To hear political pundits up north tell it, attorney general candidate Jerry Brown is a changed man. Editorials and commentaries in recent months have declared ad nauseum that Brown is no longer the flaky "Governor Moonbeam" of yesteryear, but a hard-nosed, git-er-done kind of guy when it comes to crushing crime in California. Tell that to the people of Oakland, where Brown is mayor. Folks up there must be pleased as punch with their city's crime rate, which includes the murders of 118 people, in a city of only 300,000, so far this year. Intrigued by the notion of a...