LA Times

A life spent stranded in Los Angeles traffic can nonetheless yield its epiphanies. One such moment came in November 2008, when L.A. County's beleaguered commuters voted to increase their sales tax by half a cent over the next 30 years to build an electric rail system that could speed their journeys and clean their air.

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California's economic woes can do more damage to America's recovery than Greece's can do to Europe's. Yet which of the two may be getting a bailout?

If I were the governor of California, cursed with an insoluble budget crisis, and if I had asked the federal government for help and been rebuffed, and if I hailed from Europe and noticed that the European Union had agreed -- in principle at least -- to bail out Greece, I might be mumbling, "Vut gives?"

When Greece (a charming though relatively piddling land) comes calling in Brussels, it gets embraced (and lectured); when California (an economic powerhouse) comes calling in Washington, it gets, almost universally, the cold shoulder.

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The filibuster is an affront to the most basic principles of democracy, and California's senators should take the lead in getting rid of the tactic.

It's been a maddening year for California liberals. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama carried the state by a stunning 24 points. He took office with a distinctly progressive agenda and with heavy Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. A moment of liberal breakthrough -- another 1935 or 1965 -- seemed at hand. And then . . . nothing happened.

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Los Angeles has long been a place where it's easy -- dangerously easy -- to labor in obscurity. Just ask any of the 90,000 workers employed at the immense warehouses of Ontario and Fontana, where more than half the goods unloaded at L.A. and Long Beach harbors are trucked, sorted and sent on their way to Wal-Marts, Targets, Home Depots and the like for a thousand miles around. The warehouses are a key switch-point in our new global supply chain, the place where Asian production meets American consumption.

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As the state that once embodied the American dream has devolved into an American nightmare, Californians have begun looking for ways to rescue their state from its own dysfunction. We are awash in constitutional proposals, some sensible (eliminating the Legislature's two-thirds-vote requirement for passing a budget or raising taxes; abolishing term limits), some not (enacting a flat tax).

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Because of a quirk in California's Constitution, the minority Republicans have managed to push through a budget that makes the state sicker and dumber. Where is the Democrats' white knight?

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