California Forum

Dawn and Leonard McCutcheon wouldn't be anywhere else than the front row when racing comes to Marysville.

What's a chemical company to do?

The Bee has published a front page story about community efforts to keep the Sacramento Kings in town about 40 times this year.

Nevada's practice of busing patients with mental illness to all corners of the country is reprehensible. The response is not much better.

Sacramento's future vitality isn't only about the Kings and a new downtown arena. It's also about a rich cultural scene and civic assets such as the Community Center Theater, the Crocker Art Museum and B Street Theatre.

Growing up in the shadow of the '60s, a remarkable event occurred in my otherwise unremarkable hometown of Modesto – a little group called Ecology Action created the nation's first-ever curbside recycling program.

Imagine that you're a sea turtle swimming off the coast of California. You see something that, to your eyes, looks like a jellyfish – a welcome sight, given your hunger. As you open your mouth, you realize, too late, that what you thought was dinner is, in fact, the remnants of a plastic bag. The plastic settles in your stomach, never to digest, telling your body that you're full. Soon, you'll starve and die.

We're watching television. We can't seem to turn it off. We want information, insight, words that will help make sense of something frightening and mysterious. Words are being thrown around, but the more they are used, the more layered and elusive their meanings become.

Is there nobody who can tell Ted Cruz to shut up?

With the truly horrific bomb attack at the Boston Marathon came heartfelt responses from America's editorial cartoonists. I can tell you, if poorly handled, your work becomes self-parodying and trite. Done well, strong cartoons can help create a small moment of catharsis for readers.

Hopes that North Korea's new, young leader Kim Jong Un might usher in a new era of openness and reform in that erratic, repressive country now seem a distant mirage. It disappeared with North Korea's detonation of a nuclear device underground in February.

California has an extraordinary opportunity to make its water supplies safer and more secure. We can avoid the devastating economic impacts of a natural disaster. We can restore the ecological health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and enhance Delta communities. We are, at last, positioned to achieve these significant benefits through the Bay Delta Conservation Plan.

A recent conversation made me realize that something critical was missing from the efforts to "fix" the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

To attract tourist dollars, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval unveiled a cheery little ad that displays the Silver State's sunny side and is set against a toe-tapping version of "Don't Fence Me In," the sort of tune that can worm its way into your head.

It is now alarmingly clear that President Barack Obama and U.S. officials are secretly conducting a drone war that goes far beyond what they have said are its aims. A primary weapon in the war on terror is being used to kill too many people, including civilians, who pose no real threat to Americans.

Yosemite National Park would not be the protected and beloved place it is today without champions. These include John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, journalist Robert Underwood Johnson, painters such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Hill and photographers such as Ansel Adams.

Every city has its anti-everything people, and nearly every anti-everything person eventually latches on to traffic as a reason (sometimes as a valid concern and sometimes just a smokescreen) not to do something that is so clearly the right thing to do.

Two weeks ago I was sitting in my office at the Capitol strategizing on how to navigate legislation through the Assembly and Senate, then onto the governor's desk and into the law books. Today I am recovering in a bed at UC Davis Medical Center after the removal of a brain tumor.

The recent kerfuffle over a secret recording of Sen. Mitch McConnell's campaign strategy meeting, which focused on opposition research about a likely opponent, actress Ashley Judd, has divided observers into two groups.

A couple of warning sirens didn't go off, two Civil Air Patrol planes were grounded and one unfortunate business owner received telephone calls intended for NOAA's emergency weather line.

A sleeping girl kidnapped from her own room in the middle of the night. A known sex offender, arrested nearly two dozen times since last summer, was caught again near a field where children were Easter egg hunting. Suspects were arrested in a gang-related torture killing that could be the largest murder trial in Santa Barbara County history.

In a city where David's righteousness almost never beats Goliath's might, what Nicole Hockley and the other Sandy Hook families did to the gun lobby last week was nigh unto miraculous.

Trying to discern from hospital chargemasters what my father's private hospital room would have cost in California required an advanced university degree in Dante's Circles of Hell. Apparently, all that is missing from California's hospital rooms are taxi meters so that patients can track their pending bankruptcies.

Scores of readers had the pluck to suggest captions for this week's tunnel muck cartoon. But among three strong finalists, our judges decided that Jim Allan of Thornton had the winning entry.

Politics is the art of the possible. Jonathan Thomas, who chairs the oversight committee for California's stem cell institute, has taken important steps in reducing the potential for conflicts within this agency.