New America in California: Latest Articles

Health-care cooperatives have gotten a bad rap. But if properly designed, they could offer quite a lot to both the left and the right, as well as to anyone interested in expanding health-care coverage and reducing costs.

Once a month a tractor-trailer rolls up to the Family Early Learning Center, a one-room preschool in East San Jose, Calif., that doubles as a food pantry for poor families with young kids. On a bright Friday in August, a dozen or so women from the neighborhood gathered for the truck's arrival. Volunteers as well as customers, they had come to help unload the monthly delivery of groceries from the local food bank.

Want to understand why California is such a political and budgetary mess? Consider the case of Roman Polanski.

In a strange way, the attempt by Los Angeles County prosecutors to arrest, extradite, and presumably send the French-Polish film director to prison for a 30-year-old crime-having sex with an unwilling 13 year old-offers a clear example of this state's governing myopia.

Just about any celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 - October 15) will highlight the diversity among Hispanics.

They come from different parts of the Spanish-speaking world, have settled in various areas of the United States, have distinctive customs and come in all shapes and colors.

But an often overlooked difference among Hispanics relates to how many generations back they trace their roots in U.S. history.

Where is Osama bin Laden when we need him? Don't get me wrong; in no way do I wish death and destruction on our country. But as I listen to the increasingly vitriolic and even seditious rhetoric coming from the political right, I can't help thinking that we need a threatening external enemy to help us cohere as a nation -- a more looming threat than the almost vanished Al Qaeda leader or even his recently arrested alleged minion from Denver.