Columnists

THE PUBLIC EYE: Big Liars and the Voters Who Love Them

By Bob Burnett
Friday April 23, 2010 - 08:41:00 AM

It’s not surprising that Republicans oppose the Obama Administration – they want to suck up to the rich by maintaining the status quo. And it’s not surprising that they lie – this is, after all, the Party that created the fictional Iraqi atomic bomb threat so they would have a winning issue in the 2002 mid-term elections. What is surprising is that they’ve been so successful. Why are Republican supporters so enthusiastic when they’ve been force-fed a diet of BS? -more-


East Bay Then and Now:The Goddards and Julia Morgan

by Daniella Thompson
Thursday April 22, 2010 - 06:18:00 PM
2615, 2617, 2619 Parker St., designed by Julia Morgan for Louise Goddard in 1905.

Around the turn of the last century, it was common practice for middle-class or well-to-do families with adolescent children to move their residence to Berkeley in order to secure good education for their young. Among those was the household of Clark and Louise Goddard. -more-


DISPATCHES FROM THE EDGE:Nuclear Treaty’s Pluses & Minuses

By Conn Hallinan
Sunday April 18, 2010 - 06:32:00 PM

Amid celebrations around the signing of a new treaty between the U.S. and Russia on reducing the number of nuclear weapons, Hisham Badr, Egyptian ambassador to the United Nations conference on disarmament, played crow on the cradle: “We in the Middle East feel we have, short of a better word, been tricked into giving concessions for promises that never materialized.” -more-


SENIOR POWER: “Old People Don’t Read Books.”

By Helen Rippier Wheeler
Sunday April 18, 2010 - 05:13:00 PM

The Rippowam River rushed by at the foot of our dank street, or, depending on the season, gurgled its way to Long Island Sound. I would sit on the stone embankment overlooking the water, ignoring the garter snakes in the crevices. The Ferguson Public Library children’s room was another 1932 shelter. Story hour was held in a separate room with a large picture window. I played stamping books, using a piece of black crayon stuck on the end of a protractor. It slipped off, jamming crayon into my palm, still imbedded there in a tattoo effect. -more-


WILD NEIGHBORS: Chickens in the Mist

By Joe Eaton
Tuesday April 20, 2010 - 01:06:00 PM
Rooster asks for political asylum, Kokee Lodge parking lot, Kaua'i.

Chickens were not high on the agenda when we went to Kaua’i. We hoped to see some of the endangered native forest birds, and the seabirds that nest on the North Shore. But chickens were inescapable. They greeted us at the airport in Lihue. They wandered around the hotel where we spent the first night. There were chickens on the beaches, chickens along the highway. (But relatively few road-killed chickens—far fewer than the dead armadillos you’d see in a comparable-sized chunk of Texas.) -more-