Fox and Hounds Daily Says Goodbye
With this article, we end publication of Fox and Hounds Daily. It has been a satisfying 12½ year run. When we opened in May 2008, our site was designed to offer an opportunity to those who wished to engage in public debate on many issues, especially in politics and business, but found it difficult to get placed in newspaper op-ed pages.
Co-publishers Tom Ross, Bryan Merica and I have kept F&H going over this time investing our own time, funding, and staff help. Last year at this time we considered closing the site, however with an election on the horizon we decided to keep F&H going through the election year. With the election come and gone, and with no sense of additional resources, we have decided to close the site down.
Fox and Hounds will live on, at least, with my articles collected in the California State Library.
On a personal note, I have spent over 40 years in California policy and politics. There have been some incredible high moments and some difficult low points. It pains me that politics too often is a blood sport, frequently demonizing the motives of opponents and using the legal system as a weapon in public discourse. At Fox & Hounds, we tried to adhere to the practice of giving all a voice in the debate, yet keep the commentaries civil and avoided personal attacks.
F&H offered the opportunity to publish different perspectives (even ones that criticized my writings!). We had success as indicated by the Washington Post twice citing Fox and Hounds Daily one of the best California political websites and many other positive affirmations and comments received over the years.
Tom, Bryan and I want to thank our many readers and writers for being part of our journey. The publishers of Fox and Hounds Daily believe that we added value to California and its people. We hope you agree.
Prop 54: Positive Reform
On Friday, Joe Mathews took to this page to argue that Proposition 54, demanding more transparency in the legislative process, is ill advised. He took on a George Skelton column in the L.A. Times that equated Prop 54 with motherhood and apple pie, claiming mothers would object to the goals of the initiative. However, I think the ingredients in Joe’s pie are half-baked.
Boil down his argument to the frustration he has with what he calls small reforms: redistricting, top-two primary and now Prop 54, which requires legislation to appear in print for 72 hours and provides for filming legislative hearings. He wants big changes that will allow legislators to make deals and use traditional political coercion to punish opponents and push through legislative changes. (more…)
Why Would Parents Want to Know Anything about LCAPs?
The LA Times reported recently on a poll from USC and Stanford institutes showing that more than half of voters had never heard of read about the Local Control Funding Formula.
This is treated as bad news, since LCFF is supposed to make parent engagement a priority. And the funding in LCFF is supposed to be directed in part the Local Control and Accountability Plans, which are supposed to be developed by local districts with parent participation.
I had high hopes for the LCAPs – until I saw them actually put together. They are a long, laborious, bureaucratic process. They don’t leave room for real parent input—they instead involve coming up with detailed and technical answers to meet state templates and questions that are highly technical. The end results have been very long (sometimes hundreds of pages) and confusing documents. (more…)
UC Stays On Top
The polls are in, and the University of California dominates—in academics, not football. UC Berkeley and UCLA sit atop the new U.S. News and World Report rankings of the top public universities in the nation. Six of the top ten public universities are UC schools, and all nine UC campuses made the list of America’s best public universities. UC Merced, the newest UC campus, joined the list for the first time. The University’s excellence should be a source of pride to all Californians, but that achievement is not something that we can afford to take for granted.
Football teams can’t stand on their laurels, and neither can top flight universities. Higher education institutions have to compete for the best faculty and students. They require up-to-date curricula, facilities and equipment. They have to adapt to changing cultural and economic realities, and they have to keep up with the growth in qualified applicants. The incoming class at UC will be the most diverse in history, in the context of the university adding almost 8,000 more California students than last year. All these actions must be accomplished within the framework of increasingly constrained finances. (more…)
Public Pension Problem is Not Old News
A couple of years ago, sitting on a panel discussing the recent election and looking at future policy and political topics, I raised the public employee pension issue. A public union representative on the panel dismissed the issue as “old news.”
Not hardly.
Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times began a series put together in cooperation with CALmatters and Capitol Public Radio on the miscalculations of dramatically increasing public employee pensions that will hit taxpayers with a double whammy: billions of additional dollars billed to taxpayers to pay the exploding costs and reduction of services because money must be diverted to cover pensions. (more…)
Is It Time To Reconsider California’s Initiative System?
On November 8, 2016 Californians will once again have the opportunity to not only elect (or re-elect) local, state, and federal representatives, but also to directly participate in generating public policy. While California’s initiative system is often romanticized, its inflexibility often leads California down a path ripe with unintended consequences and few options for fixing past mistakes.
First adopted in 1911, California became the tenth state to create the initiative system, whereby voters could themselves put on the ballot statutes, constitutional amendments, and referenda. Supported by the progressive movement to blunt the influence of the railroad lobby over the Legislature, California’s version of direct democracy has led to some of the Golden State’s most notable – and infamous – policies, such as Proposition 13, medical marijuana legalization, the death penalty, and California’s abbreviated period of banning same-sex marriage. (more…)
The Great Stampede of 2016
In certain parts of America, Baptist churches still hold “cowbell” services that offer churchgoers a Sunday succession of clergy sharing brief vignettes intended to motivate and inspire their congregation to commit to lives of public service. If a shepherd addresses his flock beyond the allotted time, a moderator rings a cowbell, which is the preacher’s signal that their time is up. When they’ve overstayed their welcome, someone whispers, “Ring the cowbell.”
In a famous Saturday Night Live skit, a Blue Oyster Cult cover band is cutting a song in the studio – constantly interrupted by their hare-brained percussionist and the band’s producer, who keeps chiding the musicians to use “more cowbell.” (more…)