Thomas D. Elias
Before Opposing Children at the Border, Remember the St. Louis
For people familiar with the history of the runup to World War II, there is a sense of déjà vu in today’s humanitarian crisis along the Mexican border as resistance rises against the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children attempting to enter and stay in the United States. Eyewitness reports indicate that half the children coming without parents are actual refugees fleeing ...
Red Light Cameras Rated ‘Q’ for Questionably Reliable
There are few worse feelings for a driver than receiving a letter purporting to show him/her in the act of running a red light. Few legal items are less enforceable or reliable, despite what the California Supreme Court said in an early summer ruling that held red light camera photos and videos have “a presumption of authenticity.” There’s a reason traffic cops routinely demand that ...
Old, Gray and Gone – California’s Senior Politicians
For a state long a symbol of youth, there’s been a lot of age among California’s preeminent politicians of the last decade. That began to change in 2012, and the shift accelerated this summer. Many of the old guard chose not to brave the top two primary system that threatened to expose them to serious intra-party challenges.
Former Foes of Global Warming Claims Fall Into Line
The chorus of global warming deniers has not shrunk. Outcries claiming the entire issue is fraudulent are not going away. Realism also is slowly setting in among some California groups that long tried to wish away the issue by claiming any warming that’s happening is strictly a cyclical natural phenomenon.
Brown Is About to Give High Court Drastic Facelift
For more than a decade, while California has been among the most liberal of America’s blue states, its highest court has been dominated by leftovers from two of its more conservative governors. That is about to change. Two retirements soon will let Gov. Brown change the entire tone of the California Supreme Court, long a bastion of pro-business, anti-consumer decisions and sometimes a brake on movements toward same-sex marriage, loose regulation of marijuana and other social issues dear to activists on the left.
Brown Badly Needs Creative Plan, Fast, for Prison Reform
From early in his career, Gov. Brown has had a proclivity for dismissing problems with wisecracks or aphorisms. As early as 1975, in his first term, he mocked university professors’ pleas for pay raises. He said they didn’t need more money. They could make do with “psychic rewards.” He has done the same thing lately as companies like Toyota and Occidental Petroleum announced they were moving headquarters and thousands of jobs out of state, noting that those firms and their jobs are just a fraction of the California economy. True, but the moves are consequential for ...
How the Utility Monopolies Swat Away Competition
Nothing is more important to California’s large privately-owned utilities than the virtual monopolies they enjoy in most of the state. Those monopolies make it nearly impossible for businesses and residents outside cities with municipal power companies to buy electricity from anyone but companies like Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, also guaranteeing significant profits to those utilities in perpetuity. The big energy companies feel threatened these days by ...
State Senate Makes Strong Pitch Supporting Its Own Weakness
A clear message was sent when the state Senate in mid-June first rejected a ban on legislators taking campaign contributions during the last 100 days of each lawmaking session, and then partially reversed itself to finally pass a watered-down version covering a much shorter time period. The message: “We would rather have money than trust.”
Fine to Tighten Gun Control – but Exactly How?
As the round of memorial services for the six students fatally stabbed and shot in late May by the psychotic killer Elliot Rodger recedes into memory, a serious public policy question remains even while families and friends are left with their private grief: If the Isla Vista killings can’t spur laws to keep guns away from persons diagnosed as mentally ill, what can?
Smug Democrats Have Only Themselves to Blame
Democrats and other detractors of California’s “top two” primary system have been whining ever since last week’s primary election that it would be wrong to have two Republicans vie in the November general election for the state controller’s job, considered by many the fourth most significant statewide office. It would just not be right, they say, for only Republicans to have ...
