Thomas D. Elias
French Business Should Be Barred Here Because of Its Unsettled Holocaust...
Expect foreign companies galore to bid on major contracts for building components of California’s planned high speed rail system, the largest such project now planned anywhere in the world.
It Wouldn’t Hurt the Guv to Give in a Little to...
For years, Democrats have called California Republicans the “Party of No” because almost all they ever did was say “no, no, no” to Democratic budget plans and even those of former GOP Gov. Schwarzenegger.
Wrong to Claim Brown Is a Stooge for Labor Unions
No one in California politics believes this state is about to see anything like the unprecedented statehouse live-in occupation staged earlier this year in Wisconsin, where public employee unions faced the threat of losing not just salary and benefits, but their hard-won bargaining rights.
Now This Was a Dumb Move by the GOP
For the umpteenth time in the last 20 years, the extreme conservative activists who run California’s Republican Party have shot themselves in the foot. They have, that is, if they’re more interested in winning elections than merely retaining control of their own dwindling party’s apparatus.
Special Districts (Water, Sanitation) Should Look Juicy for the Plucking to...
Once again, a logical solution to California’s estimated $25 billion budget quandary stares the state in the face. All the money that would be needed to keep all services going, pay all state employees and meet pension obligations now sits in government hands.
Move Slowly, Cautiously Before Re-licensing California Nuke Plants
Foresight is a quality rarely seen among politicians in Sacramento, which makes it remarkable that 10 state legislators actually displayed a lot of it barely two weeks before the devastating 9.0 Japanese earthquake on March 11 and the nuclear power plant crisis that followed.
Health Insurance Is a Frustrating Exception to the Insurance Rule
If taxes are defined as money that citizens must pay in order to avoid serious difficulties, then surely health insurance premiums are a kind of de facto tax.
Coming in July (Maybe): A Runoff Between 2 Democrats
The first real test of California’s new “top two” primary election system will likely come on July 12 when two high-powered, well-known Democrats vie to replace the long-serving Jane Harman in a strongly Democratic coastal district of Los Angeles County.
Stern Warning from Unlikely Source That the GOP Should Heed
Dwight Eisenhower usually is recognized as a fine President and an even better general. But in the long run, he may be remembered as much for one warning he issued three days before leaving office in 1961:
Despite Brown’s Supreme Confidence, Road to Victory Is Cluttered
Whether or not he manages to eliminate all of the more than 400 city redevelopment agencies that have thrived around California for six decades, it now appears Gov. Brown will at the very least spur them to do some things they probably should have done long ago.
