Okay, John McCain has yet another problem with his connections to crazy bigoted preachers. Check this out.

In a post-trial hearing on the Guardian’s lawsuit against the Weekly and its chain parent, Miller said she was inclined to rule that some, but not all of the damages a jury awarded to the Guardian in March should be trebled. And she said in a tentative ruling that she was prepared to issue an order forbidding the Weekly from engaging in further predatory behavior.

The ruling hit the front page of Sfgate this afternoon with the headline "SF Weekly loses big, again."

On March 5th, a San Francisco jury found that the Weekly had engaged in predatory pricing and awarded the Guardian $6.39 million in damages. The law allows for treble damages.

Judge Miller opened the May 9th hearing by stating that, on the basis of legal briefs filed by the two sides, she was inclined to treble $4.6 million of that, leaving a final judgment of $15.6 million.

Although Guardian attorney Ralph Alldredge argued that the entire verdict should be trebled, the outcome wasn’t a big surprise: From the day of the verdict, we’ve been reporting that the likely final award would be around $15 million.

The Guardian is also eligible for attorney’s fees and court costs.

A new lawyer representing the Weekly, Forrest Hainline III, argued vociferously against any injunction, claming that the court would be wading into troubling First Amendment territory. He argued that the only way the Weekly could comply with an injunction would be to cut editorial expenses – and that would have an impact on the paper’s right to free speech.

But Alldredge pointed out that courts have always found that newspapers have to obey basic business regulations. What, he asked would happen if the Weekly were found guilty of dumping toxic printing-press waste into the Bay? Would the paper argue that paying the clean-up costs would violate the First Amendment?

The argument wasn’t new – the Weekly tried the same First Amendment claim early in the trial, when the paper filed to have the lawsuit dismissed. Judge Richard Kramer, who handled the first stages of the suit, rejected the argument. The Weekly sought an appeal of Kramer’s ruling, but the appeals courts denied that as well.

Judge Miller seemed to imply in her questioning of Hainline that an injunction would only require the Weekly to do what it should be doing anyway. “Would you advise your client to go ahead and violate the law?” she asked.

Among the more interesting part of Hainline’s argument was the claim that the Weekly would never be able to survive in San Francisco unless it could sell ads below cost. He essentially implied that the Weekly can’t make a profit on its own, and is in business only because its corporate parent is underwriting it.

He said that he didn’t see how the Weekly would be able to sell ads at a price that covered its operating costs.

An injunction that would force the paper to operate like a normal business, and live within its means, would threaten the Weekly’s very existence, Hainline argued, proclaiming that Miller was threatening to “silence a First Amendment voice.”

Alldredge pointed out that it was silly to say the Weekly would be forced out of business. After all, he said, the Guardian is selling ads at a price that allows it to cover costs

Miller took the matter under consideration and will issue a final ruling within ten days.

The Guardian's lawyers are Ralph Alldredge, Richard Hill and E. Craig Moody.

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi kicks off his campaign for reelection this evening at Yoshi's Jazz Club in the heart of the Fillmore. The Board of Supervisors' only Green Party member is popular in his District 5 -- made up of the super lefty Haight and crime-plagued Western Addition, where Mirkarimi has shown real leadership in pushing police foot patrols and other reforms -- and is expected to cruise to a relatively easy victory.

But today's event carries a far larger symbolic significance: it is the beginning of a long campaign to create a progressive narrative for San Francisco that counters the centrist and fairly superficial approach of Mayor Gavin Newsom. And that's a struggle that will carry through this fall's high-stakes supervisorial elections, into the vote for a new board president in January, and on into the next mayor's race -- all of which could feature Mirkarimi in a starring role.

But in many ways, the progressive consensus has dissolved over these last two years, torn apart by infighting, budget shortfalls, the inability to field a strong mayoral candidate, strategic missteps, divisive issues and races, term limits, and Newsom finally getting his head back in the game. At this point, it's an open question whether the Mirkarimi progressives or the Newsom moderates have the upper hand going into the upcoming budget battles and the political campaigns on the horizon.

Newsom has certainly shown a willingness to go to war with the progressives, based on his demonization of board president Aaron Peskin, unilateral mid-year budget cuts, and his recent veto of Mirkarimi's low-cost sunshine measure, purportedly for hard-to-believe reasons of fiscal austerity. And Newsom's camp has been hoping that his celebrity status, recitation of policy minutiae, partnering with power players like Nancy Pelosi and Lennar, and embrace of all things green add up to coattails that will get some allies elected to the board.

The challenge for Mirkarimi and the progressives now is to articulate an agenda that will unite candidates for all of the seven supervisorial seats now up for grabs and resonate with San Francisco voters. The conditions could be quite fertile this fall, with Barack Obama as the likely presidential nominee and the need greater than ever for affordable housing, renter protections, transportation policies that discourage driving, better energy policies, and an empowerment of average San Franciscan over wealthy individuals and corporations.

Can Mirkarimi lead the way into that new dynamic? Starting today, we'll see.

When: Friday, May 9, 2008, 5:30pm – 7:30 pm

Where: Yoshi’s Jazz Club, 1330 Fillmore St., SF.

Help with the fundraising: $25-$500 per person

RSVP REQUIRED - R.S.V.P. via email: IAFORM@yahoo.com

For more information please contact: 415-994-0067

Please make checks payable to: Committee to Re-Elect Mirkarimi

Mail to: Treasurer Kelly Dearman; Address: 721 Webster Street, SF 94117

The language used to justify these yuppie monstrosities was truly twisted, most of it mouthed by Willie Brown's short leashed then-Planning Commission president Anita Theoharis. The logic went as follows: we need more housing, so let's build live work lofts. We can build live work lofts in the districts zoned industrial, where housing is banned, because live work lofts are not housing. This reasoning enriched the builders while impoverishing the community as lofts were not charged for their impacts like housing because, silly, lofts are not housing.

But things have changed now.

So here we had an individual who used her position of power to demolish neighborhood character by entitling 5000 units of ugly fake housing that were granted height and bulk bonuses and exempted from paying fees, insisting that the Commission stop the show on a 4' addition to one home.

The clincher was that the current Planning Commission President, Christina Olague, back in the day, was instrumental in organizing community resistance to the Live Work Loft scam which led to the election of a progressive, district elected Board of Supervisors and to her appointment to the Planning by Matt Gonzalez and reappointment by Aaron Peskin earlier this year. Christina carried herself with professionalism and dignity as the Commission did the right thing and declined to take another look.

We still have a long way to go on improving land use process and policy in San Francisco, but yesterday's hearing clearly showed how far we'd come under November 2001's Proposition D, which divided land use commission appointments between the Mayor and Board, where a former power player was reduced to pleading with an activist Commission President who offered more consideration than the petitioner ever offered up to the east side.

Editor & Publisher is reporting that the San Francisco Examiner will be creating a Sunday edition of the paper and also expanding its Thursday edition. Right now it's published six days a week. It will also be scaling back home delivery of the free paper -- residents have been enraged over them piling up on their porches -- to Thursday and Sunday.

It seems odd that a newspaper company would be growing its deadwood edition when so many dailies are laying people off and trimming back operating expenses. But one theory says that the Examiner papers, which are also available in Washington and Baltimore, are popular even among younger readers because they're free, easy to pick up on the way to public transit and contain mostly boiled down local coverage. The company that owns the Examiner, Clarity Media Group, took over the Examiner in 2004 after the Fang family nearly ran it into the ground.

According to his statement:

“It’s no secret that this is a very difficult period for our industry. But it’s actually an exciting time when one has the necessary talent and is sufficiently nimble and innovative -- to effectively meet the demands of rapidly changing markets. That’s where Clarity Media Group, with the Examiner newspapers and examiner.com, is well-positioned.”

Huh? Wha?

Mayor Gavin Newsom just returned from a trip to Israel, where he told The Jerusalem Post that much of the criticism by Bay Area residents of Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians and its longstanding military occupation of parts of Syria, Lebanon and Egypt was simply anti-Semitism, something these Semitic anti-war activists just might take issue with.

Officials at the Golden Gate Bridge are pondering a $7 toll. In early April, we brought you a story outlining why the bridge district was facing a $91 million long-term deficit. Part of the reason is that it operates a transit system that's incredibly expensive. We all love public transit, of course, but the Golden Gate Bridge's bus and ferry system, we discovered, isn't all that efficient. (By the way, it took us a damn long time to understand how the feds crunch transit efficiency figures, but once we figured it out, it made a lot of sense.)

We also showed that the district's overloaded board of directors contained members who received health insurance coverage through the district, but they also obtained it in the towns where they lived and worked as local public officials. One guy even got three layers of health coverage. Inducements to get out of the car, like high gas prices and bridge tolls, in the long run seem like a good idea. But it doesn't look like higher tolls are going to save the bridge district from its long-term debt and organizational problems.

"Tolls are a ridiculously inefficient way of collecting government revenue -- why not have the federal government spend a certain amount of money each year on infrastructure such as roads and bridges, and use federal taxes to pay for it like every other civilized country in the world? Toll bridges are something that should left in the middle ages, where they belong."

"The rents are definitely going up on the vacant units, and for various reasons, the supply is declining," says Ted Gullicksen, executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union. Some of those reasons include condo conversions (which number 2500 since 2003, according to the latest Planning Department figures), demolitions, temporarily rented SoMa condos taken off the rental market, and would-be home owners driven to rent by foreclosures, still-high prices, and fear that they bottom still hasn't been reached (check here for some interesting rental data compiled from Craigslist listings).

Check it out. (It’s an Excel file.)

“This is all publicly available data,” Moss told us. “And all the data is right there. People can mess with it any way they want,” he added, encouraging number crunchers to dig into the spreadsheet.

For example, the tab titled “DC Line 72 Trans” was generated “based on Cal-ISO’s claim that 28 percent of transmission is not available,” said Moss. According to their analysis, with the Transbay Cable online, we’d still have a 100-megawatt cushion of extra power.

Moss said the data was collated and crunched by James Fine, an economist for the Environmental Defense Fund, and Richard McCann, of M.Cubed, who doesn’t seem like a slouch either.

Fine told me they did the analysis about a year ago and it came from questioning whether or not the city needed the 400 megawatt Transbay Cable. They assumed we’d have the peakers and factored them in. Now we’re getting the cable but questioning if we need the peakers, so the data’s the same but the question is different. Moss presented this data to the Mayor's office last week. Mayor Newsom's support for the peakers seems to have waned a bit recently.

I saw Hillary on TV last night vowing to fight on, and talking about seating the Michigan and Florida delegations, which would tear the Democratic convention apart and almost hand the election to McCain. But the Clinton campaigning is clearly circling the drain. She's canceled all public appearances today; maybe she's getting ready to do the right thing for the party and call it quits.

Just got a call from the folks over at Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles in Oakland. They're involved with a press conference that will take place today at noon calling on the city of Oakland to deal with a spate of recent aggressive robberies on Grand Avenue. Uhuru endured a takeover robbery on Sunday that left eight customers and two employees short of $1,000 in cash. Silver Screen Video at 3850 Grand Ave. has been robbed twice recently, as has Grand-Piedmont Liquors.

The press conference will be held at Uhuru, 3742 Grand Avenue, in Oakland.

“We recognize that the robbery at Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles and the increased robberies of Oakland businesses go hand in hand with the sharp escalation of desperate poverty of Oakland’s black community,” store coordinator Joel Hamburger said in a presser. “Although we denounce this attack on our nonprofit work, we are calling on the city to respond in a way that will not exacerbate the terrible conditions in the African community but address the root causes of crime and poverty.”

Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles is a nonprofit project of the African People’s Education and Defense Fund (APEDF) that relies on support from community donations. Residents are mad about the robberies, but organizers of today's press conference want the city to respond by improving economic development in the neighborhood.

“Every San Franciscan counts, and I am serious about ensuring San Francisco receives our fair share of federal
and state funding and attention,” Newsom said in a press release that went out less than an hour ago. “We can use this new data to attract high quality retailers to our under-served markets and make sure we develop the neighborhoods that have been unfairly under-counted.”

As to the population data, it's probably true that there are more people here than official figures indicate, and that they're making more money than tax collectors know, but I find Social Compact's rhetoric and approach a little creepy. Their DrillDown report, which also looked at Detroit and Cincinnati, talks about how much more money that bankers and other capitalists can be extracting from "inner city neighborhoods" that are awash in hidden cash.
But it's certainly an interesting question: just how many of us are there?

Seems that Erin Brockovich is testing levels of methane and hazardous chemicals at a Lennar housing complex in South Carolina. The EPA previously tested the site and claimed all was well, but Brockovich is challenging those results. Hardly the kind of sound bite that Lennar's well-financed Prop. G supporters in San Francisco were hoping for.

Then the crowd, about 100 strong, filed inside to speak their minds about it at a Government Audit and Oversight Committee hearing -- last stop for the plan before it heads to the full Board of Supervisors. But 10 hours later, only a handful of people were still in the room when the chance to speak was finally given.

The insanely long hearing had a loaded agenda, with topics ranging from funding the airport to defunding Edgewood foster care center, not to mention six separate bits of legislation related to the peaker power plants. The public comment requests were piled high and proceedings slammed to a halt during Item #5 when Stephanie Gates, a rep for Edgewood, fainted to the floor in the middle of her testimony about foster care in San Francisco.

It was well into the evening and most of the audience had left for home or work by the time talk finally turned to the peakers.

"I am not supporting development of a power plant," Maxwell said, urging that building the peakers is about closing Mirant, which, after years of study, she believes is the only solution. "I've not focused on this for eight years because I oppose solar or renewable energy," she went on, outlining her detailed involvement with the issue and attempting to assure the crowd that this is the way forward for a cleaner neighborhood.

But Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, a recent renewable energy revivalist, railed on the city to forgo the peakers and adhere to the state's mandate for a deep reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The peakers would emit 308,629 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions a year. Mirant currently emits 396,325, so building the new plant would be a reduction, if modest. Cheers arose from the audience when she said, "I understand what's going on over there even though I've not lived it myself." She said the city could potentially run the plants for 30 years to recoup the $250 million pricetag to build them. "My son will be almost 40 years old when these things are shut."

Three of the six proposals before the committee were put up by her -- calling for the city to adopt the state's energy action plan, an independent analysis of the need for the peakers, and a fiscal feasibility study of the plan. Behind the scenes, critics claim she's just delaying approval of the plan and carrying water for PG&E, which opposes the peakers.

Under the guise of the CloseIt Coalition, PG&E has been sending mailers to citizens, filled with threatening language and scary smokestack images. "These new plants would reverse decades of environmental stewardship," a recent PG&E mailer states, going on to suggest a "greener alternative." Their alternative: a study, done by PG&E, outlining transmission upgrades and energy efficiencies that could be done on their lines.

Outside of the hearing, PUC staffer, Laura Spanjan, pointed out PG&E should upgrade their lines anyway.

Ed Harrington, the newly anointed general manager of the PUC, had a PG&E mailer on hand when he said, "I'm disturbed by the number of people using various pieces of information that are being called facts." He went on to dispel them by saying the peakers would be cleaner than Mirant, that it was clear to PUC staff that putting together an energy plan that didn't include the peakers "would have been a waste of time," and that alternate studies showing the city doesn't need the peakers have only been done by PG&E. "The only study I'm aware of was PG&E's, in July of 2007." He added It was six pages long, "lightweight by Cal-ISO's standards," and they rejected it. (It's actually seven, and you can read it here.)

Considering PG&E's stance against the peakers, which they likely consider a threat to their monopoly on San Francisco's energy market, it seems if a real alternative were possible they would have worked harder to come up with it, rather than just launching a PR campaign against the peakers. PG&E -- which claims opposition to the peakers for environmental reasons -- is actually building similar power plants throughout the state, is a vendor of natural gas, and takes a proud stance supporting it as a clean fossil fuel. They're also building a 230-mile natural gas pipeline between Oregon and California in anticipation of a spike in need for LNG.

Sup. Aaron Peskin, chair of the committee, brought forth a number of experts to dispel or support conflicting information that's been going around about the peakers, including reps from the PUC (their round-up on the issue is here), the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the California Energy Commission, Sierra Research (which did an independent analysis of the peakers' air quality impacts), citizens from the Power Plant Task Force that have been working on the issue for as many as ten years, and a former Cal-ISO board member from 1997-2005, Mike Florio, who talked about how the state comes up with this stuff in the first place. He confirmed that it came from the community wanting to close Mirant and it took a push from the ISO board to its staff to come up with data on what it would take to close a power plant in San Francisco. "That's contrary to their DNA to shut down power plants. They want more power plants. They want more energy," he said. In fact, that's the solution ISO staff came up with -- build another, cleaner power plant. "I'm not saying I'm happy with this," he added, but pointed out, "They [the city] don't have to run. It's just that they sit there, capable of running." He considered the city-ownership an advantage because we can call the shots about when they're on or off. He also said that ISO is currently grappling with the issue of a grid with more renewables and that peakers are considered a good augmentation to a renewable portfolio. "That's why they are encouraging more of these peakers -- to run quickly when needed."

Eric Brooks, a Green Party member from Our City, disagrees. "They're telling us we need to build fossil fuel plants in order to support renewable energy," he said. "If you create backup power you're going to rely on it...If we create any fossil fuel energy that just gives us a chance to slack." He's been pushing the PUC to put the city's Community Choice Aggregation plan in front of Cal-ISO instead of the peakers. The CCA plan adopts 51 percent renewables and efficiency measures by 2017.

According to testimony from the air district and Sierra Research, the peakers are about 33 percent cleaner than Mirant and are more efficient as they can be turned on and off instantly, whereas the older turbines at Mirant require hours to get up to speed and essentially idle, even when they're just on-call. "If you want them to run tomorrow afternoon, you need to turn them on tonight," said Gary Rubenstein of Sierra Research. "As a result you end up with a lot more pollution from Potrero Unit 3 than you need." (For a breakdown on the pollution, check out page 22 of this PDF.) He singled out that one unit of Mirant's four because there had been some discussion of closing Units 4,5,6 -- which run on diesel and are far dirtier -- and retrofitting Unit 3, which runs on natural gas. Former ISO member Florio suggested this would be costly and compared it to a similar project recently completed in Long Beach, citing $250 million for the retrofit -- the same cost for the city to build the peakers.

PUC staff also testified that capacity payments from the state would finance the project, and the city would be paid for having the peakers available to run, whether they operate or not.

Public comment was about fifty-fifty, for and against, with some devoted Bayview residents like Espanola Jackson telling the committee the neighborhood never asked for this power plant. Others who've been involved with the process for as many as ten years, called out the newbies for arriving on the scene at this stage of the game. Tony Kelly of the Potrero Boosters, who support the peakers, pointed to Alioto-Pier specifically. "I don't know where you've been for the last five years. I've brought this up in front of you before and you never said a word."

The committee voted to send the peaker plan forward to the full Board, with Alioto-Pier dissenting. They also voted against her two measures, calling for an independent analysis and a fiscal feasibility study, with Peskin saying he felt they'd already been done "in spades." They did pass Alioto-Pier's resolution to adopt the state's energy action plan, though Peskin amended it significantly.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, just back from Brazil where he was speaking about green energy, flew in a day early to witness the hearing and gave a thorough grilling to the reps, with a pointed comment about how this conversation would be moot if the city's public power plan hadn't lost by a handful of votes in 2001. He still left the hearing unsatisfied. "There are two schools of thought here. Cal-ISO is giving us a very restricted view of what we can do. The other school of thought is we can do better with what's before us. I'm not convinced the city has done its due diligence." He compared the struggle to the recent aerial spraying issue. "The vigor demonstrated by many of us on the light brown apple moth demonstrates what we can do even when the state opposes us," he said.

Josh Arce, of Brightline Defense, which sued to stop the construction of the plants, said he and Steven Moss of SF Community Power had a meeting with the Mayor's office last Thursday to go over alternatives to the peakers, and that Newsom is now more neutral on the issue. In the past he's been one of the leaders, signing off on letters to Cal-ISO confirming the city's commitment to close Mirant and build the peakers. Giselle Barry, a rep from the mayor's office, said, "Number one, he's absolutely committed to shutting down the power plants and, number two, he's committed to investigating alternatives to the CT project and will work with all our community partners to determine what the alternatives are." She confirmed that his staff has been meeting with those community partners, listing the Sierra Club and PG&E as two of them, as well as commissioners from the PUC and people from the Department of the Environment and the Mayor's Office of Workforce and Economic Development, which brokered the ironclad deal with Mirant to close for good once their contract to run for reliability purposes is pulled by Cal-ISO.