Columnist.
When then-Sen. Barack Obama visited the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board in 2008, I had one question for him: Which Democratic candidate for president would be best at keeping Iraq from imploding? "That would be me," Obama answered.
The latest CBS poll found that 59 percent of Americans view Arizona's SB1070, the immigration bill that allows Arizona to prosecute immigration violations, as "just right," while another 14 percent think the bill doesn't go far enough. So why does President Obama continue to hammer Arizona's law? And why did the State Department include a reference to the Arizona law in a report for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights on America's human rights record?
In 2005, Rep. John Salazar, D-Colo., sponsored the Stolen Valor Act that made it a federal crime to lie about receiving military medals or honors from the military. Breaking the law could lead to a fine and a sentence of six months. Lying about being awarded the Medal of Honor, a Purple Heart or other top honors could carry a prison sentence of up to one year.
The mission of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's Cordoba Initiative is not just to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center near ground zero, but also to build "interfaith tolerance and respect."
When 52 percent of California voters passed Proposition 8 in November 2008, Attorney General Jerry Brown said he would defend the measure during the inevitable appeals. Then, as is his fashion, Brown changed his mind.
Taxpayers don't look at taxes the way the people who spend the tax money do. Take the battle over the extension of the "Bush tax cuts." Americans to Washington: They were tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. If Washington allows all or parts of the "Bush tax cuts" to expire at the end of the year, the result won't be to not cut taxes, as Beltway lingo and President Obama suggest, but to raise taxes.
Prosecutors at the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone at The Hague interrupted the trial of former Liberian leader Charles Taylor last week with some comic relief. They put supermodel Naomi Campbell on the stand to tie Taylor to the trade of "blood diamonds."
Trust Republicans to go too far. They take a good idea -- such as the notion that the federal government should enforce immigration laws, and states should be able to help -- and then drive it into the fringes. Witness a Fox News interview in which Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., declared, "We should change our Constitution and say if you come here illegally, and you have a child, that child is automatically not a citizen."
There are two kinds of people in California politics: those who want Sacramento to ban plastic grocery bags and those who just want state pols to pass a budget. The budget is after all -- what? -- only 39 days late.
"Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license," federal Judge Vaughn Walker wrote. So one judge overturned a measure approved by 52 percent of California voters in 2008 and upheld by the California Supreme Court in a 6-1 ruling.
The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct -- also known as the House ethics committee -- issued a Statement of Alleged Violation last week to Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y. To sum it up, Rangel thought he could skirt the rules and get away with it. Earlier this year, the ethics committee admonished Rangel for taking corporate trips to the Caribbean in violation of House rules.
I am a veteran of the math wars. I was there in 1995 when the shiny new California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) test told graders to award a higher score to a student who incorrectly answered a math problem about planting trees -- but wrote an enthusiastic essay -- than to a student who got the answer right, but with no essay. The genius responsible for that math question explained that her goal was to present eighth-graders with "an intentionally ambiguous problem in which no one pattern can be considered the absolute answer." Gov. Pete Wilson's education czar, Maureen DiMarco, promptly dubbed new-new math "fuzzy crap."
The Obama administration had gone to federal court to kill Arizona's new illegal-immigration law, scheduled to go into effect on Thursday. The Department of Justice argues that enforcement of the Arizona law "is pre-empted by federal law and therefore violates the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution." Does this mean that if Team Obama prevails over Arizona, San Francisco and other sanctuary cities should prepare to go to court against the feds?
Today's question is: Why have both major candidates for California governor -- Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Meg Whitman -- failed to endorse the governor's authority to furlough state workers? How do you build a house without a hammer?
President Obama hailed the 60 U.S. senators who voted to extend federal unemployment benefits Tuesday -- without paying for the $34 billion tab -- for standing on the side of "working families." The measure, which had been blocked by Republicans, would distribute unemployment benefits to some 2.5 million recipients who have been out of work for 26 to 99 weeks. GOP Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine voted in favor of the measure. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., joined the GOP filibuster. The House is expected to pass the measure so that Obama can sign it.
