California’s Election System Exaggerates Democrats’ Strengths. Again.
Four years ago, I wrote in this space about how California elections produce results that are unrepresentative of voter choices. The losers, in these unfair elections, are Republicans. They receive a lower percentage of seats in the legislature than the percentage of votes they get in elections. Four years later, this is still true. Indeed, […]
Educating Voters on Education Spending
The latest Public Policy Institute of California poll reflected a similar finding from previous PPIC polls that’s puzzling: When it comes to actual state spending priorities versus the knowledge voters have of those spending priorities the lineup is nearly reversed. California spends the most money from its General Fund budget on K-12 education (42.6%), the […]
California: Time for a Major Change in Course
Governor Brown, California Attorney General Becerra, legislative and other government officials are fixated on battling the new administration in Washington with almost total disregard for California’s major problems and unmet needs. Failure to address these pressing problems threatens the viability of a state whose status is rapidly being transformed from “golden” to “tarnished.” To help […]
U.S. Government vs. California – Let The Battle Begin!
On Tuesday, former Attorney General Eric Holder, one of President Barack Obama’s longest serving Cabinet members, paid a visit to one of his newest clients: the California State Legislature. Holder, who returned back to private practice as a partner with the law firm of Convington and Burling in the fall of 2015, was hired by the California legislature […]
Trump suggests yanking fed dollars if California’s a ‘sanctuary’—can he do that?
The burgeoning political standoff between California and the Trump administration took another step into unprecedented terrain this week when, on a pre-Super Bowl televised interview, the President denounced California as “out of control” and contemplated cutting its federal funding. The threat came in response to moves by the Democratic-controlled Legislature toward providing additional legal protections […]
Foundation Journalism and Caesar’s wife
As a career newspaper man, it has been with unspeakable pain over the last decade or so that I have watched the demise of the institutions that made it possible for people to know their communities, indeed to exist as communities. Local newspapers, large and small, have either disappeared or become shells of what they […]
Improving a good thing: making regulatory reform better
One of the few significant pro-business reforms to emerge from the Legislature during the recession was a more robust cost-effectiveness requirement for administrative regulations. Authored by Senator Ron Calderon but written and shepherded by then-Senate staff and now Assemblyman Ken Cooley, the measure required agencies to analyze regulatory alternatives more diligently, provide more extensive economic analysis of […]
NFIB/CA Reveals Initial “The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly” Bill List
With the Legislature back at work for the 2017-2018 legislative session, NFIB California released a new “The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly” bill list which identifies new and developing policy issues in the State Capitol affecting small business. Bills included in this list represent those which will have the greatest impact, either negative or […]
Grow Up, Sacramento!
Are you finally growing up, Sacramento? I pose that question not to our state government but to the real Sacramento, by which I mean the Sacramento Capital Region. It’s a query that should be aimed at all of the Central Valley’s big urban areas. Are you ready for civic adulthood, Fresno, Bakersfield, Stockton and Modesto? […]