Gray Davis

Sometimes the page turns quietly, without the clang and confetti of a New Year's celebration. So it appeared last week, as the display of power visibly shifted in Sacramento a month ahead of Jerry Brown's formal assumption of the governorship from Arnold Schwarzenegger. Brown announced last week that he would hold a budget summit on Wednesday and invited the Legislature, state and local officials and other interested parties. Schwarzenegger offered a somewhat wistful soliloquy about what being governor has meant to him, in personal terms that inadvertently underscored how different his ending has been from his beginning.

In making the case why they ought to be California's next governor, Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman have slashed at the seven-year tenure of the man they hope to replace, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who in turn has slapped at each of them as he defends his priorities in office. The three-way skirmishing will come to a remarkable head Tuesday, when the three are to share a stage at the annual Women's Conference in Long Beach, hosted by Schwarzenegger's wife, Maria Shriver. "You've got the governor, who hasn't endorsed either candidate, and who both candidates are using as a whipping boy," said Raphael Sonenshein, a political science professor at Cal State Fullerton.

Marcia Fritz remembers it distinctly: She had a chilled glass of Handley chardonnay in her hand and was chatting with friends on the shores of Lake Tahoe in August of 2002. She was totally relaxed until one of her pals brought up an official in her mid-size city who was retiring. His pension was to be based on a 3-50 formula. Fritz, a certified public accountant, nearly choked. The 3-50 formula meant that the official could retire at age 50 with a pension based on 3% of his final salary, multiplied by his years of public service.

According to many pundits, the four police officers shot to death Sunday in Parkland, Wash., aren't the only victims of alleged killer Maurice Clemmons. Also wounded in the attack, perhaps fatally, was Mike Huckabee's political career. Huckabee, a presidential candidate last year who was considered a front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2012, is one of the reasons Clemmons was on the street Sunday. While governor of Arkansas in 2000, Huckabee commuted Clemmons' 108-year sentence.

The notion that the only safe job in a recession is a state Civil Service job was punctured this week when a Sacramento court gave the governor the authority to take an ax to the government payroll. Thursday's Superior Court ruling, which greenlighted Gov.

Five years ago, Donnette Shaffer was one of nearly 5 million Californians who did something unprecedented: she voted to fire Gray Davis, just months after he had been reelected governor. Now she wonders why she bothered. "I was thinking that we needed to do something before the ship totally sank," the 35-year-old postal carrier said last week as she ended her shift at Yuba City's downtown post office.

Pick your cliche: What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Turnabout is fair play. Payback's a -- well, you get the idea. The point is that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is facing a nascent recall move, and it may seem that there is some cosmic justice in the prospect. But Californians should see the dump-Schwarzenegger movement for what it is: A tactic by a powerful public employee union to extract higher pay from taxpayers and exacerbate the state's budget dysfunction. Yes, we can bask in the irony.

The state's ethics agency announced fines Monday against former state Sen. Martha Escutia of Whittier for failing to properly disclose at least $340,000 in payments made by 17 special-interest firms and campaigns to her then-husband's political consulting firm. The state Fair Political Practices Commission also announced fines against former Gov. Gray Davis, related to the campaign fund he used to fight the 2003 recall that removed him from office.