Peter Hannaford

Last week was a bad week for marijuana lovers in California. It ended with a large raid in one county that netted 850 pounds of dried marijuana, 400 growing plants, $200,000, a cache of firearms and the arrest of two…

Henny-Penny’s call came as a surprise. I hadn’t heard from her in months. More surprising was what she had so say: H-P: I’ve resigned as secretary of The Holy Order of The Sky Is Falling because I’ve learned that it…

Most state constitutions require an annual balanced budget. In California this has been honored in the breech for some time. In recent years, it has often been September by the time the legislature cobbled one together (despite the fact it…

Farm subsidies, mostly in the form of price supports, have been with us since the 1930s, but they may be going the way of the dodo bird. Thanks to growing worldwide demand and especially China’s expanding middle class, the price…

It’s said that word-of-mouth advertising is the best kind. It certainly worked for Ms. Kinde Durkee for more than 12 years. It would still be working if she hadn’t helped herself to some of her clients’ bank accounts once too…

California is still a land of political surprises–outlandish, foolish, and mischievous ones. Consider the latest: The state legislature is about to pass a bill (AB 889) requiring that adult babysitters (age 18 and up) be paid the minimum wage, overtime…

Arkadi Gontmakher, a Ukraine-born American had been buying crabs in Russia for the U.S. market for years when, one day in 2007, he was arrested in Moscow and charged with poaching, money laundering and organizing a “criminal community.” He’d been…

While the massive union effort to overturn the Wisconsin state senate failed, in California the Left quietly moved its agenda forward this week when Governor Jerry Brown signed the “National Popular Vote” bill whose purpose is to award the state’s…

Examine the political math of the debt ceiling/spending-reduction bill and it adds up to a Republican win. Examine the green eyeshade math, however, and there is plenty to worry about in the near future. When Democrat Senator Charles Schumer whines…

California is a land of contrasts. For example, take the fact that its teachers are among the nation’s best paid in the nation, while its student test scores are among the lowest. That’s a story for another day. The focus…