Now that I no longer have to live there...

The Golden State of California offers me an ever-full cornucopia of entertainment.

With other things going on here, I'd actually forgotten that Kali had scheduled yet another special election yesterday; something I'd have enjoyed watching. Kali's proposition system excites and endears observers (who don't have to live through it) on several levels: The individual propositions are often deceptively phrased so that "no" can mean "yes" and vice versa; funding measures provide opportunities for insanely misleading advertisement campaigns (1% of a funding measure can go to something like the prevention of warm puppy and rainbow extinction while 99% goes to further enhance the illiteracy of schoolchildren and pave over the Sequoias ; the advertisements will sing the praises of the 1% and pretend the 99% doesn't exist.) As long as you don't actually have to live there, all the sausage-making can be quite diverting.

None of it ever does a damned bit of good, and lately the chaos and disruption have reached monumental proportions even by California standards. There may be a few people in Tibet who aren't aware (in nauseating detail) of the financial hole Californians have dug for themselves through their government. Schwarzenegger's 2005 special election propositions for bringing the budget into some misleading semblance of control was resoundingly trashed by government "workers" unions, and since then the Governator has behaved like a broken toy. He was elected in a historic recall election to undo the financial damage blamed on Gray Davis, but he seems to have outdone him instead. The only solution (of course) Sacramento could come up with to fill in the deficit was a new round of even more outrageous taxation. Virtually all those propositions went down to defeat yesterday, no doubt leaving federal bailouts as the state government's only hope of even temporarily continuing solvency. The recriminations, of course, are already under way.

To paraphrase a certain fictional Rabbi: "May God bless and keep the California government - far away from us."

UPDATE: This is amazing. I hope to hell George Orwell patented the Memory Hole, because if he did his estate stands to make a fricking fortune. The second link above originally went to a Sacramento Bee article addressed to California voters, taking them to task (in extremely snarky terms) for their foolish votes on the propositions.

That article has apparently been pulled, or at least the link now goes to a different article entirely, addressed to California legislators, taking them to task (in somewhat snarky terms) for their foolish spending habits. That's just weird.