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Discovered: a new way unions manipulate CA status quo
Californians who don’t belong to a public employee union have every right to feel as if the state is rigged against them. Because districting is based on population, not number of citizens, Democrats do better in Sacramento from the get-go
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Pension reform waits till 2016
The pension reform of San Jose mayor Chuck Reed, a Democrat, is going to have to wait till 2016: The proposed initiative would have allowed local governments to reduce benefits for current employees, which have strained the finances of California
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O.C. Sheriff Hutchens allows more conceal-carry permits
Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens commendably is expanding the ranks of those able to get conceal-carry permits. This follows a ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms”
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Why Prop. 13 is more crucial than ever
Every year brings attempts to gut Proposition 13, the 1978 tax limitation measure. It limits yearly increases in property taxes to 2 percent of the assessed value, beginning when the property was purchased. The original rate is 1 percent of
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Ruling on Chuck Reed’s pension initiative not end of the world
Editor’s update, 2 p.m.: San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed is reportedly suspending the initiative push until 2016 because the court delays related to the ballot language challenge will make it difficult for signature gatherers to meet deadlines — not because
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Happy 25th anniversary, World Wide Web
The Internet was invented in California in 1969 as a government project. But the critical technology, the World Wide Web, was invented in Switzerland 25 years ago this week by one man, Tim Berners-Lee. He created the universal Hypertext Markup
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CA mayor’s car vandalized; all assume it was a cop or firefighter
On its surface a Tuesday story in the San Luis Obispo Tribune is a funny, mordant comment on small-town politics in California. But if you dig a little, it turns out to be related to yet another pathetic, union-favoring power
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Sen. Feinstein upset over CIA searching congressional computers
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., generally has a liberal record. Yet the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee long has defended the vast snooping of the NSA and the other intelligence agencies. Perhaps she is having second thoughts after she attacked
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CA Dems: Are they following the pattern of another one-party state?
After I got out of college in the 1980s, I spend a fun few months working as a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Kauai. The chairman of the County Council was an affable young Democrat in his late 20s
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Buzz builds in TX, FL over privately funded bullet-train projects
Back in 2008, perhaps the single biggest thing that supporters of Proposition 1A had going for them was that a California bullet-train network just sounded cool and futuristic. Critics, however, pointed out correctly that the $9.95 billion bond that went
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