Column

ARDMORE, Pa. - Wednesday was a beautiful day at the Merion Golf Club. Soft clouds, perfect temperature, gently cooling breezes. It was also the day before the U.S. Golf Assn., the diabolical mastermind of the U.S. Open, hands 150 players blindfolds and offers each a final puff on a cigarette. The 113th edition of this annual golf agony is meant, as always, to make the greatest golfers in the world feel as if they are wearing starched underwear. Mike Davis, executive director of the USGA, summed up nicely Wednesday morning.

From what I've been reading, the Santa Monica killer was packing an illegal assault rifle and 40 high-capacity ammunition magazines. He sprayed 100 bullets and had access to 1,300. And, oh yes, he was a mental case. The guy's exact background and how he obtained his war-ready arsenal weren't clear as of this writing. But, regardless, there are at least two possible and troubling scenarios. John Zawahri may have been an "innocent law-abiding citizen" until he wasn't - until he murdered his dad and brother, then three others randomly during a 10-minute rampage.

I'm an 84-year-old man on Social Security with original Medicare and Mutual of Omaha gap insurance. My insurance premium was raised from $262 to $363 a month, a 39% jump. After all my monthly expenses, I have just $240 left. What can I do in the event of another increase in my premiums? If you've had your current Medicare supplement plan for years, it's not surprising that you've seen your costs steadily rise, says Steve Zaleznick, senior Medicare advisor at PlanPrescriber, a Maynard, Mass.-based online provider of Medicare education and plan comparison tools.

ARDMORE, Pa.  - It is hard to know whether this year's U.S. Open golf tournament will be remembered for Justin Rose's victory or Phil Mickelson's defeat. Rose is 32 years old, an Englishman born in South Africa, who was a prodigy as early as 17 with his tie for fourth place as an amateur in the 1998 British Open. Recently, he has been seen as somebody who hasn't won a major but certainly should. Now he has, making birdies on Nos. 12 and 13 and holding on for a one-shot victory with his closing 70, an even-par finale that left him at an unusual 72-hole winning total of one-over 281. The real answer to how this U.S. Open will be remembered may rest with the course it was played on, Merion Golf Club, which yielded nothing.

Tony Cabral is the kind of consumer who makes a habit of checking his credit files at least twice a year. "I just want to be safe," he told me. "I want to know how my credit looks. " These days, though, it's become surprisingly difficult to stay on top of this most basic of consumer needs, an especially timely concern as hordes of Black Friday shoppers break out the plastic in search of holiday deals. Consumers are entitled to one free credit report annually from each of the three leading credit bureaus ?

In these troubled economic times, it's not hard to understand why people might want to protect their life savings by purchasing a hard asset like gold or silver. At least, that's the pitch of Monex, the big Newport Beach investment firm, which bills itself as "America's trusted name in precious metals investments" and assures clients that it's "committed to customer service. " So let's take a look at the experiences of some customers who say their trust in Monex was misplaced.

ARDMORE, Pa. - Phil Mickelson, who has already wrapped up the father-of-the-year title, was the leader in the clubhouse after the rainy first day of the U.S. Open here Thursday. It was storybook stuff. The golf wasn't bad, either. Mickelson, for the better part of the last two decades among the top golfers in the world, has won four major championships, but never a U.S. Open. Winning one would round out a legacy of his three Masters and one PGA title. Not that he hasn't been close.

As if you didn't know this already, we're coddling criminals in America. By that I don't mean the petty drug dealers, three-strikes necklace-snatchers and other mooks filling up our state prisons; many of them are doing hard time. I'm talking about people like Jeff Skilling. Skilling, you may recall, was a key architect of the rise and fall of the energy and commodities trading firm Enron, which around the beginning of the last decade claimed the trophy for the biggest securities fraud of all time.

Welcome to this rite and ritual of an American spring, breaking in a new glove. As with anything in baseball, there are 100 views on the proper way to do this, all argued passionately. Glove gurus, some more guru than others, recommend treating a stiff new glove as either your best friend or roadkill. You can drown a glove, you can bake it, you can run it over with the car. Breaking in a baseball glove isn't science so much as a form of testosterone-fueled witchcraft. Tony Pena, former major league backstop and current New York Yankees bench coach, reportedly goes ape on a new catcher's glove, turning it inside out, outside in, punching, prodding, mugging it into submission — it's almost hard to watch.

Rich in parable, rife with prophesy, it is a transaction of biblical proportions. In hopes of saving his football soul, the NFL's most famously devout player is going to the dark side. Tim Tebow is joining hands with Bill Belichick. Kum-ba- yow! A celebrated quarterback mostly known for public prayers and lousy passes is joining a celebrated New England Patriots team not known for much of either. In a desperate effort to prolong a seemingly doomed career, one of the sporting world's warmest stars has signed a contract to work in one of its chilliest cultures.

City Councilman Eric Garcetti campaigned for mayor for 622 days. He raised more than $8 million and secured the votes of 222,300 residents of Los Angeles. Now comes the hard part: governing. He has his skeptics. Some worry that he's too liberal to rein in spending. Some fear that he's too amiable to demand performance. Some think he's too young (at 42) or that he's too much a creature of government. And some believe that Los Angeles is so unwieldy, its problems so thorny, that the city defies repair, even by the most talented chief executive.

With a pneumatic whoooooooosh , I leave Earth again, and I am not even propelled by the sort of happy hour rocket fuel with which I'm sometimes associated. In truth, I do not have many happy hours. I have happy minutes, happy moments. An entire hour? Only our parents had happy hours, long chunks of the evening devoted to happy juice. By comparison, I'm almost a nun. A manly nun, sure. And on this day, the flying nun. That's what this training glider looks like, that big cockeyed bonnet that Sally Field used to wear back in her "Flying Nun" days.

ARDMORE, Pa. - Steve Stricker, true to his personality, played another wild and crazy round in the U.S. Open golf tournament Saturday. One double bogey. Two birdies. Even-par 70. Also, one semi-fist pump and a smile, followed quickly by a return to stone-faced composure. Mannequins have shown more emotion. The smile came after he saved par with a 13-foot putt on the 18th hole that left him a shot out of the lead going into Sunday's usual U.S. Open agony and ecstasy. "It was a big putt," Stricker said.

As President Obama contemplates his many bad options in Syria, he may want to consider the Aspin Doctrine, an argument for intervention abroad made by President Clinton's first secretary of Defense, Les Aspin. In 1993, the Clinton administration was wrestling with a seemingly insoluble conflict in Bosnia, where Serbian-backed troops were besieging cities and slaughtering civilians. Aspin's advice was straightforward: Let's bomb the Serbs and see what happens. INSIDE SYRIA: More Times coverage Critics objected that military action would put the United States on a slippery slope toward deeper intervention, but Aspin rejected that thinking as outmoded.

Of all the important numbers rolling around Stan Kasten's busy brain, from a giant Dodgers payroll to shrinking Dodgers victories to the size of the line at reserved-level bathrooms, the number that most shaped his life is the one he's never known. It was tattooed in blue on the left forearm of his father. The number was blurred because, during the five years Nathan Kasten spent in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust, he would continually gnaw his skin in an attempt to suck out the ink. "His memories, my lessons," Kasten said.

It's always amazing that we need academic studies to state the obvious, such as the one in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology a few years ago finding that people are happier during weekends. No less amazing, though, is the knee-jerk reaction from businesses when a common-sense study comes anywhere close to threatening profits. They routinely say that the findings are inconclusive and that more research is needed. Is it any wonder it's so hard to get anything done? The latest example of a study confirming what most of us - if we're honest - knew already came this week from the American Automobile Assn., which hired researchers at the University of Utah to look into whether doing other stuff while we're driving is dangerous.

Jan Juliani was standing behind the counter of the Santa Monica College library about noon when a group of terrified, screaming students sprinted through the entrance. One was running backward, shouting: "He has a gun!" Juliani knew exactly what to do. Recalling a lesson from a recent workshop on how to respond during "active shooter" incidents, the library assistant, 34, headed for a set of double doors that led to a storage closet in the back office. Other library workers followed her. Shutting the closet door seemed to take forever because of resistance from the pneumatic closer.

This is a story of persistence. In the case of Miriam Ramirez, it's the story of trying to obtain a much-needed loan modification from Bank of America. In BofA's case, it's the story of giving a mortgage customer the runaround for two years . Loan modifications have been an increasingly nettlesome issue as millions of homeowners struggle to make mortgage payments during the economic slump. The Obama administration has called upon banks to be more diligent in assisting customers prior to foreclosing on properties.

Jan Juliani was standing behind the counter of the Santa Monica College library about noon when a group of terrified, screaming students sprinted through the entrance. One was running backward, shouting: "He has a gun!" Juliani knew exactly what to do. Recalling a lesson from a recent workshop on how to respond during "active shooter" incidents, the library assistant, 34, headed for a set of double doors that led to a storage closet in the back office. Other library workers followed her. Shutting the closet door seemed to take forever because of resistance from the pneumatic closer.

As a member of Congress, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale) is proud to stand up for the principles of limited government and individual responsibility. The first-term congressman expresses skepticism about such safety-net programs as food stamps, regarding them as the handiwork of an "oppressive" government that snatches wages from the hands of working people. Helping the poor is better left to individuals and churches, he said at a recent committee hearing in Washington, because then "it comes from the heart, not from a badge or from a mandate.