News Media

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

Need to create middle-class CA jobs matters more than minimum wage

Chris Reed March 26, 2014

Economic conservatives seem wary over the attempts by Democrats at just about every level of government to focus on the minimum wage. But should they be? It provides an easy way to broaden the debate from how the poor are

Legislature worries more about animal misery than human misery

Chris Reed March 25, 2014

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.

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

Chris Reed March 21, 2014

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

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

Chris Reed March 20, 2014

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

Will failed Prop. 209 rollback help GOP with Asian voters? It depends

Chris Reed March 19, 2014

With Asian-Americans making up 14 percent of the state’s electorate, there is a small but real chance that this past month’s developments in the Legislature could prove the biggest story in California politics in years. I refer to Asian Democratic

Discovered: a new way unions manipulate CA status quo

Chris Reed March 17, 2014

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

CA mayor’s car vandalized; all assume it was a cop or firefighter

Chris Reed March 13, 2014

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

CA Asians finally grasp that under affirmative action, they’re victims

Chris Reed March 10, 2014

The fact that Asian-Americans in California tend to be Democratic seems to me to be almost entirely a function of the perception of Democrats are more welcoming to minorities and Republicans more hostile. Surveys and anecdotal evidence show that Asian-Americans

Fracking showdown: Will CA media STILL ignore Obama view?

Chris Reed March 9, 2014

The prospect of rich Dem dilettante Tom Steyer targeting Jerry Brown over fracking is scary in some ways. It could well lead to fracking never coming to California and bringing the jobs and wealth it has to North Dakota, Texas,