Willie Brown

Former California Speaker of the Assembly and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was crowing a bit Sunday when his prediction that former Secretary of State Colin Powell would endorse presidential candidate Barack Obama came true.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was taken to politics school over the weekend by former speaker of the California Assembly and longtime San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown over his handling the state budget impasse.

Brown said in his new column in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle that the governor's handling of the situation to date reminded him of "of a guy who goes deer hunting with a shotgun. You blast and blast away, but you don't hit anything."

Here's the rest of Professor Brown's homework assignment to California's celebrity governor:

During the course of his long and illustrious political career, Willie Brown has been a lot of things. Thirty years in the California Assembly (15 years as Speaker) and two terms as San Francisco's first African-American mayor, to name just a couple of his achievements.

But to the knowledge of most folks, Brown has never been a newspaper correspondent -- until Saturday, that is.

Political courage, once again, was in short supply last week, what with two-thirds of the viable candidates for president reaching new lows in pandering. In California, we know all too well how gas taxes get used for funding all sorts of projects having nothing to do with their intended purpose. As a state, we have more interest than most in transportation matters that involve driving our own vehicles. Ample and/or efficient mass transit is but a pipe-dream outside of the Bay area.