Columnists

It was a good week in Lake Southside, where everyone is down and out.

Craig Becker was making plans for the first Thanksgiving at the Cafe Med since he bought the business four years ago, when it was close to bankruptcy. Becker is a Berkeley big shot, who is chummy with all the city bureaucrats, as well as two police chiefs.

He is a member of the city's homeless commission, and president of the Telegraph Avenue business improvement district, but manages to find time here and there to run the Med, which has recently added Beer and Wine, which some Medheads thought triggered the death of the Med. -more-

Over the next four years the U.S. will face a number of foreign policy problems, most of them regional, some of them global. Dispatches From The Edge will try to outline and analyze some of the key issues for Africa.

Africa is probably the single most complex region of the world and arguably its most troubled. While the world concerns itself with the Syrian civil war and the dangers it poses for the Middle East, little notice is taken of the war in the Congo, a tragedy that has taken five million lives and next to which the crisis in Syria pales. -more-

Over the next four years the U.S. will face a number of foreign policy issues, most of them regional, some of them global. Dispatches From The Edge will try to outline and analyze them, starting with the Middle East. -more-

In the last one hundred years, only four Democrats have twice been elected President: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Obama’s reelection was doubly remarkable considering the sluggish economy, the $2 billion plus spent to defeat him, and the fact that at the beginning of his campaign many Democrats were unenthusiastic. Obviously voters reappraised the President. -more-

In his November 11 "Willie's World" column in the San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com/default/article/Next-up-for-Jerry-Brown-Prop-13-4026611.php), Willie Brown suggested that Jerry Brown's next "bold move be to enlist Warren Buffett for a joint effort to reform Proposition 13." -more-

Despite months of uncertainty, on October 6th Barack Obama decisively defeated Mitt Romney. There were ten other notable winners and losers in the 2012 Presidential election. -more-

Sue Kaufman’s 1967 novel, Diary of a Mad Housewife, was about a woman struggling to find some sense of her own identity within the confines of her role, her lifestyle and her husband’s unreasonable demands. Tina Balser begins an affair with George Prager, a dashing, successful and blatantly sadistic writer. He torments her in much the same manner as her husband plus being unfaithful. She plays with the idea of resisting her psychiatrist-approved feminine role, but decides that for her, there are no other options. She goes back to her husband and begins group therapy. Even many sixties-decade readers were dissatisfied with the story’s ending. -more-

Because of how society treats persons with mental illness, and also because of the strong "work ethic" that people have, (in which people who can't keep up are made a scapegoat) persons with mental illness, (at least those who can't work at a job as a result of their condition) are made to feel that our existence isn't justified. -more-