SACRAMENTO, CALIF. — Both houses of the California Legislature gathered Monday to conduct the swearing in ceremony of the 69th Speaker of the California State Assembly, Assemblywoman Toni Atkins (D- San Diego). Atkins made history as the first LGBT woman to be elected to serve as Speaker and is only the third woman to hold the leadership position in California's history. She was first elected to the Legislature in 2010 and has served as majority leader since 2012.

It is a midterm election year, which means voter turnout is likely to be lower than a presidential election year, but there is a chance Americans could see record-low turnouts nationwide as enthusiasm among voters has dropped sharply in the last two years. In fact, according to a recent survey, enthusiasm among American voters has dropped to a 20-year low.

Service generals and former acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Christine Fox testified before a Senate panel in February that military members were ok with the proposed budget cuts to pay and benefits in favor of increasing training and outfitting expenditures.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NbDOpx4g70

The Approval Voting Primary Act in Oregon has cleared a major hurdle which could allow Unified Primaries to be put before Oregon voters later this year. With the May 8 approval of the ballot title by the Oregon Supreme Court, the secretary of state will begin giving out the petition forms within the week. A total of 87,213 signatures from registered voters by July 3 will be necessary in order to get the measure on the ballot.

CNN asks this morning what political significance we should attribute to the fact that a bearded Austrian drag queen won the Eurovision contest on the eve of renewed tensions between Russia and Ukraine, especially in light of Russia's recent anti-LGBT policies. I have considered this question carefully, and here is my answer:

On Friday, Kentucky U.S. Senator Rand Paul became one of the highest-profiled elected Republicans to speak out against voter identification laws.

"Everybody's gone completely crazy on this voter ID thing. . . . I think it's wrong for Republicans to go too crazy on this issue because it's offending people," Paul said at a gathering of black pastors in Memphis, Tennessee.

In a precedent setting case, a Florida court has approved a settlement against Avmed for a data loss. The decision was handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th District of Florida.

Thomas Piketty, a French economist trained at MIT and a professor at the Paris School of Economics, recently published a book two decades in the making, titled Capital in the 21st Century. The book has gone viral the old-fashioned way; the publishing house in Harvard is clean out of copies and is frantically printing more, and Amazon’s limitless warehouses are out of stock, too.

On Tuesday, June 3, San Diego voters will weigh in on Propositions B and C -- a set of community plan updates for Barrio Logan already passed by the San Diego City Council last year.