By DAN WALTERS, Sacramento Bee

When Jerry Brown goes into his bunker -- or monk's cell or man-cave -- and issues cryptic messages, you know he's up to something.

California's governor did it again last weekend during a brief appearance before a state Democratic convention in San Diego.

WALTERS13 (Walters, Sacramento Bee; Column) -- California's Legislature once was a part-time body. One ballot proposal would restore that schedule and remove lawmakers from "the seductive atmosphere of the Capitol dome," a critic says. 425.

Redevelopment in California is dead after more than six decades as a multibillion-dollar government economic development tool.

Or is it?

As the decree to kill redevelopment takes effect, the Capitol is buzzing with efforts to bring it -- or something like it, or some substitute -- back.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has a hard-won reputation for issuing sweeping, precedent-setting and liberal rulings that are often overturned by the more conservative U.S. Supreme Court.

WALTERS07 (Walters, Sacramento Bee; Column) --

Gov. Jerry Brown's campaign to balance the state budget with new income and sales taxes took a double hit Monday.

California's 112 community colleges, the nation's largest higher education system, may change a lot if Gov. Jerry Brown has his way.

Many years of partisan wrangling over California's budget reached a climax in 2010 when public employee unions and Democratic politicians persuaded voters to pass Proposition 25, eliminating the two-thirds vote for budgets.

It gave the Legislature's majority Democrats the power to pass budgets without having to garner Republican votes. But that's not all it did.

California Gov. Jerry Brown is scaling back the state's highly controversial bullet train project to keep it alive.

Just three months ago, his administration unveiled, with great fanfare, a revised "business plan" for building the north-south bullet train system to answer the embryonic project's many critics.

When a political party achieves dominance of any government, one expects that it would use its hegemony to enact its public policy agenda.

That's the way democracy is supposed to work.

Using dominance to change the political system with the aim of perpetuating control is another matter. It fixes the game and undermines democracy.

The big news in central California's Stanislaus County these days is that a big Internet retailer -- almost certainly Amazon -- will establish a huge distribution center in Patterson that would employ at least 1,500 workers.