“Put it all together, and it’s a big, fat political mess. The contending ideological factions have been rolling toward this calamity for years, adopting budget after budget that evaded underlying conflicts of spending and revenues with gimmicks and wishful thinking, well aware that any economic downturn could put them into a hole too deep to ignore.

“It’s finally happened. No one – and that includes the governor and 120 legislators – has the slightest notion of how or when the mess will be cleaned up, or whether it will be.”