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Flap’s Links and Comments for May 17th on 19:42

These are my links for May 17th from 19:42 to 19:47:

  • Is This Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Love Child? – News of Arnold Schwarzenegger having fathered a child with a member of his household staff more than a decade ago shouldn't come as a surprise. The alleged existence of an out-of-wedlock son, including his name and his mother's name, was reported by the London Daily Mail in 2003. That's him playing high school football.

    UPDATE: I just heard from Wendy Leigh, the Schwarzenegger biographer and Daily Mail reporter who broke the love-child story in 2003, and she believes that today's revelations might be about a second love-child. "I'm hearing that this is a different child," she says. "Which means there are two." Leigh stands by her 2003 account Schwarzenegger being the father of Tanner Tousignant, but if what she's hearing today pans out, then Schwarzenegger's statement today wasn't about Tanner. So while he's still a Schwarzenegger love-child, he's not the latest Schwarzenegger love-child.

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    Read it all….

    How did Arnold cover it up so long?

  • Arnold’s True Love Child: California’s Deficit Problem – And what about Arnold? He insisted that this stuff was so far in the dim past that he could barely remember it. But it wasn't. Today we learn that he had cheated on his wife and had a child out of wedlock just a few years before. His megawatt-smile denials were pure pap, and if knowledge of his affair had been public it's almost a dead certainty that the recall would have failed and Gray Davis would have remained governor. The car tax would have stayed in place, no bonds would have been issued to make up for it, and California's deficit problems would have been less than half as bad as they turned out to be under Schwarzenegger.

    That's what comes of running a politically motivated snap election with weird rules in six weeks: you don't really know what you're getting. In the end, the Times was right about Schwarzenegger, and his folksy boys-will-be-boys denials were lies. We've paid a pretty high price for that.

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    Nice revisionist history from Kevin Drum.

    California structural budget deficits were set up many years before Arnold came upon the scene and were at issue when Gray Davis, Arnold's predecessor was in office.

    California voters were fed up with Democrat Governor Gray Davis who imposed higher taxes, including the car tax, sweetheart public employee union contract deals (California Correctional Peace Officers Association) and was responsible for the poor handling of the California electricity crisis, where utility bills skyrocketed – among other issues, including the refusal to appeal Prop. 187 on illegal immigration.

    But, Arnold did nothing to improve California's dire financial situation and was inept as he was ineffective.