Opinion: Attorney general spurs on big 2022 housing battle
There will be plenty of political battles next year, starting with likely reelection challenges to Gov. Gavin Newsom and similar efforts to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla. Heated contests for the insurance commissioner’s job and an effort to unseat appointed state Attorney General Rob Bonta have already started. Initiative fights are also pretty certain, […]
Opinion: Appeals court tries to gut tough consumer law
California’s ballot initiative process has never been more effective or beneficial to voters (who are also utility customers) than since the strongly consumerist Proposition 103 passed handily in 1988. Now the San Diego-based Sixth District state Court of Appeal has brazenly tried to gut a major part of that law, which made the insurance commissioner […]
Opinion: State’s housing solution begins
It’s happening. Despite the best efforts of California’s highly ideological, developer-financed state legislators, the solution to this state’s widely acknowledged housing shortage is coming fast, driven more by market forces than by state laws. Even local bureaucrats who had long ignored the obvious solution are now gradually having to recognize it. That solution: Convert or […]
Opinion: When ideology collides with reality
There can be few better examples of ideologically convinced politicians running head-on into reality than a new California law known in the Legislature as AB 1346. This bill, signed into law in September by Gov. Gavin Newsom, is the personification of today’s faddish hostility to everything fossil fuel by the Democrats who dominate California government. […]
Opinion: Nursing homes face a new life-or-death crisis
The COVID-19 crisis is over at California’s hundreds of nursing homes. Or is it? Like nursing homes around the nation, this state’s skilled nursing facilities and the somewhat similar assisted living homes were the state’s most tragic dying grounds during the height of the pandemic. They accounted for almost 48 percent of COVID deaths here […]
Opinion: More fire prosecutions, but still no personal responsibility
There were headlines all around the state late last month, when local prosecutors filed criminal charges including several counts of manslaughter in Shasta County over deaths in the 2020 Zogg fire, at least partially ignited because of negligence by the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. That fire blazed for about two weeks […]
Opinion: This recall spurred some fresh ideas
Until the campaigning got serious in the recall election that unsuccessfully targeted California Gov. Gavin Newsom, this state had not for years heard very many new and creative ideas for solving its many problems. But suddenly during the recall, the air was full of them. Sure, the campaign season saw a lot of old ideas […]
Opinion: New COVID numbers show state beats Florida, Texas
New COVID numbers show California beats Florida and Texas by a lot It just might turn out that the Delta variant of the coronavirus becomes the best thing that’s happened to California Gov. Gavin Newsom in quite awhile. At the very moment mail-in ballots for the Sept. 14 recall election went out, new figures showed […]
Opinion: How Newsom got himself into this fine mess
Gavin Newsom might be asking himself these days, as Oliver Hardy first did in a 1930 film, how he got into this fine mess. And Newsom truly is in trouble: One sometimes-accurate public poll in early August found voters favoring the firing of the governor by 11 percent, while most other surveys have that question […]
Opinion: Recall backers barking up at least one wrong tree
The latest crime statistics and a new study from the federal Department of Justice reveal that backers of the effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom have spent months barking up at least one wrong tree. Since early spring, Republican candidates to replace Newsom have blasted him for spawning what they often describe as a crime […]