California Voices

The dramatic rise of the San Francisco Bay Area into a globally important cultural and economic powerhouse, and why it zoomed past its much larger rival in Southern California, is, among other things, a case study in regional cohesion.

Gov. Jerry Brown persistently cautions Californians that their pulsating economy cannot last forever. When, for example, he unveiled a revised state budget last May, he included what has become boilerplate, warning that “by the time the budget is enacted in June, the economy will have finished its eighth year of expansion – only two years […]

Sunday’s initial quasi-debate among the four declared Democratic candidates for governor strongly indicated that access to medical care may be a dominant campaign issue. However, it also strongly indicated that voters will likely see more sloganeering on the issue than reality-based prescriptions. That would be unfortunate, because it’s an issue that potentially affects not only […]

The four Democratic candidates for California governor mostly believe that dealing with the state's big issues will mean spending a lot more money. But they're murky on where that money should come from.

Not always fairly, history tends to judge political executives – presidents and governors, especially – by how they handle crises. Abraham Lincoln is rightly revered for his willingness to wage civil war rather than see the country disintegrate. Franklin Roosevelt is equally venerated for dealing with two immense crises, the Great Depression and World War […]

The Harvey Weinstein sexual misconduct scandal that has roiled Southern California’s smugly cloistered entertainment industry reverberated last week in the equally smug and cloistered state Capitol. More than 140 women – legislators, Capitol staffers, lobbyists and political consultants – signed an open letter denouncing “pervasive” sexual harassment and other forms of misconduct in state politics. […]

Puzzling: While Gov. Jerry Brown and California's Legislature made it harder for a teacher to protect children against gun-wielding criminals, they also reduced potential penalties for gun-wielding criminals.

One factor – perhaps the decisive one – in Dianne Feinstein’s decision to seek another term in the U.S. Senate next year was pressure from party leaders, who feared an expensive and divisive free-for-all were she to retire. Democrats have three dozen Senate seats up next year, will be financially stretched to defend the most […]

Critics, particularly Republicans, often complain that Democrats who control the state Legislature yearn to minutely control or heavily tax any human behavior they don’t like. Democratic legislators often seem eager to justify the criticism by passing pettifogging “nanny” bills. But in doing so, they occasionally engender some kickback—adult supervision of a sort—from governors. As he […]

When Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed Assembly Bill 715 last week, he closed the book on even token legislative efforts to confront California’s epidemic of opioid abuse. Last year, California doctors and dentists wrote 23.7 million prescriptions for opioids, supposedly to relieve their patients’ pain, but overprescription, misuse by patients and/or backchannel diversion of the drugs […]