Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger intends to join President Barack Obama when he visits California this week.
Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear says the Republican governor will appear with the president during his two-day visit to Southern California.

Obama is expected in California Wednesday and Thursday on what would be his first official visit as president to the nation's most populous state.

In November, Californians overwhelmingly voted for Obama, who beat GOP nominee John McCain by 24 percentage points in the state. Schwarzenegger had endorsed the Arizona senator.

Sources in the Obama administration Tuesday said that despite previous media reports administration officials did not know until a couple weeks ago that the officials of the controversial AIG Financial Product Division were set to receive $165 million in bonuses on March 13.

It was just this month, administration sources told ABC News, that officials of the New York Federal Reserve Bank — after studying AIG's more than 100 compensation policies for more than 116,000 employees throughout the world — informed the Treasury Department of the $165 million in bonuses pending for the controversial Financial Products Subsidiary.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was alerted last Tuesday; he phoned AIG CEO William Liddy on Wednesday evening to protest the bonuses, sources told ABC News.

President Dmitri A. Medvedev said Tuesday that Russia would begin a "large-scale rearming" in 2011 in response to what he described as threats to the country's security.

In a speech before generals in Moscow, Mr. Medvedev cited encroachment by NATO as a primary reason for bolstering the military, including nuclear forces.

Mr. Medvedev did not offer specifics on how much the budget would grow for the military, whose capabilities deteriorated significantly after the fall of Soviet Union.

Russia has increased military spending sharply in recent years, but with the financial crisis and the drop in the price of oil, the country's finances are under pressure, suggesting that it would be hard to lift these expenditures further.

Former President George W. Bush says he won't criticize President Barack Obama because Obama "deserves my silence," and says he plans to write a book about the 12 toughest decisions he made in office. Bush's speech Tuesday at a luncheon in Calgary, Alberta was his first since leaving office.

He declined to comment about the Obama administration like former Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney said Sunday that Obama's decisions are threatening the nation's safety.

Bush says he doesn't know what he'll do in the long term but says he'll write a book that will let people determine what they would have done if their most important job was to protect the country.

I've been hearing rumblings about this for a while, and I'm glad Politico finally did a story on it. Basically, "mainstream" journalists from The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, Politico, and many others chat all day on a list-serv with liberal activists and journalists.

Several of you have asked me; here's my answer: no — I'm not one of the privileged reporters/commentators who were asked to join the semi-secret JournoList group. Had no idea it existed until today. Which either makes me clueless, sheltered, an outsider, or privileged, depending upon your point of view.

In the middle of decrying the misdeeds of the financial firm AIG, President Obama cracked a joke. "Excuse me," he said Monday, after coughing into the microphone. "I am choked up with anger here." There were laughs all around the gilded East Room of the White House, because he didn't sound angry at all

For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList.

Proof of a vast liberal media conspiracy?

Not at all, says Ezra Klein, the 24-year-old American Prospect blogging wunderkind who formed JournoList in February 2007. “Basically,” he says, “it’s just a list where journalists and policy wonks can discuss issues freely.”

But some of the journalists who participate in the online discussion say — off the record, of course — that it has been a great help in their work. On the record, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin acknowledged that a Talk of the Town piece — he won’t say which one — got its start in part via a conversation on JournoList. And JLister Eric Alterman, The Nation writer and CUNY professor, said he’s seen discussions that start on the list seep into the world beyond.

Aside from Paula Abdul, the producers of “American Idol” have one more loudmouth to deal with on the set.

One of the hit show’s staffers is running around telling anyone who’ll listen that the team of producers and judges has already picked the final four contestants — despite the fact that 11 kids are still battling to be the latest pop star.

The female “AI” worker told a “group of people that the last four are going to be Danny Gokey, Lil Rounds, Adam Lambert and Alexis Grace,” said our insider. Asked if this was opinion or actual fact, the staffer vehemently retorted, “Those ARE the people,” saying it wasn’t mere speculation.

AIG's bonus payments ranged from $1,000 to $6.5 million, CNBC has learned. Only seven employees will receive a bonus of more than $3 million.

Although some suspect pressure may be growing for those employees who received bonuses to return them on their own free will, many of the employees who received bonuses are not American and may not care that American taxpayers are outraged over the incident.
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Outrageous conduct by the Obama Administration

Far fewer drivers in California have been ticketed for texting while driving in the first seven weeks since a new state law took effect, compared with cell phone scofflaws, California Highway Patrol statistics show.

And while studies suggest California drivers are donning wireless headsets and putting down their cell phones, state police wrote more tickets for talking while driving in January than any prior month, since the cell phone ban went into effect in January.

CHP spokeswoman Fran Clader in Sacramento said in January officers wrote 9,412 tickets for driving while talking on a cell phone. The previous high was 9,166 in October.

California's recession has not stopped lawmakers from proposing nearly two dozen bills that would dip into taxpayers' pocketbooks for causes from trauma care to domestic violence.

The measures would affect millions of Californians in ways ranging from legalizing and regulating marijuana to charging for shopper carry-out bags or requiring sterilization of pet cats that roam.

Most of the Democrat-driven proposals target specific groups of people, such as millionaires, pornography buyers, teenage drivers, motorcycle owners, cigarette smokers or liquor drinkers.

And let's put those fees – students' major concern – in context. Even with the four-year college fee increases next year, attending college in California is an immense bargain, as the new comparison by the California Postsecondary Education Commission underscores.

The $20-per-unit community college fee is, by far, the lowest in the nation. The $600 it costs for a year's full load of classes in California would be more than $900 in the next-lowest state, New Mexico, and is less than one-fourth the national average of $2,700.

State university fees, $3,849 a year, are much lower than any of the other comparable state university systems and scarcely half the average of $7,516.

The University of California's current fees, $8,027 a year, are not quite the lowest of comparable systems – University at Buffalo, N.Y., has that ranking at $6,285. But UC's fees are nearly $2,000 below the average and just two-thirds of the most expensive school, the University of Illinois.

Like the guys at Ace, I figured this was some dumb bureaucrat's idea that just hadn't been shot down yet.

Nope. Turns out, according to the American Legion, the President himself is open to the idea of making injured veterans have their service-related disabilities and wounds treated by private insurance instead of the Veterans Administration.

The leader of the nation's largest veterans organization says he is "deeply disappointed and concerned" after a meeting with President Obama today to discuss a proposal to force private insurance companies to pay for the treatment of military veterans who have suffered service-connected disabilities and injuries. The Obama administration recently revealed a plan to require private insurance carriers to reimburse the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in such cases.