NewsTrust - California News - Most Recent Stories: Opinion

California's deficit of common sense

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Rebecca Solnit - Nov. 01 (Opinion) - California is rich. Even in the midst of a drought, we have lots of water, and in the midst of a recession, we have lots of money. The problem is one of distribution, not of actual scarcity.

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Can California Be Fixed?

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

American Prospect - By Pema Levy - Sep. 27 (Interview) - In the coming weeks, the coalition Repair California will begin the official process of calling a state constitutional convention, submitting ballot-initiative language to Attorney General Jerry Brown's office. Repair California proposes to restructure government through a state constitutional convention. The Prospect talked to John Grubb, official spokesperson for Repair California, about the crisis in California and the emerging movement to reform government.

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California v Texas: America's future

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Jul. 09 (Opinion) - Plenty of American states have budget crises; but California’s illustrate two more structural worries about the state. Back in its golden age in the 1950s and 1960s, it offered middle-class people, not just techy high-fliers, a shot at the American dream—complete with superb schools and universities, and an enviable physical infrastructure. These days California’s unemployment rate is running at 11.5%, two points ahead of the national average. In such Californian cities as Fresno, Merced and El Centro, jobless rates are higher than in Detroit. Its roads and schools are crumbling. Every year, over 100,000 more Americans leave the state than enter it.

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Critical mass for same-sex marriage

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Media Nation - By Dan Kennedy - Jun. 05 (Opinion) - At some point, though, it seems inevitable that liberal, blue California will re-enshrine same-sex marriage. And with more than 36.7 million people, it remains the big prize. Add them to the other six states plus New York, and you've got 58.9 million people, or 21.7 percent of the U.S. population.

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California's State of Insanity

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Joel Stein - May. 31 (Opinion) - Before I moved to California, I enjoyed voting. Once every four years, I thought very deeply for a very long time about the presidential candidates and then voted for the Democrat. I left the crappy high school gym knowing I had voted for a government that would bring progress and change, ignoring the fact that the high school gym kept getting crappier.

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California Was The Future

Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New America Media - By Sandip Roy - May. 29 (Opinion) - In a few years some young activist in South Asia might be mystified why the world’s first group for LGBT South Asians was born all the way out in California.

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The Golden State's extreme makeover

Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Bay Guardian - By Rebecca Bowe, Tim Redmond - May. 29 (Opinion) - California's an amazing place, a state with a history of starting trends that sweep across the nation. It has crowded cities and spectacular wilderness, agriculture and high-tech industries, 840 miles of coast, 163,000 square miles of land and 36 million people. And it's proving almost impossible to manage.

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A Setback for Equality

Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - May. 27 (Editorial) - The California Supreme Court got it terribly wrong Tuesday. It upheld Proposition 8, a state constitutional change on last fall’s ballot intended to prohibit marriage by couples of the same sex. In addition to denying basic fairness to gay people, the court’s 6-to-1 ruling sets an unfortunate legal precedent that could allow the existing rights of any targeted minority to be diminished using the Election Day initiative process.

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A Victory for Democracy

Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - May. 27 (Editorial) - The gay rights lobby is apoplectic, though we suspect the decision will eventually be seen as a victory for gay rights -- precisely because it respected the ordinary rhythms of democratic debate. That wasn't the case in 2008, when the same court created a right to gay marriage by reading it into the state constitution. Yet when moral and social disputes are "settled" by the judiciary, they inevitably become even more divisive than before, inspire a political backlash and in any case are denied the durability that comes from popular consent.

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State of Paralysis

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - May. 25 (Opinion) - The recession has hit the Golden State hard. The housing bubble was bigger there than almost anywhere else, and the bust has been bigger too. California’s unemployment rate, at 11 percent, is the fifth-highest in the nation. And the state’s revenues have suffered accordingly.

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California Voters Don't Want Dire Cuts; They Want Leaders to Get It Right

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Phil Angelides - May. 22 (Opinion) - There will be ample debate about why voters from across the political spectrum rejected Sacramento's proposed budget fix, but there is no credible evidence that they wanted to see vital investments and programs hit with $21 billion worth of Draconian cuts. Recent polls show that voters oppose cuts in law enforcement, public schools, colleges, and health care for low-income families and the disabled by more than 2-to-1.

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Schwarzenegger missed his golden opportunity to give Californians the truth

Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Michael Hiltzik - May. 21 (Opinion) - Instead, he uttered the same lies about state government and proposed the same nostrums as many of his predecessors: Californians are overtaxed and underserved, the budget can be balanced by cutting waste, fraud and abuse, etc. Like everyone else who has made these claims, he never delivered on his promise.

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California's proposed Low Carbon Fuel Standard

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - Apr. 20 (Editorial) - The goal of the Low Carbon Fuel Standard is to lower the "carbon intensity" of fuels sold in California 10% by 2020. It does this by using complexformulas to score each type of fuel based on its life-cycle emissions; carbon intensity is calculated by comparing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by a fuel over its life cycle with the amount of energy it produces. Starting in 2011, companies that sell fuel in California will have to lower the overall carbon intensity of their various fuels at a rate that will increase every year until 2020, or else buy credits from companies that sell cleaner fuels.

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When green has shades of gray

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - Mar. 28 (Editorial) - Green energy advocates and land preservationists in California are on opposite sides of a proposal to place solar-mirror fields in the Mojave Desert. The dispute is reminiscent of the battle over wind power in Nantucket Sound - a clash of competing "goods" where all the players wear green hats.

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All-American Canal, California-Mexico border

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

NASA - By NASA Earth Observatory - Feb. 23 (Statement) - The All-American Canal, the largest irrigation canal in the world and a key landmark along the U.S.-Mexico border, shows up in this astronaut photograph. This image captures about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) of the important infrastructure corridor just west of Yuma, Arizona. The prominent dark line crossing the image is the Canal, which is crossed in this view by Interstate Highway 8. The canal carries 740.6 cubic meters (26,155 cubic feet) of water per second westward from the Colorado River to support the intensive agriculture of California’s Imperial Valley to the northwest and nine cities, including San Diego. The canal system is the Imperial Valley’s only source of water, and it allows irrigation of more than 2,000 square kilometers (500,000 acres) of agricultural fields. The Coachella Canal, one of four main branch canals, leads water north to Imperial Valley.

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The courts and Prop. 8

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - Nov. 20 (Editorial) - The legal challenge to Proposition 8 has six lawsuits going for it, a host of influential friends of the court and the governor's opinion that the ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. Whether the challenge has a chance is another matter.

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Oh, No, You Don't

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Andrew Sullivan - Nov. 05 (Opinion) - Yes, it is heart-breaking: it is always hard to be in a tiny minority whose rights and dignity are removed by a majority. It's a brutal rebuke to the state supreme court, and enshrinement in California's constitution that gay couples are now second-class citizens and second class human beings. Massively funded by the Mormon church, a religious majority finally managed to put gay people in the back of the bus in the biggest state of the union. The refusal of Schwarzenegger to really oppose the measure and Obama's luke-warm opposition didn't help. And cruelly, a very hefty black turnout, as feared, was one of the factors that defeated us, according to the exit poll. Today this is one of the solaces to a hard right and a Republican party that sees gay people as the least real of Americans.

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Skid row in rehab

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 08:05:31 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Heather Mac Donald - Nov. 18 (Opinion) - The Los Angeles Police Department's Safer City Initiative -- under which 50 additional police officers were assigned to the neighborhood to reduce crime, fight drug dealing and crack down on quality-of-life offenses -- has begun to bring safety and assistance to people living on the streets and in the SROs and missions. The number of people sleeping on downtown streets declined from a peak of 1,876 in mid-September 2006 to just over 700 in recent months, according to police. "We've broken the back of the problem," says LAPD Chief William J. Bratton.

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A new carbon standard

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 11:30:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Daniel Sperling - Jun. 21 (Opinion) - PROMINENT VOICES are calling for national carbon taxes as a way to fight global warming. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the Los Angeles Times' editorial board and economists on the left and the right all support a carbon tax as the cure for our greenhouse gas pains. It isn't, at least for transportation. As the California Air Resources Board votes today in Los Angeles on adopting new carbon standards, we should understand that global warming can't be solved by a single policy or solution. Carbon taxes -- taxes on energy sources that emit carbon dioxide (CO2) -- aren't a bad idea. But they only work in some situations. Specifically, they do not work in the transportation sector, the source of a whopping 40% of California's greenhouse gas emissions (and a third of U.S. emissions).

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