Today's Ammianoliner:

Due to public protests, San Francisco parking meters will now be free. April Fools.

(From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on April Fools day, April l, 2008.) B3

Today's Ammianoliner:

A conundrum. Olympic torch flame attacts brown apple moths. Oh, no!

(From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on April 9, 2008.) B3

For those of us in the free speech and free press line of work, China's censorship of the internet is a major practical and theoretical issue. Here is a reasoned approach by Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC). B3

Make no mistake, China’s censorship of the internet is a crime against liberty on a mass scale. Still, American firms can’t just steer clear of the world’s biggest market. What to do?

By Peter Scheer

A milestone of sorts was passed in the first quarter of this year when China blew past the United States to become the biggest internet market in the world. At 225 million users, and still growing at double-digit rates, China’s internet is a business opportunity so grand and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises that cooperation with Chinese government authorities inevitably entails.

I experienced this first-hand when, about a year ago, I made inquiries at the China offices of a number of American law firms to ask for help in comparing internet search results for searches performed inside China--within the “Great Firewall” of government censorship, as it is called--with the same searches performed from locations outside China (and therefore outside the firewall). The law firms demurred, explaining, with commendable candor at least, that they could not risk being observed submitting to Google and Yahoo search terms like “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong”.

Mind you, these were American-trained litigators, the kind of lawyers who barely flinch in the face of a grand jury subpoena, and who spend their careers pushing back against the demands of government authorities. While usually immune to intimidation, they nonetheless feared the repercussions to themselves, their firms, and their clients from the mere act of typing a few search terms into an internet-connected computer. So seductive are the business opportunities in China that the risk of losing them transforms even hardened litigators into wimps.

In conversations with internet entrepreneurs and investors active in China, one often hears arguments that are more rationalization than logic. An internet CEO recently told me that freedom of speech is a “relative” value that, despite its appeal in western democracies, is not appropriate to China. Popular variations on this theme are that freedom of speech is an unaffordable luxury in a country that must be single-minded in its pursuit of economic development; that the people of China are more interested in consumer goods than personal and political freedom; and that westerners’ pressure on China to be more tolerant of dissent is a form of cultural imperialism.

Let’s be clear: Freedom of speech, freedom of political choice, and the rule of law are not relative values; they are absolutes. China’s regime of internet censorship is, without question, a crime against individual liberty on a truly mass scale. That it coexists with a fast-modernizing economy offering its people considerable choice in the economic sphere only makes the curtailment of personal freedom more offensive because less excusable. China does not need to suppress speech to achieve its economic goals. China’s leaders are more cynical than that. They maintain censorship solely to preempt challenges to their monopoly on political power.

This can be seen in the government’s censorship policies. Websites based inside China are subject to content restrictions that are, by design, so uncertain and unpredictable that they force internet companies to censor themselves. Standards that are unknown and unknowable, backed by the threat of license-revocation for companies and jail for individuals, create a pervasive fear that is far more effective than direct regulation at muting opposition to the government and its policies.

Websites based outside China, meanwhile, are subject to blocking by the Great Firewall based not on their content, but on their capacity to create, inside China, large, voluntary online communities that are independent of the government. These include nearly all blogging services, wikipedia and wiki platforms generally (wikileaks included), social networking websites and peer-to-peer technologies of all kinds, including photo-sharing and video-sharing businesses. In other words, the full panoply of internet 2.0 technologies.

Websites commanding vast audiences for user-generated content are seen by authorities as a grave threat. The Chinese government’s worst nightmare, after all, is a lone and anonymous Tibetan uploading to YouTube grainy cellphone videos of rioting police.

What should American internet companies do? To point out that doing business in China is morally compromising is not to say that companies must forswear the world’s biggest market--hardly a realistic option, in any event, for premier internet firms like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Amazon. And while these companies might prefer to compete in China remotely--basing their servers outside the Great Firewall--government policies force them to set up shop inside China.

Those policies manipulate the firewall to degrade the performance of websites based outside China. Because all data from foreign websites pass through bottlenecks connecting China’s internet with the outside world, and because sensors at those bottlenecks further degrade transmissions across the firewall, non-Chinese websites are experienced from inside China as performing v-e-r-y
s-l-o-w-l-y.

This performance deficit is so substantial--and puts non-Chinese websites at such a huge disadvantage relative to their competitors inside China--that foreign websites must establish a presence inside the firewall. Indeed, Google, despite misgivings, established Google.cn within China in 2007 mainly for this reason, while Yahoo and Amazon crossed the firewall by investing in their Chinese domestic rivals.

American internet companies doing business in China should, for starters, acknowledge the extent of their self-censorship, not hide it or rationalize it or pretend that it is something other than the intensely unpleasant compromise that it is. Spare us the tortured and hypocritical justifications. It helps for companies to admit their complicity; to clarify that all is not as it should be or appears to be; to openly assert their disagreement with Chinese government policies (if they do, indeed, disagree); and to disclose specifics about how their content has been altered to avoid displeasing authorities.

U.S. firms also should do everything they reasonably can to protect their Chinese customers from the surveillance--and worse--of Chinese government authorities. If customer data and identifying information can be stored outside the firewall, beyond the reach of Chinese regulators and courts, they should be, even though that may involve greater costs. While this step does not assure protection of anonymous users (since control of a company’s license to operate in China gives the government considerable de facto leverage, quite apart from territorial limits on subpoenas and other legal processes), it is still meaningful.

If off-shoring of confidential user information is not feasible, companies must take steps to warn their customers about the risks of using their service. And finally, where warnings are not possible or go unheeded, companies should force customers to give their real names when using their websites--which will, in turn, force users to think carefully about what they say or do online. Ironically, the barring of anonymity is the surest means of getting users to appreciate the risks of saying what the government doesn’t want to hear.

Doing business on China’s internet is a messy, though potentially very lucrative, activity. Some companies may be so put off by the messiness that they stay away. For most, however, that is not a viable option. They must learn to be both honest with themselves and honest with their customers.
----
Peter Scheer, a lawyer and journalist, is CFAC’s executive director. CFAC is involved in a legal initiative to use the World Trade Organization to force China to suspend its censorship of the internet on grounds it violates international treaties on free trade.

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

The good news today is that Randi Rhodes, the talk show host who was suspended by Air America radio network for calling Hillary Clinton A "Big F*cking Whore" at a Green960 radio event on March 22 in San Francisco, is going back on the air today (Monday) from 4 to 7 p.m. on Green960 radio.

Congratulations to John Scott, program director of Green960, for taking her back on Green960. Says Scott, "This has been a fight worth fighting. I'm thrilled we cuold be the lead station in the country to get her back."
And congratulations to Nova M Radio Network for hiring Rhodes. Says Nova M CEO John Manzo in a press statement, "I just can't stop smiling. Randi is simply the biggest and the best."

Says Randi, "With Manzo at the helm of Nova M, I am truly going to work for the best of the best. He is radio elite..and I am too (laughs). I'm home. I'm home. I'm home."

Nova M, according to the Green 960 website, "is in the business of building a progressive talk radio network with the original founders of Air America Radio."

Welcome back, Randi. I wish you were broadcasting out of San Francisco, to give your show the San Francisco character the old Will and Willie show had, but I am damn glad to see you back. Keep on giving us lots of Randi shock and awe. (By shock and awe, I mean the intelligent and hard-nosed research she does to illuminate her radio riffs, such as the riff she did on the Naomi Klein thesis that it was shock and awe in Iraq that laid the groundwork for the U.S. privatization of Iraq. Every Randi Rhodes show has some shock and awe nuggets.)

Since Randi is a favorite of mine, and since she is an important and influential radio talk show host, I am going to lay out the details on her case as reported on the Green960 radio website. B3

Click on the continued reading link for press releases on Randi Rhodes.

Here is a video of Randi Rhodes doing a standup comedy routine and making remarks about Hilary Clinton that got her suspended indefinitely from the Air America radio network. She was doing an event on March 22 in San Francisco for Green960, an Air America affiliate. She is now back on Green960 weekdays from 4 to 7 p.m. on NovaM network. B3

Today's Ammianoliner:

Bush meets Pope personally to give him his rebate. Sweet.

(From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on April 16, 2008). B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Alas, I didn't see the debate last night. Jean and I were hosting a small birthday party for our granddaughter, Bonnie Brenda Brugmann (B3 to me and her friends) at the Gold Mirror restaurant in West Portal. But here is the account of the debate that i like best, from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR.) More to come on this trivia-overwhelms-policy theme, B3

Trivia and biased questions dominate Democrats' debate
4/17/08

The ABC-sponsored Democratic debate in Philadelphia on April 16 emphasized trivial matters of little concern to voters, while the actual policy questions were often based on misleading right-wing spin.

During the first half of the debate, ABC moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson avoided any mention of policy issues. As the Los Angeles Times noted (4/17/08), "With the moderators and Clinton raising assorted questions about Obama's past for the first half of the debate, issues received relatively short shrift. Not until 50 minutes in was a policy issue-- Iraq--asked about by the moderators."

Today's Ammianoliner:

Supreme Court rules in favor of lethal injection but decries listening to Baker's Dozen acappella group as cruel and unusual punishment.

(From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on April 17, 2008.) B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Here's the official word from University of Santa Cruz Executive Chancellor David Kilger on the kind of day that university administrations can't stand. April 20 has become nationally known, as Kilger says in a letter today (April 17) to faculty and staff, "as the date when people gather to communally smoke marijuana in an expression of support for the reform or marijuana laws. In recent years, thousands of people have gathered on the UCSC campus to participate in the event."

Kilgore in UCacademese says that the university does not "condone, support or otherwise sanction t his event." To his credit, he doesn't threaten damnation nor a flood of troopers but he does lay out some regulations Santa Cruz style. Thanks to an alert from a UCSC graduate, and roommate of a Guardian employee, we can turn up and tune in on the letter for you. Click on the continued reading link:

Today's Ammianoliner:

Popemobile goes green. Runs on Hail Marys.

(From the home telephone answering service of Sup. Tom Ammiano on April 18, 2008.) B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

I liked the perspective of Bob Herbert in his April l5 Op Ed column in the New York Times.

Senator Obama, he wrote, " has spent his campaign trying to dodge the race issue, which in America is trying to dodge the wind. So when he fielded the question in San Francisco, he didn't say: 'A lot of folks are not with me because I'm black--but I'm trying to make my case and bring as many around as I can.'

"Instead, he fell back on a tortured response that was demonstrably incorrect...In his San Francisco comments, Senator Obama fouled up when he linked frustration and bitterness over economic hard times with America's
romance with guns and embrace of religion. But, please, let's get a grip. What we ought to be worked up about is the racism that still prevents some people from giving a candidate a fair chance because of skin color."

Herbert also made a key point: "this toxic issue is at the core of the Clinton camp's relentless effort to persuade superdelegates that Senator Obama 'can't win' the White House. It's the only weapon left in the Clintons' depleted armory."

The race is over. Obama has won. And I will never feel the same about the Clintons.

Click here to read Bob Herbert's NY Times article Some Perspective on ‘Bitter’.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Well, the sail racing news is that Nicky and Gordo are back.

As attentive readers of this blog remember, the fearsome twosome are my grandson, Nicholas Perez, a lithe 14-year sailor from Santa Barbara, and his veteran skipper Gordon (Gordo) Bagley, of Boulder City, Nevada. I wrote up how they did the impossible in the Hobie National Championship race in Alameda and and pulled off one of those once-in-a-lifetime sailing feats that sailors only dream about. Read original blog here.

Nicky and Gordo port tacked the fleet, which means they threaded the needle between the pin boat and the rest of the fleet of catamarans on port tack, took the lead, and never gave it up during the race. To pull off this maneuver during a national championship was nothing short of miraculous.

They were back in fine form in their first race of the season last weekend in Monterey Bay, the kickoff regatta for the Hobie Association of North America. (Hobie is the name of a catamaran boat.) It was so cold and windy that the race was canceled the first day (Saturday) and it was almost as cold and windy on Sunday, but some 40 sailors took to the water. Gordo sailed in bare feet. "I get a better feel of the movement of the boat," he said, explaining his obvious masochistic tendencies.

Nicky and Gordo were first out on the bay, in their l6 foot Hobie, and sailed smartly out to sea.
They hit some rough patches during the race, but still managed to place fifth. "We survived," Gordo said,
always optimistic, and looking ahead to the next race in San Diego.

HIs feet, he said, didn't get cold but the rest of his body did. Nicky, bundled up in a dry suit, was cold but he didn't complain. I was cold as hell standing on the shore watching.

As Gordon latched his boat onto his car for the ll-hour ride home, I noted several lines from Gordo's favorite songs scrawled in blue on the sides of the boat.

Gordo's favorite was a line from a song by the group Cream, "The sparkling waves are calling to kiss their lace white lips." My favorite, "You can leave it all behind and sail..." from an Eagles song.

Meanwhile, I caught a wave while getting some closeup photos. So I headed off to a local bar to get out of the wet and into a dry martini. B3

Nicky and Gordon head out to sea.

Nicky and Gordo put their boat on wheels

Nicky and Gordo wheel the boat to the car.

Nicholas and Gordo standing tall at the end of a cold windy day at sea. Note Gordo's bare feet. B3

Today's Ammianoliner:

Polygamist DNA test points to Mitt Romney. Talk about a stimulus package.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup.Tom Ammiano, making his say to Sacramento as the virgin politician amongst the hard-driving lobbyists. Recorded on Monday, April 2l, 2008). B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Often, on Wednesday, the San Francisco Chronicle will run a nice color PG&E ad on the lower right hand corner of its front page.

On Wednesday, April 16, the Chronicle did not run a PG&E ad on the front page, but it did run a major story on the front page above the fold that did a major favor for PG&E.

The story by Kelly Zito focused on public power and alternatives to PG&E, largely in Marin County where there's an active and aggressive move to create a CCA (community choice aggregation) system that would replace PG&E
as an energy supplier in ll cities.

The story once again largely ignored San Francisco and its CCA movement headed by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi. It didn't quote Mirkarimi nor any public power or CCA leaders, but instead used a dubious expert from the University of California at Berkeley, who never supported public power and generally supports PG&E private power and deregulation efforts to undermine without rebuttal the community- based anti-PG&E efforts.
And it once again followed the longtime Hearst policy of blacking out the key element of any serious public power story: the PG&E/Raker Act scandal and the fact that San Francisco is the only city in the U.S. that is mandated by federal law to have a public power system. (See Guardian stories and editorials back to 1969.)

I don't blame Zito the reporter. She is only the latest in a long line of Hearst reporters who ends up executing Hearst policy of coddling PG&E and blacking out the Raker Act scandal. And, after years of questioning Chronicle reporters and editors and trying to get to the bottom of Hearst's incessant censorship of and capitulation to PG&E, I really don't know who to blame. But let me ask the questions again: who censors Hearst stories on PG&E as a matter of Hearst policy. The reporter? The city editor? The top editor? The publisher? Hearst corporate? Anybody over there?

In any event, I would much rather have a straightforward PG&E ad on the Chronicle front page, properly labeled PG&E, than stories that omit the Raker Act scandal and slant the stories for PG&E and against public power. B3

Click here for this week's editorial, PG&E's attack on CCA.

Click here for this week's editorial, The floating peakers: An energy solution on the Bay?

Click here for The shame of Hearst

Today's Ammianoliner:

No matzo. No matzo balls. No balls but lots of chutzpah.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Tuesday, election day in Pennsylvania,
April 22, 2008.)

Here's a press release on an unusual coupling of musical legends as put together by Lee Houskeeper, press agent and worthy keeper of the flame for rock and roll music from the l960s and beyond:

Ramblin Jack Elliott And Country Joe McDonald
An Evening of Song, Stories, Wit, Wisdom and Much More . . .

Living Legends Share Stage for the
First Time in Berkeley April 25 & 26th

WHERE: Cafe de la Paz 1600 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA
WHEN: Friday & Saturday, April 25 & 26th -7:30 PM
TICKETS: $40 in advance (100 seats per night) Cafe de la Paz (510) 843-0662
http:///www.cafedelapaz.net

I first met Country Joe on stage at Woodstock a few years after he recorded a Woody Guthrie tribute LP in Nashville. In 1976 I met Ramblin Jack Elliott at my buddy Phil Ochs memorial in New York. Jack had introduced Dylan to Woody and has performed Guthrie songs his whole career. When I caught Jack at the Noe Valley Ministry earlier this year I was amazed that he and Joe had never met and got them together for this historic union Friday and Saturday in Berkeley.

This one time only get together will be a rare and historic treat for the lucky 100 per performance. There has been no advertising and I would be forever in your debt if you would let folks know about the show. The following is a

Two of Music's Living Legends

and long time evangelical Woody Guthrie devotees Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Country Joe McDonald recently broke bread together for the first time at Cafe de la Paz

…and something special happened. Jack picked up a guitar and started playing Woody Guthrie's Ladies Auxiliary and Country Joe, who has been performing his critically acclaimed tribute to Woody: This land is Your Land (premiered at Cafe de la Paz, dropped his jaw when Ramblin Jack sang some long forgotten stanzas to the popular old Union ballad. After hours of swapping lies, stories and lessons on text messaging, the two decided to do an intimate one-time only show right in Cafe de la Paz's intimate (100 seat) Fiesta Room.

Lee Houskeeper
Managing Editor
San Francisco Stories
(415) 777-4700
newsservice@aol.com

By Bruce B. Brugmann

I liked the jaunty conclusion to Maureen Dowd's column summing up the Pennsylvania election in the Wednesday, April 23 New York Times:

"Before they devour themselves once more, perhaps the Democrats will take a cue from Dr. Seuss's 'Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now.' (The writer once mischievously redid it for his friend Art Buchwald as 'Richard M. Nixon Will You Please Go Now!' They could sing:

"''The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go...I don't care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Hillary R. Clinton, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can go on skis...You can go in an old blue shoe.

"'Just go, go, GO!'" B3

Today's Ammianoliner:

Joe Nation comes out! Against crime and change. zzzzzzzzzzz

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Wednesday, April 23, 2008) B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

More on the kind of media news the mainstream media conglomerates censor as a matter of policy: news involving the conglomerates and how they seek major concessions from the government:

This morning, the Senate Commerce unanimously approved a "resolution of disapproval" as the first major step toward an official congressional "veto" of the Federal Communication's new rules that gut media limits.

Here's the call to action from the freepress action fund, a national non partisan organization working to reform the media.

Big Senate Win Today: Let's Stop Murdoch

Today's Ammianoliner:

Anne Marie Conroy becomes rock star. "I'm neither grateful nor dead, she says."

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup.Tom Ammiano on Thursday April 24, 2008.) B3

George Powell, longtime Examiner and Chronicle employee, sent me the following critique of the obituaries of Charlton Heston. Personally, my favorite Heston portrayal was of the honest Mexican detective, as directed by Orson Welles in "Touch of Evil." I also liked the idea of the two working together and Heston's touching explanation of what he and Welles were trying to do dramatically in this most interesting Welles film.

By George Powell

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Every year, the Guardian runs a major front page story from Project Censored at Sonoma State University, listing the 20 major stories that have been "censored" or underreported during the previous year by the mainstream media.

Since 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq with "Shock and Awe," the project's stories have criticized the runup to the war, the lies of the Bush administration, the mendacity of the neocons promoting the war, the lousy media coverage, on and on. Neither the project nor most of the stories were published by the mainstream media. And the New York Times, and its sister paper the Santa Rosa Press Democrat near Sonoma State, refused to run the Censored story nor to explain why. (Last year, to its credit, the Press Democrat did a story on Censored.)

Now, the media reform organization Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has raised anew an important point involving a major New York Times story on April 20 that exposed the Pentagon's program of feeding talking points to military pundits featured on TV newscasts. (Fair pointed out rightly that the military analysts' ties with military contractors and advocacy groups had been documented as far back as 2003 with a report in the Nation (4/21).

FAIR's point: "While the Times article focused on the role of the Pentagon, the parties that arguable have most to answer for are the media organizations that relied on these Pentagon analysts and failed to disclose blatant conflicts of interest posed by their ties with defense contractors...Of course, the Pentagon's propaganda plan would have little effect if not for the enthusiastic participation of the corporate media."

My question: when will the mainstream media start interviewing such prominent war critics as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and others of this caliber? Meanwhile, keep an eye out for our Project Censored package later this year.

Here's the FAIR article and its call to action to hassle the five major networks:

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Bob Herbert, the Afro-American op ed columnist for the New York Times, had the most sensible answer I've seen in his Monday (April 29) column.

He waded right in with his lead:

"The Rev. Jeremiah Wright went to Washington on Monday not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him.

"Smiling, cracking corny jokes, mugging it up for the big time news media,--this reverend is never going away. He's found himself a national platform, and he's loving it."

Then: "So there he was lecturing an audience at the National Press Club about everything from the black slave experience to the differences in sentencing for possession of crack and powdered cocaine.

"All but swooning over the wonderfulness of himself, the reverend acts like he is the first person to come with the idea that blacks too often get the short end of the stick in America, that the malignant influences of slavery and the long dark night of racial discrimination are still being felt today, that in many ways this is a profoundly inequitable society."

Herbert then gets to the question. "This is hardly new ground. The question that cries out for an answer from Mr. Wright is why--if he is passionately committed to liberating and empowering blacks--does he seem so insistent
on wrecking the campaign of the only Afican-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency."

Herbert says that "my guess is that Mr. Wright felt he'd been thrown under a bus by an ungrateful congregant
who had benefited mightily from his association with the church and who should have rallied to the former pastor's defense. What we're witnessing now is Rev. Wright's "I'll show you!" tour."

Obama rightly and firmly rejected Wright and his attacks. Now he should change the subject, get back to the real campaign and the real issues, and let his Afro-American and white surrogates carry on the dialog if necessary. Wright will be a killer swift boat issue only if Obama and his campaign allow it to become one.

I think he should take Clinton on in a Lincoln and Douglas style debate. I think he would win, given his oratorical skills, and it would help change the subject. But most important, Obama needs to reenergize his campaign
by injecting a strong populist appeal to his campaign theme of unifying and transformation. He needs to present the case that he has the grit and the intellect to beat the Republicans on foreclosures, the economy, the war, Iran, universal health care, the rising inequality in American life, and everything else that our despised president and his sucking up successor represents. He must offer leadership and offer real solutions and programs with passion and stick to the issues that really matter to the growing tide of Americans who are desperately angry and frustrated with Bush. That is the best way for Obama to deal with Wright and the Wright attacks to come. B3

Click here to read today's Bob Herbert column, The Pastor Casts a Shadow.

Today's Ammianoliner:

Mr. Zito, can I (errrrrr) have a rebate, please?

(From the home telephone answering service of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Wednesday, April 30, 2008.) B3