Commentary, editorials and opinion, opinions

The seemingly endless health care debate remains intensely partisan, and now dominates news coverage of Washington, but there are other games in town. Among the most important is the largely neglected, low profile but potentially profound effort of Paul Volcker, Chairman of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, to reform regulation of our banking system.

Economically, it has been all blue skies for China since Beijing began opening its economy and joined the World Trade Organization. This year, China will surpass Japan as the world's second largest economy and it has already overtaken Germany as the world's largest exporter and the U.S. as the largest auto market.

As noted in this space countless times, California's government is broken, endemically incapable of addressing the state's most pressing policy issues.

As the crisis has deepened, another factor has made itself increasingly evident -- intervention by state and federal courts in what used to be political policy decision-making.

Speaking a couple years ago about technology and education, Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs said that technology wouldn't matter as long as you can't fire teachers.

"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," he said.

Israel has humiliated the Vice President of the United States. China, to whom we owe hundreds of billions of dollars, is angry with us. Russia doesn't trust us. Afghanistan is a mess. The jury is out on Iraq. We're all but certain Iran will have nuclear weapons. U.S. citizens are being brutally murdered in Mexico.

Here is a quick test. Read the following two lead paragraphs that appeared in two different papers in January about the same set of events.. They are highly similar but with a major difference, at least in terms of objectively intended journalism. See if you can find it.

First example.

Large parts of the country likely thought 1:32 p.m. EDT Saturday, March 20, would never come. That's the vernal equinox, the traditional end of winter and beginning of spring, the heliocentric spring, that is.

The National Weather Service dates the start of meteorological spring from March 1, but those extra 19 days are good insurance that the winter of 2010 is well and truly gone.

SAN FRANCISCO - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D -- Calif., and her henchpersons are whipping Democrats to secure 216 votes to pass the Senate's health care reform bill. The Senate then would approve a companion "reconciliation" measure to deodorize some of the more pungent legislative bribes and corrupt deals that helped grease the Senate legislation's passage last Christmas Eve.

WASHINGTON - It is bad enough to have proposed legislation worth at least a trillion dollars that few Americans or their elected congressional representatives know exactly what is in it. But it is even worse to finally adopt it without actually doing so.

The "birthers" have finally succeeded in accomplishing something other than embarrassing themselves. They may have driven the state of Hawaii into shutting off their requests for original copies of President Barack Obama's birth certificate.