Columnist.
Across the pond, British Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition is calling for 19 percent cuts in government spending. As The New York Times reported, British finance minister George Osborne believes that the cuts will steer the country -- where the deficit runs at about 11.5 percent of total economic output -- away from the "brink" of "economic ruin."
"High school, for me, it sucked," Kristel, a 27-year-old lesbian who grew up in Honolulu, confided in her videotape; it was "kind of a hostile environment." The good news is: "These people who treat you like crap now, in a few years, they're not going to matter."
In 2006, voters in California's 11th Congressional District, which meanders from San Ramon to Stockton, fired Rep. Richard Pombo, once a highly popular congressman first elected in 1992. Pombo got caught up in a wave that cost the GOP 31 seats and its control of the House.
Californians do not face an easy choice in the race for governor -- as was clear in Tuesday night's debate at Dominican University in San Rafael.
Even though America is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, members of President Obama's Cabinet are three times more likely to have attended law school than boot camp.
There aren't a lot of walls around Carly Fiorina. While politicos have marveled at the missteps of Meg Whitman's $140 million Titanic of a campaign, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO has made herself accessible to journalists in her bid to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer.
President Obama killed the climate change bill. That's the brunt of the article "As the World Burns, How the Senate and the White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change" by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker. Lizza tells the tale of how Washington's erstwhile "Three Amigos" -- also known as K.G.L., for Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. -- cobbled together a cap-and-trade climate-change bill that had "the support both of the major green groups and the biggest polluters" -- until the deal fell apart.
Last week, CNN fired anchor Rick Sanchez after he called Jon Stewart a bigot in a radio interview during which he also questioned whether Jews face discrimination. Quoth Sanchez, "Everyone who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority? Yeah."
On Oct. 28, 1980, Albert Greenwood Brown snatched Susan Jordan, 15, raped and strangled her to death with her own shoelace. Brown, who was on parole after raping a 14-year-old girl, then spent the night tormenting the dead girl's parents over the phone, telling them that they would never see their daughter again and where to find the girl's half-nude corpse and belongings. A jury sentenced him to death for that crime. Last Wednesday, almost 30 years later, Brown was scheduled to be executed. Of course, it didn't happen.
"What did Meg Whitman know and when did she know it?" publicity hound attorney Gloria Allred asked Wednesday. It was a savvy close to a press conference at which client Nicandra Diaz-Santillan, who worked as a housekeeper for Whitman, alleged that Whitman knew that she was an illegal immigrant, then fired her in 2009 as she prepared to run for California governor.
The House Republicans' "Pledge to America" calls for an extension of the Bush tax cuts for all; a rollback of government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels; "strict budget caps," an end to the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the rest of the Obama stimulus package. What's not to like?
I don't understand why San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris wants to be California's next attorney general. Then again, it's hard to understand why she even ran for DA -- other than because she has a yen for elective office.
This week, Reid called for a vote on the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Everyone knew the measure would fail, and it did, leaving supporters angry that in his fervor to make Republicans look obstructionist, Reid damaged their cause. Ditto his decision to put the DREAM Act -- a measure that would provide citizenship for young people who were in the country illegally but had attended college or served in the military -- in a military spending bill.
I agreed to be on a panel at UC Berkeley's Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service Monday night, where we addressed the question "California's Next Governor: What Should the Agenda Be?" Here's my agenda for her or him.
"In almost every respect imaginable, Prohibition was a failure," former New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent concluded at the close of his new book, "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition." "It encouraged criminality and institutionalized hypocrisy. It deprived the government of revenue, stripped the gears of the political system, and proposed profound limitations on individual rights."
This is how news gets made. Conservative writer Dinesh D'Souza writes a piece for Forbes pimping his new book, "The Roots of Obama's Rage." During a National Review interview, former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich gushes over the piece and calls it "the most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama" as it reveals the "Kenyan anti-colonial" thinking that motivates Obama.
Why did Florida pastor Terry Jones garner all that media attention last week for threatening to burn Qurans on Saturday's 9/11 anniversary? I believe it's because network swells had spent weeks trying to frame opponents of the ground zero mosque -- also known as the Lower Manhattan Islamic community center -- as stupid anti-Islam bigots, but that story line wasn't sticking. So networks found a stupid anti-Islam bigot in Florida who had nothing to do with the mosque, but who reinforced their political view.
Jerry Brown has a secret plan to balance the California state budget. When the state attorney general and Democratic gubernatorial nominee recently visited the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board, he brought with him a large three-ring binder with his ideas on how to bring state spending back into the black. But he wouldn't tell us what was in the book.
A Florida pastor's plan to burn the Quran on the anniversary of 9/11 is a breathtakingly dumb idea. It's bad for the country. As Gen. David Petraeus warned, this illiterate's stunt could incite violence against U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
At the end of Obamaland's Recovery Summer, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer is betting that Californians want the federal government to keep growing. GOP challenger Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, is betting that Californians want more private-sector jobs, not more government jobs. At Wednesday night's televised debate at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, Boxer -- anti-Wall Street -- faced off against Fiorina -- anti-Washington.
