President Obama has put forward an ambitious, wide-ranging $476 billion program to fund transportation for six years. He says it can be paid for with the “peace dividend” from ramping down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The Senate and House are currently debating their own much smaller transportation bills and are currently ignoring the president’s plan.  But, all of this can and will probably change.

When Governor Jerry Brown delivered his remarks on February 11 to the State Democratic Convention, he touched on what he called “this whole standardized testing business” in California’s public schools, and told the delegates that the state might already have “too much of a good thing”.

Amid the heated rhetoric of a presidential election year, President Barack Obama's latest federal budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2013 (which starts on October 1, 2012) is already eliciting strong reactions from both sides of the partisan divide and foreshadowing a big, politically-charged fight over taxes and spending.

Voter registration systems in the United States are in need of serious reform. According to a new report from the Pew Center on the States, the voter registration process in states across the country is “plagued with errors and inefficiencies that waste taxpayer dollars, undermine voter confidence, and fuel partisan disputes over the integrity of our elections.”

President Obama's fiscal year 2013 budget request was sent to Congress this week. In it are some suggestions for the 2012 Farm Bill that, if enacted, could adversely affect California's small to medium-size family farms.