With the world anxiously watching the conflict in Iran, it was no surprise that the first segment in the March 1 edition of CBS’s 60 Minutes featured an interview with Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last Shah. The second segment, however, returned to a staple theme of the CBS news team. It presented...
If enough people in California agreed on a state water strategy, the political obstacles would be overcome. If every major water agency, every farming association, and a critical mass of environmental groups were all committed to a specific set of policies and projects, then elected politicians would be bound to adhere to those priorities. Regulatory...
The California High-Speed Rail Authority released its 2026 Draft Business Plan on February 28, two years after the prior plan and in a radically different environment than when that last plan was written. While quite detailed, the new plan raises serious questions that the Authority has not fully answered: about costs that keep growing, about...
It’s been an amazing week in California news, both for what’s in it as well as what’s not. The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday that sex-assault claims are so widespread in Los Angeles Unified schools that board members took a break from their liquidation of the bourgeoisie to ask Evil Wall Street bankers to...
The lawsuit comes after a federal investigation sparked by a California Justice Center complaint exposing FERPA violations. Just weeks after a federal investigation found that the California Department of Education had “egregiously abused its authority” by hiding students’ gender transitions from parents, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued to stop federal enforcement actions — the...
The municipal financial crisis is more urgent than ever. It has been four years since my book, The Municipal Financial Crisis, was published by Palgrave Macmillan. I wrote the book to bring to light the root causes of why our local governments are failing to manage administratively, operationally, and financially. Looking back today, I find...
It’s a risk to promote an agenda that calls for practical water projects, and at the same time, calls for practical energy projects. To begin with, the word “practical,” in both cases, is a matter of bitter debate. Equally challenging is the fact that even within each of these communities, water, and energy, there is...
On February 12, the Trump Administration formally repealed the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding” that gave the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from virtually anything that used energy, including vehicles, power plants, factories, dairy farms, landfills, fertilizer, rice paddies, tractors, air conditioners, refrigerators, etc. Reactions were swift. From CBS News, “an enormous blow to...
California’s high-speed rail project has never lacked for drama, but the challenges converging on the California High-Speed Rail Authority in early 2026 represent something qualitatively different from the delays, cost overruns, and political skirmishes that have defined the project for the better part of two decades. The Authority now faces a reckoning that is simultaneously...
About the time it became inevitable that California was going to lose two major refineries, in May of last year, an alarming study was released by Michael Mische, an economist and business professor at USC. In his analysis, “Ensuring California’s Gasoline Security for the 21st Century,” Mische made a prediction that was widely quoted: “Based on current...
California’s hospitals recorded $11.3 billion in total net income in 2024 — 10% above pre-pandemic levels. The average hospital CEO in the state earns roughly $920,000 a year. And the largest union representing healthcare workers collected $114.5 million in dues in 2024 alone, according to its federal LM-2 filing — spending just 16 cents of...
When Permission Replaces Property Rights, the California Dream Becomes a Dream Deferred For over a century, California stood as a frontier of first resort for the ambitious, attracting those eager to escape old-world constraints in exchange for a promise of radical autonomy. This California Dream was not a byproduct of luck; it was forged by...
When it comes to the water supply in California for cities and farms, nothing matters more than how we manage the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. As of 2/09 we were 132 days into the 2025-26 rainfall season which began on 10/01/2025. That’s enough time to get an idea of how delta management is shaping up this...
Public sector unions collect nearly $1 billion a year to control Sacramento. Normal citizens? A trickle against a torrent. TL;DR California’s public sector unions rake in $921 million annually and spend hundreds of millions controlling elections—but there’s a legal pathway to break their grip. California’s public-sector unions are the Colorado River of political spending. Normal...