Tag "Chris Reed"

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2014’s low turnout eases path for 2016 tenure, pension ballot measures

Rick Claussen, Ned Wigglesworth, and Aaron McLear of the Redwood Pacific consulting group have released an interesting memo that is good news for those considering taking on public employee unions in 2016 with ballot measures putting limits on government pensions

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Will MWD try — again — to sabotage client seeking new water supplies?

I’ve been a journalist in Socal since 1990, and I’ve never seen a story about government behavior as strange as the ones about the giant Metropolitan Water District of Southern California trying to sabotage its biggest client’s efforts to broaden

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Fracking safety: NYT vs. LAT, yet again

The fracking revolution continues to unfold in a half-dozen states around the nation, with enormous benefits to all Americans. A New York Times analysis Friday laid out the particulars: The steepening drop in gasoline prices in recent weeks — spurred by

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Will severe school lunch policies eventually cost Dems? Maybe

The news this week that UC San Francisco had “unveiled a repository of sugar science, designed to collect the evidence against sweetened foods and disseminate that information to the public — and persuade people to boot fructose and most other

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Modest-seeming CalSTRS pension estimate lacks key context

The California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers do a good job of promoting the narrative that state teacher pensions are very modest at best. It’s true that there aren’t the same type of outrageous stories that we see in

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Think tank explained CA’s affordable housing debacles long ago

A weekend story about the gross failure of affordable housing policies in San Francisco contained plenty of public frustration and official consternation. But it also is one more example of the very shallow way this issue is almost always covered

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Teachers win Torlakson battle, but does Brown want them to win war?

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson’s defeat of reformer and fellow Democrat Marshall Tuck on Tuesday prompted analysis pieces that outlined how California’s union-dominated education establishment had rang up another win. While Tuesday night was grim for liberals, embattled teachers

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Silicon Valley firms, Asian voters edging away from Democrats

The 2014 midterms have already been dismissed by President Obama as irrelevant because of low turnout. This isn’t entirely self-serving sour grapes. Not just partisans but analysts who have little nice to say about the Obama administration wonder how a

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Mercury-News report on mass CA poverty may change coverage

The pack mentality of the Sacramento beat reporters is striking. No one wants to point out that the Obama administration says fracking is safe. No one wants to point out that the Local Control Funding Formula turned out to be

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Part of bullet-train legal mystery may be answered

For close followers of the bullet-train saga, one of the most basic mysteries of recent years has been what happened after Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny’s tentative ruling in August 2013 that blocked the state from starting construction on

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