Commentary, editorials and opinion, opinions

Imagine if, in 1942, the son of German immigrants from the Sudetenland had yelled "Heil Hitler!" and then gunned down several dozen of his fellow soldiers on an American military base. Most reporters probably would not have expressed bewilderment as to the perpetrator's motive.

Here is my secret: While the absurdities of life are always the fundamental subject of this column, I wish politics, the ultimate absurdity, did not so often demand attention.

When the California Legislature was drafting its massive water plan, it included a number of specific appropriations as political lubricants.

It did not, however, include funds for analysis of the Capitol's own supply of drinking water, thereby denying us an opportunity to discover whether it contains a mysterious germ that compels legislative leaders to do really dumb things.

Recently, after my wife and I saw our No. 2 son off to Iraq after his mid-deployment leave, I wrote how airport security has made a shambles of the traditional farewell.

Suppose Major Nidal Hassan had called a meeting of agents of the FBI and top officers of Fort Hood, and then said something like this:

The biggest unreported news in ages just happened in plain sight. America's conservatives have been backed into opposing their own mantra of states' rights.

Just so they can continue to say no to any form of public option for health insurance.

The suspect in the Fort Hood shootings, it turns out, exhibited telltale warning signs that something was amiss, but none of them seemed alarming enough to prompt authorities to act. The killings at the Texas base should lower that threshold.

Maywood is one of California's tiniest and most troubled cities, a plot of scarcely 750 acres southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

Its official population, nearly all Latino, is about 30,000 persons, not counting an untold number of illegal immigrants. Its Police Department has been singled out by the state Department of Justice for brutality.

So now health-care reform rests on the shoulders of the Senate and in the hands of Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid.

The House did its part, passing a plan that would extend health insurance to 36 million Americans, requiring those who can afford it to buy coverage and subsidizing those who can't. The cost over the first 10 years is estimated at $1.2 trillion.

The first Armistice Day on Nov. 11, 1919, marked the one-year anniversary of the end of World War I, what many proclaimed, with an optimism that turned out to be wildly misplaced, "the war to end all wars."