Gov. Brown hasn’t yet said whether he’ll run for a new term as governor, his fourth overall. Aides like to chortle that “he has until the March 7 filing deadline to decide.”

Once in awhile, California gets a major public official who thrives on telling the unvarnished truth. In recent history, these have usually held the office of state treasurer, a low-visibility position that can give its occupant plenty of time to ruminate.

If there’s one main reason behind the distrust Californians feel for government and elected officials at all levels, it may be the way special interests regularly pour millions of dollars into election campaigns while managing to hide their identities. There was hope last year for an end to…

There is little doubt an economic bonanza awaits California beneath the surface of the Monterey Shale, a geologic formation stretching from San Benito County south along the west side of the San Joaquin Valley right into parts of Southern California. One study put the possible job-creating potential of this oil and gas trove at …

As the new year approaches, a new era also looms for California medicine, and the changes are not due only to the Affordable Health Care Act, Obamacare. Other big changes will come as pharmacists expand their role in patient care and nurse practitioners, nurse midwives and physician assistants begin performing first-trimester abortions – unless…

Maybe it is time to stop the steady stream of handwringing over how poorly America’s schoolkids, especially California’s, perform in math and science. They are doing okay even if there still is plenty of room for improvement.

Imagine a California where polio becomes a threat to children’s health again, as it was before the 1950s when first the Salk vaccine and later the even more effective Sabin formula threw this crippling disease into dormancy. Or a California where dozens of kids die every year from pertussis, better known as whooping cough because of the gasping whoop ailing children often make after coughing.

Republicans have been talking big this fall, saying they expect to improve greatly on their current 15 seats in California’s delegation of 53 members on the House of Representatives. Don’t bet on it, despite the fact the GOP managed…

Alex Maese is an example of how mistaken critics can be when they claim, as they have for decades, that Californians are not smart enough for direct democracy via ballot propositions. Maese was convicted in 1997 of possessing a fragment of a cotton ball containing 0.029 grams of heroin, then sentenced to life in prison. No court at the time saw evidence of how he was using that…

The unproven, unprovable but persistent myth that undocumented immigrants are a vast financial burden on the American taxpayer is now extending to the unlikely field of organ transplants. The latest furor began when…