SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Here's a novel idea: Don't spend money until you've got it. What a concept!

Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed that as a way to head off future crippling state budget deficits. They've become all too common as Sacramento politicians muddle through cycles of economic booms and busts.

State budgeting in California is a constant ...Read more

As the ax came down on Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday, it was Democrats who were there to block it, with the caucus uniting with the majority of GOP members to defeat Marjorie Taylor Greene’s effort to remove the speaker. It wasn’t just an act of goodwill — this was in exchange for Johnson’s successful efforts to help...Read more

While TV news was glued last week to Stormy Daniels' tell-all testimony and pro-Palestinian demonstrations, scant attention was paid to Vladimir Putin's tsar-like coronation for a fifth term. Nor to his bellicose parade of Russia's nuclear-capable missiles through Red Square on Thursday, the annual Victory Day commemoration of World War II.

I ...Read more

Last week, after Stormy Daniels spent nearly eight hours over two days testifying in former President Donald Trump's hush money trial in New York, the time seemed right to crack open her memoir, "Full Disclosure."

I had missed the book when it was published in 2018, but now that she has been a star witness in the first criminal trial of an ...Read more

When Donald Trump’s attorney Susan Necheles tried to discredit the adult film actor Stormy Daniels on the stand during Trump’s hush money trial, she took this absurd position: Assume a sex worker has no integrity.

“You have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex appear to be real?” Necheles asked.

“Wow,” Daniels said. �...Read more

Here they go again.

Six months before election day, for the third straight presidential contest, Donald Trump and his Republican lickspittles are sounding alarms about virtually nonexistent voting fraud, laying the groundwork to claim that he wuz robbed should he lose to President Biden.

Trump has refused in recent interviews to commit to ...Read more

Young people overseas are paying close attention to American politics, and they are concerned — not only about us but about the impact on them as well.

We are a bipartisan group of former members of Congress, having just left office last year, and we traveled together to Germany where we met with university and high school students in Hamburg...Read more

There are several ways the oldest president in America’s history could diffuse the sticky issue of his age as he seeks a second term.

He could embrace it with humor, à la Ronald Reagan’s quip at Walter Mondale during the 1984 presidential debate (“I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience�...Read more

America has had a generation gap from the very start, and generational warfare for almost as long. But in at least one area, I believe a cease-fire is possible: We can end the war over which generation had it worse when they were young.

With soaring rents, high mortgage rates, student loans and a ballooning national debt to pay for entitlements...Read more

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just got McCained.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that the independent candidate for president had some health issues in recent years, including an abnormality caused by a worm that entered his brain and eventually died.

Kennedy revealed this info as part of a 2012 deposition during his divorce from second wife ...Read more

Students at C.K. McClatchy High School in Sacramento are getting a crash course in the First Amendment, while school administrators are hopefully learning a lesson of their own: Don’t censor journalists.

Last week, the student paper published a series of comments from students, including one praising Adolf Hitler. Then, administrators at ...Read more

Steaks and shakes are the new SUVs.

It’s all those cows, contentedly mooing while producing billions of pounds of planet-warming methane. The World Bank has a solution.

In a new paper, the international financial lender suggests repurposing the billions rich countries spend to boost carbon dioxide-rich products like red meat and dairy for ...Read more

California’s Proposition 47, a milestone in criminal justice reform, is under threat. The proposed Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act, which seeks to undo important aspects of Proposition 47, would take us backward to prioritize punishment over rehabilitation.

Proposition 47 was passed in 2014 to revise penalties for ...Read more

As a local organizer and advocate, I spend most of my days in official municipal or state-level meetings and hearings about issues affecting our communities. Often, I become frustrated because even though I am seen as a respected community leader, I am not able to officially represent and advocate for my community. My ineligibility to run for ...Read more

Public opinion polls show the Nov. 5 presidential race has tightened in recent days, with President Joe Biden and ex-President Donald Trump running nearly neck and neck. And in case you don’t trust polls, which underestimated Trump’s support in 2016 and 2020, you can check out the latest odds on one of the online gaming sites based offshore ...Read more

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency plans to reclassify marijuana from the most restrictive category — Schedule I, up there with heroin — down to Schedule III, in the company of testosterone and Tylenol with codeine. This does not mean that the federal government is giving its blessing to the use of cannabis as a recreational drug. But it does ...Read more

Trump, reelected, will subvert the law — first by freeing the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

Of all the promises that Donald Trump has made for a second term as president, he's all but certain to fulfill one if he's reelected: pardoning most, if not all, of the rioters who've been arrested, pleaded guilty or been convicted by judges or juries for ...Read more

There is a scene in the first “Star Wars” where the heroes find themselves in a garbage compactor. They frantically grab for anything that can keep them from getting crushed as the walls inexorably close in. Such is the plight of civil society in countries facing what democracy experts call “closing space” — and it has now come to the ...Read more

Let no one underestimate the seriousness of the Clery Act, the federal law that requires institutions that participate in federal financial-aid programs to provide timely reporting of statistics about various types of crime and other information about campus safety.

The U.S. Department of Education underscored its importance last month when it ...Read more

If you’re alone in the forest, who would you rather run across: a man you don’t know or a bear? This question, posed to multiple women in a TikTok video last month, has taken the dilemma of man versus bear viral. And women online are nearly unanimous in favor of the stocky, shaggy, sleeps-through-the-winter one.

Let me clarify in case you ...Read more