Thomas D. Elias

Sometimes it can take more than a decade for a completely sensible idea to catch on. So it is with what may be the single best money-saving idea in the inventive preliminary budget proposed by Gov. Brown. The idea, part of a Brown plan to appease a panel of federal judges, calls for...

Listening to radio host Rush Limbaugh and former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, you’d think all newspapers, radio and television stations are owned by the pinkest of leftists. But a series of moves by the nation’s largest owner of radio stations, Clear Channel (controlled by the Bain Capital firm once headed by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney), means the most-heard medium in California will now carry...

Like swallows returning to Capistrano, state legislators come back to Sacramento as each new year begins, ready to peck away at what they see as the state’s problems. Last year, that included...

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.