One of the revelations was that Arnold really did want to be president. He was plotting how to change the Constitution to allow foreign-born citizens to run for the office.

He still is, according to Page Six:

Action star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been lobbying for support to change the law to allow him to run for president in 2016, Page Six has exclusively learned.

We’re told Ahnold has been openly talking about his political ambitions while in New York to promote his new movie with Sylvester Stallone, “Escape Plan.”

One source said: “Schwarzenegger has been talking openly about working on getting the constitutional rules changed so he can run for president in 2016. He is ready to file legal paperwork to challenge the rules”….

Columbia University Law School professor Michael Dorf, an expert in constitutional law, said about the Governator’s case in 2007, “The law is very clear, but it’s not 100 percent clear that the courts would enforce that law rather than leave it to the political process.”

We all have our fantasies. Mine is to restore the U.S. Constitution, which would mean eliminating 99 percent of what the federal government currently does.

In Arnold's case, it would be difficult for him to become president. So maybe it's another of his larks.

There's no way the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn the constitutional requirement of U.S. birth. They might have looked the other way back in 1968, if Michigan Gov. George Romney (father of Mitt) had gotten elected, because he was born in Mexico of U.S. citizens. That particular issue could come up again because Sen. Ted Cruz, the current GOP frontrunner, was born in Canada to U.S. citizens. But Arnold's parents never were U.S. citizens.

The court twists and shreds the Constitution to suit its members' ideologies. But it would not do so for the convenience of an egocentric Austrian action-movie star.

People, even outside California, know that his two terms as governor did not go well. He increased taxes, which automatically would repel a large part of the GOP base. He left office with unemployment soaring and the state in a shambles.

If he became a Democrat, it's unlikely he would do well against Hillary Clinton. A big reason is that his Kennedy relatives, beginning with his wife, Maria Shriver, have been big Obama supporters. And at the Obama convention last year, former President Bill Clinton spoke — and helped the Obama campaign greatly with a rousing oration — only after President Obama promised to support Hillary in 2016. Obama's supporters now are gearing up to support Hillary.

Arnold's messy private life also would be a big problem.

And there's no national recall procedure providing a quick election, the method by which he became governor in 2003.

But if Arnold did try to run, it would be amusing.

“I'll be back!”

Not likely.

By John Seiler

California leads in state implementation of Obamacare. In 2010, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation making our state the first to set up the “insurance exchanges” that are supposed to make the system work (except it’s having big problems). He said at the time, “For national reform to succeed, it will be up to the states to make it work, and California is moving forward on reforms that will provide affordable and quality health care insurance.”

He should have told that to then-Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., now the U.S. secretary of state. When the U.S. Congress passed Obamacare in 2010, Kerry was interested in one thing: Ripping off the patients in the other 49 states, leaving them to suffer and die painfully, as he shifted their health-care money to his state. He was following the path of his fellow Democratic senator from Massachusetts, Teddy Kennedy, who had died a year before, in 2009. Teddy spent his 47 years in the Senate obsessed with imposing socialized medicine on America, and fell just a year short of seeing it done.

Massachusetts also imposed the socialist Romneycare a decade ago under then-Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican rejected last year by voters in his presidential bid. Voters figured that, as Romneycare inspired Obamacare, there wasn’t much difference between the two candidates.

Kerry’s con

Anyway, here’s what happened thanks to John Kerry — who, like Teddy and Mitt, is fabulously wealthy, so he always could buy expensive private medical care in Switzerland. Kimberley A. Strassel writes:

“Everyone remember the origins of the so-called Affordable Care Act? The Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, Gator-Aid, and other buyoffs for the votes of key Senate Democrats?

“Three years on, yet another sweetheart deal has declared itself, this one inserted by the then-senator for Massachusetts. In Congress, it’s becoming known as the Bay State Boondoggle.

“At issue are the dollars that Medicare pays to hospitals for the wages of doctors and staff. Before the new health law, states were each allocated a pot of money to divvy among their hospitals. The states are required to follow rules in handing out the funds, in particular a requirement that state urban hospitals must be reimbursed for wages at least at the levels of state rural hospitals.

“Enter Mr. Kerry, who slipped an opaque provision into the Obama health law to require that Medicare wage reimbursements now come from a national pool of money, rather than state allocations. The Kerry kickback didn’t get much notice, since it was cloaked in technicality and never specifically mentioned Massachusetts. But the senator knew exactly what he was doing.

“You see, ‘rural’ hospitals in Massachusetts are a class all their own. The Bay State has only one, a tiny facility on the tony playground of the superrich—Nantucket. Nantucket College Hospital’s relatively high wages set the floor for what all 81 of the state’s urban hospitals must also be paid. And since these dramatically inflated Massachusetts wages are now getting sucked out of a national pool, there’s little left for the rest of America. Clever Mr. Kerry.

“The change has allowed Massachusetts to raise its Medicare payout by $257 million, forcing cuts to hospitals in 40 other states. The National Rural Health Association and 20 state hospital associations in January sent a panicked letter to President Obama, noting that the Massachusetts manipulation of the program would hand that state $3.5 billion over the next 10 years at the expense of Medicare beneficiaries everywhere. They quoted Mr. Obama’s former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Donald Berwick, admitting that ‘What Massachusetts gets comes from everybody else.'”

Arnold’s role?

One question I have: What role did Schwarzenegger play in all this? As I noted in my review of “Governator,” the biography of Arnold by Ian Halperin, at the end of his term in office, Arnold basically was tired of it all and let his wife, Maria, make most of the decisions. Maria of course is Maria Shriver-Kennedy, niece of Teddy, and of President JFK and Senator RFK.

So was she the one who turned Arnold’s original opposition to Obamacare, calling it a “ripoff” in Jan. 2010, into signing the implementation bills in Oct. that year?

We also know that the Schwarzeneggers were suffering marital problems in late 2010, and would split the next year when it came out that Arnold had a love child from the family maid.

In such a situation, it’s hard to see Arnold going against Maria on the sweetheart deal set up for Massachusetts, no matter how much Californians suffered.

This is another indication that, to Arnold, the people of California, to use a catch phrase of his from the end of “Commando,” are “Juszt bodiez.”

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 Chris Reed

Arnold Schwarzenegger was such a disappointment as governor that it’s somewhat of a disappointment that the reason the media have turned on him has to do with his personal misconduct, not the bait-and-switch he pulled on California voters. His decision to switch from a libertarian-lite, pro-business governor to the champion of AB 32 and his version of Obamacare was an utter betrayal. But if you want 21st-century Benedict Arnold to take some deserved abuse, even if it is for other sins, then you’ll enjoy the cattiness and bile of this Newsweek article by Lawrence Leamer, who wrote a highly favorable biography of Arnold after his election as governor:

I hadn’t seen Schwarzenegger since 2004, when I was researching a biography about him, Fantastic. As I greeted him at Caffé Roma in Beverly Hills, I saw a man who appears a diminutive, action-toy version of the movie and bodybuilding Arnold. He is devoid of his once-bulging muscles, and his face looks as if a master taxidermist has been at work. In the ’80s, you would often find Schwarzenegger at his special table in the back of the restaurant, schmoozing with his bodybuilding buddies, smoking a stogie and commenting authoritatively on the breasts and buttocks of women who walked by. Schwarzenegger is still a fixture at Caffé Roma, dropping in after having his hair tinted at a salon behind it. But times have changed. When the scandal broke, a woman shouted “pig” as he walked to his favorite table, says a longtime friend of his. Schwarzenegger has said that he did not hear the remark. But he has heard of the widespread public disgust, especially among women, at the betrayal of his wife in such a spectacularly sordid fashion.

More here.

Forget the President Obama “Birther” controversy over his birth certificate.

What I want to know is: When did ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger find out that his name was not on the birth certificate for the “love child” he had with former housekeeper Mildred Patricia Baena?

According to Eonline’s timeline:

Sept. 27, 1997: Maria gives birth to Christopher Sargent Shriver Schwarzenegger, the now estranged couple’s fourth and youngest child.

Oct. 2, 1997: Just five days later — yes, five days — Schwarzenegger’s out-of-wedlock son with Patty is born. Baena used a different last name — Pena — on the birth certificate, and also listed her then-husband, not the future governor, as the birth father. As the boy is a minor, his first name has not been revealed.

The ewwwwwwwwww! factor on that one is high.

But the question is: Did Arnold know about the false filing of the birth certificate? Did he know that the wrong biological father was put on it? Inquiring minds want to know.

California Penal Code Section 115 is clear:

115. (a) Every person who knowingly procures or offers any false or
forged instrument to be filed, registered, or recorded in any public
office within this state, which instrument, if genuine, might be
filed, registered, or recorded under any law of this state or of the
United States, is guilty of a felony.

Moreover, how much did Baena’s ex-husband contribute to supporting the child the he thought was his, but in fact was Arnold’s?

California Penal Code Section 484(a) reads:

484. (a) Every person who shall feloniously steal, take, carry,
lead, or drive away the personal property of another, or who shall
fraudulently appropriate property which has been entrusted to him or
her, or who shall knowingly and designedly, by any false or
fraudulent representation or pretense, defraud any other person of
money, labor or real or personal property, or who causes or procures
others to report falsely of his or her wealth or mercantile character
and by thus imposing upon any person, obtains credit and thereby
fraudulently gets or obtains possession of money, or property or
obtains the labor or service of another, is guilty of theft.

Perhaps there’s an innocent explanation for Arnold’s actions. But as the breakup of his marriage shows, these are serious matters involving some serious money.

Legal authorities at least should ask him some questions about what he knew about his name being left off his “love child’s” birth certificate; and about why he let the other fellow to go on thinking he was the child’s father, and paying for the privilege.

What did Arnold know and when did he know it?

July 21, 2011

Here’s the latest on the Schwarzenegger split:

It now definitely looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s estranged wife Maria Shriver will not be back.

The former TV journalist is looking to splash some of her fortune on a $10 million luxury house which is just three miles away from the marital home.

While Arnold will keep the family home in Brentwood, California, in the divorce settlement, it has been reported….

TMZ reported that Arnold will get the house but nothing else has so far been worked out, except that the couple will split the rest of the assets 50/50.

It emerged this week that Maria, who is related to the influential Kennedy political family, will get half of the action star’s $700 million fortune after she filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.

So, the Schwarzeneggers basically doubled their carbon footprint. According to Wikipedia:

A carbon footprint is “the total set of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by an organization, event, product or person.”^[1]

Arnold will continue to live in the massively carbon-footprinted Schwarzenegger Compound in Brentwood. While Marie will live in a second, massively carbon-footprinted Shriver Compound three miles away.

And Arnold will continue to drive around in his massively carbon-footprinted Bentleys and Mercedes. I don’t know what Maria will drive. Maybe she’ll get one of those trendy Priuses.

Talk about hypocrisy. Both of them are environmental fanatics, obsessed with reducing everybody else’s carbon footprint — but not their own, nor that of their their elite, massively wealthy, massively carbon-footprinted friends.

I think global warming is a hoax. So I don’t care what people’s carbon footprint is. And I certainly don’t have anything against the wealthy. I just hate hypocrisy. If you’re rich, enjoy it. But don’t use your money to control my life!

Arnold, of course, signed into law AB 32, the Jobs-Murdering Global Warming Hoax Act of 2006. AB 32 actually was written by Maria’s brother, Robert Kennedy Jr.

If these people really cared about the environment, they would move into small apartments in Bakersfield. But they really don’t care about anything except posturing.

They live in $10 million compounds, drive gas-guzzling dinosaurs and jet around the world to hobnob with their equally massively carbon-footprinted crony capitalist cronies at global-warming conferences — while the rest of us are forced to huddle in hovels, burning in the summer and freezing in the winter.

Welcome to the New Arnold Order.

July 8, 2011

Now Arnold’s blaming Oprah for his marital problems. Reports Celebs.gather.com:

Yes, the disgraced former California governator now blames Oprah Winfrey for the dissolution of his marriage. He’s recently learned that it was the talk show powerhouse/media mogul who convinced her oldfriend Maria Shriver to summon the courage to walk out of the marriage.

“Arnold had totally believed he could convince Maria to stay with him, and that she wouldn’t have left without encouragement,” claims an inside source. “He thought the ‘leave the creep’ advice had come from Maria’s cousin/main family confidant, Robert Kennedy Jr., but a mutual friend says Maria confided it was Oprah she first unburdened her secret to – and Oprah told her to get out of Dodge! Now Arnold wants revenge on Oprah, and badly, for meddling in his family affairs.”

Of course, it was Arnold who cheated on his wife with the housekeeper, producing a “love child.” It was Arnold who lied about it and covered it up. Oprah didn’ t have anything to do with that.

But we should expect this kind of behavior from Arnold. After all, he did the same thing to California: He whispered sweet nothings in the state’s ear about how he would be ever faithful to his vows to “blow up the boxes” of wasteful bureaucracy, “cut up the credit” cards of state debt, “end the crazy deficit spending” and never, ever raise taxes.

Then he drove the state SUV to Vegas, maxed out the state credit card and blew the mortgage on gambling losses, then left California bruised and bleeding in a ditch while he returned to his native Austria to party down.

Some folks (like me) warned from the start that Arnold would betray the state. But you know how that goes. You warn the bride that her groom is a deadbeat loser, and she cries and says, “No he isn’t! I love him.”

As old Ben Franklin said, “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”

June 27, 2011

Maria Shriver has split from ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger because she was tired of being treated badly and lied to, especially about his “love child.”

California also should split from his policies. Although he’s gone from office, his seven years of bad policies remain in place. The worst is his political “love child,” AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 that is destroying one million state jobs. No wonder state unemployment remains at 12 percent, much higher than the 9 percent national rate.

Yet the proof keeps coming in that global warming is a hoax.

Then there’s Arnold’s $13 billion of tax increases. Gov. Jerry Brown still wants to continue most of them.

It’s obvious California is suffering from “battered person syndrome.” According to Wikipedia:

The feeling of being both responsible for and helpless to stop the violence leads in turn to depression and passivity. This learned depression and passivity make it difficult for the abused partner to marshall the resources and support system needed to leave.

Sounds just like what California is going through with Arnold. California is “depressed” from his seven years of abuse and exhibits “passivity” at finding ways to get rid of his abusive policies.

May 18, 2011

As I’ve said before, the problems between ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his estranged wife, Maria Shriver, are their business.

But news articles on their split have brought up some interesting tidbits about why he was such an abysmal governor. The L.A. Times reports:

Several who worked for the governor said that during Schwarzenegger’s first term, he spent about three nights a week in Sacramento, but that once he was reelected in 2006, he spent less time in the capital. At his wife’s request, said one, Schwarzenegger would usually fly from Brentwood to Sacramento in the morning and be home by evening.

But the essence of politics is schmoozing, including with the opposition party. Even in these days of cell phones, the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, etc., personal contact is essential to get people involved in major political change.

You have to “press the flesh.” The most successful politicians all were masters of it. Bill Clinton obviously comes to mind. And Ronald Reagan used to quip that he gave speeches at a thousand rubber-chicken dinners.

Arnold, essentially, was detached from his job. He should have been wining and dining members of both parties to advance his agenda. Instead, he flew back to his massive compound in Brentwood.

Then there’s the massive hypocrisy of Arnold’s own life. He was forcing Californians to sharply downsize their lives and jobs with AB 32, his jobs-killing global-warming bill that forced a 20 percent reduction in state greenhouse gases by 2020.

Yet he lived in that Brentwood mansion. Why didn’t he down-size to a more modest abode?

And the Times writes:

On Tuesday, [son] Patrick tweeted about his family drama: “Appreciate all your messages. Small speed bump I’n life, luckily we own hummers, we will cruise right over it. All will be okay. #peace.”

“We own Hummers.” Those are the massive, gas-guzzling, quasi-military vehicles Arnold popularized a decade ago.

But with his global-warming obsession, shouldn’t Arnold and his family have downsized from its panzerkorps of Hummers to a single Prius?

Then there’s this hypocrisy:

On Sunday, Mother’s Day, the family gathered at Santa Monica’s Ivy at the Shore. But Shriver and Schwarzenegger left in separate cars.

Maria also is a big global-warming fanatic, and was deeply involved in Arnold’s political life. So, shouldn’t they have driven home in a single car to save on gas, and therefore protect the environment from destruction?

This hypocrisy was a constant cognitive dissonance permeating the Schwarzenegger administration, another reason his seven years in office were so disastrous.

It’s too bad that ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, are splitting up. That’s their personal business.

But it’s worth remembering that Maria dominated Arnold during the last five years of his governorship. Californians thought they elected a fiscally responsible, moderate Republican. But after he lost his slate of reform initiatives in November 2005, she took over and turned his administration in a radical, Democratic, Kennedy direction. Maria-Arnold lurched much further to the left than the Democrats Arnold defeated: recalled Gov. Gray Davis and 2006 election challenger Phil Angelides.

So much for the will of “the people” that Arnold always was chattering about.

The evidence of this is provided in the book, “The Governator: From Muscle Beach to His Quest for the White House, the Improbable Rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger,” by Ian Halperin. I reviewed it here on CalWatchDog.com last November. Here’s the key section from the bio:

And as she watched her husband eviscerated in the media and his approval ratings plunge for listening to the Republicans who had forced him to the right [with the Reform Platform], Maria was no longer content to sit around and play the smiling wife….

Maria couldn’t stand the Republican strategists, who she believed had hijacked her husband’s agenda and turned him into somebody she didn’t recognize anymore. She knew from the beginning that the special election was political folly, but she had been shut out of the loop repeatedly. Now it was time to exorcise the men who she believed were bringing her husband down in an idiotic power game they couldn’t possibly win….

Before long, Democrats had filled a number of key posts and were playing a vital role in guiding state policy. Many of the old Republicans were still around, but their role was greatly diminished.

“The Republicans would watch these Democrats with a free run of the governor’s office and it’s like they knew they were licked. They would call the Democrats surrounding Arnold ‘the posse’,” one statehouse staffer told me.

One of the first orders of business was mending fences with Democratic leaders in the Legislature. Maria counseled Arnold to make friends, telling him, “It shouldn’t be to hard to get into bed with the Democrats. You sleep with me every night” — a joke he would later recycle at rallies.

Maria took over and put Susan Kennedy (no relation), the far-left cabinet secretary under Davis, in as Arnold’s chief of staff. So after two years, Maria-Arnold overturned the recall — the will of “the people” — and put the Davis regime back in charge. Susan Kennedy became so powerful was called “the little governor.”

A couple of months later, Maria-Arnold signed into law AB 32, the jobs-killing global warming bill. Halperin writes:

Robert Kennedy Jr. [Maria’s brother] would later admit his direct role in crafting the legislation, “which Arnold read and then adopted.”

Then Maria-Arnold went on a wild spending binge that is the true cause of today’s budget deficits. When the economy crashed in 2008, and tax receipts along with it, in 2009 he signed into law a record $13 billion tax increase.

He left office with California’s economy in a shambles and its state budget perpetually in deficit.

Arnold is back doing movies, and Maria has her own projects. But together, the Maria-Arnold co-governorship “terminated” California.

May 10, 2011