The West Ranch Beacon – News & Commentary for the Santa Clarita Valley

A Health Care Forum will be held on tonight from 7-9 p.m. at St. Stephens Episcopal Church, 24902 Orchard Village Road, Valencia.  A panel of experts will discuss the health care crisis and the Single Payer solution (more…)

John Edwards trails in third place. But his policy ideas are shaping the Democratic presidential race. He strides into an Iowa primary school where more than a hundred people have skipped their (more…)

This week we will be revisiting some vintage commentaries from the past several years to see if they still resonate today as when they were first published. Some of those opinion pieces will be slightly update; especially the more controversial ones. Several, like this one titled “Modern Dating or the Caveman Approach?” have stood the test of time and are still relevant. I got a great reaction when this was first published in 2004 and re-published last summer of 2006. (more…)

This admission will age me – and I’m not happy about that – but I remember extremely well how John F. Kennedy in 1960 made his fellow candidates for president look like a group of tired lounge lizards. (more…)

This week we will be revisiting some vintage commentaries from the past several years to see if they still resonate today as when they were first published. Some of those opinion pieces will be slightly update; especially the more controversial ones. Several, like this one written in July of 2006 by Ron Mechsner, are especially relevant today. (more…)

As housing woes spread to the corporate credit market, the economic outlook is sure to decline. Just how much further down do we have to go? News from credit markets and economic data (more…)

Bridging the gap between rich and poor countries should be as high a priority for the International Monetary Fund as helping to solve the world’s financial imbalances (more…)

Wall Street closed lower on Friday after a tumultuous week in which the S&P 500 index experienced its worst performance since September 2002 as heightened credit market concerns (more…)

John Feigenbaum flew out of San Jose this week in first class, with flip-flops on his feet, a T-shirt on his back and a dime worth $1.9 million in his pocket (more…)

Worries about a population explosion have been replaced by fears of decline. The population of (more…)

Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich along with County of Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation, California State Parks, California Department of Boating and Waterway; (more…)

Stores continue to sell recalled canned chili, stew, hash and other foods potentially contaminated with poisonous bacteria even after (more…)

The impasse shows the Senate GOP’s rightward shift and the limits of the governor’s influence. Strain between Perata and Nuñez is also felt. For all of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cheery talk (more…)

Our neighborhood is changing. A number of homes are undergoing major renovations that will double their sizes, and new homes are being built that are much larger than existing homes (more…)

A Health Care Forum will be held on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 from 7-9 p.m. at St. Stephens Episcopal Church, 24902 Orchard Village Road, Valencia.  A panel of experts will discuss the health care crisis and the Single Payer solution (more…)

Barack Obama on Thursday dismissed Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy approach as “Bush-Cheney lite” in the clearest indication yet that the proverbial gloves are coming off in the 2008 Democratic presidential (more…)

Wall Street suffered its second-biggest plunge of the year, leading global markets lower amid increasing uneasiness about the mortgage and corporate lending markets (more…)

A new report shows illegal aliens and their families in Los Angeles County collected over $35 million in welfare and food stamp allocations in June, announced Los Angeles (more…)