We got lots of retweets yesterday quoting Governor Jerry Brown during his May Revise press conference Monday. As George Skelton noted in the LA Times, in the middle of all the talking about austerity was a passionate defense of government and a concise argument against the cuts:
“Government is a nurse. It’s a teacher. It’s a highway patrolman. It’s someone working in a mental hospital. And when we cut, that’s what we cut,” he said.
There are other less profound but still amusing quotes from the press conference:
“There are ideologues who say government is an abstraction that you can just completely eviscerate with no impact in the real world. Well that isn’t true.”
The state budget: “It’s a pretzel palace of incredible complexity.”
“What that means is that things that are good in and of themselves have got to be stopped or curtailed if we are going to have balance.”
“In some ways you are a declinist… I am a bouyant optimist.”
“..I would urge a modicum of stoicism and less of indulging your propensity to immediate gratification”
“The capitalist system is not coincident with your expectations of exactitude.”
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