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Gee, guess who was the #1 all-time champion top political donation recipient from Enron? Gray Davis. Isn't that surprising.

To those who point out that Davis inherited the situation from Pete Wilson... well, sure, and part of the job of being Chief Executive of anything is to recognize and correct the bad legislation and bad policy you inherit--including legislation passed unanimously by both houses of the state Legislature--even when your party controlled the process. Davis received repeated warnings more than a year in advance of the snowballing issues that became last year's electricity crisis and did nothing (except take Enron's political donations). Then, he panicked, vaporizing a $12 billion dollar budget surplus he also inherited and turning it into (at latest count) a $24 billion deficit. In hindsight, of course, the so-called "de"-regulation was nothing of the sort--what sort of deregulation shackles producers' pricing powers while installing a whole new layer of middlemen?--but save for a few economists (and, sadly, even fewer politicians and commentators) versed in free-market principles, this fact escaped the whole state government when it was put into place. Davis' main accomplishment in the face of this crisis has been to demagogue the whole concept of deregulation and privatization. Meanwhile, the dire warnings piled up. It was Davis' passivity in the face of the onrushing market imbalances and bureaucratic ineptitude that worsened the problem into a true crisis for the world's fourth-largest economy. And guess what: even as the power crisis remains fundamentally unresolved and metastatizes into a budget crisis, he's doing it again: with water and with roads.

Gray Davis has got to go.

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