Editorial

This is National Newspaper Week and this year’s theme is “power of the press.” That leads us to a list of very provocative questions about newspapers and their future. We hope all our readers will be interested in some of the answers.

Reflecting on the ongoing national debate over the influx of immigrant children from Central America, columnist and political commentator, George Will, who will never be mistaken as a bleeding heart liberal, said on Fox News Sunday, “We ought to say to these children, ‘Welcome to America. You’re going to go to school and get a job and become American. We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can’t assimilate these eight-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous.’”

It is time to come together and sit around the Thanksgiving table. Family members, from near and far, will be together again. We’ll eat turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. There will be pies and a family blessing. The couch will be full after the meal and a football game will probably be on the TV, just the way the original Pilgrims celebrated the very first Thanksgiving in 1621.

Some time ago a column entitled “Religion challenges left and right” by E. J. Dionne, Jr. appeared in the Press Democrat. “Whenever I write sympathetically about religion,” he noted, “I get bombarded with tweets and notes from readers who normally agree with me but cannot abide by the idea that religious belief should be seen as intellectually serious.” Having made that caveat he goes on to treat religion seriously in a summary of a study produced by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution. Dionne himself took part in the research for the study. The study divides citizens into four groups: 28 percent religious conservatives, 38 percent religious moderates, 19 percent religious progressives, and 15 percent nonreligious. These groups are correlated to political attitudes and party affiliations.  Not surprisingly, most religious conservatives are politically conservative and gravitate to the Republican Party, and most religious progressives and nonreligious are politically liberal and gravitate to the Democratic party.  Also not surprisingly, religious moderates are in between and just as they are religiously moderate they tend to be moderate Republicans or moderate Democrats in fairly equal numbers. 

Since retiring, I have come to Arequipa, Peru, for two or three

On October 27 the County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to

In 1985 there were over 350,000 cases of paralytic polio in the world. These were basically all in third world countries, as polio had been eradicated, due to immunization, in the United States and Europe and Asia in the 1970s. For the young people who do not know what polio can do, as it is no longer a threat here, it is a virus that can cause permanent paralysis of major muscle groups, including respiratory muscles leading to death.

Taxes. We all pay them. We all complain about them and we all