Our job as journalists is to keep you informed about what is taking place in your community. In the year-plus that I’ve been working exclusively online, I’ve seen how we can expand what we do so we can respond almost immediately to what you want to know about.

Presented with two historically plausible arguments about whether the Second Amendment secures an individual right to keep and bear arms, the Supreme Court on Thursday opted for the interpretation less suited to a 21st century America bedeviled by gun crime.

Dear editor, I am a wine industry professional and long-standing Napa resident who would like a great place to live and work in Napa. There are many young professionals that would like to live in Napa if it would offer appropriate affordable housing and social activities here. This is why new commercial and residential developments would improve Napa, not hinder it.

Dear editor, So, it’s Friday night and you’ve been out and about hanging those flyers on every lamp post and telephone pole in your neighborhood to attract the public to your garage sale. If all goes well, your junk will become someone else’s treasure.

Dear editor, Napa High School initiated a new requirement for graduating seniors named Senior Projects, wherein every senior is required to write a paper and make an oral presentation on a topic of their choice.

Dear editor, A suggestion for Registrar of Voters John Tuteur: Dump those 9,500 uncounted ballots (as of election night) in the Napa River and forget ‘em. You know the results, so why waste our money counting them? And in the future, just tally votes cast at a precinct. People who are so lazy as to cast an absentee ballot shouldn’t count anyway. They’re the dumb-dumb kind that just do what they’re told to do.

Overall, last Friday’s Napa Community’s Growth Summit was a good start in the right direction. Not much was produced in terms of tangible solutions, other than an agreement that Napa County’s challenges are increasingly regional and, as such, require cooperative solutions. While I was discouraged by some of the passive-aggressive public statements made by other city’s planning officials directed at American Canyon, I found it at least beneficial to get the sentiments out in the open, so we can begin working past them.

A populist frustration increasingly finding voice in Napa County is that the wine and hospitality industries are pulling in services and attractions that cater principally to upscale vacationers and tourists, while neglecting any sense of a local living wage and inadvertently threatening the very Ag preserve that those industries depend on through, among other things, jumbo-sized developments and hotel mega-resorts in areas that were once only the purview of B&B’s.  

I am shocked and angered by the contemplated attempt of those who lost the Measure N vote to immediately put the same attempt to scuttle Napa Pipe before us. This is a way to flip off the community that voted against this once, and reeks of being sore losers.

I am surveying the latest news to think over what I want to say about the Obama-McCain race at this point and I can’t help but feeling that the world is breaking down into a lot of chaos right now. I know, I know, it always seems that way, nothing new under the sun, but yet right now ... the problems just seem to be piling up. And there is a gathering sense that things are really out of control. And I am not hearing any answers, just the same old tired propaganda.

Remember, everyone, starting July 1 it is illegal to hold a cell phone and talk while driving.

OK, folks, you've been debating online here for about two weeks now whether John McCain or Barack Obama is your choice for president.

OK, folks, you've been debating online here for about two weeks now whether John McCain or Barack Obama is your choice for president.