What about the crucifix?

I was very, very disappointed by your so-called "review" of the band HIM [Sonic Reducer, 10/19/05]. Yes, HIM is out to make money. All bands are in it for money to some degree. But they haven't sold out nearly as much as other bands – their online store didn't even really exist until a few months ago! Also, not all their fans are little Goth-imitating high schoolers who think Ville is hot, or that Ville/HIM is cool because Bam is cool – I've never seen Viva La Bam. A friend of mine gave me a burned HIM CD to check out, and I've liked them ever since.

You really shouldn't get so hung up on the symbol – it helps HIM people identify one another (which, believe me, is a great thing here, where most people haven't heard of HIM; it's hard to find another HIM fan). You wanna go off on a symbol, you should go of on Christians/Catholics taking a guy dying on a crucifix, which happened to hundreds of people in Roman times, as their symbol – how depressing and pathetic.

Rachael Spradley

La Jolla

The Pelosi outcome

The resolutions, amendments, and substitutions came so fast at the Oct. 26 San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (SFDCCC) meeting that one could easily lose sight of what was going on. But the fact was that by the time the resolutions stopped flying, the committee had urged Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Tom Lantos to support Rep. Lynn Woolsey's congressional resolution for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. The committee did all of this rather more indirectly – addressing "elected Democratic officials," rather than naming Pelosi and Lantos, and never mentioning the specific resolution, instead citing it verbatim in urging "action to call on the president to develop and implement a plan to begin the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq."

The extreme sensitivity demonstrated toward the appearance of criticism of Lantos, and particularly Pelosi, does not alter the import of the committee's resolution though. If the city's representatives should heed the SFDCCC's advice, they will join the 122 Democrats who supported a May 25 budget amendment directing the president to "develop a plan for the withdrawal of US military forces from Iraq" – a motion that they actually opposed at the time, along with 77 other Democrats and virtually all Republicans.

The SFDCCC's passage of an additional resolution supporting four separate Democratic congressional efforts "to end US involvement in the conflict in Iraq and to bring our troops home" – including both the Woolsey resolution and a Pelosi amendment – further demonstrated its desire to deflect criticism of Pelosi but ultimately took nothing away from the other resolution. The Pelosi amendment, calling for the president to "provide Congress with a strategy for success that identifies criteria to begin the withdrawal of the United States Armed Forces from Iraq" did garner the support of all House Democrats, including antiwar stalwarts like Woolsey, Barbara Lee, and Dennis Kucinich. So it does have its uses, but what it is not is a substitute for making substantive votes against the war.

The hard part remains getting Lantos and Pelosi (and Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer) to actually vote along with the 63 percent of San Francisco voters who directed the government to "bring the troops safely home now" when they passed Proposition N in Nov. 2004.

Tom Gallagher San Francisco

Unaffordable state

I wanted to say that your story ("A Streetcar Named Displacement," 10/19/05), in many ways, says exactly what should and needs to be said loud and clear to anyone running the city, or state for that matter. While your article is dead on as far as what is occurring, I think the crisis is much, much deeper than that. I came here from the rural South five years ago to get a job doing graphic design and various art-related jobs. I love my job. I also make $45,000, which isn't bad money by any means. My wife makes $35,000. By modern definition, we are well within the middle class, but there is no way in hell we could ever afford even the worst home, in the worst neighborhood, within a 100 miles radius of the city. Trust me. We've looked.

So if the poor definitely cannot afford rent and for sure buying any home, and even the majority of us who don't qualify as being poor cannot afford homes either, then something about all of this is (pardon the language) really fucked up.

One day Californians will wake up and, golly: There's nobody left to work, teach their kids, make their artwork, or police their streets.

I wanted to add one more thing, which is that the problem is fairly complex, but if one were to look into the history of housing developments in San Francisco and the area, you would see that almost every single plan is met by fierce protests by numerous special interest groups who, one way or another, claim that such a development will bring crime, damage the ecosystem, etc. It is extremely easy in this state to strike down any new development at all and make developing low-income – and even normal-income – housing prohibitively expensive.

Name withheld by request of writer

Alameda