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As a doctor, I believe in the science underlying vaccination, and what Jonas Salk, Edward Jenner and others in this field contributed to our understanding of how immunization works. But I am steadfastly against Senate Bill 276 because it is trying to fix a problem that does not exist. Vaccination rates for children in California are above levels for ”community immunity.” According to California Department of Public Health, 99.3 percent do not even have medical exemptions. Further, over 97 perc

Lulu Friesdat is an Emmy award-winning journalist and filmmaker whose election security investigations have received over 4 million views on Now This and been featured on Politico, MSN.com, the Young Turks, The Hollywood Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, Salon, Truthout, AlterNet and many other media outlets. She joins T.J. O’Hara to discuss SMART Elections, a new, non-partisan election integrity watch guard organization. There are currently four main sectors in the election reform movem

The biggest story happening right now nationwide that is not getting any attention from the mainstream media are the campaigns, ballot proposals, signature drives, and legislative efforts going on RIGHT NOW to give voters an election system that protects their right to a meaningful and equal vote in the taxpayer-funded election process -- from the primary to the general election. I’ve covered 10 of the biggest reform organizations to watch in 2020, whose mission it is to give voters a better el

For the last several years, I’ve been spending time in rural Wisconsin in a small farmhouse set on 130 heavily-wooded acres on County Road T, Polk County. This is the northwestern Wisconsin of hardscrabble dairy farming, bitter winters and luminous springs. I’ve come here because my companion — a Minnesota-born outdoorsman of Swedish extraction who lived much of his adult life in Alaska and wears a thin fleece jacket in the cold while I layer up in Canadian Goose — inherited this property from

At least 26 million voters in the United States were denied the freedom to vote in the 2016 presidential primary elections. A large portion of these voters were independents. I am assuming that a similar problem occurred in the 2018 mid-term elections. It is time to create a new primary election system. This undemocratic process has continued for far too long. It is time that we give ownership of the election process back to the American people. Why should American taxpayers continue to pay fo

On Page D1, April 14, in the Portland Press Herald, the headline on Jim Fossel’s column states: “Simplification of tax code would achieve bipartisan goals.” The other, on Brian Klaas’ commentary, reads: “Can America survive scandal overload?” First, may We the People have a tax code that meets America’s goals, not bipartisan ones. Second, we live in the Age of Nixon-Like Scandals, but the 2020 election is not, in Klaas’ words, “our last” or first “line of defense.” It’s a party-directed offens

An Update on the Lindbergh Intermodal Transportation Center (ITC) Option By Carl Nettleton The San Diego Association of Government’s (SANDAG) leadership in developing a proposed Grand Central Station to link San Diego International Airport with regional ground transportation modes is an important initiative whose time is long overdue. The options for the Grand Central Station concept have been reduced to the Navy’s SPAWAR facility and a location called the Intermodal Transportation Center, bot

Seven score and sixteen years ago, President Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most memorable speeches in all of human history in his Gettysburg Address, though he wrongly presumed the world would not “long remember what we say here.” His triumph was to clarify just what was at stake in such a devastating internal war that killed around 750,000 Americans. “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and

With politics in a permanent state of chaos, we might have to look outside the political sphere to be grounded politically. At least I do. Sports is a good place to turn -- real sports, not the blood sport of partisanship and governance. Like a lot of people, I spent my Sunday night glued to the television. Not to watch 60 Minutes and its pompous narrative of “what Americans should be concerned about.” Heaven forbid. But to watch the women’s basketball teams of Notre Dame and Baylor battle it o

The 2016 presidential primaries in California didn’t go smoothly. The election was marred by widespread confusion and frustration as millions of voters had to navigate a complex and restrictive semi-closed primary process. As a result, they were completely disenfranchised by the process. The Independent Voter Project had anticipated this issue, and offered legislative solutions in 2015 and 2016, but neither the legislature nor the secretary of state took up the cause. As a result, millions of