So, for months Democrats in the Legislature have said taxes must be raised to reconcile the state's massive budget shortfall. Republicans have said taxes would be raised over their dead bodies. It certainly sounded like a formula for a long impasse.

Thanks to Dede Alpert, who as a state senator from San Diego introduced the bill requiring accurate tallies of school dropouts, data released by the state Department of Education are a mother lode. Based on individual (but unnamed) students' records, it may show reasons they drop out.

The high school graduation rate is among the most basic barometers of the success of a school system. But in California, school officials at every level hid the extent of the state's dropout problem for as long as they could. It wasn't until spring 2005 that the truth came out. That's when Harvard researchers demolished the state's claim that the vast majority of high-schoolers graduated. Instead of 87 percent, their report said, the actual figure was 71 percent – and far lower for some minorities.

A word may no longer play such a major role in Southern California water planning. That word is “surplus.” The region has long managed its water supplies as though there was extra to provide in any given year.

• Let's not destroy county's agricultural industry

Fisher recently met with the members of the Union-Tribune editorial board. This is an edited transcript of that interview.

Barack Obama is looking for a way to convince Latino voters that he is simpatico. He may have found it thanks to the cover of The New Yorker. During the primaries, Obama tried to equate civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and United Farm Workers President Cesar Chavez.