SACRAMENTO — The best way to avoid a life of poverty is to develop work skills that are marketable. That seems pretty obvious. Although I’m financially dependent on the companies that pay me, my job security stems not from whatever…
SACRAMENTO — Thanks to the wonders of social media, it’s easy to find large communities of car-loathing, bicycle-riding, transit-loving urbanists who view cars as “death machines” and insist they are the cause of every woe known to mankind. Many of these…
SACRAMENTO — California’s environmental-friendly lawmakers were quite proud of themselves when, in 2014, they passed a first-in-the-nation ban on stores from handing out so-called single-use plastic bags as a means to turn back the tide, so to speak, on an ocean-pollution…
SACRAMENTO — A Washington state Senate committee last week passed legislation designed to bolster democratic engagement by requiring eligible Washington voters to not only register to vote but to turn in a ballot for every primary and general election. Nothing…
A week before the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan closed his debate with President Jimmy Carter with some of the most memorable questions in campaign history: “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go…
Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ended racial preferences in higher education. This year will feature a battle to reinstate those preferences, in the state that first eliminated them nearly 30 years ago. The California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), Proposition 209 on the…
Our major cities struggle with increased crime, sprawling homeless encampments, overcrowded jails, sky high taxes, and exploding budget deficits. Yet most government officials ignore the one factor that contributes significantly to each of these problems: the lack of acute psychiatric…
SACRAMENTO — A front-page Washington Post investigation provides, as reporter Kyle Swenson promotes it in an X post, “an inside look at a well-funded effort on the political right to target, vilify, and defund a key piece of the social safety net, the ‘housing…
SACRAMENTO — After Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1228, raising the minimum wage for fast-food workers and creating a council to regulate working conditions, the bill’s author issued a typical highfalutin statement. “We did not just raise the minimum…
SACRAMENTO — Those of us who know and love San Francisco have a pretty good idea why the city continues to become less livable as rampant crime and homelessness turn its streets into (literal) cesspools of public disorder. Despite a…