California Voices

California dodged a big financial bullet when congressional Republicans deadlocked on overhauling or repealing the Affordable Care Act. The state had vigorously embraced the ACA, or Obamacare, and reduced its medically uninsured population by millions of persons, mostly via expansion of Medi-Cal, the state’s program for the poor, with billions of federal dollars. Had the […]

Geographically, San Diego County is a microcosm of California – a coastline as its western edge, giving way to tree-covered mountains and a searing desert to the east. By happenstance, the county is also a self-contained reflection of California’s cultural and political dynamics. Its urban core, around picturesque San Diego Bay, is multicultural and liberal/Democratic […]

The business, civic and political elites of Los Angeles are understandably stoked that their city was chosen last week to host the 2028 Olympic Games. They see nothing but upside from having hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world come to Los Angeles and spend money on hotels, meals and personal services, and […]

What’s not to like about California’s economy this summer? The state’s’s $2.6 trillion economy would be the sixth largest in the world were it a nation, and many politicians are already crowing that it may move into the No. 5 spot due to economic turmoil in Great Britain. California’s unemployment rate, which topped 12 percent […]

The late Glenn Frey’s song about the international drug trade, “Smuggler’s Blues,” contains a phrase that resonates in politics as well: “It’s the lure of easy money, it’s got a very strong appeal.” Politicians are habitually lured by easy money, which is defined as money they can spend without directly taxing their constituents, but somebody […]

Tesla delivered the first of its new and much less expensive battery-powered cars last week, betting that it can move beyond producing a relative few luxury vehicles and become a mass producer. Tesla founder Elon Musk drove a Model 3, whose prices begin at $35,000, onto a stage at Tesla’s Fremont factory to kick off […]

The multi-front political and legal war over the direction of California’s immense public school system has a new front. The state Board of Education – and inferentially, Gov. Jerry Brown and the education establishment – want to take a minimalist approach to complying with the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act. Civil […]

Four decades ago, writer Cyra McFadden perfectly captured the aura of self-absorbed entitlement that envelops Marin County, on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Her 1976 satirical novel, “The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County,” was, columnist George Will wrote at the time, “a Baedeker guide to a desolate region, […]

The political deal that led to reauthorization of California’s cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions has many pieces, but one of the strangest is Assembly Constitutional Amendment 1. To win support from Assembly Republican leader Chad Mayes and presumably several other Republicans, Gov. Jerry Brown and his fellow Democrats agreed to place the measure, authored […]

Slowly – but surely – we are learning that the near-catastrophic failure of Oroville Dam’s main spillway wasn’t truly caused by weather, even though the state claims that in seeking federal aid for repairs. Rather, it resulted from poor engineering and construction when the nation’s highest dam was rising more than a half-century ago as […]