The Hercules Putsch:

Seizing power in a coup is a pretty undignified messy business most everywhere else in the world.
This is despite the fact that the old fashioned coup with it's flags and tanks is the accepted manner of changing governments for something like 75% of the world.
Thanks to Good Old Fashioned American Know-How, we've even managed to standardize this peculiar foreign custom.
And so we come to November 17th 2003, a day in which thanks to an obscure law written by well meaning goo-goos in the 1900's Arnold Schwarzenegger, a vain preening lout, is seizing power in the State of California.
I'm sure his inaugural address with be mercifully bereft of the usual truculent threats that have characterized Arnold's movie work to date.
"I'll be back" and junk like that.
No it'll be naught but indigestible rubbish about the free market, opportunity, and the California Way of Life.
And amidst these bloviations the Golden State will be whisked off on a waltz with yet another tedious demagogue.
There is a tiresome cliche on the neocon right to the effect that the states are "fifty little thrifty beehives of social policy experimentation".
Hence they should be allowed the widest possible latitude in order for a "hundred policy flowers to bloom".
This is of course errant nonsense on a cosmic scale.
They are less fifty little social policy labs and more like fifty nasty semi-bankrupt banana republics mostly presided over by the lowest most contemptible scoundrels on Ghod's Green Earth.
In fact most of the nation's demagogues and dictators have been state governors not U.S. Presidents.
A President has precious little time to set up a really effective tyranny, he's got to be fund-raising for re-election practically from the moment he takes the oath.
And he's watched like a hawk even by his own so called supporters and sycophants, there is nowhere to go but down once you are in the White House.
Plenty of people are gunning for you...
Not so being a state governor a man can safely don jackboots and a Sam Browne belt and rate nothing more than a snarky picture in "Time Magazine".
The Gubernatorial roll of dishonor features many such stalwarts as Huey P. Long, Herman Talmadge, George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Pete Wilson, James Rhodes (who pumped the National Guard up to a shooting frenzy just prior to Kent State) and of course lets not forget Massachusetts own James Michael Curley.

Yup not only are all politics local, but all Dictatorships are local as well.
That is a consequence of Federalism that the Heritage Institute would rather not deal with.
Or maybe when they say "laboratory" they mean "gulag"....who can tell in today's rhetorically debauched times?
Sick
Demented
Typical