Verlyn Klinkenborg - Idiot

Verlyn has an opinion piece in the NY Times today.  I would say "Opinion" Article, if it was thought out or fact checked.  By Verlyn is either sloppy, lazy, a liar or an idiot - and so opinion with a lower case it is.
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His or her outline statements are so wrong, no has to wonder about the "facts" of the article.  If he or she investigated them or just pulled them out of his ass (or her ass - Verlyn is a pretty androgynous name).
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Some of the asides:
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The state has been arguing with itself since the days when it was just a territory... 

California was never a "territory" - we came in as a state after the Mexcian-American war, in a take us as a state or we'll just be our own country mode.
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It was a tour of the less populous California, a route that — to borrow a 50-year-old phrase from Joan Didion — is also “the trail of an intention gone haywire.”

Well, not really.  The point of the article (if such a meandering hit piece can be said to have a point) is that there is too much agriculture - and agriculture was the intention of the central valley.  So your line is asinine, unless you just want to quote a line you like and make it fit.
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Finally there is this gem...

You can’t miss the massive California Aqueduct alongside the freeway, which draws water from the Sacramento River delta. One of its purposes, aside from watering Los Angeles, is to keep the owners of these vast acreages from pumping still more water out of the ground and sinking the valley further.

Again, no.  The California Aqueduct's is expressly prohibited from providing water to Los Angeles.  Los Angeles steals it's water via the LA Aqueduct, which is on the opposite side of the Sierra Nevada's from the California Aqueduct.  Los Angeles also helped to pay for the Colorado River Aqueduct to bring extra water to Southern California.  In fact, the California Aqueduct is legally not allowed to provide water to Los Angeles.  Maybe you mean Southern California - if so say that dipshit.
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As for "keep the owners... from pumping still more water..."  Again, not really.  The California Aqueduct's original purpose was to provide snow melt water from the Northern Sierras to the Southern Central Valley because the San Joaquin River dried up in the summer.  It was a compromise to take the snow melt form the delta rather than build damns in the Sierra Nevadas because they wanted to keep the delta full of fresh water.
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By the damn California Water Atlas.