JAN. 5, 2012 By JOHN SEILER Gov. Jerry Brown today released a budget proposal that reaffirmed his fealty to the public-employee unions. It's for fiscal year 2012-13, which begins on July 1, 2012. The budget would rise to $92.5 billion from the $85 billion of the previous year, fiscal 2011-1...

JAN. 5, 2012 By KATY GRIMES As work in the California Assembly began for 2012, on Wednesday the festive mood quickly was quashed. In the first committee hearing of the New Year, the Assembly Labor and Employment Committee killed two bills by Assemblywoman Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield,  AB 98...

Commentary JAN. 4, 2012 By JOHN SEILER It sounds like a sequel to a Clint Eastwood movie: The Beautiful, the Bad and the Ugly." The beautiful is Kim Kardashian. The bad are the tax increasers. And the ugly is the tax increase itself. I don't know if Kim reads our Web site. Maybe someb...

JAN. 1, 2012 By WAYNE LUSVARDI Two members of the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors, Larry Ruhstaller and Ken Vogel, have recently contended in an opinion piece in the Tracy Press that lack of freshwater inflows and outflows are the “clear cause of the Sacramento Delta’s decline.” ...