California’s government soon will begin to learn what it means to deal with a president who very frequently is less than truthful. The reality of Donald John Trump’s relationship with facts and truth apparently didn’t matter much to voters in the many small-population states which together provided the Electoral College majority that’s about to put him into the White House … Read More

As a United States attorney in Alabama serving under President Reagan in 1986, the 39-year-old Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was charged with enforcing civil rights laws. But he said then that he didn’t have much of a problem with what the Ku Klux Klan stood for, musing that he thought the KKK was “OK until I found out they smoked … Read More

The scene was a festive holiday-season dinner with guests from both Northern and Southern California. The discussion grew serious as the question arose of whether President-elect Trump would really try to set up a national registry of citizen and resident Muslims in America as an anti-terror tactic – which he advocated while running for office – with no one knowing … Read More

With the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump less than a month away, and the election receding into the rear view mirror, one thing is clear: The scope of the Latino vote majority Democrats needed and expected to get was significantly less than in many earlier elections. While outgoing President Obama has spent the last few weeks skirting this fact by … Read More

President-elect Donald Trump probably does not lose much sleep over it, but millions of Californians have spent wakeful nights since his election wondering what will happen to their healthcare if he follows through on his promise to “eliminate Obamacare on Day 1.” That day is five weeks away. If the promise is kept, it could affect 4.6 million Californians whose … Read More

All through his career, unpredictability has been the hallmark of Gov. Brown, and he did it again by choosing 12-term Democratic Rep. Xavier Becerra of Los Angeles as California’s next attorney general. With his confirmation by a Democratic-controlled Legislature completely certain, Mr. Becerra will force other major politicians to look over their shoulders; some are likely to change their longstanding … Read More

“The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states,” Barack Obama famously observed in 2004, several years before he ran for President. “But I’ve got news for them: There’s the United States of America.” Twelve years later, Obama is about to depart the White House, and by now he has probably learned there are … Read More

There was considerable irony when a California parole review panel late on Oct. 27 – just 12 days before the fall election – denied parole for the 17th time to Charles (Tex) Watson, self-described “right hand man” of Charles Manson, participant in at least seven of the Manson Family murders and leader of some of those murders. Watson’s parole denial … Read More

In the hullabaloo over Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s surprise election victory, it was easy to miss the fact that in the preliminary vote count, the winner was Democrat Hillary Clinton – by a margin of over 600,000 votes. Her plurality came mostly from California, where Mrs. Clinton won by more than 2.7 million votes – exponentially more than the leads … Read More

It just may be that life has overtaken political polling. Just as they have shaken up industries and activities from newspapers to taxicabs, from telephones to shopping, some relatively new technologies are making old reliable survey research techniques and tactics obsolete or inaccurate. This never was more evident than in the presidential polling, which consistently predicted a huge Electoral College … Read More