Don Miller, Editor

One of the toughest choices facing local voters next month is who will replace Democrat John Laird in the state Assembly. Laird, the Assembly’s budget chair, has become one of the most popular and well-regarded Democrats in Sacramento and his departure will be a major loss.

Unfortunately, in a district that’s more than 50 percent Santa Cruz County residents, along with voters from Monterey and Santa Clara counties, our county faces having no elected representative in the state Legislature come January. To make matters worse, there is no clear-cut choice to replace Laird. The two leading candidates are Santa Cruz City Councilwoman Emily Reilly and Monterey-area lawyer Bill Monning, whose background is in farm labor issues, social justice and conflict resolution and mediation.

Monning is super-smart, soft spoken,  personable and professorial – and he’s never held elected office. Reilly is … well, opinionated, a business owner, a former mayor, has tasted some tough times and tragedy in her life, and has made some enemies in local political circles.

Which one would be an effective successor to Laird in Sacramento?

Or is the answer, none of the above? As one political analyst put it, the choice in this election for the 27th Assembly is a case of term limits and partisan redistricting coming home to roost.

The Sentinel will give up its endorsement next week. But we’re always listening …

Amazing, for a guy who has transformed himself from a symbol of American “weakness” into a leftist, do-gooding, Hamas-hugging, peace-prize winning global citizen, that he’s now becoming part of the Barack Obama movement. Yup, Jimmy Carter, fresh off last month’s journey to the Miasma East, was on Jay Leno last night  warning Hillary Clinton to just shut up and go away.

And even though Hillary was vowing today to continue, that’s the general consensus. It’s over. Get outta here. We’ll use today’s Wall Street Journal, more and more newsworthy under the reign of Rupert, for the words that this time, it’s really over. But writing in the Opinion section of today’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger takes a different look at an Obama-McCain race, and among his fresh insights is this: McCain’s best strategy is not to remind voters about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but to invoke …. Jimmy Carter.

Meanwhile, the nefarious Karl Rove, resurfaced as a columnist, forecasts a wild and unpredictable presidential election that today, he says, favors McCain, but just slightly. Even if you loathe Rove’s political machinations in the service of W., he’s an incisive and eminently sensible and readable analyst ….

So one more day into the Democratic campaign — and nothing much has changed, except that Hillary now looks even more unhinged and desperate. So where to go from here? You may have your own ideas how this could or should play out, but I really loved this column earlier in the week by the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman on the real question about this pivotal time in American political history.

Here’s tomorrow’s opinion piece for the Sentinel on this same subject:

Not every Internet wave is suspect or tawdry or overwrought (I’ve nowdisqualified this blog). The story of Randy Pausch, a 47-year-old professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, has become the feel-sad, but feel-good phenomenon of the Net-o-sphere. Paush is dying of pancreatic cancer, which usually kills sufferers in less than a year. But a lecture he gave last September to students and faculty at his university has been viewed by millions of people who have been moved by his elegy of life and dying young.

Randy Pausch is also writing, with Jeffrey Zaslow, a book about the lecture and about how he is preparing his family for his departure. The book, “The Last Lecture,” came about because Randy allowed Zaslow to spend months with him and his family — all part of the testimony and testament he is preparing. Zaslow wrote about this Saturday in the Wall Street Journal, and it’s a story well worth reading (and a video interview about an “accidental celebrity” well worth watching).

I have to say, a story like this shows the beneficial power of the Internet in so many ways.

The apparent suicide of the so-called “D.C. Madam” — a media gotcha name that provides the audience to play voyeur and judge at the same time — was, well, just sad. The news reports today noted that one of the women accused of working as  prostitute in the operation, also killed herself.

But, shades of Elliot Spitzer, these women are just making a living, right?, even though they’re dying, one way or another. It’s just sex and men have always demanded instant gratification  and our culture is all about freedom — which is the point of this recent column in the Wall Street Journal on the continuing trend on college campuses of hooking up. The column delves into a new book, “Sex and the Soul,” by Donna Freitas, a religion professor at Boston University, who makes the point that this era of on-campus free sex has created, surprise surprise, a lot of inner turmoil for many of the kids, even though the universities remain indifferent to the phenomenon. Tom Wolfe had this trend spot-on in his 2004 novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons.”

And sex remains a commodity, to be trafficked in, bartered, weighed and … ultimately tossed away. You gotta make a living — and maybe that’s why agents and photographers and magazine publishers thought nothing of unveiling 15-year-old Miley Cyrus to her future as … meat on the counter. Priced by the pound.

Reminds me of  C.S. Lewis’s description of men lathering over young women at strip clubs, back in the day. Lewis compared this particular lust to another seemingly insatiable human desire, food. Imagine, he wrote, if these guys were all lathered up watching a piece of baloney displayed prominently on the same dance stage.

So now Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is saying the state budget is out of whack to the tune of $20 billion — an obvious scare tactic say budget bombasters who think the guv is just lookin’ for a reason to raise taxes. The new figures are more bad news for education, which, of course, is drawing howls of protest. Still, according to a new poll to be released Thursday, while a majority of Californians want better schools and funding not to be cut to provide better schools, they also don’t want their taxes raised.

That’s the thread of tomorrow’s editorial in the Sentinel – no one, as usual, wants to pay the piper. But the song is a dirge and it just keeps playing ….

But massive budget numbers and deficits are just sooooo anxiety producing — which might have caused the local kid to eat mushrooms and just maybe drop LSD the other day, causing him to get lost in the woods, thus provoking a successful rescue attempt involving a Santa Cruz County police dog and trainer. His dad is going to take extreme measures, however, to show the young man this kind of behavior is just not gonna be tolerated: he’s threatening to take away his car for a while. (Hey, at least he wasn’t getting drunk like other kids his age …)

Speaking of extreme consequences, irony, timing, and strange behavior, the Swiss guy who tripped over LSD in the first place, Albert Hoffman, died yesterday at age 102. Wonder if the wandering youth had ever heard of the man who discovered acid and caused an entire generation to misplace their identities? Interesting that Hoffman, no hippie he, did continue to drop acid for many years, even after the flowers lost their ’60s power.

Kids these days. Blame it on the underfunded schools and the drop in money from inflated housing ….

In reading the story that … ohmigosh … we did for today about the rising tide of immigrants and their kids who could be voting in 2012, I couldn’t help but continue to be amazed that this story, this issue remains drowned out by debates over elitism, black liberation theology and the Klingon Klintons. But it isn’t lost among the rank and file, especially Republicans. That’s why the Supreme Court decision yesterday about Indiana’s requirement that voters show a photo ID may, with the demographic trends, bring this all back home. At least that’s the subject of our latest Sentinelian editorial — are the Republicans on the winning side of what people are really, really feeling about immigration? Or is it, as this link suggests, just a reminder of why the Democrats had better win to control the next nomination to the high court?

Watching the Rev. Jeremiah Wright over the past couple of days make the rounds of TV interview shows, culminating in today’s appearance at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. made me kind of agree with Maureen Dowd that Barack Obama has a good reason to look so wan and weary these days.

“God doesn’t bless everything,” said the Rev. Wright when asked today if he was apologetic for suggesting the U.S. should be damned. “God condemns something — and d-e-m-n, ‘demn,’ is where we get the word ‘damn.’ God damns some practices.”

Understandable if you’re in the black church, perhaps, where many people found refuge from the white world of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” But anathema in the voting booth, if voters decide their next president cannot possibly be tied to such sentiments. Or the black church, in all its fiery sermons and red-hot rhetoric.

More than that, in a campaign where many Democrats have a hard time believing in the veracity of Hillary Clinton (check out this story on how Bill Clinton has been taking an ever-larger role in her campaign in recent weeks), the Rev. Wright’s comment to a reporter that Obama goes to church “about as much as you do.” Meaning — rarely, if ever. Meaning, just what is Jeremiah warning?

The back-and-forth, who-do-you-believe-now?, battle over spraying Santa Cruz County to eradicate the light brown apple moth has now taken a dramatic turn  — a Santa Cruz County judge today stopping, if only temporarily, plans to spray us again by air in June (and perhaps beyond).

A couple of points here, in this saga, which has been spraying us since last fall, when the eradication program began in Monterey County and the first claims, still unsubstantiated, about the effects on humans began coming to us.

1. I have to believe the state California Department of Food and Agriculture wishes, no matter how many times they get experts to say otherwise, they wouldn’t have opened this can of … pheromones.

2. CDFA says they will quickly appeal this order, which affects Santa Cruz city and the unincorporated parts of the county  – but what other cities in this county plus counties along the rest of the Central California coast will also try to get their own courts to stay the spray?

3. Is this a trade issue or truly a public pest? The problem for CDFA  — and they freely admit this — is that there is no damage that anyone can see, just this specter of the LBAM and a quarantine of local ag products. The proving there is an emergency issue is what has legislators like local Assemblyman John Laird fighting the spraying.

At this point, does anyone believe CDFA? Or the Sentinel? We’ve been hip-deep in this story since the fall — even going to court after the manufacturer of the spray tried to suppress us from publishing the ingredients. It’s pretty much a daily story for us and the CDFA closely watches, and reacts to, every word we publish. And while we don’t buy into black-op government conspiracies, we do harbor reasonable doubts about whether the spraying and whether alternatives would work and have expressed these in opinions we’ve published.

What do you think?

At least the ongoing battle between Hillary the C and Obambi (the subject of today’s editorial) is generating millions and millions of dollars to pay for TV spots — and some pretty biting commentary. Check out the pro-Obama Rocky spoof, “Baracky,” or the WWE wrestling smackdown, “Senators on Steroids” — and considering that Hillary comes off as the Queen of Mean in both, Maureen Dowd’s column today (to be printed in the Thursday Sentinel) seems particularly … um, to the point. Here’s a sample: “She’s been running ads about it, suggesting he doesn’t have “what it takes” to run the country. Her message is unapologetically emasculating: If he does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran and stop Osama?”