For many years, it was valid to urge that students take a good look around as they entered high school in the fall. More than one-third of their opening-day classmates probably would drop out before Graduation Day four years later. Dropouts remain a big problem, but the rates have been cut substantially, down from the disastrous 34 percent of several years ago to between one-fourth and one-fifth of high school freshmen.

When California voters adopted the “top two” primary election system four years ago via Prop. 14, they meant to make state politics more moderate, to ease some of the sharp divides between Republicans and Democrats that led to legislative and budgetary gridlock. It is working, but is a work in progress. For the relatively new system that pits the two leading vote-getters in each primary against each other the following November, regardless of their party affiliations, is now changing some runoff campaigns as profoundly as it quickly did many primaries.

And so California government now walks a tightrope, put in that position by one of the latest in the large corps of successful high-tech startups this state has spawned over the last few decades. Make a misstep in one direction and the state stands to lose a huge battery plant and 6,500 jobs. Stumble the other way and the state’s most important environmental law could be discredited, tainted by favoritism.

For the last 20 years – ever since passage of California’s abortive anti-illegal immigrant Prop. 187 – Democrats here and around America have increasingly depended on Latino votes. The 2.5 million California Hispanics who became citizens and registered to vote in the three years after 187 passed, with its bans on undocumented children in public schools and hospitals, made California a solidly Democratic state in almost every election since. The same could happen in current Republican strongholds like Texas and Georgia if Latinos were to become galvanized as they did here.

To some, it seems almost as if California lately has become New Jersey West. Incidents of possible corruption and conflict of interest are seemingly exposed at least once a month, with almost no consequences for anyone involved. Some examples:

Few things in an absurd world are more deserving of ridicule than the United Nations Human Rights Council, a 47-nation group that includes some of the world’s leading human rights violators, from China, Cuba, Kuwait, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, to take a few in alphabetical order. It was completely appropriate when Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer recruited a bipartisan group of 35 fellow senators to sign a letter to the U.N. secretary general protesting the Human Rights Council’s announced investigation into alleged war crimes by Israel during its latest campaign in Gaza.

Whichever way Californians vote this fall on Prop. 49, which aims to convince Congress to pass a constitutional amendment overturning the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision on political fundraising, they will send a dangerous message to the rest of America. Vote yes, in favor of nixing the court’s decision to remove restrictions on political spending by corporations and labor unions, and voters will be saying they want this done at all costs. With the Republican-dominated House of Representatives highly unlikely to pass anything that might restrict corporate political donations, a yes vote could conceivably lead to the first full-fledged constitutional convention America has seen since the 1780s.

For people familiar with the history of the runup to World War II, there is a sense of déjà vu in today’s humanitarian crisis along the Mexican border as resistance rises against the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children attempting to enter and stay in the United States. Eyewitness reports indicate that half the children coming without parents are actual refugees fleeing …

There are few worse feelings for a driver than receiving a letter purporting to show him/her in the act of running a red light. Few legal items are less enforceable or reliable, despite what the California Supreme Court said in an early summer ruling that held red light camera photos and videos have “a presumption of authenticity.” There’s a reason traffic cops routinely demand that …

For a state long a symbol of youth, there’s been a lot of age among California’s preeminent politicians of the last decade. That began to change in 2012, and the shift accelerated this summer. Many of the old guard chose not to brave the top two primary system that threatened to expose them to serious intra-party challenges.