Respected journalist Dan Walters IIRC is a hold-over from the defunct Sacramento Union, and the (ugh) Bee took him as sort of a concession after they successfully undermined the Union.
The Bee gets more radical leftwing every year (exceeding the NYT in some cases), so Mister Walters is, indeed, an artifact of a more journalistic (and less radical activist) time.
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I can't help but wonder if even people in Sacramento are figuring out that the money is drying up and this is just the beginning of one bureacratic monstrosity throwing another bureaucratic monstrosity under the train in an effort to perpetuate its own flow of money.
I HOPE that's what's going on.