As Memorial Day makes its annual appearance I’ve been thinking about what men and women face today as they volunteer for military service. It is remarkable that so many sign up, committing themselves to almost certain danger.

La Mesa Mayor Art Madrid reported last year that while the city has about 10,000 more residents now than it did 10 years ago, it has fewer employees. I‘ve asked several people who follow La Mesa’s city government why that is so. The common answer was there was no choice.

California’s so-called prevailing wage laws governing public construction are achingly complicated and have an inordinate negative effect on costs.

The recent horrific murders at the finish line of the Boston Marathon have me worried.

The current fuss over the move to expand bar hours until 4 a.m. and to add regulatory oversight of medical marijuana to the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) is, in part, because activists want regulators to make law. In this case, some people think there are too many bars.

When the results of the 2008 presidential election were announced, those who favored Barack Obama responded with lively ebullience. There were high-fives in evidence all over the country along with shining smiles, tears of excitement, joy and appreciation.

Wikipedia’s first definition of "profit" is “the difference between the purchase price and the costs of bringing to market.” The top line in the Merriam Webster online dictionary definition is a “valuable return.” Another definition on the Merriam Webster list is that it is the “net income usually for a given period of time.”

In 1931, California’s legislators agreed with Republicans in Congress that giving administrators authority to set construction-worker wage levels on projects paid for with taxes was a good idea. The Davis Bacon Act became law for federally funded construction and a “prevailing wage” law was adopted in California.

Conservative pundits and some leaders of the Republican Party are hyperventilating. Their candidate didn’t win the presidency. It’s time, they say, for redesign. That happens with each party every time the other side wins. This time it’s the Republicans’ turn.

President Barack Obama is an Academy Award shoo-in for his portrayal of Chicken Little in this winter’s production of “Sequestration: The Sky is Falling.”

When several pension and benefit reform measures were approved by voters in 2012, there was at least a sliver of hope that public agencies would be forced to come to grips with and hopefully solve an underfunding problem.

Our government is again engaged in misdirection. After a failed effort to keep the use of drones out of the public eye, the administration now wants to give their use respectability. The Pentagon has created a new noncombat medal: the Distinguished Warfare Medal.

In 2014 the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which supporters and detractors alike refer to as Obamacare, will offer individual states the opportunity to expand Medicaid coverage. Those that accept that invitation, an action that requires legislative approval, are succumbing to a siren’s song and are bound for the same collision with rocky shores as those sailors in Greek mythology.

Once again activity at the La Jolla Children’s Pool is in the news. Harbor seals that have made a home there are now the subject of 24-hour video from the Western Alliance for Nature Conservancy, which was established to help save threatened habitats.

Recently, I decided to shut down an email address, one that was associated with a former place of employment.

When President Barack Obama announced his proposals for gun control, he said those who don’t agree with him will have been unduly influenced.

When California resident Phil Mickelson said he might have to make drastic adjustments due to higher tax rates in California, tax-and-spend liberals made him the poster child of selfishness.

Over the past several weeks one outright deception and a separate effort to deceive voters were revealed to California citizens. The media have been all over one of them.

Periodically we are urged to “buy American.” It is well nigh impossible.

Casual watchers and partisan political junkies agree that in California the election results have tilted the state government farther to the left. There is change afoot.