Sacramento The last week of the legislative session always is a wild ride, but this year’s proceedings take on an urgency that we haven’t seen in the past several years given the stridently more progressive tilt of the state government. It’s…
This California Watch column ought to be renamed Crisis Watch, given the number of public-policy crises that have engulfed the Golden State. There’s a common thread in all of them. They all are the result of government agencies or policies. There’s…
Sacramento California’s housing crisis has such an obvious cause that even many of the state’s Democratic lawmakers now acknowledge it. Local and county governments have for decades discouraged the construction of housing tracts through slow-growth ordinances, global-warming policies, environmental laws…
Sacramento On a trip back from the rugged Mendocino coast, we were fortunate enough to reach California State Route 37, which meanders along the north side of San Pablo Bay from Marin County to the Interstate 80 intersection at Vallejo,…
Sacramento When I moved to Orange County in the mid-1990s, it was still the most Republican county, in raw numbers, in the United States. Virtually anyone with serious political ambition there ran as a Republican, although changes were starting to…
Sacramento Say what you will about former Gov. Jerry Brown, but he did in fact govern as an adult. He spent too much money and promoted boondoggles such as the bullet train and a twin tunnel project that would burrow…
Sacramento Everyone who has visited the Happiest Place on Earth has been greeted by this not-so-joyful sign: “WARNING: The Disneyland Resort contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm.” Who…
Sacramento It was one of the most absurd stories of California’s lunacy. In the midst of one of the worst droughts in the state’s history, state and federal wildlife officials were depleting a large reservoir in the Sierra foothills to save…
That former California Attorney General Kamala Harris is surging in the Democratic presidential polls tells us one not very surprising thing: Democrats are situational when it comes to concerns about “authoritarianism.” A few progressive writers have pointed it out, but most…