When I was a kid growing up in New York, California beckoned as an idyllic place of beaches, wine, wildflowers, and beautiful people. It was the land of “good vibrations,” “surfer girls,” and little “deuce coupes.” I distinctly recall watching…
The “progressive,” so to speak, vision of politics and public life envisions tighter and tighter government control over economic life, along with looser and looser controls over human behavior. I think you’d refer to the overall design as a paradox:…
Washington Every morning I take the four morning newspapers that I have subscribed to into the kitchen and glance at their front pages as I eat. Occasionally I have a little trouble downing my matutinal feast as the front pages,…
Washington President Donald Trump is right about San Francisco. It is, as he said, “a total disaster” that needs to clean up its act. It’s a dystopian pit. It stinks. It feels dangerous. It isn’t clean. It is an expensive…
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 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…
Why does California suffer such a scourge of homelessness and poverty? Why do Californians allow it to go on? Where is the outrage that their fellow citizens are living in filth and squalor, being stripped of their human dignity while…
Friends call. Acquaintances email. (I don’t text, Facebook, or tweet.) (But my students still are shocked that I know what’s what.) The message of concern: “Dov, I heard about the earthquake. Are you OK?” Yes, I’m OK. It was a…
I don’t give a damn where you were 60 years ago on civil rights. I don’t care if your great grandpappy owned slaves or you grew up in rural Louisiana and used the “N” word as often as a contemporary…