Viewpoints

During the 15 months the wolf known as OR7 has crisscrossed the Oregon-California border, the news from his birthplace back in Eastern Oregon has shaken the boots off some of those holding most tightly to deeply rooted misperceptions about the ability of wolves to coexist on the landscape with the rest of us.

The scene at the U.S. Supreme Court recently is a sure reminder that many people see the dispute over same-sex marriage rights as the most important civil rights cases of this generation. Yet, not everyone sees the effort to secure marriage equality as a major civil rights struggle. Among this group may well be a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court.

The striking juxtaposition of the preternaturally perfect Angelina Jolie, waiflike and wispy in a ghostly gown, and the scrappy Pakistani schoolgirl Malala, her face cruelly misshapen by the effects of a Taliban bullet to the head, captures the confluence of feminine power assembled here to "lean on" the world to save women and girls.

Last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's Foreign Trade Division, California's merchandise export trade was valued at somewhere between $124.6 billion and $164.4 billion. It was either up 1.8 percent over the preceding year or down by 6.2 percent.

As a mom and teacher, I am challenged again and again by the amount of junk food in our nation's schools. Like all parents, I want my child to be healthy, happy and successful.

The best part of the rise of online education is that it forces us to ask: What is a university for?

After last week's Supreme Court arguments on California's Proposition 8, most of the smart money seems to be on a ruling – you can't really call it a decision – ducking the big issue: Does the equal protection clause of the constitution allow a state to prohibit gay marriage?

I think I've figured it out. Republicans must be staging some kind of fiendishly clever plot to lure Democrats into a false sense of security.

Is a bipartisan immigration deal at hand? It's close. Last week, the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce worked out a guest-worker compromise that admits foreign workers on a sliding scale of 20,000 to 200,000, depending on the strength of the economy.

California is a famously volatile place – lurching from boom to bust and from sunshine to natural disaster – but it's nowhere near as volatile as the perceptions of California.

In a basement laboratory on the UC Davis campus, a team of young researchers, from graduate students to newly minted Ph.D.s, are helping create better radioisotopes to seek out human tumors – and deliver treatments.

Two weeks ago, on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, I wrote a column that laid out the losers in the conflict. I argued there were still no clear winners.

What would the United States be like without a first-rate federal judiciary? We are about to find out if two of the three branches of government have their way.

There can be no question that our nation needs an independent, critically thinking news media. A media free of political bias (however unlikely that is), providing our nation's citizenry with objective, thoughtful analysis is essential. Often, regardless of political persuasion, we hear that is lacking today.

I don't think we've paused sufficiently to celebrate the wonderful recent defeat for the cause of personal freedom. After all, these sorts of defeats don't happen every day.

As a businessman in Winters, I am fully behind the effort to designate federal lands in the 100-mile stretch from Lake Berryessa to 7,000-foot Snow Mountain as California's third national conservation area.

Modern movement conservatism, which transformed the GOP from the moderate party of Dwight Eisenhower into the radical right-wing organization we see today, was largely born in California.

I think this question is mighty uncomfortable for many conservatives because answering it requires comparisons with the conversation the party is having with itself today to what it represented when they began voting Republican, and to what the party even recently championed during the presidential campaign.

The obligations of religious toleration and pluralism require all who care not a bit about baseball to accept that Opening Day is more than the beginning of a sports season. It is a great religious festival.

The criticism of CalPERS by The Bee's editorial board, "CalPERS isn't a white knight in Stockton's bankruptcy" (March 27), demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of Chapter 9 bankruptcies and the relationship between the city of Stockton, its employees and CalPERS.

It's finally happening. There's been a lot of talk in recent years about Sacramento capitalizing on its natural geographic advantage in the heart of one of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world, but it hasn't gained much traction beyond local foodie circles.

Even as California governments say they don't have enough money, they keep throwing it away – on information technology.

Two years ago the U.S. Supreme Court certified California's prisons as unconstitutional – overcrowded, unsafe and prone to cause, not cure, recidivism. Responding to the earlier federal injunction ordering California to reduce its prison population, the Legislature passed Assembly Bill 109, the so-called Public Safety Realignment law that transferred authority for large numbers of convicted felons from the state prison and parole system to the state's 58 counties.

So, about that fiscal crisis – the one that would, any day now, turn us into Greece. Greece, I tell you: Never mind.

In grade school, I proudly wore a colorful array of political T-shirts, ranging from presidential candidates to the plight of agricultural workers, in a complex rotation based on a combination of campaign cycles and Ms. Magazine cover stories.

Chances are, if you've visited a hospital or a health clinic in recent years, you've received medical care from a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant. And if that's the case, then you've come face-to-face with one of the health care professionals who are essential to successfully implementing the Affordable Care Act in our state.

California physicians strongly supported the Affordable Care Act because it promised first, to expand access to health coverage to all while, second, ensuring the high quality of medical practice in our state.

Imagine how gratifying it must feel to be Anthony Kennedy.

In a for-profit budget, the biggest winners will be Sacramento's ruling class. Here's why: With the state's finances in the black, the California Citizens Compensation Commission likely will vote to give the governor, legislators and other state officeholders a pay raise.

The last few years have been hard on cities all across America, but in few places has this been more evident than in Stockton.