Tom Philp

3 weeks ago | sacbee.com | Tom Philp

California’s love-hate relationship with Elon Musk has hit a fork in the road, right along with his fast-collapsing bromance with President Donald Trump: Will the Republicans who have loved him and the Democrats who have loathed him make room for a change of heart? Maybe. This is either quite complicated, or not at all. And this split, yet again, is likely going to follow party lines.

3 weeks ago | sacbee.com | Tania Azhang |Tom Philp

About two-thirds of the way through my daughter’s commencement last week on a vast lawn at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undergraduate student body president Megha Vemuri went off script. She brought up the ongoing one-sided war in Gaza and criticized MIT for not doing more. And she used the word that divides the proverbial room — “genocide.”A staid ceremony suddenly turned acrimonious. Jewish students left their seats in search of their parents.

1 month ago | mercurynews.com | Tom Philp

One of Gavin Newsom’s first acts as governor was to start rebuilding California’s water system differently than his predecessor. Yet California’s regulatory system of analysis, permitting and litigation for big projects is leaving him nowhere close to an actual decision point, much less a podcast-worthy ribbon cutting, before his years in Sacramento are over.

1 month ago | dailygazette.com | Tom Philp

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1 month ago | mercurynews.com | Tom Philp

It is as if Proposition 36, the sentencing reform initiative overwhelmingly approved by voters in November, never happened. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest budget proposal continues to ignore Prop. 36’s call for expanded drug treatment opportunities for repeat drug users who seek to end their addiction as an alternative to a stiffer jail or prison sentence.