Propositions

California voters delivered a potent defeat Tuesday to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Capitol lawmakers, dismissing a slate of ballot measures they had championed as a way to fight the state's latest deficit crisis. Just one of the half-dozen measures passed in a special election marked by meager voter turnout: Proposition 1F, which bans salary hikes for Sacramento politicians in deficit years like this one.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's campaign for a $243-million telephone users tax has received a major contribution from an unlikely source -- a Texas oilman whose company could see a windfall from one of the mayor's environmental initiatives. Proposition S, which is on Tuesday's ballot, took in a $150,000 contribution last week from billionaire T. Boone Pickens, the co-founder of Clean Energy, which bills itself as the nation's largest supplier of liquid natural gas.

Even as they preserved the status quo on term limits Tuesday, voters fired the starting gun on races for new Senate and Assembly leaders. And by giving a thumbs-up to expanded gambling operations for four Southern California Indian tribes, they may have cleared the way for even more deals to add slot machines to tribal casinos. With perhaps as many as 2 million ballots still uncounted Wednesday, the gambling measures, Propositions 94 through 97, were passing by an average of 56% to 44%.

Cruz Baca Sembello feels under siege by City Hall, in danger of losing the modest Baldwin Park home that she and her parents have lived in for decades. The San Gabriel Valley city is threatening to use its powers of eminent domain to force the sale of the home, with plans to raze it and several others to make way for a large shopping center.

Emotions may run high for California voters in November, not just over the choice of the next president but also over many of the 11 initiatives on the same ballot that tap into their personal beliefs. Voters will decide whether to ban same-sex marriage, require parents to be notified before an abortion is performed on a minor, free farm animals from tight enclosures and put criminals in jail longer.

Perhaps you've seen oilman T. Boone Pickens on television advertising the "Pickens Plan" for alternative energy, urging Americans to wean themselves from foreign fuel by adopting natural gas and wind power. Pickens has another plan he isn't advertising and from which he also stands to profit. He wants Californians to borrow $5 billion to invest in natural gas and alternative energy by voting yes on Proposition 10 on the November ballot.

There has been a lot of screaming that Sacramento fails to live within its means, and the howlers are correct. But on Nov. 4, the voters will have their hands on the state checkbook. It's called ballot box budgeting -- when many Californians who normally cry about red ink become hypocrites, voting for nice-sounding proposals that further bloat the overspending. On election day, voters will have an opportunity to jack up annual state spending by at least $1.

The award for the most cynical, mendacious, Orwellian campaign of the state election season goes to the opponents of Proposition 11, the redistricting reform initiative. Prop. 11 would strip away the Legislature's power to draw its own districts, which means the authority for lawmakers to select their own voters. It's a blatant conflict of interest. The once-a-decade chore would be turned over to a 14-member independent citizens commission.

With hundreds of veterans returning to California from service in Iraq and Afghanistan, voters are being asked to borrow $900 million to provide low-cost mortgages for those who served in the military. Californians have approved similar requests 26 times before, allocating $8.4 billion toward home loans for more than 420,000 veterans of World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq and Afghanistan. The latest measure, Proposition 12 on the Nov.

For a quarter century it has been a California dream on one drafting board or another -- a bullet train system so novel, environmentally friendly and fleet that it could reshape transportation in the car-crazy Golden State. Now, state voters will be asked Nov. 4 to provide some locomotion by approving nearly $10 billion as a down payment toward the ultimate vision of an 800-mile high-speed rail network.