Caltrain is a commuter rail line serving the San Francisco Peninsula and Santa Clara Valley. It is operated by Amtrak, funded by local and regional governmental entities, and runs from Gilroy north to downtown San Francisco. It is heavily used by commuters to get to work, and connects to BART and other major transportation lines, as well as San Francisco Airport and sporting events.

In January 2002, detentions at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan began.  With a reputation worse than Guantanamo Bay, President Obama continues to oversee its operations.  Today, the number of detainees at Bagram has climbed to 800, a number greater than its better known Cuba counterpart at its height.  The fact is, while the number at Guantanamo diminishes slowly, the numbe

California's new early release program, authorized by Senate Bill 18, will result in the early release of over 6,000 prison inmates classified as "low-risk" offenders. Proponents argue that the new program will save the state hundreds of millions, but it still raises the perennial question when it comes to the state's prison policy: how safe is safe enough for Californians?

According to three Winston Group telephone surveys, 57% of Tea Party supporters are Republicans, while 41% are Democrats and Independents.  Winston Group, a Republican leaning firm, utilized three surveys, each consisting of 1,000 registered voters, between December and February to accumulate the relevant data on the burgeoning grassroots movement.

Here are some of the other pertinent highlights:

Nonpartisan, or 'decline to state', voters represent the fastest growing segment of California's electorate.  Generally speaking, these independents are highly educated, fiscally conservative, and socially moderate. Not tied to either parisan ideology, independent voters have supported both Democrats and Republicans in the golden state, and because of their rapidly growing influence, both major parties are mounting more serious efforts to win their critical votes.

Receiving little press attention over the Easter weekend, filings with the Security and Exchange Commission on April 2 revealed that WellPoint Inc.

The race is on to find a new representative for the 37th District in Riverside. Former state senator John Benoit relinquished his position in late 2009 in order to swap leadership roles, and become a member of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors instead. The Republican Benoit left a Southern California vacuum, which a number of candidates have actively been jockeying for. One of the candidates is Russ Bogh, a former representative of the 65th District of the California Assembly, and a longtime businessman.

With prospects for bipartisanship looking increasingly thin in the present political era, a surprising exception has arrived on the scene, bearing the best of fiscal reforms culled from both parties – and perhaps most significantly, the bill features a radical departure from previous action on the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).

To better assess many of California's problems and some possible solutions, the following is from an interview I conducted this week with former New Mexico Governor, Gary Johnson.

When he ran for Governor of New Mexico as a Republican in the early 1990s, Gary Johnson was a long-shot, political outsider- a self-made, small business owner who wanted to apply business-like pragmatism to solve the state's problems.

Voyeurs and strippers and scandal, oh my! This past week’s scoop de jure was that Republican National Committee staffers had paid for party officials at a club in which most strict conservatives would not be caught dead.