To understand the brazen quality of the latest rate increase application from California’s third-largest electric utility, it’s necessary to step back in time, to the scene when wildfires raged across some of the prettiest parts of San Diego County in 2007. Those fires would kill 13 persons, even more than the notorious natural gas pipeline explosion that came three years later … Read More

The polls don’t look super-strong today for Dianne Feinstein. True, she has a very good approval rating in the latest surveys, the Field Poll showing 44 percent of California voters think she is doing a good job. Only 29 percent disapprove of her work. The same surveys indicate that even though a generation or two has come of age since … Read More

There has been little more than dithering from the University of California and its top officials in the year since anti-Semitic episodes on several of its highest-ranked campuses became well known. Even faculty members – including some without tenure for whom public protests are risky – complain that the university has “become a breeding ground for hate speech.” Of course, … Read More

Many of America’s worst traffic bottlenecks are holding up commuters for hours each week even where there’s plenty of mass transit nearby. That is the upshot of a new report titled “Unclogging America’s Arteries,” which offers a few nostrums that don’t really figure to solve the problem anytime soon. (http://www.highways.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/unclogging-study2015-hi-res.pdf) The most prominent conclusion is that 11 of the nation’s … Read More

Here is the bottom line on the significant but under-publicized retirement of Melanie M. Darling, the California Public Utilities Commission judge who fined a huge utility $16 million late last year for not reporting secret contacts with PUC officials including herself: The PUC is rid of a major embarrassment, but is still under criminal investigation. Why? Because private phone calls … Read More

Every forecast of California’s future insists this state will need far more college-educated workers than now live here if it is to avert losing out when established businesses expand and seek places with qualified potential employees. This is true in almost every field, from film-making to making computer chips and hunting knives. That is why a community college program to … Read More

California’s new motor voter law has taken effect, even if it is not yet in massive use. So far the sky has not fallen. That was the prediction from many Republicans the moment Gov. Brown signed the new measure into law last fall. Many GOP activists predicted it would lead to “state-sanctioned voter fraud” and flood the voting rolls with … Read More

A flood of lawsuits began within weeks after a huge, still-ongoing leak of natural gas arose in late October from a Southern California Gas Co. storage facility 1,200 feet above the Porter Ranch area in the northern reaches of the San Fernando Valley. There is a class action on behalf of many residents and a suit by the city of … Read More

It surely looked like reefer madness was back the other day when the state began advertising for a new medical marijuana czar. The timing of the listing, coming while a dozen proposed ballot initiatives to legalize recreational pot are pending, appeared to suggest an assumption by Gov. Brown and his administration that at least one will pass. The new pot czar, … Read More

There is a simple answer to the question of why the seemingly constant lying of presidential candidate Donald Trump has not cost him much, if any, of his standing among Republicans likely to vote in this spring’s primary elections. There also is a complex answer. The simple answer is that because Mr. Trump – billionaire businessman and television personality for … Read More