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."

U.S. senator and 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart Tuesday to discuss the PATRIOT Act, as well as other topics. Last week, Paul stood on the Senate floor for nearly 11 hours to discuss his objection to renewing controversial provisions in the PATRIOT Act, something that has set him apart from many of his Republican colleagues.

Last week, the General Assembly in North Carolina sent a bill (HB 405) to the desk of Governor Pat McCrory that is directed at thwarting undercover investigations that expose businesses' wrongdoing.

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.

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.

In February 2015, Edwin Gomes became the first candidate running solely on the Working Families Party (WFP) line to win a seat in a state legislature. Gomes beat out four other candidates in a special election to represent Connecticut’s 23rd senate district.

Ever since the days of the Roman republic, when Quintus Tullius Cicero wrote a brief work titled “Little Handbook on Electioneering” for his brother Marcus, then a candidate for consul in Rome, political consultants have had a heavy presence in campaigns for public office.

Memorial Day's roots can be informally traced back to May 1868, first known as Decoration Day. The holiday was meant to be a time for Americans to consider the sacrifice of those who died in the Civil War, also as a day of remembrance and national unity. Bear in mind, then-president Lincoln was assassinated just a few years earlier in 1865. Understandably, the late 1860s was a time when national unity was sorely needed.