National media report Saturday mail delivery may go the way of the milk wagon, and that a wide majority of Americans think that's OK.
Hold on.
Congress must act first, and that is not likely to happen soon. Some Congressional leaders worry about trimming mail service, even if only 35 percent of people surveyed by Gallup last summer disapprove.
No one feels comfortable when someone else has the power to irreparably change the world with a simple stroke of a pen.
Thanks to the American Antiquities Act of 1906, the president of the United States has the power to unleash a huge federal bureaucracy and create national monuments on his own authority without the approval of Congress or any other governmental entity or agency.
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the other Founding Fathers created the census in 1790, when they wrote the U.S. Constitution and empowered Congress to count every person living in the United States of America and to use that count to determine representation in the Congress.
It's no secret, and it shouldn't come as a big surprise to anyone living in Plumas and Lassen counties - the state of California faces a fiscal crisis of frightening and historic proportions that's not likely to be resolved anytime soon.
While legislators, politicians and pundits try to place the blame and offer possible stopgap solutions, most of them ignore the simple, down-to-earth reality faced by every household in the state trying to balance its checkbook and keep food on the table and every business leader from San Ysidro to Fort Dick struggling to stay in business and make payroll every week: You can't spend money you don't have.
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