As we noted, in Blazing Saddles the devious Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) plots to build a railroad and has his eye on the land he needs. “Unfortunately,” he laments, “there is one thing standing between me and that property – the rightful owners.” As Ralph Vartebarian notes in the Los Angeles Times, California’s bullet…
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The Sacramento Bee is disturbed that the Assembly has derailed SB 1190, which would ban lobbying of California Coastal Commission members. Lobbyists had set up meetings between commissioners and David “The Edge” Evans, a guitarist with U2, who sought to build a house in Malibu, and members of the Newport Banning Ranch Project in…
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Rob Feckner, president of the CalPERS board of administration, has heard stories that all is not well with the massive pension fund, with assets of more than $301 billion. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” writes Feckner in the Sacramento Bee. “Let me tell you why.” Investment returns for fiscal year July 1,…
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We have been tracking Covered California, the Golden State’s wholly-owned subsidiary of Obamacare. Emily Bazar of the Center for Health Reporting has exposed glitches in the system’s $454 million computer system, problems with cancelation of policies when people turn 65, and difficulties in enrollment for others. For Bazar, these and other problems resulted in…
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In 1978, when Jerry Brown was governor, soaring property taxes were literally driving people from their homes. Embattled Californians responded with the People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation. This measure capped property tax rates for residential and commercial properties at 1 percent of the assessed value and prevented assessed value from growing more than…
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We have been keeping track, so to speak, of California’s high-speed rail project, the vaunted “bullet train.” In February, we noted that farmers are not eager to sell the land the project needs. The alleged cost of $68 billion was already more than double the $33 billion estimate before California voters approved $9.95 billion…
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In recent years, income equality has become an issue, with the discussion usually generating more heat than light. As Michael McGrady writes in The College Fix, income equality research has also become a lucrative pursuit. Drawing on a recent report from the California Policy Center, McGrady notes that several UC Berkeley economics professors who…
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The whopper government pension of Mike Wiley, outgoing boss of Sacramento Regional Transit, continues to make news, but not just because it draws on the RT operating budget. As Tony Bizjak notes in the Sacramento Bee, Wiley is eligible for a pension of $278,000, a full $48,000 more than Wiley’s final salary of $230,000…
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As John Tozzi and Michelle Cortez of Bloomberg report on the stem cell front, “press releases, popular media, and even some journal articles routinely inflate expectations for future therapies based on early findings that probably will never turn into cures.” Now the International Society for Stem Cell Research, representing more than 4,100 researchers, wants…
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California is a high-tech state and that leads Zócalo Public Square columnist Joe Mathews to wonder: “Why, in this Internet age, doesn’t my state offer a one-stop shop where I can renew my driver’s license, register to vote, pay my taxes and buy passes to a state park?” This one-stop shop, says Mr. Mathews,…
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