For the umpteenth time in the last 20 years, the extreme conservative activists who run California’s Republican Party have shot themselves in the foot. They have, that is, if they’re more interested in winning elections than merely retaining control of their own dwindling party’s apparatus.

Once again, a logical solution to California’s estimated $25 billion budget quandary stares the state in the face. All the money that would be needed to keep all services going, pay all state employees and meet pension obligations now sits in government hands.

Foresight is a quality rarely seen among politicians in Sacramento, which makes it remarkable that 10 state legislators actually displayed a lot of it barely two weeks before the devastating 9.0 Japanese earthquake on March 11 and the nuclear power plant crisis that followed.

If taxes are defined as money that citizens must pay in order to avoid serious difficulties, then surely health insurance premiums are a kind of de facto tax.

The first real test of California’s new “top two” primary election system will likely come on July 12 when two high-powered, well-known Democrats vie to replace the long-serving Jane Harman in a strongly Democratic coastal district of Los Angeles County.

Dwight Eisenhower usually is recognized as a fine President and an even better general. But in the long run, he may be remembered as much for one warning he issued three days before leaving office in 1961:

Whether or not he manages to eliminate all of the more than 400 city redevelopment agencies that have thrived around California for six decades, it now appears Gov. Brown will at the very least spur them to do some things they probably should have done long ago.

It’s high time for Gov. Brown to use the bully pulpit that comes with his office. The somewhat vague but nonetheless real deadline for getting legislative approval to put his budget plan before the voters this June now draws near and he still hasn’t won over a single Republican lawmaker.

Because Republicans in Congress have steadfastly stymied attempts to get the federal government to act against global warming and climate change, critics of California’s new carbon trading rules usually get little contradiction when they insist those regulations will see this state going it alone and putting itself at an economic disadvantage.

The Census is over, its findings known and California has a brand-new redistricting commission made up of citizens who have never before been public figures.