California News by Alex Benes

So, let's recap. The week after the Field Poll shows that the California legislature has the lowest approval rating EVER -- even lower than Richard Nixon -- a budget gets passed. The governor, in the face of a recall threat by the powerful don't-call-me-prison-guards union talks tough and the cowardly legislature gives in. And everybody is blaming each other and the requirement to have a two-thirds majority to pass a budget. That about right? Can't get much worse than that.

"In the middle is a sweet, tired town of roughly 35,000 people, three-quarters of them Latino and more than half considered low-income under county standards," writes Scott Gold in the Los Angeles Times of Aug. 22 in a story titled, "In Santa Paula, a white minority blames the poor for the town's problems."

Two articles that I'm confident drew reasonably little statewide attention caught my interest last week. One has a lesson in how difficult it is for all of us to change habits, especially when it comes to the incomprehensible (to me) desire to have green lawns in areas that are virtually deserts. The second raises real questions about how little oversight there is on the potential impact of proposals surrounding the state budget. Both are superficially about water, but really are about the need for changing how we do things.

Story 1: All Wet

The most useful diagramming of how a rumor spreads was provided last week by the Sacramento Bee's "Capitol Alert" under the headline, "Slow news day?