Thomas D. Elias

For a governor with barely two years left to serve, one who can't balance a budget or compromise with the state Legislature, Arnold Schwarzenegger has an odd way of establishing a positive legacy.

Look at the map provided by the American Civil Liberties Union and you'll see that almost all of California resides in a "Constitution-Free" zone the ACLU maintains is being created and policed by the U.S. Border Patrol.

Just in case anyone still wondered, President-elect Barack Obama has now made it plain he is a greenhouse gas believer. He gave no truck during his campaign to skeptics' frequent claims that climate change has nothing to do with human activity, and it's now certain he won't as President.

The brand-new Ronald Reagan Medical Center on the campus of UCLA provides 520 standard beds and 61 short-term hospitalization beds. It contains 1,050,000 square feet and encompasses four kinds of treatment facilities: the Mattel Children's Hospital, the Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Institute, an emergency center treating all manner of traumas and a general hospital handling everything from organ transplants to cancer treatment, infectious diseases and general surgery.

There are plenty of good reasons why state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner has the next Republican nomination for governor all but locked up. And there are a host of other reasons why the better-known Democrats now thinking of trying for their party’s nod to run against him should not be taking victory for granted, despite the big Democratic voter registration edge that has made California a “blue” state in the last five Presidential elections.

[Editor’s Note: This essay marks the return of the popular Santa Monica-based essayist to the newspaper. His thinking will appear every Thursday.]

If ever there was a contest that tested how much prejudice remains in California’s melting pot, it was the fight over Prop. 8, restoring the ban on same-sex marriages.