Calblog

I haven't been following closely enough (nor do I trust the news reporting in the local newspapers if I were following closely enough) to be able to point fingers and assign blame. I find myself falling back on these two general rules of thumb:

• Absent strong evidence that one or the other is being particularly intransigent, the failure of two negotiating parties to reach a compromise falls on both parties; even if one side's position appears intransigent, it is almost always possible to find some bribe that will get them to loosen their grip, and if the other party hasn't been able to do that, at least part of the blame adheres to them;
  
• When faced with a 38-billion-dollar deficit, neither trying to fix it exclusively by cutting spending *nor* trying to fix it exclusively by raising taxes is reasonable. The hole is too big for either solution to be workable, and some sort of compromise must be found.
  

The former would seem to suggest that the mess is Brulte's fault, for drawing a line around an unreasonable position and refusing to budge; the former would suggest that, even if Brulte is in fact doing that, either Davis or the Democrats in the legislature ought to be able to find some bribe that would get Brulte off of that position, some trade-off that would give him and his allies something they want in exchange for capitulating on this ... and the fact that they haven't been able to do that suggests that the morass is their fault.

In my darker, more cynical moments, I'm wondering how long this impasse will go on, and if it will get so bad that the schools won't open in late August. If that happens, I intend to print out a blacklist of everyone in the legislature or the executive and consult in when voting in future elections.

This entire situation is insane.

But when Brulte pledged to campaign against any Republican who agreed to *any* tax increase, well golly, to any rational observer that would seem to rule out any sort of compromise.