Here’s the situation: Tens of millions of state tax dollars are going to billion-dollar corporations – but only with approval from other billion-dollar corporations – at the same time Gov. Brown maintains state government is flat broke and needs billions more in new taxes..

From the moment Gov. Brown announced his latest budget revision proposal, complaints poured in both from his political enemies and some interests that usually have supported him.

The harm that California’s extremely short legislative term limits have done never has been more obvious and extreme than today.

Millions of dollars in “hydrogen highway” grants by a state commission are drawing cries of favoritism and collusion as they seem to guarantee that most refueling stations for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles due to hit the road between now and 2017 will be owned by two large companies closely aligned with auto manufacturers.

California State University professors and other employees cannot engage in “discriminatory behavior, bullying or harassment,” nor may they display “offensive conduct of an unwelcome nature…”

No, the California Republican presidential primary on June 5 will not have particular importance, with Mitt Romney all but crowned the Republican nominee against Democratic President Obama.

As the “top-two” primary election system embodied in the 2010 Prop. 14 was being debated exactly two years ago, backers tried to comfort skeptics by pointing out that Californians already had experience with the system. The two leading vote-getters, they noted, have long advanced to runoffs whenever there’s been a special election anywhere in California.

The ripple effects of high gasoline prices have been clear for decades, ever since the Arab oil boycott of the mid-1970s temporarily forced a form of gas rationing on California.

Do the Democrats who dominate the state Legislature side with a governor of their own party or do they go the way of their colleague Republicans, who fought with partymate Arnold Schwarzenegger most of the seven years he spent as governor?

From the moment it was created as part of the 1974 Prop. 9 political reform initiative, California’s Fair Political Practices Commission has operated on the presumption that politicians and their most active campaign aides and backers never should be fully trusted.