Today's Ammianoliner (on the voicemail of Sup. Tom Ammiano):

Folsom Street Fair goes green. Beat me, bore me, biodegrade me.

Friday's Ammianoliner:

George Bush blames gays for global warming. The queenhouse effect.

Personal note to Ammiano: Your Ammianoliners are coming through with more clarity. Keep it up. B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Sometimes, in these heady days of what passes for online journalism, the press release is better than the story.
This one just in, from Yoko Ono of John Lennon fame, is an example:

Dear Bruce,

Make sure you visit www.IMAGINEPEACE.com on October 9th, John Lennon's birthday,
for the unveiling of the incredible IMAGINE PEACE TOWER on the isle of Videy, Reykjavik, Iceland.

Please visit the site, have a look around, IMAGINE PEACE and send your wishes to join
over 495,000 others buried in capsules around the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, dedicated
to my late husband: musician, poet, artist and peace activist, John Lennon.

Please join us on October 9th at www.IMAGINEPEACE.com
Wherever you are, we will all be together that day.

With the deepest love,

yoko ono

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Visit www.IMAGINEPEACE.com to send your wishes to the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER and join the biggest online peace demonstration on October 9th.

The website contains over 160 pages, loads of easter eggs, and is being augmented every day. Explore, have fun, participate, IMAGINE PEACE and join Yoko Ono and thousands of others at www.IMAGINEPEACE.com on October 9th for the unveiling of the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, when we will be uploading photos and videos of the
days events as they happen.

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A dream you dream alone is only a dream
A dream you dream together is reality
Yoko Ono

Imagine all the people living life in peace
John Lennon

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The IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is an artwork conceived by Yoko Ono in memory of John Lennon.

It is dedicated to peace and bears the inscription IMAGINE PEACE in 24 languages.

Its construction and installation is a collaboration between Yoko Ono, the City of Reykjavik, Reykjavik Art Museum and Reykjavik Energy.

The work is in the form of a wishing well from which a very strong and tall tower of light emerges. The strength, intensity and brilliance of the light tower continually changes as the particles in the air fluctuate with the prevailing weather and atmospheric conditions unique to Iceland.

Every year it will light up between October 9th (Lennon's birthday) and December 8th (the day of his death).

In addition the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER will be lit on New Year's Eve, during the first week of spring and on some rare special occasions agreed between the City and Yoko Ono.

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Banners, posters and desktops are available at the website.

Please forward this letter to everyone on your mailing list. thankyou. IMAGINE PEACE!

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Join the biggest online peace demonstration - www.IMAGINEPEACE.com

No, No, Mr. Frank. Not ATM, FTM.

(On the voicemail of Sup. Tom Ammiano, a supervisor who happens to be gay, commenting on the San Francisco Chronicle's lead story on today's front page. Headline: "GAYS ANGERED BY SCALED-BACK RIGHTS BILL, House leaders remove transgender people to improve chance of passage--most advocacy groups withdraw their support."

The lead by Carolyn Lochhead of the Chronicle's Washington bureau, pointed out that "leading gay organizations withdrew their support Monday from a landmark gay civil rights bill after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) pulled transgender people from the legislation that would protect gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination." B3

The San Francisco Press Club has the newsiest blog in the Bay Area

By Bruce B. Brugmann

I have always had a fondness for the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.
I was an early member back in the middle 1960s in the good old days when there was real daily newspaper competition on the Peninsula.

I was a young reporter on the old Redwood City Tribune, fresh from a tour of reporting duty on the Milwaukee Journal and getting the local experience I needed to found the Bay Guardian in San Francisco.
I spent three years on the Trib, from 1964 to 1966, as a liberal conservation-oriented reporter under the aegis of Publisher Ray Spangler and Managing Editor Dave Schutz. Let us say that my views and reporting habits differed from theirs, but I nonetheless had a field day covering the scandals of the era.

I picked up on how PG&E operated as it worked with Stanford University and the Atomic Energy Commission to impose high powered transmission lines through Woodside and the gunsights of Attorney Pete McCloskey.
I spent late Monday and Tuesday nights covering the council and planning commission meetings in Belmont and San Carlos and later in Redwood City. (If I left early, the council s would often roll some bad stuff through. But I would check the next day and do a juicy follow story on the late night chicanery.) There were wonderful save the bay stories: the dirthaulers would scoop up the dirt in the green hills of the Peninsula, haul it in double gondola dirt-hauling trucks down Ralston Avenue in Belmont, and dump it into the bay for fill for Foster City and Redwood
Shores. And, through it all, Mayor Wallace Benson of Belmont would hold pre-council meetings at the old Villa Chartier restaurant in nearby San Mateo and polish the policies to keep the dirt flowing from the hills to the bay.

When I called him on his indiscretions, Benson would wave his cigar and say, "Bruce, if you don't think I deserve some champagne and Maine lobster for running the city of Belmont, then you just go and vote me out office."

I was having a field day. Spangler and Schutz were quite nervous about my aggressive reporting, but each told me in his own way that I could do the stories as long as my facts were straight. I also had an excellent city editor, Michael Kernan, who protected me. Years later, after I sent Spangler a copy of a Guardian expose, he wrote me a letter in longhand, "Bruce, you were a pain in the ass. But you were always worth it." That was probably the nicest compliment I ever got from a publisher.

Well, the reporters and editors from the Peninsula papers would meet now and then in a hotel bar off the Bayshore Freeway for drinks. It was a convivial affair, even though we competed and there was real daily competition and the San Mateo Times of J. Hart Clinton was in head to head competition with the Redwood City Tribune and Burlingame Advance-Star (which with the Palo Alto Times were under the umbrella of an organization known as PNI , Peninsula Newspapers Inc.) This group became a press club and ultimately the proud San Francisco Peninsula Press Club, despite the sad sad deaths of three PNI papers and the gutting of the San Mateo Times/Singleton and deathly journalism until the Palo Alto Weekly of Bill Johnson. The club is, I am happy to report, still going strong under the stewardship of Darryl Compton and a batch of fugitives and expats from Singleton and Knight-Ridder journalism. They produce a vigorous annual newspaper contest, some zesty parties, the most newsy blog in the Bay Area, and the feel that there is still some real watchdog journalism on the Peninsula.

Let me make the point with some headlines from the club's Tuesday Oct. 2 blog edition:

Media News profits up; Singleton gets $l.8 million

Rosenthal: Journalists are being eliminated

Ridder disappointed by today's Merc (B3: what did he expect?)

Ex-Merc editor finds herself in a firestorm

Station group urges rejection of Hearst bid

Citing finances, KQED cancels 'Pacific Time"

Clint Reilly gets free space from Media News (B3: hot news: remember the Singleton exec saying Reilly was a liar and that he would have to pay for his columns according to the terms of his antitrust suit settlement. The blog even runs a Reilly column with the telling admission. Does this count as a Singleton lie?)

Merc accounting error means cuts

Guild files new charge against MediaNews (B3: when will our daily newspapers ever hire a fulltime labor reporter to report on all the major labor issues of the day?)

In short, the Peninsula Press Club blog shows what a good media column can be. Now it needs to check and see how many reporters are regularly covering the council and planning commission meetings till 2 a.m. from Brisbane down to Palo Alto. That would be a good story. B3

Click here for Peninsula press club blog.

Hello, Mr. Jew.

May I help you.

I'm not a lawyer

But I play one on tv.

(On the voice mail of Sup. Tom Ammiano) B3

Hey, how about all that noisy, scary, upside down, loop-to-looping....Damn the Muni!

(From today's voicemail of Sup. Tom Ammiano)

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Just as the Chauncey Bailey Project makes its presence known in Oakland and in the U.S. media,
I am off to Miami for an assembly of the InterAmerican Press Association (IAPA), the international free press association for the Americas.

For years, the hardy U.S. journalistic souls who are members of IAPA have helped do resolutions, go on free press missions throughout the Americas, and support impunity projects to investigate the murders of journalists and turn the evidence over to prosecutors and then push for successful prosecutions.

This year, for the first time, I will be pushing the IAPA for help on the deaths of two U.S. journalists who were killed in the line of duty. The first is Brad Will, the New York video journalist who filmed his own assassination last fall while filming violent demonstrations in Oaxaca province in Mexico. The second is Chauncey Bailey, the Oakland editor who was gunned down in August on his way to work at the Oakland Post by a man wearing a ski mask.

The good news is that an impressive array of journalists, news organizations, and journalism schools have come together to form the Chauncey Bailey Project and to take on the job of finishing his reporting on the suspicious activities of the Your Black Muslim Bakery. This coalition has already had some success. The San Francisco Chronicle was asked to join the project, but declined and said that it preferred to do its own reporting.
And so, for the last four days, anticipating the project's investigative reports, the Chronicle has rolled out extensive and detailed front page stories on the murder.

The investigative team plans to go further and deeper and research the activities of the Bey family empire, which operates the bakery, and their thuggish operations for the past two decades and the protection they have gotten from the Oakland political establishment. "This is a unique collaboration and we hope our work goes beyond Bailey's murder and reveals broader issues that impact the lives of Oakland's citizens," said Robert J. Rosenthal, editorial coordinator for the project and former managing editor of the Chronicle.

This amounts to an unprecedented collaboration among competing news organizations and promises to be the largest collective journalistic project since the Arizona Project was formed 31 years ago following the murder of Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles for his reporting on the tangled Arizona underworld.

The resulting collaboration and story led to the formation of the group called Investigative Reporters and Editors. But significantly, the Arizona Republic in Phoenix didn't run the story and a Tucson daily was the only daily in the state to run the story. The New Times, the local Phoenix alternative paper, ran the story, as did the Guardian in San Francisco. The story was widely run in other papers throughout the country.

This time around in Oakland, the hometown media stand fully and publicly behind the Bailey Project. "We cannot stand for a reporter to be murdered while working on behalf of the public," vowed Dori J. Maynard, president and CEO of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland. "Chauncey's death is a threat to democracy, journalists will not be intimidated. This type of crime cast a chilling effect over our community. We will not be bullied. We have to prove that there is no gain, and hell to pay, when the very structure of society is challenged."

Moreover, Maynard said that the team would insure that "Chauncey did not die in vain."

Pete Wevurski, executive editor of the Oakland Tribune, said, "I'm happy that the Oakland Tribune, and our Bay Area News Group-East Bay partners the Contra Costa Times and San Jose Mercury News, are involved in this noble effort and extremely pleased that the Tribune has been able to take a lead role." Wevurski is also managing editor of BANG-EB. "Chauncey Bailey was a colleague and friend to many of us and we want to honor his work and our profession by picking up the standard that fell the morning he was assassinated. I'm extremely gratified by the numbers and caliber of journalists who have joined the coalition, and I'm astounded by the work they are turning in already.

"The project is essential to Oakland and essential to us as journalists who wish to emphasize the point that you can kill the messenger, but the message is still going to get through. Based on this alone, I believe this will be the most important work any of us have ever done and ever will do." Let me add, as an occasional critic of Dean Singleton, owner of the Media News Group, that this project may be the most important work that he or any of his papers have ever done or will do. I congratulate him for allowing his troops to plow forward on a tough story that everyone involved knows how high the stakes are.

The coalition's message is profound and dramatic: you can't kill a journalist, in the Bay Area, in California, in the United States, and get away with it. Because the best reporters and editors and news organizations in the area are going to go after you and see that the story is told and justice is done.

Journalists from the following organizations are working on the project:

Bay Area Black Journalists Association
Bay Area News Group
Center for Investigative Reporting
KGO-AM
KPIX-TV
KQED Public Radio
KTVU-TV
Maynard Institute for Journalism Education
National Association of Black Journalists
New America Media
New Voices in Independent Journalism
San Francisco State Journalism Department
San Francisco Bay Guardian
San Jose State University Journalism Department
Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California chapter
University of California, Berkeley; Graduate School of Journalism

I'll keep you posted from IAPA in Miami. Continue reading to learn more about IAPA. B3

Click here to read the Guardian's story on the Chauncey Bailey project.

San Francisco:

Lying on the sidewalk: $500

Lying in office: priceless

(On the voice mail of Sup. Tom Ammiano) B3

San Francisco finds solution to Halloween, calls in Blackwater.

(On the voice mail of Sup. Tom Ammiano) B3

Schwartzenegger vetoes same sex water rights. "They're levees, dammit. Not dykes."

(Message on Sup. Tom Ammiano's voicemail yesterday, Oct. l8th.)

Thousands evacuated. State of emergency declared. Boy, those Harvey Milk Club meetings are something.

(From the voicemail of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Thursday, Oct. 25.) For the uninitiated, this is Ammiano's account of the club's pandemonium meeting this week to consider whether Assemblyman Mark Leno or State Senator Carole Migden gets the club's important endorsement in this hotly contested race for Migden's Senate seat. Note our blogs. B3

Gap for kids. It's a whole new meaning for sweat clothes. No, Mr. Fisher, that's not what we meant by No Child Left Behind. (From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Monday, Oct. 29.)

Personal note to Tom: Work on your enunciation.

Political note to everyone in San Francisco: Vote no, no, no, a thousand times no, on Fischer's wrong-headed, wrong-way Proposition to allow more parking spaces for more cars in downtown San Francisco for the new and awful highrise condos. No on H.

Impertinent question: how did so many people and organizations in the small business and neighborhood communities get suckered into voting for Fisher's proposition? They have a lot of explaining to do. B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

I was just settling down to get back into the business of blogging (I have been away at an assembly of the Inter American Press Association in Miami and a convention of the California First Amendment Coalition at USC in Los Angeles) when an ominous email from Washington, D.C., popped up on my computer.

At first I thought it was just more fear-mongering out of the Bush administration, but the head did intrigue me, "Millions of children could be exposed to dangerous toys on Halloween." It was the announcement for a news conference call with reporters on Tuesday, to release a new report on the "toxic trade of deadly Halloween toys," toys made in China and being recalled for containing dangerous levels of lead in violation of U.S. safety standards. Halloween was the news peg.

Meanwhile, the word was dire back in San Francisco. The mayor and city fathers were warning people to stay out of the Castro, the gay area that annually sees a tumultuous gathering of hundreds of thousands and police in full riot gear. "HALLOWEEN WARNING: KEEP CLEAR OF THE CASTRO," trumpeted the San Francisco Chronicle in its Halloween morning edition. "City puts word out: There's no party, just stay home."

I was astounded. A full year has gone by since I wrote an almost famous blog disclosing in graphic detail, naming names, what really happened on Halloween Eve in 1951 in my almost famous hometown of Rock Rapids, Iowa. As Halloween seems to spin out of control, the story of Halloween in Rock Rapids is worth retelling, as anybody in the almost famous Hermie Casjens gang would argue. And so I am going to do so.

There weren't any "deadly Halloween toys" nor any toxic trade thereof nor any tumultuous hordes creating a riot situation in Rock Rapids, but there was a bit of targeted hell raising on Halloween. In fact, it was understood that Halloween was the one night of the year when the more adventurous youth of the town could raise a little hell and hope to stay one step ahead of the cops. Or, in the case of Rock Rapids, the one and only cop, Elmer "Shinny" Sheneberger.

Shinny had the unenviable job of trying to keep some semblance of law and order during an evening when the Hermie Casjens gang was on the loose. Somehow through the years, nobody remembered exactly when, the tradition was born that the little kids would go house to house trick and treating but the older boys could roam the town looking to make trouble and pull off some pranks.

It was all quite civilized. The Casjens gang would gather (no girls allowed) and set out about our evening's business, being careful to stay away from the houses of watchful parents and Shinny on patrol. Dave Dietz and I specialized in finding cars with keys in the ignition and driving them to the other end of town and just leaving them. We tipped over an outhouse or two, the small town cliche, but one time we thought there was someone inside. We never hung around to find out. There was some mischief with fences and shrubs and swings hanging in back yards.

After an evening of such lusty adventures, we would go home about ll p.m. and tell our parents what we had been up to and how we evaded Shinny the whole evening and they would (generally) be relieved. Shinny would just drive around in his patrol car and shine his lights here and there and do some honking. But somehow he never caught anybody nor made any serious followup investigation. And the targets of our pranks never seemed to make police complaints. I once asked Paul Smith, the editor of the Lyon County Reporter, why he never wrote up this bit of zesty small town lore. "Bruce," he said, "I don't want things to get out of hand." During my era, they never did.

Nonetheless, the city elders decided to keep Halloween devastation to a minimum and scheduled a dance in the Community Building, with the misbegotten idea the pranksters would give up their errant ways and come to the dance. The Casjens Gang would have none of this. In fact it was the year of the dance diversion that we made our most culturally significant contribution to Halloween lore in Rock Rapids. We happened upon a boxcar, loaded with coal, parked on a siding a block or so from Main Street, which also served as a busy main arterial highway for cars coming across northwest Iowa.

It is not clear to this day who came up with the idea of rolling the boxcar across Main Street and blocking all traffic coming from both directions. We massed behind the car and pushed and pushed but it wouldn't budge. Then Bob Babl came up with a brilliant stroke: to use a special lever his dad used to move boxcars full of lumber for his nearby lumberyard. Bob slipped through a fence behind the yard and somehow managed to find the lever in the dark. We massed again, now some 20 or so strong, behind the car and waited for the signal to push. Willie Ver Meer climbed to the top of the car and wrenched the wheel that set the brakes. We heaved in unison and the car moved slowly on the tracks until it reached the middle of Main Street. Willie gave a mighty heave and ground the car to a dead stop, bang, square in the middle of the street. Almost immediately, the cars started lining up on both sides of the car, honking away. Grace under pressure. An historic event. Man, were we proud.

We slipped away and from a safe distance watched the fruits of our labor unfold. Shinny, the ever resourceful police chief, soon came upon the scene. He strode into the dance in the nearby Community Building and commandeered enough of the dancers to come out and help him move the car back onto its siding. We bided our time and then went back and pushed the car once again into the middle of the street. Jerry Prahl added a nice touch by rolling out a batch of Firestone tires onto the street from his Dad's nearby store. Suddenly, Main Street was a boxcar- blocked, tire-ridden mess. Again, the cars started lining up, honking away. Then we fled, figuring we were now wanted pranksters and needed to be on the lam.

The Casjens gang and groupies have retold the story through the years at our regular get togethers at the Sportsmen Club bar at Heritage Days in Rock Rapids and at our all-Rock Rapids Cocktail Party and Beer Kegger held in the back lawn of the Mary Rose Babl Hindt house in Cupertino. We would jokingly say that the statute of limitations never runs out in Rock Rapids and so we needed to be careful what we said and ought not to disclose fully the involvement of Dave Dietz, Hermie Casjens, Ted Fisch, Ken Roach, Jerry Prahl, Bob Babl, Romain Hahn, Willie Ver Meer, and lots of others, some who were there working in peril, others who declared they were there safely after the fact.

Two years ago, just before Halloween, I was invited back to Rock Rapids to speak to a fund-raising event for the local high school. It was a a crisp clear night just like the night of Halloween in l95l and a perfect setting to tell the story publicly in town for the first time. The event was at the new community building, on Main Street, just a block or so from the old Community Building, and a block or so from the siding where we found the boxcar. I told the audience that Shinny had assured me the statute of limitations had run out in Rock Rapids and that I could now, 54 years later, tell the boxcar- across -Main -Street caper with no fear of prosecution. And so I did, with relish.

Chuck Telford was in the audience and I recalled that he had driven up to us that night, as part of a civilian patrol, and inquired as to what we were doing. When he could see what we were doing, he just quietly drove off. "Very civilized behavior," I said. Afterward, I told Chuck I would back him for mayor, on the basis of that incident alone. Craig Vinson, then the highway patrolman for the area, came up to me and said he remembered the incident vividly because he was on duty that night and came upon the boxcar blocking the highway with long lines of honking cars. "I got ahold of Shinny that night and told him it was his job to move the boxcar and get it off the highway," he said. Others said they had gotten a whiff of the story but were never able to pin it down. The high school principal and superintendent didn't say much and, I suspect, were worried my tale might lead to the Rock Rapids version of the movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

For years, I said in my talk, I didn't think that Shinny ever knew exactly what happened or who was involved in the caper or how we pulled it off, twice, almost before his very eyes. Shinny retired in Rock Rapids and I saw him twice a year when I came back to visit my parents. But I never said anything and he never said anything but finally a couple of years ago I found the right moment and cautiously filled him in. He chuckled and said, "Let's drink to it." We did. And we have been drinking to it ever since. He calls me now and then in my office in San Francisco. He always tells the receptionist, "Tell Bruce, it's Shinny. I'm his parole officer in Rock Rapids."

Those were the days, my friends. The days of Halloweens without dangerous toys and toxic trade with China and riots on Main Street. B3

No, Mr. Bush. It's Ron Paul. Not Rupaul.

(From the answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Tuesday, Halloween Eve, Oct. 30, 2007)

Personal note to Tom: Your enunciation is a tad better. Keep it up. B3

No port a potties in the Castro? No problem. Dress up as an astronaut in diapers.

Happy Halloween.

(From the answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Halloween Eve, Oct. 3l, 2007) B3