My favorite part of the Arnold letter:

In it, Schwarzenegger also said he would no longer permit the use of his name "to advertise or promote the city of Graz in any way" and would return the city's "ring of honor."

The ring was given to him in a ceremony in Graz in 1999. At the time, Schwarzenegger said he considered it "a token of sincere friendship between my hometown and me.

"Since, however, the official Graz appears to no longer accept me as one of their own, this ring has lost its meaning and value to me. It is already in the mail," the governor wrote.

The ring is in the mail. That's gotta hurt.

Hmm, any way to combine threads? I commented above upon returning from lunch, only to find another topic...

loved Ahnuld's response. just the right combination of "I have a responsibility as Governor" and "kiss my ass".

Sorry, Lapsed. I took down my post when I realized there were TWO others on it already. In any event, noting my disgust with landlocked Austria, you wrote:

Well, it's not land-locked if you're playing Diplomacy. But that was circa 1900. And it was Austrio-Hungary. So I guess I really don't have a point.

Yet another reason why Arnold rocks. (1) He showed Graz who's boss, (2) he killed the evil mercenary Freddy Mercury, and (3) he gave us Governor Jesse Ventura.

Sadly, I think this triple posting evidences the master coordinating abilities of the blog-tards working this outfit's levers.

Those losers in Graz are just wannabes. Arnold wasn't from there anyway; he was from a smaller town down the road from there.

HA! HA! Finally, Ahnuld did something "bawsy" and sticks by it. Maybe this Tookie thing will turn him into a real Republican.

When did he kill Freddie Mercury?
I thought 'pnemonia' did that.

make that "Pneumonia".
Loose sh*t, no pun intended.

Referencing Arnold's opponent in the greatest movie of all time, 1985's Commando. Originals are 404, but take a look at the first two images here.

I still have a problem with him keeping his Austrian citizenship, if indeed that is correct.

Schwarzenegger initially declined to respond to the political backlash after he denied clemency for Williams, the co-founder of the Crips gang who was convicted of four 1979 murders. Williams was executed shortly after midnight Dec. 13.

Political backlash? Backlash?!?

If there is a "Political backlash" because Gov. Schwarzenegger failed to cave in and grant clemency for a man who was directly responsible for the brutal murder of four people, and indirectly responsible for the deaths of countless more across the county, then the people of California are even more screwed up then I thought.

P.J. O'Rourke said it best - "I'd rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than King, Queen and Jack of all you smart-assed Europeans."

From the linked article...

They are now waiting to see how Schwarzenegger deals with the scheduled Jan. 17 execution of a 75-year-old inmate.

Oops! Missed it by that much!

"Tookie? Oh, he be dead now."(I'd add a link if I weren't such a lazy fuckin' white boy...)

The folks in Graz can now proceed with their dream of renaming the stadium The Tookie Dome, and converting it to a giant art gallery; the influx of new visitors from San Francisco will more than offset any loss of tourist dollars caused by Arnold's action.

The New York Times seems to state that the city council acted BEFORE Arnold did, and that Arnold's demand to remove his name was a "pre-emptive strike". I wonder if the Times is correct or if it is typical Times bias. They did seem to print this story a few days later than the blogs did.

Here's the article:

Hometown Snubs Schwarzenegger Over Death Penalty

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Published: December 27, 2005

BERLIN, Dec. 26 - For years the quaint Austrian town of Graz trumpeted its special relationship with its outsize native son, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Born in a village nearby and schooled in Graz, Mr. Schwarzenegger was an honorary citizen and holder of the town's Ring of Honor. Most conspicuously, the local sports stadium was named after him.

But early today, under cover of darkness, his name was removed from the arena in a sort of uncontested divorce between Mr. Schwarzenegger and the town council, which had been horrified that Governor Schwarzenegger ignored pleas to spare the life of Stanley Tookie Williams, former leader of the Crips gang, who was executed by the state of California two weeks ago for murdering four people.

The 15,000-seat stadium had been named after Mr. Schwarzenegger in 1997 as an act of both self-promotion and fealty toward the poor farmer's son and international celebrity who has always identified Graz as his native place.

But when Mr. Schwarzenegger declined to commute Mr. Williams's death penalty, the reaction was swift and angry in Graz, which, like most places in Europe, sees the death penalty as a medieval atrocity.

"I submitted a petition to the City Council to remove his name from the stadium, and to take away his status as an honorary citizen," Sigrid Binder, the leader of the Green Party, said in a recent interview. "The petition was accepted by a majority on the council."

Before a formal vote was taken on the petition, however, Mr. Schwarzenegger made a kind of pre-emptive strike, writing a letter to Siegfried Nagl, the town's conservative mayor, withdrawing Graz's right to use his name in association with the stadium. There will be other death penalty decisions ahead, Mr. Schwarzenegger wrote, and so he decided to spare the responsible politicians of Graz further concern.

"It was a clever step," Ms. Binder said. "He took the initiative," she continued, and then suggested a bit of the local politics that had entered into the matter. "It was possible for him to do so," she said, "because the mayor didn't have the courage to take a clear position on this point."

Needless to say, Mr. Nagl, a member of the conservative Peoples Party, who opposed the name-removal initiative, does not agree.

He is against the death penalty, he said in an interview, and on Dec. 1, he wrote a letter to Mr. Schwarzenegger pleading for clemency for Mr. Williams. But he blames the leftist majority on the City Council - consisting of Greens, Social Democrats and two Communists - for trying to score some local political points at Mr. Schwarzenegger's and, he believes, Graz's own expense.

"One stands by a friend and a great citizen of our city and does not drag his name through the mud even when there is a difference of opinion," Mr. Nagl said in a letter he wrote to Mr. Schwarzenegger. "I would like to ask you to keep the Ring of Honor of the City of Graz."

The heated nature of the debate revealed how much a relatively small place like Graz, certainly a place with no military might or diplomatic power to speak of, wants to play a role as a sort of moral beacon, waging the struggle for what it considers the collective good.

Graz, a place of old onion steeples, museums and Art Nouveau architecture, designated itself five years ago, with a unanimous vote of the City Council, to be Europe's first official "city of human rights." While the designation has no juridical meaning, it provides a sort of goal to live up to.

"We are against the death penalty not only in word, but really against the death penalty," said Wolfgang Benedek, a professor of international law at Graz University. He said the council's reaction reflected the special circumstances surrounding Mr. Williams: a man who had written a children's book aimed at steering young people away from violence, had already spent many years in jail, and seemed, to Europeans at least, to have reformed himself.

"Many people around the world pleaded with Mr. Schwarzenegger to show mercy in this case, and when he didn't, the city had somehow to react," Mr. Benedek said.

Mr. Benedek allows that there is an element of elite versus popular opinion on this matter. A poll by the local newspaper found that over 70 percent of the public opposed removing Mr. Schwarzenegger's name from the stadium. This adds to a practical consideration very much on Mr. Nagl's mind: that Graz will no longer be able to count on using its special relationship with the governor to promote its image.

"We had the great classical culture on the one side," the mayor's spokesman, Thomas Rajakovics, said, referring to other important figures who are associated with Graz, - like the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the Novel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger, and the conductor Karl Böhm. "And on the other, we had Arnold Schwarzenegger and the popular culture. These were the two poles for us, but we're not allowed to use his name any more."

The Schwarzenegger name has, as it were, been erased. The new name is now simply Stadion Graz-Liebenau (a district of Graz), though there were other proposals. One was to name the stadium after the Crips, the gang that Mr. Williams founded, but that idea did not get widespread support. Another was to name it Hakoah, after a Jewish sports club that was banned after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938.

But the first "city of human rights" did not seem quite ready for that either. It is not that there was vocal opposition but, as Ms. Binder put it, Austrians do not generally want a daily reminder of the terrible wartime past.

Meanwhile, city officials are holding on to Mr. Schwarzenegger's honorary citizenship ring, which arrived from Mr. Schwarzenegger during the holidays. Mr. Rajakovics said they will keep it for him in the hope that one day he will take it back.