As Goes California...

I was born in Kentucky, which just idiotically elected Randroid Paul (although, strictly speaking, I was born in Louisville, which did not), but I moved to California and have stayed here, and I am proud to say my adopted state, after a decades long fever dream of libertopian catastrophe, may have wakened to sense. The Props were a mixed bag, but 23 was defeated and 25 passed, and that's something solid to build on, meanwhile the whole Democratic slate seems to have been elected, a staging of the same confrontation of market fundamentalism versus good government in evidence across the country, but here with the proper conclusion. Frankly, given the number of Tea Party candidates who were defeated precisely because of their fulminating fundamentalism (market and cultural), I think Americans more generally may be waking from the long Reagan epoch anti-governmental pieties (not that the results are being spun that way by our privileged punditocraps, and not that it is much consolation to wake from such a fever only to discover you're saddled with a Senatorial loon for six years). As I said last night, in dread of the disaster of paralysis, witch-hunts, and infantile spectacles in the face of ignored problems we are sure to face in our national politics under a divided government one of the "partners" in which is a brainless brutal bully, I hope a turn toward the work of my State, a State which has, after all, on its own, the eighth largest economy in the world and is the focus of mass-mediated attention and imagination, will be more edifying and more productive for a while...