California Election Postmortem
California voters yesterday lurched even further to the political Left, the state even more out of step with the rest of the country. In a battle of two Democrats for a U.S. Senate seat, Bay Area leftist Attorney General Kamala Harris trounced Orange County moderate Rep. Loretta Sanchez, two to one – a greater margin […]
Jerry Brown Is Our President
We’ll soon have two presidents, and one will live in Sacramento There’s the guy that a plurality of American voters elected Tuesday. He arrives in office as the most unpopular president elect in U.S. history. He’s reviled – and rightly so – by many for his bigotry and belief in all sorts of discredited nosense. […]
Donald Trump’s Victory
Donald Trump pulled it off. He will be the 45th president of the United States. Hillary Clinton had everything going for her or so it seemed—plenty of money, strong organization, a blue-chip veteran staff, a reasonably united Party, decades of campaign experience and the support of a popular president. It was not enough. Trump had […]
Prop. 55: California Voters Extend Highest Income Tax Brackets to Fund Education and Healthcare
California voters on November 8 passed Proposition 55, which is an initiative constitutional amendment which took effect on November 9. This ballot measure was the successful effort to extend the Prop. 30 highest marginal tax rates promoted by Governor Brown and others in 2012 as a “temporary tax” to help stabilize the state’s General Fund. […]
I’m Still Voting at My Local Polling Place, Dammit
I’m old-fashioned. I get four newspapers—the actual paper—delivered to my home every day. I occasionally send letters and pay bills with actual letters, with stamps. And today, I will vote in a polling place in my neighborhood on Election Day. We are told that I’m a dinosaur. But I’m glad to be one. We’re told […]
Finally…Election Day. A Few Notes
Either the USC Dornsife/LA Times poll is going to be hailed as the Nostradamus of all polls or it will be ridiculed after the national election results are in. The USC/Times poll has been an outlier during this election season, as of Monday showing Donald Trump 6-points ahead of Hillary Clinton. Even the Times political […]
Can this Presidential Election Actually Energize Political Reform?
How did it come to this? The two most unpopular candidates in the history of presidential polling — Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — wind up being the two main candidates for President. While early voting numbers crossed 40 million nationally before Tuesday, an overwhelming majority of voters are simply “disgusted” by the state of […]
Presidential Race Shows Fallacy Of California’s Top Two Primary System
If this year’s presidential race has demonstrated anything, it’s that large numbers of voters want a choice other than that offered by the Democratic and Republican parties. In our American democracy, do we deserve such choice? Or is it too ‘dangerous’ to leave choice up to the voters, so that we need to be ‘protected’ […]
Through the Backdoor to Tax Websites & Apps
Let’s face it, websites and apps are nothing like utilities, and it defies logic for California municipalities to tax them that way. But that’s not stopping cities like Alameda and Watsonville from trying to pass deceptive ballot measures on November 8 that would allow them to do just that. Officials in these two cities are […]