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Bustamante's new "big lie" -- from a California Insider report:

Sounding no more informed than a cranky letter writer to the local paper, Bustamante badly mischaracterized the roots of California’s budget crisis, falsely claiming that the electricity purchases the state made on behalf of the utilities in 2001 erased the budget surplus and forced the state to cut vital programs .. [The claim] is completely untrue, and any second-year staffer in the Legislature could tell you so .. The electricity purchases had no effect on the state’s budget situation.

Weintraub is charitable here, characterizing Bustamante as merely ignorant of the budget facts. I doubt it. More likely he is just doing what has become natural for a politician, he's lying to score political points. It's the great lesson Democrats seems to have learned from the Clinton experience over the last 10-12 years -- lying works and is completely legitimate -- it all goes to serve cause of those who are battling the vast right wing conspiracy, i.e. evil. It's the Clintonian ethos -- if the polls show you can't tell the truth, then what you'll have to do is you'll "just have to win" to quote Bill Clinton.

Sometimes it isn't easy believing the truth -- for example, every instinct in your body wants to believe something better of politicians. But in this case, I think we've come to the point where we have to put those idealistic instints aside, and admit that what our head is telling us is the truth.

Sidenote -- I've heard what Bustamante is saying many times, but never from members of the California public. Where I've heard it a dozen times is from East Coast journalists talking out of their *ss on cable television on a subject they seem to know nothing about -- California. Oh, and Paul Krugman was also spouting the same thing yesterday on Tim Russert. Lets see now, is Krugman an 1) economist?; 2) a journalist?; or 3) a Democrat party official. I'm not quite sure.