Confidential to the California state GOP:
If you're going to go around telling the media that all you wanted were a few little pension and regulatory reforms to allow a special election, maybe you shouldn't release your seven pages of demands to the LA Times.
Actually, never mind. Go ahead: the New York Times will acknowledge that perhaps there were other issues, but largely back up your story. Dan Walters will claim that the voters support your positions...while signaling in favor of an all-cuts budget with (presumed) political reprisals from the voters (that's cute. I guess Dan doesn't have any school children).
None of these sources will mention that you demanded a special election for not five years but eighteen months of tax continuances. (I saw ONE mention of this, in the San Jose Mercury News.) They will also fail to mention that you are demanding redevelopment funds be continued, for tort reform, end QEIA funding (even though it works!), and muck around with teachers' contracts.
Oh! And all those teachers and state workers who've given up whatever they've put into Social Security should also accept our brutal changes to their pension plan - current AND future workers.
That's a lot of free giveaways in exchange for one and a half years of piddling tax continuances.
This is not a story with two sides that are equally partisan and radical. This is a story of a deeply radical right wing and a center-right Democratic party. Nor is there a winner and a loser: everybody loses.
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