State schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell unveiled newly calculated high school dropout data Wednesday, pegging the overall rate at 24.2 percent and saying it would end reliance "on complicated formulas to make educated guesses about how many students were graduating and how many were leaving school without diplomas."

When Assemblyman Mark Leno was challenging Sen. Carole Migden's bid for a second term this year, one aspect of their campaigns was what one might term chemical warfare.

It has been nearly 40 years since a well a half-mile beneath the Pacific off the shore of Santa Barbara blew a gasket, spewing 200,000 gallons of gooey black oil over 800 square miles of ocean and fouling 35 miles of coastline.

Seven decades ago, California's politicians wisely concluded that they couldn't trust themselves to divvy up highway construction funds that were critical to the future of a fast-growing state.

One of the more irritating aspects of the state budget wrangle – albeit also one of the more intriguing – is the sheer amount of factual error, historical revisionism, supposition and mathematical nonsense that sloshes around.

The flames burning the Big Sur coast have captured the nation's attention, and a big blaze in Butte County is forcing the evacuation of thousands of people. But a stubborn fire steadily chewing its way up the western slope of the Sierra Nevada is largely responsible for making life hell for residents from Tahoe to the Sacramento Valley. And that fire might be burning for weeks to come.

The Wall Street Journal published a very lengthy, front-page article the other day about the Sacramento region's multicounty "blueprint" for growth, aimed at curbing sprawl and automotive traffic with higher-density housing and mass transit.

This week's dust-up over whether all of California's eighth-graders should be taking algebra encapsulates one of the state's overarching educational dilemmas: Is it wise to set educational standards that apply to all students, even though they have an astonishing and ever-widening array of innate abilities and cultural, economic, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds?

If nothing else, the state's budget imbroglio has brought the Capitol's stark ideological conflict - very liberal Democrats vs. very conservative Republicans and no more than a handful of even semi-moderates - into razor-sharp focus.

TRUCKEE – A hot and smoky Independence Day weekend might not have been the best time to imagine what it was like for the ill-fated Donner Party, whose snowbound horror story will forever dominate the history of this Sierra town and the summit that looms ominously above it.

California politicians often take pride in enacting policies that, as they would say, point the way for others to follow.

Over the years, as California politicians have contended with income-outgo gaps in the state budget, they have often turned to upfront and backdoor loans, accounting gimmicks, and raids on various pots of money to ease or avoid the difficult alternatives of raising taxes and cutting spending.

A new report on California's highly contentious system of compensating workers for job-related illnesses and injuries proves that the systemic overhaul pushed through the Legislature by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2004 continues to save employers many billions of dollars each year.

California Forward is a new, bipartisan, foundation-supported organization whose goal, it says, is to fix the evident dysfunction of state government – a malaise most evident in the circular wrangling over the deficit-ridden state budget.

California's historic attempt to put an entire state on a low-carbon diet as a way to stave off global warming is going to reach into every corner of the economy, changing the way we live, what we drive and many of the products we use every day without ever thinking about their origins.

On a planet ruled, often by whim, by kings, czars, emperors, ayatollahs, popes, sultans, rajas, caliphs and warlords, the very notion that "all men are created equal" and had "certain inalienable rights" such as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was radical in the extreme.

When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom spoke to the Sacramento Press Club a few months ago, his body language bespoke ambition.

Californians will get a chance to make history this November, an opportunity to seize control of their government from the politicians, handlers and consultants who have rigged the game to serve their own interests.

A legislative staff analysis of Senate Bill 823 declares that during the 1980s, California acquired the reputation of being "the diploma mill capital of the world."