By Bruce B. Brugmann

After three weeks in Istanbul, Cappadocio, and London, Jean and I got back into the swing of San Francisco
with a walk in our favorite part of Golden Gate Park near the ocean and a visit to the splendid Sunday organ pops concert in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

David Hegarty, best known for his 28 years as staff organist at the Castro Theater,
led off with “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit from “Carousel,” then rolled through a collection of “Songs of Paris” and some Jerome Kerns and Cole Porter songs and ended with a rousing rendition of “San Francisco.”

The organ concert, amidst the Rodins in the A. B. and Alma de Bretteville Spreckels Rodin Gallery, beneath the French and U.S. flags, is a perfect way to celebrate the start of June and end a Sunday afternoon in San Francisco. Outside the palace, as if on cue, the fog slipped in and out of the trees, around the Holocaust Memorial and under and over the nearby Golden Gate Bridge, illustrating one of the city’s most spectacular views.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

I always read Matt Smith, the star columnist of the SF Weekly/New Times/Village Voice Media, with interest. But he often puzzles me. For example, in his column of May 30, he was banging away at his favorite target, those dread progressives, ("Lacking (Progressive) Definition, Lefty factions and a phony convention do not an effective political party make"). And he dropped this puzzling nugget:

"For more than a generation (liberals have been) opposing growth, while snubbing traditional liberal causes such as uplifting gays or African-Americans.

"When San Franciscans, for example, were dying en masse from AIDS during the l980s, progressives' minds were more preoccupied with opposing 'Manhattanization,' the term they coined for new office buildings. Today, when African-Americans in the Bayview District are losing their sons, nephews, friends, and neighbors to drug-related
street violence, progressives' official political pamphlet is concerned primarily with enacting a moratorium on construction of market-rate apartments."

The truth, as anyone who was here and had friends and loved ones dying of AIDS knows, the progressives in San Francisco put together a world-renowned system for caring for people with AIDS and pressing for prevention and research funding. The 'San Francisco Model' did not come from Washington or Sacramento or Dianne Feinstein. The progressives, led by people like Harry Britt and Cleve Jones and leaders of the Harvey Milk Democratic Club etc., did it themselves. Progressives did, indeed, oppose Manhattanization (and fight for rent control and police oversight and a lot of other good causes) in that era, but AIDS was very much a centerpiece of the progressive agenda.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Tom Ammiano is a supervisor who happens to be a standup comedian on occasion. Or, depending on your point of view, he is a standup comedian who happens to be a supervisor. As people know who call his private home phone, he puts up a political joke almost every day on his answering machine.

Monday: "Mayor Newsom says he is a progressive. I guess rehab really works."

Friday: "Ed Jew under house arrest? What house?"

Alas, for understandable reasons, Ammiano doesn't give out his home phone number, so people just can't call in and get their daily dose of Ammianoism. But I will make the call for you on occasion and try to put the best of Ammiano on my blog. Hear any good political jokes lately? Pass them along. B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Last Tuesday June 5, a mysterious column popped up in the ll Singleton/Media News dailies that ring the bay. It was the debut of Clint Reilly and the first of l56 weekly columns that he will write for the Singleton papers, according to the terms of the Reilly/Hearst/Singleton antitrust settlement.

A "paid advertising" line adorns the top of the column, but Reilly says he will get no bills and won't pay them if he does. At the bottom of the column is an identification that Reilly wrote himself: "Clint Reilly is a San Francisco businessman and commentator on public affairs. The views expressed in this column are Clint's alone and do not represent the views of MediaNews or any MediaNews paper."

Riley writes about how Bill Honig 25 years ago this June won election as state superintendent of public instruction, against incumbent Wilson Riles, a popular superintendent, because of the power of newspaper endorsements.
Riley managed Honig's campaign. He writes that "newspaper endorsements cut through the confusing array of promises and attacks and offer a seemingly objective evaluation based on the public interest."

Why didn't he point out that the newspaper landscape has changed, as his suit charged, and that voters today would be faced with a conservative Singleton dailies and the Chronicle/Hearst? Why didn't he write about his suit? Or explain why his picture and column were mysteriously appearing simultaneously on Tuesday in ll regional dailies?

"I have l55 columns to go," Riley told me. B3

Click here to read Reilly's editorial.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

On Monday June ll, I called the home phone of Tom Ammiano, supervisor and comedian.

His daily recording summed up the end of the Sopranos in l2 words:

"Tony Soprano can't come to the phone right now. He's blacked out." B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

There is a phrase I like to use to describe the power that PG&E has exercised in City Hall since the beginning of time, or at least since the federal Raker Act was passed in l9l3 mandating that San Francisco get public power from its Hetch Hetchy dam.

When PG&E spits, City Hall swims.

That is the phrase I used when I testified Monday night June ll at the Ethics Commission hearing in the infamous Carolyn Knee case. “You’re all swimming in it,” I told the commission.

I was trying to illustrate my key point: that the Commission, which had been created to expose and penalize the campaign and financial muscling of PG&E and the big guys in town, was now picking on the little guy, in this case Carolyn Knee, the woman who volunteered for the thankless job of being the treasurer of two citizens’ groups that put initiatives on the ballot in 200l and 2002 to do what the city had never done. And that was to kick PG&E out of City Hall, enforce the public power mandates of the Raker Act, and bring our own cheap green Hetch Hetchy public power to the residents and businesses of San Francisco. PG&E, the groups maintained, had an illegal private power monopoly and the citizens were forced to take this law and order issue into their own hands and go to war with PG&E.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Yesterday June 12, there was no joke and no message on Ammiano's voice mail. Just a blackout. (See my early blog on his Tony Soprano joke.)

Today June 12,
Ammiano quipped on deadline. "ED Jew busted for a TUI. Tapioca under the influence." B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, the veteran public power advocate, flashed the word from City Hall by email at ll:42 a.m. Tuesday, June l9.

"I just learned," Mirkarimi wrote, "that the mayor is announcing a deal on tidal power today. I view this as a direct launch to derail or at least distract from community choice power. (PG@E has another poll in the filed on cca as of Sunday.) I'm going to try to blunt his move with the introduction of a tidal power ordinance so that we can hopefully
control the design protocol."

Then, at ll:35 a.m. Tuesday, PG@E sent out a press release even before the press conference ended. It went out via the PR Newswire for Journalists and was titled "PG@E, San Francisco and Golden Gate Energy Combine efforts to explore Tidal Power Options in SF Bay."

The head, lead, and text made the key point loud and clear: San Francisco, despite the public power mandates of the federal Raker Act, had once again caved in to PG&E and was allowing PG&E to fund and control a crucial study of tidal power for the city. PG&E was also calling the shots on the press announcement and doing it as a timely and telling part of its campaign to undermine the passage of community choice aggregation. The city, as Guardian readers know, is in violation of the Raker Act because it allows PG&E to control the city's supply of cheap clean public power from its Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite National Park.

"In honor of gay pride, Supervisor Daly and Mayor Newsom will have makeup sex." B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

On the front page of today's San Francisco Chronicle, June 2l, Mayor Gavin Newsom is pictured, grim, scowling, arms clenched, over this caption:

"Mayor Gavin Newsom denies Supervisor Chris Daly's suggestion that he has used cocaine. "That's how low politics now has gotten in this city, and I seriously thought it couldn't get much worse."
The story by City Hall Reporter Cecilia M. Vega had this head: "CITY HALL UPROAR AT COCAINE CLAIM," with this subhead, "Angry Newsom blasts Daly for bringing politics to a new low."

This jolly back and forth, I submit, is far from a new low. (See City Editor Steve Jones's blog in our politics blog.)
For starters, I would submit there is a new new low and a most timely new new low at that. This new new low is the fact that Newsom, despite the public power mandates of the federal Raker Act, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the crucial Ammiano/Mirkarimi CCA legislation approved by the Supervisors only last Tuesday, reversed his public pledges supporting CCA and public power and clambered into bed in hot embrace on Tuesday with PG&E. (See my previous blog.) He allowed PG&E to call the shots in a PG&E-arranged and PG&E- promoted press conference at the Presidio announcing that the city in effect was turning over its public study of tidal power to the private utility that has perpetuated the PG&E/Raker Act scandal for decades.

This is the new new low: the scandal of how the mayor of the City and County of San Francisco, after PG&E has privatized and stolen the city's cheap, green Hetch Hetchy power, and after PG&E helped privatize and steal the Presidio, was in effect turning over the choppy waters of the bay and the ocean to PG&E to privatize and steal. Incredible. Newsom was doing his damndest to put PG&E in the catbird seat on the next giant step on power generation and to further entrench the illegal private utility in City Hall. No wonder Newsom gets so "agitated" over the handy dandy issue of whether he did or did not use cocaine.

Ooops. We missed an Ammianoliner earlier this week.

"49ers reject Ed Jew's bid for stadium in Burlingame." (The message on Tom Ammiano's home telephone.)

"Vatican warns against driving under the influence of gay. Oh, my God. That hat. Those shoes." B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

I ask this question week after week when I read Rich's splendid column in the Sunday NewYork Times.
Perhaps, if he were on the Sunday talk shows or in the White House press corps, he would be asking the tough questions that are so painfully needed nowadays as the surge doesn't surge and the Iraq war escalates. .

For example, he writes in his lead, "By this late date, we should know the fix is in when the White House's top factotums fan out on the Sunday morning talk shows singing the same lyrics, often verbatim, from the same hymnal of spin. The pattern was set way back on Sept. 8, 2002, when in simultaneous appearances three cabinet members and the vice president warned darkly of Saddam's aluminum tubes. 'We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,' said Condi Rice, in a scripted line. The hard sell of the war in Iraq--the hyping of a (fictional) nuclear threat to America--had officially begun.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Note: In July of l972, when the Guardian was short a Fourth of July story, I sat down and cranked out this one for the front page on my trusty Royal Typewriter.)

Back where I come from, a small town beneath a tall standpipe in northwestern Iowa, the Fourth of July was the best day of a long, hot summer.
The Fourth came after YMCA camp and Scout camp and church camp, but before the older boys had to worry about getting into shape for football. It was welcome relief from the scalding, 100-degree heat in a town without a swimming pool and whose swimming holes at Scout Island were usually dried up by early July. But best of all, it had the kind of excitement that began building weeks in advance.
The calm of the summer dawn and the cooing of the mourning doves on the telephone wires would be broken early on July Fourth: The Creglow boys would be up by 7 a.m. and out on the lawn shooting off their arsenal of firecrackers. They were older and had somehow sent their agents by car across the state line and into South Dakota where, not far above the highway curves of Larchwood, you could legally buy fireworks at roadside stands.
Ted Fisch, Jim Ramsey, Wiener Winters, the Cook boys, Hermie Casjens, Jerry Prahl, and the rest of the neighborhood would race of their houses to catch the action. Some of them had cajoled firecrackers from their parents or bartered from the older boys in the neighborhood: some torpedoes (the kind you smashed against the sidewalk); lots of 2 and 3-inchers, occasionally the granddaddy of them all, the cherry bomb (the really explosive firecracker, stubby, cherry red, with a wick sticking up menacingly from its middle; the kind of firecracker you’d gladly trade away your best set of Submariner comics for).
Ah, the cherry bomb. It was a microcosm of excitement and mischief and good fun. Bob Creglow, the most resourceful of the Creglow boys, would take a cherry bomb, set it beneath a tin can on a porch, light the fuse, then head for the lilac bushes behind the barn.
“The trick,” he would say, imparting wisdom of the highest order, “is to place the can on a wood porch with a wood roof. Then it will hit the top of the porch, bang, then the bottom of the porch, bang. That’s how you get the biggest clatter.”
So I trudged off to the Linkenheil house, the nearest front porch suitable for cherry bombing, to try my hand at small-town demolition. Bang went the firecracker. Bang went the can on the roof. Bang went the can on the floor. Bang went the screen door as Karl Linkenheil roared out in a sweat, and I lit out for the lilacs behind the barn with my dog, Oscar.