WELL, YEAH , I felt bad when Harry Britt didn't quite get enough votes to beat Mark Leno in the Democratic primary for the 13th District assembly seat. Britt would have been great up in Sacramento, the sort who would put San Francisco back on the state map as the hotbed of progressive (even radical) new ideas.

And we can all go on for hours (as I'm sure we will) arguing about why and how he lost. He could have attacked Leno a lot earlier in the race (by the end, the flood of mail was so overwhelming that nobody was paying attention). He could have broadened his message. His campaign could have done better with absentee voters. If the Britt forces had only managed to get another 2 or 3 percent of the voters out in what was an abysmally low-turnout election, it would have put him over the top.

But the truth is, he came pretty close, very close – and that was quite an accomplishment for someone who had been out of politics for 10 years, running against an incumbent supervisor.

In politics, close sometimes does count. It sends a message: The voters are not satisfied. The reform movement is still very much alive.

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Last week's story on how the SF Weekly, owned by New Times Corp. of Phoenix, is using what appears to be predatory pricing to try to undermine the Bay Guardian ("The Predatory Chain") clearly hit a nerve at New Times: John Mecklin, editor of the SF Weekly, posted a piece on its Web site (www.sfweekly.com) last week responding, at some length.

You can read it yourself, if you can wade through all the bile and vitriol. But his basic point goes like this: the Bay Guardian sucks because we do endorsements, and push issues, and engage in political crusades, and try to influence local politics.

We plead guilty, John. We care about this city, this community. We're part of it, and we want to make it a better place. We've been working at it for 35 years, and it's made us one of the most successful, respected alternative newspapers in the country. I'm sorry you and the folks in Phoenix, who run a national chain that wants to destroy independent competition, are too cynical to do what great community newspapers have always done – stand up for something worthwhile.

P.S. Check out this week's FOI issue, an annual project for which we've won a public service award (see page 24), for a good example of what we do well. Something New Times papers would never do.