A TASTE OF THINGS TO COME

The Governator is forced by his disastrous defeat on Tuesday to stop his assault on California's nurses:

SACRAMENTO — Jettisoning another apparently losing fight, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has abandoned his yearlong effort to relax rules mandating the number of nurses that hospitals must employ.

His endeavor helped spark the public employee union rebellion that led to the defeat of his special election agenda Tuesday.

Schwarzenegger last November had set aside rules that required hospitals to employ in some wards one nurse for every five patients instead of every six. His administration said it was concerned hospitals could not handle the financial costs involved in hiring more nurses.

But a Sacramento County Superior Court judge rejected the administration's effort in March, and the ruling was upheld by an appellate court. While the administration continued to try to overturn it, hospitals had to follow the new rules and discovered they were not as burdensome as they had feared.

On Thursday, the same day Schwarzenegger publicly pledged to be less combative with those who had opposed his special election, the administration dropped its appeal. "We had 10 months of experience with the court-mandated ratios and there seems to be no negative impact on the healthcare system," Sabrina Demayo Lockhart, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Agency, said Friday.

This is an exemplar of what life will be like for Republicans moving forward. Make no mistake, the GOP is imploding before our eyes. Add this defeat for Arnold to the scuttling of plans to drill in ANWR and the mutiny from moderate Republicans over the House budget bill. No more can the GOP count on lockstep allegiance to their agenda. Congressional Republicans have seen that George W. Bush is an albatross around their necks, and they are looking to toss him overboard. Look for more and more Repukes appealing desperately to their constituents, taking great pains to tell how they never really liked Bush, and they're nothing like him, etc, etc.

This is gonna be great. Just sit back and watch the fur fly. Bush will have so many knives in his back, he'll look like a porcupine.

JC