Cullyforneeyah

Bahia mi rumba.

Me personally, I like firefighters, teachers, nurses, prison guards, and public employees. Generally speaking, they help people. You might not think so if you are an arsonist or inmate, or even perhaps a delinquent junior highschool student. But me, I like 'em.

And I want them to be able to have some say over their work, for they know it best.

Take firefighting, for example. You would never stop a fireman in mid-task, say for example, rushing into a burning home to retrieve a trapped toddler, to criticize his work style, promotion structures, and union politicking. Yet many people (beware the link) rail on and on about teachers, as if they know as much about the work as teachers themselves.

Then such people might even riff upon the term "trapped toddler" with scathing remarks about the so-called indoctrination of school students. As if that would be funnier this time than the last eight million times some libertarian griped about public schools.

Anyways, bravo for the people of California, for rejecting the Anuhld's many propositions in the recent special voting.

It must have been some party:

Dogging the governor, as it has for months, was the California Nurses Assn., which organized a luau at the Trader Vic's in the same hotel. As Schwarzenegger's defeats mounted, giddy nurses formed a conga line and danced around the room, singing, "We're the mighty, mighty nurses."

When you're sick in a hospital bed, you will not be able to petiton your government for redress.

The nurse-staffing law, signed by former Gov. Gray Davis, was the first in the nation to require hospitals to have a certain number of nurses for each patient on all wards. The regulations took effect in 2004. This past January, ratios on busy medical and surgical units were scheduled to increase. But in November Schwarzenegger blocked those new increases, causing tensions with nurses to rise.

The California Nurses Association immediately took the matter to state court, arguing that Schwarzenegger could not halt the law by using an emergency regulation, a little-used rule that allows the governor to suspend state laws during emergencies, such as an earthquake. The judge ultimately ruled that the nursing shortage did not constitute a dire emergency and the administration had therefore overstepped its bounds.

Old news, but good news.

That Arnie is so clever. As the article from Women's e-News shows, he tried to declare the nursing shortage an "emergency" so he could suspend laws that mandated safer hospital nurse-patient ratios. Brilliant, that.

In the face of rising floodwaters, he would attempt to halt the deluge by drooling.

Propositions that would affect union politics and teacher tenure were defeated in this special election, and Scharzenegger was made lame. As if he weren't lame enough already.

Thank goodness for the nurses of California, as well as many other people, for their principled opposition to this lug. It gives hope to all of us who move and shake, make the coffee, transfuse the blood, grade the homework, mind the convicts, and get the stuck cats out of the trees.