I had and have nothing but respect and affection for Sgt. Barry Donelan, the former president of the Oakland Police Officers Union, who stepped down a few months ago. Sgt. Donelan was a great help to me, personally, and thus to my readers, in helping us understand the Oakland Police Department and the politics surrounding policing in Oakland.

Some years ago, when editor-in-chief Emilio Garcia-Ruiz arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle, the paper took a decidedly leftward turn. Almost overnight, the articles became anti-police, with “exposés” by newly-hired young Woodward-Bernstein wannabes looking to tarnish local police departments. The result of all this has been regular coverage of cops that portray them in a negative light, and the hiring of an avowedly racialist columnist, Justin Phillips. Were Phillips a White man bashing Black people, he’d be unemployable anywhere in America, but Phillips can get away with it at the Chronicle because Garcia-Ruiz (with presumably the blessing of the owning Hearst family) is allowed to peddle his propaganda.

I don’t think there’s been a politician in American history who promised so much and then failed to deliver so thoroughly as has Carroll Fife. Maybe Herbert Hoover, whose 1928 campaign promised “continued prosperity,” and then gave America the Great Depression.

Our local progressives are obsessed with a bizarre thought: if only they can come up a way to transfer wealth from working people to the lower classes, who are mainly people of color, then all will be well: they will have fulfilled their revolutionary mission.

In nearly every analysis of the causes of homelessness, “the mentally ill excuse” is trotted out. According to it, some unknown but significant percentage of homeless people are “mentally ill” and, therefore, any approach to “solving” homelessness must include treatment for mental illness.