Adam Eran: Niello’s hearing is yet another bit of evidence that, no matter what the facts, the Republican narrative remains constant: We must reduce taxes and regulation, even if lack of effective regulation produced the current less-than-optimum outcome. And although “deficits don’t matter,” no matter how low they are, taxes are too high, especially on the wealthy.

Joseph Palermo: Schwarzenegger’s hackneyed “State of the State” address was pathetic and unconvincing. If it weren’t for his acting chops and his ability to emote on cue, he couldn’t get away with the simplistic platitudes that roll off his tongue. Then again, if he couldn’t act he wouldn’t be governor either.

Ron Kaye: Antonio Villaraigosa once held the promise of being the leader who could bring us to this promised land. Maybe he still can but not as long as keeps on looking to enrich his friends and allies at the expense of others, not as long as keeps looking for his next job, not as long as travels the world rather than attending to his duties, not as long as he keeps thinking the people are fools who will fall for hollow promises.

Adam Eran: As usual, McClintock ignores the actual biggest expansion in history. That occurred after the Clinton administration balanced the federal budget by raising the top rates a mere 3%. Neo-cons like McClintock, and Newt Gingrich gravely prophesied economic doom following these tax hikes, but again, as usual, history contradicts them.

Republican Senator Abel Maldonado is an Olympia Snowe character. He is a so-called “moderate” who is willing to cut a deal on the budget, while the rest of his party would rather see the state fall off a cliff than raise any taxes whatsoever. But the deals that Maldonado has extorted in past years for his one vote are enough to leave a sour taste in anyone’s mouth.

Governor Arnold Scwharzenegger and the Republicans in the Legislature who control California’s finances have apparently concluded that it is not even worth trying to compete with India and China anymore. California’s “leaders,” by abandoning the CSU, are throwing in the towel.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger praised U.S. soldiers for helping Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki build and nurture Iraq’s public institutions, which are central to the American war effort. But at the same time Schwarzenegger is systematically (even gleefully) dismantling similar public institutions in California.

Any trace of the Jerry Brown who sounded like Dennis Kucinich when he ran for President is gone. At this weekend’s California Democratic Party E-Board meeting, Brown got into an argument with Party Chair John Burton about single-payer health care. Brown insisted single payer “will not happen” – even though the state legislature passed it twice, only to have Arnold Schwarzenegger veto it. The only thing stopping single payer in California from happening is a Republican Governor – yet the only Democratic candidate left in the race has insisted that it will not happen.

If the miserable status quo continues and the Republicans succeed in their long-term project of turning California into a failed state the time might not be far off when the labor unions of this state are going to have no choice but to call for some kind of General Strike.

Despite Shriver’s political agenda, and amid a raft of budget cuts affecting women and children – including $16 million from domestic violence programs and $50 million from Healthy Families – the rape kit veto underscored the message that women in California count for less in the Schwarzenegger regime.

So when the community went with Ridley-Thomas, Parks went to the feds and the newspapers. The L.A. Times, always willing to get in the middle of a good community fight, took it and ran with it.

I knew from experience that Sen. Poochiaign’s votes had consistantly indicated animosity to civil rights statutes regarding gender, disability and sexual orientation.

Next year, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s circus will leave Sacramento. The cigar tents will be packed up and his menagerie of lobbyists and hangers-on will follow him out of town. And like a departing circus it will leave in its wake a barren field strewn with garbage and elephant shit. Whoever is the next Republican nominee for governor will have to at least promise to clean up some of this mess. The last thing the state needs is a Margaret Thatcher wannabe.

UC’s future cannot be left to administrators who don’t understand that disinvesting in post-secondary education is disinvesting in California’s future. If we work together, there may yet be a chance to save the crown jewel of California from the pawnshop.

The Assembly cannot agree on what seems like common sense to the rest of us: people who commit low-level crimes like petty theft and simple drug possession should be punished on the local level, not in prison cells at a cost of nearly $50,000 per person per year.

Students are paying more than ever for a CSU education even though they’ll be spending less time with professors, have fewer course offerings, and be crammed into overcrowded classrooms.

The professors will endure. But the students and their families are the true victims here. They’re getting ripped off. The quality of their education is suffering even while they go into debt.

My account of these alternative criteria does, as readers will see, lend support to a vision of the UC system as characterized by a widespread distribution of excellence, at least where the eight established campuses are concerned

The “Prison Population and Budget Reduction Package” proposed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is like a drunk person walking home from a bar – it knows where it wants to go but oftentimes you find it stumbling off the sidewalk or turning down the wrong street.

Absent constructive and reasonable suggestions, this heels-dug-in approach to government gives the appearance that these groups would prefer the “wild west” environment currently in place to the structure provided by AB 48.

Mayor Newsom is the most exciting thing to happen to California politics in years. He has started his campaign early, enlisted the help of an army of energetic young people who represent the future of the state, and promises to lift California out of the morass the deadening hands of the Republicans have submerged us in.

Oddly, McClintock yearns for the golden era when California was a more highly taxed state and could afford “the finest highway system in the world and the finest public school system in the country. California offered … FREE university education.”

The state is ungovernable for many reasons. Republicans know that California is getting younger and browner (and therefore more liberal), so they bitterly cling to the two-thirds budget rule – starving the state into oblivion.

Right-wingers at the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association understand that elections are transitory – and a long-term approach requires going back to the voters over and over again.

“Why do they keep sending me budgets I won’t sign?”, the Governor asked, after saying no, once again, to any proposal but his own, cuts-only solution. And, since he had all the guns, no one in the Legislature asked in return, “Why does he keep refusing our budgets?”

the campaign to repeal two-thirds has to be about the status quo, and whether California can afford to continue its budgets the way it’s been done. Talk about public health clinics shutting down, more teachers getting laid off, and more unemployed people.

Now we have a Republican governor in California who sees the state’s current budget catastrophe as nothing but a big joke. Why else would Arnold Schwarzenegger post a tasteless Twitter video where he wields a two-foot-long folding knife boasting about his budget-cutting prowess?

When Arnold Schwarzenegger calls an agreement “a really great, great accomplishment” you know average Californians are in for a fleecing.

With the state legislature on the brink of caving to Republicans on the budget (even though only 36% of voters want a “cuts-only” solution), California politics has been unbelievably depressing. But a trip down to Burlingame this weekend gave me hope for the state’s future.

Schwarzenegger doesn’t get the human costs of his actions. He seems to enjoy the attention he’s getting as well as playing on right-wing “populist” anger. He’s satisfying his Tea Bagger constituency by beating up on Californians who happen to be poor or work in the public sector.

Just as many of the neo-cons seemingly cross their fingers hoping for a mass-casualty terrorist attack on U.S. soil because they see it as political gold for them, they’re also cheerleading for the economy to remain stagnant

There is NO WAY Pat Brown would allow the type of cuts Arnold is trying to force onto Californians.

If the Governor converts all death sentences to permanent imprisonment, he could then use that $1 billion check to actually make California safer by keeping more police on the streets and more crime labs open.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier & Ross, nearly all of the political experts they consulted felt that California Attorney General Jerry Brown would gain more than Gavin Newsom from the non-entry of Los …

It’s been a while since I’ve been on the same page at the same time with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. As one of the few black stakeholders who backed his losing bid in 2001, …

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his Republican colleagues are using the trauma of the economic collapse and the record state budget deficit to implement policies they’ve been advocating for years. “This budget ought to be …

Immediately after the election, the Governor announced that the “voters had spoken” and that the defeat of Prop 1A “clearly” meant that Californians stood adamantly against any new taxes or fees. He must have …

In Part 1 of this two-part Q&A, UC Berkeley Law Professor Jonathan Simon talked about criminal sentencing and parole as practiced today in California. He concludes here by discussing the social and fiscal impacts of …

California’s criminal justice system was thrust into the national spotlight recently after the shooting deaths of four Oakland police officers by a recently released state prisoner. In this two-part Q&A, the NewsCenter speaks with UC …

In his most recent piece in the New York Times Paul Krugman asks: “Who would have thought that America’s largest state, a state whose economy is larger than that of all but a few nations, …