What’s different about California’s budget?

Comparing the Golden State’s tax structure to other states

All states were not created equal. The hodgepodge map of borders within the continental United States was primarily drawn during a period of rapid population movement—when politicians had no inkling of what the territories’ eventual population density and makeup would be—and during a period of intense national struggle—plenty of states inherited their borders due solely to the slavery question, and plenty more were slapped together in the aftermath of the civil war, when the notion of federal unity trumped any idea of state independence.

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1987 meets 2010 It’s been fantasy baseball drafting time around here. I’ve got all my teams lined up already, and now I’m just biting my nails through Spring Training hoping nobody gets hurt. I’m also reading up, belatedly, on who’s expected to have a breakout year. That’s what initially drew me to MLB’s official fantasy preview. But my jaw hit the floor when I saw the visual treatment, putting every player in an authentic 1987 Topps baseball card. I drool at the thought of these being on sale somewhere. I mean, just look at them. Beautiful.

The real reason behind Twitter’s mediasplosion Everybody’s typing about tweeting, even though most savvy web users grokked, used, and digested the concept of Twitter a year ago. What’s with the sudden rush? Some of it is Twitter’s own hyping of the race to a million followers, which highlighted the service’s celebrity users, and American media loves it some celebrities. But the other thing the media loves — the one that might really be behind the twitternoia and obsessive “we’re still hip!” coverage from newspapers and TV newscasts clawing at the cliff of extinction — is that the service has reached a tipping point among a very specific class of communicators: PR professionals. I don’t know how the mythical Average Reader would feel if they ‘found out’ what a large percentage of media stories are driven by PR froth. I do know how irked and defensive most reporters get when this is pointed out. I don’t mind admitting that I rely on PR. I get far more interesting story ideas from PR folks than I do from freelance writers, and on today’s editorial budget, I’ve never had a staff to create in-house brainstorming to counteract the tide of PR info. Does this plain fact indicate nefarious forces at work? Or does it point to just how much good, important work PR professionals do? I’ll leave such judgments to people with more active Twitter accounts than mine. However, it does mean that I’m in a position to judge how much Twitter activity is really newfangled PR, and the answer is: LOTS. The service has shifted in recent months from proto-blogging of entirely useless information to professional peddling of mostly useless information. PR presence on Twitter is enormous. If you are a heavy Twitter user, and chasing down follow counts as fast as you can, chances are you’ll fill out your Census profession with PR or Marketing later this year. And why not? It’s a tremendous venue for unfiltered PR (a flavor of marketing that is two ethical slips away from spam). Plus, it adds a nice quantitative number to the size of a PR professional’s reach. Where once a firm might brag about the size and quality of its media contacts, now it only has to point to its Twitter stats. Media dependence on PR + PR user increase on Twitter = media about Twitter. The exact same process led to a sudden surge of “lifestyles” and “humor” columns about e-mail in the ’90s. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision the scenario. Reporter has inbox that is 80% press releases. These press releases start touting the PR person’s Twitter account. Reporter checks out Twitter, and sees mostly PR people on (because, in the increasingly myopic world of journalism, these are the people she knows). Options: a) reporter is annoyed and writes scathing article about uselessness of Twitter; b) reporter is impressed with the efficiency of the service and writes glowing article about revolution of Twitter. And once a few reporters write about something, the herd follows, especially now that the herd is basically a handful of wire services, hundreds of inexperienced interns, and an expanding galaxy of laid-off reporters with blogs. It might be the most predictable phenomenon on the planet, right up there with hyperventilation about scary new diseases that aren’t that dangerous (um) and overwrought dissections of media trends (whoops).