Bipartisanship, it turns out, was just a big hairy animal away for Congress.

It seems that the bison has done what balancing the budget, the Medicare/Social Security mess and jobs and the economy couldn’t: get America’s legislators to find common ground.

Apparently, the bison is to become our national mammal.

"Since our frontier days, the bison has become a symbol of American strength and determination," Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) said in introducing the National Bison Legacy Act.

Uh, yes, but:  Doesn’t that kind of gloss over the fact that in our frontier days the bison was also a symbol of Americans’ savage disdain for both nature and Native Americans?  Didn’t we hunt the beast to near extinction for its hide, its meat, for sport -- oh, and to deprive the Plains tribes a vital source of food?

Well, sure, but let’s let bygones be bygones.  After all, there are hundreds of thousands of the beasts roaming parts of the country today (OK, roaming may be a...

Mitt Romney's embrace of Donald Trump has some political analysts puzzled. Here's an example from a Business Week story Tuesday: “[T]here’s no real advantage for Romney to appear with Trump,” said Tobe Berkovitz, a communications professor and longtime Romney watcher at Boston University. “Anything Trump does is to benefit Trump. At this point, it’s not like Romney needs publicity.”

Maybe not, but Romney's presidential campaign certainly needs the money. The fundraiser Trump is hosting for Romney on Tuesday evening is expected to bring in $2 million -- Trump change, perhaps, but not chump change. And Trump is slated to bring in more cash for Romney next month with a "Dine With The Donald" fundraiser in New York.

It should surprise exactly no one that a wealthy real estate developer would cozy up to a Republican presidential candidate. The question raised by political savants such as Berkovitz is whether this particular real estate developer carries so...

With jobs and mortgages and same-sex marriage to be bandied about, who has time to talk about what kids are or aren't learning in school? The conversation finally veered toward education last week with Mitt Romney coming out with some stands. The problem was that it looked less like taking a stand and more like wobbling while trying to get a foot out of his mouth.

Romney came out swinging at President Obama for toadying to the teachers unions, which would be pretty strong stuff if it weren't so downright inaccurate. Obama has been no buddy to the unions with his insistence on making students' scores on standardized tests a significant part of teacher evaluations and his call to fire teachers who don't make the grade. In fact, The Times' editorial board has criticized Obama's stubbornness on the evaluation issue -- states can't get a waiver from the No Child Left Behind Act without falling in line with the president's views on this -- because there's little evidence it would do much to...

So, you’re an old-fashioned “dinner and a movie” kind of guy?

Turns out you may be a lot more old-fashioned than you realized:  say, millions of years old.

As Times staff writer Rosie Mestel explained Monday:

The roots of the modern family -- monogamous coupling -- lie somewhere in our distant evolutionary past, but scientists disagree on how it first evolved.

A new study says we should thank two key players: weak males with inferior fighting chops and the females who opted to be faithful to them.

These mating strategies may "have triggered a key step in the very long process of the evolution of the family," said study author Sergey Gavrilets, a biomathematician at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. "Without it, we wouldn't have the modern family."

Gavrilets sought to explain why humans became monogamous, unlike, say, chimps, which tend to be organized in bands with a few dominate males that, politely speaking, get all the babes.

As Mestel writes:

First, he stopped...

Many of those commenting on my May 25 Op-Ed, which called for a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge, seem to believe that people should be allowed to kill themselves without any preventative measures. That astounds me.

"SFJay09" put it this way: "People who want to kill themselves will find a way....  These people are just speaking their minds." And "meshele01" said this: "Enough with bubble-wrapping the world to prevent boo-boos."

How is it possible to be so uncaring?

If someone you love -- a spouse, parent, sibling, child or close friend -- wants to die, doesn’t have a fatal illness and can be saved, why wouldn’t you want to save them? Why wouldn’t you want to give people another chance at life?

Facts do not back up the "just let them jump" contingent.

According to a study done in the last decade by the Harvard School of Public Health, 90% of people who survive a suicide attempt don’t go on to kill themselves. Many, in fact, end up leading lives that are...

Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney's "Day One" ads, whose second installment was launched this week, do manage to grab its audience by the guts: By focusing on the deficit, unfair Chinese trading practices and job-killing federal regulations (three topics that no doubt ranked high in internal polls of Americans' top economic concerns), Romney aims to solidify his position as the candidate who knows and cares most about economic issues. It's too bad he has so little to say about them. On our relevancy meter, this one is Debatable.

"What would a Romney presidency be like?" the narrator intones in this week's ad. "Day One, President Romney announces deficit reductions, ending the Obama era of big government, helping secure our kids' futures." That's a magic trick worthy of Harry Potter. Congress controls the federal budget; presidents can make spending recommendations, but Romney can't end the era of big government with a wave of Dumbledore's wand. His high points for relevance are...

Dolores Huerta is the co-founder of the United Farm Workers and an committed feminist who now heads her own foundation.

For her, even a shoe-shopping expedition can be laden with socio-politics.

For Mother’s Day, her son said he was buying her new shoes. "We go to the store," she told me, "and there’s nobody to help you. When I was young, there was always somebody who could help you. [Now] it’s like our time isn’t valuable, so we have to look to find the things we need.

"And I thought, what if all women one day said, we’re not going to shop until all these stores put people in the stores to help us? Women’s time is valuable. We shouldn’t have to waste 15 or 20 minutes or a half-hour because they won’t hire clerks. It’s like we’re not important any more. And yet if it wasn’t for us, they couldn’t make any money."

Shod in new shoes or old ones, Dolores Huerta joins the company of Toni Morrison and John Glennand Bob...

Can POM Wonderful really save prostates? Prevent impotence? Protect from heart disease? According to a judge’s ruling on Monday, not so much.

"It has long been clear that the most wonderful thing about Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice is the spectacular marketing skill that persuades consumers to fork over their hard-earned cash for a liquid that sells for five to six times the price of, oh, cranberry juice," Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik wroteon Monday after a cease-and-desist order was issued to the makers of POM. The verdict: false and misleading advertising. "The 335-page decision found that Pom's health claims weren't backed by competent and reliable scientific evidence, as they needed to be,” Hiltzik wrote. “As a result, they violated federal law."

For the next five years, POM’s advertising and marketing materials, as well as consumer comments and complaints, must be submitted to the Federal Trade Commission for review, according to the New York...

It didn't take long for the major broadcast networks to sue Dish Network over its ballyhooed commercial-skipping DVR, the Hopper. But to win, they may have to persuade a federal judge to roll back the precedent the Supreme Court set in 1984 when it declared Sony's Betamax video recorder to be a legal product.

Fox, CBS and NBCUniversal filed separate lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Thursday, and they take pains to distinguish what Dish was offering from what Sony put on the market three decades ago. The allegations include:

• Dish, not its customers, is doing the copying because the Hopper can be set to record all prime-time shows from the four networks automatically. That's a direct infringement, the networks say.
• Dish encourages and enables its customers to infringe by skipping over commercials in the recording.
• Dish encourages and enables its customers to infringe by recording TV shows, or by keeping copies of TV shows on the Hopper for a long period of time.
• Dish violates...

Over at Politics Now, our David Lauter has a fascinating deconstruction of a Gallup poll showing that the share of Americans who call themselves “pro-choice” on abortion has hit a record low of 41% while 50% now call themselves “pro-life.” Lauter explains why that factoid (resultoid?) is not a sure guide to Americans' views about whether abortion should be legal in certain circumstances:

"On the issue of when abortions should be legal, Americans’ views have moved very little, Gallup’s numbers show. The share of Americans who believe that women should be able to legally obtain an abortion under at least some circumstances now is 77%. That figure has bounced more or less randomly between 76% and 84% over the past 12 years. Similarly, the percentage who believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances has fluctuated between 15% and 22% in Gallup polls since 2001. It now stands at 20%."

Now for the next question: Should people continue to refer to...

As Mel Brooks once said: "It's good to be the king."

And if you can't be the king, it’s not so bad being a member of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission -- or, for that matter, Berkeley's police chief.

Just when you think public officials are starting to clue in that "the public" they’re supposed to serve is a little, shall we say, restive these days over their performance, you get stories with headlines like this one in The Times on Wednesday:

"Leaders of cash-strapped Coliseum complex claim luxury suite."

"The taxpayer-owned venue is in financial ruins, but four commissioners kept a private, catered area at the Sports Arena from public sale, so they had prime views of Bruce Springsteen singing about blue-collar struggles."

Yep, seems that L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, City Councilman Tom LaBonge, David Israel and William Chadwick, who run the property as members of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission, are fans of the Boss.

So they paid $100 a ticket...