Breaking News
Back to homepage21% of small businesses on brink
March 12, 2010 By ELISE VIEBECK A report released last week showed that 21 percent of California small businesses believe they will fold in the next three years. The annual survey, conducted by advocacy group Small Business California, revealed low
Read More
Who’s running the Delta Stewardship Council?
By KATY GRIMES With the five major component bills of the 2009 water package representing a massive undertaking for the State of California, it appears that the Delta Stewardship Council — which will oversee the whole deal — has become operational
Read MoreCalifornian Utopia turns into Dante’s Inferno
Mar. 10, 2010 Inferno, the first part of the famous 14th century epic poem Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy) by Dante Alighieri, tells of a man’s journey through Hell toward faith. Along the way, Dante sees the uncommitted souls of the people
Read MoreAB32 vs. jobs
The nonpartisan — and, in my experience, professional and objective — Legislative Analyst confirms that AB32 will kill jobs. AB32 is the 2006 bill that’s supposed to cut greenhouse gases by 20% by 2020. It’s called the “Global Warming Solutions
Read MoreLegislators Allow Another Enviro "Ransom"
When the word “mitigate” is used repeatedly in a legislative hearing, and written extensively into the summary of the proposed bill, special interest must be wrangling money from business, claiming to try to “limit damages.” Specifically, environmentalists win another big
Read MoreVoyeurism bill shut down
March 9, 2010 By KATY GRIMES Fulfilling a request by the Riverside County District Attorney, Assembly member Kevin Jeffries, R-Lake Elsinore, introduced legislation last month requiring any person convicted of inappropriate sexual filming offenses to register as a sex offender.
Read MoreBrown scandal resurfacing?
Mar. 9, 2010 Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters has been covering California politics since 1975. No one writing about our beloved state government has more experience or authority. But Walters did a curious thing in his March 3 column, titled
Read MoreCalifornia’s jobs crash worsens
March 9, 2010 By JOHN SEILER In some of the articles I’ve written for CalWatchdog, I’ve devised new ways of looking at policies and their consequences, such as my “California Jobs Gap” calculation here and here. It showed that California’s
Read MoreThe Ballad of John Nunez
Once upon a time — okay, in 1996 — there was a Garvey school board member named John Nunez. He apparently didn’t really get along with another school board member named Robert Miranda, because one day Nunez told a couple
Read MoreFeel like cussing
March 7, 2010 California’s union-dominated, Democratic-controlled Legislature is temperamentally incapable of fixing the state’s structural budget deficit, given that such a fix would require reduced government spending and the granting of fewer benefits to the state’s class of government workers.
Read More