Shock and indignation from many sides greeted a late-March decision by the California Air Resources Board to scale back drastically its longstanding zero emission vehicle (ZEV) demand on the world's leading auto manufacturers.

Rather than having to get 58,000 ZEVs onto state roads by 2014, as previous rules would have required, now the big companies will only have to build and sell 7,500 by then. Affected are General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda and Nissan.

Take a good look at the leading advocates of the three major proposals to build multi-billion-dollar liquefied natural gas receiving facilities in California, and you can't help wondering about state agency decisions that make those plans seem feasible. That's because some of the same people who made or recommended key LNG reports and rulings by the state Energy and Public Utilities commissions are now leading players in bids enabled by those decisions.

No one knows if there are any quid pro quos at work here, secret promises made by companies to important regulators for high-paying jobs if they make the decisions those companies want, decisions that promise tens of billions of dollars in corporate profits over 30 years or more if they are allowed to persist.

As will surely become clear when the hot days of summer arrive about two months from now, California now confronts two problems more threatening to more people than any other current ones: the state budget deficit and a looming water crisis.

Yes, other problems affect tens of thousands of Californians, including the continuing spate of home foreclosures caused in large part by the real estate bubble that built through most of this decade and the questionable lending and borrowing practices that fueled it.

While all political eyes are still on this year's presidential race and properly will be until after November, it won't be long before people start looking at the impending race to succeed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

When they do, the first person they will see is Jerry Brown.

The television commercials leading up to the June 4 California primary -- and they will air thousands of times in all parts of the state before that vote -- will tell voters this election is all about eminent domain, with the big question whether government at any level should be allowed to take property from one private owner for the purpose of selling it to another.

But this election will really be about things like rent control, new freeways and rail lines and whether the National Football League will ever return to Los Angeles.

Like a swarm of small earthquakes that might - just might - turn out to be foreshocks of a Big One to come, the spate of near bankruptcies and other fiscal woes befalling small and medium-sized California cities this spring could be an early warning of far more serious trouble to come.

The city with the worst difficulties so far has been Vallejo, a medium-sized town on the San Pablo Bay about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco that has never been quite the same since the Mare Island Naval Shipyard -- opened in 1854 -- shut down in 1996.

One exciting California primary election season is over, and another is just beginning. And because voters defeated the proposed Proposition 93 term limit extensions for today's state legislators, the upcoming June campaigns promise to be at least as interesting and contested as the presidential primary was, just a lot more local.

In dozens of state Senate and Assembly districts from the Oregon line to the Mexican border, tight and unpredictable races are brewing among both Republicans and Democrats. Despite the reapportionment plan of 2001, designed to assure that almost all districts belong solidly to one party or the other, some hot races will even carry over to the fall.

In the beginning, it looked like an utter disaster for the First Amendment, whose guarantees of freedom of speech and press have protected Americans from prior restraint since the Bill of Rights was adopted almost 230 years ago.

But the unified defense of an obscure Internet Web site by mainstream media and other free-press advocates instead turned around a case that could have set a pernicious precedent for squashing information governments and corporations don't want the public to see.

The knee-jerk uproar that's followed a state Court of Appeals decision to require credentialed teachers for every schoolchild in California -- including those in home schooling -- was fully predictable, but ignored some vital questions.

The ruling essentially means that every child in the state must attend an accredited school, public or private, or be taught at home -- or at least be supervised -- by a credentialed teacher, something that many take as a threat to most home schooling.

The knee-jerk uproar that's followed a state Court of Appeals decision to require credentialed teachers for every schoolchild in California -- including those in home schooling -- was fully predictable, but ignored some vital questions.

The ruling essentially means that every child in the state must attend an accredited school, public or private, or be taught at home -- or at least be supervised -- by a credentialed teacher, something that many take as a threat to most home schooling.