Thomas D. Elias

Every adult living in California knows, or should know, that the next significant earthquake is coming just as surely as the next big wildfire. It's only a matter of time.

So why is it that virtually every homeowner carries fire insurance, while barely 12 percent bother with earthquake coverage?

Every adult living in California knows, or should know, that the next significant earthquake is coming just as surely as the next big wildfire. It's only a matter of time.

So why is it that virtually every homeowner carries fire insurance, while barely 12 percent bother with earthquake coverage?

Check last fall's election results in the contest for a spot on the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, and you'll see that retired businesswoman Doreen Farr won a seat by just 806 votes over Steve Pappas, president of a local school board in the Santa Ynez Valley, near Solvang.

That race would normally have remained obscure and inconsequential outside the county, where environmental issues are often the biggest bones of contention in local politics.

The sponsors of last fall's Prop. 8, which rolled back the recently-won right of homosexuals to marry, are now complaining because some of their targets no longer want to do business with proposition backers.

It would be one thing if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the top officials of the state Legislature had pursued all logical and available methods for solving the state budget crisis.

It's the constant bugaboo of California politics: Republicans and business interests have claimed for decades that businesses will move out of state if taxes, home prices and utility rates rise.

It's fast becoming clear that all the talk about fighting global warming from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and leading Democrats in the state Legislature might be just so much hooey, happy talk to make them look good.

That's the implication of the final item in the Democrats' lengthy list of proposed cuts aimed to help bring this year's state budget into balance and make a start on solving next year's likely problems, an item also among the cuts in Schwarzenegger's newest budget blueprint.

There is no more sacred a cow in California state government than the prison system, whose population has multiplied by seven since 1980 to a total of about 170,000.

Even while politicians incessantly say they're looking for every dime of waste, they never finger prisons. They should.

While all around him, prospective candidates for governor are pulling out checkbooks and fattening up campaign war chests, lame-duck Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger gives mixed messages about what he might do next.

Whatever he does, he says he won't be acting anymore, and he will be pushing environmental causes and clean energy.

Almost exactly two years from now, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be termed out and leave the office he loves, like it or not.

Which means he now faces the possibility of hanging around for two years as the lamest of lame ducks while a host of Democrats and a few Republicans fight over which one of them will inherit the governor's office and all the unsolved problems that go with it.