Commentary

I remember life before the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. I grew up in Altadena and Pasadena during the late 1930s and '40s. All too often I awoke to thick smog and air quality warnings. I watched as segments of the San Gabriel Valley shifted from orange groves to miles upon miles of housing, and communities were cut in half by an ever-expanding network of freeways. By 1970, Gov. Ronald Reagan and a Republican-led Legislature realized that something had to be done.

Outrage. That's what we should feel over the Syrian government's slaughter of more than 70,000 of its own people and its use of chemical weapons. And outrage is what we should feel over the international community's total impotence. Despite nearly irrefutable intelligence regarding Syrian use of chemical weapons, which the Obama administration acknowledges, the White House persists in setting a burden of proof that is impossible to achieve in practical terms and is designed to allow the U.S. to avoid military involvement in Syria almost at all costs.

When President Obama told students in Mexico that without the support of U.S. Latinos he would not be president, he wasn't talking about the GOP's Ruben Barrales. But Barrales gets the message. He is the son of immigrants, and San Mateo County's first Latino supervisor. Mexico gave him its Ohtli medal, for his work on behalf of Mexican Americans. Once a Democrat, he went to work in the George W. Bush White House and ran San Diego's regional chamber of commerce. His principal task now, as head of GROW Elect , is cultivating Latino Republican elected officials in California, not exactly fertile soil for the GOP of late.

This week, on Facebook, someone posted one of those preprinted witticisms that vie with cute kittens for the attention of people sharing stuff: "I don't know where YOU live, but the weather here is somewhere between bipolar and psychotic this year. " I live in the woods in Northern California at an elevation of 2,500 feet. In my backyard, fenced to keep the deer out, there are 30 rosebushes. Most years, the first flush of roses comes at the end of May, but there are a couple hundred roses in full bloom out back, an unusual sight at this elevation this early in the season.

For the last two months, President Obama has been mired in Washington's inside game, caught up in backroom congressional politics as he tried unsuccessfully to pass a bill on gun control and nudge Republican senators toward compromise on the budget. But do his losses mean, as some pundits suggest, that, four months into his second term, the president is already a lame duck? The answer may depend on the mood far outside the capital. This week, the president is leaving town to launch what the White House, reverting to campaign mode, is calling a "middle-class jobs and opportunities tour.

My cousin, Ramez, was dead before the echoes of the gunshot that killed him stopped ringing. His 4-year-old daughter, Zeynab, watched him fall on a narrow street in Damascus, but she never heard the shot because she is deaf. She held onto his lifeless hand until a second bullet tore into her chest. She survived. I tell this story to make it clear that my family and I have experienced the civil war firsthand. Ramez was just one of several family members who lost their lives in the battle against Bashar Assad's police state.

The deaths of more than 600 garment workers in Bangladesh's Rana Plaza factory collapse April 24 is a tragedy that highlights widespread problems in the global apparel industry. But will it be the spark that finally leads to much-needed global reforms? After disasters like Rana, or the fire at another Bangladeshi garment factory in November that killed 112 people, there is a tendency to play detective, to focus on the culprit, whether it be the owner, corruption or lax laws and missing enforcement.

At an investment conference last week, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson created a huge mess for himself. He glibly speculated that maybe because economist John Maynard Keynes was a childless, "effete" homosexual, he embraced a doctrine that favored immediate economic gratification. Keynes' bon mot "in the long run, we are all dead" takes on new meaning when you realize he didn't have kids to worry about. FOR THE RECORD: Book title: The May 7 Jonah Goldberg column had a typo in the subtitle of William Greider's book “Secrets of the Temple.” It is “How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country,” not “County.” Following the usual script, but at a much faster clip, an uproar ensued on Twitter and in various blogs.

This has been a complicated season for organized labor in Los Angeles. On the one hand, labor got the mayor's race it wanted: Controller Wendy Greuel and Councilman Eric Garcetti both have a long history of supporting, and being supported by, unions. Labor-supported candidates also have fared well in City Council races and stand poised to help protect a union agenda. At the same time, extravagant spending by the unions that represent employees of the Department of Water and Power and the Los Angeles Police Department has produced a backlash and scrambled the city's politics.

In recent years, the Indo-Pacific lionfish - a dramatically striped, finned and armored aquarium fish - has invaded Atlantic and Caribbean coral reefs. It has been spotted off the Southeastern United States, throughout the Caribbean Sea, in the Gulf of Mexico, and it's now eating its way toward South America. What's to blame for this invasion? Most likely aquarium releases beginning in the early 1980s. And once introduced, lionfish took off. The fish has no known predator in the Atlantic.