By DAN WALTERS, Sacramento Bee

As California's fiscal crisis deepens, despite desperate efforts by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature, the state's politicians are casting about for ways to relieve the financial -- and political -- pressure.

That's why, almost by default, raising the state's cigarette tax, now 87 cents a pack, has again moved to the Capitol's front burner.

What, one might ask, is the appropriate metaphor for California's convoluted budgetary situation?

Would be it be Enron, which cooked its books to fool investors and lenders? Perhaps a Third World country whose rulers run up a mountain of debt while squandering revenues? Or both?

Gay rights advocates were shocked last year when hundreds of thousands of Californians who voted for Barack Obama's presidential bid also voted for Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage.

The devil, it's been said, is in the details, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is bedeviled by one paragraph of a bill he signed three years ago to create a new system for collecting and storing information about the state's public-school teachers.

The dominant cultural trait of the California state Capitol is procrastination, a chronic tendency to deny reality as long as possible and thus avoid the political consequences of facing it.

California, it's been observed, is a canary in the socioeconomic mine, telling the rest of the nation what to expect in the future, for better or worse.

If so, then the rest of the nation had best be prepared for fragmentation, which is the only word that fully captures the division of a once-cohesive society into its many component parts.

California is one of just three states that require supermajority votes to enact state budgets, and while that constitutional provision has been in effect for nearly eight decades, only in the past quarter-century has it become a major political impediment.

Arnold Schwarzenegger believes -- correctly -- that a huge factor in California's chronic budget travails is the feast-or-famine nature of the state's revenue stream.

There is a certain erratic quality to the state's economy, a few years of headlong expansion, followed by a few years of despair-inducing decline, with the cycle occurring roughly once a decade.

Even the most cockeyed optimist in the state Capitol, if there is such a thing, would not contend that the much-revised California state budget that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Tuesday is the final fiscal word.

The California Capitol's political machinations have become increasingly convoluted as the state's fiscal crisis has deepened, with the latest deal, another melange of gimmicks aimed at once again postponing the day of reckoning, typifying the trend.

In the aftermath of last week's deal making, confusion, conflict and angst, politicians are chanting the mantra of reform.