{"id":4689,"date":"2005-07-14T09:51:08","date_gmt":"2005-07-14T13:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/4689.html"},"modified":"2005-07-14T09:51:08","modified_gmt":"2005-07-14T13:51:08","slug":"the-beginning-of-the-end-for-schwarzenegger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-beginning-of-the-end-for-schwarzenegger\/","title":{"rendered":"The beginning of the end for Schwarzenegger"},"content":{"rendered":"

Arnold Schwarzenegger has picked enough fights and been just incompetent enough to drive his approval ratings down and dim his re-election chances, but it’s recklessness like this<\/a> that makes one wonder if he’s completely lost his mind.<\/p>\n

Two days before he was sworn into office, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger accepted a consulting job paying an estimated $8 million over five years to “further the business objectives” of a national publisher of health and bodybuilding magazines.<\/p>\n

The contract pays Schwarzenegger 1% of the magazines’ advertising revenue, much of which comes from makers of nutritional supplements. Last year, the governor vetoed legislation that would have imposed government regulations on the supplement industry.<\/p>\n

According to records filed Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Schwarzenegger entered into the agreement with a subsidiary of American Media Inc. on Nov. 15, 2003. The Boca Raton, Fla.-based company publishes Muscle & Fitness and Flex magazines, among others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Taking millions from an industry to represent their interests and then vetoing a bill in order to help the industry is criminally stupid. Legislatures write conflict-of-interest laws for just this kind of situation.<\/p>\n

Did Schwarzenegger assume no one would ever notice? Dd Schwarzenegger really need another $8 million? For that matter, wasn’t Schwarzenegger’s entire campaign platform specifically geared to tell voters he’d expose and eliminate just this kind of corruption?<\/p>\n

It’s also worth noting that the two parties involved went to some lengths to keep the contract secret.
\n<\/p>\n

As recently as a few days ago, American Media refused to say anything about Schwarzenegger’s pay. The company filed an 83-page annual financial statement with the SEC last month that, in one paragraph, mentioned a consulting agreement with an unnamed “third party.” Stuart Zakim, an American Media spokesman, refused to say whether the third party was Schwarzenegger.<\/p>\n

American Media, which also owns the National Enquirer, the Globe and the Star tabloids, made public the terms of Schwarzenegger’s contract in a separate SEC filing Wednesday.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, it’s probably a good thing that Schwarzenegger doesn’t seem to enjoy being governor anyway, because he’s toast. <\/p>\n

The only thing I wonder now is whether some other California Republican will step in to either challenge Schwarzenegger in a GOP primary or just push Schwarzenegger out of the way entirely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arnold Schwarzenegger has picked enough fights and been just incompetent enough to drive his approval ratings down and dim his re-election chances, but it’s recklessness like this that makes one wonder if he’s completely lost his mind. Two days before he was sworn into office, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger accepted a consulting job paying an estimated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}