LA Times

Californians seem to have had it with the underfunding of their schools. With tuition rising every semester to close the gap created by legislative budget cuts, the state's fabled higher education system — the University of California, the California State University and the community colleges — is pricing out tens of thousands of middle-class students. At the K-12 level, the Golden State ranks 42nd among the states in per-pupil spending, and is almost certain to fall even lower if, as seems likely, an additional $10 billion is whacked from state spending.

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Even as Occupy Wall Street protests have turned America's attention to the economic inequality that has soared as banks have come to dominate our economy, those banks have been quietly working to cut themselves still one more sweet deal. Whether they get away with it may ultimately depend on California Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris.

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On Tuesday, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, will hold its annual awards gala and fundraiser in downtown Los Angeles. The awardees include such indisputable worthies as Linda Ronstadt and former MALDEF leader Antonia Hernandez. The real awardee, though, should be MALDEF itself, whose decades of civil rights litigation have yielded significant gains for Latinos. I haven't always agreed with all of its actions, but I generally find myself cheering it on (as I do its current campaign to create a second Latino-majority district on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors).

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This week, the state Senate and Assembly may take up a legislative rarity: a bill that could actually strengthen democracy in California. The measure, championed by Senate Democratic leader Darrell Steinberg, would mandate that initiatives be voted on only in general elections, not in primaries.

Steinberg's brainchild has been condemned as just the latest partisan ploy from a Sacramento pol. Republicans complain that it seeks to move a ballot measure they support — barring unions from spending some of their members' dues on election campaigns — from next year's June primary to the November general election. Democrats counter that next year's primary is likely to have a disproportionately Republican electorate, as the GOP's presidential nomination contest may still be ongoing while Democrat Barack Obama will be running unopposed.

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Just when you thought the soap opera that is the Los Angeles Dodgers couldn't get more ridiculous, reports came Thursday that embattled owner Frank McCourt had received a $1.2-billion offer for the club from L.A. businessman Bill Burke, with some unspecified share of that $1.2 billion to come from "certain state-owned investment institutions of the People's Republic of China," according to the letter from Burke's group to McCourt.

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The Citizens Redistricting Commission has drawn its lines, and the latest redistricting, like all redistrictings, has lessons to teach us about California.

First Lesson (for Republicans): It's not the districts, it's you.

The initial Republican reaction to the districts that the commission unveiled was to protest their presumed partisan bias. "We are concerned that this appears to be a tilt towards Democrats," said Tom DelDeccaro, chairman of the California Republican Party. His predecessor as chairman, Ron Nehring, enumerated the GOP's grievances. "The commission created 40 districts where the Democrats are the largest party, and 13 where Republicans hold the plurality," he complained.

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