Timm Herdt

There will be many who will suggest that either this keyboard or its operator is defective, but the following sentence is intentional: The California Legislature had a productive year.

Late Tuesday morning, with the calendar running down on the final days of the legislative session, Assembly Speaker John Pérez took a few minutes to reflect on the job of being speaker, which he describes as "not a management job ...

An unexpected development seems to have happened on the way to the Great California Train Wreck. The locomotive has gotten itself back on the rails, and although it is not yet exactly speeding forward it has left a legion of ...

A week ago, I sat through a three-hour committee hearing in the State Capitol during which, as required by law, the panel reviewed and heard testimony on four propositions that will be on the November ballot.

Eliseo Medina, secretary-treasurer of SEIU International and widely regarded as one of the nation's most influential Latino leaders, was back in his home state last week to give a California lift to the national "Todos a Votar (Let's Vote)" campaign ...

Perhaps it's not the best time and place to contemplate mortality, but as you wait to board a flight at the airport in Sacramento you are likely to see an advertisement on the wall that will make you stop to ...

Judging from the "statement of purpose" they wrote for their initiative, the drafters of Proposition 29 felt fairly strongly that the money generated by their proposed cigarette tax would be spent to conduct cancer research only in California.

There is a chart on the California Department of Finance website, bookmarked on my computer, that for the last several years has been referenced regularly this time of year.

Back when the reformers who designed California's top-two primary were first promoting their idea, they asked us to imagine a system that would empower Republicans in Santa Monica and Democrats in Orange County.

Will Rogers' observation, a classic in American political folklore, has been proved true many times over the years. "I belong to no organized party," he said. "I'm a Democrat." But today in Ventura County that line rings hollow.

One of the rites of campaign season in California is the sounding of alarms to tell voters that one or more of the ballot initiatives they are about to decide isn't what it appears to be. Often, those alarms are ...

Voters in Thousand Oaks who have long memories must be very confused these days. Just two years ago, they were receiving hit pieces targeted at Supervisor Linda Parks that said her "priorities are too liberal for us." They screamed that ...

Steve Peace is a former Democratic lawmaker from San Diego, producer of the cult satire film "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes," and co-chairman of the Independent Voter Project.

There aren't many big ideas coming out of Sacramento these days, so it takes awhile for the magnitude of Assembly Speaker John Pérez' middle-class scholarship proposal to sink in.

Now that the presidential nominating contest has been settled, it's time to move on to the next phase on the 2012 political calendar: polling season.