By Amber Peckham

One of the first waves of protest over the move in Congress to remove transgender people from an anti-discrimination bill came from the labor movement. Members of Pride at Work, an LGBT-focused labor coalition and the newest member of the AFL-CIO, held a press conference Sept 28 to announce they are withdrawing their support from the ENDA bill, and encouraging other LGBT advocacy groups to do the same.

The advocacy is having an impact – already, more than 20 LGBT organizations have come out against the move, and it’s entirely possible that the one-time landmark workplace-discrimination bill will lose almost all of queer community support.

“The need for gender provisions in this bill doesn’t apply only to those who are transgender, but also to, say, effeminate gay men, or lesbians who are ‘too butch’” said Robert Haaland, a representative of Pride at Work. “By picking and choosing who to include in their non-discrimination bill, these legislators are discriminating. It’s self-contradicting.”

“With the transgender community as arguably the most marginalized part of the LGBT community, they are really the ones who need the support of this bill the most,” added Masen Davis, a board member of the Transgender Law Center board. “Over 60% of transgenders in San Francisco are unemployed.”
Davis also expressed gratitude for the support of the labor community.
“If anyone is familiar with the ‘divide and conquer’ tactics being used on the LGBT community right now, it’s the labor movement.” he said. “It really heartens me to hear this voice of support from the labor community, because it means that maybe the bill won’t have to be divided, it can stay one, unified proposition.”

Pride at Work is calling on Pelosi to withdraw her support for the bill if transgender provisions are removed before ENDA is voted on, and is holding a vigil outside her office. If she were to do so, it is likely the bill would not pack the punch required to make it through a Congressional vote, and none of the LGBT community would benefit.

“That’s how the labor movement works; if you injure one, you injure all.” said Haaland. “And it looks like that’s how this bill is going to end up working as well.”

The Bay Guardian is interviewing community leaders about the issues at stake in the upcoming 2007 elections. We'll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.

Supervisor Jake McGoldrick on Props G, J, and K

"Do we have to submit to advertisers to get things done?"

Jake McGoldrick interview

Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.

"Public Financing is like teenage sex."

So says Chicken John Rinaldi, who has just spent the last month running around like the proverbial headless chicken, as he tries to reconcile reality, which is messy and imperfect, with public financing law, which is rigorous and well-ordered.

Chicken John Rinaldi back in the pre-public financing day when he and his fake moustache had time to chill out at the Temple Bar and educate people, including Fog City's Luke Thomas, on the correct way to pronounce Ri-NAL-di

“When I was 15 years old, I was very aware of what all those girls had, but there was no chance of my getting it,” said Rinaldi, on learning that his application for public financing in the Mayor’s race has been rejected. For now.

Because, and here's the tease, the Ethics Commission has given Rinaldi another five days to try and satisfy public financing requirements and then, maybe, just maybe, he can get a piece of it.

“I’m reminded of teenage sex, because I am experiencing the same level of frustration," said Rinaldi, who has spent the last few weeks knocking on contributors' doors, trying to get photocopies of their driver's license, so he can prove that those who each gave up to $100 to his campaign actually live in San Francisco.

And then there are his pesky problems with Paypal, since some efilings took over 48 hours to post, thereby blowing public financing deadlines along the way.

“It’s not the Ethics Commission’s fault, but the way the rules are written," added Rinaldi, who, much like a horny teenage boy, isn't about to give up on his quest. "Of course, I'm going to refile!"

It's time to piss some more people off, esp. the folks who think that highrise housing=urban density=good.

The Chronicle just announced that the American Planning Association has designated North Beach in SF as one of the best neighborhoods in American Why?

The 41,000-member organization took note of the atmospheric collage of low buildings around such historic gathering places as Grant Avenue and Washington Square. They also acknowledged the tenacious way that residents have fought to keep out chain stores and development projects that might water down "its eclectic mix of mom-and-pop shops, nightclubs and polyglot character (that) make it one of the city's most unique and authentic communities," according to the announcement.

What's the message here? North Beach is dense -- one of the densest parts of San Francisco. But it's a real neighborhood, with local stores, locally owned businesses and local character.

And there are strict rules against chain stores.

Now check out the new highrises south of Market. The stores are all chains. There's no neighborhood feel. It's like someone dropped in a bunch of luxury hotels in a faux San Francisco setting.

If the city wants to build density, fine: But build real neighborhoods, with a mix of people, with local businesses, parks, street lfe. The highrises we're building don't do that.

Okay, commenters: let the attacks begin.

I realize that the mayor of San Francisco has all sorts of reasons why he doesn't want to offend the United States Armed Services (might embarass Nancy Pelosi or Dianne Feinstein). And I realize that past mayors have been friendly to the Blue Angels and supportive of Fleet Week as a revenue-generator for the city.

But this letter , which the folks at PRO-SF got through a sunshine request, is over the top.

Gavin Newsom, Mr. same-sex marriage, saying that "My office and the community could not be more supportive of the Navy?" You gotta be kidding.

The Bay Guardian is interviewing the candidates for the 2007 elections. We'll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.

Mayor Gavin Newsom

www.actlocallysf.org

"I'm not satisfied."

Gavin Newsom interview

Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.

The Bay Guardian is interviewing the candidates for the 2007 elections. Unfortunately, our tape recorder crapped out during our hilarious interview with Chicken John, so we can only offer his info below. We'll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.

Chicken John Rinaldi

Chicken John asked us to endorse him for second place. When asked if his campaign was akin to a hamster running on a wheel, Rinaldi elaborated on the twin issues that he holds dear to his heart -- art and innovation -- by talking about innovative ways to streamline the current complexities that artists, performers, and others must face when trying to get a permit to put on an event in San Francisco.

"I'm running for the idea of San Francisco," Rinaldi told us, and claims to be painting a campaign logo in the style of a mural on the side of his warehouse in the Mission district. "It's going to say, 'Chicken, it's what's for Mayor,' or 'Chicken, the other white Mayor," Rinaldi said.

Click here for Chicken John's video blog

http://voteforchicken.com

Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.

Five years ago, Barack Obama stood up in Chicago and spoke out against invading Iraq.

"What I am opposed to is a dumb war,” said Obama on October 2, 2002. “ What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

“What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income - to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics."

Today, Obama supporters gathered in 18 cities across the United States to rally against the “conventional thinking in Washington, D.C” that led us into that war.

Ed Jew's lawyer is bailing out. This can't be good news for the suspended supervisor. Lawyer Bill Fazio cites "irreconcilable differences," which in legalese generally means "my client wants me to do something that's moronic or unethical and I'm not going to get caught in that swamp." It could also mean "my client doesn't want to pay my hourly rate anymore," which, given the complexity and extent of Jew's problems, isn't a good sign either. But generally, when it's about money the client just fires the lawyer. For Fazio to petition the court for the right to quit means things are probably going very badly.

The guy is not helping himself. I'm still convinced that if Ed Jew had resigned when all the trouble started, the San Francisco DA would have dropped the charges against him, and the feds might have just let it go. Now he's facing serious federal charges, he's out of office and almost certainly not coming back and he's facing the real prospect of prison time. What, exactly, is he thinking?

By G.W. Schulz

Here's a small arrow indicating exactly what a byline is, if anyone's struggling to grasp how it works. And we thought anonymous assaults were the exclusive domain of the barely pubescent teen girls that occasionally drop by our comments section. Mortar shells are natural in the biz, but put your name on it. Then again, one can hardly expect so much. And here I've spent so long in the bunker.

Cynthia McKinney, the former congressional representative from Georgia, became a sort of hero to progressives by opening calling for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney and for courageously calling for a real investigation of the 9/11 attacks when most of her Democratic colleagues were asking few hard questions and dutifully falling into line with the imperial ambitions of the neo-cons. And for that, McKinney was attacked by the GOP and abandoned by her own party, losing her seat.
So the California Green Party last month decided to nominate McKinney to run for president as a Green. Unfortunately, McKinney didn't bite and has resisted the idea. But she has agreed to a Green-sponsored tour of Northern California that starts today, which Greens are hoping will be part of the process of wooing her into changing her mind. So if you want a courageous black radical on the same ballot with Giuliani and Clinton -- or whichever Establishment candidates the two major parties are likely to offer us next year -- stop by one of the following events to say "Run, Cynthia, run!"

Some interesting analysis here of how gutting ENDA of protections for transgender people will in fact render the law pretty ineffective. This thing is really picking up steam.

Some of the folks who oppose Prop. D (the renewal of the Library Preservation Fund) are angry -- really angry -- that the Guardian supported the measure. How angry? Well, library activist and critic James Chaffee did a detailed point-by-point chart dissecting our endorsement. He had some harsh words for us, too. And we have some responses.

You can read the entire exchange here. Scroll down and read from the bottom up. It's amazing.

For all the grief Kimo Crossman gets for making public records requests of city officials, you gotta love some of the stuff he comes up with.

After Mayor Gavin Newsom called for voluntary resignations from all department heads and appointed commissioners with little apparent foresight, Crossman made a records request of the City Attorney's office for the accumulated amount of billable hours that office spent providing advice to their city clients on the legality of resigning.

The total: 112.75, according to a response emailed to Crossman from the city attorney's deputy press secretary Alexis Thompson. That number is a "comprehensive summary of the number of hours this Office has spent from September 10, 2007 through the present date on its work and advice concerning 'the Newsom mass resignation request,'" Thompson wrote.

Matt Dorsey, press secretary for city attorney Dennis Herrera confirmed to us that $200 is a good estimate of a billable hour of city attorney time. (Some bill higher, some lower, and there's a range to the quantity and quality of advice given.)

That's a total of $22,550 spent advising a swath of city officials, when Newsom could have just pointed a finger at the 10 or so he wants out.

Is Chuck Nevius...

...the new Ken Garcia?
It's bad enough that the San Francisco Chronicle and its columnist Chuck Nevius have been demonizing the homeless for months in a highly sensation and misleading fashion. But in today's paper, they have the gall to claim -- with little substantiation -- that San Franciscans are no longer tolerant of the poor and now support the homeless crackdown being pushed by the Chronicle and Mayor Gavin Newsom (and let's not forget the Examiner's Ken Garcia, whose old anti-homeless columns for the Chron Nevius has now revived).
And when I asked Nevius about why he's chosen the homeless for his punching bag, he said his coverage has been driven by the "400-plus" blog comments they've gotten complaining about the homeless. You see, he's just giving the people what they want. As he wrote to me, "I understand that not everyone agrees, but I've been at this for a while, over 20 years, and my experience is that newspapers can't create issues -- no matter how we try. We can only follow them."
Well, Chuck, I've been at this for almost 20 years myself, long enough to recognize bullshit when I smell it -- and to understand when a newspaper is trying to play on people's prejudices in setting the public agenda.

Wade Crowfoot of the Mayor's Office looks on as School Board member Eric Mar hands him the school board's unanimous resolution asking for a temporary shutdown of Lennar's site until health testing can be done. Crowfoot promised to "pass the message along" to Mayor Gavin Newsom...

Sup. Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi joined educators, spiritual leaders, and families and residents from BayviewHunters Point outside City Hall today to commend the San Francisco School Board for unanimously passing a resolution that asks the City to halt Lennar's BVHP construction at Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard, at least until testing proves that it is safe.

A dressed down Daly (there was no Board of Supes meeting today) joined the anti-dust rally outside City Hall

Randy Shaw checks in today with another housing action plan for the city. I'm getting a real sense of urgency on this, all over town, a feeling that San Francisco needs some sort of comprehensive housing legislation. I still like a prop. M for housing, but Randy's idea that the city needs to buy up as much land and as many buildings as possible also should be part of the mix.

The only problem with the city buying land and buildings is figuring out what happens next. Either the city mainstains the buildings, becomes the landlord and rents them out, or the city turns it over to a nonprofit to do that job -- or, if we want affordable ownership housing for middle-class people, which is part of Randy's platform, the buildings need to be sold as part of a land trust to make sure they stay affordable forever. Otherwise it's only affordable housing until the owner decides to cash in and sell at some astronomical price.

This morning on Forum Michael Krasny hosted Jennifer Friedenbach from the Coalition on Homelessness and CW Nevius, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, discussing the homeless sweeps in SoMa and the vitriol stirred up by the Chron's coverage of life on the streets by pointing at the shit, the needles, the trash, the insanity.

Near the end of the piece, Nevius says that using the cops to ticket homeless people who do these things is one solution and a way to hold them accountable. He said he doesn't know how to solve the overall issue of homelessness. In the background, you can hear Friedenbach simply say, "Housing."

Which is the whole frustrating disconnect on this issue. "Homeless" does not automatically translate into "criminal," or "insane," or "druggie," or "lover of shitting on the street." Nobody wants to see people sleeping in the streets, using drugs, defecating, or publicly displaying their individual psychotic problems. So give them a place to live. Don't buy cops, buy housing. Let people do what they need to do behind closed doors.

One caller mentioned new housing developments at 5th and Mission and how none of the buyers of the million dollar condos are going to want to see the streets outside their doors in such a condition. Again, another major disconnect -- developers want attractive neighborhoods, but when it comes to building affordable housing that might make those neighborhoods more attractive by housing the homeless, they run away screaming that it can't be done.

The chickens were back last night, come home to roost in front of Dede Wilsey's (the swell's chicken-in-chief) house, where she helped Mayor Gavin Newsom by hosting a fundraiser to stop Question Time from becoming enforceable law through Prop. E. Fun stuff, but the real fun comes tomorrow night when Newsom tries to shake his chicken image by finally debating the dozen candidates who are running against him, including Chicken John. The League of Women Voters event starts at 6 p.m. in Koret Auditorium at the main library, but seeing as this is the only debate Newsom has agreed to (insert clucking sounds here), attendees are advised to arrive early because it's expected to be a capacity crowd.

Photos by Patrick Roddie, webbery.com

In some ways, I feel totally cheated by this. I had no idea Tom's of Maine sold the farm to Colgate. I've been brushing my teeth with their toothpaste for years, I've been to their headquarters in Kennebunkport (which is a bonanza of free/cheap products), and I frickin' love their gingermint flavor. Love it.

Tom and Kate say they still have their values, and it's all about broadening their market (Wal-Mart) and bringing those values to more consumers, and they still donate ten percent of their profit, but you gotta wonder what those values are really all about. Especially since they chose not to disclose on their packaging that they're now owned by a global giant. Tom said, "I don't see why our customer would be interested in seeing a Colgate reference. Branding is really about values, and the Tom's of Maine values are intact. We are living those values, and that is what we need to reinforce among our consumers by investing in the Tom's of Maine logo, not confusing them with another logo."

Kate said, "It clarifies that we are still in Maine. It's important, a sense of place."

What? Maybe your summer house on Monhegan Island is still in Maine, and your factory is still in Maine, but this feels like finding out the man you love kills people for a living. World domination of the toothpaste market -- what kind of value is that?

Did anyone else see "Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox" last week at the Red Vic? That company is still family-owned, they give away 70 percent of their net, profit share with their workers, and Ralph Bronner was still whipping out his wallet and passing out $100 bills on camera and presses hugs and bottles of soap on anyone he runs into. Guess I'm back to brushing with the peppermint Bronner's.

Photo from www.cecilbfeeder.com
Beware, citizens, we've received word of an impending zombie attack in San Francisco. Our sources in the zombie world say they are likely to be gathered around 7:30 p.m. outside the main library, just as the crowd is leaving today's mayoral debate, apparently drawn to that spot by the large quantities of fresh brains inside. Please take all necessary precautions, including not placing a piece of duct tape on your clothing if you don't want to be attacked and forced to join the rampaging zombie mob. That is all.

Photo of Don Fisher by Luke Thomas, www.fogcityjournal.com, used with permission
Gap founder Don Fisher and other proponents of Prop. H, which seeks to invalidate city parking and land use policies developed over the last few decades, have sent out a misleading mailer attacking Prop. A, the Muni reform measure that would negate approval of Prop. H, among other things. The attack, which arrived in mailboxes on the same day many voters also received their absentee ballots, breaks a deal they had cut with Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin to not campaign on the issue in exchange for Peskin's promise to support a less-heinous parking measure on the February ballot. "I always negotiate in good faith, and if that is true, this is very disturbing," Peskin told the Guardian when informed of the mailer. "If A loses and H wins, it's the worst day of my political life. That would set planning in this city back 30 years."

So the folks at SFist have decided that we're all commies over here because we think it's okay to tax the rich and provide services for the homeless.

I thought we were all too intelligent in these circles to resort to stupid quips about the "proletariat," and I've posted a response on SFist. But since I've had to have this fight since I was an economics major at Wesleyan way back in the dark ages, I have to make a point here:

The Soviet Union as we knew it in the post-War era was not built by Karl Marx. There were some guys named Lenin and Stalin who built a political system in the name of his economic theories. Neither of them had much use for democracy or freedom. One of them was a savage butcher.

That said, you have to admit that Marx was, and remains, one of the most important economists of the modern era. You can't understand capitalism just by reading Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. The critique of capital that Marx put forward was brilliant; I never fully understood the role of labor in productivity and the way labor-price theory actually works until I studied Marx. So yeah, he should be on the reading list of anyone who wants to talk intelligently about economics.

I would add Robert Reich's Supercapitalism to Steve's reading list, too; I did an interview with him last week which will be posted on sfbg.com shortly.

The theory of money -- how it's created, what it is, how it effects the economy -- is that stuff of dozens of textbooks and a thousand doctoral theses. But the bottom line is, money today is not a direct measure of labor productivity; it's a far more artifical construct, as Steve points out. Money is created by the federal reserve and by private banks. At times, the government in effect prints more money at the mint to inject it into the economy. In practice, money -- the dollar -- is an internationally traded commodity, and the money supply in the United States is desperately hard to even track,much less manage or control.

Yes, taxes come from labor. But these days, a sane system would tax investment income and speculative income much higher than what we typically think of as labor. And a lot of the economy today is built on investment income and speculation that has nothing to do with productive labor.

Yeah, it's all more complicated than that, but folks: If you can't understand that money doesn't directly equal labor, and that you can use Marx's economic analysis without being a commie .. geez. I thought people in San Francisco were smarter than that.

Last night's mayoral debate wasn't terribly exciting, at least until the zombies attacked attendees as they left. A photo essay by Charles Russo:

Progressive favorite Quentin Mecke with Mayor Gavin Newsom

The first and only gathering of Newsom and his challengers.

Chicken John Rinaldi cracking up the mayor.

And outside, the zombies waited for brains.

Zombies attack and feast on Chicken

Zombie Chicken joins the mob.

Big business loves complaining about California’s famously “tough” regulations. But if they exist mostly on paper and there’s no one around to enforce them, than what the hell is big business whining about?

The state legislature gets the best of both worlds as a result. The majority Dems can show the unions how they’re protecting workers by passing new rules on occupational safety, but their big-business donors are appeased when year after year California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (known widely as Cal/OSHA) is systematically de-funded and top administrative posts remain vacant.

And now it’s worse than it has been in more than a decade, writes Garrett Brown in the rag Industrial Safety & Hygiene News. (Is this really what we spend our weekends reading?) Brown is a long-time investigator for Cal/OSHA. He notes that inspections have dropped statewide by 35 percent since 1992, and actual citations have declined by 44 percent.

In fact, California has one inspector for every 84,000 workers compared with the average among nearly two-dozen other states of one for every 50,000, according to Brown. (Those Commies in Canada have one for every 10,000.) Huge percentages of violations simply go unabated, and while employers are appealing citations they’ve received – which they commonly do and which are severely backlogged statewide – no one can force them to fix the identified hazards in the meantime.

That’s kind of like allowing someone to continue breaking people’s knees with a baseball bat until they’re proven guilty of the first assault.

Still from Daisy Mohr and Negin Kianfar's 2006 documentary "The Birthday," about sex changes in Iran

One of the weirder outcomes of combining fundamentalist religion with national governance is that you have the leader of your country say things like “There are no gays in Iran. We do not have this phenomenon,” at an American university, only to be practically laughed offstage and spend the next week backtracking on the statement.

Another is that your country finds itself in the somewhat awkward position of punishing homosexuality with death, yet publicly funding gender reassignment surgery. According to this recent report in the Guardian UK, Iran is second only to Thailand in the amount of sex change surgeries performed there. Yep, folks – sharia law commands that gays be killed for having sex with each other only once, and that lesbians be executed if they have sex four times (talk about double standards!). But it'll foot your trans bill.

Yet another strange thing to emerge from this situation is that your country is so fucked up that the leader of the major transsexual organization can say, as Maryam Khatoon Molkara recently did, "Transsexuality is a real disaster. It's a one-way street. But if somebody wants to study, have a future and live like others they should go through this surgery." Eek. (She herself convinced Khomeini to make transsexuality legal -- no small potatoes!)

Iran’s fundamental answer to gay love is change one of the partners into a woman. Shazam!

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's calvacade zoomed past me today as I left Alameda island. They were coming from the Alameda ferry terminal, where Arnie and SF Mayor Gavin Newsom and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums had just held a press conference to mark the formation of a new agency.

It's called the San Francisco Bay Area Water Emergency Transportation Authority, or WETA,and it's aimed at bolstering ferry service as a fallback if a disaster takes out area bridges and highways. Like an earthquake or a Maze meltdown, we guess.

WETA was created by a bill that the Governor signed on Friday, October 12, and will get $250 million in infrastructure bonds passed last November to begin building more ferries and ferry terminals.

I suppose that means that there won't be money for more free rides if and when emergencies happens. Remember the Maze meltdown earlier this year? At the time, I naively thought they'd make the ferries free for as long as it took to replace the freeway connector that had melted to toffee after a truck driver lost control of his rig and crashed.

But, no-oooo.

Wokette's got this lovely nutty rumor that Sean Penn would give Matt Gonzalez $5 million to run against Gavin Newsom -- as a Democrat. SFist picked up, wondering if it's a joke.

Coupla problems with the item. First of all, Wonkette refers to Gonzalez as a "deputy mayor under Willie Brown," which would be news to both of them. Second, folks, the deadline for filing as a candidate for mayor passed quite some weeks ago. The only way someone could file now is as a write-in -- theoretically possible, but since abstentee voting has already begun, and by the time a campaign got up and running, a sizable percentage of the votes would already be cast, the whole thing seems rather implausible.

I think Wonkette heard some very old gossip and thought it was new.

CItizens for Halloween report that at the Police Commission hearing, Martha Cohen, who is coordinating Halloween for the Mayor's Office, indicated that the City might be willing to reconsider its decision to forbid portable toilets this year.

If you would like toilets placed in the Castro on Halloween, C4H urges you to contact the Mayor's office:
Call 415.554. 6141 or email martha.cohen@sfgov.org.

Because a girl, boy, sheman or faux queen never can have too many places to go? Right?

Tim Redmond recently reviewed former labor secretary Robert Reich's new book Supercapitalism -- below, he talks to Reich about economics, industry, and the pervasive creep of new capitalism's moral degradations.

Today’s New York Times features a photograph of soldiers phoning home from Iraq. The image reminds me of my son. He was deployed in September and has called me twice since, once from Kuwait, once from Iraq.

My son this summer before he deployed to Iraq
I feel cheered and churned when I get those calls.
My emotions don't resemble "300"'s Queen Gorgo , who tells her her husband, the Spartan king, "Come home with your shield or on it."

Lena Headley plays the wife of Spartan King Leonides in "300".

I am not Volumnia, the mother figure in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, who tells her daughter-in-law, “had I a dozen sons, I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.”

But as a mom whose son chose to serve in the US military, I understand that my son is following his passion.

My son studying a medal he was awarded
I respect the courage and discipline that he and his fellow soldiers are showing in going into a war zone.
I recognize the need for troops in some situations, given that we are not living in a perfect world.

The 143rd Field Artillery's farewell ceremony at Camp Roberts, California, earlier this summer
So, for me, it’s not about ending the war in Iraq just so my son come can home.
I know he’s likely going to be there for 12, 15, perhaps 18 months.
What bothers me is that there are no guarantees that the troops won’t be sent right back for a second or third tour No guarantees that they'll get a break that’s at least as long as the time they’ve just served.
No guarantees of adequate care for veterans or adequate, functioning equipment for active soldiers.
And then there’s the fact that the US had no business invading Iraq in the first place.
Every day, I think about my son and what he is experiencing and what his presence in Iraq means for the Iraqi people, the US and the rest of the world.
Every day, I wonder if today, maybe, he's going to be able to call home.
Every day, I hope that this nation will have the courage to talk about bringing our troops home.
And most of all I hope that one day I'll be able to drink tea with my son in the garden, again.

.

Guardian photo by Charles Russo
Chicken John Rinaldi's quest to become the first San Francisco mayoral candidate to qualify for a grant of taxpayer money is still lumbering along like the zombies that attacked him last week, more than a month after the Aug. 28 deadline for raising $25,000 from at least 250 city residents. The Ethics Commission last night voted unanimously to allow Rinaldi one more submission of proof that those who gave to him through PayPal are city residents, overruling Ethics director John St. Croix that Rinaldi doesn't qualify. At issue are whether to count contributions from city residents whose current addresses doesn't match their drivers license addresses, a fairly common circumstance for the artists and techies who make up Rinaldi's base. If the campaign can satisfy Ethics, it gets $50,000, and so its quest inches forward like the undead.

The San Francisco Examiner called Prop. H “a veritable minefield of unintended consequences. It could actually take away parking, harm business, reduce new housing and drive out neighborhood retail. By now, Californians should be wary of unexpected mischief unleashed from propositions that legislate by direct referendum.”
We should also be wary of self-serving Republican billionaires like Don Fisher, who is sponsoring Prop. H, and Phil Anschutz, who owns the Examiner and has used its editorial page to attack progressives values like smart planning and reasonable regulation of greedy capitalists who would harm the public interest.

Why would I say such things about the Examiner, whose editorial also noted that “If the initiative organizers had faced harder questioning, they might have recognized that merely adding parking to a fast-growing downtown is likely to make already-bad congestion dramatically worse.”? Well, because it wrote this honest assessment of the measure back on Aug. 2, and even though Prop. H hasn’t changed since then, the Examiner yesterday used its front page endorsements to urge a “yes” vote on Prop. H. There was no explanation or arguments, just a simple position change on the most heinous and far-reaching ballot measure in years.

This is really brilliant.

Wow, never thought I'd write that sentence.

But Garcia picked up on a story today that I've been following, too, and he's got the point basically right: A property owner whose case is coming up tomorrow before the Board of Appeals claims that Clear Channel tried to shake him down, demanding he accept a lousy contract -- and when he didn't, the company pulled a billboard off his building and made sure that he could never lease the space to anyone else.

The building owner, Cheon Hool Lee, isn't exactly an impoverished victim; he's a retired dentist who owns several commercial properties in the city and lives in Hillsborough. He's a Korean immigrant who has done well in the United States, and one of the things he did was buy a piece of property on Market Street that had a billboard on top -- a valuable billboard in a prime location. In legal papers, Lee and his son Tony assert that they'vbe been told similar billboards in similar places rent for $10,000 - $15,000 a month (and that's about what I've seen from my experience watching the cost of political ads on billboards, too.)

Clear Channel had a lease on the billboard at 2283 Market and was paying the Lee family $697 a month.

Lee wanted more, and when the lease expired, he tried to raise Clear Channel's rent. According to the legal briefs, Tony Lee contacted other competing billboard companies and other industry professionals who told him that comparable properties rented for "in excess of 10 to 30 times" what Clear Channel was paying.

"I spent hundreds of hours in the last few months trying to be reasonable with them," Tony Lee told me.

And here, according to the legal filings, is what Clear Channel said: Take our deal -- or you get nothing at all.

That's because city law says that no new billboards can be constructed in San Francisco -- and if an existing billboard comes down, it can't be replaced. So Clear Channel one Sunday evening showed up with a crew and took the billboard structure on Lee's building down. Now he gets no rent at all -- and can't replace it.

Although Lee technically owned the structure and the building it sat on, and could have rented it to a Clear Channel competitor, it's gone now -- and unless the Board of Appeals supports the Lee's plea, it will be gone for good.

The message: Mess with mighty Clear Channel, refuse to accept our bad contract, and we'll screw you.

There are, of course, complicated legal issues here: Who exactly has the "right" to a billboard, the building owner or the company that leases the space and resells it? Did Clear Channel have the right to put a crew on top of Lee's building without his permission and take down a structure? Does the city's ban on new billboards apply even when a billboard was improperly taken down?

I'm no fan of billboards, and I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to try to sort that all out. I've called Clear Channel's lawyer, who said he can't comment and sent me to the company's government affairs office, where I've left a message and haven't heard back. I'll keep trying to get the company's response and will update this post when and if I get it.

But I will say that at this point, it sure looks like one of the biggest media companies in the nation is doing something pretty damn sleazy.

Who knew the scramble of the Republicans for the White House in 2008 would yield such icky comedy? From lovey-dovey phone calls in the middle of NRA advocacy speeches to bizarre backbends over evolution, I'm pretty much betting that instead of rapping Bush twins at this year's Repub convention, there'll be a full on circus -- with elephants dressed as showgirls, and dancing macacas of course. Maybe their strategy is to put Jon Stewart out of business? Hey, it just might work!

Fred Thompson

This morning's hilarity comes from a graphic in the NYT of (wide) candidate stances on global warming (pace, laureate Gore!) accompanying a sadly funny article on Republican candidate ungreenness. Fred Thompson, who believes there's "no scientific consensus on global warming" spilt this gem on the Paul Harvey show in April:

"Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. It seems scientists have noticed recently that quite a few planets in our solar system seem to be heating up a bit, including Pluto. NASA says that the Martian South Pole's ice cap has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter's caught the same cold, because it's warming up too, like Pluto.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence make the archbishop squirm

I stopped going to Mass the minute I got my drivers license. At first it was kind of a goof -- my brother and I told my devout Catholic partents that we wanted to go to a different church in town, where we liiked the priests better, and on Sunday morning, when they set off for their parish, we set off for ours ... only we'd stop on the way at a deli where the German owner had never respected the drinking-age laws, and we'd pick up a six of beer. Then we'd go sit in the park and drink for an hour, come home a bit dizzy and answer my mother's interrogation:

"How was mass?"

"Good."

"What was the sermon about?"

"Sin."

What did the priest say about it?"

"He's against it."

We all tried not to laugh, and lunch would be served.

Soon we stopped pretending, and didn't even bother to get out of bed. A Catholic-school education never quite worked; I think I was born with the Atheist Gene, not the God Gene.

But 16 years of exposure teaches you a few things, and when I read about the ridiculous furor over the archbishop of San Francisco apologizing for giving Communion to two members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, I had to laugh.

The Chronicle has discovered how expensive it is to live here. I have exactly one thing to say:

Years and years of refusing to promote affordable housing -- refusing to enact effective rent control, allowing evictions to go on without effective limits, building housing for the rich and not the rest of us -- has come back to haunt San Francisco.

And on all of those battles, the Chronicle was on the wrong side.

Elliott Sclar, economics professor at Columbia University and the author of You Don't Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization is one of the nation's leading experts on the consequences of turning public-sector programs over to private businesses and nonprofits. In an extensive interview with Amanda Witherell, he discusses the central theme of our our anniversary issue.

Jim Rivaldo, who was Harvey Milk's first campaign manager and was involved in progressive politics in San Francisco for more than 30 years, died last night. He was a remarkable guy, a rare political consultant who had high ethics, a real sense of progressive political ideology, and a sweet personality. He never had a mean word to say about anyone.

There's a good story about him here. I'll have a lot more this week. Meanwhile, his many friends all over San Francisco miss him.

I attended a Transportation Authority workshop last night on its new Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study (which, among other things, might recommend a fee to drive downtown, just like London, Rome, and Stockholm have) -- and I came away more convinced than ever that San Francisco is screwed if downtown greedheads fool people into approving Prop. H and defeating Prop. A.
Ours is one of five U.S. cities selected to collectively receive almost $1 billion in federal money to study and implement ways of reducing traffic congestion. Why? Because we're the second most congested downtown in the country after Los Angeles. Preliminary studies show traffic congestion cost San Francisco $2.3 billion in 2005 (in delays, fuel, health impacts, and slowed commerce), congestion consistently ranks as people's top concern in surveys, traffic has slowed our transit system to a crawl, congestion roughly doubles travel times, and half our city's greenhouse gas emissions come from cars. And if Prop. H is approved, there will be unfettered new parking construction, putting up to 20,000 new cars on our clogged roads, according to the Planning Department. This is madness!
I'm baffled why the Chamber of Commerce supports this because the evidence is clear it will hurt business (perhaps they're just blinded to reality by their slavishly doctrinaire devotion free markets and hatred of all things government). Study after study shows that more parking draws more cars, and in our built-out city, where there's no room for creating more lanes, that means more traffic congestion. And therefore slower Muni, which will cause more people to want to drive or ride bikes, which will cause even more congestion -- a feedback loop that leads to gridlock. C'mon everybody, think about this stuff for a second because it isn't rocket science. You can support more traffic or better transit, your choice.

Photo by Charles Russo

The sun may be shining, but it's raining legal cats and dogs for suspended Sup. Ed Jew.

On the eve of a preliminary hearing by the City's Ethics Commission into charges of official misconduct by Supervisor Jew, California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. has granted City Attorney Dennis Herrera's application for leave to sue in quo warranto to remove Jew from the Board of Supervisors for failure to comply with the City Charter's residency requirements .

The ruling comes a little more than three weeks after Mayor Gavin Newsom initiated official misconduct proceedings against Jew and suspended the District 4 supervisor, replacing him, at least for now, with political rookie Carmen Chu.

City Attorney Herrera says that in llight of the Ethics Commission's preliminary hearing tomorrow, he intends, "to carefully evaluate" the legal options.
"In the coming days, I will decide how best to represent the City's interest in concluding a crisis that has clouded the legitimacy of San Francisco's representative government for too long," Herrera said in a press release.

Tomorrow's preliminary Ethics Commission hearing takes place at 1:30 p.m. in Room 416, City Hall.

Why does Republican billionaire Don Fisher have such influence in San Francisco? Why does Mayor Gavin Newsom subvert good planning simply because Fisher tells him to, then sit on the sidelines while Fisher tries to fool voters into creating gridlock in our downtown? Why would Senator Carole Migden want Fisher -- who wants to subvert the public education system with vouchers and charter schools -- to serve on the State Board of Education, let alone sing his praises in public while appointing him? Why does anyone still listen to the Fisher-sponsored SFSOS, which still draws elected officials to its luncheons? Is our political system so thoroughly corrupted by money that self-proclaimed liberal Democrats are willing to crawl in bed with such an ideological Neanderthal?
At the Yes on A, No on H rally in front of the Gap yesterday, near where they had parked the rented white Hummer (which H deems a "low-emission vehicle," exempt from parking restrictions), Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin framed the issue for those of us who don't want or need Fisher's money: "San Franciscans have a clear choice. We can either pursue the Republican policies of the last century and continue to clog our roads and pollute our cities and poison our air, or we can move into the 21st Century."

So as some of us expected, Sutter Health now wants to effectively shut down St. Luke's hospital in the Mission and turn it into an abulatory clinic.

That's terrible news for the southeast neighborhoods; St. Luke's is the only hospital other than SF General in the Mission area, and when St. Luke's stops taking patients, they'll all be shuttled to the already overcrowded public hospital.

Sutter is supposed to be a nonprofit, but it acts like a greedy corporation. The problem with St. Lukes is that it gets a lot of uninsured and Medi-Cal patients; Sutter only likes rich patients with good health plans.

Let's hope the supervisors remember this when the assholes from Sutter come along and ask for permission to build a giant new hospital on Van Ness.

The San Francisco Board of Appeals did the right thing last week and blocked Clear Channel from using its corporate power to shake down small property owners. The board sided with Cheon Hool Lee, a retired Korean immigrant dentist who owns a building on Market Street, who lost a billboard because Clear Channel yanked it down when he demanded fair rent.

The legal issues were tricky, but the principle wasn't: The giant conglomerate was acting like the mob. It had to be stopped.

And yet, the Board of Supervisors, usually far more progressive than the Board of Appeals, went along with Clear Channel and gave the evil media barons a twenty -- that's 20 -- year contract to sell ads on bus shelters in the city. Only Ross Mirkarimi voted no.

I know it was a tough one for progressives -- somehow, Muni management, which wants the money from the bus shelters, convinced the union for the bus drivers to lobby for the contract. And I realize that the estimated $15 million a year Muni will get out of the deal isn't peanuts.

But I have to ask: How much is Clear Channel making? The company won't say. All we know is that the contract is very lucrative, because the media barons went to great lengths to get it. Which means the city could have built the shelters itself, brought in even more money for Muni, hired even more bus drivers ... and sent a message to Clear Channel.

Nope. DIdn't happen.

I've had, to say the least, some fights with the company that publishes the SF Weekly. We're suing the bastards for predatory pricing. I've made a few critical comments on the big chain in my time.

But I'm also the First Amendment chair of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, and we are strongly supporting the chain's flagship paper, the Phoenix New Times, and its top executives, Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin, in their battle against a local sheriff and prosecutor in Arizona.

Well, ain't this special!
A Special Report from the Controller and the Legislative Analyst is recommending the establishment of an Office of Special Events.
The impetus for this special study came, says the report, from Sup. Bevan Dufty in the wake of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to cancel a City-sponsored Halloween this year.
The report is already getting activists nervous.
That’s because one of its main thrusts is reviewing “whether the Entertainment Commission’s unfulfilled responsibility to attract and support special events (including those without sponsors) should officially be transferred to some other unit.”
That unit would most likely be contained within the Mayor’s Office.
Now, Piss-poor communication between the Mayor’s Office and the Entertainment Commission over Halloween 2007 became an open secret this year, after a public records request unearthed emails in which commissioners complained that the Mayor’s Office has been trying to avoid meeting with them to discuss plans to shift the event to the waterfront.
This may be why the Special Report recommends that the two be required to communicate in future, or it could be because, as the Special Report notes, a recent Civil Grand Jury found that “communication between the Entertainment Commission and the Mayor’s Office has not been sufficiently good to allow such efforts [promoting the development of a vibrant entertainment and late-night entertainment industry] to move forward.
Either way, it’s an interesting development ten days before this year’s non-event looms, and a tacit admission that no one in Room 200 is expecting to be able to kill Halloween 2008, which occurs on a Friday.
The report, which reviews the role of all the City’s major special events, not just Halloween, finds that San Francisco could benefit economically and culturally from additional special events, but that no city agency is currently focused on “attracting, creating and promoting” such events.
It suggests that the Convention and Visitors Bureau, which receives 56 percent of its $14 million budget from the City’s hotel tax to promote SF as a tourist destination, or another non-profit such as SF’s Grants For Arts, could play a larger role.
It also recommends that “ unsponsored events like Halloween are likely best managed by the Mayor’s Office in cooperation with a Private event producer.”
Stay tuned.

Look at all the pretty condos

I'm sick of hearing San Francisco planners, the folks at SPUR and SF Weekly columnists talk about how wonderful Vancouver is, what with all of the slender downtown condo towers that provide walkable neighborhoods, bike paths and a "new urbanist" approach to housing.

Here's a bit of reality: The New York Times reports that housing costs in Vancouver are soaring. Guess what? All those condos haven't brought down housing costs, or even stabilized them. The more condos, the higher the prices.

And guess what? Many of those rich condo buyers aren't from Vancouver:

Fueling the high-end market are foreign and second-home buyers, [Helmut Pastrick, the chief economist for the Credit Union Central of British Columbia] said, though not necessarily from the United States. The weak American dollar, which for the first time in decades is worth less than the Canadian dollar, has been making real estate in Canada more expensive for Americans.

Other foreign buyers make up a significant percentage of the market, according to Ian Gillespie, the president of Westbank Projects. The company is building several residential towers downtown, including the 60-story Living Shangri-La, which will be Vancouver’s tallest building after it is completed in 2009.

“This is a very multicultural city,” said Mr. Gillespie, who cited as an example a pharmaceutical executive from the Middle East, who recently bought a 1,700-square-foot $3.65 million condo at the Fairmont Pacific Rim.

And:

To make room for some projects, hundreds of single-room-occupancy hotel rooms for low-income residents have been lost, said David Eby, a lawyer with the Pivot Legal Society, a legal advocacy group. High prices are pushing out middle-income renters and buyers, he added.

Gee, might there be a different kind of lesson here for San Francisco?

The harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club meets tonight to consider a parliamentary procedure that could lead to an an early endorsement for state Sen. Carole Migden, who faces a challenge in next June's primary from Assemblymember Mark Leno. Not surprisingly, the sleaze is flying

We haven't endorsed in this race, and we won't until next spring, but I have said, repeatedly, that both sides ought to play fair and keep it clean and try to avoid doing long-term damage to the progressive community. If Migden manages to disenfrancise Leno supporters at Milk, it will be one of those ugly moves that hurts the club's credibility.

Everyone tries to pack club endorsements. The Milk Club rules are designed to block that, and this may be an unintended consequence. But there are plenty of people who are clearly legit, long-term members of the Milk Club, and if there's any question about who gets to vote, it ought to be decided in a way that is as democratic as possible.

Migden's a former club president, and has a lot of strong Milk allies. She's been a Milk person for years, and Leno has been much more closely allied with the more moderate Alice B. Toklas Club. Migden doesn't need to play any games here; Leno's the underdog for this endorsement anyway.

By the way, perhaps the Milk Club members could ask Sen. Migden why she's so fond of Republican Don Fisher,, and whether she will take the $7,200 he's given her campaign and turn it over to the Yes on A/ No on H campaign.

And to keep the debate lively, they can ask Assemblymember Leno why he's so supportive of Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Remember last year when Business Week, in a cover story about Digg.com, described our offices as "grungy," and several major arteries located in the neck of our boss, Bruce Bruggman, nearly exploded? They also hilariously misidentified us as the SF Weekly.

The lack of imagination in American journalism makes for strange bedfellows, it turns out. In their August/September issue, the American Journalism Review described the Chronicle's offices downtown off of Fifth and Mission streets the same way, actually using the word "grungy."

Christ, assholes, do we really come off as that unkempt? Phil Bronstein didn't make his bed this morning, and I forgot to shave down south. Perhaps the glossies could teach us all out here on the Left Coast a thing or two about obsessive compulsion.

Or, they can loosen their ties and get a life. Either way, if they saw how neatly organized my cubicle was, they'd find a better adjective. My filing system would give even Jann Wenner an erection.

...they do it dirty and big time

A bunch of huge billboards and fliers popped up all over San Francisco yesterday, like some kind of overnight pox, trying to persuade people to vote against Prop. K

Prop. K is an advisory measure on this Novermber's ballot that adopts a policy of restricting advertising on street furniture and City buildings.

But until yesterday, when I drove past one of this monster billboards while stuck in traffic, I had never heard of the No on K-Citizens to Protect Muni Services Committee.

What caught my eye, other than the enormous ad, was the line that said "Major Funding by Clear Channel Outdoor and Outdoor Advertisers."

Clear Channel numbers, of course, among the folk who would lose big time if ads such as these were restricted, so their opposition is predictable.

Clear Channel are also the folks who want to place ads on all the City's bus shelters, in return for fixing the shelters up and installing new ones.

These are also the folks who argued that they don't have to tell us their projected profits from coating our shelters with signs, because they are "renting" City space, rather than using it for free.

Curious, I called the Ethics Commission this morning to find out why I had never seen this Committee's name before.
tThe guy on the other end of the line had never heard of them either, and it took an hour before someone got back to me and said, 'Wow, How did you find out about them? They only filed with us today. Which is in violation of Ethics's own rules."

Turns out that this mystery committee already has $100,000 to play with, so expect to see more of the above ads all over, and expect that Clear Channel isn't worried about having to pay some piddling, to their mind, fine to Ethics, later on.

PS The treasurer for No on K is Bill Hooper, President/General Manager of Clear Channel Outdoor, Nothern California Region.

The Bay Guardian is profiling the candidates for the 2007 elections. We'll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.

Mayoral candidate Michael Powers

www.powersforthepeople.com

"As a candidate for Mayor it is my intent to accomplish the following tasks for my fellow residents. I will:

*make Muni free and introduce a community bicycle program with 10,000 bikes
as in Paris.

*protect our city's skyline through slow growth rather than our present program
of Manhattanization.

*lower our crime rate by increasing the number of police officers we have on our
streets by use of Lateral Transfer hiring and insisting that sworn personnel are not
wasted on administrative duties.

*use our bike program to allow the homeless to become its supervised labor pool
in bike maintenance, thus teaching them a trade.

*encourage the promotion of Harvey Milk's birthday as a national holiday."

Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.

SF Weekly loses a big one

It's no news to most of you that the Guardian has sued the SF Weekly and its parent company for predatory pricing. We're arguing that the Weekly, owned by Village Voice Media (which used to be New Times), has been selling ads below cost for the purpose of injuring the locally owned competitor.

Back in July, SF Weekly managing editor Will Harper wrote a long, rather nasty story that sought to portray the suit as groundless. He called the suit "light on witnesses and evidence," quoted his boss, Mike Lacey, at length, and laid out, in detail, the Weekly's motion for summary judgment -- in essence, a motion to dismiss the suit because of a lack of evidence.

Well: this Wednesday and Thursday, Judge Richard Kramer heard arguments on that motion (actually, three different motions). One of the things that the Weekly's lawyers argued was that the VVM managers couldn't possibly have intended to harm the Guardian; after all, the lawyers argued, VVM CEO Jim Larkin denied any such plan.

That's right: The lawyers said their client couldn't have done anything wrong, because he (imagine this) said he didn't do it.

Shortly before noon yeterday, Judge Kramer denied all three motions. In essence, the judge said, just saying you didn't do it won't fly; there's plenty of evidence to take this case to trial, and a jury will have to decide who's telling the truth and what's really going on.

The folks at the SFW, of course, are spinning the ruling as just more evidence of our "looney lawsuit". That's their opinion, and they're welcome to it. But in this particular matter, the opinion that counts is the opinion of the Hon. Richard Kramer -- and he didn't see it the SF Weekly's way.

Trial is scheduled for early January.

The organizers and speakers from Hip Hop 4 Obama make Chris DeMento wonder: Can Obama really do it?

By Chris DeMento

Barack Obama's been making the biggest grassroots push since JFK's presidential campaign, but will it take? I spoke and listened to three very intelligent and spirited Obama supporters at a recent Hip Hop 4 Obama event at Berkeley's Ashkenaz, all of whom were filled with information and the will to help their man beat a Clinton in a primary. One small problem: nobody showed.

Annemarie Stephens, founder of Hip Hop 4 Obama

Why does GOP bigwig and GAP founder Don Fisher have so much money to pour into the campaign to defeat sound planning in San Francisco? Gee, maybe the fact that his company's clothes are made by child slaves might have something to do with it.

I love the Onion's hit on this.

I was writing a story about the long-term damage that Prop. H -- which will entitle every land owner to build new parking lots, regardless of their traffic-inducing impacts or the desires of certain neighborhoods to limit parking -- could do to San Francisco when Mayor Gavin Newsom called me. Actually, it was just Newsom's voice in a robo-call urging me and others to vote against Prop. E, the mayoral question time measure, arguing that it won't fill any potholes or put more cops on the street. Although Newsom is on record supporting the muni reform measure Prop. A and against Prop. H, the campaigns are frustrated that Newsom has done nothing to fundraise or campaign for them. "I think he's focused on his own race and also question time. That's where he's spending his resources," Newsom spokesperson Nathan Ballard told me when I asked about it.
So, there are two important measures on the ballot which will have a long term impact on quality of life in San Francisco. And there's a measure that only affects Newsom personally, and perhaps his long term political ambitious if question time shows he can't handle real unscripted debate. And Newsom ignores the big measures to focus on the small. If there was ever a telling testament to Newsom's priorities -- placing his own interests above San Francisco's -- this is it.

P.S. The Examiner had an interesting interview with London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who has a monthly question time with that city's legislators that it tough but ultimately good for him and for democracy. "It keeps me in touch with the people." One more reason Newsom should embrace it instead of fighting it.

By Tim Redmond

The Harvey Milk LGBT Club is all tied in knots over this race. A lot of progressives are arguing that it’s split the community. A lot of people don’t even know how to approach it – two queer community leaders with progressive politics are fighting it out, and in the end, we all have to pick sides (or at least vote for one of them and not the other).

It’s tough: Both have been right sometimes and wrong sometimes. Leno used to be more associated with the moderate side of queer politics, and Migden with the more progressive side, but that’s not entirely accurate today: Leno has moved to the left (in part, no doubt, because that’s easier to do in Sacramento) and has become one of the most accessible, hard-working politicians in town. He’s proven himself trustworthy (although his political consulting firm, BMWL, is involved in some of the worst and sleaziest pro-downtown stuff in the city.

Migden, meanwhile, endorsed the more conservative Steve Westly over the more liberal Phil Angelides for governor. She’s done a few truly embarrassing things, like promoting for state school board a downtown Republican who wants to privatize public schools.
A lot of people say there’s no ideological difference between the two today, that the race is all about style (Migden brash, confrontive, an insider deal-making pol; Leno friendly, conciliatory, able to work well with others). Some say the criticisms of Migden’s style are sexist.

Over the next few months, as this gets more and more competitive and (I fear) ugly, there will be lots of trash talked about both of them. The two candidates will talk about history, records, and (maybe) positions on the few issues on which they don’t agree. They’ll both argue – and they can both make a case – that they will be more effective in Sacramento, better advocates for progressive causes and the city’s needs.

I’d like to offer a different lens.

This is brilliant. A tech company in Mississippi has bred wi-fi technology with electricity meters, and Burbank, CA, which has a power grid owned by the city is using the technology to cut down usage during peak times.

Why can't San Francisco put $60 million toward this instead of bringing another fossil fuel power plant into the world?

As Naomi Graychase reports in this article, “An example of the immediate effect of this sort of load control,” says Fletcher, “ would be to send a signal to a grocery store that would turn down lights and turn down the A/C, so we can regulate power when there’s a shortage of power in the grid.”

Hmm...big power plant that runs on gas we have to buy from PG&E and puffs nasty smoke to an already smoky neighborhood...or...better switches and control of the power we use? This is a no-brainer: fossil fuels are so 20th century. WiFi is so 21. The kids love it. We could hip out the city's Community Choice Aggregation plan with some of these, especially if we can get the Mayor to cut some sketchy back room deal to make them free!

Last bus to Oakland! The cell phone photographer who sent us this shot said the driver of the rented vans had been hired by PG&E to bus people to City Hall from the East Bay to speak against the peaker power plants

Who got a robo-call last night about the city's plan for new power plants? Was there something about three new fossil fuel power plants "right in the middle of the city" on your answering machine when you got home?

There was on ours:

"These new plants will further reliance of fossil fuels, add to global warming, and cost up to $500 million. And they aren’t even needed because there’s a green alternative. If you would like to join our efforts to stop the SFPUC, please press 1 or if you’d like more information please press 2. This call was paid for by the Close It Coalition with the proud sponsorship of PG&E. Find out more on closeitcoalition.org."

PG&E...you're so tricky. Your press office never has time to return our calls for comment but you're dialing up half the city as part of your bogus campaign for clean energy.

The SFPUC will be discussing the peakers tomorrow -- Wednesday Oct. 31 -- at 2:30 in Room 400 at City Hall. Maybe PG&E will bus in some more people to speak against the peakers like they did for the last PUC hearing on Oct. 23.

Our source for that tidbit said he asked the driver of the rented Enterprise vans who had hired him and the response was PG&E and the A. Philip Randolph Institute. We asked APRI's executive director Guillermo Rodriguez if they bought the vans. He denied it, and said he has complete control over APRI's two credit cards and neither had been employed for such a task.

Up until two years ago, Rodriguez was Senior Director of Public Affairs for....Holy shit! PG&E. Last year, APRI received $85,000 in grants from PG&E. I wonder what they're doing with all that money?

The Board of Supervisors had a little shake-up today in the middle of a conversation on the city's deal to build a new peaker power plant.

One of the biggest selling points from proponents of the $230 million natural gas fired power plant has been that it will receive the "Reliability Must Run" contract from CA-ISO, the state energy agency that dishes out those kinds of things. Right now the Mirant Potrero plant has that RMR, and city officials and activists have been trying for several years to get that plant to close down because it spews more filth into the air than a newer one would. Without an RMR, which essentially pays the power plant owner to NOT run unless needed during peak energy hours, it becomes financially dicey to keep the lights on, but Mirant has never definitively said they'd pull the plug if the city built its own power plant. Some folks, including us, have expressed concern that we could end up with two power plants.

Supervisor Tom Ammiano was intending to slap a couple of amendments onto the resolution the board heard today regarding the peaker plant, one of which would have urged the PUC to get an iron-clad guarantee from Mirant that they'd shut down. In the middle of the supes grilling the PUC on the peaker contract, Sup. Aaron Peskin interjected with the late-breaking news that Mayor Gavin Newsom was at that very moment negotiating with Mirant for a signed agreement that the plant would shutter for good if their RMR is removed.

Some of the supes seemed a little surprised by the news, if not miffed. (Gav's got a bit of a thing for trumping.) Rumors outside the chamber were that the Mayor's office has been working on this for awhile, and part of the negotiation may have to do with some city assistance with cleaning-up of the old power plant site and maybe a little fast-tracking of the permitting process for Mirant to put it to some other, more lucrative use. (Condos, anyone? Anyone around here need another $2 million condo?)

No one from the Mayor's office got up to speak about it (nor the Mayor himself, though it was his day to shine in front of the supervisors. More on that after Prop E passes.) They haven't issued a press release yet, and I swung by the press office but no one there knew anything about it. Supes Mirkarimi, Daly, and Alioto-Pier voted still voted against the resolution.

UPDATE:

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi tells us we got it wrong -- he introduced the resolution amendments, not Tom Ammiano. Sorry about that -- we missed the beginning of the hearing, and got the amendments through a fax from Ammiano's office. The hearing isn't up on SFGTV yet, so we'll take Mirkarimi's word that the amendments are part of the resolution.

They urge the SFPUC to do two things:
1. secure the closure of Mirant as a condition before operating the peakers. (Mayor's on that one.)

2. "...stipulate a controlled operating regimen that reduces the usage of the CT's as renewable in-city generation capacity comes on-line consequent to implementation of City's renewable energy plan under Community Choice Aggregation and other renewable power sources." (So, essentially, curb the peakers as we put up the solar panels.)

Also, here are some PDFs which prove the point commenter Eric Brooks makes below that the peakers will spit out about the same amount of pollution as Mirant does now:

Testimony of Bay Area Air Quality Management District's engineer Barry Young at 10/23 SFPUC hearing

Images that quantify the testimony

By Sarah Phelan

Moments after this week’s edition of the Guardian went to press, I got through to “notorious campaign attorney Jim Sutton,” as we describe him in this week’s article about campaign finance.

I’d been playing phone tag with Sutton since last week, wanting to ask him about all the accrued funds, or outstanding debts in this year’s election, and their role in hiding the identity of donators from the voting public, until after the election.

A master of the ins and outs of campaign law, Sutton, came across as charming and witty, as he told me about the Sutton Law Firm and its role in political campaigns:

Jim Sutton

“We are a law firm. We bill for our services—and we fully expect our clients to pay in a prompt way,” said Sutton, pointing to the fact that the City law had been amended, so that candidates have to pay off their debts within 180 days of the election.”

But the amended rule that Sutton refers to does not apply to ballot measure committees—groups that raise and spend money in support of or opposition to specific measures on the ballot.

Guardian photo by Neil Motteram
Apparently, most people aren't buying the inevitability of the endless Iraq War or the defeatist fatalism expressed by the major political parties and the mainstream media, if Saturday's massive anti-war march in San Francisco was any indicator. Tens of thousands sent the clear message that we need a new Iraq strategy, one that ends the provocative occupation by American troops as soon as possible. The ANSWER Coalition, which sponsored the event, is trying to marshal the anti-war forces moving toward the next major event in March, when there are calls for a general strike.