By John Seiler

As if he hadn’t inflicted enough sleaze on the public consciousness during his long public career, ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger just published another autobiography. I’m not reading it.

If you want to know about Arnold, instead read “The Governator: From Muscle Beach to His Quest for the White House, the Improbable Rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger,” by Ian Halperin. It came out in 2010 and includes everything except the 2010 scandal about the pregnant maid, which you know about from the frequent media stories. I reviewed Halperin’s book here.

In his “60 Minutes” interview just before the book came out, Arnold said, “I explained that it was my screw-up, that [Maria] should not feel that it had anything to do with her.” What? He committed adultery against his wife and it didn’t have anything to do with her?

Maybe when I can check it out of the library I’ll look into the parts where Arnold gives excuses for another betrayal: of the people of California. He’s already marked in the history books as one of California’s worst governors. Nothing he can write ever will change that. He promised tax cuts and balanced budgets; he delivered tax increases and deficits. He promised to create jobs; his AB 32 and other schemes killed jobs by the thousand. His policies jacked up unemployment above 10 percent, where the number has remained stuck for four straight years.

A new report by the Manhattan Institute, “The Great California Exodus: A Closer Look,” detailed how people hated Arnold’s “Kauhliphornya” so much they left in droves. I’m posting the full chart below. Arnold became governor in October 2003. Here are the exodus numbers — net migration from the state by fiscal year beginning July 1:

2003: +146,630 in-migration (people flocked to California; Arnold becomes governor for 9 months of that fiscal year)
2004: +62,836 in-migration
2005: -83,183 out-migration (people begin fleeing Arnold-topia)
2006: -52,760 out-migration (Arnold passes AB 32 jobs killer; Arnold re-elected)
2007: -24,293 out-migration
2008: -25,307 out-migration
2009 -89,018 out-migration
2010 -47,204 out-migration (Arnold finally leaves office halfway through the fiscal year)
2011 -10,000 out-migration (Arnold’s damage continues)

Especially on the budget and the economy, Arnold made California worse in almost every way. His governorship was the same as his private life: crass, boorish, sleazy, betraying.

By John Seiler

California’s eco-fanatics have a lot of explaining to do!

Given how green-crazy California is, you would think it would have been awarded a special utopian village dedicated to the Chevy Volt electric car, what I’m calling Voltotopia. We have AB 32! We had Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the world’s No. 1 ambassador against global warming! We have Gov. Jerry Brown!

Nope. It’s going to Austin, Tex., reports Edmunds Inside Line:

“AUSTIN, Texas — Maybe it should be renamed ‘Chevrolet Volt-ville.’ The largest concentration of Chevrolet Volts in the country will play a key role in helping Texas residents in a 700-acre planned community as they test the impact of “smart homes” and other green technology, like electronic vehicles.

“GM calls it the greatest concentration of Chevrolet Volts in the world.”

I hope they have a good fire department because Volts tend to catch fire.

“Pecan Street is funded by a $10.4 million grant from the Energy Department and more than $14 million in matching funds from project partners. Although Pecan Street oversees the consortia, it also includes researchers from the University of Texas, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Environmental Defense Fund. It’s housed in the University of Texas at Austin.”

Why Texas?

So, why did the Volt dough go to Texas, instead of to an Obama-friendly Blue State, especially California? Was it because the Volt was conceived under President George W. Bush, who hailed from Texas?

No. I checked. The federal money was doled out under President Obama, much of it from his 2009 economic stimulus that blew $700 billion but didn’t stimulate the economy. I checked the Website of the Pecan Street Project, the official name of Voltopia. It contained a Nov. 5, 2009 article from the Austin American-Statesman, which read:

“Austin’s Pecan Street Project has won $10.4 million in federal stimulus money to create a smart-grid demonstration project at the Mueller development in East Austin.

“On Tuesday, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced $620 million in clean-energy grants for 32 demonstration projects nationwide.

“Chu said the projects chosen — which include large-scale energy storage, smart meters, transmission system monitoring devices and a range of other smart technologies — will serve as models for the deployment of smart-grid systems on a broader scale.

“In Austin, the money will help turn Mueller — the city’s former airport, now a 700-acre community of homes, stores and businesses — into a smart-grid model community.”

Chu even is from California. He was a physics boffin at Berkeley.

I suspect that solipsistic California was just lazy. Those were the waning months of the Schwarzenegger administration, and Arnold, always slovenly about politics, long had turned over the reins of power to his wife, Maria Shriver, and his chief-of-staff, Susan Kennedy. The details are in Ian Halperin’s biography.

CARB Commissar Mary Nichols, leaders in the Democratic Legislature and others in California politics live in their own little worlds and couldn’t care less about getting a measly $10.4 million for our state for a dumb car. They’re more interested in that $3.5 billion in federal lucre for the Browndoggle.

It’s just as well. Let Texan drivers dodge flaming Volts.