The self-serving plastic bag props
Every few years, an industry for self-serving reasons tries to exploit California’s loose rules for putting propositions on its ballot....
Thomas D. Elias
Thomas Elias: Power rate shift: Utilities seek to soak small users
A strong spotlight shines these days on the state Public Utilities Commission as it gets set to rule on how much the state’s biggest utilities...
California Focus: New vaccination form eases way for falso myths
For almost two months, parents of California public school pupils have been able to claim with no proof that their religion precludes getting their children...
California Focus: If water rationing comes to the state, do it right
Despite heavy mid-February rains that briefly drenched Northern California and the respectable ensuing snowfall in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the California drought remains....
California Focus: Costa Azul shows the state avoided white elephants
White elephant: an idiom for a valuable but burdensome possession of which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost (particularly cost of upkeep) is out...
Siskiyou secession move going nowhere, like all the rest
It’s secession season again in California. For the seventh time in the last 27 years or so, there’s a movement afoot to split the state....
Lines blur between citizens and non-citizens
As the lines begin to blur between American citizens living in California and immigrants who are here legally, it’s fair to begin asking what’s the...
Rejected spending and the prisoner crisis
For every action, goes the law of both physics and politics, there is a reaction, a consequence....
At least two more years of fixable property tax inequity
Maybe Proposition 13 really still is a third rail in California politics, one that no one dares touch for fear it means instant political suicide,...
San Onofre no cause for a power panic
Temperatures reached 116 degrees in some urban parts of California early this month, but there were no rolling blackouts, no brownouts, no problems....
Lawsuit serves as a cautionary note
Back in 1996, Monterey resident Janice O’Brien, then 75, began paying almost $5,000 per year for long-term care insurance....
Constitutional crisis coming over prisons draws closer
Imagine a troop of U.S. marshals trying to move aside the cadre of California Highway Patrol officers assigned to protect Gov. Jerry Brown and carry...
PUC can redeem itself: Charge Edison
More consumerism from the California Public Utilities Commission — that was a fond hope of at least some of the voters who gave Jerry Brown...
‘GOP: Cosmetic change is all we need’
As the election neared last year and it became clear that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney could not possibly win without more Latino support than...
Constitutional crisis coming over prisons?
Rarely since the Civil War have state officials anywhere in America been as close to openly defying federal authority as Gov. Jerry Brown and the...
