Election as segue Rarely does election night mark the beginning of a political season, but the completion of the gubernatorial recall election definitely served as the starter's gun for the San Francisco mayor's race.

Still, mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez was reluctant to use the Green Party's election-night shindig at Delancey Street Restaurant to promote his candidacy, even though he and his supporters intended to head back to his Haight Street headquarters afterward to plan their postelection offensive.

As we stood talking – Gonzalez saying at one point, "I'm not campaigning. I'm just here to support Peter [Camejo]" – well-wishers periodically stopped by, but Gonzalez had little to say. Even during his brief speech, he played pundit in dissecting the election results but never mentioned his own candidacy.

Luckily for Gonzalez, his political consultant Ross Mirkarimi wasn't so reticent, passionately pumping up the crowd into a Green frenzy and telling them, "Now, it's time to segue into the Matt Gonzalez for Mayor campaign. Am I right?!?!" (Steven T. Jones)

The L train Denizens of the city's left gathered Oct. 10 at Brava Theater Center to raise funds for Proposition L, the measure that would set the San Francisco minimum wage at $8.50 an hour.

Politicos including Gonzalez (who pushed for a minimum-wage study and initiated the signature-gathering campaign that put the measure on the ballot), District Attorney Terence Hallinan, Sup. Aaron Peskin, and mayoral candidate Angela Alioto munched on appetizers while leaders from the Prop. L campaign spoke.

"In case you don't know the situation of most workers ... it's miserable," Nora Calderon from People Organized to Win Employment Rights declared through a translator. "We don't have housing, we don't have child care.... We don't have the benefits we deserve."

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, was there to kick off the presentation of a play based on her book, in which she goes undercover in several low-wage jobs to expose the difficulty of living on America's bottom employment rung. The mood was serious, but Ehrenreich also brought some levity to the night.

"I've been traveling around the country from North Carolina ... to Ohio ... to Virginia," where communities are also fighting for low-wage-workers rights, she said. All of these efforts, she pointed out, are local, "which makes sense. If Bush did think he could do something about poverty, what would he do – bomb it?" (Rachel Brahinsky)

Suing for ethics Hallinan and Gonzalez are taking the San Francisco Ethics Commission to court for falling down on the job.

On Oct. 10 local civil rights attorney Ben Rosenfeld filed, on behalf of Gonzalez and Hallinan, a petition asking the Superior Court to intervene and force the Ethics Commission to scrap its Oct. 3 settlement of a complaint against deputy city attorney Kamala Harris – who is seeking to oust Hallinan from the District Attorney's Office in November – for breaking her spending-cap pledge (see Campaign Watch, 10/9/03).

The petition asks the court to order the agency to fine her the full amount allowed by the law (at least $275,000), reinstate the $211,000 spending limits in the race, and assess further fines against Harris if she keeps spending cash.

The commission decided behind closed doors Oct. 3 to fine Harris a mere $34,000 for violating several parts of local campaign-finance laws. Harris is spending some of that on flyers telling voters she broke the voluntary but legally binding pledge she signed back in January.

The Gonzalez and Hallinan suit against the commission says that, according to the law, the commission should not have allowed Harris to sign a new document Sept. 25 (the same day she filed a report showing she had blasted past the limit by more than $90,000) indicating she had changed her mind about staying under the cap. That means, the suit says, commission director Ginny Vida had no authority to lift spending caps in the race.

If the Ethics Commission reinstates the cap, Harris would face fines of three times what she spends beyond that amount. The panel was set to reconsider whether to do that during a meeting Oct. 14, after the Bay Guardian's press time. The suit was scheduled to be heard in Superior Court Oct. 15.

"Appearing to act in unseemly political concert with candidate Harris ... the Ethics Commission have flouted the law and made a mockery of their very name, 'Ethics,'" the suit argues. "Sadly and ironically, the candidate who has flagrantly violated the law is a candidate for the city's top law enforcement officer." (Savannah Blackwell)

Comedy isn't pretty Two San Francisco Democrats have turned up on governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger's transition team: outgoing mayor Willie Brown and his predecessor, Frank Jordan.