List California’s biggest problems and water immediately comes up, followed by public employee pension obligations, voter distrust for government and childhood poverty, which runs higher here than almost anywhere else. But the biggest problem this […]

If this seems like deja vu, that’s because it is. For the twenty-ninth time since he was convicted in two of the nine gruesome killings conducted by the cult-like Charles Manson “Family” in the late […]

Imagine a California where polio becomes a threat to children’s health as it was before the 1950s, when first the Salk vaccine and later the even more effective Sabin formula threw this dreaded and crippling […]

The common assumption in California politics is that labor unions will always be a major force because they have been for the last 30-plus years. But change may be coming, even though organized labor since […]

In my unproduced screenplay, “Jeepers, It’s Hot!”, an everyman played by George Clooney turns on his TV set to see what the weather man has to say about exactly when the heat wave will be […]

The more time goes by since last fall’s passage of the high-minded Proposition 47, the more it begins to look like a well-intentioned mistake. This was the ballot measure that turned some “minor” felonies into […]

Back in June, the president of the University of California promised on national radio that the UC Board of Regents would vote in its next meeting – in July – on whether to adopt the […]

The days when oil companies could easily deny they’ve gouged California motorists through much of this year should have ended with the second-quarter financial reports of Valero Energy Corp. and Tesoro Corp., which together control […]

Gov. Jerry Brown has never professed to be the model of political or ideological consistency. In fact, he’s a decades-long advocate of the “canoe theory” of politics, which goes like this: You paddle a little […]