The politics of narcissism

I read an article in Newsweek magazine the other day about California and it's economic troubles. I found the article interesting because I used to live in California, now I live in Arizona.

The article discusses how California has overcome economic troubles in the past for example:

For decades, California has epitomized America's economic strengths: technological excellence, artistic creativity, agricultural fecundity and an intrepid entrepreneurial spirit. Yet lately California has projected a grimmer vision of a politically divided, economically stagnant state. Last week its legislature cut a deal to close its $42 billion budget deficit, but its larger problems remain.

California has returned from the dead before, most recently in the mid-1990s. But the odds that the Golden State can reinvent itself again seem long. The buffoonish current governor and a legislature divided between hysterical greens, public-employee lackeys and Neanderthal Republicans have turned the state into a fiscal laughingstock. Meanwhile, more of its middle class migrates out while a large and undereducated underclass (much of it Latino) faces dim prospects. It sometimes seems the people running the state have little feel for the very things that constitute its essence—and could allow California to reinvent itself, and the American future, once again.

The facts at hand are pretty dreary. California entered the recession early last year, according to the Forecast Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is expected to lag behind the nation well into 2011. Unemployment stands at roughly 10 percent, ahead only of Rust Belt basket cases like Michigan and East Coast calamity Rhode Island. Not surprisingly, people are fleeing this mounting disaster. Net outmigration has been growing every year since about 2003 and should reach well over 200,000 by 2011. This outflow would be far greater, notes demographer Wendell Cox, if not for the fact that many residents can't sell their homes and are essentially held prisoner by their mortgages.

I found this information interesting because there seems to be a lot of "self-absorbed" jerks moving to Arizona from California, more specifically Southern California like Los Angles. How can you tell when you get cut off on the freeway or cut in front of in line at the grocery store that the person is from LA? well most of the time they have a California license plate on their Cadillac Escalade or are wearing a UCLA sweatshirt at the time and almost always on the phone at the time.

All I wanted to say is that I think self-absorbed, narcissist jerks suck and are the downfall of civilized society!

That is all, have a nice day.