Much of what you have written about Arnold is true. With respect to handling the State's fiscal crisis I think he has been no better a governor than Grey Davis and in many respects not as good. I do not approve whatsoever Arnold's attempts to gut the state pension plan.
It is part of an attempt to lesson the strength of the Teachers Union & other State employee unions. Part of the problem is that the CAl Democratic party is far to beholden to these unions. The party will not be able to stand up to Arnold until it deals with the fact that it has given to much strength to these unions to control it's agenda. I do not mean that it has to abandon unions just that it has to be less dependent on them to stand up to Arnold. When prison guards w/ high school educations are making $85,000 a year plus better benefit packages than anyone in private industry due largely to their unions clout in the Democratic party Arnold will always be able to point to government excess as the cause of the State woes & it will ring true w/ a lot of the voters.
If this state is to stay blue for long, the party has to be able to say no to the state employee & teachers union, while at the same time truly backing worker rights. Then it can take back the governor's office and look to correcting the tax base & solving some of the states fiscal problems in a rational & fair manner. This is a difficult juggling act to say the least.

The 2,000 pound canary is the effect of global warming on CA's water system. All is designed around the snow-pack, reservoir model with neither working without the other. As the snow - pack recedes, another means of storing water, one capable of handling very high flow rates, becomes necessary.

Better to be a media junkie than a media whore.

Before the trolls hit claiming there is not scientific proof of global warming, I will state that there is currently scientific proof that a climate change is occurring. The best evidence shows a correlation between our obsession with dumping massive amounts of pollutants in the air and this change. As anyone who has had a statistics class knows, you cannot imply a cause-effect relationship from a correlation, but you can imply that a relationship exists. Whether this is proof of a man-made cause or a natural change in the climate is the focus of the debate. Maybe a big volcano will blow and dump more shit than we ever put in the atmosphere at one time. Maybe. This possibility is not reason enough to dump unlimited crap in our environment, foul our air and water, and make ourselves ill (and the evidence does support a direct cause-effect relationship for this occurrence).

As for prison guard salaries. Holy Cow! They do make a ton, and I don't know how you address that issue. You could do what many other states have done, build tons of private non-union prisons (largely at state expense) paying $23,000 per year per officer. The right's punish people, punish lots of people, and punish them permanently move of the 80's and 90's has paid off with the U.S. having the largest prison population of any nation, and the most regressive and oppressive incarceration system for an industrailized nation. But, by God, we get even with them criminals, and doing so gets even with us.

I sure hope the asshole cop who pulled me over one night in Culver City for an "unsafe lane change" isn't experiencing any damage to his property right now. That would make me cry.

Whether or not global warming is an actual thing (and I happen to believe it is), it is stupid to resist efforts to curb it. It is stupid to pretend that it's not a possibility. Because we cannot afford to be wrong about it, we must absolutely operate as though it were an actual thing.

And fuck the cops in Culver City, California.

Well, Tobe. Enjoy the watch list you just put yourself on. Ain't fascism a grand thing?

really quick letter from CA reads:

Please make it stop raining. ;-(

Paradox, ah, Kalifornia in the the Springtime!

Or is that Springtime for schwarzenegger?

I don't use the cute first name thing for the gropin governor because it just plays to his "franchise," and that's one of the things we need to tarnish, his stinkin franchise. Did he bring back big bux from DC? No. Does bushco care if he pulls CA from our budget woes? No.

So if he can't get anything from his "friends" in Washington, what good does he provide to California by being a mouth breathng, knuckle dragging, fish loving gopper anyway?