Dan Walters

Gov. Jerry Brown's campaign to balance the state budget with new income and sales taxes took a double hit Monday.

California's 112 community colleges, the nation's largest higher education system, may change a lot if Gov. Jerry Brown has his way.

Gov. Jerry Brown and his fellow Democrats in the Legislature settled on a hastily revised state budget last June – after Brown had vetoed legislators' first version – and pronounced it to be balanced and timely.

Many years of partisan wrangling over the state budget reached a climax in 2010 when public employee unions and Democratic politicians persuaded voters to pass Proposition 25, eliminating the two-thirds vote for budgets.

Gov. Jerry Brown is scaling back the state's highly controversial bullet train project to keep it alive.

Would it be churlish to say that the much-ballyhooed Think Long Committee for California fell short on fortitude?

When a political party achieves dominance of any government, one expects that it would use its hegemony to enact its public policy agenda.

The big news in Stanislaus County these days is that a big Internet retailer – almost certainly Amazon – will establish a huge distribution center in Patterson that would employ at least 1,500 workers.

Last Tuesday, the Public Policy Institute of California issued a new poll that found, among other things, just 17 percent of the state's voters like the Legislature's performance.

As the Legislature reconvened this month, California's judges resumed their civil war over money and power.

The state budget contains hundreds of specific provisions but none is bigger, more complicated, more politicized, more emotional – or more important – than the 30 or so billion dollars that it spends on K-12 education.

Whenever someone suggests that California's public employee pension systems need reform, civil service unions react dismissively, often with attacks on the credentials or even the morals of critics.

Jerry Brown evidently does not want to join the nascent movement to overhaul – perhaps radically – California's dysfunctional political structure.

California's big tax battle will be waged next fall, as voters decide the fate of Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed hike in sales and income taxes and perhaps one or two competing tax increases.

Jerry Brown devoted much of Wednesday's State of the State speech to dissing "declinists" who portray California as failing because they don't understand that "California is turbulent, less predictable and, well, different."

Bee political columnist Dan Walters hosted a live chat to discuss Gov. Jerry Brown's State of the State address. Replay it here.

Some of the California legislators who voted last year to abolish redevelopment agencies and shift their money into schools and other local governments appear to be having executioner's remorse – creating uncertainty about redevelopment's future, if any.

"In re Glass on Admission" is certainly not the most important case ever to be decided by the California Supreme Court.

The mayors of California's larger cities have enjoyed – or at least experienced – marked increases in their authority in recent decades.

Jerry Brown spent months and much political capital three decades ago to persuade the Legislature to authorize construction of a "peripheral canal" that would complete the immense statewide water project that his father had begun.

"Soak the rich" has a populist ring that resonates in a period of economic uncertainty, and making the rich pay their "fair share" of taxes has become a rallying cry for those on the political left with no small appeal to those in the middle.

The three-pronged battle over which state Senate districts will be used for this year's elections is reaching a climax that will determine whether Democrats can achieve a two-thirds majority in the upper legislative house.

Gov. Jerry Brown's new budget says that the state's shaky finances are "exacerbated by an unprecedented level of debts, deferrals and budgetary obligations," which he describes as "a wall of debt."