Opinion

Close your eyes and picture this: A warm and cozy ... no, wait a minute. You'd better open your eyes or you won't be able to read the rest of your newspaper. Or worse, you might drift off to sleep and land face first in your cereal bowl, and then you'll be cranky and out-of-sorts the rest of the day.

Hooray, Trader Joe's is open – what a wonderful holiday gift for South County residents! But it's a gift that the region – Morgan Hill residents and officials especially – worked hard to get. After a citywide postcard campaign, a few columns on the topic, and who knows how much behind-the-scenes work between city officials, developers and TJ's representatives, South County finally has one of the much-loved specialty grocery stores and it's in Morgan Hill.

The city cannot create a successful downtown alone. A thriving

I've pretty much discounted the reality (or rather, unreality) of the next few weeks of Christmas and am already looking forward to a new year. So is the governor it seems, as he seeks to devise a proposal that addresses the crisis of inadequate health care for the entire population of California. Because so many of California's non-profits are health care providers or greatly impacted by the ramifications of poor health care policies and practices, the California Association of Non-profits asked about what is going on around the state, particularly in the area of private and public partnerships.

It's No Wonder Whales are 'Snapping' - They Belong in the Great, Open Oceans

With the release of the Iraq Study Group's findings, we have a

Attorney Needs to 'Learn Facts Before Arguing'

Adults often complain about mixed signals they get from teens, but what about the messages teens get? Here's one with major life implications: Go to college, but graduate with a load of debt. Oh yeah, like that makes getting a degree look real attractive.

"All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them."

Is it just me? It seems that whenever I turn to the news on TV or the radio these days, the world outlook simply gets bleaker by the minute. Could we – pleeeeeze – have just one 24-hour stretch of good news for a change? I was driving in major traffic recently, and before the news report was over I was "this close" to taking my purse and beating my radio senseless with it.