A day of reckoning is coming in California. That which can't continue won't. The bill for the state's credit card will almost certainly come due. The question for us as lovers of this state and her people is what do we do now when our state, once the pride of the world, is described by The Wall Street Journal as America's Lindsay Lohan. How it pains me to read that. We are one tenth the nation, and yet we seem to be nearly all of her problems.
I do not believe that the land of Steinbeck that beckoned the Joads and that was just East of Eden should become just a dream. Let us start earning some "belief money." CalWatchDog has more:
“They have nowhere to go but up,” Jack Pitney told me; he’s Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College and author of “The Art of Political Warfare” and other books. “That’s the optimistic way of looking at it. The party is in about as tough a shape as you can imagine.”
Voters passed Proposition 25, which dropped from two-thirds to a majority the threshold for passing a state budget. “That means they’re cut out of the budget process,” Pitney added. “They don’t have any significant leverage in the Legislature. Interest groups don’t have any reason to give them the time of day.”
He said that there are two kinds of contributions to political campaigns: Access money and belief money. Access money is to buy influence; Republicans won’t be getting much of that. Belief money is because the politician advances something the donor believes in. “Republicans now will have to motivate people with their beliefs. They will have to make arguments to persuade people to move away from the Democrats.”
