Are the political reforms that Californians approved having an effect? Increasingly the answer seems to be yes.

The latest example was a special election for the vacant 7th Senate District in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. It pitted what the San Francisco Chronicle's John Diaz called "Centrist Democrat Steve Glazer over the more doctrinaire (liberal) Susan Bonilla."

It’s the 21st century; we may not have flying cars, yet, but the technological advances we have made over the past 25 years are astonishing. Where were you 25 years ago, and did you ever think you would have everything you ever wanted to know at your fingertips? It wasn’t always easy and it wasn’t always perfect, but we have more education, communication, and entertainment than ever before.

We Californians are to blame when it comes to our water shortage -- but ultimately for reasons most of us never contemplate.

The problem is our willingness to cede to single-party control in our state. Regardless of which side of the aisle you purport to stand on, putting all our water through one filter is proving to be disastrous for a multitude of reasons.

Some Republican presidential candidates are facing a serious problem: they may be denied access to some debates during the primary election season.

The 2016 GOP presidential field is going to be huge, and it is going to feature current and former governors, senators, entrepreneurs, and even a retired neurosurgeon. The problem? There are simply going to be too many candidates to fit on one stage.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected. -- G. K. Chesterton

The 2016 U.S. presidential race is shaping up to appear as how G.K. Chesterton saw the world in 1924 -- with progressives all too willing to create new mistakes, while conservatives cling to the mistakes of the past.