Good morning. To start your Election Day, here’s a pop quiz. No gum chewing or Twittering, and please keep your eyes on your own computer screen. You may begin: (1) Within 10,000 people, how many Sonoma County residents are eligible to vote? (2) And how many are registered to vote? [...]

Here’s a question: Would you support a measure called the Taxpayers’ Right to Vote Act, a measure that promises to reduce budget deficits and constrain wasteful politicians? Before you answer, let’s re-phrase the question: As a consumer, would you vote for a measure designed to protect the PG&E monopoly, even [...]

In February, I wrote here about a demonstration video from Wired magazine - a video designed to provide a glossy introduction to how magazines, newspapers and books could be transformed by the iPad and other touch-screen computers. In the days before the iPad went on sale, the Wired video became [...]

In March, when I wrote about Proposition 16, it was believed that Pacific Gas and Electric was prepared to spend $35 million to make it more difficult for local agencies to develop renewable energy sources. Today, we learn that PG&E will spend at least $44 million on a campaign designed [...]

In the last decade, the popularity of what we call absentee voting has transformed campaigns. When virtually everyone voted on Election Day, the task was simple for candidates and their advisors. All they needed to do was devise a strategy that made sure their campaigns peaked on Election Day. Now [...]

In local politics, we spend a lot of time identifying what’s wrong with our hometowns - and what’s wrong with the people who disagree with us. And we seldom get around to celebrating what we do right. I thought about our pessimistic politics while listening to presentations on anti-gang programs [...]

In his Tuesday column - here - Editorial Director Paul Gullixson wrote about Assemblywoman Noreen Evans and her contention that state government should not attempt to reform its under-funded pension system until the economic crisis has run its course. Gullixson observes that this sounds like “saying we should wait until [...]

The latest round of state budget cuts will be heartbreaking. Things we value as a society - education, children’s services, care for the elderly and the disabled, health care, parks, hometown government - will be devastated, and not for the first time. Over the last several months, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger [...]

If you live in southern Sonoma County, you live in the Third Senate District, represented by Democrat Mark Leno of San Francisco. In a region in which Democrats are dominant, the Third District is among the most Democratic of all. A new study on the potential impacts of Proposition 14 [...]

California today marks the 50th anniversary of the Master Plan for Higher Education, the blueprint that promised every qualified student the opportunity to go to college and find success. One might say the state is “celebrating” the 50th anniversary, except there is nothing to celebrate. As Staff Writer Kerry Benefield [...]