California politics update

Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta's ecological decline is breathing new life into bypass proposals

A drilling rig bit into the bed of California's biggest river, hauling up sage-green tubes of clay and sand the consistency of uncooked fudge.

The rig workers rolled the muck into strips, dried it in sugar-sized cubes and crushed them under their palms. They packed slices into carefully labeled canning jars for testing at an engineering lab.

They were taking the river bottom samples for a $13-billion project that would shunt water around — or under — the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the big aqueducts that ferry supplies south.

Nearly three decades after a proposed delta bypass was killed by voters in a divisive initiative battle, the idea is back in vogue.

Pumping water from the delta's southern edge has helped shove the West Coast's largest estuary into ecological free fall, devastating its native fish populations and triggering endangered species protections that have tightened the spigot to San Joaquin Valley farms and Southern California cities.

A fresh battle between Southern California water adversaries

Dead these hundred years,Mark Twain would wholly understand the dispute between the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Imperial Irrigation District over water flowing into the Salton Sea.

In the West, Twain is famously reported to have quipped, whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting.

In the world of water, Metropolitan and Imperial are behemoths, for different reasons. When these two clash, as they have done repeatedly in recent decades, other water agencies in the West fret and wait for the fallout. At stake is a lot of water and a lot of money.

Metropolitan serves more people (19 million) than any other water district in California. Farm-rich Imperial gets more Colorado River water (3.1 million acre-feet) than any agency in the seven states that depend on the river.

A California GOP recovery program

In the wake of the disastrous showing by Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and the rest of the California Republican Party ticket, the leaders of the Golden State GOP should recalibrate their politics and policies to become relevant once again.

The state's Republicans are now so trapped in their ideological hall of mirrors that they have become a distorted caricature of themselves. The midterm election demonstrated that they utterly fail to reflect the impulses of the vast majority of California voters, who tend toward fiscal conservatism and social moderation.

Many Republican values have a wide following: smaller government, lower taxes, reduced regulation, economic growth, individual freedom and law and order, to name a few. The California GOP should fight for these ideals. But it needs to incorporate them into a platform that begins with a realistic growth agenda. Investment in roads, bridges, dams and/or levees, ports, water projects, redevelopment projects and schools and universities — all of these things and more are wholly consistent with their philosophical worldview.