State Politics

January 27 wasn’t a banner day for appellants at the California Supreme Court.

Most media attention was focused on the state Republican Party failing to convince any members of the court to toss out district maps for the 40-member Senate drawn by the California Redistricting Commission prior to a determination of whether the GOP’s referendum to disqualify the commission’s effotrts would qualify for the ballot. Republicans worry the new district lines could give Democrats a two-thirds majority in the upper house.

In its 92-page ruling, the court said it wouldn’t ditch the districts drawn by the commission before it’s [....]

On January 25, the United States Department of Agriculture issued the first updated nutrition standards for schools in 15 years.

The standards clock in at 280 pages and allow, among other things, schools in American Samoa, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands to serve starchy vegetables like yams, plantains or sweet potatoes to meet the new grain/bread rules.

Generally, the rules require more fruits, vegetables and whole grains. More fat-free and low-fat milk. Less salt, saturated fat and trans fat.

According to the  USDA, “these improvements to the school meal programs, largely based on recommendations made by the Institute of Medicine of [....]

By Lev Grossman 

For every minute that passes in real time, 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.

You can turn that number over in your mind as much as you want; at no point will it stop being incredible. Sixty hours every minute. That’s five months of video every hour. That’s 10 years of video every day. More video is uploaded to YouTube every month than has been broadcast by the three big TV networks in the past 60 years. And the pace is accelerating: last year the rate was only 48 hours per minute. William Blake once wrote something about seeing [....]

Lots of folks have lots to say about Gov. Jerry Brown’s January 18 State of the State speech, which, certainly seemed to generate more comments than the content warranted.

(Lamentably, none of these myriad statements note that the arguable highlight of the speech was use of the adjective “dystopian” in the sixth paragraph to define a certain brand of journalists the governor believes exists.)

There was a canned response, apparently filmed the day before Brown’s speech was presented, by Senate GOP leader Bob Huff of Rancho Cucamonga and Assembly GOP leader Connie Conway of Visalia.

Speaking directly to the [....]