California's Preemptive Strike -One More for the Gipper

You will recall that California's Gov. Schwarzenegger declined to commute the death penalty for notorious Crips gang founder Stanley 'Tookie' Williams, executed recently for a few of his career homicides. Commutation would have set an awfully bad example for youth, disenfranchised a majority of voters and propelled a convicted criminal to undeserved fame and fortune.

A majority of Graz, Austria's City Council, had threatened the governor (yes, they threatened The Terminator) with renaming the Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadium, if he denied clemency for the unrepenetant mass-murderer. Such are the long noses of some Europeans that they had been willing to borrow a celebrity name for the past 7 years, but unwilling to respect jurisdictional boundaries of a U.S. state 4 times as large as Austria (population 8 million).

Before city officials had taken a formal vote on the petition to remove the sign naming their 15,000-seat arena in actor Arnold Schwarzenegger's name, however, the Governor withdrew Graz's right to use his name in association with the stadium. City officials are keeping Schwarzenegger's honorary citizenship ring, returned during the holidays, in the hope that Schwarzenegger might accept it again later. Ronald Reagan would have been proud of Arnold.