Three days after last Tuesday’s primaries seemingly tilted the Democratic presidential nomination decisively toward Barack Obama, the surprising fact was that

Ron Bracken walked into our newsroom in 1967 and immediately started covering high school football games.

The last time I witnessed a woman becoming a mother, it wasn’t anything like the frilly sentiments of Mother’s Day.

I’d like to think it was the sangria talking. But the plain truth is, when Anna said she doesn’t find this country to be especially free, it was Anna talking. Granted, her complaint is hardly new. People often grouse about the lack of freedom in the land of the free.

Ntombi must be so hungry — and so desperate. That’s all I can think as I read the endless stream of headlines about skyrocketing food prices. Amid the talk of abstract economic factors, her memory brings home the human cost of the worldwide food shortage. I met Ntombi a few years ago when I was serving as a volunteer physician in South Africa. An HIV-positive mother of three children, she was struggling to raise her family on about a dollar a day.

Any day now — perhaps already for some of you — our economic stimulus checks will be here.

If the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright were white, he’d probably have his own church show on television. Maybe even his own network.

How can the world’s hungriest schoolchildren be denied meals while the farm bill being debated in a House-Senate conference provides millions in subsidies for wealthy farmers? That’s what Congress proposes. In all fairness, it should not become law.

When I earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Penn State, I was taught to make sure that my facts were accurate before submitting a paper for publication. Unfortunately, the Centre Daily Times embraces the adage “never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

Over the year-end holidays, we called it the “Spirit of Giving” — a nine-day series on volunteers making a difference in Centre County.

Something is happening at the nation's largest pension fund, the Sacramento-based California Public Employees' Retirement System, which has nearly a quarter-trillion dollars in investments ranging from real estate to stocks.

The old philosophical argument over whether the chicken or the egg first emerged from the primordial ooze has a political counterpart in California's circular debate over the initiative process.

"We tumbled and played for hours. My hands and feet were wrinkled, like raisins. An adult dolphin let me have a thrilling ride on his back. He skimmed over the rolling waves and then suddenly, went under. Giggling, laughing and occasional chirrups with hints of laughter were heard. We dove back under, like an airplane during turbulence. The females performed a beautiful underwater ballet."

A new chapter in an old and dreary story of political interference with the economic aspirations of low-income and/or immigrant Californians is unfolding in Los Angeles, whose county supervisors have voted to crack down on the horrendous crime of selling tacos.

Facing a shortfall that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has estimated at $20 billion, Democratic lawmakers in the Capitol are looking for a way to raise tax revenue. They might want to adopt and modify an idea advocated by a conservative think tank – and increase tax revenue while lowering tax rates.

Fabian Núñez ended his four-year reign as speaker of the state Assembly Tuesday by proposing – seriously or not – that the Legislature cede the power to redraw legislative districts to an independent commission and modify legislative term limits.

TRUCKEE – High on the Sierra crest above this old railroad town, the granite rocks are scarred with ruts carved by the wheels of the wagons pioneers hauled over Donner Summit 150 years ago.

Last week's sharply worded exchange of letters between Republican Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and his Democratic predecessor, Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, sounded very much like opening salvos of the 2010 contest for governor.

California's Democratic leaders, who have seen their share of the electorate decline by about 15 percentage points over the last three decades, are crowing about an uptick in registration.

PHILLIPS STATION – Frank Gehrke has been coming to a Sierra meadow here behind an old stagecoach stop for 21 years to check the depth of the snow for the Department of Water Resources, part of a tradition that is California's answer to Groundhog Day.

If demography is destiny, as 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte first proposed, California is destined to soon experience an economic and cultural tsunami of monumental proportions.

Republican state legislators complain constantly that majority Democrats ignore them and their ideas in fashioning legislative policy.

When Cindy Hailey applied for health insurance for her family in 2000, she didn't tell the insurance company that her husband was overweight and had been treated for headaches, hypertension and throat problems, or that he had been in the emergency room just nine days before. Steven Hailey signed the application, Cindy turned it over to an insurance broker, and Blue Shield of California sold them the coverage they were seeking.

A few days after winning re-election to the governorship in 2002, Gray Davis declared that the state faced a $35 billion budget deficit and proposed spending cuts and new taxes to close the gap.

California may be the epicenter of the housing industry's meltdown, but very few areas of the nation are exempt from its effects.

Arnold Schwarzenegger did a great job of selling Californians on the notion that the state's health care system is a gigantic mess and of promising to bring affordable care to everyone. But his failure to make it happen is leaving a bitter aftertaste in voters' mouths, a new poll indicates.

So, Mr. Smarty Pants Columnist, since you're always complaining about politicians failing to close the state's chronic budget deficit, how would you do it?

Anyone looking for a job in California this spring has to be a little depressed. The collapse of the housing industry has wiped out tens of thousands of jobs in construction and the finance industry. Manufacturing is slumping. Retail is not doing much better. If not for schools, health care, government and information technology, the state's employers wouldn't be adding any jobs at all.

It's the classic dilemma that afflicts members of both political parties as they choose candidates for offices from the presidency down: whether to opt for the true-believing ideological purist or the more pragmatic, and perhaps more electable, alternative.

An environmental coalition called Californians for Solar and Clean Energy has submitted more than 700,000 signatures for an initiative measure that would compel the state's utilities to use renewable sources for 40 percent of their electric power supplies by 2020 and 50 percent by 2025, a sharp increase in what the state's current policy requires.