Black Bart Award for California Politics 2019
For the past ten years frequent contributors to this page Joe Mathews, John Wildermuth and I have nominated candidates for Californian of the Year in the world of politics. This year we will be joined by Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, long time journalist for NBC in Los Angeles and former professor at USC’s Sol Price School […]
Black Bart 2019 Nominees: Wiener and Gonzalez
The Black Bart was a game-player and a schemer. And in 2019, California politics was full of games and schemes. The early favorite for Black Bart was our own U.S. senator, Kamala Harris, but it turned out that she and her team couldn’t play the presidential game. The year concludes with Harris moving to Iowa, […]
Bait and switch on pensions
Local officials, particularly those in California’s 400-plus cities, have been complaining loudly in recent years about pension costs, raising the specter of insolvency if they continue their rapid increase. Last year, the League of California Cities issued a report declaring that “pension costs will dramatically increase to unsustainable levels.” The California Public Employees Retirement System […]