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With only hours to spare, Gov. Jerry Brown headed off what was sure to be a multimillion-dollar initiative battle and signed legislation boosting the rights of consumers over how internet companies use their personal data. Brown’s signing Thursday afternoon came after a scramble in the Legislature to get the measure passed in the face of a tight deadline.
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With the close of the 2018 primary election cycle, we get another chance to see how campaigns have evolved under California’s top-two open primary system. The most noteworthy change appears to be the manner by which campaigns are extending their reach across the partisan aisle. But they are not doing it in the way that the authors of the Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act, which took effect in 2011, intended.
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Deborah Kratter sat in her Half Moon Bay home, explaining her decision to move to Washington state to live, and then die with life-ending medication alongside family members when her terminal pancreatic cancer worsens. “My gosh, when the time comes and you can’t be who you are … I don’t see why you should have to lie in a bed and wait to die,” Kratter said.
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It’s an art form that no one wants to get really, really good at. Perhaps that’s because no one wants to practice it. It starts with “…a few minutes ago, I telephoned…” You guessed it. Concession speeches.
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Stem cell researchers rarely have a chance to talk directly about their work to thousands of people at a time, including those in the farthest reaches of the globe. But Jeanne Loring at the Scripps Research Institute did it last week. The California stem cell agency did it last month with Stanford researcher Gary Steinberg. And it could well be that the technique that they used will emerge as a critical tool in the effort to stave off the death of the $3 billion, stem cell program.
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The once-a-decade national census is still nearly two years away but it’s already generating heated discussion. Among the myriad concerns raised so far is that this survey will be the first conducted in part online. People are also expressing alarm over the inclusion of a new citizenship question, the wording for questions on race and ethnicity and the way prisoners are counted.
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In a closely watched election contest, San Francisco voters have upheld a first-in-the-nation ban on the sale of menthol cigarettes and other flavored tobacco products, overwhelmingly rejecting an $11.6 million campaign by R.J. Reynolds to scuttle the law. San Francisco officials last June approved the ban but a petition drive funded by Reynolds, the maker of the top-selling menthol brand, Newport, forced the issue onto yesterday’s ballot.
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OPINION: Gov. Jerry Brown is trying to revamp the way funding for the state’s 114 community colleges is determined, which is smart since the current practice of funding schools in various regions of the state based almost entirely on enrollment does not do the areas with the highest need students any good.
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Before Election Day, fewer than one in every five California voters have cast their ballots. About 11.8 primary election million ballots were mailed during the past month — 5.3 million to Democrats and about 3.1 million to Republicans, according to figures compiled by Political Data, a firm that markets campaign information.
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The conventional wisdom in Sacramento is that high-dollar borrowing has a better chance of winning voter approval if the economy is strong. That thinking will be tested Tuesday. Proposition 68 would provide $4.1 billion for natural resources, state parks and water projects. It is backed by Democrats and their allies, and opposed by anti-tax groups.
An illustration of data privacy and the internet. <i(Image: Green Tech, via Shutterstock) 
