Not because it had damaged the environment

 Citing "great inner city organizing against it" and an LA City Council-adopted resolution in support of a statewide fracking moratorium, Hayden sees increased prospects for moratorium legislation this year.Like nuclear fission power, fracking has a somewhat frightening sound to it. But after Brown blocked a huge pro-nuclear surge in the '70s, nuclear fission power in California declined not because of a serious deleterious impact on the environment but because it was inefficient. The San Onofre plant outside San Diego, where I once spoke at a huge anti nuclear rally in the early '80s, has finally been closed by the utility that owns it.

 Not because it had damaged the environment, as most of the rally speakers claimed it would, but because a history of problems with equipment, which caused it to be off line for much of the state's ballyhooed electric power crisis early in the last decade, finally made it more trouble than it was worth.If the oil and gas industry can get ahead of the curve on fracking by taking steps to make it clear the industry is confident in its technology and practices, and if Brown and other state leaders make sure the state is exercising clear oversight, fracking could have a promising future in California.

In the meantime, the future is back in California, with the state's people contemplating and debating things off in the distance, free from having to constantly worry about the state's chronic operating budget deficit.A study last month from the policy center Schwarzenegger started a year and a half ago, the USC Schwarzenegger Institute on State and Global Policy, released at a forum featuring MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, strongly suggested that political reform initiatives pushed by the former governor tamed the wild beast of "hyper partisanship" and created a more moderate and productive state legislature.The USC prof who conducted the study used floor votes on Chamber of Commerce priority bills to gauge this end of gridlock in California even as Congress was b"ing more gridlocked and polarized. The finding?