Click here to read Paul Krugmann’s April 24th column, Reclaiming America’s Soul.
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Bruce Blog
Madam Speaker, I Object!
(Scroll down for Reilly’s column)
Clint Reilly’s column ought to be the institutional line in every independent daily paper in the Bay Area and beyond.
However, since there are no independent dailies left and all the Bay Area and most of California dailies are owned by out-of-state newspaper chains, this is not to be. But at least his column appears in the MediaNews/Singleton papers in the Bay Area, thanks to the settlement of his last federal lawsuit challenging Hearst/Singleton collaboration.
Reilly opposes Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s move to gut the antitrust laws to accommodate more Hearst/Singleton collaboration. The Guardian goes a step further and recommends that Pelosi and U.S./ California/San Francisco politicians promote legislation and resolutions at federal, state, and local levels that would bar a daily newspaper in a one-paper town from closing down unless and until the owners offer it for sale at a fair price and give someone else a chance to run it.
And we recommend that, since any Hearst/Singleton collaboration would have national implications, this should happen only in a fishbowl in the glare of the mid-day sun. More: our federal, state, and local politicians should
pull out the stops: subpoena Hearst documents, hold public hearings in Washington and San Francisco, and promote any and all alternatives to another daily paper assassination. Save the Chronicle! B3
Madam Speaker, I Object!
By Clint Reilly
Sanctioning a Bay Area newspaper monopoly in order to rescue the San Francisco Chronicle from bankruptcy is a horrible idea.
Does anyone know what I’m talking about?
Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder urging him not to enforce antitrust laws, which would pave the way for the Chronicle and MediaNews – the owner of every other paid-subscription daily newspaper in the Bay Area – to merge operations and have a monopoly over news and opinion in the Bay Area.
Editorial: Saving SF’s human services
President Obama has given San Francisco more than $50 million in federal stimulus money to help prevent cuts to health and human services. But Mayor Newsom is refusing to use the money for this purpose
EDITORIAL San Francisco stands to get more than $50 million in federal stimulus money designed to prevent cuts to health and human services. That could be a huge help to the city’s efforts to close a half-billion dollar budget gap. And the Department of Public Health is counting on its $27 million share to prevent layoffs and program closures.
But the city’s Human Services Agency, which ought to be able to spend some $25 million in federal money to keep programs for the homeless and the needy alive, is refusing to include that revenue as part of its budget for next year. That’s a terrible mistake that will literally cost lives.
Ammiano comes clean
Today’s Ammianoliner:
Kiss my toxic assets. (The only four words on the answering machine of Assemblyman Tom Ammiano on Monday, March 23, 2009. Tom, Tom, watch the enunciation.) B3
The news from Rock Rapids: Shinny’s funeral
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Shinny during his years as chief of police in Rock Rapids, Iowa, during the l950s. This was the card I had in my billfold when I heard about his death. He was technically “Shene” but he was Shinny to me. Shinny approved of my pronunciation. His last card omitted a key word from his earlier cards: “lover.”
The funeral services for Elmer (Shinny) Sheneberger, the central figure in the famous Halloween caper of 1951, were held Friday March 20 in the Congregational Church in Rock Rapids, Iowa.
I got word from Marj and retired CPA Jim Wells and Shinny’s nieces Audrey and Margo Wallace that Shinny had died on Saturday March 14 in his suburban mobile home in Phoenix, Arizona. He had fallen the day before and was found 20 hours later. He was terminally ill with cancer but hanging on.
Shinny was born and raised and lived his entire life of 92 years in this little northwest Iowa town. He was what every small town needed and cherished: an authentic good-natured character who went on generation after generation. He was somehow always there, when you needed him and sometimes when you didn’t. When a politician came to town, the word would get around that Shinny was briefing him at the Lane Cafe. When the Hermie Casjens gang rolled a loaded boxcar across Main Street, twice, on Halloween eve in 1951, Shinny was on duty as chief of police and had to move the boxcars off the street.
I never told Shinny who was involved in the incident and he never asked. Finally, years later, I gave him the full story. He laughed and said, “Let’s drink to it.” We did and did all through the years. When he would call me at my office in San Francisco, he would say, “I want to speak to Bruce. This is his parole officer in Rock Rapids.” Shinny had a wonderful way of operating on Halloween: he would just come upon the roving Casjens gang, and would just shine his car lights. We would scatter and he would move on, never making an arrest. In fact, I don’t think he ever made many arrests, that night or on any other Halloweens. His was humane law enforcement, Rock Rapids style.
Shinny did roll the boxcars back off of Main Street, but we never knew exactly how he did it. He explained in detail at our 55th class reunion last June in Rock Rapids. We invited Shinny to come after Dave Dietz and I got firm assurances that the statute of limitations had run and we were free to talk about the incident. We surmised that Shinny had gotten everyone out of a nearby dance at the Community Building to move the cars. No, he said, he rousted people out of the nearby movie theater under threat of “arrest” and pressed them into action, twice.
Shinny was quietly generous. He owned a farm near town and he told me that he was would be willing it to Camp Foster, the YMCA camp on nearby West Okiboji Lake where many of us went to summer camp. “I always thought highly of the boys who came out of that camp,” he told me. “And so I thought that would be a good place for my farm.”
Through the years, Shinny would say to me, “Bruce, you and I have got to get along together. We’re going to be together for a long, long time.” I never could figure out what he was talking about until I was out visiting the Brugmann plot at the Riverview Cemetery, the picture postcard cemetery atop a hill overlooking the Rock River. I noticed that the plot next to the Brugmann plot was the Sheneberger plot. As usual, Shinny was right.
Click here to read Halloween 1951: Fast times in Rock Rapids, Iowa, from the Bruce Blog archive.
Here is the email note I sent to my classmates on our email tree for the Dream Class of 1953 (16 boys, 16 girls, now many less):
Shinny’s funeral will be tomorrow (Friday) in the Congregational Church in Rock Rapids.
I ordered a bouquet of red tulips for the service from the Flower Village, with a note “from the Brugmann family and the Class of 1953.” I assume I don’t need to go over the details once again about Shinny’s connection to our class and his involuntary participation in our class activities and the famous Halloween incident of 1951.
Shinny was a longtime member of our church. He always wanted to live as long as Henry Rahlk, also a member of our church, who lived to be 102. Shinny, alas, only made it to 92.
I always enjoy buying my flowers from Flower Village, which once was in the old Brugmann’s Drugstore building. It’s now across the street in the old Bernstein department store building. Each year on Memorial Day, I phone in to Flower Village and buy potted flowers for all the members of the Brugmann plot at Riverside Cemetery. That’s both sets of my grandparents (Ethel and C. C. Brugmann, founder of Brugmann’s Drug in l902; and Allie and A.R. Rice, a Congregational minister in several small Iowa towns); my mother and father (Bonnie and Conrad Brugmann, who was a partner with my grandfather in the drugstore from the Depression onward); and my aunt and uncle (Mary and Clarence Schmidt, a veterinarian from Worthington who was the family representative in World War II.) I hope to end up in the Brugmann plot with my wife Jean.
And the Village people put the flowers on the plot, always well positioned and blooming nicely. Shinny’s family had the next plot and he would always take pictures of my potted flowers and send them to me with a friendly note about “staying in touch and getting together someday.”
And then I would always call the former Janice Olsen to remind her to pick up the flowers and take them to her home in Rock Rapids, once the home of her aunt and uncle, Edna and Harold Jongewaard. Harold was a funeral director in Rock Rapids for many years and buried almost all of our family in our plot. Janice’ s mother was Elsie Olsen, Clarence’s sister, and the Merl Olsens had a family farm out near Edna that I used to visit when I dated her in our junior year.
I didn’t mean to ramble on so long, but Shinny’s death reminds me once again of how it was and still seems to be back there in Rock Rapids, the best little hometown in the country. There are lots of good connections and lots of good memories, but they grow dimmer and dimmer.
So long, Shinny. I’ll be seeing you soon. B3
Ammiano: wearing rubbers causes rain
Today’s Ammianoliner:
The Pope says wearing condoms causes Aids. So wearing rubbers causes rain.
(And so Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, enunciating more clearly than ever, lays out his Ammianoliner for the day on his home answering machine. No, he doesn’t give out his home number, so you will have to read his Ammianoliners right here on the almost famous Bruce blog. If you want to comment on his Ammianoliners, do so here as blog comment. Tom regularly reads the Bruce blog to see if we got his Ammianoliner correct and if he needs to phone in a correction.) B3
California Courts Rain on Sunshine Week
Posted March 11, 2009 on the Cal Aware website.
Sunshine Week (March 15-21) is a national celebration of open government, but here in California a court decision has favored the suppression of dissent and cost a long-time open government advocate $80,000.
More than four years ago the people of California went to the polls and, by an overwhelming 83 percent support for Proposition 59, passed a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing the public fundamental access to the meetings and records of their local and state government agencies.
This month, however, despite those constitutional protections, California courts finalized an order that a small public interest non-profit group and its past president must pay nearly $86,000 for merely asking them to protect the public’s right to hear the opinions expressed by its local elected representatives.
Editorial: Save the Chronicle!
If Hearst is going to assassinate yet another newspaper, it must do so in a fishbowl. Congress, the state Legislature, and the supervisors should hold hearings, subpoena Hearst executives, and push alternatives.
The San Francisco Chronicle story March 15 on Mayor Gavin Newsom’s frequent absence from the city drew comments from many who believe the mayor is out of touch, wandering the state seeking votes for governor at a time when the city is facing a historic financial crisis. The news was really nothing new — we’ve been reporting for months now that the mayor is disengaged in the business of running the city. But it appeared on the front page of the local daily newspaper, and that put the story right in the center of civic discourse.
We’ve been as critical of the Chron as anyone in town. For 42 years, we’ve been reporting on the failures of the daily newspapers in San Francisco, and we regularly blast the Hearst-owned near-monopoly daily for its failure to cover major stories and its biased slant on others.
Meister: A new deal for american workers
By Dick Meister
(Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based journalist, has covered labor and political issues for more than a half-century.)
The preliminaries are over and what’s certain to be one of the fiercest political fights in many years is finally underway. It pits the nation’s labor unions and their Democratic allies against the pillars of corporate America and their Republican allies.
The stakes are huge. A union victory would give U.S. workers the unfettered right to unionization that would raise their economic and political status substantially. But that would come at the expense of employers, who have been able to block a large majority of them from exercising the union rights that the law has long promised all workers.
The union-employer fight began in earnest on March 10 with the re-introduction in Congress of the long-proposed Employee Free Choice Act. The bill would strengthen the National Labor Relations Act to make it easier for workers to form and join unions, the stated purpose of the NLRA.
Meister: The massacre at Ludlow
By Dick Meister
(Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based journalist, has covered labor and political issues for more than a half-century)
It began at 10 o¹clock on a cold morning 95 years ago this month, on April 20, 1914 in the southern Colorado town of Ludlow. National guardsmen, professional gunmen and others high on a hillside unleashed a deadly stream of machine-gun and rifle fire into a tent colony below that housed some 1000 striking coal miners and their families.
Strikers grabbed their hunting rifles and fired back. Two men and a boy on their side were killed. One Guardsman died.
The battle raged throughout the day. Finally, as night fell, Guardsmen wielding torches dashed down the hill, doused the tents with coal oil and set them aflame. They shot to death 10 of those who fled — men, women and children alike as well as three strike leaders they had captured. Thirteen others, two women and 11 infants and children, were burned alive or suffocated as they huddled in a pit under a tent where they had sought refuge.
Ammiano on single payer health coverage
Today’s Ammianoliner:
Let’s hear it for single payer coverage. From sperm to worm.
(From the home telephone answering machine of Assemblyman Tom Ammiano on Thursday, March 12.) B3
Jess Brownell: Ways we’re not going to die
I never thought I’d have to ice fish for food
By Jess Brownell
There’s a game I play with a friend of mine who, like me, is aging and relatively sedentary. We call it Ways We’re Not Going to Die. Falling off a roller coaster (or for that matter, a horse) is on the list, for example. So is wind-surfing and parachute failure while sky-diving. Driving your pick-up out on a supposedly frozen lake to your ice-fishing shack and breaking through the ice and drowning, perhaps along with members of your immediate family (it happens in Wisconsin, annually) is there. Being mauled to death by your pet chimpanzee is a recent addition.
That this passes with us for light-hearted entertainment probably says more about what our lives have come to than decent, God-fearing people need to know, but I bring it up because the board game of life is showing signs of becoming even more complicated. The points we’ve accumulated over the years by avoiding the kinds of perils mentioned above may not be enough to save us from some equally humiliating demise.
Dick Meister: Hearst: Six down, one to go
Don’t be surprised if Hearst kills its seventh daily newspaper in San Francisco
By Dick Meister
Dick Meister is a former labor reporter for the Chronicle and has covered labor and politics for more than 50 years. He explains in this piece how he covered the 1968 Chronicle/Examiner strike in the Guardian under the byline “by our correspondent.” Four of his Guardian pieces are run below as links. His big scoop: the obscure 23-page document, filed secretly in Reno, Nevada, that laid out how the Chronicle family and Hearst set up the San Francisco Printing Company/JOA on a 50-50 basis. Our front page head: “Secret Merger Deal–Now, proof that the booming Chronicle went into equal partnership with the ailing Examiner in the touchy 1965 deal.” Our illustration was a dagger impaled in the heart of a Chronicle front page. B3
Don’t be surprised if the Hearst Corporation closes the Chronicle, despite its importance to the community and the men and women who produce it. Hearst, after all, has already killed six other San Francisco newspapers.
It began in 1913, when William Randolph Hearst, who had been operating the then-morning Examiner, bought the San Francisco Call and merged it into Hearst’s Evening Post. Sixteen years later, he bought the San Francisco Bulletin and merged it with the Call to create the afternoon Call-Bulletin.
Ammiano catches Ken Starr
Today’s Ammianoliner:
Golden Gate park: Kenneth Starr appears before bench, bends over and leaves his briefs. Oink oink.
(From the answering machine of Assemblyman Tom Ammiano on the weekend of March 7, 2009).
FAIR: What the Dow isn’t
Media Advisory from the media advocacy organization called the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
The media is misusing the Dow as a ‘scorecard’ of White House policy
3/5/09
To hear some in the corporate media tell it, you judge a president by how the Dow Jones Industrial Average is performing–and, thus, Barack Obama is not doing a very good job.
As NBC’s Meet the Press host David Gregory said (3/1/09):
The Obama stimulus package, $787 billion. The housing plan, $75 billion. That’s $2.3 trillion. Seven hundred and fifty billion dollars additional in this document for additional bailout money for the banks. Meantime, what metric do we have to see how people–what people think of that government intervention? The Dow is one metric. It closed on Friday at its lowest level since 1997, just over 7,000.
Will Durst: Bye American
The dastardly bums that created the worldwide financial crisis is…us. That’s right. You and me. And I hope we’re happy.
By Will Durst
(Will Durst is the political comic who writes sometimes. This is one of them.)
Can we stop with the waving of the sharp instruments for a minute and speak rationally to this whole ugly recession mess we find ourselves currently mired in? C’mon. You know what recession mess I’m talking about. You’re packing a bag lunch and taking mass transit to visit the public library to use their ancient computer to check out the job classifieds on Craigslist for crum’s sake. Yeah, THAT recession mess.. Well, you’ll be glad to hear we’ve positively identified the bad guys responsible for this meltdown and they end up having awfully familiar faces.
Go ahead. Guess who’s to blame? No, not the subprime mortgage brokers or Bernie Madoff and his ilk or those reverse Robin Hood hedgefund speculators throwing trillions of dollars worth of derivatives around like paper towels at a chili cheese dog eating competition. Nope. The dastardly bums that created the world wide financial crisis is… us. That’s right. You and me. And I hope we’re happy.
For making former Silicon Valley start up CFOs toil as Indian casino valets. For driving down the price of 2 year old Porsche Boxters to the level of a 96 Taurus with a blown head gasket. For forcing casseroles and meatloaf onto the menus of 3 star Michelin chefs. It’s all our fault. And how are we doing it? By not buying enough stuff. Damn us anyway. How dare we?
Who cares whether we’re employed or not? Don’t we realize we are the pistons that drive the free market engine? It’s our God- given patriotic duty to go out there and buy stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like. We don’t do easy. We do compulsory.
Remember how good it felt to buy that brand new DVD we had no intention of ever watching? Aren’t you just itching to tear the shrink- wrap off of something with your teeth right now? Anybody can conspicuously consume when things are going well and money geysers from the ground like it did between the Bushes. It takes a true retail soldier to run up credit card bills when banks are raising interest rates so high, it would not be too far off the mark for them to utilize a dorsal fin as a logo.
I wouldn’t get this squishy if I wasn’t seeing pubescent girls get punched in the gut with our selfish frugality. Girl Scout Cookie sales have sunk to levels not seen since Jimmy Carter was scolding us while wearing cardigans. The Girl Scouts! Okay, that’s it.. I don’t know which of you commie pinko yellow rat cretinous toads managed to hypnotize the rest of us into believing we’re so broke we can’t afford a couple of measly packages of Thin Mints, but you’ve gone too far. You fiend. How soon before we take out our parsimonious wrath on the innocent producers of Sham- Wow and Snuggie?
Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you; open your wallets. Ask yourself, “what would Paris Hilton do?” It doesn’t matter what you buy. A Jonas Brothers lunch box. A $75 grass fed, hand massaged, Kobe beef porterhouse steak, bathed in boysenberry infused truffle butter. A 96 piece Limited Edition Pewter Napkin Ring Set in the shape of the characters from the Lord of the Rings. Ford. Besides, this isn’t about you and me people. This isn’t about America. This isn’t about Detroit. This is about the Girl Scouts.
Will Durst is the political comic who writes sometimes. This is one of them.
Catch Durst blogging live from the Masters Tournament in Augusta Ga, April 6th- 12th. Masters.org.
And the book: “The All American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing,” available from Amazon.
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Yes, cameras in the state Supreme Court on Prop 8
Prop 8 Supreme Court hearing is best evidence yet for allowing cameras into the courtroom
By Peter Scheer
(Peter Scheer is the executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition)
The California Supreme Court’s hearing yesterday in the Prop 8 case–broadcast live over the internet via streaming video–erased any doubt about the wisdom of allowing cameras into the nation’s courts.
Let’s hope US Supreme Court Justices David Souter, Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, Antonio Scalia and Clarence Thomas were watching the oral arguments on Prop 8’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. They are the camera-allergic justices who have publicly stated their opposition to televising the US Supreme Court’s oral arguments (and other public proceedings).
Jon Stewart’s rant on CNBC
Once again, Jon Stewart on Comedy Central gets the story the mainstream media can’t seem to do. This time he pounces on the business reporting on CNBC. B3
Click here to read Dan Mitchell’s The Sausage blog from bigmoney.com on how Stewart’s satire trumps conventional journalism.
Jess Brownell: Think Dubai!
Think Dubai, free, rich, and minimally governed. It will be fun.
By Jess Brownell
Sometimes it’s like taking candy from a baby. Or selling an adjustable rate mortgage to an illiterate.
This requires a little set-up, but it’s worth it. Recently the New York Times Book Review covered a book by Jeff Madrick called “The Case for Big Government.” In the Times piece Mr. Madrick was quoted as writing “there really is no example of small government among rich nations.” The review elicited a response from one Donna Wiesner Keene, identified as a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum (whatever that is) and a former toiler in the verdant gardens of the Reagan and Bush administrations, taking issue with Mr. Madrick. According to her, the statement quoted above is “unsupported nonsense. Think Dubai, free and rich.”
Oh God, yes. Let’s do that. Let’s think Dubai, free and rich and, I guess, minimally governed. Trust me, it’ll be fun.
Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet
From the March 16th edition of the Nation comes Calvin Trillin, summing things up in four lines.
Pundits Say Washington Must Instill Confidence
The pundits say Obama must discuss
Our plight but sound much less like Gloomy Gus:
We need the only thing-we-have-to-fear leaders,
Or, failing that, the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders.
Ammiano: Is Rush Limbaugh shovel ready?
Today’s Ammianoliner:
Oxycotton found buried in Rush Limbaugh’s yard. “I’m shovel ready,” he said.
(From the home answering machine of Assemblyman Tom Ammiano on Tuesday, March 3, 2009.)
Editorial: Fisher’s Folly threatens the Presidio
The commercialization of the Presidio stands as a legacy of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Back in 1994 Pelosi bowed to Republican demands and decided to take the new park away from the people who run every other national park in America and turn it over to a developer-run Presidio Trust. The result: the wildy inappropriate Fisher Museum.
EDITORIAL
The latest proposal for developing the Main Post at the Presidio national park shows exactly what’s wrong with the privatized, developer-driven planning that has plagued the 1,400-acre jewel since Rep. Nancy Pelosi took control of it away from the National Park System.
The centerpiece of the new plan, released last week, is the same old monument to the greed and ego of Gap Inc. founder Don Fisher still gets his art museum, a three-building, 200,000-square-foot development that has no place at the Presidio. Oh, it’s not quite as ugly and intrusive the original design: most of the main gallery will be underground, and the roof will be green. How lovely.