Championing what he calls "prudence, not exuberance," Governor Jerry Brown on Tuesday rolled out the annual "May Revise" of his proposed California state budget. How's it playing? Oh, and what's the play?

One of the strangest things about California over the past decade is how little impact Arnold Schwarzenegger's two landslide wins for the governorship had on the Republican Party.

California's generation-long chronic budget crisis is over, but, while the sun is shining, metaphorically speaking, happy days aren't here again. (To reference the Democratic Party's New Deal theme song.) Not just yet.

Governor Jerry Brown is working on the new California state budget, the first in more than a decade to be free of the state's deep chronic fiscal crisis. It's an agenda which his two most immediate predecessors, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis, in large measure promoted themselves.

Brown's Proposition 30 revenue initiative, which consists of temporary hikes in income taxes for the wealthy and a quarter-cent sales tax for all to stop education cuts and stabilize the long-reeling state budget, is a big win that may point to a path forward for national Democrats.

Gov. Jerry Brown might be a septuagenarian, but his vision and forward thinking are decades younger in spirit and idealism than anything caustic right-wingers have to offer.

The real winners and losers are the constituents and causes who did battle on the ground and on the airwaves, and whose lives and livelihoods will be influenced by what happens over the next four years and beyond.

WASHINGTON -- A "dark money" non-profit that funneled $11 million into two ballot initiative fights in California revealed to the state's campaign fin...

Want to know how the right-wing astroturf machine works? Want to see how they use power and money to drown out the voice of the people? Want to see the motivations behind the Koch Brothers' hit man in California?

I've predicted that Prop 30 -- the California initiative to temporarily raise taxes on the rich, along with a quarter-cent sales tax hike, to stave off big education cuts and stabilize the state budget -- will lose. Sometimes I like being wrong. This would definitely be one of those times.