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.

It's not all that hard to incite a Republican race to the hard right on immigration. Once undertaken, that race ends up in the same place: one of fences, exclusion and super-heated rhetoric that utterly turns off most people of color and younger voters.

Strategy documents from an eminent consultancy circulating in the highest level of political circles around the President of the United States and the Governor of California have recently come into my possession.

While the U.S. Supreme Court may hold the line on most of the country, while likely allowing the invalidation of California's Proposition 8 anti-gay marriage initiative, it is clear that the right to same-sex marriage will be part of America's future.

Two new polls contain fascinating information about major trends of thought among California voters. The most dramatic development is a sharp reversal of opinion on illegal immigrants.

With Republicans in such profound disarray, can Democrats still screw up their opportunity for ongoing dominance?

Will Jerry Brown be unopposed for reelection? Technically, no. Effectively? We'll see.

Does Brown want to fence with Perry in such a way as to help him with his right-wing Republican base and hurt him with moderate voters? Is he just messing about? Does he want to have some fun at the expense of a relatively unarmed man?

There is no shortage of kudos now for Governor Jerry Brown, who with his State of the State address last Thursday tied the late Governor-turned-Chief Justice Earl Warren for the most such addresses in California's history. Does he have things sewn up politically in the battered but brightening Golden State?

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.

The dust is still settling from Governor Jerry Brown's big win with his Proposition 30 revenue initiative. While it may be premature to say that the Prop 13 era has given way completely to the Prop 30 era, this is clearly a very big deal, with ramifications that will play out over a period of years.

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.

How did Governor Jerry Brown pull off the strikingly sizable victory for his Proposition 30 revenue initiative? Think three words: Focus, foundation, and fortune.

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.

After a mostly sleepy summer and fall, California's initiative campaigns are concluding in a paroxysm of the bizarre. Here's the latest in the wild banana republic-style funding action, and a forecast of the outcomes of the various initiatives on the ballot.

Jerry Brown may have thought that the bad old days of campaign finance were gone. At least for a fleeting historical moment. But now he's finding himself in the midst of some bad new days.

Brown's plans to match his big budget cuts with new revenues were already somewhat complicated by heiress Molly Munger's rival income-tax-hike-for-the-schools initiative. But a much bigger threat emerged in dramatic fashion late last week.

Sufficiently contrite or not, Arnold Schwarzenegger continues to be, as Jerry Brown noted on CNN right after the "surprise" announcement of candidacy in 2003, "a very interesting character."