Pants On Fire...

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Today's Los Angeles Times column by Steve Lopez pulls back the curtain on another of Team Arnold's fake photo ops, this time from Arnie's visit with firefighters in Thousand Oaks last week.

Lopez says, "The whole thing also raises a question that goes beyond politics and straight to the heart of voters' concerns about Schwarzenegger. Does he ever get out of makeup, or is everything show business?":

"So how did Schwarzenegger find 20 firefighters eager to pose with him?

"He didn't, says Pat McOsker, president of United Firefighters of Los Angeles, who went to the command center to check on the condition of colleagues who had been on the job for three days with little sleep. He says the men and women flanking the governor were acting under duress...

"McOsker said he began telling reporters at the news conference that the firefighters were ordered to stand up there with Schwarzenegger, and one scribe asked the governor about it.

"Rather than dispute the contention, Schwarzenegger said everybody is ordered to do things at one point or another. Someone was ordered to put up the podium, he said. Someone was ordered to bring in the microphone...

"'We were all in agreement amongst ourselves: Nobody wanted to do it,' said Capt. Wayne Ferber of the Ventura County Fire Department. 'We were directed by one of our chief officers that this was something we were to do. If you were watching
on the TV screen, I was to the right side of the governor, but I was sort of ducking so nobody would see me. I was doing my best to stay out of the picture.'" (Los Angeles Times, October 5, 2005)

So it seems that somebody on the governor's staff pulled firefighters away from their jobs, against their will, in order to pose as a backdrop for the Guvenator.

Hmmm, the governor wasting important resources for something that Californians don't want, against their will? Sounds familiar...

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