Horrible murders of LGBT people have been out of control lately -- but the number of reported murders of transgender people has doubled over the past year. If you can stomach the statistics and seeing some of the faces (and it really does bring the point home, even without the dramatic music), then here:

While not all of the above people may have been killed because they were transgender, they were all killed and its a tragedy -- as well a reason that an inclusive ENDA bill and a stronger push for global transgender rights is so important. Today on Transgender Day of Remembrance, the community gets together to mark the violent passing of its members. Here's the plan:

San Francisco, California
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
7:00 - 9:00 PM
CIIS California Institute for Integral Studies
1453 MISSION ST
3rd Floor - Namaste Hall
—–
San Francisco, California
Friday, November 20, 2009
6:00 - 8:00 PM
API Wellness Center
730 Polk Street (corner of Ellis)
For more info: Leeza Edwards, Co-chair of SF TEAM
415. 724.1680 or lavendergoddess@mac.com
—–
San Francisco, California
Transgender Day of Remembrance Shabbat
Friday, November 20, 2009
7:30 PM
Congregation Sha’ar Zahav
290 Dolores Street (corner of 16th Street)
San Francisco, CA 94103
For more info: http://www.shaarzahav.org/node/1852

The mayor is speaking to the press again. Oh goodie.

First, Hank Plante of KCBS TV gets a sit-down interview that's stunning in its lack of substance. Newsom gets all pissy and defensive about his trip to Hawaii, says he doesn't read the newspapers and complains about inaccurate reporting without ever saying what's inaccurate. (I like Brock' suggestion at sfist:

Why couldn't Newsom tell CBS 5's Hank Plante, "Yeah, I took off to Hawaii. And what, hooker? Somebody hold my earrings."

Then when Plante finally starts asking about the budget deficit, the mayor totally ducks and won't say anything except that it's going to be a lot of work to resolve.

Then the mayor's office kicks the press out of a department head briefing on the budget and follows it up with some brief public remarks that show:

1. Newsom would much rather downplay this and say it's no big deal, and

2. There's no serious talk about raising new revenues (except from selling off the city's rental housing stock and creating lots of new condominiums) and

3. Every department is being asked to cut 20 percent and prepare for as much as 30 percent cuts -- but that's going to mean really, really ugly decisions that Newsom can't possibly make. For example, the Sheriff can only cut 20 percent by letting people out of jail -- many of them the same people who Newsom's new police chief, George Gascon, just put in jail with his much-lauded Tenderloin busts. Then the Tenderloin crackdown will become a joke, because nobody arrested will actually do any jail time, because the city can't afford to lock them up. Oh, and there won't be enough cops to arrest them, anyway -- unless Newsom has Gascon pull cops out of other, richer neighborhoods to patrol the Loin, which may be a fine idea but will create such political backlash among Newsom's allies that he won't dare do it.

And closing fire stations seems to be political poison, so the mayor won't want to do that.

Which means public health and human services and rec-park will have to cut way more than 30 percent to save police and fire, which means we won't really have much of a public health, human services or rec-park system any more.

4. The mayor is doing nothing to prepare the public to face the fact of life -- we're going to need significant tax increases, or we're going to see the devastation of the public service sector in this city.

Welcome back, Gavin.

Oh, and by the way: The last chief executive I remember saying that he didn't read the newspapers was Ronald Reagan. Great role model. Either Newsom is lying (which I suspect; I can't believe the mayor of San Francisco actually avoids reading the daily newspaper) or the guy is more out of touch, arrogant and clueless than even I am willing to believe.

Mayor Gavin Newsom began speaking to reporters today, but not before members of the press were ejected from the plush velvety seats of Herbst Theater when the mayor, who was running half an hour late, arrived at the War Memorial Veterans Building to deliver his latest budget instructions.

But those descriptors are better applied to the mayor’s own behavior and outlook. The City Charter requires the mayor to announce his daily schedule. He’s never been good at showing he actually works a full day, but since his gubernatorial campaign tanked, he hasn’t announced any events (check for yourself at this site that the mayor is required to keep).

Apparently, he finally talked to reporters this afternoon, and they dutifully quoted his claim to have attended 62 events since his flameout – despite a dearth of evidence supporting that. Whatever. The reality is that Mr. Sensitive can’t pout for long, not without violating the law and breaking the public trust.

For once, I actually agree with the Chron's Chuck Nevius: Do your job, Mr. Mayor, or resign.

Calitics reports this morning that the California Nurses Association is preparing a split-roll ballot initiative for 2010. The outline of the measure looks good, both in terms of impact (billions and billions in extra tax revenue for local government) and politics (a clear message to homeowners that this won't raise their taxes). As Robert Cruickshank notes, the proposals would

• Tax commercial property at fair market value, and frequently reassess property taxes at fair market value (instead of locking in a value and rate, as Prop 13 currently does). The main difference between the two initiatives is how that reassessment is accomplished.

• Provide a small business exclusion of up to $1 million

• Double homeowners' exemption from $7,000 to $14,000 (as a sweetener to voters)

It's a clever approach, one that almost certainly polls well with voters, since the initiatives offer tax relief for residential owners and small businesses - making it crystal clear, at least in the initiative language, that this is NOT an attack on the sacred cow of residential property protections offered in Prop 13.

CNA has the money and the clout to get this going, and it could become one of the most important campaigns of the year. If the group goes forward -- and I hope that happens -- wafflers like Jerry Brown will have to take a stand, and tell us whether they're with big business and commercial landlords or with the millions of Californians who are getting screwed by an unfair tax system and deep cuts in public services.

It's gotten surprisingly little press (outside of the NY Times), but the decision by Russell Athletic to rehire 1,200 workers in Honduras who had been thrown out of work when the company closed a factory in the wake of a union-organizing effort is a very big deal.

It's easy to criticize student activists; they're too idealistic, they're just kids who don't understand the real world, nobody listens to them anyway, or maybe (as one of my professors at Wesleyan once said about anti-apartheid activists) they just don't have enough homework.

But the folks at United Students Against Sweatshopsnot only took on a good cause -- they developed a brilliant strategy that actually worked. Targeting Russell Athletic made perfect sense for college students: Russell makes millions of dollars off university licensing deals. So students at hundreds of college campuses could work locally, demanding that their school cut its ties with Russell until it settled with the union in Honduras.

The local pressure worked. More than 80 colleges and universities, including Harvard, NYU and Stanford, agreed to cut off the deals that allowed Russell to use their logos on sportswear -- and that convinced Russell to turn 180 degrees around and accept the union in Honduras.

"This is the culmination of 12 years of student organizing around this issue," Shaun Martinez, a 2008 graduate of USC and a national staff organizer for USAS, told me. "We have never before been able to reverse a decision when a company closed a factory to stop union organizing efforts."

The student group was able to leverage its success with colleges and universities to put pressure on Russell's other major partners -- like the NBA -- and when NBA officials started hearing the message, Russell had no choice but to settle.

So chalk one up to the students; they've won a major victory not just for organized labor and the anti-sweatshop movement but for campus organizing everywhere.

Arnold isn't running again -- for anything. Or so he says. After eating some Wienerschnitzel.

At issue is whether the environmental impact report on the San Francisco Bicycle Plan, which the city completed early last summer, is adequate and addresses the concerns that led to the injunction. The far-reaching plan was originally approved with no EIR. A full hearing of the EIR’s adequacy won’t happen untill next year, but the city wants to be able to start making some improvements now.

Activists and city officials have long been frustrated with the breadth of the injunction, which bans all projects mentioned in the bike plan, even simple bike racks and sharrow markings (which indicate the safest area for bikes to ride on shared roadways), as well as critical safety features like new bike lanes on dangerous streets. And they’re hopeful that Judge Busch will issue at least a partial lifting of the injunction.

How much rope has the Obama administration given the US Attorney for Northern California Joe Russoniello (center) when it comes to prosecuting probation officers around the city's sanctuary policy?
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The resignation of Gavin Newsom’s criminal justice director Kevin Ryan and his mayoral spokesperson Nathan Ballard
could give the mayor the chance to revisit his policy towards juvenile immigrants, smoke out US Attorney for Northern California Joe Russoniello over his claims that not referring kids at the moment of arrest is tantamount to “harboring," and allow Newsom to connect with seriously alienated members of the city's immigrant community.

I say “could” because the mayor is notorious for his snippy, thumb-in-yer-face attitude towards anyone that questions his policies.

But I also say “could” because records show the mayor reaffirming his commitment to the city’s original sanctuary policy in April 2008—just days before Ryan, Ballard and Russoniello began arguing for a policy shift.

The union urged guests of the St. Francis to observe the picket line that has gone up and to find other accommodations when staying in San Francisco, even offering to help with that process through its website. This strike will end by the first shift on Saturday morning.

Five years ago during the last labor standoff between hotel workers and management, Mayor Gavin Newsom walked the picket line in front of the St. Francis after hotels refused his request to end their lockout of employees, which affected almost every major hotel in town.

The ongoing saga of budget cuts affecting a majority of people of color and women in the city’s Department of Public Health took yet another twist this afternoon.

For now, the Budget & Finance Committee has voted to restore the cuts, but it won’t be heard by the full Board of Supervisors until next Tuesday, when eight votes will still be needed to pass the $8 million supplemental appropriation. Meanwhile, in the wake of the city controller’s dramatic pronouncement yesterday that the Board wasn’t allowed to take anything out of the General Fund reserve, Sup. Chris Daly had to do some fancy footwork to come up with a new way to restore the cuts.

At a special meeting of the Budget & Finance Committee this afternoon, Supervisors voted to restore the cuts -- but since City Controller Ben Rosenfield said he was unable to certify a spending decision that would draw approximately $8 million from the General Fund reserve, Supervisors voted to dip into the $45 million that the Board placed on reserve across major city departments at the 11th hour of budget deliberations back in July. In the Department of Public Health, it represents about $11.9 million in salaries and benefits. Since drawing from this pot of money wouldn’t render the budget out of balance, the city controller can sign off on it as a legitimate move.

The idea to use the DPH reserve, instead of General Fund reserve dollars, was suggested by Sup. Chris Daly after City Controller Ben Rosenfield announced yesterday afternoon that he would not allow the Board to vote on a supplemental appropriation that spent General Fund reserve dollars because the city is projected to be in dire straits financially. “The previously appropriated spending no longer appears to be supportable,” Rosenfield told the Supervisors this afternoon. “The difference exceeds the value of the General Fund reserve.”

The city controller has never barred the Board from taking a vote on a supplemental appropriation due to a budget deficit. But Rosenfield said this afternoon that in the handful of instances when the controller has had to notify the city of a projected budgetary shortfall, this was the first time that a vote was pending on a supplemental appropriation.

While this could be a sign of a sinking political ship, both departures are big improvements from a progressive perspective. Ryan, a Republican who was forced from his US Attorney’s post for incompetence, has pulled Newsom in a conservative direction on issues ranging from medical marijuana policy to municipal ID cards to public surveillance.

Most recently, Ryan advised the mayor to adopt a harshly nativist policy change to the city’s sanctuary city policy, with Newsom refusing to enforce a newly adopted city law requiring due process to play out before city officials turn juveniles over to federal immigration authorities – a stance Newsom took with no public input and after refusing to meet with immigrant families or activists.

The Newsom Administration now appears to be in full meltdown mode, with Newsom acting bizarrely and refusing to hold announced public events or answer media inquiries. But as I wrote yesterday upon the resignation of press secretary Nathan Ballard, this could be an opportunity for Newsom to reinvent himself and engage with city constituencies that he has scorned, if only he had the will to do so.

I think it’s pretty clear now that Jerry Brown’s press office made a huge mistake in secretly recording conversations with reporters. (For starters, why do it in secret? I’ve done plenty of interviews where I turned on the tape recorder and the politician’s press secretary said, hey, I’m going to record this, too, just so we have a copy and we can be sure you’re report is accurate. Which is always fine with me, and I’m sure would have been fine with the reporters in this case.)

But one good thing came out of it: We have the full transcripts of some fascinating interviews.

Joe Matthews at Foxandhoundsdaily has posted the full 93-page pdf here.

I agree with Matthews -- the best interview is the one with AP reporter Beth Fouhy. It shows the good and the bad side of Jerry Brown in full glory, more than any summary or even detailed profile could. It also shows why the progressives need to be prepared to really push Brown on some critical issues -- because whatever he was in the 1970s, he’s not acting like a progressive today.

Some of the remarkable details from the interview:

Fouhy: I think you make a really good point. Hillary [Clinton] had never been a candidate.

JB: She doesn’t have the scope. She didn’t work with Mother Theresa. She didn’t spend six months working in a Zen Buddhism. She didn’t take Linda Ronstadt to Africa. She didn’t have her own astronaut. I had Rusty Triker (sic), an astronaut. I put him on the state energy commission. There is a certain texture to who I am, and it’s unique, so I don’t know how you compare it.

JB: I’d like to do something about the prisons. They’re very expensive and have a gross inefficiency, the recidivism rate in California prisons is the highest in the country. What that means is that they’re not working. They keep people off the street, but when they return them, they’re as bad as when they went in, if not worse.

JB: The last time there was real creativity in the state was when I was governor. We created the California Conservation Corp., made the state the leader in wind energy, that was the time when these new innovations in Silicon Valley came along. I brought people into government. We protected the wild and scenic rivers. In fact, people stigmatized, they said there were too many new ideas.

JB: Is the past yesterday? Or ten years from today?

Fouhy: Do you think that Prop. 13 needs to go away?

JB: The real estate taxes have grown since Prop. 13 dramatically. Because property has shifted. Property shits, the tax rate goes up to the current assessed value. .... 13 has centralized decision making in state government and it may be that local government needs more authority to make decisions and I think that’s worth looking at.

So Brown at least gets the point on the state prisons -- but he pulls a world-class duck on Prop. 13. He talks about creativity in government, and it’s true -- back in his first term, the state did all sorts of cool stuff. But that was when Brown was willing to take risks. Now he’s sounding too much like a grump who doesn’t think anything can really change -- witness his battle with John Burton, in which he proclaimed that single-payer “is never going to happen.”

The old Jerry Brown would never have used that term.

So he’s got his old weird (sometimes lovable) spacy-ness, but not so much of the bold vision. Not a great combo.

In a move that's unprecedented in modern San Francisco history, city controller Ben Rosenfield appears poised to try to block the Board of Supervisors from approving a $7 million supplemental budget appropriation to prevent 500 layoffs of frontline health department workers.

It's the latest twist in a convoluted battle that pits SEIU Local 1021 and the progressives on the board against the mayor, who wants to lay off nurses aides and clerical workers.

In a budgetmessage posted today, Rosenfield says that the city is running $53 million in the red, and that "until this shortfall is addressed, the Controller's Office will not be able to certify funds from the General Fund Reserve for other appropriations."

Rosenfield, a Newsom appointee, is apparently relying on a very old City Charter section that looks like this:

S.F. Charter Sec. 9.113 (d) "General Fiscal Provisions"

No ordinance or resolution for the expenditure of money, except the
annual appropriation ordinance, shall be passed by the Board of
Supervisors unless the Controller first certifies to the Board that
there is a sufficient unencumbered balance in a fund that may legally be
used for such proposed expenditure, and that, in the judgment of the
Controller, revenues as anticipated in the appropriation ordinance for
such fiscal year and properly applicable to meet such proposed
expenditures will be available in the treasury in sufficient amount to
meet the same as it becomes due.

But in my 25 years of covering City Hall, I have never once seen this happen. There have been bad budget deficits before, and supplemental appropriations, and the controller has never told the supervisors that they can't spend reserve money.

"About the only thing Rosenfield and I agree on is that this has never been done before," Sup. Chris Daly told me this evening.

The controller's report notes that several city departments are running over budget -- but interestingly, Human Services and Public Health, the targets of the layoffs, are running a surplus of $8.1 million (exactly what the supervisors want to spend).

Among those departments facing shortfalls: The Sheriff's Office, which is in the red because of "an increase in jail population" -- possibly due to the new police chief's crackdown on drug dealing in the Tenderloin.

I couldn't reach Rosenfield tonight, but Daly notes that the same legislation was before the board last week, and Rosenfield didn't object. "So he's already certified it," Daly said. "And I'm not sure how he can decertify it now."

I'm not going to argue that the city has money to burn, but there are always mid-year budget changes in bad times. The supes and the mayor are going to have to make some budget adjustments. But there's also unanticipated money coming in -- for example, San Francisco stands to get about $33 million in federal stimulus money for the Department of Public Health in April, and that funding will be retroactive to the previous year. So this year's shortfall will actually be $33 million less.

Tina Johnson, a legislative affairs staffer for the state Department of Health Care Services, confirmed the near-certain availability of that money in a Nov. 16th letter to state Sen. Leland Yee.

In any other year, I suspect the controller would follow the normal practice of informing the mayor and the supes that the budget was out of line (as it is, in one way or another, almost every year) and then allow them to come up with some mid-year corrections. But this battle between Local 1021 and the mayor has gotten ugly, and I'm sure there was pressure on Rosenfield.

Look for a showdown at the board meeting tomorrow (Nov. 17). Daly told me that whatever Rosenfield says, "we're going to have a vote on this."

The Mayor’s Office has announced the departure of press secretary Nathan Ballard, a glib and caustic communicator who unnecessarily sowed division with members of the Board of Supervisors and various community groups. The question now is whether this represents an impending change in tone for the lame-duck mayor.

While this afternoon’s press release makes the split sound amicable, it’s hard to know what’s actually going on in this increasingly squirrely administration. But Mayor Gavin Newsom’s quote in the release is telling: “Nathan Ballard is unflappable, smart and a fierce advocate.”

I would agree with each of those adjectives, but it was the last one that really characterized his approach and its contribution to the bunker mentality that the Newsom Administration has developed over the last few years, with its Nixonian penchant to treat all potential opponents as enemies to be publicly scorned and belittled.