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While many American states have struggled with problems caused by the economic slowdown, the signs have been out there for a while that California is in danger of imploding — sinking into itself, collapsing under the weight of its problems. Though it finally passed a budget today, it is moving ahead with a plan to force more than 200,000 state employees to take unpaid furloughs to save state money.

So the news that a 25-foot-wide sinkhole had opened under Interstate 215 near the town of Murrieta, south of Los Angeles, on Wednesday, shutting down traffic across all lanes of the highway, did little to break the end-of-times vibe that the state’s residents have been trying to shake off.

Asked today about the 6-foot-deep divot in Murrieta, Rose Melgoza, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Transportation said, “Yes, I suppose it’s just one more thing going wrong.”

While Ms. Melgoza’s department dispatched an assessment team to the area “to figure out how we will temporarily shore it up and reopen the freeway or whether we will have to close it long-term to fix it,” the state’s legislators could use some shoring up themselves, after spending several recent nights sprawled across their desks as the wrangling over the budget impasse kept up day and night. A compromise finally attracted the bare minimum votes needed in the State Senate just before 7 a.m. Pacific time.

As Jennifer Steinhauer reports in The New York Times:

After five days of intense, nearly nonstop negotiations over how to close a $42 billion gap, California state senators agreed early Thursday morning on a budget that raises taxes, cuts deeply into services and borrows far into the future, leaving nearly every person in the state scathed in some way.

The Los Angeles Times reports from Sacramento that the budget compromise finally cleared the necessary two-thirds-majority hurdle in the Senate after Democratic leaders and California’s Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, reached a deal with one holdout senator:

Sen. Abel Maldonado of Santa Maria provided the final Republican vote needed to pass a spending plan, which includes more than $12 billion in tax hikes. In exchange, Democrats agreed to rewrite election rules that Maldonado said had allowed the Capitol to become paralyzed by partisanship, leading the state to the brink of financial ruin.

Gail Collins wrote in an Op-Ed column in The New York Times on Wednesday night that:

Maldonado has always denied that his political ambitions had anything to do with his inability to make up his mind about the budget. Nevertheless, one of his ongoing demands has been to eliminate money for new office furniture for his mortal enemy, the current controller, John Chiang.

The Los Angeles Times noted that on Wednesday, Mr. Maldonado seemed ready to end his opposition to the budget compromise “after lunching on salmon and swordfish with Schwarzenegger at an Italian restaurant a few blocks from the Capitol.”

As chance would have it, sinkholes and the small town of Murrieta were already on the minds of California’s legislators as they struggled this week to win the votes of anti-tax Republicans for the measure. As Michael Rothfeld and Eric Bailey reported in The Los Angeles Times today:

Republicans hold only 15 of the state Senate’s 40 seats. But they wield significant influence, because two-thirds of lawmakers are needed to approve state budgets, and that requires some G.O.P. votes. The senators hail mostly from the smaller cities and towns of California, where farming and industry drive the economy, cities are often viewed as sinkholes for state tax dollars, and regulations such as environmental restrictions are seen as an impediment to success. The G.O.P. senators’ new leader, Dennis Hollingsworth of Murrieta, was born and raised on a Riverside County dairy farm in a town of 6,000 residents; he worked early on selling frozen bull semen to dairymen and later as a representative for an association of farmers and ranchers.

And the traffic on California’s roadways is more central to the state’s politics than outsiders might understand. As Michael Lewis explained six years ago in an article for The New York Times Magazine on California politics, the recall of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s predecessor, Gray Davis, who was kicked out of office after a petition drive, succeeded in no small part because of backing from John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, the hosts of California’s highest rated drive-time talk radio program.

Briefly stated, the theory goes like this: Conservative radio hosts thrive on a kind of populist anger at politicians that is not terribly different from the road rage that drivers stuck in traffic feel for other motorists. As Mr. Lewis wrote in 2003:

John and Ken started to care about state politics — when politics finally accommodated what they call their “tone.” “The challenge is to hold onto the tone,” John says. Asked to describe the tone, Ken says, “Rabid dogs.” John says: “I don’t know that part of the brain that shouts all these things you aren’t supposed to say in polite company, but that’s the part of the brain we speak to.” Ken: “People relate to the shouts. What differentiates us from a crazy man is that a lot of people agree with the shouts.” John: “The line we get all the time is, ‘You say exactly what I feel in the car!'” Then he laughs. “Some part of me always roots for chaos.”

And, as drivers sit in jams caused by the latest freeway sinkhole in Southern California, John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou are still playing a role in California’s politics. The L.A. Times reported today that “Local politicians fear the conservative radio hosts of the “John & Ken Show” on KFI-AM (640).”

For an idea of why, visit their Web site, where the radio hosts issued one “Action Alert!” after another throughout the budget negotiations, imploring listeners to get on the phone to specific state legislators who expressed any willingness to raise taxes. A recent post on the site also declared:

This is War! Now it’s time to go to work. Call your Legislators and demand they vote no on this huge tax increase!

Contact details for state legislators were provided right after the declaration of “War!”

Most recently, the pair also issued what they called a “John and Ken fatwa” against Republicans who support tax increases and have been carrying on what they call a “heads on a stick” campaign against their opponents, including Mr. Schwarzenegger, who is himself a Republican. On the Web site, Mr. Schwarzenegger’s head is depicted impaled on a sword.

As a drive-time broadcast, the John and Ken Show has not aired yet today, but the show’s Web site also allows visitors the opportunity to listen live. Tune in later today to find out what populist outrage against the state’s budget compromise sounds like. But it will make more sense if you happen to be trapped in a traffic jam next to the sinkhole in Murrieta while you listen.

Update: Some of the cheering in response to California’s problems reminds us of what a character in Don DeLillo’s novel “White Noise” said about the state’s role in the media-saturated American imagination:

We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information. … Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

For more on California’s problems, see the new discussion on The Times’ blog Room for Debate.