The state Legislature adopted a budget less than a month ago, and it's already may have turned upside down. If it hasn't, there's little doubt that it will soon. The budget was intended to push the mess into next year and onto the next Legislature. In that sense, it only may succeed because the election is coming up fast.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger meets Wednesday with the party leaders from the state Senate and Assembly. The Big Five didn't make much progress on the budget this summer, and there are plenty of lawmakers angry that their bills were vetoed. Schwarzenegger set a record by vetoing about 35 percent of the legislation passed this year, in many cases saying the late budget didn't give him time to review bills in detail.

The next food fight may start sooner than we think.

We will editorialize on the budget in Wednesday's paper. But the best description I've seen yet was in a column today by Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee. He included this quote from an as-yet-unpublished commentary by Al Checchi, the mega-investor who ran for governor in 1990 and lost the Democratic primary to Gray Davis:

"The self-delusion manifested in the manner that California 'balanced' the current fiscal  year budget, the myopia involved in ignoring the magnitude of future year shortfalls, and the abdication of fiscal responsibility in failing to provide a  feasible basis for funding the long-term pension and health care obligations  promised California's public employees, make Wall Street executives, by  comparison, paragons of fiscal responsibility."

Ouch.

-- Jim Sweeney