April 23, 2012 By Steven Greenhut SACRAMENTO -- A Sacramento area family is mourning the death of their mentally disabled son, who was shot to death by a sheriff's deputy after the family had called the sheriff's department for help in restraining him. Newspaper accounts suggest the deputy ord...

April 16, 2012 By Steven Greenhut SACRAMENTO -- Americans suffer under the delusion that transportation systems are just that -- systems for transporting people from one destination to another. What most of us fail to recognize is that the politicians, activists and planners who play the great...

April 9, 2012 By Steven Greenhut SACRAMENTO -- Some Oakland residents are furious that on the same day a gunman murdered seven people this week at the private Oikos University in the city, SWAT teams raided a different educational institution less than a mile away, where only peaceful activit...

April 2, 2012 By Steven Greenhut SACRAMENTO -- California's public schools continue to lay off teachers, in a process that is as convoluted and illogical as one would expect in a bureaucratic system in which the needs of the students falls fairly low on the list of priorities. That's my takeaw...

March 26, 2012 Faced with rising water rates, some politicians and community activists in Southern California are revisiting a fundamental question that most of us thought had been answered by the collapse of the Soviet Union: Is government the most efficient provider of services? We know of t...