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Today, the Assembly Public Safety Committee will take up AB 144, legislation introduced by Anthony Portantino (D-Pasadena) to ban the open carry of a handgun in the state of California. The controversial legislation has reinvigorated the decades-long debate over the effects of gun legislation on public safety. Writing Monday at the California Progress Report, Dr. Dallas Stout, President of the California Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, argued that open carry laws actually make Californi

As Los Angeles commuters were making their way home Monday evening they were treated to a spectacular site.  Around sunset, a large missile emerged from the Pacific Ocean north of Catalina Island and about 35 miles out to sea and rocketed skywards. A local station's traffic helicopter captured a brief video of the missile, with a substantial contrail, disappearing into the stratosphere, en route to Asia. At this point in time, these are the only facts we, the American public, know. Amazingly en

On July 1, the federal government and dozens of states set up temporary “high-risk” health insurance pools for people denied health insurance due to so-called pre-existing conditions. These pools were one of the major provisions included in federal health care reform signed into law early this year. However, this is only a temporary fix intended to provide health insurance to individuals without coverage until the law goes fully into effect in 2014, when insurance companies will no longer be ab

Watching the awe-inspiring television images from the recent U.S. Open golf tournament at Pebble Beach, I began to envision the Monterey Peninsula marred with splotches of oil, and the famed golf course closed as the result of a drilling accident.  Then, I began to imagine the outrage that such an incident would trigger here in California and across the country, and wondered how it would compare with the response to the BP disaster in the Gulf Coast. Here’s the difference: The images of Pebble

Santa Barbara environmentalists who have been fighting offshore oil drilling for more than 40 years appeared to have gained a new ally when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced this week that he would withdraw his support for a proposal to mine oil from Tranquillon Ridge because the big spill off the Louisiana Coast couldn’t be ignored. But, in fact, the leading environmental organization in the area – the Environmental Defense Center (EDC) – is deeply disappointed in the Governor’s decisi

On April 20, when an explosion hit the Deepwater Horizon oil rig just off the Louisiana coast, the repercussions might have crashed like a tidal wave on the far off shores of Santa Barbara – home of one of the worst oil rig disasters ever, back in 1969. But there was little or no outcry among the coastal city’s eco-activists such as the Environmental Defense Center (EDC) and Get Oil Out! (GOO) – two prime movers in cleaning up the beaches and fending off further drilling in the area. In fact,

With the June election fast approaching, political analysts both in and outside California are scrambling to offer their opinions on the contentious “Top Two Open Primary”. While the battle lines remain more or less the same in terms of allies and foes, this increased barrage of press coverage has allowed for new evidence to come to light regarding the efficacy of the system, especially where previous statewide efforts at implementing it are concerned. Moreover, these various editorial position

A significant – and often overlooked -- result of what’s been dubbed the Great Recession is that in just over half of the 50 states, the programs that pay unemployment insurance to workers who’ve lost their jobs are insolvent, leading states to borrow more than $39 billion from the federal government to keep writing checks. California, which has the largest unemployment program in the country, has the dubious distinction of leading 34 other states and the Virgin Islands in borrowing:  $8.5 bil

This month there has been little good news for the California public school system.  On March 4, California got word that the state’s bid for a piece of over $4 billion of the federal stimulus dollars available to improve education for the poorest students, the program known as Race to the Top, was denied.  Instead, fifteen states including New York, Pennsylvania and Louisiana as well as the District of Columbia were selected in the first round of Race to the Top dollars. California won’t know

Given the oft-bemoaned existence of partisanship in California politics, it is no surprise that imaginative remedies are frequently proposed. The standard anti-partisan argument goes that, because political parties are naturally polarized and ill-disposed to play well with each other, some sort of check must be placed on their fanatical opposition so as to permit the occasional bit of government action to pass muster. In California, this argument becomes especially popular in the case of taxatio