On June 4, at an Oakland City Council meeting, Noel Gallo wanted to know how many cops Jestin Johnson, the City Administrator, thought OPD should have.

Jack Saunders sent me a video clip of a guy, Ben Kawaller, who recently gave a speech to the Log Cabin Republicans, down in Los Angeles. Ben (I feel like I can call him by his first name) is gay, calls himself a “centrist Democrat,” and the topic of his speech was how much he loathes wokeness, which he defined as “the belief that a person’s immutable characteristics, like race or gender, always and inherently either limit them or grant them advantage.”

It hasn’t been a good week for Pamela Price. First, there was the scandal of her cutting plea deals for those murderers who brutally invaded the home of a man and then killed him. The story received widespread news coverage and fed into the narrative that Price is soft on criminals, especially when they’re Black.

The historian Christopher Caldwell, in his 2020 book “The Age of Entitlement,” asks what America actually bought with the massive national debt caused by LBJ’s War on Poverty and accelerated by the Reagan tax cuts. What did those trillions of dollars get us?

What should a school do with a problem kid who’s a threat to everyone around him? It’s complicated. One problem is that the officials making that decision—the teacher, the school’s administration and staff, the local school district—all may have different opinions. Some may incline towards leniency and second chances, others towards maximum punishment, depending on the severity of the offense.