Subscribe to RSS
Subscribe by Email
Ask the voters to require that the UC system get at least half what the prisons get. It would pass in a landslide.
Archive for the ‘California Politics’ Category
March 2nd, 2012
Category: Britain, California Politics, Education policy, Policy briefs, Uncategorized, University of California
Years and years ago, David Mundel used to provoke my interest in public policy as an object of analysis (rather than an occasion to opine) by suggesting out-of-the-box things like: the way to deal with affirmative action and discrimination in college admissions is to require colleges to admit by lottery and have done with it. [...]
December 14th, 2011
Category: California Politics, Drug Policy
Following our debates here about the price of marijuana, I thought I would flag for people’s interest this piece by Michael Montgomery. His reporting indicates that after dropping lower than $1,000 pound ($62.50/ounce), Northern California prices for the latest harvest have now rebounded to $2,000-$2,500 a pound ($125-$156/ounce). I suspect normal market forces, bad weather [...]
November 11th, 2011
Yesterday an OWS-affiliated (whatever that actually means) crowd tried to occupy what functions as a quad at Berkeley, with tents in which to stay a while. Campus police and Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies arrived in armor looking like Darth Vaders, cleared the tents away by force, pulled down signs, and brutalized a bunch of students [...]
May 19th, 2011
To the surprise of exactly no one, Senate Republicans will filibuster Goodwin Liu’s nomination to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. As I argued yesterday, this really shouldn’t matter if the administration’s eventual goal is to appoint Liu to the United States Supreme Court: many of the greatest justices had no or virtually no judicial [...]
January 14th, 2011
Category: California Politics, Politics and Leadership
Jerry Brown has issued a budget that engages a $25b deficit. Note the word engages; not “papers over” or “hides with wishful thinking” or “lies about”; engages. There’s plenty of work not done yet, but this is huge: for the first time in recent memory, our elected chief executive is telling us the truth. Not [...]
January 3rd, 2011
Category: California Politics, Politics and Leadership
California’s voters need to take responsibility for the state’s budget, and stop blaming the politicians. Here’s the way to make them do that.
December 6th, 2010
Category: California Politics, Prisons and penal policy
As the Supreme Court debates whether to force California to finally reduce overcrowding in its wretched prison system, Justice Alito asks “If 40,000 prisoners are going to be released…[do] you really believe that if you were to come back here two years after that you would be able to say they haven’t contributed to an [...]
November 18th, 2010
Republicans have told the Big Lie for 30 years, and are finding it hard now to say, “Sorry folks: just kidding.”