A California voter initiative to legalize marijuana has officially qualified for the November ballot. From the web site Ballotpedia:

Supporters of legalization are focusing on the benefits they say would flow to the state from taxing marijuana; when marijuana is illegal, it is not taxed. If it was legal, the government would be able to collect [...]

Of all the dysfunctional state governments, California’s may be at the top. California has a $20 billion budget deficit, but the state cannot raise taxes or pass a budget without a 2/3 majority vote in the state legislature. That law was enshrined in the state constitution in 1978 through Proposition 13, which also capped property [...]

On Thursday, thousands of California students protested the severe budget cuts to education at all levels that have been enacted due to the state’s fiscal crisis. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The historic day of demonstrations in the Bay Area and beyond was largely peaceful, with students and others carrying signs like “Chop from the [...]

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Oakland, California sits right across the Bay from San Francisco. The city has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state at an official 16.3% and, by some accounts, sits at No. 3 in the entire country in terms of crime. The murder rate per capita is 3.5 times the national average.
So it’s [...]

It’s one thing to read the Twitter feed from yesterday’s nasty student protest at the University of California Regents meeting at UCLA, it’s another to see the video. This was posted by a group called the National Inflation Association. Student groups are angry at an expected 32% hike in UC tuition in response to the [...]

This is pretty dramatic. The University of California Office of the Student Regent is Twittering the UC Regents meeting in which the University system’s overseers are expected to vote for a tuition hike. As noted in our last post, students have called for a three-day strike to protest the increase.
Last Tweet, 26 minutes ago: [...]

California is suffering a severe budget crisis, and the state university system is taking its lumps. The University of California Regents are meeting over the next three days to vote on student fee hikes to cover budget shortfalls.
From today’s San Francisco Chronicle:
Meeting in Los Angeles, the regents are expected to approve a [...]