Imagine you go to the grocery store and find long lines at the checkout. A clerk approaches and says, "You can wait in line, or if you're willing to pay four times more, we can get you out right away."
Barack Obama was right to call for closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay when he first became president. Four years on, his cause is even stronger.
Fund-raising for the opening bash planned for the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge -- scheduled for the Labor Day weekend -- has been suspended. That's the clearest indication yet that the new span's cracked bolts and other problems pose serious risks to a safe opening of this bridge.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein hit a bull's-eye when she said last week that Yosemite National Park's "popularity is also its greatest challenge."
How do you measure success of California's community colleges, which try to be so many things to so many people?
Battling Jerry "Bulldog" Brown is back, and with the right cause. He vowed Wednesday "to fight with everything I have and whatever we have to bring to bear" to overhaul what his budget calls the state's "overly complex, administratively costly and inequitably distributed" school funding system.
When President Barack Obama failed to respond to the nation's mortgage crisis with effective programs early in his first term, the results were devastating for thousands of San Joaquin Valley homeowners.
After a year-and-a-half under public safety realignment, counties are deep into preparing plans for 2013-14. Have they done better or worse than the state in reducing re-offense rates for those convicted of nonviolent, nonserious, non-sex offenses? The jury is still out, primarily because legislators and the governor failed to include statewide collection of data. That needs to change.
As a country, we have not yet accepted that in the understandable fear and anger after Sept. 11, suspected terrorists were tortured. An independent review released last week can be an important step to reach that truth -- and to make sure it never happens again.
Nevada's practice of busing patients with mental illness to all corners of the country is reprehensible. The response is not much better.
Gov. Jerry Brown has some explaining to do about his repeated promises to bring clean, safe drinking water to people in California's rural communities.
Indian gambling in California has exploded well beyond the "modest increase" voters were promised when they approved casino gambling just 13 years ago.
Raise your hand if you're happy this week is over. We agree. It's been a long one. Here are a few thoughts on some good news that occurred in the midst of all the horrific stuff and then a few numbers of note:
A modest, common-sense expansion of background checks for gun buyers was blocked Wednesday by a minority of U.S. senators who caved to pressure from the gun lobby and put their own political futures ahead of the country's best interests. All the measure proposed to do is extend current background checks -- an important tool to keep guns away from criminals and the mentally ill -- to cover purchases online and at gun shows.
Where does nature end and human ingenuity start? And what type of "discoveries" are truly deserving of patent protection? Those two important questions now rest in the lap of the U.S. Supreme Court.
