Thomas D. Elias

It’s fair to say they did it to themselves. The future of California’s more than 400 municipal redevelopment agencies is completely unclear today, more than one month after Gov. Brown signed a budget-enabling bill that threatened to eliminate them.

It’s about time someone put the correct labels on efforts by Amazon.com to avoid paying any semblance of sales tax in California or anywhere else. Those labels: Greed and fear.

Want to know what a California high speed rail system might actually be like? What might be some strengths, flaws and weaknesses in current plans of the state commission working to get such a system built? Or who might ride it?

There are plenty of draconian cuts in the state budget Gov. Jerry Brown signed last month, items that promise to affect hundreds of thousands of Californians.

California has a new budget, and it even came in on time for a change. Cause for cheers? Maybe, but only if you don't get into the fine print. As often happens, the devil is in the details. This is quite a bunch of devils.

By now, most Americans have heard the story of the Jewish holiday of Chanukah many times, with its tale of a Greek king in ancient Syria (which included modern Israel) trying to eradicate the Jewish religion. He was thwarted by the guerrilla warfare of the Maccabees, who liberated the ancient Temple in Jerusalem in the second century B.C.

Millions of Americans believed all through his Presidency that George W. Bush never deserved to hold that office – regardless of what the U.S. Supreme Court ruled and no matter who got a few hundred votes more or less in Florida. That was because Democrat Al Gore won more actual votes in the 2000 election than Bush, even if he didn’t get more electoral votes.

Budget deficits have threatened California’s state parks – among the finest places with which nature has gifted this state – for several years, with annual threats to cut their operating budgets or even close them down.

The years-long campaign against Californians by the state of Texas, its officials and industries has done anything but abate since the Lone Star state was revealed as having a worse budget crisis than California’s, in addition to poverty and school dropout rates that far eclipse ours.

“It is nice to hear,” writes a reader of one of California’s largest newspapers, “that Arnold Schwarzenegger is sorry for his actions and takes full responsibility. But I just don’t quite understand what it means when a powerful person does wrong, tells the media that he takes full responsibility…and then the public sees no accountability or punishment for those actions.