One could imagine a capacity crowd at the old Olympic Auditorium venue for many an LA boxing match, with the turnout at Temple Judea in Tarzana last night to see Democratic Congressmen Howard Berman and Brad Sherman slug it out in a debate. Republican Mark Reed was on the scene, too, and he got in [...]
Why the 16th President Can’t be Left in Peace Originally published at Zocalo Public Square Election night 1876 arrived full of uncertainty. The presidential race was something of a referendum on Reconstruction, and the results were so tight that the winner was unknown. It would be months before a special commission awarded 20 disputed electoral [...]
Joint Venture Silicon Valley focused on Proposition 13 at a conference last week issuing a report that Proposition 13 should be part of a discussion about restructuring the tax system. No other part of the tax system was in the report’s crosshairs. The report authored by Stephen Levy, Director and Senior Economist of the Center [...]
Public employee unions are turning up their offensive to prevent changes to public sector retirement programs. In the wake of proposed state initiatives pulled back by proponents because they say the Attorney General’s title and summary did not fairly reflect the measure, a proposed San Diego initiative to reform the city’s pension system has suddenly [...]
Governor Jerry Brown is taking knocks for not yet clearing competing tax proposals proposed for the November ballot to the point where Scott Lay in his Nooner report asked the question whether Brown would be the one to dump his measure and back another. Joe Mathews in his weekly rankings of the ballot measures on [...]
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once commented that each state could “if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Over the weekend one could glimpse this laboratory function in full operation with California Democratic leaders declaring for a state with [...]
California Pension Reform announced that it will not move forward to qualify one of the two initiatives it filed this year, blaming a “false and misleading” title and summary from the Attorney General that stunted fundraising and made it doubtful an initiative would pass. That switches the focus for pension reform to the legislature.
The Attorney General issued the title and summary for the spending limit proposal yesterday emphasizing the proposal’s goal of not only controlling government spending but also cutting down the “wall of debt” Governor Jerry Brown rightly criticizes as burden to state government and its taxpayers. The Investors Business Daily posted an editorial recently on the [...]
Molly Munger and I are not in the same corners when it comes to ballot measures proposed for the November ballot but we do have one thing in common: Governor Brown and his allies are trying to knock both of our initiatives out before they make the ballot. Munger is for more taxes and more [...]
Congratulations to Indianapolis for putting on a grand super week that in some way might give a boost to Los Angeles’s hope of getting an NFL team and those who are promoting the downtown stadium plan. I found myself in Indiana this weekend and took in the atmosphere around the Super Bowl. Indianapolis received much [...]
