San Francisco Chronicle

As the Bush administration struggles with bipartisan opposition to increasing troop levels in Iraq, the new Pentagon chief is also weighing requests to send more troops to Afghanistan, where military commanders anticipate another surge in violence in the spring.

While many analysts support a troop boost to Afghanistan, they also warn that the increase alone would not be enough to fight the resurgent Islamic militia, which has been staging increasingly bold attacks against U.S., NATO and Afghan forces and civilians...

In his speech Wednesday announcing his new Iraq strategy, President Bush assured Americans that the Iraqi government had promised to cooperate, but some experts are deeply skeptical that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki can deliver the things Bush is demanding: cracking down on militias, writing new laws on oil wealth distribution and the political process, and eliminating sectarian factions within Iraq's security forces.

Sacramento -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is looking to redirect billions of dollars now spent to treat people without health insurance to purchase coverage for the uninsured, according to sources who have seen a recent version of the governor's health care plan expected to be released Monday.

The governor's plan, which continues to be revised and reconsidered, would move up to $2 billion in tax money that now goes to hospitals to help cover indigent care and use it to buy insurance for part of the uninsured population.

Below the surface of all the big issues facing California -- education, prisons, transportation, immigration, political reform -- lies the disturbing reality that the grassroots of citizen political involvement are drying up. In recent years, alienation between Californians and their government leaders has burned like a wildfire across the state, melting voter turnout and heating up cynicism toward the political establishment in Sacramento...

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As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger renews his call for an independent redistricting commission, a new opinion poll finds that California voters overwhelmingly support improvements in the election process, but there's a catch -- it depends on who is proposing them.

For generations, being a big-city mayor was akin to being confined to the political equivalent of Devil’s Island. Even if you escaped imprisonment, it was only with the shirt on your back.

But today, mayors across America are riding an unprecedented wave of upward mobility. Here in California, for example, the men most widely touted to become governor once the Terminator terminates are not any of the myriad of statewide Democratic officeholders, but two high-profile mayors, San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles’ Antonio Villaraigosa.

Imagine that the transportation bond measure on Tuesday’s ballot, Proposition 1B, signifies a return to the golden era of California, when the state’s future was on the drawing board.

This is the dream the measure’s backers, including legislators, local officials and the coterie around Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, would like us to believe. In its endorsement of the proposition, one newspaper crowed that "for the first time in nearly 50 years, California is on the brink of building for the future."

Deficits of hundreds of billions of dollars a year are projected to last for decades; efforts to reform Social Security have fallen flat; and no one is talking about the elephant in the room -- how to fix the nation's health-care system. We do not know what the makeup of Congress will be following the November elections, but there is one thing we know for sure: the state of fiscal affairs will still be a disaster.

Like binge drinkers or fast-food fanatics, American urban leaders have had a tendency to run wild when things appear to be going well. But soon they will find that the good times are coming to end.

The prime culprit this time will be deflation of the residential real estate bubble, which has brought about a surge of tax collections and development.