State Watch

HOMELESS CRISIS - The intersection of Howe Avenue and Fair Oaks Boulevard lies in one of the Sacramento area’s most affluent neighborhoods.

GUEST COMMENTARY - For 11 years, Adela has labored in the vineyards of table and raisin grapes that surround Fowler, in California’s Central Valley. 

CALIFORNIA POLITICS - Do you think Dianne Feinstein should retire because she is too old, too out of it, and too tied to the past to represent today’s California?

CAL MATTERS - The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association isn’t shy about its mission.

HOUSING CRISIS - The passage of 2021’s Senate Bill 9 was supposed to herald the end of the single-family zoning that many point to as a culprit of California’s housing crisis.

MARC’S ANGLE - While the national environment of high gas prices and inflation, along with Joe Biden’s other failures have given the national Republican Party a boost in energy, the CA GOP convention stood in stark contrast to other states.

CA WORKER’S RIGHTS - Workers today are subject to more monitoring and tracking on the job — often without their knowledge — than ever before, advocates say. 

THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA - Even today amid a mounting exodus among those who can afford it, and with its appeal diminished to businesses and newcomers, California, legendary state of American dreams, continues to inspire optimism among progressive boosters.

MINING BATTERIES & JOBS - Its proximity to the Salton Sea has shaped the destiny of the Imperial Valley in countless ways.

CAL MATTERS - When California’s first-in-the-nation task force on reparations voted to restrict who would be eligible for reparations to African American descendants of enslaved people, it sparked much debate and many questions about what would happen next.

COVID WATCH - A patient sample that wasn’t processed for more than 30 days. A test used without proper validation of its accuracy.

HOUSING WATCH - California housing prices have soared during the pandemic.

CA ECONOMY - When I met Amparo Ramirez in March of 2020, our conversation was very much of the moment.

GUEST COMMENTARY - Although California’s population growth began to slow in the 1990s after exploding in the previous decade by 6 million people, both official and independent demographers continued to see relatively strong growth for decades to come.

CONNECTING CALIFORNIA - When your town’s biggest business is punishment, how do you fight back when you’re being punished unfairly?

CA GUN LAWS - As Democratic elected officials rush to toughen gun laws in the wake of Sunday’s mass shooting in Sacramento that left six dead and 12 injured,

REDQUEENINLA - Recently at a local, large political club endorsement meeting, after numerous iterative votes to zero-in on whom the club membership liked best – who merited “endorsement” unequivocally as described by a supermajority – I asked...

CA GUN LAWS - The modern American gun debate began in 1967, when 30 protesting members of the Black Panther Party marched into the California Capitol with loaded handguns, shotguns and rifles.

STATE WATCH - “Don’t bite off more than you can chew” is one of those old, but valid, aphorisms that people and institutions ignore at their peril.

STATE WATCH - There’s to be a one-two in the old AD62/new AD61 following on the heels of Autumn Burke’s abrupt resignation from the State Assembly on February 1, 2022.

CAL MATTERS - The budget that Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed in January totals $286.5 billion — big money by anyone’s measure — and likely to grow because state revenues continue to surpass expectations.