Editorial

What links the outcomes of recent news stories about schoolteacher pay and strikes, SMART train expansion, mental health services, Kincade Fire recovery, expanded fire protection services, future Highway 101 improvements and happier holidays? Would you believe local shopping dollars?

There are two looming events on our calendars that may further confirm the difference between compulsory law and bendable customs.

We rarely quote our president, Donald Trump, but here goes: “I’m proud to be a citizen, you’re proud to be a citizen. The only people that are not proud to be citizens are the ones who are fighting us all the way about the word ‘citizen.’”

Effective June 3, we will require all our website visitors to log in with their email and password to read the newspaper online. Online-only subscriptions will be $5 a month.

The month of May, now almost over, is/was Small Business Month in California and May 5 through 11 was National Small Business Week.

It’s more than luck that us folks living in Sonoma County have things pretty good.

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ...

Commentary:

He went by a single name, “Spence,” and was equally singular in his focus on community and a very large circle of friends in his adopted hometown of Healdsburg. His full name was Donald Lamarion Spence and he died Dec. 13 after a long fight against lung cancer. He was 56. A large portion of his circle of friends held a candlelight memorial in the city’s Plaza last Friday, Dec. 14.

TIME magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ for 2018 is a group of imprisoned and slain journalists. The selection honors journalists as “guardians of the truth.” Besides being slain and jailed, journalists everywhere now face toughening challenges to investigate, report and defend the truth. This is true in oppressive non-democratic countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Myanmar and it is true right here where economic factors are eliminating journalist’s jobs and where our president calls journalists “enemies of the people.”