Mahablog: What Small Government Looks Like: Alternatively, what happens when the Tea Baggers win. I suppose it had to happen somewhere, if for nothing else because so many folks can only learn things the hard way, and Colorado Springs -- home of James Dobson's Focus on the Family and the U.S. Air Force Academy -- is at least, blessedly, not here. Colorado, you may recall, was the state that got suckered into passing a so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TaBOR) law, which pretty much guaranteed that taxpayers would be subjected to nothing but bad government until it keeled over and expired from starvation. (We've fought similar laws off here in Kansas for years, although the ringleader managed to get himself elected to the Sedgwick County Board where he's become Public Menace No. 1.) Still, it's rare to read a report starting off with how many police and firefighters will be sacked.

I read a similar piece a while back about how Arizona is closing half of its state parks due to lack of funds. As someone who as a kid grew up drooling over Arizona Highways that hit pretty close to home. Here in Kansas our ex-Republican, ex-Democrat, soon-to-be-ex-Governor is pushing for a sales tax increase to salvage even the cutback budget, while many of the state's local school boards are suing the state for abandonment. These stories show one of the ironies in the Republicans' starve-the-beast strategy: it isn't hard to get folks riled up about the federal government and all its waste and corruption, but the immediate victims of their success will be state and local governments that those same folks actually depend on. I expect this will backfire, although I have to admit that in their strongholds Republicans manage to keep getting re-elected while providing the worst government possible. Still, especially in the belt from South Carolina to Texas and Oklahoma expectations have been awful low for a very long time. Still, what's happening in Colorado and Arizona are even below long-time norms, so you have to wonder.