What happens when Iowans discover that gay marriage is legal? Jess Brownell provides some clues in the classic Iowa movie "State Fair"

By Jess Brownell

Iowa is in the news just now, and for a reason I must confess I would never have anticipated: Gay marriage turns out to be legal there. Who’d have thought it.? Not many Iowans, I’d venture.

I know a little about the state. I was born in Iowa, and grew up a few miles to the west in Nebraska. I had cousins living on Iowa farms whom I visited. (My host on this blog was born and raised in Iowa, and I imagine has his opinions on what’s happening in the Hawkeye State.) Frankly, I have no idea what to expect now.

Generally, Iowa hits the public eye only when the caucuses gather every fourth year, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t weird all the time. Iowans seem to be of two minds about almost everything, this tension being best represented by the two senators they have chosen to send to Washington. One, Tom Harkin, the Democrat, is a stalwart liberal (except where agricultural subsidies to factory farmers are concerned); the other, Charles Grassley, the Republican, is a fierce fiscal conservative (except of course where agricultural subsidies are concerned) who is still remembered for his objection to an eternal flame at JFK’s grave because of the unfair burden keeping it lit would place on the American taxpayer. I suppose you could say that like all of us Iowans have a lively sense of self-interest, but they do seem to have a hard time making up their minds about anything else.

Photo captions by Phil Johnson, a longtime friend of Michael Bowen and a patron of his art.
Click here to read Marlena Donohue's evaluation of Michael Bowen's life and art from the Bruce blog."

Michael in Indian Head Dress: this is from Life magazine in 1967 article on the Hippy movement.

Michael in Kristiansand, Norway museum show with one of his early pieces. This is from the Radar Wennesland collection which was donated to a two schools in Kristiansand. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art turned down the collection of over 500 works of art back in the 70’s as they did not see enough art “of worth”. Now this collection is considered the definitive collection of Beat art. Bowen is the most represented artist in the collection.

Michael Bowen, who died March 7 in Sweden at the age of 71, was a seminal Beat figure who inspired the famous "Turn On, Tune in and Drop Out" dictum of the "Human Be-In" in San Francisco in 1967. Click here for a photo essay of his life and art.

By Marlena Donohue

(Marlena Donohue is Associate Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and Managing Editor of ArtScene in Los Angeles.)

Michael Bowen recently passed away in Sweden after five decades of exhibiting art in major international art museums and private collections. He passes away before his career or work could be adequately evaluated in the context of history, particularly those epoch-altering years marked by the 1960s-1970s he is most closely associated with.

Born in Beverly Hills to a famous dentist into a legacy of great wealth, Bowen was the quintessential drop out from consumer culture long before the term was made popular in SF cafes. On the road, so to speak, from his teens, Bowen traveled the globe, engaging life and making art alongside some of the art world’s major luminaries.

Primarily self taught, Bowen coined an art style and remained committed to it for over forty years of changing art world styles and alternatively hip and conservative social mores. He is associated with a distinct visionary surreal art whose nearly hallucinatory intensity came to be identified with the Beats and with the drug and underground culture.

Fourteen times the Sunshine Task Force has asked the Ethics Commission for action on sunshine violations.
And l4 times Ethics has dismissed thsoe cases with little investigation. The supervisors need to hold hearings with the goal of placing a charter amendment on the ballot to give the task force independent authority to order the release of documents and to sanction city officials who flout the law.

EDITORIAL The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force and the Ethics Commission are talking to each other, which is some small progress on one of the most annoying lingering issues in San Francisco. But the joint meeting last week, while positive in tone, didn't solve the basic problem.

Under the city's Sunshine Ordinance, the task force investigates complaints about city agencies improperly withholding records or meeting in secret. If the task force members find that there's been a violation — and that the matter is serious enough to merit enforcement action against the city officials involved — the file is forwarded to Ethics, which can charge elected and appointed officials with misconduct.

But that never happens.

Here is our monthly installment of Joseph E. Stiglitz's Unconventional Economic Wisdom column from the Project Syndicate news series. Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University, and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, is co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.

It's time for Plan B in bank restructuring and another dose of Keynsian medicine

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

New York – As spring comes to America, optimists are seeing “green sprouts” of recovery from the financial crisis and recession. The world is far different from what it was last spring, when the Bush administration was once again claiming to see “light at the end of the tunnel.” The metaphors and the administrations have changed, but not, it seems, the optimism.

The good news is that we may be at the end of a free fall. The rate of economic decline has slowed. The bottom may be near – perhaps by the end of the year. But that does not mean that the global economy is set for a robust recovery any time soon. Hitting bottom is no reason to abandon the strong measures that have been taken to revive the global economy.

Tpday's Ammianoliner:

Schwarzenegger redecorates his smoking tent.

Palm tree out.

Lamp plant in.

Disco ball groovy.

Maria, I'm hungry.

(And so Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who has unleashed a torrent of publicity with his pioneering legislation to legalize marijuana, puts the issue into an Ammianoliner on his home telephone answering machine on Saturday, May 9, 2009.) Stay tuned, as they say.) B3

President Barack Obama brings new hope to America's working families, says AFL-CIO president John Sweeney

By Dick Meister

(Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based journalist, has been covering labor and politics for more than half a century.)

Barack Obama the presidential candidate declared that the nation needed "a
president who doesn't choke on the word 'union.'" But now that Obama has
assumed the presidency - and good riddance to his virulently anti-union
predecessor -- is he delivering on his promise to lead a pro-union
administration?

Absolutely, says the AFL-CIO, which played a major role in Obama's victory.
The federation spent more than $450 million and put more than a
quarter-million volunteers to work in its campaigns for Obama and pro-labor
congressional candidates, and turned out millions of union voters.

"The political pendulum is swinging back toward sanity," says AFL-CIO
President John Sweeney. "Barack Obama brings new hope to America's working
families."

It is clear, in any case, that Obama's strong support for unions is genuine.
He really meant it when he said -- not while campaigning for labor votes,
but after his election - that "I want to strengthen the union movement in
this country and put an end to the barriers and roadblocks that are in the
way of workers legitimately coming together in order to form a union and
bargain collectively."

Imagine George Bush making such a statement. He would indeed have been very
likely to choke.

Obama already has done a lot to back up his words. For starters, he quickly
rescinded some of the most damaging of the anti-worker executive orders that
Bush had issued. One had allowed White House staffers to overturn, in behalf
of Bush's employer allies, job safety regulations that the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration had promulgated. Obama ordered that those
regulations and some new ones go into effect immediately.

He also voided a Bush regulation that had allowed federal contractors to be
reimbursed for the costs of blocking unionizing drives. And Obama overturned
a regulation that had banned so-called Project Labor Agreements, which in
effect call for collective bargaining on federal and federally funded
projects.

Unions are especially pleased -- and should be -- with Obama's appointment
of Congresswoman Hilda Solis to head the Labor Department. Bolstered by what
promises to be a substantial increase in funds and personnel for labor law
enforcement, Secretary of Labor Solis is certain to move forcefully to
protect and enhance workers' rights. Under Bush, workers had little
protection from employer exploitation.

Workers didn't get much help, either, from the Bush appointees who
controlled the National Labor Relations Board, which is supposed to protect
workers' union rights. Bush's NLRB did the opposite in many cases, siding
with employers to block workers from unionizing, particularly by failing to
act against such illegal employer tactics as firing or otherwise penalizing
pro-union workers.

Obama will soon be able to appoint a majority of board members who are
certain to protect workers' rights. His appointee as NLRB chair, longtime
board member Wilma Liebman, is expected to put a high priority on reversing
board rulings that stripped union rights from thousands of workers.

Other important pro-labor steps taken by the new administration include:

*Creating a cabinet-level "task force" headed by Vice President Joe Biden to
give working people a direct voice in developing and coordinating policies
to improve the status of poor and middle class Americans.

*Obama's signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which Bush had threatened to
veto. It overturns a Supreme Court decision that made it virtually
impossible for women to sue for wage discrimination.

*The signing of a bill, vetoed twice by Bush, that reauthorizes a health
insurance program for more than 10 million children of low-income workers.

Additionally, Obama's budget and stimulus programs call for major
infrastructure projects that would provide as many as 3.5 million
well-paying construction jobs. The programs also would give tax relief to
working people, create job training programs to help low-wage workers and
ex-offenders learn marketable skills and, among other changes, update the
unemployment insurance system to provide more help to the jobless.

Several other promised reforms await White House action, including
strengthening the union rights and job security of federal employees. What
organized labor wants most is passage of the highly controversial Employee
Free Choice Act that would remove the legal obstacles that have limited
union expansion. Obama supports the act, but he's been giving signals that
he would back a compromise version because of heavy pressure from opponents
that threatens to block congressional approval.

Although some unionists are demanding that Obama take a stronger stand on
the proposed act and otherwise show even more support for labor, most
unionists seem to be highly pleased with his actions so far. The AFL-CIO
praises him for taking "big, concrete steps" to lay the foundation for
important change.

The federation's organizing director, Stewart Acuff, says Obama is "doing
extremely well in very difficult circumstances. He continues to have our
unwavering support and appreciation .... There is much to be done and we
intend to do all we can to help him succeed."

Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based journalist, has covered labor and
political issues for a half-century. Contact him through his website,
www.dickmeister.com.

Mayor Newsom needs to quit his political games and direct the Municipal Transportation Agency to draft a new budget, quickly, that trims the money Newsom is using to fund the cops and his call center

Just one day after the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee voted to reject Mayor Gavin Newsom's Muni budget, the mayor's press flak, Nathan Ballard, reminded us of how deeply the Mayor's Office remains in budget denial.

"We are currently operating under the assumption that the supervisors will approve the MTA's sensible budget," Ballard told City Editor Steven T. Jones May 8. "If they reject the budget, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it."

That was a foolish assumption. At press time, seven supervisors had signed on as cosponsors to Board President David Chiu's bill rejecting the Municipal Transportation Agency budget proposal, and Sup. Bevan Dufty, an eighth vote, was among the Budget Committee members favoring rejection. Only seven votes were needed, so the MTA budget was dead by May 7 — and Newsom's refusal to recognize that was nothing more than a foolish attempt to play chicken with the supervisors. If the MTA fails to produce a new budget by the end of May, the current funding remains in effect — and that means the city's budget deficit is much worse. The mayor strategy seems to be aimed at blaming the supervisors instead of addressing the problem.

New report calls for national strategy to contend with the crisis in journalism

B3: I believe that the alternative and community papers that are firmly embedded in their communities, with a strong print and web presence, doing real reporting and tackling the tough issues and making solid endorsements, will survive during hard times and live to flourish. Yes, of course I mean the Guardian and many other alternative papers. But here is a proposal that I especially like that covers other media.

WASHINGTON -- Today, Free Press released Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy, a new report on how the government should respond to the current crisis in journalism. The report provides an in-depth analysis of ideas and proposals being debated around the future of the news business and advocates for a range of short- and long-term strategies.

"Traditional media have been battered by a perfect storm, as the rise of the Internet and the disappearance of traditional ad dollars collided with the economic downturn," said Craig Aaron, senior program director of Free Press and co-author of the report. "But many of the media industry's wounds are self-inflicted, the result of bad business decisions and failed strategy, aided by idle regulators who looked the other way. We need a new approach."

Read Saving the News.

Today's Ammianoliner:

Rush Limbaugh indicted for running nude in the Bay to Breakers. He said the devil and Ms. California made him do it.

(Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, speaking on his telephone answering machine, the day after the race, Monday, May 18, 2009. So, Tom, how are you voting on the state props you and the legislature and the governor put on Tuesday's ballot? Tom? Tom? Tom?) B3

Reject the new condo tower project next to the Transamerica Building. It's too big, the city would have to give up a block long section of Merchant Street, an alley filled with small businesses, and it passes over a key bit of Manhattanization history.

EDITORIAL To hear the proponents of a new downtown condo complex talk, you'd think they were giving the city a wonderful deal. In exchange for an exemption from height limits that would allow a tower twice the allowable size just a few yards from the Transamerica Building, the developer would give the city a little patch of parkland that's now privately owned. Even the city planning director, John Rahaim, seems to think the special treatment is acceptable, since none of the other buildings in the area are nearly as tall as the Pyramid, and, he told the Chronicle, "usually you cluster tall buildings together."

Of course, the usual crew of downtown boosters love the architecture (a sort of spiral design), love that it would create housing in an area that's generally empty at night, and figure that something only about half as tall as the high-rise it's next to can't be all that bad.

But there's a stunning lack of historical perspective in all this discussion.

Here is an installment from Jeffrey D. Sachs' monthly commentary: Economics and Justice available exclusively on the Project Syndicate news series. Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also a Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals.

Peace Through Development

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

New York – American foreign policy has failed in recent years mainly because the United States relied on military force to address problems that demand development assistance and diplomacy. Young men become fighters in places like Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan because they lack gainful employment. Extreme ideologies influence people when they can’t feed their families, and when lack of access to family planning leads to an unwanted population explosion. President Barack Obama has raised hopes for a new strategy, but so far the forces of continuity in US policy are dominating the forces of change.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Scroll down for Paula Connelly's photos of the 2009 Guardian small business award winners

For years, small business leaders have criticized City Hall for spending only a fraction of its hundreds of millions of dollars of public purchasing money with local businesses.

Wednesday night (5/20/01) at the Guardian's annual Small Business Awards Ceremony, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu and the new executive director of the Small Business Commission Regina Dick-Endrezzi acknowledged the wrongway policy and pledged to work to change it and put millions of dollars of city money into local businesses and the local economy instead of spending it for good and services out of town.

Chiu, a former small businessman and former president of the SBC, said he had campaigned on this issue and would do all in his power as board president to fire up a "Shop Local, City Hall" campaign.
Dick-Endrezzi said the SBC would make it a central issue on the commission agenda. She also said she wanted to promote a Shop Local campaign for the 55 per cent of the city's work force who lived outside the city.

Both Chiu and Dick-Endrezzi pointed out that the city was dependent on small businesses as the backbone and economic engine of the city. Yet, they could not get much of the public money that the city spent each year for goods and services.

Chiu said the issue was not new with him and waved to Steve Cornell and Scott Hauge, battle-scared veterans sitting in the audience, and said they had been at it for "l0 or l5 years." He asked Hauge how long. "Twenty years," Hauge said. Cornell and Hauge were both pleased with the statements and said they were awaiting the action.

Chiu spoke as keynoter for the ceremony and handed out the award certificates. Dick-Endrezzi spoke as an award winner for small business advocate. She was making her first public remarks as the new SBC head and, in outlining the issues for small business and the SBC, gave every indication she was the right choice by Mayor Gavin Newsom for this critical City Hall position. Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond served as master of ceremonies, which were held in the bar area of the Teatro Zinzanni theater.

Photos of the winners:

To read about our 2009 Small Business Award winners, click here. Read Tim Redmond's article, Shop local, City Hall!, here.

Employee-Owned Business Award: Church Street Flowers. From left Stephanie Foster, Rachel Shinfeld, Brianna Foehr. Redmond on the left, Chiu on the right.

Small Business Advocate Award: Regina Dick-Endrezzi with Supervisor Ross MIrkarimi Guardian Publisher Bruce B. Brugmann on the left, Chiu on the right. Dick-Endrezzi is a forrmer aide to Mirkarimi.

B3: The Guardian through the years has criticized Rep. Nancy Pelosi for many things, from leading the fight to privatize the Presidio to her early support of the Iraq War to her unnecessary move to take impeachment of President Bush off the table during the election season.

But we are happy to come to her defense now that now she is under fire for saying that CIA briefing officials told her in September 2002 only that they had determined that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were legal, not that they were using them, as the New York Times put it on Friday (5/22/09). Why? Why is she under fire and not the people who did the torturing and former Vice President Dick Cheney who without shame is publicly supporting waterboarding and torture?
Why is she under fire for lying by people who lied us into war and lied about torture? Here is one of the best accounts I've seen, written by the media advocacy group called Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

Media Advisory

Does the CIA Ever Lie?
Parsing the Pelosi torture controversy

The debate over Bush-era torture tactics like waterboarding has morphed into a full-blown Washington scandal. But the target isn't the Bush administration officials who ordered the torture; instead, the corporate media's focus is on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who claims that she was not fully briefed by the CIA on the use of waterboarding in late 2002. The prevailing assumption in much of the coverage is that the CIA couldn't possibly have misled members of Congress--despite the fact that this has happened repeatedly.

The media reaction has been intense. Right-wing pundits and the Fox News Channel are treating the issue as the most important political story of the moment. Pelosi is "undermining our national security. She's emboldening our enemies," declared host Sean Hannity (5/15/09). MSNBC's Morning Joe has covered the subject repeatedly, with host Joe Scarborough expressing utter disbelief (5/15/09) that the CIA could possibly have misled Pelosi, since Congress could cut off the CIA's funding. "They would never lie to Congress, because they would be crushed," Sen. Kit Bond (R.-Mo.) said on the show.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

When I was growing up in my hometown of Rock Rapids, Iowa,
a farming community of 2,800 in the northwest corner of the state, Memorial Day was the official start of summer.
We headed off to YMCA camp at Camp Foster on West Okiboji Lake and Boy Scout camp at Lake Shetek in southwestern Minnesota. The less fortunate were trundled off to Bible School at the Methodist Church.

As I remember it, Memorial Day always seemed to be a glorious sunny day and full of action for Rock Rapids. The high school band in black and white uniform would march down Main Street under the baton of the local high school band teacher (in my day, Jim White.) A parade would feature floats carrying our town’s veterans of the First and Second World wars, young men I knew who suddenly were wearing their old uniforms. And there was for many years a veteran of the Spanish American War named Jess Callahan prominently displayed in a convertible. Lots of flags would be flying and the Rex Strait American Legion Post and Veterans of Foreign Wars would be out in force. We never really knew who Rex Strait was, except that he was said to be the first Rock Rapids boy to die in World War I and the post was named after him.

Martin Feldstein, a professor of economics at Harvard, was formerly Chairman of President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors and President of the National Bureau for Economic Research. Feldstein is a contributing writer for Project Syndicate.

Has the US Recovery Begun?

By Martin Feldstein

CAMBRIDGE – Although the American economy is continuing to decline, it is no longer falling as fast as it was at the beginning of the year or in the weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. In that sense, it is reasonable to say that the worst of the downturn is now probably behind us.

But my reading of the evidence does not agree with that of those who claim that the economy is actually improving, and that a sustained cyclical recovery is likely to begin within the next few months. Although the stimulus package of tax cuts and increased government outlays enacted earlier this year will give a temporary boost to growth, we are unlikely to see the start of a sustained upturn until next year at the earliest.

Newsom is running for governor with a sophisticated political operation behind him. If he would use it back home for major tax reforms, he would show more leadership ability than all the campaign trips in the world.

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom and a negotiating team from the Service Employees International Union Local 1021 have hammered out yet another deal, this one slightly better for the workers than the proposal that the 11,000 union members voted down last week. As part of the deal, SEIU members will take 10 legal holidays without pay over the next 14 months, and gain five floating paid holidays. It's way better, for both the city and the union, than the prospect of 1,000 more layoffs — and the deep service cuts that so many job cuts would entail.

ON ACCUSATIONS THAT
PELOSI AND OTHERS
WERE BRIEFED ON BUSH
ADMINISTRATION TORTURE

When evil deeds catch up with you,

Your best defense is "You're one, too"

--Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet, from the Nation (6/8/09)

Today's Ammianoliner:

Spelling bee: Please spell Rush Limbaugh. "UmmmmmmmmmmmA-S-S-H-O-L-E."

Correct!

(Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, more newsorthy than usual, speaking on his home telephne answering machine, May 29, 2009.) B3