An artist's rendering of California's bullet train. (Image: High-Speed Rail Authority)State rail officials are taking the glass-half-full view. Rather than lamenting the fact High Speed Rail is absent from the president’s infrastructure plan, they’re pointing to supportive statements from Biden and his team, and insisting there’s time before Congress irons out a final deal to claim a share for California’s fast train.
A Californian casts a ballot. (Photo: Vepar5 via Shutterstock)Democrats are traversing the 4th Assembly District, seeking support in the sprawling district that stretches from the Bay Area to Sacramento and even further north into the Sacramento Valley and North Coast mountains. The big money from Sacramento hasn’t dropped in yet and might not, depending on whether special interests feel they have a candidate they really want.
A California voter casts a ballot. (Photo: Vepar5)One thing about California’s lineup of looming ballot propositions: You can’t say they aren’t interesting. From school bonds to the environment to condoms to drugs to plastic bags, and more, voters already are set to vote on seven propositions on the November ballot. And many more are in the wings.
Voters in Los Angeles casting their ballots on election day. (Photo: Joseph Sohm)Bottled water, immigration, condoms, hospital fees, plastic bags, statehood, alimony – those are just a smattering of the issues on, or trying to get on, California’s 2016 statewide ballot. There are 36 proposed initiatives that are either awaiting review in the Attorney General’s Office or are being shopped around California’s 58 counties for signatures.
California’s new online insurance marketplace signed up 31,000 customers in the first month it was open for business and another 18,000 in the first two weeks of November. That’s less than 1 percent of the number of people without insurance in the state, but California, through Nov. 2, still accounted for more than a third of those who signed up for insurance nationwide under the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature program to overhaul the health insurance industry.