The governor took another step backwards on the road to what he likes to call "reform" last week. Looking over his shoulder at various unions, including the police and firefighters nipping at his heels, Schwartzy decided that he doesn’t really want to privatize the Public Employees Retirement System–CALPERS–after all. This is a pretty big chink in the governor’s armor of perceived popularity. For months he’s been going around saying that if the Legislature won’t pass his reforms, he’ll use the referendum to take it straight to the people in a special election. A few more setbacks like this one and he won’t have much left to take to the people. That special election part should tell you all you need to know about the governor’s interest in saving the state some money.

Since he ousted an incumbent governor mid-term, Schwarzenegger has tried to project an image of the popular breath of fresh air in Sacramento. His style is certainly different from any of his predecessors, but his program is mostly from the recycling bin. Let’s see, he wants to privatize everything imaginable, a standard Republican chestnut, everything that is but the prisons. Following Gray Davis’ lead, he wants to pour truckloads of money into prisons and lock up more and more people. Where does he get the money? From the poor, of course. His proposal to limit state funded home care workers to minimum wage probably is popular with a lot of voters who think they’re putting the squeeze on a bunch of welfare recipients, always a popular Republican theme. What most voters haven’t thought about, but the governor and the people who pull his strings surely know that it costs at least ten times more to keep a person in a nursing home than it costs to pay a home health care worker to keep ‘em out of the nursing home.

The honeymoon appears to be over. Now it’s governor is as governor does. You start messing with people’s pensions, it doesn’t matter how much they liked your movies.

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That leads to another story which illustrates Schwartzy’s peculiar approach to saving money and balancing the budget. Most of us cross the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge occasionally. Before the current governor came along and after much local political sqabbling, a design was approved and construction started on a new east span. Then along comes the new governor who says, "This is way too fancy. Costs way too much money." So now construction has stopped, and everybody’s looking at a bunch of very large, useless towers sticking up in the air. No one is saying anything about what the next move might be. Everybody must be waiting to hear from Arnold the frugal. With millions already invested, it may be back to the drawing board. What are they going to do? Tear down the towers they’ve already built? Sounds pretty frugal to me.

Further muddying the already muddy waters of the East Bay, a report says that the welding on the work that’s already been done isn’t adequate, and the FBI is investigating. What are they going to do? Start arresting incompetent welders?

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I read a piece in The Chronicle last week about capital punishment. Although it appeared at the top of the front page, it wasn’t really news; it was analysis. It centered on two U.S. Senators, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Sam Brownback from Kansas. Both these guys call themselves conservatives, but both recently made statements explicitly renouncing their former rigid support of the death penalty. Santorum said he now believes it should be reserved only for "The most horrific and heinous crimes." Brownback may have gone even further, talking about establishing a "culture of life," which is difficult to do when the state is staging executions.

The analysis was that seeing conservative minds changed all the way to the U.S. Senate is a sign of a trend that’s been developing rapidly over the past few years. The pollsters say that support for the death penalty now is about 50%, down from around 80% just a few years ago. The story cited DNA as a big reason for the shift. I always knew that innocent people were in prison, but since DNA became evidence, people have been walking out of prisons and even off of death rows at a rate even I wouldn’t have anticipated. Even the most heardhearted Christian right type has to agree that if you’re going to execute someone, there should be no margin for error. The analysis also made reference to the Therri Schiavo story, in which the movement to save her life was widely seen as a conservative issue. Conservatives started to wonder why they were pleading for the life of this one severely disabled woman while supporting war and capital punishment. Don’t look for this to become the great left-right crossover issue, however. There’s still that abortion thing that’s likely to be a social and political wedge for generations to come.

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This parental consent thing just won’t go away. The school district said it’s sticking with its current policy, and that should have been the end of it, but county supervisor Sue Horne and her troops are still beating the drum and marching to the beat, demanding that the high schools must not allow kids to leave the campus during school hours without parental consent. This is, of course, a strategy to reverse the widespread acceptance of the idea that teenagers are entitled to receive family planning services confidentially. Horne and her crowd clearly have deluded themselves that all kids grow up in a home just like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver. Her persistence, however, gave some reporters a chance to do a little checking on Capitol Resource Institute, the Sacramento based anti-abortion group that’s been backing Horne in this endeavor. It turns out that it started in Southern California as a Christian Right group whose written goals included making their religion the guiding principle in all aspects of American life, including government. These folks are entitled to say whatever they want, of course, but I’m sure glad the rest of us are entitled to know who they really are.