 41 percent of likely voters support his effort to take it out of the hands of the Legislature and give it to a neutral panel of retired judges, 40 percent oppose the plan.

Throwing away $80 million in a state with budget problems is bad enough, but there is a more insidious dynamic at work, and one that is not getting the attention it deserves. Voter turnout in off-year elections is notoriously low, even lower when there aren’t any candidates running. The ballot initiative process in California has mutated into a farce of competing 30-second ads designed to confuse all but those who carefully follow politics. Schwarzenegger knows that he has a better chance of sneaking his toxic policies through in a special election rather than the normal primary the following June, and he has no problem spending Californians’ money to get what he wants: more power for himself and less power for teachers, nurses and state legislators.

With leadership this shoddy, is it any wonder that Californians are a pessimistic lot?

More residents say the state is headed in the wrong direction than the right direction (57% to 35%) and say they expect bad economic times rather than good times in the next 12 months (49% to 39%).

Tell me again why we had to get rid of a governor with a few cracks in favor of one who’s a gaping asshole pothole.