By DAN WALTERS, Sacramento Bee

When Mac Taylor, the California Legislature's chief budget adviser, declared this week that the state budget enacted just four months ago is already billions of dollars upside down, no one in the Capitol should have been surprised.

When California's political consultants share war stories, 1988's immensely expensive, multi-front battle between insurance companies and lawyer-backed consumer groups takes center stage.

Jerry Brown's first governorship of California was marked by what one might term -- charitably -- a high degree of flexibility.

Although he generally hewed to a liberal line after his 1974 election, Brown was often willing to bend ideology for political advantage, a tendency that some called "flakiness."

As America's trade with the Far East -- principally China -- expanded massively during the 1980s and 1990s, California reaped the benefits as the gateway for both exports and imports.

With trade emerging as a major component of the state's very diverse economy, traffic and payrolls blossomed at its major ports.

Advocates of overhauling California's troubled pension system for public employees couldn't have chosen a more providential moment to launch their reform campaign.

When the California Legislature was drafting its massive water plan, it included a number of specific appropriations as political lubricants.

It did not, however, include funds for analysis of the Capitol's own supply of drinking water, thereby denying us an opportunity to discover whether it contains a mysterious germ that compels legislative leaders to do really dumb things.

Maywood is one of California's tiniest and most troubled cities, a plot of scarcely 750 acres southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

Its official population, nearly all Latino, is about 30,000 persons, not counting an untold number of illegal immigrants. Its Police Department has been singled out by the state Department of Justice for brutality.

Last June, the Public Policy Institute of California released a highly critical report on California's "enterprise zone" program that provides big tax breaks to businesses for supposedly hiring workers in areas of high unemployment.

A batch of amendments to a massive water-bond bill was submitted to the state Senate's clerical desk Monday, and one, as it turned out, had nothing to do with water.

Later that evening, as the bond bill was being debated, Sen. Dave Cox, R-Fair Oaks, asked about the opaquely worded new provision and was given a misleading answer about its effect.

Winston Churchill paid tribute to the young fighter pilots who staved off Nazi Germany's aerial assault on England during the Battle of Britain with characteristic eloquence: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."