MAILBAG:

The ads have already started. You know the ones. The ads that tell us that life as we know it will end abruptly unless all of us loyal serfs enthusiastically vote for Propositions 1A through 1F on May 19.

Those are the tortured bits of folly conjured up by our action-hero governor and the village idiots we’ve sent to Sacramento. These propositions, the ads tell us, are supported by firefighters, police officers, dental technicians, Wal-Mart greeters, airline flight attendants, museum security guards, people from Bakersfield and blind albino dwarfs. Wow! Must be good stuff, right? Let’s take a peek inside.

If you vote yes on everything, you’re approving $16 billion in new taxes, on top of the recent state sales tax hike, near doubling of the car tax and a surcharge on income. You’re approving not a cut, but a reduction in the rate of increase, in spending on several programs. You’re voting for a rejiggering of payments on children’s services and to education. You’re OKing an unprecedented raid on the state lottery. You’re giving the thumbs-up to a no-interest, multiyear loan to be extracted forcibly from mental health funding.

Oh, and to make you all warm and fuzzy about giving these stunningly inept “public servants” even more of our money, you will permit them to magnanimously forgo raises in years where we’re running a deficit. Forgo raises? How thoughtful.

Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), president pro tem of the California Senate, stated recently that the failure of the people to pass all these propositions would be like “…pushing California over a cliff.” Considering that Steinberg and others of his ilk have kept our state teetering precariously on the edge of that figurative cliff for years, I’d kind of like to see what that would look like.

I’m thinking that if we, the citizens of California, repudiate these otherwise unemployables by soundly defeating their cobbled-together efforts to take even more money out of the pockets of the already most highly taxed Americans, I’m thinking maybe they’ll have to all sit back down and actually trim their spending to match their income. Whoa! What a concept! Kind of like what we all have to do in our own families and in our businesses.

If our elected representatives were addicted to more and more narcotics instead of more and more of our money, we’d hold an intervention and put them into rehab. Let’s hold that intervention May 19.

CHUCK CASSITY

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City should run the senior center

I think the city should take over the [Costa Mesa Senior] center and fire Aviva [Goelman] and Darrel [Kim].

They are responsible for the long, drawn-out fiasco.

If they had answered Wendy’s questions a year ago, this would have never happened.

They are to blame.

DARLENE LETNES