Are Those Ballot Initiative Clauses Unconstitutional?
As readers of Fox & Hounds know, I’m not a fan of the fashionable new clause of this year’s class of California ballot initiatives: the clauses attempting to give legal standing to initiative proponents to defend their initiatives, if successful on the ballot. The arguments against such clauses are strong. Proponents already have legal standing […]
The Golden State Is Now the Gritty State
California’s reputation as a supremely glamorous and wealthy place was once so entrenched that even its sports teams had to live up to the image. The “Showtime” Lakers of the 1980s played a brand of basketball as Hollywood as the stars sitting courtside. The 49ers, under quarterback Joe Montana, gave the violent game of football […]
A Good Question That Calpers Shouldn’t Duck
The New York Times recently put a very good, very direct question to Calpers. And Calpers ducked. Californians, and The Times, deserve a real answer. In her column Sunday, Gretchen Morgenson took note of two facts regarding Calpers and credit rating agencies. The first is that Calpers has sued two of the rating agencies for […]
Are Californians Big Losers?
How do you win in California? Lose big first. That’s a very old bit of wisdom in a state founded by people who abandoned their homes and families to move here and fail to get rich in the Gold Rush. But this lesson has been given fresh context by a new book (Jo Becker’s Forcing […]
This Year’s Budget? We Don’t Even Know What the 2011-12 Budget Was
Is the budget in surplus? By how much? Does this mean we can put money away for a rainy day fund (that doesn’t save much for a rainy day)? Doesn’t this mean that California is back? You can laugh – and safely ignore this budget conversation this budget season. No one knows what the 2014-15 […]
Al Cowlings and His Ford Bronco Saved O. J. Simpson’s Life. The Trial that Followed Changed Us All.
Twenty years ago this month, Al Cowlings drove his friend—the football star, broadcaster, actor, and soon-to-be-accused murderer O.J. Simpson—around the freeways of greater Los Angeles in a white Ford Bronco, trailed by police and with our entire state and nation watching. Ever since June 17, 1994, Southern California, for better and for worse, has not […]
I Take It All Back. I Love Top Two
I would like to take back everything bad I ever said about the top two. Heck, I’ll even call it a primary, even though it isn’t. The results in June’s general…er… first round… er… jungle cluster-thing elections were delicious. For those of us who always knew California politics was a joke, the top two has […]
I Voted, But Sort of Wish I Hadn’t
I headed to the polls Tuesday morning wondering if I was doing the right thing. In general, I try not to participate in frauds. Given how broken California governance is, how constrained elected officials are, and how our media and government keep calling June elections “primaries” even though primaries were eliminated in 2010, California elections […]
Is There a Third Way for Republicans?
I’m not a Republican. But if I were, and if I had picked up the LA Times Monday to read George Skelton’s column with the headline, “Kashkari and Donnelly present 2 paths for GOP,” I’m confident that my reaction would have been: Can’t we find a third path instead? It strikes me that, as down […]
Is Texas Becoming a California Colony?
I pulled my rental car over to a curb in Plano, Texas, next to the site of Toyota’s future North American headquarters, to be staffed by thousands of workers transplanted from Southern California. I had flown in the previous evening on Burlingame-based Virgin America; I had driven here on a tollway long maintained by Jacobs […]