Editorial

Summer time and the living is easy. Especially in our cozy, friendly small towns we call home and where we welcome streams of visitors, seeking respite, fun and some genuine modern Americana.

By now we’ve all seen the stunning pictures of humpback whales swimming in San Francisco Bay and received in our mailboxes the expensive color brochures touting the benefits of Measure AA. The well-funded proponents of Measure AA would have us believe that $500 million in new taxes will result in a clean and healthy San Francisco Bay for ourselves and future generations.

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. 

The cruelest of crimes are committed in our homes and within our

Letter carrier food drive May 14

Editor: Alright, let¹s take a look at the view from here. In the

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Power washing and our local creeks