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Heck, yes.

Always has been.

Always will be.

This metaphysical question enters the realm of the relevant in the runup to and during a war; and for presidential elections. Candidates and their camps denounce various newspapers, networks and news magazines--and their individual journalists and stories--for all manner of sins of omission and commission.

Hillary invokes the distressed female battling on an uneven playing field. Obama claims to be running against a relentless machine committed by patronage and pork to the Clintons. McCain calls piling on by the New York Times for a journalistically frail story about a possible, alleged, ancient (by political standards) and anonymously sourced bimbo eruption.

My bosses told me that I'm supposed to write about music here. I don't want to be insubordinate, so you may have noticed a pattern forming through my last few posts.

Nevertheless, I feel up to the challenge since I consume music with an hearty appetite throughout the day, and I play music, specifically guitar, with as much regularity.

But that's a weak justification. So I'll throw out some random trivia.

 To cut down on wintertime pollution, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District set in place the "Check Before You Burn" residential wood-burning season. This year's season started in November, and it just ended Feb. 29.

 During the season, citizens had to check their county's air quality before burning any solid fuel, such as wood, manufactured fire logs or pellets. If air quality was bad, burning was prohibited, or at least discouraged.

Last week we wrote the follow-up story on Richard Abston, the guy who drove the wrong way down Highway 99, then died after he was Tasered by cops.

I wrote one of the initial stories on Abston.

It was a good reminder of a truth reporters sometimes forget about: there's never just one version of a story, even if it seems like a cut-and-dried news story.

Every person involved in a story has his own perspective on what happened. The reporter's job is to weave these accounts into something coherent.

Education reporters end up writing the same stories year after year. I’ve written dozens of stories about the first day of school, graduations and everything in between.

Read Across America is one of those events I have written about every year of my career.

But as I researched the event for my story in Tuesday’s newspaper, I came across some information I don’t remember ever seeing before – a short biography of Dr. Seuss.

Reporter Leslie Albrecht will be in the council chambers tonight. She'll post breaking news updates to the site once a decision is reached.

Members of the Central Presbyterian Church recently voted to raze the current downtown chruch sanctuary and build a new one on the site. They say the old building is inadequate for today's church and cannot be remodeled.

Santuary Merced, a group of church members and others who oppose knocking down the nearly 100-year-old building, is asking the council to designate the santuary as a historic structure. The group's members hope the designation will make it more difficult for the church to get the necessary permits to demolish the current facility.