California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom likes to be out front on issues. As San Francisco mayor, he approved same-sex marriages in City Hall even though they weren't legal. He pushed for a first-of-its-kind ban on city pharmacies selling cigarettes. Likewise, he signed the Special City's first-in-the-nation ban on groceries giving away plastic bags.

Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder gave Washington a preview of how the last few months of the Obama administration are going to look, and they're going to be ugly.

Gov. Jerry Brown recently stepped in it when a reporter asked him about the Bay Bridge. In March, 32 of 96 key rods in the under-construction eastern span cracked after they were tightened.

As a journalist, I am not supposed to admit this, but: I sympathize with the Obama administration's frustration over national security leaks.

Last Sept. 11, a terrorist attack left four Americans dead at the Benghazi, Libya, diplomatic mission. The next day, a State Department official wrote in an email, "The group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists." Days later, however, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice went on Sunday talk shows and blamed an anti-Islam video for the violence, even though others in her own department knew better.

After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake shook loose a big chunk of the Bay Bridge, local politicians did not signal that they wanted to take decades to build a new eastern span, so commuters should get used to driving on a span expected to crumble in a big rumble. Instead, they made grandiose promises about a "world-class" structure. Then-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown demanded a tony design; then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown stood up for Treasure Island interests. Steel prices soared.

The Pecksniffs of America had nothing but scorn for Congress' vote last week to stop furloughs of air traffic controllers, which were ostensibly mandated under the 2011 Budget Control Act.

Hours after the Boston Marathon bombings but before authorities identified suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, President Barack Obama purposefully addressed the nation. "We will find out who did this. We'll find out why they did this," the president pledged.

This week, the Obama administration furloughed 14,500 air traffic controllers -- staffers will lose two days of work per month -- ostensibly to comply with the 2011 Budget Control Act's $85 billion in sequester cuts this year. The Federal Aviation Administration's share is $637 million. So expect delays at the airport. That's the idea, but it didn't have to be.

There is no problem too flimsy for California's nanny lawmakers, as witnessed by the many laws that state solons have proposed to keep constituents from getting free plastic bags at the grocery. Those teensy plastic bags are cheap.

The bipartisan immigration package put forward by the Gang of Eight looks like a reasonable bill, but it likely won't become law, and it probably shouldn't.

Secret tapings can only have a chilling effect on the classroom. As USC provost Elizabeth Garrett noted in a statement, "one of the most important principles of an academic community has been that academic inquiry and discussion be free from censorship or undue outside control."

When Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., visited the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board in February, he essentially predicted that Washington would end up where it is today. Asked whether an assault weapons ban had a realistic chance of passage, the longtime gun owner, Vietnam vet and Democrats' point man on crafting legislation in the wake of the horrific Dec. 14 Sandy Hook shooting replied, "You don't think this whole thing's going to get through?" His apparent assessment was that it would not.

When the Transportation Security Administration announced that it will allow passengers to carry small knives on planes effective April 25, my reaction matched that of Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., who has called the policy change "misguided and, frankly, dangerous."

Whatever prompted the change, its practical effect is to delegitimize those who have called for tougher enforcement of U.S. immigration law. The AP just erased from journalism's lexicon the important distinction between legal and illegal immigrants.

Readers share their ideas. Since the massacre in December in Newtown, Conn., which left 20 children and six elementary-school staff members dead, readers have passed on a host of so-called remedies. Let's make gun owners be licensed and pass a test, some have suggested. So the problem is, I ask them, that these mass killers aren't good shots?

Whom does Barack Obama want to please more -- out-of-work adults who would love a high-wage job building the Keystone XL pipeline or tony venture capitalists who travel cloistered in private jets when they're not complaining that Washington doesn't do enough about global warming?

When you're president, every day is a holiday. This April is National Financial Capability Month, as declared last week in a presidential proclamation.

In 2009, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom announced a city policy that directed police not to impound the cars of unlicensed drivers if those drivers could find a licensed friend to drive away their car.

Marriage returned to the two-parent union of a 1950s sitcom on Tuesday as the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the legal challenge to Proposition 8, the California-voter-approved measure that banned same-sex marriage in 2008.