Originally appeared in the Mercury News

In 1951, when I was 8 years old, our family drove from San Jose to the old San Francisco airport -- then called Mills Field -- to see Grandma Jenny off on one of her biennial trips to Hawaii. After watching the Pan...

President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has sparked a heated and, at times, ugly debate. The worst aspects of the debate are most evident on cable TV talk shows and the web, but it is only a matter of time before some Senator makes a statement...

In a recent email a friend asked: "How concerned are you about the dirt being hurled [in the presidential campaign]? It's getting rough out there... politics as usual or something darker and more dangerous to the fabric of our country?"

The same day I read Dana Milbank's column in...