When Arnold Schwarzenegger landed his current starring role as California governor, many worried about his lack of political experience. Never fear; the actor has turned out to be a quick study in partisan trickery. Taking a page from the Bush administration’s playbook, Gov. Schwarzenegger has been using taxpayer money to pay for fake news.

This advertisement is filmed to look like a real news report. It’s narrated by an actual former TV reporter who, no longer a journalist, now works for the state. The ad pushes a new, government-backed, corporation-friendly proposal which would kill mandatory lunch hours. California workers – construction workers, waitresses, nurses, farm workers and a forklift operator — are shown in “interviews,” extolling the benefits of the proposal.

It’s pure political propaganda. The proposal is backed by big corporations like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, which have been in expensive hot water for denying workers time for lunch. It’s also backed by the California Restaurant Assn., “which donated $21,000 to one of Schwarzenegger’s campaign funds last year and provided food for his 2003 inauguration.” The “news” segment ignores all of that, and stays very quiet about the fact that “organized labor opposes the changes, or that workers would have a harder time suing employers over missed meal breaks.”

But you’d never know it wasn’t real by watching your local California news station. Eighteen stations ran the spots as news reports. The tape even provided positive promo text for the local anchors, which read: “If approved, the changes would clear up uncertainty in the business community and create a better working environment throughout the state.”

Sen. Joe Lieberman, 5/4/98:

If we can manage the transition, we have a chance to not only do something right, but to give people more confidence about what their retirement years would be like. Of course, it also dramatically increases our savings rate, which has to be good for our economy overall. Not everybody supports this….I think in the end that individual control of part of the retirement/Social Security funds has to happen.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, 10/5/00:

For a while I was drilling into this idea of privatization of Social Security. It requires taking as much as a trillion dollars out of the Social Security fund. The independent analysts have said that would put the fund out of money in 2023, or if it’s not out of money, benefits will have to be cut by over 50%. That’s just not worth doing.

Washington Post, 2/28/05:

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has declared that Senate Democrats are united in their opposition to personal accounts carved out of Social Security…Despite Reid’s assertion, however, several moderate Democrats have not ruled out backing a more modest version of the president’s plan. Some of these centrists, such as Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., have been meeting with Republican colleagues to discuss whether there is a middle ground.

In April, 2002, Tom DeLay told a church crowd, “He [God] has been walking me through an incredible journey…He is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for biblical worldview in everything that I do and everywhere I am. He is training me, He is working with me.”

No word on whether God was with DeLay during his luxurious vacation at the Four Seasons Hotel in London in mid-2000, paid for by corrupt GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff. This weekend, the National Journal provided new detail on the close, personal and grotesquely unethical relationship between DeLay and Abramoff. According to expense accounts obtained by the Journal, Abramoff financed DeLay and DeLay’s staff’s stay at the Four Seasons hotel in mid-2000, to the tune of $4,285.35. The total reimbursement for expenses in London was $13,318.50. Read more

This week the credit card industry — which raked in $30 billion in profits last year — storms the Congress in an attempt to squeeze a few more dimes from Americans who are sick or out of work. Starting today the Senate will consider a bill (S. 256) that would amend bankruptcy law to “make it harder for families struck by financial misfortune to get back on track.” (Nine out of 10 bankruptcies “are triggered by the loss of a job, high medical bills or divorce.) The bill is supported in Congress by a bipartisan coalition on the credit industry dole. They think they can pass the bill without the American people noticing. Prove them wrong. Write your senators and tell them to reject the legislation in its current form.

The bill on the Senate floor right now doesn’t stop some of the worst abuses of our bankruptcy system. In several states — including the president’s home in Texas — a multimillionaire buisnessman can declare bankruptcy, avoid his debts, and still keep his palatial estate. Some examples:

Marvin Warner, a former ambassador to Switzerland and the owner of a failed Ohio Savings & Loan, who paid off only a fraction of $300 million in bankruptcy claims while keeping his multi-million-dollar horse ranch near Ocala, Florida.

Dallas developer, Talmadge Wayne Tinsley, who filed under chapter 7 after incurring $60 million in debts. Tinsley objected to the Texas law that permitted him to keep only one acre of his $3.5 million, 3.1-acre magnolia-lined estate. But that acre included a five-bedroom, six-and-a-half-bath mansion with two studies, a pool and a guest house.

The 2001 bankruptcy bill at least stopped these abuses by capping the so-called “homestead exemption” at $125,000. This bill has a complicated exemption that will allow “wealthy debtors who are sophisticated enough to plan ahead — and those are, after all, the people we are talking about — can purchase a homestead to shelter their non-exempt assets and simply wait [49 months] before filing their petition.”

The Department of Homeland Security has set up a committee to advise them on privacy issues. In theory this seems like a great idea. But the DHS has installed representatives from Cendant, SAIC and Claria on the privacy board.

This is the equivalent of putting Armstrong Williams on a federal advisory board for media ethics.

Cendant owns Galileo, a computer reservation system for airline travel. According to the Transportation Security Administration, Galileo “shared private information about their passengers” with the governement without their customer’s consent. The records included the travelers’ “name, address, phone number, e-mail address, credit card number and other personal details.”

SAIC is a major government contractor. Last month, a break-in at SAIC headquarters in San Deigo netted thieves “computers containing the Social Security numbers and other personal information about tens of thousands of past and present company employees.” Former weapons inspector David Kay — whose information was compromised because he used to work at SAIC — said, “I just find it unexplainable how anyone could be so casual with such vital information. It’s not like we’re just now learning that identity theft is a problem”

Claria is the internet advertising company formerly known as Gator. The company changed it’s name after being subject to criticism for having policies “not friendly to people who want reasonable levels of privacy.” The company was also sued “by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other media companies for installing unauthorized pop-up ads on their Web sites.”

Sounds like just the kind of folks we need advising the government on privacy issues.

[The Center for American Progress is co-hosting a two-day conference this week in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, entitled New Strategies for Southern Progress. The conference is convening more than 200 national, state and local political leaders, policy experts, journalists and academics to rethink critical issues facing the South and chart a new progressive vision for the region. ThinkProgress Team member Jon Baskin is on the scene]

Progressive religious voices at today’s third panel, “Rethinking the Role of the Faith Community,” argued over the legacy of the Civil Rights movement in the South. Congressman David Price (D-NC) said his social and political conscience was forged during the North Carolina sit-ins and harkened back to the Civil Rights movement as a moment characterized by interfaith coalitions and progressive ideals.

But Reverend Daphne Wiggins, the Assistant Pastor at Union Baptist Church, cautioned that even as pastors led mass movements to broaden rights and tear down segregation in the South, “in that same period, you had the emergence and increase of segregated Christian day schools. And older people of faith too, who had a particular agenda saying we’re not in the progressive movement, we’re not going to have desegregated schools.”

Wiggins was joined by Alabama Baptist Reverend James Evans in warning that many of the gains of the Civil Rights movement may not be as permanent as they once appeared. The modern Christian right wing, said Evans, wants to “refight battles its already lost. Evolution is back. they lost on Civil Rights but this battle over gay marriage is a way for white Christians to say, ‘by golly I’m right about this and I know I’m right.’” It also wants to dismantle the New Deal, said Evans.

Indeed, Wiggins emphasized the importance of not resting on laurels or “patting ourselves on the back” about past victories. “It seems to me that if we talk about what’s happening currently…good work once done is not being repeated in our pulpits, not being put in our Sunday school literature.” she said. “The people that went through [the Civil Rights movement] are not telling their stories. A generation of people are not getting the lessons.”

Quote That Made Me Hungry But Shouldn’t Have:

“It’s so hard when you have good sweet Anglo pastors who say, ‘Maria, we want to partner with your church and we want to be inclusive and we have decided, it’s taco night!’”

–Reverend Maria Teresa Palmer, founding Pastor of Iglesia Unida De Christo (United Church of Christ), explaining some of the benefits and challenges of inter-racial church activities