As the fall election season nears its welcome end, there are a few people and parties missing, at least in California: The candidates of the Green, Libertarian, American Independent and Peace and Freedom parties. When […]

Not everything is treasure to everyone. To you it’s just an old beat-up baseball cap, but it happens to be the one my father bought for me at the last game played by a baseball […]

If some voters feel a sense of déjà vu as the fall election nears, one reason may be the battle between the tax-raising Propositions 30 and 38, a fight with strong and ironic echoes of […]

Democrats have dreamed all Fall of making a huge congressional comeback and reinstalling San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House. That would be a gigantic turnaround from two years ago, when Republicans won […]

Before the 1994 Proposition 187 galvanized them into a powerful voting bloc, it was common to refer to California Latinos as a political “sleeping giant.” No longer. Where before 1994, Hispanics accounted for barely 10 […]

Several months ago, a relatively modest looking package arrived at the front desk of the Fire Department’s administrative office. As promised, a friend left a copy of a book entitled, “The Richest Man in Town,” […]

Every election year at this time, radio and television airwaves, newspaper columns and political websites are suffused with poll results. Some track voter preferences daily, like www.realclearpolitics.com, which carries a daily compendium of polls on […]

Imagine you are elected to the City Council and it is four years from now. How will you be remembered? On which issues will you lead the Council and the City? That was my question […]

The strangest of all this fall’s intense initiative battles may be the small-money one being waged over Proposition 31, whose innocuous title (“State Budget. State and Local Government. Initiative constitutional amendment and statute) gives only […]