The left doesn't like Prop 1A, which sets up a strong rainy day fund and limits spending. The right doesn't like Prop 1A either, because its passage would extend temporary taxes. So the coalition forming to fight the measure, one of six measures that came out of the budget deal and are on the May 19 special election ballot, has plenty of "strange bedfellows," the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Want more proof that the initiative process is too powerful in California? All the recent talk about lawmakers reaching a budget deal is bunk. The deal, even if it passes, requires the voters to sign off on multiple ballot measures later this year. That's right -- California simply can't handle a budget emergency without a vote of the people.

Details have not been released, but I count at least five separate ballot measures that would be needed to complete this deal: 1. a measure authorizing the modernizing of the lottery and borrowing against future funds. 2. the approval of some sort of new spending limit that Republicans insisted upon in negotiations. 3. Changes to the state's education funding formula. 4. A measure permitting the state to raid money that voters approved for early childhood programs and 5. A measure permitting the state to raid money that voters approved for mental health programs.

Given the extreme costs of delays by the legislature, and their inability to do much without the voters OK, the real question is: why bother having a legislature at all?

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Congressman Devin Nunes, a Republican from the Central Valley, describes California as an economic basket case and outlines, by my count, five ballot initiatives that he believes are needed to fix the state. Why should anyone care? Because Nunes, while little known to most Californians, is one of California's more thoughtful Republican politicians, and he has the ability to raise money to pursue at least a couple of these ideas at the ballot.

Widening his lead in the gravitas/ideas primary, former Congressman and current gubernatorial aspirant Tom Campbell has one of the most detailed pieces on the budget you'll read anywhere in today's San Francisco Chronicle. It's refreshing to read an honest, clear-eyed view of the budget from a Republican; Campbell is the furthest thing from the obstructionists in the legislature, to which the answer to every question is: "no new taxes."

Campbell makes the case for a form of spending limit that he championed in 2005. This was a legislative constitutional amendment that he drafted but never went anywhere; Prop 76, which was defeated by voters, had some similarities, but I believe it wasn't what Campbell wanted. Campbell would never quite answer my direct questions about his true feelings about Prop 76, which was championed by his then boss, Gov. Schwarzenegger.

That's what Union-Tribune argues in this blog item. When was that golden opportunity? In 1979, right after Prop 13.