The Council on American-Islamic Relations sent out its usual roundup Tuesday of news stories alleging the mistreatment of Muslims in America. There was a story critical of the FBI harassment of Muslims in Queens, N.Y., in the wake of the arrest of a suspected terrorist. Another story concerned calls for an investigation into an FBI shooting that left Detroit Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah dead. There were also notices of CAIR banquets.

Be prepared to see more of Levi Johnston than you ever wanted to see. The 19-year-old who fathered a baby born out of wedlock to Sarah Palin's teenage daughter Bristol is about to pose nude for Playgirl magazine. Also, with Palin's book, "Going Rogue," set for release this month, some publications may follow Vanity Fair's example in October by granting the high-school dropout a byline.

No journalist who has followed Lt. Gov. John Garamendi over the years could be surprised at his answer to the final question at Monday night's debate at St. Mary's College among candidates competing to replace Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, in Tuesday's special election. When an opportunity for fulsome flattery presents itself, Garamendi does not miss a beat.

Mayor Gavin Newsom's office has argued that San Francisco's "sanctuary city" policy protects undocumented immigrants who are otherwise law-abiding residents.

Why isn't Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner doing better in his bid for governor? On paper, Poizner is a solid contender.

The Obama White House's war on Fox News heated up when President Obama appeared on five Sunday talk shows in September, but snubbed Fox's Chris Wallace. Then White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told CNN's Howard Kurtz, "Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party." On ABC's "This Week" Sunday, Obama guru David Axelrod commented on Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch's "talent for making money" -- and added that Fox News programming is "not really news."

It's hard to instill confidence in the U.S. economy when Washington keeps finding new and creative ways to spend money it doesn't have.

If the Democrats' health care package is so great, why are President Obama and Dem congressional leaders so hungry to share the credit for its passage with a Republican?

On Oct. 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake brought down a chunk of the upper deck of the Oakland-Bay Bridge onto the lower deck. Anamafi Moala Kalushia, 23, of Berkeley died. Twenty years later, some 280,000 cars use the bridge daily -- and it still isn't safe.

"What happened to global warming?" read the headline -- on BBC News on Oct. 9, no less. Consider it a cataclysmic event: Mainstream news organizations have begun reporting on scientific research that suggests that global warming may not be caused by man and may not be as dire and eminent as alarmists suggest.

Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker opened the gates to hell this month when he ruled that strategists for Proposition 8 -- the 2008 ballot measure, passed by 52 percent of California voters, that limited marriage to a man and a woman -- must release internal campaign documents to measure opponents.

At the Democratic National Convention in Denver last summer, then-Sen. Barack Obama pledged to "finish the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan."

On Tuesday, Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Afghan immigrant who was a teenager in Queens during the Sept. 11 attacks, pleaded not guilty to federal terrorism conspiracy charges in New York.

Our Betters in Europe, of course, are outraged that Switzerland arrested and may allow the extradition of film director Roman Polanski, 76, a fugitive from California justice after he pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a 13-year-old in 1977.

Democrats seem to have shifted their thinking on a number of issues since President Obama took the oath of office. Figure some Dems have more faith in government with a like-minded man at the helm, and besides, circumstances have changed. But also figure that some Democrats were just looking for sore spots -- and their anti-Bush rhetoric was based not on principle, but raw opportunism.

I would not go see the film "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" because I found more cruelty than humor in deliberately exposing unwitting civilians to the easy ridicule of smug sophomores.

Will the sex scandal of former GOP Assemblyman Mike Duvall make a difference for the California GOP? In that Duvall -- now known as Spanky -- had the good sense to resign 15 hours into the scandal, the answer would be: No.

Toward the end of his speech on health care Wednesday night, President Obama said that he had been thinking a lot about the phrase "the character of our country."

One of the (many) irritating things about being a Republican in the liberal Bay Area is the certainty that if there is a story out there that makes conservatives look stupid -- like the protests against President Obama's Tuesday speech to America's students -- then you know that wherever you go, folks are going to ask you about that particular flap.

"You Don't Know Jack" is the perfect title for the upcoming HBO biopic starring Al Pacino as Death Doc Jack Kevorkian -- because it is clear that many of Kevorkian's fawning interviewers don't know much about Jack.

As he campaigned for the presidency, Sen. Barack Obama argued that Afghanistan should become "the central front in the battle against terrorism." Obama has delivered on that issue.

Since 1999, when he was placed under California parole supervision for a 1976 rape in Nevada, Phillip Garrido, 58, was subject to drug testing, required to wear a GPS device and subject to twice-monthly visits by his state parole officer.

When he served as deputy attorney general, now Attorney General Eric Holder gave a "neutral leaning positive" recommendation that led to President Bill Clinton's pardoning of gazillionaire fugitive Marc Rich, who was on the lam in Switzerland hiding from federal charges of fraud, evading more than $48 million in taxes, racketeering and trading oil with Iran in violation of a U.S. embargo.

Earlier this month, three federal judges -- Stephen Reinhardt, Lawrence Karlton and Thelton Henderson -- ordered the release of more than 40,000 of California's 160,000 inmates. No lie: They claimed that releasing one-quarter of state inmates would not have "a meaningful adverse impact on public safety."

How do you run for California's top political offices when you often have failed to vote yourself and have no political experience?

At a recent Colorado town hall, University of Colorado at Boulder student Zach Lahn asked President Obama how private insurers could be expected to compete with a public health care plan.

When Barack Obama was 11, his mother and grandmother took him and his half-sister Maya on the most American of family vacations -- a road trip that included Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. Last week, Obama passed on that gift as he took his wife, daughters Malia and Sasha -- as well as Maya and her family -- on a four-day trip to two of America’s most breathtaking national parks.

The latest infamous incident of Major Airline Tarmac Dysfunction occurred in Minnesota last weekend when a severe storm curtailed Continental ExpressJet Flight 2816.

First a confession: I've never flown on a private jet. I've never flown on a Gulfstream. Never flown on a private 737 "office in the sky."

The first thing you have to know when you read that California's 33 adult prisons -- like the state prison in Chino where riots erupted over the weekend -- are operating at 190 percent capacity is that 100 percent capacity means one inmate per cell, single bunks in dormitories and no beds in spaces not designed for housing. Put two inmates in a single cell and bunk beds in lieu of single beds and you get 200 percent capacity.

Imagine it's four years ago and an aide to President Bush posted a blog on the Whitehouse.gov website that bemoaned Internet criticism of the Iraq war, then continued: "These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversations.

You know that American voters aren't feeling the love for ObamaCare when House members hold town-hall meetings in their districts, only to be heckled and booed.

Because courts can sentence murderers to life without parole, why not get rid of the death penalty? It's a frequent question posed by readers and advocates who oppose the death penalty. For years, my answer has been: If death-penalty opponents ever succeed in eliminating capital punishment, their next target for elimination will be life without parole --or as lawyers call it, LWOP.

When the Senate passed a federal hate-crimes measure by a 63-28 earlier this month, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., proclaimed, "This legislation will help to address the serious and growing problem of hate crimes."

The video features an angry woman in red, armed with a birth certificate and a small American flag, scolding Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., at a town meeting. She is angry, she said, because President Obama "is not an American citizen. He is a citizen of Kenya."

In May, President Obama touted $17 billion in cuts he had planned for a budget of more than $3 trillion. Obama was quite proud of these cuts. Really. He told reporters that while $17 billion in cuts was considered "trivial" inside the beltway, "outside of Washington, that's still considered a lot of money."

In a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago this month, Department of Defense Secretary Robert Gates laid out the case for discontinuing the F-22 Raptor: "The F-22, to be blunt, does not make much sense anyplace else in the spectrum of conflict." In English that means that plane has not been used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Sacramento is so desperate to erase the state budget's $26.3 billion shortfall that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democratic Legislature seem poised to end decades of prohibition so that they can tap new revenue from a widely occurring natural resource -- one dear to many Californians and known for its unmistakable aroma.

Last weekend, the New York Times reported that after 9/11, the CIA developed a "secret counterterrorism program" to train hit squads to kill top al-Qaida leaders. It seemed like good news to me. After all, why bankroll an intelligence agency if you can't use it to kill an enemy against whom America has declared war?

Two schools of thought on the Senate's power of advice and consent on Supreme Court nominees: One -- which I support, but then-Sen. Barack Obama did not -- holds that barring extraordinary circumstances, senators should go along with a president's judicial choices.

When California voters rejected five measures on the May 19 special election ballot, but passed a sixth measure that barred legislative pay raises in budget deficit years, the message to Sacramento was clear: Voters did not like what Sacramento had to offer.

No wonder skeptics consider the left's belief in man-made global warming as akin to a fad religion -- last week in Italy, G8 leaders pledged to not allow the Earth's temperature to rise more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Here's the reason Californians don't trust Sacramento: In July 2003, the state controller's office figured there were 230,000 state employees. Since then, every budget deal has featured legislators' howling protestations that they've been forced to make horrific budget cuts, yet the controller now estimates the state has 244,000 employees.

"A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not why the ship is built," Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said last year to explain why Sen. John McCain picked her to be his running mate. Those words may come back to haunt her. When she assumed office in December 2006, Palin committed to Alaskan voters to serve four years. Having failed to do so, she will be in no position to campaign in 2012 for four years in the White House.

This is not a joke. Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision that required an Oregon public school district to pay a $5,200 monthly tuition (plus fees) for a private boarding school for a high-school senior whose psychologist had diagnosed him with ADHD, depression, math disorder and cannabis abuse.

As recent AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin tells the story, when a White House aide called him on June 10, Walpin thought the administration was calling him to enlist his support -- as a prominent Republican member of the New York bar -- for the confirmation of Sonya Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, Special Counsel to the President Norm Eisen informed Walpin that President Obama wanted Walpin out of his job.

"We certainly recognize that Chevron does not make a sympathetic victim here," company spokesman Kent Robertson told me over the telephone.

There are no legal grounds for prosecuting Bush administration lawyers who supported the use of enhanced interrogation techniques to thwart planned terrorist attacks, so civil libertarians have the tort system to try to ruin Bush lawyers.

I wish Sarah Palin would just go away.

After the shooting deaths of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller last month and security guard Stephen T. Johns at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum last week, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would receive an e-mail like one sent from Ann Pinkerton of Oakland:

Last week, White House chief economist Christina Romer told reporters that there are "billion-dollar bills lying on the sidewalk" in America's health care system -- apparently there for the taking if only Washington would show the will to pick them up.

When the San Francisco school board voted last month to restore the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps program, it seemed that sanity had prevailed -- three years after the board voted to kill the popular program. Finally, the board had put students' welfare ahead of its ruthless political correctness.

If you see the federal government as a benign force that seeks only to make your life better, then the questions in the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey may not bother you. But if you have a smidgen of doubt, or if you value your privacy, you probably aren't going to like some of Uncle Sam's invasive queries.

If law enforcement officials believe they can prove that Scott Roeder is guilty of Sunday's shooting death of abortion doctor George Tiller at the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kan., then they should work to put him away for life. Roeder is being held on first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault.

How will the GOP react to President Obama's pick to replace Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court? Who cares? It doesn't matter what Senate Republicans think of Sonia Sotomayor.

Within a decade, same-sex marriage probably will be legal in California. Thanks to the California Supreme Court 6-1 ruling on Tuesday to uphold Proposition 8, the law will be changed in the proper way -- not by judicial fiat, but with California voters determining whether, when and how best to broaden the state's marriage laws.

In 1992, after he stopped wearing clothes to his UC Berkeley classes, Andrew Martinez was something of a walking only-in-Bezerkeley joke as the campus' own Naked Guy. But his life was no laughing matter.

Britain's Parliament has been mired in a political scandal so damaging that Speaker Michael Martin resigned from office Tuesday. He's the first House speaker to step down in more than 300 years. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labour Party is dreading the next election -- which must be held before June 2010 -- as members of Parliament have been snared in a series of Daily Telegraph stories detailing how they filed bogus claims of up to $40,000 to cover their expenses needed to maintain two homes.

Members of President Obama's Cabinet are three times more likely to have attended law school than boot camp. How things have changed since 2004, when Democrats were outraged that, in time of war, the GOP White House could be run by men with no combat experience.

Last week's briefing brought home to me the difficult challenges faced by the Central Intelligence Agency in the current threat environment.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued at a press conference Thursday that Republicans are focusing on how much she knew about CIA enhanced interrogation techniques in 2002 and 2003 as a "diversionary tactic to take the spotlight off those who conceived, developed and implemented these policies, which all of us long opposed."

Even when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals does the right thing -- as it did Monday in denying convicted killer Kevin Cooper a hearing on yet another of his dubious appeals -- there is always a judge, or in this case five, on the court with an overly active imagination. And those judges don't help the court's results-oriented reputation.

Elizabeth Edwards always seemed like the yin -- a genuine human being -- to her smarmy husband's too-slick yang. No more. With the release of her memoir "Resilience" and self-flagellation book tour about her life with her cheating hubby, Mrs. E now seems about as believable as her husband. That is: Add the prefix "un."

Doublespeak is alive as Democrats pull the strings in the White House and Congress 24 years after 1984. What do they mean when they engage in Democrat-speak?

When Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, proponents boasted that stiff mandatory minimum sentences would be bad news for major drug traffickers. Ha. Over time, drug kingpins learned that they had little to fear from the law -- especially if they were dealing crack cocaine.

Why are most newspaper reporters and editors liberal? I've been working in the business for more than 20 years, and I can't give a quick, definitive answer to the question. But I do think a contributing factor is that editors, like other managers, tend to hire and reward staffers who think as they do. They see their positions as neutral, which is human nature -- and is reinforced by the fact that the folks in the desks around them vote the same way they do.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been pushing for a "truth commission" to investigate the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques like waterboarding -- until Republicans started shining the spotlight on Pelosi herself. Now she is not so adamant.

The mantra from the left during the Bush years went something like this: The world is not black and white. Sophisticated minds should seek out different, nuanced opinions.

When she was a 13-year-old student at Safford Middle School in Arizona, Savana Redding was strip-searched by school officials in search of -- this is no joke -- ibuprofen. Now she is suing the district and the officials for violating her Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

After 9/11, Americans wanted one thing from Washington: to prevent future terrorist attacks. President George W. Bush, the CIA and other hard-working officials delivered. For their trouble, a handful of those individuals now have reason to fear that they may be ruined.

Republican politicians are afraid of their base. Very afraid. Press folks have categorized the April 15 TEA parties -- TEA for "Taxed Enough Already" -- as anti-President Barack Obama, anti-government and even "anti-CNN." But it is GOP leaders who are scared senseless (for want of a better word) by the protests.

Last Wednesday, conservatives held coast-to-coast "TEA parties" designed to send the message to Washington and state governments that the partiers feel "taxed enough already." The exercise struck me as more than a little out of touch with the political realities of President Barack Obama's

On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security distributed a counterterrorism assessment to local law-enforcement types entitled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." The nine-page paper has many on the right questioning what is going on in Washington.

In December 1773, Bostonians held a Tea Party in Boston Harbor to protest excessive British taxes. "No taxation without representation" was their message.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal seeking a new trial for death-row inmate and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted in the 1981 shooting of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

In the 1990s, the Math Wars pitted two philosophies against each other. One side argued for content-based standards -- that elementary school students must memorize multiplication tables by third grade. The other side argued for students to discover math, unfettered by "drill and kill" exercises.

Two very rich Republicans -- former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner -- are lining up to run for governor in 2010. The most money that a third Republican gubernatorial candidate, Tom Campbell, ever earned was as the dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley -- about $300,000 per year. That would make him the pauper in the primary.

When Barack Obama first met his Auntie Zeituni at an airport in Kenya in 1988, his late father's sister told him, "Welcome home," and kissed him on both cheeks. Obama was on a pilgrimage to the land where his African father lived apart from Obama's American mother.

American voters want -- and President Obama campaigned on a platform of -- European-style government at American tax rates.

It seems pretty obvious that the last three presidents -- Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- once smoked marijuana. OK, Clinton claimed he didn't inhale. Bush refused to say whether he ever used drugs; instead, he coyly alluded to mistakes in his youth. Obama didn't play games in his memoir, "Dreams from My Father" -- he wrote about using marijuana and cocaine as a kid.

There is no group more dangerous than one with some power, no scruples and leaders who think that they are really smart and that everyone else is really, really stupid.

When Tristan Anderson, now 38, was living illegally in the trees at the University of California, Berkeley, to protest the administration's ultimately successful bid to cut them down to build a sports training center, life was good.

How the tables have turned. In September 2008, when GOP presidential nominee John McCain said "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," unemployment was 6.1 percent, the credit crunch had yet to reach the point that prompted President George W. Bush to propose a bailout, and Team Obama proclaimed that an out-of-touch McCain "just doesn't get it" on the economy.

"The war on drugs is a failure," Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Cesar Gaviria and Ernesto Zedillo -- the former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico -- wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month. "Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalization … simply haven't worked," they wrote.

When a jury found Richard Allen Davis guilty of the murder of Petaluma's 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1996, Davis puckered his lips and extended a middle finger to TV cameras.

I have known Rush Limbaugh since his old radio days in Sacramento, before he became a GOP god. I've disagreed with him over the years. Last year I took on his bashing of Republican moderates and criticized Limbaugh and other talk-radio hosts when they were too harsh on not-yet GOP nominee John McCain. I've never apologized and we're still friends.

California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ron George looked none too comfortable Thursday morning as he heard oral arguments for and against California's ban on same-sex marriage.

Twenty-five years after 1984, Doublespeak lives. Last week, President Obama released "A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise" -- a 10-year, $3.55 trillion spending plan that represented anything but fiscal maturity.

A Sunday New York Times story described an expected sea change in international global warming policy. The story noted that President George W. Bush, "pressed by the Senate, rejected" the Kyoto global warming protocol in 2001, but now President Obama is eager to negotiate a robust international global warming treaty to be signed in Copenhagen in December.

When he worked as a legislative liaison in 1982 for Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, B.T. Collins -- an unlikely Brown hire, as Collins was a Republican and double-amputee Vietnam War veteran who joked that he threw grenades "like a girl" -- had choice words for the California Legislature. He used to call the Assembly "an adult day care center."

A couple of years ago, when speaking to a local group, I mentioned that The Chronicle was losing money.

LONDON -- Think that credit collapse that triggered the Bush administration's $700 billion bank bailout was necessary because of Republican hostility to regulation and the ineptness of President George W. Bush?

The unemployment rate in Ireland is 9.2 percent and expected to climb, perhaps as high as 15 percent. A real estate market that, according to Bloomberg, quadrupled from 1997 to 2007, is crashing.

Quoth President Obama: "It's a little hard for me to take criticism from folks about this recovery package, after they've presided over a doubling of the national debt. I'm not sure they have a lot of credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility."

I ran into a friend in Sacramento Tuesday -- one of the many disappointed Republicans who inhabit the capital -- who told me that he will never again vote for a candidate for governor who has not lost an election. He had soured on the lack of humility invasive in state politics.

Back in May 2000, Harry Markopolos, a Massachusetts fraud investigator, provided detailed evidence to the Securities and Exchange Commission that financier Bernard Madoff was a fraud. Eight years later, the SEC figured that out -- albeit after Madoff told federal authorities he had defrauded investors of up to $50 billion.

This is not going to be a column that dumps on the misguided and clearly troubled Nadya Suleman -- the 33-year-old unemployed single Whittier mother of six who gave birth to octuplets last month. Of course, a single mother of six has absolutely no business having more children.

Back in October, after the Obama economic stimulus plan had grown from $60 billion to $175 billion and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had doubled the amount she wanted to spend to $300 billion, I asked, "Do I hear $450 billion?"

Americans now know that the "change we can believe in," which President Obama promised, means a taxes-optional administration. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner rode out the bad news about his failure to pay $34,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes on income he earned while working for the International Monetary Fund, and still won confirmation. The man now in charge of the IRS says it was "an innocent mistake."

Of course California's prison inmates are entitled to reasonable 21st-century health care. Unfortunately for taxpayers, Clark Kelso, the federal receiver in charge of California's prison health care has, as state Attorney General Jerry Brown noted at a news conference last week, a "gold-plated wish list" for California's prison health care system.

During the campaign, President Obama said he would stop federal raids of medical marijuana clubs in states (like California) that had passed medical marijuana laws.

I voted against Proposition 22, the same-sex marriage ban, in 2000. I figured that if same-sex couples want to marry, why not let them? I believe in marriage. I don't want gay people to feel marginalized. But 61 percent of California voters thought otherwise.

I keep waiting for that moment when Barack Obama -- President Obama -- tells the American people that there is a price to be paid for the many proposals he has offered. That moment has yet to come.

On his way out of office, President Bush used his power of the pardon to commute the sentences of former U.S. Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, who had been sentenced to 11 years and 12 years respectively for shooting and wounding a fleeing drug smuggler in 2005 and then covering up the incident. It was the right move.

From the day President Bush took office, the long knives were out for him -- in ways they will not (and should not) be out for President-elect Barack Obama.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's State of the State address on Thursday was a far cry from his first such speech in 2004.

Sunday's New York Times ran two columns that advocated for investigations into America's use of coercive interrogation techniques -- known to editorial writers as "torture" -- of enemy combatants, as well as one that opposed a show trial.

Former eBay chief Meg Whitman is preparing to run for governor in 2010. Considering that California is so broke that next month it may have to issue IOUs instead of checks, I cannot imagine why anyone would want the job.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has an identity problem. In blocking the lawful and legitimate appointment of Roland Burris -- admittedly tarnished by its maker, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich -- the Nevada Democrat apparently thought that he was the king of Illinois, with the veto power over whom Illinois could send to the Senate.

Conventional wisdom last week decreed that President-elect Barack Obama had done such a fine job culling his Cabinet that only one pick -- Attorney General-nominee Eric Holder -- would present a problem, but most likely, a surmountable hurdle.

For lo these many years, the Democratic motorcade class has scolded American workers for driving gas-guzzling cars. Now that Americans have begun driving more fuel-efficient cars and driving less, how have the finger-waggers reacted? No, they are not planning a parade -- they already are working on a new tax on miles driven to make up for lost gasoline-tax revenue.

If President Bush had been looking for a textbook case of a federal offender who should never win a presidential pardon, Isaac R. Toussie would fit the bill.

I recently read a book that deserves the widest possible readership: "The Trouble with Textbooks -- Distorting History and Religion," by Gary A. Tobin and Dennis R. Ybarra. I never have met or talked with either of these gentlemen, but I can't say enough good things about this book.

Gay civil rights groups -- the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force -- are calling on President-elect Barack Obama to yank his invitation to Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren to give the inaugural prayer on Jan. 20.

A panel of three federal judges is holding a trial to determine whether to free 52,000 of California's 172,000 prison inmates to alleviate overcrowding. You might be asking yourself: Who elected these guys to run California?

For eight years, Democrats have hurled all manner of criticism at President Bush. Some of the heat was well deserved, some was not.

Last week saw the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. In Washington, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) -- a group of former cops and drug-war veterans who have soured on America's war on drugs -- gathered to celebrate the anniversary, and to argue for an end to America's current prohibition on marijuana and more serious drugs.

If you're not a "Star Trek" fan, you might not get this, but as I've watched President-elect Barack Obama these past few weeks, I feel as if the country is passing the torch from the brash, rule-breaking Capt. James T. Kirk, whose Starship Enterprise boldly went where no man had gone before in the original sci-fi series, to the more cerebral governance of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, who ran the Enterprise not so much as his merry ship but as a cutting-edge corporate venture, which culled databases and held meetings to brainstorm possible responses to new challenges.

Here's another reason why people don't trust newspapers. When science reporters write about, say, hormone therapy or drinking red wine, they report on studies that find that hormones or red wine can be good for you, as well as studies that suggest otherwise.

Ever since California voters recalled Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003 and replaced him with Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sacramento has been passing gimmicky state budgets that did not raise taxes, but also kicked structural deficit spending into the next year.

Whatever the intention of the anonymous leaker (or leakers) from the McCain campaign who spread nasty rumors about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, in the end they did not so much trash the image of Caribou Barbie, as they ended up tarnishing the public's perception of their G.I. Joe, Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Elections do not deliver neat verdicts. The 2008 race so handily won by President-elect Barack Obama shouted that the American public wanted to see reform in Washington. So it just doesn't seem right that John McCain, a true reformer in the GOP, lost, while Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, holds a thin lead in his re-election bid -- even though Stevens was just convicted on seven felony counts for violating federal ethics laws.

In the end, American voters serve as the great equalizer. When one party goes too far, voters snap the leash, as they did on Tuesday.

The blog headline read: "Obama Tells SF Chronicle He Will Bankrupt Coal Industry" and the author charged that the audio of the meeting with Obama "(had) been hidden from the public."

The biggest loser in this 2008 election is obvious even before the first vote has been counted: conventional wisdom. Remember last year when Hillary Rodham Clinton was considered the shoo-in for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, after which she was supposed to waltz into the Oval Office?

Barack Obama has waged a brilliant, disciplined campaign for the White House. To the extent that Obama's campaign demonstrates his strategic and organizational abilities, the junior Illinois senator has the potential to be a great leader.

I've long considered myself a bad Republican. During the Bush administration, for example, I've felt free to whack George W. and Republicans in Congress for passing big-spending bills, such as their pork-rich 2002 farm bill, the underfunded prescription-drug bill and earmark spending. But in 2008, I find that I'm a piker in the bad Republican department.

In an age of craven politics, John McCain is not afraid to swim against the tide. When Americans soured on the Iraq War and had begun telling pollsters they wanted out, McCain pushed for a surge of U.S. troops in Iraq. Today, casualties are down dramatically and Iraqi troops are defending Iraqis.

Is Sarah Palin ready to be president? I haven't seen enough of the GOP vice presidential candidate to get a handle on the answer to that question. I know that she wants to finish the job in Iraq.

Before Wednesday night's debate, Team Obama sent out pre-debate "talking points," which Politico.com posted, that hit John McCain for his "erratic and unsteady" response to the economic crisis, while lauding Barack Obama's "steady leadership."

Over beers, Brian McConnell and his buddies came up with the idea to put a measure on the San Francisco ballot to rename a city sewage plant after President Bush. Ha, ha, ha.

The race card is back. After Tuesday night's debate, Washington party-crossover dean David Gergen announced it was "too early" to declare victory for Democrat Barack Obama, not because the election is a month away, but because "Obama is black."

Two important questions were asked at Tuesday night's presidential debate.

The only way Congress could pass a $700 billion economic bailout package last week was to spend an extra $110 billion that the federal government does not have.

As reform measures go, Proposition 11 -- the redistricting reform measure -- is hardly a transformational law likely to supercharge activists (of any political stripe) eager to make Sacramento more effective and more accountable to the public.

She passed. He passed. Palin fared better going against Joe Biden than Katie Couric.

Who do I blame for this financial disaster? Let me count the villains. Start with President Bush and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.

Want a preview of Thursday's veepstakes debate between running mates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin? Pick up a copy of Christopher Buckley's latest satirical novel, "Supreme Courtship," that begins when a very unpopular American president decides to tweak Senate solons by nominating to the U.S. Supreme Court America's most popular TV judge, the "sassy, flippant, sexy," no-nonsense, gun-toting hottie from Texas, Pepper Cartwright.

Before getting to Friday night's debate, let us look at what happened before the debate.Yes, John McCain's suspension of his campaign earlier in the week and call for a delay of Friday's debate were campaign stunts.

Until Wednesday afternoon, when GOP presidential nominee John McCain announced that he was heading to Washington to work with congressional leaders and the Bushies to craft a better bailout bill, both McCain and Democratic candidate Barack Obama clearly had believed that the last place they wanted to be seen was in Washington.

I understood the Bush administration's decision to promise up to $30 billion to facilitate the fire sale of Bear Stearns. I got the administration's decision to spend as much as $200 billion to stabilize mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are worth about $5 trillion. Ditto the $85 billion federal bailout of AIG.

John McCain was right when he said Monday that despite the bad news about Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy and AIG trolling for help from Uncle Sam, "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." As politicians running for the White House learn, honesty is a commodity best used sparingly on the campaign trail.

At age 18, an American can enlist in the military, vote, sign a contract, get married, have an operation -- hey, in California, a 14-year-old can have an abortion without telling her parents -- but he cannot buy a beer. Not legally, anyway.

"You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig," Sen. Barack Obama said Tuesday -- thereby spawning one of those vacuous debates that will consume at least two days of air time on cable news talk shows.

The 2008 Republican National Convention had too much in common with the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.

"I miss the old John McCain." It's a refrain I hear on a regular basis, most often from people who are Barack Obama voters no matter what.

"The Republican Party will not stand by while Gov. (Sarah) Palin is subjected to sexist attacks," Carly Fiorina, the former head of Hewlett-Packard and constant McCain booster, told a press conference at the Republican National Convention Wednesday. "I don't believe American women are going to stand for it either."

"This plan makes no sense. It's the height of political correctness," railed John Ziegler, a California alternate delegate, Sunday after he heard the news that John McCain was suspending the political part of the first night of the Republican National Convention.

MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL -- Bingo. For weeks, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been the Republican whom conservatives barely dared to hope could become John McCain's pick as his running mate.

Can he win in November? Yes, Barack Obama was the best Democrat in the field. Start with his charismatic yet cool demeanor.

In some ways, the Dems confab sounds a bit like a Republican convention. For example: Nuclear energy? It's big here. The daily convention edition of the National Journal has been running pro-nuclear energy ads on Page Two every day -- and touting the support of Democratic Party biggies.

DENVER -- There are two Democratic National Conventions here in Denver. The first one is the official convention, which has a sole purpose: to sell Barack Obama, not as a different kind of Democrat, but as a red-white-and blue everyman. Mr. Middle America.

Monday morning, before the Democratic National Committee launched its convention at Denver's Pepsi Center, the documentary "I.O.U.S.A." -- think: "one nation, under stress, in debt" -- played to a small but committed audience at the nearby Starz Film Center.

DENVER -- The goodie bag given to attendees of the Democratic National Convention includes maps, magnets and Dale Carnegie's Golden Book. The first principle for Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is: "Don't criticize, condemn or complain." No. 2: "Give honest, sincere appreciation."

Democrats used to love to bash President Bush for sending America to war without asking Americans to sacrifice. Now that it is an election year, you won't hear the s-word coming out of their lips.

In politics, everyone wants to be seen as a mudslinging virgin -- who, like King Lear, is "more sinned against than sinning." Toward that end, Democrats have crafted the conceit that Republicans are attack dogs, while Democratic candidates are not sufficiently ruthless. After years of calling President Bush every name in the book, the left nonetheless manages to see itself as the victim in the smear game.