The Sacramento Bee committed an act of journalism today, taking a look at the consequences of the legislature failing to act on various bills in favor of solving the budget.

Merced County beekeeper Gene Brandi says he had enough problems before getting ensnared in the nasty war of words between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature over California’s failure to cure its staggering budget deficit.

His Gene Brandi Apiaries in Los Banos, which once produced 400 drums of honey a year, has turned out just 20 drums so far this year as a searing drought has deprived wildland plants of the nectar that bees turn into honey.

And Brandi says he is facing competition from food processing companies that market sugar-added honey products as the real thing. “We’ve got people who take advantage of the good name of honey to try to sell their product,” he says.

Now some agricultural producers and Democratic lawmakers say Schwarzenegger and his aides are unfairly exploiting the good names of honey, blueberries, pomegranate juice – and cow tails – to bash legislators for fiddling while California burns.

The dust-up stirs debate over whether the budget mess should freeze out all other matters – or whether lawmakers still have a responsibility to continue the business of legislating, no matter how mundane it can appear.

Did this guy really ask to be turned into a punchline by the Governor?  I would argue that the crap that large multinational food producers package and sell as food is a serious problem on a variety of levels, not the least of which is public health.  And given 120 legislators with different committees and responsibilities, we are perfectly able, even with a budget crisis, to deal with additional legislation, particularly that which can make a difference to small businesses and the health and safety of the entire state.  In the past several years, with budget woes in every single one of them, somehow we passed a prescription drug benefit for seniors, an increase to the minimum wage, a landmark smart growth bill, and the Global Warmings Solutions Act, just to name a few.  

Ol’ Stogie And Jacuzzi is guilty of the exact same crime of turning every program that sounds funny, that includes animals or food, into an object of derision, as John McCain when he discussed so-called “pork” in the stimulus package:

McCain’s method of indentifying waste, gleefully repeated by Dowd, is a disgrace. His technique is to focus on programs that mention animals or food, or anythign that sounds silly. He’s clearly not interested in learning whether any of the programs he targets have merit. Here is Dowd recording McCain’s twitter postings:

$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted. …

$2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.” …

$200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past. “REALLY?” McCain twittered.

I don’t know whether or not cricket control is a necessary program. Maybe crickets are doing many times that amount in crop damage every year. Maybe it’s a boondoggle. I don’t know about the astronomy program, either, though I do think there’s a role for federal support of the sciences, even in silly-sounding places like Hawaii.

I do know that the tattoo-removal program is an effective anti-crime initiative — it allows rehabilitated former to reenter society shorn of visible markings that cut them off from middle-class culture. McCain and Dowd don’t know this, and they don’t care. What’s on display is the worst elements of political demagoguery meeting the worst elements of the instant-reaction internet culture. They think the very idea of trying to learn about something before you take a position on it is a joke.

Who could have expected that going with a chief executive this simple-minded could lead us to such a place of ruin?

Bipartisan death cultists love to tell us that the real problem in California is that gerrymandered seats lead to extremists of both sides in safe elections, and that no opposition can win in such a rigged game.  Thanks to the Swing State Project and some dedicated individuals who have done the work, we can now pronounce that myth dead.  Completely dead.

Volunteers processed county-level information to come up with the Obama/McCain split in virtually all California Congressional districts.  Fresno, Madera, San Joaquin, Santa Clara and Ventura counties have yet to release the county-level data, so we’re missing a few districts, but hopefully that information is forthcoming.  What we can already view, the data for 43 of the 53 districts, is stunning.

Obama won 34 of those 43 districts, including 7 held by Republicans.  He just missed in CA-46 (McCain was under 50% and the spread was less than 5,000 votes).  Also, seven of the 10 currently unknown districts are held by Democrats, and I’ll bet CA-24 goes blue as well, or at least close to it.  I think we can say that Barack Obama won or was extremely competitive in 43 of the 53 Congressional districts in the state.  Here are the 7 GOP-held districts where Obama won:

CA-03 (Lungren): Obama +1,600 votes

CA-25 (McKeon): Obama +3,000 votes

CA-26 (Dreier): Obama +12,000 votes

CA-44 (Calvert): Obama +2,500 votes

CA-45 (Bono Mack): Obama +13,000 votes

CA-48 (Campbell): Obama +2,500 votes

CA-50 (Bilbray): Obama +14,000 votes

The data I’ve wanted is the downticket ballot dropoff stats, and now we have them.  I’ll list it for these seven key districts, plus CA-46 (Rohrabacher), which Obama nearly won.  These are rough estimates of the total number of votes in the Presidential contest and the Congressional contest for each district:

CA-03 Presidential 336K votes; Congressional 314K votes

CA-25 Pres. 271K, Cong. 250K

CA-26 Pres. 292K, Cong. 267K

CA-44 Pres. 269K, Cong. 253K

CA-45 Pres. 276K, Cong, 266K

CA-46 Pres. 303K, Cong. 285K

CA-48 Pres. 330K, Cong. 308K

CA-50 Pres. 329K, Cong. 313K

Though it may have made a small difference at the margins, the ballot dropoff is relatively small, actually, and to be expected to a certain extent.  Some people are just going to come out for the Presidential election, on both sides.

But what is indisputable from these numbers is that Democrats can win in California in virtually every district, even when they are “hopelessly” gerrymandered.  The shifts from 2004 to 2008 are quite incredible and represent a realignment.  In ’04 Kerry lost CA-03 58-41.  Obama won.  Kerry lost CA-25 59-40.  Obama won.  Kerry lost CA-26 55-44.  Obama won 51-47.  Etc.  You can check the numbers for yourself.

There’s only one Congressional candidate who outperformed the top of the ticket and that’s Charlie Brown.  Obama lost CA-04 54-44.  Therefore it’s untrue that, even in unfriendly areas, there is no Democrat that can make a race competitive.  The right Democrat can win in any seat in California.  And I think the numbers would bear this out in the Assembly and Senate as well.

The “hopelessly gerrymandered” line is an excuse.  An excuse used by elites who are pretty happy with the status quo and don’t want the crazy libs having a working majority in the legislature.  An excuse used by those in Washington who don’t want to spend money on expensive California races.  It’s a pernicious excuse because it restricts progress and leads us to the brink of crisis.  But it’s an excuse, nonetheless.

The Presidential campaign on the Republican side has really become ridiculous, with nonsense talk of “socialism” (I guess that’s what the kids are calling the progressive tax system nowadays).  Here, Arnold Schwarzenegger tries to defend it by playing the “I was born in socialist Europe” card (expect this to be part of his campaign address for John McCain in Ohio next week):

• Schwarzenegger seemed to embrace language that Republican John McCain has been using in his latest attacks against Democrat Barack Obama related to “redistribution of wealth.”

“I left Europe because of the socialistic kind of environment and the way countries were run and the way government was on your back and therefore stifled the opportunities in Europe and that’s why I came to America,” he said. “So I hope — and that’s why I’ve been always involved in campaigning for political leaders that I believe in, because I wanted to do everything that I can to make sure that America doesn’t go back to those days of 40 years ago when I left Europe, that we go back to that system of redistribution of wealth that some people are talking about. There is no redistribution of wealth.”

“Redistribution of wealth,” apparently, is raising the top tax rate from 36% to 39%.  Ooh!  Why don’t you just give everybody borscht as well? (By the way, hasn’t Arnold called for new taxes to fill the budget gap?  Um, Arnold, isn’t that, er, redistributing wealth?)

But that’s not half as embarrassing as this exchange with CNN’s Campbell Brown:

BROWN: Do you think she’s qualified to be president?

SCHWARZENEGGER: I think that she will get to be qualified.

BROWN: She will get there? What do you mean? She’s not ready yet?

SCHWARZENEGGER: By the time that she is sworn in I think she will be ready.

OK, today is October 23.  Inauguration Day is January 20.  Exactly what is going to happen over three months that would suddenly make Sarah Palin qualified for the office of the Presidency?

The answer, of course, is nothing.  But Arnold is a loyal Republican soldier and a “Free To Choose” economic royalist, so he can’t see that.  What a fraud.

Some people don’t have a well-developed sense of honor, I guess.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger once again will stump for a Republican presidential candidate in Ohio on the weekend before the election, this time making a Halloween stop for Sen. John McCain in Columbus.

Schwarzenegger considers the Ohio capital his second home. He hosts his Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus each winter and has invested in a suburban mall there.

At a press conference backing the redistricting initiative today in San Diego, Schwarzenegger called Columbus “the city where I traditionally always go and campaign, like the weekend before the election. I have done this in 1988 and in 1992 and so on, so I will be going there for one event to Columbus, Ohio.”

Somebody should ask Arnold if this means he agrees that Barack Obama pals around with terrorists.  Somebody should ask him if he agrees that Obama tried to teach kindergarteners sex ed.  Somebody should ask him about every one of the despicable tactics McCain has used in the most dishonorable campaign in anybody’s memory.  And whether or not Sarah Palin is qualified to be President.

The thing is that, for all the moves to the contrary, Schwarzenegger is a doctrinaire Republican and loyal soldier.  There are many other Republicans rejecting McCain’s approach in this campaign – Arnold’s ideological soulmate Charlie Crist, the governor of Florida, is basically sitting out the election.  But Arnold would never think of that.  He’s a Republican serving in a state that is rapidly trending Democratic.  He’s stumping for McCain while holding office in a state that may go for Obama by 20 points.  

Well, Arnold can do what he wants, although I don’t want to hear another word from him about post-partisanship.  And McCain can have Schwarzenegger; I’ll take my chances with Obama and teh Google.