S&P forces Democrats to balance budget

June 13, 2012 By Katy Grimes This morning Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, anounced big solutions for the state’s budget problems. They said the Senate and Assembly budget proposals, due on

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Gov. Brown pushes pale education ‘reform’

June 13, 2012 By Lance T. Izumi Around the country, governors like Bobby Jindal in Louisiana have led successful fights for new education-reform laws that eliminate or restrict teacher tenure, re-think old-line seniority protection rules and give parents the ability

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Bad actors, lousy script, in CA budget ‘play’

June 13, 2012 By Katy Grimes California’s budget process has become a charade–it’s like watching a really amateurish play, with bad actors who do not know their lines, haven’t read the script fully, but know that someone dies at the

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Top Two destroyed third parties

June 12, 2012 By John Seiler More than two years ago on CalWatchDog.com, I was the first to report that the Top Two voting system would destroy third parties. My article was entitled, “Will Prop. 14 kill third parties?” It

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I wasn’t born to follow…

June 12, 2012 By John Seiler Cue the great Byrds song, “I Wasn’t Born to Follow” from one of my favorite movies, “Easy Rider”: I bring that up because The New York Times’ featured “conservative,” David Brooks, whom I knew

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‘Big three’ budget talks behind closed doors

June 11, 2012 By Katy Grimes SACRAMENTO — This is budget deadline week in California. Which explains why every known special interest group in the state is at the Capitol, protesting against the looming proposed spending cuts. Hundreds of home

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Restoring the San Joaquin River for non-endangered red herring

Editor’s note: For clarity, this article has been modified to include an excerpt from the letter by Robert Pyke.  June 11, 2012 By Wayne Lusvardi Should we save the endangered red herring fish in California’s San Joaquin River? The question

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Why a split-roll property tax is DOA

June 11, 2012 By Wayne Lusvardi A proposed ballot proposition circulating for signatures in California for what is called a “spilt tax roll” is dead on arrival at the ballot box in November 2012 should it gather the necessary 807,614

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