Columnists

Oakland is facing a chickens-coming-home-to-roost summer, where years of official and unofficial neglect of the root causes of crime are now surfacing into what some members of the public, politicians, and elements of the media are labeling a public safety “crisis.” -more-

Wednesday: So far, all of the Democrats' Denver convention objectives have been met: the convention logistics have been flawless; Michelle Obama's speech argued effectively that she and her husband are Americans, "just like you"; Hillary and Bill Clinton gave Obama the resounding support required to unify the Party; and Democrats began to explain why Obama is the right choice for America while John McCain is not. -more-

As Democrats left Denver, there was an overwhelming consensus that the 2008 Convention was extraordinarily successful. Dems united behind Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Here are a few final thoughts about the week. -more-

This is the season when the mudflats of San Francisco Bay swarm with southbound migrant shorebirds: willets, godwits, curlews, dowitchers, plovers, and, outnumbering all the rest, western sandpipers. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, scientists from the Point Reyes Bird Observatory (now PRBO Conservation Science) attempted to estimate the birds’ year-round numbers. For western sandpipers, they came up with average fall and winter counts of over 100,000 individuals and spring counts of over 500,000. The peak spring count exceeded 700,000. That’s a lot of avian biomass, even at nine-tenths of an ounce per bird. -more-