Gov. Schwarzenegger has done the easy stuff – repealed the car tax increase and the illegal immigrant driver license bill, passed the deficit bond, and written a reasonably tight budget – and now he’s going after the real bad guys in California, the gaming tribes and the public employee unions. In particular, the prison guards got a sweetheart raise from Davis after spending millions to elect him:
The contract has come under fire for its generous pay raises and its semisecret provisions. Many legislators now say they were ignorant of its true dimensions when they voted to approve it during the Davis regime. If the Legislature refuses to appropriate money for the contract, as the 17 senators are urging, the CCPOA would be forced back to the bargaining table. The action would bolster Schwarzenegger’s call for renegotiating public employee union contracts signed by the Davis administration, saying the state can’t afford them since it’s running multibillion-dollar deficits.
Few pols have taken on the CCPOA and lived to tell about it, because their election tactics make Abu Ghraib look like Sunday School. In the Davis/Lungren contest, they bought up all the media time in the Central Valley so that Lungren couldn’t get his ads on in October when he was desperate.
Free speech belongs to the guy who owns the ads.