If California highways and parking lots of 2025 look considerably different from today’s, it probably will be because they will contain almost 1.5 million more hybrid cars and trucks, hydrogen-driven vehicles and plug-in hybrids that run mostly on electricity except on long trips.

Jon Coupal likes to say his hard-fighting organization, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., exists to beat back constant attacks on Prop. 13, the landmark 1978 initiative that limits property taxes in California.

Those several years in the last decade when actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was its Great Germanic Hope said more about the current state of California’s Republican Party than almost anything else that happened during his seven years in Sacramento.

The many negative stories represent aberrations, revealing nothing at all typical about public employees in California. But they have turned public opinion against civil servants so severely that it will be difficult to pass any of the current spate of tax increase proposals, no matter who might back them or bankroll them.

It’s fashionable to say — and the Occupy movement has made this a basic tenet — that Republicans and Democrats are really alike beneath their skin, any apparent differences amounting to no more than a contrast between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

A bit over 10 months from today we will know the resolution of the great California redistricting controversy, and we will find out just how much clout this state will lose in Congress.

One startling statistic from last fall’s municipal elections around California has not been lost on the state’s policymakers and would-be reformers: Fully 40 of the 53 local tax or bond measures up for a vote in November passed, usually with supermajorities of 55 percent or more.

It’s a question commonly asked by schoolchildren: What is the President’s most important job? The answer plainly is not being commander-in-chief of the military or appointing a cabinet or negotiating a budget.

Imagine the public outcry if a legislative committee suddenly raised future taxes on almost every Californian and then said no one would know the amount until the tax bill arrived. Fury would be a mild description of what might follow.

Climate change skepticism by one congressman among California’s 53 ordinarily doesn’t matter much. But coming from Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, it’s now leading to one of the most significant attacks ever on California’s lead smog-fighting agency, the state Air Resources Board (ARB).