Editorial

The response letters in the Healdsburg Tribune’s “Letters to the Editor” to Dave Henderson and my letters criticizing Gary Plass for not endorsing a ban on assault weapons made me realize that although there are many people who agree with our opinion there are also plenty who don’t. It was interesting to see the various views on the same subject. Most of us here in Sonoma County are liberals - mostly center-left but liberals just the same. Although we are technically part of the Bay Area we are still a rather rural community which is traditionally conservative. The divergent opinions have led to a healthy discourse which is one of the things that make our American way of life, as Vladimir Putin put it, “exceptional.”

“All who believed were together and had all things in common. They would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need…”

Why do public health systems matter? Because they work extraordinarily well, and are among the most efficient public programs in the country. More importantly, because public health providers work together to keep our communities healthy.

On Tuesday, November 15, 2011, a public hearing was held at the

The City of Healdsburg is updating its granny unit ordinance and needs your input to build a more effective and robust granny unit program. Would it serve your family to have a rentable granny unit?

GMO Clarity

My wife Bonnie and I recently went to the de Young Museum to see the Vermeer (1632 - 1675) exhibit on loan from the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The Exhibit is called “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” after what is perhaps Vermeer’s best known work. The girl turns to look at us over her left shoulder and as she turns our gaze is drawn to the single pearl on the lobe of her lovely ear. A text describes the painting as the Dutch “Mona Lisa.” The exhibit reveals a world of mostly prosperous looking men and women. Self assured, Protestant, one might even say secular. They are a class of people absent from earlier times, the early Renaissance and the Middle Ages. They are neither prelates (there is one painting of a preacher in the exhibit), nor princes, and they are certainly not peasants. They are burghers and their families, men of commerce, trade and industry; and they read and write. There is a charming, domestic scene of a woman, seated comfortably at a desk in her own home. She is writing, maybe a personal letter, maybe household accounts, but the point is she is writing, something that a few hundred years earlier few other than clergy were able to do.

SMART train officials recently took a reverse commute trip to Cloverdale after brief stop-offs in Windsor and Healdsburg to deliver updates on the commuter train project that was first launched by Sonoma and Marin county voters in 2008.

Our editorials written here each week seek to refrain from making brash edicts or direct ultimatums. But this week we are making an exception.