Disappointed after the midterm elections, Republicans are trying to decide which voters should be the party's top priority.

In recent elections, they have been losing votes from white college graduates, often in the suburbs, while gaining votes from whites without college degrees. Should Republicans go further down the road of working-class ...Read more

All across America, university towns are thriving. Their skilled workforces and research activities draw in business investment, while their medical facilities and high quality of life attract residents from smaller rural towns.

As a result, there are a lot of ideas for how public policy can help turn small and decaying rural towns into ...Read more

"I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie."

Those words, attributed to George Washington at the age of 6, appeared in the fifth edition of Mason Locke Weems's "The Life of Washington," published in 1806.

In case you've forgotten the details of the story: Young George cut down a cherry tree, and when confronted by his father, he ...Read more

When the Founding Fathers established freedom of the press as a constitutional right, they didn't hedge their support with the phrase as long as they're nice about it. A free press by design is a check on power and often a robust critic of government.

Donald Trump isn't the first president to disparage the news media. That honor goes to George ...Read more

(EDITORS: This editorial was crafted by opinion editors in McClatchy's five California newsrooms: The Sacramento Bee, The Fresno Bee, The Modesto Bee, The Merced Sun-Star and The Tribune in San Luis Obispo.)

The Camp Fire has claimed more than 60 victims, and rescue workers continue to search for hundreds who are still missing.

The Tubbs Fire,...Read more

BEIJING -- The queues of Chinese tourists eager to visit Mao Zedong's mausoleum in the center of Beijing's Tiananmen Square start building at 7 a.m. and the wait can be three hours. The tourist shops along one side of the square are filled with glossy pendants that feature Mao on one side, and Chinese president Xi Jinping on the other.

Those ...Read more

The National Rifle Association's arrogance struck a nerve last week when it scolded doctors for daring to state the obvious: that gun violence in America is a public health crisis. Apparently physicians weren't supposed to notice that the gunshot wounds they try desperately to heal -- too often failing -- are in fact caused by guns.

"Someone ...Read more

The Rohingya Muslims have endured more than a year of savagery at the hands of the Myanmar military, which has burned their villages, killed and raped their people, and driven about 700,000 of them out of the country in what amounts to a campaign of ethnic cleansing. What refuge they could find has been in Bangladesh, in crowded camps near the ...Read more

In 1981, I spent my junior year in Paris. It should have been a magnificent time, something that people with English majors and literary aspirations would have called "halcyon." There I was, 19 years old, single, and earnest in the City of Lights. I should have been Leslie Caron dancing along the banks of the Seine with Gene Kelly, or Audrey ...Read more

If any truth emerged from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting this week in Baltimore, it was surely Archbishop William E. Lori's observation that the priest sex abuse scandal " is going to be with us for a long, long time." The church covered up the widespread abuse of children and adults by priests for a long, long time. It...Read more

Bob Woodward doesn't like it one bit.

The legendary investigative reporter has chastised CNN because it is suing the Trump administration for revoking the White House press credentials of its star reporter, Jim Acosta.

"In the news media there has been an emotional reaction to Trump," Woodward clucked to an audience in Florida. "Too many ...Read more

British Prime Minister Theresa May on Thursday defended the "Brexit" agreement she reached with the European Union as "a decisive breakthrough." A more honest description would be "making the best of a bad job," the bad job being the disastrous decision by 52 percent of voters in 2016 to withdraw the United Kingdom from the EU.

No one is ...Read more

As of Thursday, more than a week after election day, about 2.7 million ballots cast by California voters remained uncounted. In all but two of the 58 California counties -- lightly populated Sierra and Inyo -- vote-counting is ongoing and may continue until the Dec. 7 deadline.

Why is it taking so long? Surely something must have gone terribly ...Read more

When the Founding Fathers established freedom of the press as a constitutional right, they didn't hedge their support with the phrase as long as they're nice about it. A free press by design is a check on power and often a robust critic of government.

Donald Trump isn't the first president to disparage the news media. That honor goes to George ...Read more

There was a single big item on the agenda when U.S. bishops convened in Baltimore this week: how to confront the child sex abuse scandals that perennially soil the church.

The bishops were prepared to debate whether to create a lay commission to investigate complaints against those in their ranks, including the power to make recommendations for...Read more

Recent debates over America's immigration policy are exposing a deep rift in conservative politics. In the Utah Senate debate earlier this year, Mitt Romney referred to U.S. policies that separated immigrant parents from their children at the border as a "dark chapter" in American history. Others have urged President Donald Trump to uphold his ...Read more

When former state Transportation Secretary Brian Kelly took over as CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority in February, he promised a new era of transparency with the state's bullet-train project -- and admitted that the project's then-$64 billion price tag would go up. Given the revelation in 2015 that the authority had never revealed ...Read more

Last September, in a now infamous exchange between Sen. Dianne Feinstein and judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett, California's senior senator suggested that Barrett's adherence to her Roman Catholic faith rendered her unfit for the federal bench.

"The dogma lives loudly within you, and that's of concern," concluded Feinstein, after an ...Read more