SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Stu Spencer had certain guideposts he followed as California's premier political consultant for several decades.

Those guideposts helped elect actor Ronald Reagan California governor and, later, president, and also aided New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, President Ford, Gov. Pete Wilson and hundreds of lesser known ...Read more

Pete Hegseth’s qualifications to serve as the next secretary of defense are so scant that when Democratic senators called them into question during his confirmation hearing last week, a Republican senator rose to Hegseth’s defense by pointing out that the only real qualification is that the secretary be a civilian. Check.

But why is ...Read more

I write about artificial intelligence a lot, and lately I have begun to think of myself as writing for AI as well. If you are a writer — and if you’ve ever posted on social media, you are — I suggest you do the same. Which is to say: Consider the AIs as part of your audience. Because they are already reading your words and listening to ...Read more

It’s bad news — though unsurprising — that following the passage of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s most recent city budget, S&P downgraded the city’s credit rating to BBB.

Bad policy decisions trigger bad outcomes, and ratings agencies serve as harbingers of these consequences, good or bad. This marks the first ratings downgrade since May ...Read more

The biggest obstacle to the expansion of renewable energy is not Donald Trump. It’s the need for improvements to the U.S. electric grid.

Connecting renewable energy sources to the grid is a lengthy and expensive process. Right now, a whopping 2,600 gigawatts of energy projects — twice the nation’s total generation capacity — sit in the ...Read more

By most measures, Donald Trump is inheriting a booming economy. Under President Joe Biden’s administration, we’ve enjoyed historically low unemployment and added nearly 1 million manufacturing jobs. Real wage growth has outpaced its rate under Trump. Gross domestic product growth is strong, and COVID-19-related inflation has fallen below 3%....Read more

Presidents do not always have a profound effect on architectural design, but Donald Trump came to office in 2017 as a second-generation real estate developer with a substantial portfolio of buildings to his credit. Trump referred to himself in the first year of his first term as the “builder president,” which sounded plausible at the time, ...Read more

A defendant standing before a judge and jury with her life in the balance should have confidence that the only motivation in the courtroom is the pursuit of justice.

The person on trial should be certain conviction or exoneration will be decided solely by the facts presented, and not by a public relations campaign aimed at swaying public ...Read more

Just before Christmas, a family arrived at the airport exhausted from a multiday trip from Pakistan to Cincinnati, Ohio. They faced hundreds of unknowns and as many fears. What would they find in this new country? Would their children be safe? Would they be alone?

Their fears were eased as they were greeted with a decorated “Welcome” sign ...Read more

The three popular pillars of Donald Trump’s electoral success have been grievances about immigrants, unfair trade practices by other countries, and American “forever wars” overseas.

The last one of these beefs was legitimate and fueled by the interventionist U.S. superpower’s major quagmires or debacles in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos...Read more

When scientists constructed a puzzle-solving task and pitted teams of people against teams of ants, the insects sometimes proved to be the smarter species. That’s not to denigrate human intelligence — ants are smart, and their feats of coordinated activity are rare in nature.

Still, it is fair to say the results were humbling and that ants ...Read more

In an updated projection, the Congressional Budget Office moved up its estimate for when deaths will outpace births, putting that event horizon only eight years away, in 2033. That would mean a country suffering from the particular malaise that’s afflicted Japan, Norway, the U.K. and elsewhere: an aging population with a dwindling worker base,...Read more

When word came Wednesday that a deal had been reached that would provide a pathway for the release of the 98 hostages still held by terrorists in Gaza, I felt relieved, but I could not yet celebrate.

Of course, I will enthusiastically welcome the return of the hostages and the end of the torture they have endured over the last 15 months. But ...Read more

Despite failing to win a second term that he badly wanted, Joe Biden’s time in the White House had some very real accomplishments and should not be measured as a failed presidency.

While those minority of U.S. presidents who only served a single term are deemed losers, having been rejected by voters, Biden had major legislative achievements, ...Read more

For years, the Food and Drug Administration has taken up arms against clinics hawking unproven and ineffective stem cell treatments to desperate patients looking for cures of intractable diseases and conditions such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis and even erectile dysfunction.

As the FDA has repeatedly cautioned, there is no ...Read more

Fire has always played a crucial role in Southern California’s ecosystem, which features dry conditions and strong, hot desert winds called the Santa Anas, which blow from the east each winter. Many native plants require periodic burning to germinate, which is why, historically, many Native American tribes in California set “cultural fires�...Read more

One of the longest, most technical and, as it turns out, most inconsequential public-policy debates of the 21st-century was about net neutrality. Now that a federal appeals court has effectively ended the debate by striking down the FCC’s net neutrality rules, it’s worth asking what we’ve learned.

If you have forgotten the sequence of ...Read more

Last Wednesday morning, after a singularly terrifying night of fire in Los Angeles, people miles away from Altadena or Pacific Palisades discovered more than ash in their backyards. The pages of books, some almost entirely blackened and illegible, others serrated and singed by flame from which fragments of text emerged, had been ripped, I ...Read more