Dan Walters State Quotations

That, in a nutshell, explains why the Democratic speaker of the assembly, Fabian Nunez, quietly amended a bill this week to grant movie producers tens of millions of dollars in subsidies from a state treasury that already is drowning in red ink, with multibillion-dollar annual deficits.

The film industry is famous -- or infamous -- for its creative accounting techniques that can turn obvious profits into paper losses, so fooling a bunch of state bureaucrats would be child's play.