In a move laden with election-year political implications, Rep. Mike Thompson announced Tuesday that he has more than 100 co-sponsors for a bill to expand background checks on gun buyers.

The broad smile, a trademark of his 20 years of representing the North Coast in Congress, still flashes across Don Clausen’s face.

Details of the wide-ranging immigration bill emerged from the nation’s capital Tuesday, fueling hopes among some North Coast immigrants that it would finally give them a path to live in the United States legally.

In March, Norman Solomon began a campaign apparently intended to scare seniors, create division in the Democratic Party and discredit Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, for not signing a pledge which only 25 of the 535 members of the 113th Congress chose to lend their name. He claimed that Huffman was throwing seniors under the bus.

It took a mysterious act of Congress to get $20 million in federal funds earmarked for controversial ferry service at Port Sonoma Marina. And it will take an act of Congress to get rid of it.

Retired Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey of Petaluma will help preside over a five-day media event aimed at revealing evidence of an ‘extraterrestrial presence’ and a decades-long government effort to cover it up.

President Barack Obama is proposing to reduce the Social Security cost of living adjustment. And the president is also putting cuts in Medicare benefits on the negotiating table. But Social Security keeps vast numbers of seniors out of poverty, and Medicare is vital to keeping many people alive. At this historic moment, a principled position would be to commit to fully defending Social Security and Medicare benefits, as well as the federal Medicaid program that funds Medi-Cal in our state. But the North Coast’s new congressman, Jared Huffman, has been hedging.

Rep. Jared Huffman, just three months into his first term as the North Coast’s representative in Congress, is already building a war chest for his 2014 re-election campaign.

Santa Rosa’s acting postmaster Wednesday paid a visit to the postal patrons who’d been told by her agency to move their mailboxes from their front doors to the curb, and whose delivery service was suspended when they failed to comply.

Veteran Rep. Mike Thompson and House newcomer Jared Huffman both cracked the million-dollar mark in last year’s campaign and are regarded as formidable North Coast political fundraisers. But compared to their colleagues on Capitol Hill, the two Democrats were in middle of the pack in the 2012 money race in which 439 House winners, including six delegates, raised nearly $742 million.