Ashburn Tells The Truth About His Fellow Cowards

Voting for the budget and facing retirement has seemed to liberate Bakersfield-area Senator Roy Ashburn. He shared coffee with a couple local reporters and dished about the behind-the-scenes budget process, confirming a lot of expectations:

In the wee hours of the Thursday before the budget vote — which had to have been Thursday, the 12th — the Senate Republican caucus met.

One of the senators pointed to four others and basically outed them for coming to his office and asking him to vote for the budget— when they didn't have the guts to do it themselves.

Ashburn wouldn't name names.

Ashburn also said senators went to state Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, and asked him to put pet projects into the budget. That as Republican senators railed against overspending. Maldonado wouldn't do it, Ashburn said.

What you have with the Yacht Party is a group of lawmakers afraid of their own base. They glorify the importance of simpletons like John & Ken* to almost mythic levels, so that if they dare to step out of their comfortable ideological shells and help move the state from the brink of financial collapse, they believe it would be the end of their careers. So like all sniveling creatures, they would rather have somebody else do the heavy lifting so they could maintain their pose of anti-tax purity. And at the same time, they have the gall to ask the same people to slip in tasty goodies for themselves and their districts, so they can have all the benefits of compromise with none of the costs.

I'm going to sound like a broken record, but this is again the fruit of a dysfunctional process that enables Yacht Party cowards to extract as much as possible and maintain maximum leverage over negotiations despite their small minority. The conservative veto must end, and democracy must be restored to California.

* - Just to add to the John & Ken stuff: James Rainey, the LA Times' media critic, slaps them around a bit:

It's all the fault of those no-good illegal immigrants. Yes, the price tag that comes with a huge influx of noncitizens is rightly part of the public discourse. So why muddy the waters with some confounding information?

John and Ken wouldn't make that mistake. They make sure to mention the taxes the newcomers don't pay and the bills they run up in public hospitals. Who needs to mention the taxes they do pay, or to waste time worrying about the lower prices and convenience we all derive from their low-wage labor?

Then, please, protest the cost of state workers. It's beyond righteous to worry about the payroll growing, when everyone else is cutting back. But certainly don't remind your listeners (at least that I've heard) that the fastest-growing state job category is prison guard and that their support of tough sentencing helps explain why that part of the state budget keeps growing by leaps.

And certainly don't suggest that an economic downturn -- affecting virtually every government and business in the world -- played any role in ruining the state's finances. It's much more fun to pin it on that special someone. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger "had five years to fix the problem and it got to $42 billion," KenJohn said the other day. (Sorry, I'm name-lumping. But when the two get all worked up, I can't tell their voices apart.) [...]

It should be no surprise that "California Psychics" is a frequent advertiser on the program of late.

The business offers the services of tarot card readers, clairvoyants, astrologers and the like. "I think, most of all," one satisfied customer says in the ad, "I felt validated."

It seems to me that's what John & Ken are selling too. A bit of hocus-pocus and validation of their listeners' anger with a story that doesn't bother with all the messy details.

Death Cult Simmers Throughout The State

I'm reading the accounts of delusional maniacs from across the state with not a little bit of bemusement. The lack of economic thought is matched only by the lack of recognition that Republicans got far more out of this budget than they deserved to get, thanks to the anti-democratic 2/3 requirement. Here's a sample of this Algonquin Roundtable:

"The Republicans should have stood their ground," fumed 70-year-old Tony Dragonetti. "Abel Maldonado is sick, and so are the other Republicans who voted for this. They give the you-owe-me crowd everything they need, but the poor slob who is working day after day paying taxes gets nothing." [...]

"I think they could have held out. There are a lot more cuts they could have made," said Steve Pyle, 61, who said he was so unhappy with the country's direction that he seriously was considering moving to Australia. "They could start by getting rid of all the illegal immigrants and the teachers unions." [...]

"I don't believe everything would have stopped if this budget wasn't passed," Sanders said. "I support what the Republicans did."

Local GOP activist Adele Harrison predicted new taxes would push the state and country into a depression [...]

Terry Carter, 65, just smiled behind the counter and kept pouring coffee. The boisterous regulars have helped keep him in business for 22 years. As for his own opinions, he keeps those to himself.

"Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is listen," he said.

Well, that depends on who you're listening to. For example, listening to talk radio is most definitely NOT the smartest thing you can do. I've been tuning in to a lot of this down in Southern California, and the ignorance abounds. A typical commenter is a well-off suburbanite bitching about $700 bucks in new taxes for their $126,000 salary (that was an actual conversation). Roger Niello, one of the Yacht Party's own who voted for the budget, got hammered on a Sacramento station.

John in Sacramento warned, "You're going to bankrupt the state with taxes."

And Dave in Cameron Park told Niello he was "outraged that you, as a Republican, caved in and voted with Democrats." [...]

"You should have let (California) fall off a cliff," John from Sacramento told him. "Then, we pick up the pieces and put this state together, the way it used to be." (emphasis mine)

This is the suicide cult politics played by the GOP. And it features a lot of righteous anger and talk of censure and recalls and primary challenges. There's even some Ventura County Supervisor and anti-tax nut who's mulling a run for Governor as the conservative alternative.

But I'm not sure it's such a force anymore. The John and Ken show ended Thursday with the two musing that "somebody should do something about this" and asking listeners to find each other to fight against the turncoats. In other words, they're not going to lead it. Ultimately, these are lazy people shouting at the end of the bar. Independents have turned dramatically against them, and the leader of the party won't show up at their convention. I don't know that they're entirely coordinated, after years of mismanagement and an almost broke state party apparatus, to even pull off the enforcer role. If someone like Anthony Adams survives a primary challenge, that would be a powerful signal that the Yacht Party is all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In fact, in maybe the most pathetic rallying speech I've ever heard in my lifetime, neo-Hooverist South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford argued for losing now, losing tomorrow, losing forevah!

"We are at the incredible gut check point for what happens next in American civilization," Sanford said in the introductory address for the state party's three-day Sacramento convention [...]

"Would you be willing to lose? Would you be willing to support folks who may likely lose," Sanford told the gathering at the Capitol Hyatt. He went on to say that it was paramount for party members to support the GOP "at a time when it may look like a losing cause" because their efforts will be "pushing the ball forward in the larger conservative movement."

California Republicans: Willing To Lose.

Enforcers of the Iron Law

It was pretty obvious that the Yacht Party here in California was intellectually bankrupt when they let right-wing radio talk show hosts John and Ken sign on to the official lawsuit against the legislature for trying to pass a work-around budget that increased fees but not taxes. Talk show hosts like John and Ken are the low-level enforcers of conservative dogma in the state, whipping their charges into a frenzy if anyone strays from the party line. They were on a roll yesterday.

"Immediately head to your battle stations," blared John and Ken on their hugely popular Southern California conservative radio show on Thursday.

The conservative duo -- blasting on the powerful KFI station -- had put the Republican lawmakers quoted in The Bee's story about potentially raising taxes in their crosshairs.

Their targets were GOP Assemblymen Anthony Adams, Mike Duvall and Roger Niello. (And, later in the show, Sen. Abel Maldonado, who was quoted in a MediaNews story saying he could potentially vote for tax hikes to balance the budget.)

Pictures and phone numbers for all four lawmakers were posted on their Web site at various points.

"Then start calling these bastards. This is war. War!" John and Ken shouted [...]

"We're going to get these heads on a stick!" John and Ken pledged at one point. "Heads on a stick!"

Two of the lawmakers, Mike Duvall and Anthony Adams, actually showed up later in the show. Duvall claimed he was just describing the state of things in Sacramento, while Adams committed the cardinal sin of trying to use reaason on a radio talk show.

Adams, R-Hesperia, went on to defend the possibility of tax hikes. "I think taxes stink," he said. "They suck."

But Adams said raising taxes may be necessary given the political and economic climate.

"I dare with the full knowledge that this will probably be the end of a political career for me. But the fact of the matter is California is in a place where they need people who are willing to sacrifice their own personal agenda for what's right," Adams said.

He was raked over by the radio hosts for his stance.

Said one host: "You guys always talked a tough game, but you always rolled over for the Democrats when it came down to the final vote, so I don't have any sympathy for you. You guys talked, but you didn't act. You always voted with the Democrats, at least enough of you did every single freaking year. And now you're going to come to us for money?"

"Yes," Adam replied.

"No," said the host, as the other laughed. "How about no."

He added, "You may be right about your career."

John and Ken quite literally live in an alternate universe, one where conservatives are under siege and always capitulating to fearsome Democrats rather than the actual one where they have a working majority inside the legislature. Of course, they make millions, and whatever happens to the budget will never affect them personally. They'll go back to their gated communities and never see the poor person who can't get health care, the teacher who is laid off at the school, the construction worker who can't find work because all the public works projects are shut down.

But it's more insidious than that. John and Ken are well-compensated fronts for the Big Money Boyz who want to keep their taxes low and impede the state from providing any services whatsoever. They are close to the masses and can fix them on a target. They can find the Republicans who step out of line and make sure they end their careers. And they take the heat instead of the powerful interests using them as dupes. It's in the same way that Jon Coupal is paid big money to make the Overton Window-shattering claim that there is no budget crisis; that Jon Fleischman is provided with plenty of wingnut welfare to pen anti-union screeds and the like, which are then passed around at the highest levels, even by the supposedly post-partisan governor. By having all these enforcers out there ranting and raving, conservative lawmakers feel empowered to ask for even more in exchange for modest, regressive tax hikes, more than even the state spending cap (which would lead to the strangling of state government) they've already proposed.

Folks like John and Ken are useful idiots, bodyguards for conservative dogma. They mobilize other useful idiots, and in the background the Big Money Boyz rub their hands together and count their coins.