All of the late-night shows were in reruns this week, so we've compiled some of the best Obama and McCain jokes from recent weeks to fill the humor void: "Now...

Watch the latest spoof videos lampooning the presidential candidates and catch up on recent classics, including "John McCain's C-Word Moment," "I'm Voting Republican Because I'm an Idiot," SNL's Clinton-Obama Ad,...

Check out our Editorial Cartoon Gallery featuring the week's best political cartoons. New this week: cartoons on the Supreme Court's gun ruling, George Carlin, Obama's and McCain's flip-flops, and more. Cartoon...

"I want to tell you how proud I am to be the President of a nation that -- in which there's a lot of Philippine-Americans. They love America and they...

"The Supreme Court has ruled that individuals have the right to carry guns...When the decision was read, it created pandemonium in the court. Justice Scalia had to fire two warning...

A roundup of the latest political insanity: • George Lucas says that Barack Obama would most certainly be a Jedi (hat tip to Extreme Mortman) • Jon Stewart explains how a Terror...

George Carlin will be remembered for his savagely funny and brilliantly subversive observations on the absurdities of American life. His political commentaries were no exception. As a tribute to the...

Keep up to date on the latest political punch lines with our roundup of the best humor from the 2008 campaign trail. You'll find a running compilation of the candidates'...

John McCain truly is the heir apparent to George W. Bush. While railing against excessive congressional earmarks, McCain declared, "I will veto every single beer." (Watch video clip) This no doubt will...

"Hey, did you all see Hillary's concession speech over the weekend? She gave a lovely, lovely speech. She was gracious, very complimentary. And she said she wanted Barack Obama to...

Were the California Legislature's 120 districts fairly drawn, the end of the legislative session would ignite a two-month frenzy of campaigning for an election that would determine the Capitol's ideological direction.

Remember the old adage about being lucky in cards and unlucky in love? California's labor unions find themselves in something like that quandary on this Labor Day -- enjoying unprecedented political influence but seeing their share of California's work force continue to shrink.

When Keith Richman was elected to the state Assembly six years ago, he personified the citizen-politician that the advocates of legislative term limits promised would bring a renaissance to Sacramento.

Is Arnold Schwarzenegger on a big-time roll, or what?

Politicians -- especially those seeking re-election -- love symbolic acts that send attractive messages without, or so they hope, any political or financial cost.

Ten years ago, this column noted that the California Legislature had enacted three pieces of legislation with potentially major consequences: "a blueprint for the deregulation of private electric utility services that affect millions of Californians, the creation of a California Earthquake Authority to offer insurance protection for those who live and work in quake-prone areas and a decision to channel substantial amounts of school funds into reducing class sizes in elementary grades in an effort to improve educational performance."

When Martin Helmke started working for the Legislature 31 years ago, the annual state budget was well under $10 billion. Putting it together each year was a relatively routine process.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-election campaign is going quite well, and more than likely he'll gain another term as California's Republican governor -- but it's not a sure thing and he still wants to pad his résumé with more legislative wins.

No one knows exactly how much Californians spend on health care, but it's somewhere between $150 billion and $200 billion a year. Medical treatment has become the state's largest single industry, roughly 10 percent of its economy.

It's August and the Legislature's annual session is drawing to a close, so it must be time for politicians to tinker -- or attempt to tinker -- with the state's perpetually contentious system of compensating workers for job-related injuries and illnesses.

Sacramento County voters who are serious about evaluating the proposal to build a new arena for the owners of the NBA Kings will soon discover what every credible study on the subject has concluded: new arenas add little or nothing to the economies of the regions in which they are built.

Even as California politicians, the courts, the prison guards union and inmate advocates are locked in a high-decibel brawl over how to reform a massive and dysfunctional adult prison system, the state's long-neglected youth prisons have begun a top-to-bottom transformation that is getting almost no public attention at all.

After being pummeled for weeks by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for proposing to raise taxes on corporations and the rich, Democrat Phil Angelides now says he wants to cut taxes, too -- on the working poor, the middle class and small business.

Politicians can be like cheating spouses. Give them the benefit of the doubt, and chances are they will burn you.

Dave Jones seems an unlikely choice to lead the opposition to a sales tax measure on the November ballot that would underwrite a new downtown arena for the NBA's Sacramento Kings.

John McDonough is a liberal, a former union organizer and Massachusetts legislator who believes the best health care reform would be a single-payer system heavy on government intervention. But he set aside that goal earlier this year to help put together a bipartisan compromise that is being closely watched as the most creative effort yet by a state to move toward universal health insurance.

A very rare event appears to be on the near horizon in the state Capitol. Politicians might actually vote to cede power, willingly.

It's becoming increasingly clear that one of the major themes of Phil Angelides' campaign for governor will be an attack on the credibility of the incumbent, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. "He's not the man you thought he would be," would be one way to summarize the premise.

The public officials promoting a new taxpayer-financed arena for the NBA's Sacramento Kings have suggested that the deal they struck with the team's owners is typical for professional basketball today, with the public paying to build the venue and the team contributing very little while standing to reap extensive profits from the relationship.

Given the great gush of numbers that the dipsticks of our school testing and accountability systems are spewing out -- STAR, API, AYP, CAHSEE, CELDT, APR, NAEP -- there's bound to be confusion and misreadings. But sometimes the misreadings are egregious enough they require correction.

Why is it that noble ideas so often come in such convoluted packages? The latest is Proposition 89, the California Nurses Association's "clean money" initiative, which would provide public funding to all qualifying state political candidates who agree to tight contribution and spending limits.

Friday's unanimous decision by a three-judge appellate panel upholding the state's power to withhold diplomas from students who failed CAHSEE, the California High School Exit Exam, got only half the attention it deserved.

This week marks the third anniversary of Arnold Schwarzenegger's surprise announcement that he'd run for governor, and he hasn't stopped running since.