Thomas D. Elias

There was public indignation when this column revealed late last year the secrecy maintained by the state Public Utilities Commission as it regulates the siting, building and design of several massive solar thermal electricity projects that soon will be a major part of California’s energy portfolio.

Imagine the outcry if students on a university campus in California set up “checkpoints” to find out whether students with tan complexions are really African-Americans, or whether students heard conversing in Spanish are citizens or illegal immigrants. Screams of protest would rise if students set up similar barriers to check whether olive-complexion schoolmates are outfitted with suicide bombs, or if anyone stopped students of any type demanding to know their sexual orientation.

When California voters begin thinking seriously next fall about the propositions they’ll vote up or down, one currently circulating might stand out as eminently sensible:

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.