Opinion

A friend on an errand was heading up to Greenfield the other day and asked if I’d like to tag along, and because the town had been on my mind of late, I readily took her up on the offer. I was feeling a...

In 1986 I worked for California’s Employment Development Department, where I processed amnesty seekers under President Ronald Reagan’s landmark immigration reform law called Immigration and Control Act (IRCA). The Watsonville office reviewed documents proving that applicants had worked in the local farming economy for...

Local column by Joanne Banuelos

There is something about eye contact that lets two people know that for just a split second, just a flicker of time, there has been a meeting of minds, a very brief acknowledgment of each other’s existence. I had just such an encounter last...

Oh, eM, Gee. That’s the short way of saying how surprised one may be when writing emails or blogs. It stands for words that aren’t necessarily wrong but just relay the way someone feels at the time. That is the way I feel right...

Crossing Nevada is similar to my memory of crossing Texas. It goes on forever. And just when you think it has to end, it carries on. Acres of mining, solar panels and corrections. Electricity poles line the freeway for miles, as if there were...

If any of you readers have paid attention over the past few years, you know I do not include a lot of family stuff; we all have family stories, so my use of space in a newspaper as a journal about my family seems...

Do you remember how you woke up on 9/11? Were you awakened by a friend who almost yelled at you to turn on the TV and see what was happening, or what you thought when you watched another plane crash into the World Trade...

You knew it was going to happen. What’s that? You didn’t know. Well, let me tell you it’s true! Last week I got on my soapbox about taxes, and since it’s April, why not continue my rant.  Instead of working on helping “We the People,”...

With the advent of 24-hour news coverage by numerous networks, we now have a multitude of current events coverage; coverage that invariably comes with opinion-fueled rhetoric offered up by everyone from professional pundits to amateur analysists and simpering sycophants to determined detractors. And with...