POLITICS - The California Maverick

I did not vote for Arny but he has surprised me and earned my respect.

"Schwarzenegger Calls Out GOP On Stimulus Hypocrisy, Praises Recovery Act For Creating Jobs In California" by Ben Armbruster, Think Progress (includes video) 2/21/2010

Today on ABC’s This Week, host Terry Moran noted the Republican Party’s staunch opposition to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that Congress passed last year and added that “it was summed up by Mitt Romney at the CPAC convention this week.” “[President Obama] scared employers,” Romney said. “So jobs were scarce. His nearly trillion dollar stimulus created not one net new job in the private sector.”

Responding to Romney, Republican California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called out the GOP hypocrisy:

• SCHWARZENEGGER: I find it interesting that you have a lot of the Republicans running around pushing back on the stimulus money and saying this doesn’t create any new jobs. Then they go out and they do the photo ops and they’re posing with the big check and they say, “Isn’t this great?”

Schwarzenegger then railed against his GOP colleagues for playing politics with the stimulus bill and attacked them for claiming it didn’t create jobs:

• SCHWARZENEGGER: Anyone that says it hasn’t created a job, they should talk to the 150,000 people that have been getting jobs in California.


• MORAN: In the private sector?


• SCHWARZENEGGER: In the private sector and from the public sector. … So I’m happy that we got this money. I’m happy that we have put 150,000 people to work and there will be more people that are put to work because of it.

Throughout the past year, many GOP members of Congress who voted against the stimulus have been touting the money it delivered to their states or districts. And in a new research report released last week, ThinkProgress found that over half of the Republican caucus — 110 lawmakers from the House and Senate — are guilty of this stimulus hypocrisy.