“No Party Preference” Candidate – Game Changer or Passing Fad?
The passage of Proposition 14 in the June 2010 Primary Election set into place a significant change in how we elect our representatives in Congress, the state Senate and Assembly. Under Proposition 14, all candidates in each congressional district and state legislative district will appear on the same ballot. Voters, regardless of their own personal […]
Walters Ignores The Obvious: The Pendulum Has Swung Far To The Left
Crossposted on FlashReport Last week, long-time Sacramento Bee columnist pens a column Both Left And Right In California Want Automatons In Office where he throws down the gauntlet of criticism on those who oppose a bigger, fatter state government (he also throws down on the other extreme, but that is not the focus of this blog […]
The Myth of Fair Reapportionment
“Good Government{” types call for a fair and objective system of drawing legislative boundaries. Republicans want to take the drafting tools out of the hands of legislators and then bemoan the results. Democrats squirm when incumbents are pitted against each other. Communities, neighborhoods and ethnic constituencies insist that they be consolidated into single districts to […]
Public Support for New Infrastructure Soars— When a Proposal Includes Real Reform
It is the first such report in six years: This week a group of over 100 well-qualified, respected professional engineers, after months of systematically analyzing the data, issued a telling and comprehensive report card on the state of our state’s infrastructure. The result this year is an overall “C” grade—with some areas even lower than […]
Is Energy the Last Good Issue for Republicans?
Crossposted on New Geography With gas prices beginning their summer spike to what could be record highs, President Obama in recent days has gone out of his way to sound reassuring on energy, seeming to approve an oil pipeline to Oklahoma this week after earlier approving leases for drilling in Alaska. Yet few in the […]