Los Angeles Times

President Obama's visit to Ghana this month was downright biblical.

Whatever path is taken, change is in the air, said Mark Paul, a senior scholar with the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. ...

Among the speakers will be Steven Hill of the New America Foundation; Robert Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies; ...

Can't stand your boring husband? Thinking of calling it quits? Well, you should have mustered the nerve to leave him well before this economic crisis. Now you might not be able to afford to live without him, literally.

It's a well-known fact that financial woes are the biggest cause of marital spats. With the economy the way it is, you'd expect lots of husbands and wives to be at each other's throats. But the conventional wisdom is wrong. This recession is so bad that you can count… more

Not since the aftermath of 9/11 has the word "evil" been bandied about so much in the public media. Last week, while sentencing Bernard Madoff to 150 years in prison, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin brought the term back in a big way. Chin's characterization of Madoff's crimes as "extraordinarily evil" was so striking that it made headlines around the world. And, as usual whenever that loaded word is used, there were plenty of people who were offended by it.

The images were decidedly retro and jarring in their distant familiarity, as if a grainy old family film long left in the attic had been brought out for a screening. In defense of la patriala patria, army troops overpowered el palacio at dawn and placed el presidente on an airplane to be flown into exile, still wearing his pajamas. Sunday's coup in Honduras followed a script once so familiar it acquired cliche status, material even for a Woody Allen sendup.

With apologies to Nike, if the United States were a for-profit venture, its slogan would be "Just do it." Few would dispute the notion that we are an action-oriented people. From an early age, Americans are bombarded with the message that actions speak louder than words and that talk is cheap. Who among us as a child opening presents on his birthday really believed the moral that it's the thought that counts? Come on!

"California government does not work because it cannot work," Micah Weinberg, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, told a reform forum sponsored by his organization last week.

The Obama administration is reportedly considering backing a radical plan to shrink deteriorating American cities by bulldozing entire neighborhoods and returning the land to nature. The idea, which originated in Flint, Mich. -- cratered by the auto industry implosion -- is to persuade disintegrating and depopulated cities to embrace their shrinkage, destroy abandoned infrastructure, save money and thereby stave off fiscal ruin.

Is a constitutional convention in California's future?

With the state's fiscal woes mounting and Sacramento seemingly frozen in place, a group of California leaders has proposed a constitutional convention as a way to fix the Golden State's deeply entrenched structural problems. Perhaps the most important question about a constitutional convention is: Who would be the delegates charged with designing California 2.0, and how would they be chosen?