Righting California's ship of state

Righting California's ship of state:

"With our budget in crisis, our economy in the doldrums and our politics in disarray, the great temptation for anyone offering an agenda for California in 2010 would be to borrow the goal former state Senate President Pro Tempore John Burton once set during another challenging year: 'Just to get out alive.'"

Sage advice indeed for those who hold political office. But what about the rest of us?
Thankfully, the formal duty of addressing both houses of the Legislature on the future of our state each year rests only with the governor, whom I applaud for striking an optimistic and constructive tone at a difficult time and for rightly placing a high priority on higher education as a cornerstone of California's future.
You might not have heard his speech. But whether you're raising a family or starting a business, getting an education or looking for work - we've all got a stake in the state of our state. And 2010 isn't shaping up as a year when we can afford to simply stay the course. By almost any measure, the status quo isn't working. What, then, is to be done?
The tradition is to lay out a set of policy prescriptions by topic: education, transportation, health care, prisons and the like. This approach


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/09/INC81BEH7P.DTL#ixzz0cDw1GDOA