If you live in South Berkeley, chances are you’ve met Bill Bahou. For 22 years, he’s run Roxie’s Delicatessen on the corner of Shattuck and Ashby, serving quality, affordable sandwiches to one and all and offering a helping hand wherever he can. -more-

FRIDAY, OCT. 10 -more-

For many, the nightmare of trying to survive on low wage jobs just about anywhere in America remains just that, a nightmare. One person who’s lived to tell what it’s really like to try to live on a little over $5 an hour is journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, author of “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.” -more-

FRIDAY, OCT. 10 -more-

West Berkeley neighbors say they hope the recent police raid of a notorious drug den will finally clear the drug dealers and loiterers from a long-blighted intersection. -more-

FRED LUPKE -more-

On a recent afternoon at the Women’s Cancer Resource Center on Telegraph Avenue, Maria gets a tender embrace from Mary Tunison, the center’s executive director. -more-

As a tenant the proposal to increase homeowners taxes by $250 annually will cost me nothing, but I oppose it because it is wrong. It is wrong to scare Berkeley residents with polling questions threatening to cut off emergency services unless we agree to increase taxes. It is wrong because homeowners are not all rich, some struggle to get by or are dependent on fixed incomes. But mostly, it is wrong because it is unnecessary. -more-

In response to vocal concern about a rapidly rising crime rate in North Oakland neighborhoods, the chief of the Oakland Police Department admitted last week that his office “made a mistake” in diverting elite officers from North Oakland and West Oakland last summer. -more-

Let’s give a cheer for good old Arnie— -more-

Volunteer poll workers mistakenly barred a Daily Planet reporter from watching them handle data chips embedded with thousands of electronic votes shortly after the polls closed on election night. -more-

Tom Lehrer, the ideological mentor of my teenage years in the fifties, said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He himself stopped performing in 1967, a long time ago now, and yet he is still regarded as a fountainhead of political wisdom by young people of a certain type who were raised in homes with old Tom Lehrer songbooks on the piano. The Onion, one of his spiritual descendants, interviewed him in May on the occasion of the release of his boxed CD set, which has been selling well. -more-