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Back to homepageAre Smaller Parties Finished?
OCT. 7, 2010 For someone who may be the last of her kind, Laura Wells is remarkably chipper – even when talking about the new law that has made her essentially obsolete. “Prop. 14? I hope it has a boomerang
Read MoreSilly laws, sillier candidates
OCT. 4, 2010 Every legislator could have skipped out of the country for the entire legislative session, and it would not have mattered one iota to anyone outside of their staff members. That’s not cynicism, so much as a fair
Read MoreState Opens Dusty Files
OCT. 1, 2010 On Thursday I took a break from high-speed rail controversies and death penalty analysis by walking over to the State Archives. Located a block away from the Capitol, the Archives are home to our state’s most precious
Read MoreStory Of A Business Closure
SEPT. 30, 2010 My husband recently closed his manufacturing business. Only a few years ago, the company had 250 employees and two sizable commercial printing plants, sales were on the upswing and he was planning on making more equipment purchases.
Read MoreMore Fixes Won't Fix Things
SEPT. 27, 2010 It’s easy to conclude that California may become, as former state librarian Kevin Starr put it, a “failed state.” It’s just too big, unruly and diverse to be effectively governed, commentators frequently say. Californians are also said
Read MoreAudit By Invitation Only
SEPT. 24, 2010 With the City of Bell scandal fresh on the minds of nearly everyone in the state who pays taxes, legislators are now questioning the exorbitant salaries and benefits some local governments are paying in order to prevent
Read MoreReading Meg's Tea Leaf
SEPT. 24, 2010 Meg Whitman fascinates me. She’s a former (and quite successful) CEO of a major dot.com who until two or three years ago showed precisely zero interest in anything involving elected politics. She didn’t vote or engage in
Read MoreMore On Right Up For A Fight
SEPT. 19, 2010 For years, Republican establishmentarians have taken their grass-roots supporters for granted, knowing that, come Election Day, activists will vote for the lesser of two evils – i.e., that even a bad Republican is better than a Democrat.
Read MoreShame To See Wright Go
SEPT. 17, 2010 You don’t find the words “state senator” and “indicted” in the same headline very often. But when I saw this Sept. 16 Los Angeles Times story on the eight-count felony indictment of Sen. Rod Wright, D-Inglewood, for
Read MoreThe (Big) Money's On Whitman
SEPT. 17, 2010 Earlier this week, gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman made a campaign stop at Yelp, a user-generated business review Web site. She received a bruising and biased barrage of questions from employees, critical of Whitman’s self-funded campaign financing. It
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