News Media
Back to homepage
Backdrop to CalPERS’ many debacles: Agency thinks it’s great
The giant California Public Employees’ Retirement System, as one might suspect from its massive and self-important Sacramento headquarters, thinks it is the bomb — a flawless organization that should inspire awe in onlookers. Yes, of course, the phenomenon of government
Read More
7 ways James Fallows is wrong about the CA bullet train
Writing on The Atlantic’s website, the much-respected journalist/intellectual James Fallows — a Redlands native who knows California better than nearly all other national pundits — has come out as a big fan of the state’s bullet-train project. He promises to
Read More
Prager: Here’s why CA left is indifferent to economic misery
The news that the U.S. is now the world’s no. 1 oil and no. 1 natural gas producer is almost unbelievable, given the decades of America fretting about its energy dependence. And the reason is fracking. Yet here in California,
Read More
Is pro-business faction emerging among CA Dem lawmakers?
For years, both the California Air Resources Board and the California Democratic Party have peddled the absurd fiction that there is no economic downside to AB 32 forcing the entire state to shift to cleaner but much costlier forms of
Read More
CA, US green-job campaign promises fall far short
In 2008, Barack Obama ran for president on the promise that he would get the economy out of the Great Recession with a recovery plan built on green jobs. He promised 5 million such jobs would be created across the
Read More
Sacramento pack somehow perceives well-run state government
Happy Fourth, everyone! In January 2008. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that he backed state lawmakers’ push to revise strict term limits for a specific reason. In response to a question I asked him at an editorial board meeting, Arnold said
Read More
Green flack thinks <2% annual growth in CA 'cleantech' is impressive
The fallout from the news that 16 Assembly Democrats were willing to go on the record with their concerns that AB 32 will drive up gas prices and cause economic pain to struggling folks in their home districts continues to grow.
Read More
High court ruling a blow to California SEIU
In a fresh demonstration that the Roberts court is incrementalist and not the wild-eyed bunch that some on the left assert, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 in favor of an appeal that argued that in-home care workers in Illinois
Read More
CA left’s absurd new dogma: Regulations have no downside
Businesses like to make money. Smart business owners are happy to change their ways in search of how to increase or maximize profits. The hostility to change that one sees in a bureaucracy with no vested interest in making things
Read More
De Leon hammers away at key idiocy of CA bullet-train plan
Over the years, in conversations with friends unfamiliar with California politics and with people I’ve met while traveling or at events or doing talk radio, I’m often asked about the state’s bullet-train project. When folks hear that the cost is
Read More