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CA Latino lawmakers value careers over Latino students

The recent dissent in California Democrat ranks — in which Asian lawmakers balked at racializing UC admission policies in a way that would punish current smart Asian students for the history of white racism — drew lots of deserved attention.

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Covered California continues to benefit from cheerleading media

Monday’s “deadline” for signing up for the Affordable Care Act triggered bad headlines for the federal health exchanges, which had an encore of last fall’s computer nightmares. But in California, Covered California enjoyed the usual upbeat happy talk in its

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Pension follies: New Jersey adopts insane San Diego approach

California leads the way when it comes to government pension dysfunction. The first big city to be stricken by pension costs in the U.S. was San Diego, leading to the memorable 2004 New York Times’ description of it as “Enron

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CA Dems caught up in corruption in L.A., Bay Area and San Diego

High-profile elected Democrats in all of California’s most populous areas are turning out to be corrupt cretins. The indictment released Wednesday of state Sen. Leland Yee depicts a San Francisco-Oakland-Daly City culture in which gangsters traffic in a long laundry list

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Did Leland Yee spill beans on corruption in Philippines?

I encourage anyone with 15 or 20 minutes to spare to leaf through the 137-page indictment of state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, and his alleged accomplices in the federal criminal conspiracy case revealed Wednesday. Yee isn’t really the central

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Legislature worries more about animal misery than human misery

California has the highest adjusted poverty rate in the nation — and by a significant margin. Nearly 1 in 4 state residents struggles to make ends meet. Unemployment was about the same in the nation as a whole in 2006.

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Did governor file bid for quick appeal to block bullet-train revolt?

Why did Gov. Jerry Brown abruptly abandon his “stay-the-course” path on the $68 billion bullet-train project in late January? I’ve been poking around a bit and have come up with a theory and some evidence as to why the governor

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Mortgage lawsuit against Gov. Brown reopens old wounds

It’s a hallmark of modern-day government: Allocate money for one purpose, spend it for another. Congress isn’t the only culprit. While the federal government has long stood accused of “raiding the Social Security trust fund,” courts across America have given

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CA taxes 150% higher than Washington state’s — to what benefit?

A new survey of state and local taxes finds California and New York take the biggest bite out of their residents’ pocketbooks. The average Californian forks over $9,509 a year; the average New Yorker, $9,718. Alas, the mainstream media coverage

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L.A. proposal: That’s a pension tax — not a pothole tax

This proposal — allegedly from Los Angeles bureaucrats but almost certainly from new L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti — got the scorn it deserved on libertarian and conservative websites when it came out Wednesday afternoon: “L.A.’s elected officials should put a half-cent

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