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

California's 112 community colleges, the nation's largest higher education system, may shrink if Gov. Jerry Brown has his way. Read comments

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. Read comments

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. Read comments

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

Would it be churlish to say that the much-ballyhooed Think Long Committee for California fell short on fortitude? Or merely accurate? Billionaire Nicholas Berggruen created the committee and invited a Who's Who of California's political, civic and economic upper crust to become members, including two former governors, one former chief justice, and two former secretaries of state. Read comments

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

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. Read comments

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

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