California Fire and Life

(apologies to Don Winslow)

Over the past twenty years or so, California's fire season has expanded from a late-summer nuisance to a nine-month volley of increasingly more catastrophic firestorms. Typically it rains enough between late November and mid-March to keep fire threats down, but our fire season now occupies nearly the entire period of time in between.

Last year saw parts of Santa Rosa, by far the largest city between the San Francisco-Sacramento I-80 corridor and the Oregon border, burned right to the ground. Hundreds of homes and buildings destroyed, thousands of people displaced. The fires disrupted the real estate market for a year, in about a hundred-mile radius, because of the sudden scarcities in an already scarce inventory.

This year has been non-stop all over the state, but especially burdensome in the relatively sparse population areas of Northern California, the region commonly known these days as the State of Jefferson. The Carr Fire engulfed the Redding area for weeks, causing destruction that will take years to recover from. And now the rather poorly-named Camp Fire (named because it originated near Camp Creek Road, not because it was a campfire that got away from the campers) has claimed the entire town of Paradise, and is heading down Highway 99 toward Oroville. Somehow Chico has been spared. Fire crews from all over the country have pitched to help, and the fire is finally getting contained. It's supposed to rain this coming week, which should help finish off the damned thing.

Waterlogged

I am glad Jerry Brown is the current governor of California, not because I have any particular like for the man, but because Meg Whitman would have been utterly catastrophic. Never trust anyone who spends $140 million of their own money trying to get a job that pays less than $175k.

That said, it is less than encouraging to see that Brown's tough talk on measures to deal with the state's ongoing drought will amount to very little. This is simple math:  if 80% of usage is from agriculture, forget a 25% reduction -- everyone else could completely stop using water overnight, and it's only going to help so much. And a reduction is only going to be enforceable for places like cemeteries and golf courses anyway, and they'll just pay the fine.

Someone who was serious about conserving water would look at some of the more egregious examples, such as why we're growing alfalfa -- far and away the most water-intensive crop -- to make hay to ship to China. Or why farmers up and down the state have switched deliberately over to more profitable (yet again, very water-intensive) crops like almonds, pistachios, wine grapes, beef cattle.

There's a certain amount of hypocrisy built into all of this. Like most people, I like steak and wine and pistachios. But I'm willing to pay a premium for those things. And I'm on a well, so when we run out, it's going to cost money to either punch a deeper well, or get a tank setup and have water trucked in.

And that's the crux of the problem -- the farmers aren't willing to pay the same premium. They take the cheap water, and the gubmint subsidies. And outside the cities, most of the pols are owned and operated by agricultural interests. As every native Californian knows, Chinatown is a documentary. As the old saying goes, whiskey's for drinkin', water's for fightin' over.

It would make more sense to charge everyone more across the board, farmers and consumers alike. You want to use up millions of scarce acre-feet of water to grow hay to send to China? Then you pay the true cost. Are you sinking a 900' ag well to tap an aquifier that might take decades or centuries to replenish at this rate? Then you pay the true cost. Do you enjoy almond milk, or steak? Then....well, you guessed it.

Until something along that line occurs, the governor's grand idea matters very little, perhaps not at all. For years California has had this never-ending boondoggle of a high-speed rail system, a bullet train to fucking Fresno that has vastly exceeded its initial cost estimates, and has no signs of starting anytime in the future, near or far. We put a man on the moon, but it took this state twenty goddamned years to upgrade the Bay Bridge, and it looks like the high-speed rail will make that look like nothing.

If we're looking for a Great Project to throw money at, maybe it's time to get serious about building desalination plants, rather than making sure people can get to Fresno more quickly. (Snark aside, California's main north-south state highways, Interstate 5 and Highway 99, are in wretched shape, constantly in repair and over-trafficked.) That would be infinitely more effective than writing people up for watering their lawns, especially when they're already conserving to begin with. The people who need to be conserving the most aren't even being asked to conserve at all.

Then again, maybe the people of California deserve exactly what they're getting, at least some of them.

America Drinks and Goes Home

Did we learn anything tonight? Of course not. There is nothing to learn, nothing to prognosticate. It did not, in fact, really matter who "won". The donor classes won, as they always do. They're not in this for their health, you know.

Some will say that because Rand Paul -- an ophthalmologist who created his own licensing board in order to certify himself -- beat Jack Conway, that the teabaggers are ascendant. Others will say that because Casper W. MilquetoastHarry Reid squeaked past the teabaggers' shithouse rat in Nevada, that said 'baggers are not what they (and the media who legitimized them with endless profiles) think they are.

The baggers seem to seriously not understand that politics is a business, first and foremost, that there is a reason that the same conglomerates and people of wealth hedge their bets by renting both parties. It is a money game, and all their Paul Revere bullshit will only take them so far once they're actually in. I'm sure Rand Paul and his toupée think this will be some Mr. Smith Goes to Washington schitck for the rubes back home, but what it will be is stasis, a two-year Mexican standoff between obstinate upstarts and puling lifers who literally couldn't pull shit together with a supermajority.

Comic relief abounds, as always, but pound for pound the biggest humor may be found in the CA goobernatorial race, where eMeg Whitman spent a sixth of a billion dollars of her own money to end up six points behind Jerry Brown, who didn't even start advertising until Labor Day. She would have gotten better results -- and saved a buttload of money -- just by going around and handing three million voters twenty bucks each.

Hilarious as it is to watch Mrs. Griff Harsh IV blow an impossible amount of money for a dismal job no one in their right mind would want, there is an actual takeaway. Every election cycle gets worse and worse in this regard, but the Citizens United decision really sealed the deal on effectively making the permanent campaign a full-time by god industry. This is why toxic yahooism and borderline-retard candidates get covered, validated, legitimized, turned into the latest and greatest.

And in the end, neither Rand Paul nor Barbara Boxer, nor a single one them, really, will do a single thing to address the two greatest issues driving this country into the dirt -- wage stagnation and wealth disparity. Even a nudge of those two factors in the right direction would address a host of connected issues, from jobs to education.

But as the man famously said, it is impossible to get someone to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it.

99 Problems: Dunce Dunce Revolution

Oy. What hath Palin wrought, you know? It was bad enough we had this belligerent nitwit dumped on us, but now her ideological gender-mates are cropping up hither and sometimes yon. And they are bad enough in the sense that you don't even need to go into their politics or positions (since none of them are willing to discuss their actual ideas anyway). They're just ridiculous people to begin with.

I don't care that Christine O'Donnell may or may not have "dabbled" in "witchcraft" (which was probably a bullshit embellishment of her being a hanger-on to either Dungeons and Dragons nerds or headbanger poseurs in the first place). The concern is that she has yet to articulate a position on anything; she apparently seriously believes she'll just waltz into Capitol Hill with a Ginsu pen and cut spending as far as the eye can see.

Of course, she's never held a real job either, not one that requires reporting to a boss and justifying your continued existence. So much for this simplistic "I'm you" crap. An even bigger concern is that she has spent her entire adult life campaigning against fairly routine things like masturbation. I don't know what to make of a person who fails to recognize biology for what it is.

Then there's Sharron Angle, Nevada's crazy cat lady, minus the cats. As with O'Donnell, it's not the actual politics (because again, Flying Spaghetti Monster forbid that they actually talk about what they do and how they plan to do it), so much as the basic notion that a person who campaigns against black football jerseys on religious grounds is simply mentally unstable, and probably shouldn't be trusted with more than a three-figure budget.

So beyond politics, there's just sheer intellectual quackery, not to mention dishonesty. And then there's eMeg Whitman, supposedly more reputable and legitimate, by virtue of her awesome bidness experience. But this is someone who has built a personal fortune on insider trading and opportunities, situations that, legal or not, are denied to 99.9% of all other human beings on the planet, period.

And really, how great of a businessperson are you when you blow an eighth of a billion dollars of your own money to be governor of California, a job sure to be as thankless and winless as head coach of the Oakland Raiders? Especially since, for all the high-dollar media blitzes she bought, Whitman is running maybe neck-and-neck with Jerry Brown, who has spent dick on his campaign, and waited until after Labor Day to even bother advertising (as it should be).

But the first rule of politics is, don't spend your own money. Yes, yes, throwing your own cash in presents the veneer of incorruptibility, but as Jesse Unruh famously said, if you can't take thier money, drink their whiskey, fuck their women, and still vote against them the next day, you don't belong there.

This is the level of incompetence I'm supposed to elect as governor? Why not just re-elect Schwarzenegger as goobernator for life and have done with it? At least Ahnult is occasionally entertaining; the best we'll get from eMeg -- before she inevitably jumps to be running mate to Mitt Romney's '12 Magic Underwear campaign -- is an occasional update on her evil snowboarder son. Frankly, just naming a kid "Griff Harsh V" -- yes, the fucking fifth, goddammit -- is a sign of epically poor judgment.

People, I'm tellin' ya, we gotta start judging people on intangibles, if they refuse to give us tangibles. As tempted as I am to let them choke on their own fumes o' stupid, this teabagger shit, it does no one any good -- except, of course, their corporate benefactors.

Not to implicitly support the hoary notion of smoke-filled backroom deals, but the idea that politics is best served by installing complete neophytes is dangerously stupid. Sure, we've railed against stupid, gutless compromises in the past, because such creatures deserve to be called what they are. But politics is, in the end, the art of reasonable compromise, and adding bozos like these to the mix just makes a toxic pot more so.

Part of me hopes the retards get what they think they want, just to watch them twist in the wind. After all, their moron bullshit won't affect me, not for a long time, by which point I'm sure (wishful thinking) I'll be just another flatulent gazillionaire. Let these Scrooge McDuck wannabes hoist themselves on their dull fantasies of striking it rich with whatever nose gold they can dig out, and devil take the hindmost. It'd be worth it just to watch their state-subsidized Rascals re-appropriated. Fuck 'em.

The problem is, no matter how iconoclastic I am temperamentally, I still trust and believe in the Scottish Enlightenment ideals of what this nation was supposed to be, what it still should and could be if even fifteen percent got their fucking shit together and brought the wood to the dipshits currently poisoning the discourse.

Teabaggers are certainly not a "populist" movement, not in the conventional sense, and its backers do not represent the best interests of its participants, pure and simple. Only in America could a cokehead morning zoo deejay -- who was so spiritually empty that he and his wife converted to Mormonism after shopping around (if only they had found magic applesauce before the magic underwear) -- print money selling easily disproved lies to addled dipshits.

Not all of these assholes will win, but the fact that any of them are even in the running, as if "throw the bums out" suddenly translated into "find the dumbest motherfucker you can", should be warning enough.

California Drinking

Deep thought: the exquisite irony of eMeg "Griff Harsh V's proud mom" Whitman spending $71 million of her own money to peddle herself as the voice of fiscal responsibility, has it registered itself in her Ben Franklin fivehead yet? Obviously not, since eMeg is really no doubt positioning herself as a possible running mate for Mitt Romney's next tilt at the electoral windmill. It takes some real doing to make Jerry Brown look like the best choice, but by gawd she's done it in spades.

As for iCarly Fiorina, the less said the better. The weekend chatter 'mongst the "news" dipshits centers around iCarly's snotty pot-meet-kettle live-mike sniping at Barbara Boxer's hair, because that is the media we have.

And while Boxer is as uninspiring as they come, at least she doesn't have the "I lawn-darted HP and all I got were these ludicrous campaign commercials" albatross. Poor iCarly probably does really think that Sarah Palin's imprimatur will help, but she would probably get more cred with the endorsement of the ghost of former gubernatorial candidate Gary Coleman. Tom Campbell would have been a much better opponent for the Republicans to run, and might have actually won with some financial support, but since the GOP org in this state could find a way to fuck up a baked potato, they declined to even pretend to help him out. So they get what they got, which is a big bowl of wrong.

Forty million people in this fucking state, and these are the choices we have. No wonder we're imploding. It's going to be a long campaign season; I may have to pull an Elvis and just shoot my teevee by the fourth of July.

Total Recall

So here in the Golden State we have a little karmic twist:

More Californians disapprove of the job performance of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger than any governor in modern state history including Gray Davis, who was ousted by Schwarzenegger in a popular uprising, according to a Field Poll released today.

Seventy-one percent of California voters surveyed said they disapprove of Schwarzenegger's handling of the job, while 23 percent approve. The low ratings are shared across all demographics including party affiliation, region of the state, age and race or ethnicity.

....

The governor's numbers are nearly identical to those of Davis in the run-up to the recall. In August 2003, 70 percent of California disapproved of how Davis did the job while 22 percent approved.

Well, gee, maybe we should be like the whining, tantrum-throwing crybabies who chucked Davis and installed Schwarzenegger in the first damned place, and blow another $50 mil on some bullshit three-ring circus sideshow of freaks, right? I mean, who doesn't miss the glory days of '03, when Gary Coleman and Mary Carey and such like were "running" for the executive post of the planet's (then) seventh-largest economy?

No. Unlike those douche-nozzles, people with integrity and intellectual honesty are consistent in their realization that California has well and truly screwed itself in no small part by a serious over-reliance on its referendum process, which is nothing short of a joke. It has gummed up the works in this state, and needs to be overhauled.

Worse yet, look at who's running to take Ahnult's place -- a couple of asshole plutocrats trying to out-conservatard one another, one of them ready to spend $50 mil of her own money on the seat, and having already given her frat-boy jerkoff kid (with the villain snowboarder name) "consultant" loot. Oh, and Jerry Brown. Maybe Mary Carey's not such a bad option.

Schwarzenegger's low rating is driven by the severe economic downturn, DiCamillo said, while Davis touted his experience and competence when he ran for office only to be undermined by the energy crisis.

Oh, is that what "DiCamillo said", because while the first half of that sentence is undoubtedly true to a great extent, the second half ("undermined by the energy crisis") comes off as if it had been a natural event, the predictable consequence of one of Kepler's Laws of Motion of some such. And that's just not even true, podna:

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “solutions to California’s energy woes” reflect those of former Enron chief Ken Lay. On May 17, 2001, in the midst of California’s energy crisis, which was largely caused by Enron’s scandalous energy market manipulation, Schwarzenegger met with Lay to discuss “fixing” California’s energy crisis. Plans to “get deregulation right this time” called for more rate increases, an end to state and federal investigations, and less regulation. While California Governor Gray Davis and Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante were taking direct action to re-regulate Califonia’s energy and get back the $9 billion that was vacuumed out of California by Enron and other energy companies, Schwarzenegger was being groomed to overthrow Davis in the recall. Thus canceling plans to re-regulate and recoup the $9 billion.

After the California’s energy debacle of 2000, Davis and Bustamante filed suit under California’s unique Civil Code provision 17200, the “Unfair Business Practices Act,” which would order all power companies, including Enron, to repay the nearly $9 billion they extorted from California citizens. The single biggest opponent of the suit, with the most to lose, was Enron’s CEO, Ken Lay.

Lay, a very close friend and long time associate of President Bush and Vice-president Cheney, and one of their largest campaign contributors, hastily assembled a meeting with prominent Californians (confirmed by the release of 34 pages of internal Enron email) to strategize opposition to the Davis-Bustamante campaign and garner influential support for energy deregulation.

Included in the meeting were Michael Milken, “junk bond king” convicted of fraud in 1990 who currently runs a think tank in Santa Monica that focuses on global and regional economies; Ray Irani, Chief Executive of Occidental Petroleum; former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan; and movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Riordan and Schwarzenegger were at that time being courted as GOP gubernatorial candidates.)

Attendees of the meeting received a small four-page packet entitled “Comprehensive Solution for California.” The packet called for an end to the federal and state investigations into Enron’s role in California’s energy crisis and proposed saddling consumers with the $9 billion loss. Discussions further focused on preventing Davis’s proposed re-regulation of energy markets.

With Davis in office and Bustamante his natural successor, there would be little chance of dismissing rock-solid charges of fraudulent reporting of sales transactions, fake power delivery scheduling, and blatant conspiracy. The grooming of a governor amenable to a laissez-faire and corrupt energy market was essential. Recalling Davis and replacing him with Schwarzenegger was the solution. With Governor Schwarzenegger in office, Bustamante’s case is dead, as few judges will let a case go to trial to protect a state whose governor has allowed the matter to be “settled.”

It's too bad Kenny Boy Lay got off as scot-free as he did, avoiding jail and dying quietly just as his role in sending the nation's largest state into a tailspin (since turbocharged by the subprime scam) would have been elucidated more fully, just as his role in Cheney's Energy Task Farce (whatever happened to that, anyway?) might have been clarified even a little. It's too bad Lay wasn't staked to an anthill and torn apart by rabid dogs, frankly.

And it's too bad that a significant part of the driving force of this state in the past decade gets brushed under the rug with some cheap elision from a pollster. Gray Davis' biggest flaw as a politician was that he had zero charisma, but the fact of the matter is he got totally hosed, with total deliberation and extreme prejudice, by forces much larger than him, for a very large payday.

Wonder where Kenny Boy's $9 billion, poached out of the pockets of 35 million Califorians and never repaid, ended up. Maybe on a pallet in the sands of Iraq, maybe in Unca Dick's undisclosed location. We'll never know, of course, because we peons are on a need-to-know basis, but the least we can do is not be a bunch of chumps and pretend that it was all some kind of "shit happens" accident.

California Reamin'

I have to hand it to my fellow Californicators -- when they get in the mood to debunk other states' perceptions of a bunch of high-falutin', over-edumacated, self-interested smugonauts, they go all in. The fact, as demonstrated yet again yesterday, is that presumptions of political sophistication are wildly overstated; this state still and always has a deep streak of stone yahooism, and is every bit as likely to vote against its own rational self-interest as the usual inbred clan of Appalachian cooters.

Don't get me wrong -- there were no good options in this, the latest iteration of what has long been an over-reliance on a much-abused referendum process. And it came to this because the state legislators are notoriously reluctant to commit to anything that might actually accomplish something, or worse yet, force them to stand for a single coherent principle. They're all for cutting back as long as it's in someone else's district, or somebody else's friend's sinecure. They're even more notorious for simply not voting on anything that they're afraid might be held against them in a future campaign, so maybe that would be a good place to start -- you vote half the time, you get half a fuckin' paycheck.

At any rate, thanks to the hamster-wheel anti-tax gomers, we now get six weeks of nasty cuts, a bunch of prisoners released early as we cut police, and a bunch of fire department cuts as we head into wildfire season in a third year of drought. Then the budget circus begins anew come July 1. Nicely done, folks.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger actually comes out of this mess looking like the only adult, seriously the voice of reason in all this, you know you've got a big problem coming.

California Dreamin'

Fella Californians, if you happen to be one of the 20,000 state employees whose jobs are on the chopping block because of the ongoing budget impasse, make sure you remember to thank Abel Maldonado, who is using this opportunity to stick it back to Schwarzenegger.

The plan's prospects all but died Sunday morning when Sen. Abel Maldonado, in an interview with the Mercury News, seemed to rule out voting for the measure while pointedly criticizing Schwarzenegger as well as the Republican Senate leader, Dave Cogdill, of Fresno. A moderate Republican whose district stretches from Silicon Valley to San Luis Obispo County, Maldonado was seen as the last best hope for the final GOP vote needed to get the deficit plan over the two-thirds hump.

"I've always been a person who's been open-minded and tried to bring both sides together," Maldonado said. "But on this one, where they're asking for almost $15 billion in tax increases, it just goes against what I believe in my heart and my values." Maldonado added, "There's nothing they can give me that would make me vote for this budget." The senator went on to question the leadership of Schwarzenegger and Cogdill.

Maldonado and Schwarzenegger have a tense relationship: In 2006, the senator publicly criticized the governor for not backing his unsuccessful campaign for state controller.

"Where was he when I needed him?" Maldonado said of Schwarzenegger on Sunday. As for Cogdill, who helped negotiate the budget plan, Maldonado said: "There's a difference between managing a caucus and leading a caucus."

It's funny. This whole thing is being held up by Schwarzenegger's own party; the Democrats are cooperating with him fully here. The GOP hasn't been much more than a running joke in this state since the days of Pete Wilson anyway, but they appear to have devolved even further as of late, to a running sore.

The budget definitely ain't pretty, and everyone will take a little somethin'-somethin' in the shorts. But it has to get done just to keep normal services, especially critical as the state is getting ready to release thousands of prisoners early. Insert a tax rollback contingent on return of revenues when property values start recouping, something along that line. To practically confess to stalling the process over a grudge, well, you just ended your own political career there, bub.