Sacramento After yet another rough wildfire season, it’s hard to say no to pretty much anything that California’s firefighters and their unions demand — for instance, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest budget calls for an extra $2 billion a year to…

Sacramento Over the last nine years, California has boosted its spending on public schools and community colleges by 80 percent, and the results are pretty conclusive. California’s low-income students continue to perform near the bottom of national averages. Its overall test scores…

Nothing gets progressives worked up more than a good conspiracy theory involving corporate greed and evildoing, but the latest one spreading through the left-of-center blogosphere is so patently ridiculous it’s hard to know where to begin debunking it. It involves…

Sacramento When Jerry Brown became governor yet again in 2011, I warned my conservative friends not to be too upset at the prospect. “It’s not going to get any better than this,” I’d say. Indeed, Brown’s final eight years in…

It’s increasingly difficult to distinguish the views of the new “national conservatives” from those held by “democratic socialists” when it comes to government regulation of the economy and social media platforms. Both groups are upset at the outcomes that a…

A gushing article in the liberal publication Vox declared in September that a new California law that outlaws the use of contractors in many industries, is “a victory for workers everywhere.” Assembly Bill 5 was not “just another progressive victory…

Sacramento Sorry, Californians, but your Second Amendment rights have been canceled — or at least placed on hold — because of clerical errors. Based on data that the California Department of Justice filed in defense of a federal gun-rights lawsuit…

Sacramento When Orange County went belly up in 1994, the stories seemed to write themselves. One of the nation’s richest counties couldn’t pay its bills. Quirky Treasurer Bob Citron was the only Democrat elected to countywide office, yet Republican officials…

Sacramento After news broke about a serious and sometimes deadly outbreak of vaping-related illnesses, my colleagues who work in the harm-reduction field — i.e., health activists who argue that smokers ought to reduce their potential harm by switching to less-deadly…

Sacramento Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, the San Diego Democrat who authored a landmark labor law (Assembly Bill 5), apparently is one of the most intelligent people in the state. Her colleagues who voted for that law, and the governor who signed…