CALIFORNIA - Partisan Paralysis Spreads

"California Voters Fed-Up With Gridlock as Budget Crunch Lingers" PBS Newshour 11/1/2011

Excerpt

JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And while Washington bemoans the partisan paralysis over the federal deficit, the nation's most populous state is wrestling with similar, perhaps even worse, gridlock.

NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels has our story.

SPENCER MICHELS: In California, with 37 million people, there's not much doubt that government is failing. Even the head of the state Senate sees it.

SEN. DARRELL STEINBERG, D-Calif.: The people are frustrated because our state government, its structure mostly, doesn't work. It doesn't work the way that people expect it to work.

SPENCER MICHELS: And it may be about to get worse, because revenues are $700 million below expectations. Under a new compromise budget that was already cut to the bone, additional cuts could be automatically triggered, further threatening state services and universities.

Schools are in bad shape and teachers are being laid off. Prisons, under court order to reduce the inmate population, remain overcrowded. Most attempts at rehabilitation have been eliminated. Health programs for the poor have been cut back.

Fixing those problems should fall to the state legislature and the governor. But, as in Washington, Sacramento is stuck in a pattern of increasingly partisan wrangling -- wrangling the public seems eager to end, but isn't sure how.

Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Walters has been covering the state capitol for 40 years.

COMMENT: The U.S. is very sick. We have a paralysis spreading across our nation. A political paralysis of which the Tea Party virus is the source.

Tea Party virus

A virus that causes no-compromise psychosis, paranoia.


ON THE CALIFORNIA INITIATIVE PROCESS: (note that I am a Californian)

Many comments in the video liked the initiative process, but the problem is HOW California Initiatives are done. They are generally well intentioned BUT written/proposed by people who do not really understand what they are trying to "fix." Hence, if the initiative passes, things end up worst.

Then, some initiatives are proposed by groups that are NOT just general citizens (even by out-of-state groups), they are special interests looking to make loopholes in the law for personal gain (as opposed to California as a whole).