Remember The Red Queen in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”? If you’re a millennial, probably not. Some may think it’s Helena Bonham Carter, the actress who played The Red Queen in Tim Burton’s 2010 film version starring Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. But, as one anonymous online reviewer of that glitzy production observed, “Poor Lewis […]
Devon Minnema: The differences in breaking the law
I have written before about the rule of law. I’ve talked a lot about how it seems to be crumbling in the face of corruption at the government’s highest levels. I’m sure at some point I even claimed that there were two different sets of rules in the country. I now believe that is wrong. […]
Matt Talbot: Crime, fear and reality
On Tuesday morning, Donald Trump posted the following on his Twitter account: “Crime is out of control, and rapidly getting worse. Look what is going on in Chicago and our inner cities. Not good!” Something about that didn’t seem right, so I checked crime statistics for both Chicago and for the nation as a whole. […]
Vice Mayor Mark Hughes to run for mayor in November
Staff Report Benicia Vice Mayor Mark Hughes has announced his intention to run for mayor in the upcoming November election. “When I first ran for City Council many years ago, my goal was to get into politics without becoming a politician; to make decisions and cast votes for what I truly believed was in the […]
Devon Minnema: The perversion of liberal and conservative ideologies
It seems that terms and ideologies have been completely scrambled, not just in this election cycle, but in the course of American history. For instance, the argument of “conservative” versus “liberal” today would utterly confuse the Founding Fathers, who actually felt that the roots of words imbued significance through cultural history not just the social […]
City Council candidate to host meet and greet at The Loft tonight
Lionel Largaespada, a candidate for Benicia City Council, will be at The Loft Wine Bar and Restaurant this evening from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. for a meet and greet event. Benicia residents are invited to attend and ask questions of the candidate while supporting a local downtown business. The event will be hosted by […]
Bruce Robinson: “A foolish consistency” or the “iron string”?
(Note: This was originally published in the May 1, 2016 edition of the Herald) It has been 174 years since the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson first published his 10,000-word essay titled “Self-Reliance.” [http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm] Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, school and college textbooks included at least a condensed version of this essay […]
Grant Cooke: Our Age of Discovery threatened by new demagogue
Coming from a cloistered Central Valley farm town to the Bay Area of the late 1960s was a transformational experience—a personal age of discovery. At UC Berkeley, I realized that it wasn’t just me, but in fact, the world stood at the beginnings of a remarkable new era of discovery. A few decades later, we […]
Matt Talbot: A bright, flashing warning
Mark Twain supposedly once said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes,” and I think he was onto something. The United States is not Weimar Germany, but there are some non-trivial similarities that ought not to be dismissed. While Americans are not post-Great War Germans half-starved by years of reparations payments, I suspect a […]
Devon Minnema: The void left by Bernie Sanders
Now that the primary here in California is over and we have a fairly concrete idea of who the two nominees will be, it’s time that we dispel some false ideas before we etch this primary into history. One that I have heard a few too many times is essentially that Bernie Sanders’ popularity among […]