You can't possibly believe that you can mention California and right wing in the same sentence. California is the most liberal state in the union.

That's not the historical case. Politically speaking, California is best described as "volatile."

The same state that gave America left-wing political figures like Upton Sinclair, Harry Bridges, and Cesar Chavez also produced Republicans like Richard Nixon, George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Ed Meese, William French Smith, S. I. Hayakawa, Bob Dornan, Howard Jarvis, Daryl Issa, R. J. Rushdoony...

More recently, California had Republican governors from 1983 to 1999. In 2003, Californians cleared the decks for a special election that installed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor, and they re-elected him in 2007.

Proposition 13 and the 3-Strikes Proposition both passed with popular majorities, as California ballot initiatives. That should indicate to you that Californians prefer a measure of conservatism in terms of economics, and that the same social liberalism that passed initiatives to reform the laws on drug possession and medical marijuana does not extend to sympathy toward violent criminals.

California's peril was the result of left wing philosophy's and if you think different you're only fooling yourself.

California's "peril" resulted- perhaps more than any other factor- from the Democratic-controlled legislature's short-sightedness about the ability of the stock market- which is nothing if not "capitalistic"- to generate high levels of revenue for the states pension investments, forever. That's evidence of poor business sense, but it does not equate to "left-wing philosophy."

Neither does it amount to a sweeping across-the-board indictment of California liberalism. The budget crisis arose within a matter of only about 3 years, from 2000 to 2003- and there's no evidence that simply electing a Republican governor has helped the situation since. In fact, it's arguably only complicated matters- it's no longer possible to fix the blame for the problem on the California Democrats, who at the outset held both the sole responsibility for creating the problem and the overwhelming responsibility for fixing it.

The Republican obstructionism over the past six years does not comprise evidence of "conservatism." All it has led to thus far is the continual borrowing of more money at increasingly high interest rates- the "borrow and spend" paradigm that Republicans have pursued at the national level ever since the era of Ronald Reagan.

Saying "no" has not fixed the problem. As a strict matter of fact, most of the budget priorities for the California government are pretty much set in stone- which means that it's a useless exercise to make meaningful adjustments in those priorities, at least until the state is solvent again. That means only the rest of the budget is subject to cuts- which, under the circumstances would amount to amputations, in order to fulfill the goal of balancing the budget without the need for a tax increase- even a temptorary one.

Apparently it isn't enough for the California Republicans to come to sufficient consensus on the need to return the state to fiscal health, and then leverage the memory of a narrowly averted crisis in order to chasten the Democrats into reordering some of those priorities, with the long-term benefit of coming down as the more fiscally responsible party.

Instead, California Republicans seem to think they can accumulate political capital by making the state weaker, and sicker. They're going for the quick quarterly return, so to speak. I think it's very likely that the strategy will backfire on them. But that's no consolation to me, since they're apparently bent on backing things up until the state government breaks.