Today the California Coastal Commission will approve or deny a permit for the desalination plant that Poseidon Resources proposes to build in Carlsbad. Coastal Commission approval is surely the best result for this often parched region and for a state facing reduced deliveries.

Democratic advocates for tax increases like to call Republicans who resent surrendering more of their earnings to the government “taxophobes.” Considering the reaction to the emergence of a full-blown state budget crisis, it's time to call those who are reflexively demanding tax hikes “taxiphiliacs.”

The budget crisis inevitably is going to turn into a nasty partisan scrap. It won't be long before Democrats depict their objections to a slowdown in spending as a noble attempt to protect California's neediest.

Last month's announcement that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize would be awarded for efforts to elucidate and publicize climate change was final confirmation for many Americans that global warming is real and not, as skeptics had claimed, an issue of scientific debate. Too bad the American public won't give the same support to evolution.

• Atheists are evolving, too

House debate was getting steamy, and small wonder. This was 1963, there were head-bashings in Birmingham and Selma – and Congress had just opened debate on the first full-scale civil rights bill ever. At the lectern, having awaited his turn to speak, stood the diminutive Augustus F. Hawkins of Los Angeles, a “freshman” member, the first African-American ever elected from California.