Today's Ammianoliner:

Election day! Winners, losers and we'll finally know which door hanger was the best hung.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Tuesday, June 3, 2008.) B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Coming home after almost two weeks in Sweden with the annual World Association of Newspapers (WAN) assembly and study tour, I was struck once again how nothing seems to change in San Francisco when it comes to the PG&E/Raker Act scandal.

PG&E was still firmly in control of the city's energy policy in the mayor's office. Mayor Gavin "The Green Knight" Newsom had capitulated spectacularly to PG&E and had reversed his policy of supporting a plan by his PUC that would have given the city control over some local power generation at the Mirant power plant (the peaker proposal.) The mayor had met secretly with PG&E executives and stiffed representatives from the Potrero Hill neighborhood and the environmental, environmental justice, public power, and community choice aggregation (CCA) movements.

The Hearst-owned Chronicle continued its long corporate tradition of blacking out the real story of the accelerating PG&E/Raker Act scandal. The utility was beautifully executing its divide and conquer strategy it has honed ever since the days that John Muir and the Sierra Club fought in vain to stop the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park for the city's public water and power supply. (In that battle at that time, the Guardian would have stood with Muir.)

Amanda Witherell laid out the latest sorry episode in her story in Wednesday's Guardian. Her lead: "Green City Mayor Gavin Newsom finally outlined what he calls a 'more promising way forward than the current proposal' of building two publicly owned power plants in San Francisco. The way forward: retrofit three existing diesel turbines at the Mirant Potrero Power Plant, while simultaneously shutting down Mirant's most polluting smokestack, Unit 2."

Our editorial laid out the political context: "The politics of the deal are complicated, but the driving force is clear: PG&E didn't want the city moving even a small step toward public power, and as usual, the big utility is getting its way...PG&E has been trying for months to derail the peakers--not, of course, out of any concern for the environment, but because the city would own the power plants. At first Newsom stuck by his SPUC but when seven PG&E lobbyists came into his office and gave him the facts of life (see 'PG&E offers Newsom a blank check'), he backed down.

"And now, after meeting with the CEOs of PG&E and Mirant, Newsom is pushing the worst possible alternative: he wants to retrofit the Mirant plant and let the private company operate its own peakers. Same fossil fuel plants in the Bayview. Same type of air pollution. And the facility would be owned by a private company."

Repeating for emphasis: When PG&E spits, City Hall swims. When PG&E spits, the mayor swims.

And so PG&E and Newsom have set the stage for the next phase in this great battle to kick PG&E out of City Hall, enforce the federal Raker Act mandating public power for San Francisco, and bring our own cheap, clean Hetch Hetchy public power to the residents and businesses of San Francisco.

The next stage is the emerging new public power initiative that Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin are working on, with a wide swath of neighborhood and public power forces, aimed for the November ballot as a charter amendment.

This would be the third go at taking on PG&E head-on on the November ballot. This time it has a good chance of succeeding since PG&E and Newsom have gone out of their way to make the case for public power in 96 point Tempo Bold for all to see and savor. The measure will also be helped by massive turnout with Obama, seven supervisorial races, a clutch of solid progressive measures, and a smart, aggressive Obama like grassroots organizing campaign.

Let's roll. B3, who wonders when he will no longer see the fumes from the Mirant plant from his office window at 135 Mississippi Street at the bottom of Potrero Hill

Click here to read this week's article, Newsom's power play.

Click here for this week's editorial, A vote for public power in November.

Here's a good idea to further localize the effort to stop the war in Iraq. See how the states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont are organizing efforts to pressure their state legislatures to stop the deployment of the National Guards, from their state to Iraq, on the orders of President Bush.

"It is clear that the mission that Congress authorized no longer exists. The President has no current or permanent legal authority to keep Guard members in Iraq. The Governor as Commander-in-Chief of the Vermont National Guard should take necessary steps to bring them home."
~ Rep. Michael Fisher, Vermont State House

Let's get a movement going in California. Let's start by asking rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House and our San Francisco representative, up for reelection this fall, if she would support the movement or lead the charge.

For more information go to www.BringtheGuardHome.org

By Bruce B. Brugmann

The California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC), a free press advocacy group, is testifying before a congressional commission in Washington on Wednesday, June 18, on the Chinese government's system of internet censorship.
The testimony by Gilbert Kaplan, a free trade
law expert in Washington, is a key part of CFAC's campaign contesting China's censorship of many U.S.-based and other western websites that are deemed offensive by Chinese government censors. Here is CFAC's press release explaining the campaign and the issue:

Continue reading for press release.

Today's Ammianoliner:

Tony and Tina's Wedding, San Francisco style. Madonna Mia.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Wednesday, June 18, 2008) B3

I'm off to Rock Rapids Iowa for my 55th high school reunion of the famous "Dream Class" of 1953. 32 graduates, 16 boys, 16 girls. Iowa, as you know from the news, is the state with endless floods from endless rivers. But the word is that the Rock River is not rising and we will be able to hold our reunion Friday night at the Rock Rapids Country Club on a bluff above the Rock River. I’ll keep you posted. B3

P.S. For a slice of the Rock Rapids way, see my previous blogs on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and other cultural adventures in between.

Today's Ammianoliner:

Hi, I can't come to the phone right now, I'm tree-sitting. Oooh I love to sit on a Fir.

(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Friday, June 20, 2008) B3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

I started cringing early on when the floodtide of eulogies came in for Tim Russert. I cringed because NBC and MSNBC forgot about journalism and went instead for self-reverence to the maximum. And I cringed because so many politicians came forward so quickly to praise him so glowingly and NPC was so happy to run them. And I cringed because all of this once again made the point so dramatically about the incestuous relationship between the press and the political establishment inside the Beltway in Washington, D.C.

I liked Tim Russert, NBC's Meet the Press anchor and Washington bureau chief. I realized that he had taken a moribund television news program and transformed it with his personality and ability into the premiere Washington television news program. And I liked the fact that he volunteered to cover the presidential primaries and provided some zest and insights.

But there were many things I didn't like about Russert's approach to journalism, most notably the fact that the Bush administration loudly claimed it used his Sunday morning show as its favorite to promote its war in Iraq and that Russert never properly challenged them. "In reality, Meet the Press was the venue for some of the White House's most audacious lies about the Iraq War--most of which went unchallenged by Russert," according to an excellent critique of Russert by the media organization Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting...

"Recalling such softball questioning, it's easy to believe the advice that Cheney press aide Cathie Martin says she gave when the Bush administration had to respond to charges that it manipulated pre-Iraq War intelligence: 'I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was the tactic we often used,' she said (Salon, l/26/07). 'It's our best format.'"

Russert also demonstrated the problem with Beltway access. He had access to the politicians and political establishment for his shows but he refused to use his powers of access for critics of the war and people outside the political establishment.
FAIR pointed out that in Bill Moyers's documentary "Buying the War" (PBS, 4/25/07), Russert said he wished that dissenting sources would have contacted him: "My concern then was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them." Of course, as FAIR noted, "any journalist could have found such sources--and few critics of the war would have passed up an opportunity to air their views on such a prominent media platform." Why didn't he have access to Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, the authors of Project Censored stories, or the director of Project Censored, the Nation people, Frank Rich at the New York Times, or other major war critics who, among other things, weren't lying and happened to be proven right on their positions against the war, the occupation, and the surge?

FAIR quoted Russert as saying that the White House claims "were judgments, and there was no way at that time to say, 'You're wrong. How could you possibly say that? You're lying.' That's just not the style of Meet the Press, nor I think the style of good journalism, but we now have a permanent record as to the judgments believed by the Bush administration going into the war and you can look at them three years later and decide whether they were correct or not.'"

Well, as FAIR concludes, "there are journalists who examine the claims made by politicians at the time they make them, and some were doing just that with the assertions Bush Administration officials used to justify the invasion of Iraq (Extra!3-4/06). Had a journalist with the prominence of Tim Russert done so, it's possible that the debate could have had an entirely different outcome."

The example I like to use is that the Guardian, and many other alternative newspapers and voices, with no special sources in Washington or Iraq, could figure out that this was the wrong war at the wrong time for the wrong reasons and opposed it strongly and continuously from the very beginning. Why couldn't Russert, the White House press corps, and the mainstream media figure this out, the biggest foreign policy blunder in U..S. history?
The coverage of his death gives us a clue. B3

Click here for the FAIR blog, Remembering Russert: What media eulogies remember--and forget.

Click here to read the Orlando Sentinel blog, The Tim Russert coverage: one of the most embarrassing chapters in television journalism.

Today's Ammianoliner:

Starbucks found on Mars due to a collision with the soy Milky Way.

(From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on June 26,2008)