Click here to read John Kass’ article from the Chicago Tribune on January 23 titled, LaHood slithering in under governor cover.
- No categories
Bruce Blog
Frontier Bank
Scott Schneidermann
Frontier Bank
Rock Rapids, IA 51246
Once we were able to enter the bank on Sunday afternoon and assure ourselves that the coast was clear, someone asked if our security cameras might have filmed the intruder while he was in the bank. We took a look at the security equipment and were please to see that everything worked. We actually had some decent footage of the deer strolling through the middle of the lobby. I was able to export the recording to my PC, which I thought I would keep to use as evidence years from now when I told the story of the buck who broke in the bank.
On Monday morning we started having some customers ask if the bank had been robbed over the weekend. I guess the boarded up windows that the deer had crashed through were sending an unintended message. After visiting with other bank management, we decided that a good way to get the word out locally about the deer would be to take the video from my PC and post it on YouTube. We then sent out a few emails thinking that word would spread around Rock Rapids and Lyon County that we had a deer and not a bank robber over the weekend. It ended up working a little too well.
Someone forwarded the video to the Sioux Falls, SD television stations who called the next day wanting an interview with a bank official, which ended up being me. After a busy day of doing interviews and showing a couple of reporters around the bank, I came home to tell my family that “Dad was going to be on TV.” We had fun watching the coverage and couldn’t believe that the Sioux Falls stations actually covered our story. I certainly thought this would be the end of it. Boy was I wrong.
On Wednesday morning, I had media calls from Sioux City, Des Moines, Davenport, and Minneapolis/St. Paul. I had friends calling me and telling me that they had seen our deer on their local news coverage in Las Vegas, NV and Albuquerque, NM. I found out that we had made the news on Good Morning America and Countdown with Keith Olbermann. I started wondering how far our deer might travel?
The good news is that these 15 minutes of fame appear to be winding down. We haven’t heard from anyone for several days now. Although I did hear that a deer tried to break into a bank during business hours in Dell Rapids, SD. I wonder if our deer could have made it that far.
To read past Bruce Blog coverage of the bank heist, click here.
Meister: 84-hour workweeks! 30-hour workdays!
By Dick Meister
It’s way past time for Congress to come to the aid of the medical residents who are among our most important providers of hospital care. The young doctors-in-training are being forced to work 80 hours a week, often as long as 30 hours in a single shift.
Congress has ample proof of the urgent need for legislative action to lessen the incredible workload of the highly exploited trainees, in part to protect patients from the possible errors of sleep-deprived residents. The proof came in a recent report Congress had requested from the widely respected Institute of Medicine because of concern over the treatment of residents and its possibly dangerous effects on patient care.
Alert: A flawed energy bill
A flawed energy bill (Scroll down to read Amanda Witherell’s Green City column with more on the clean energy/public power/Mirant plant battles)
EDITORIAL
Two months after Pacific Gas and Electric Co. spent $10 million to defeat a clean energy measure on the San Francisco ballot, Sup. Sophie Maxwell has stepped into the battle, introducing a mild ordinance that lifts some of the language from the Clean Energy Act but would accomplish very little. We’re glad to see Maxwell stepping up her efforts to close the dirty Mirant Power Plant in Potrero Hill, but her legislation needs some significant amendments.
Maxwell’s ordinance, cosponsored by Sup. Aaron Peskin (who is one meeting away from being termed out), would make it city policy to “take all feasible steps” to close the Potrero plant. That’s a laudable goal. It also borrows the aggressive environmental goals from the Clean Energy Act, stating that the city needs to meet all its energy needs by 2040 with renewable power. But unlike the Clean Energy Act, Maxwell’s mandate ignores PG&E, which supplies the vast majority of the electricity in San Francisco and which can’t even meet the state’s weak alternative energy standards. Her requirement would apply only to the city’s own power supplies, which come mostly from the Hetch Hetchy hydroelectric project and thus already meet the 2040 standards. So the part of the bill that deals with climate change and greenhouse gas emissions is utterly useless.
The measure calls on the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to study the ways the city can meet its energy goals without the Potrero plant – again, a fine idea. But it ducks the central question: who’s going to control the local electric grid, and thus the city’s energy future? Will PG&E continue to call the shots (in which case San Francisco will never meet credible green-power goals)? Or will the city take control of the distribution system, which would allow lower electric rates and far higher environmental standards?
As Amanda Witherell reports on page 17, Maxwell’s aide, Jon Lau, said the ordinance is “sort of agnostic toward public power.” That’s a mistake – leaving public power out of the equation amounts to a capitulation to PG&E and a guarantee that nothing substantial will change in the city’s energy portfolio.
Maxwell wants to close the Potrero plant as quickly as possible, and so do we. The best way to do that is to block the plant’s water permit when it comes up next year [tk: still need a date for this: (see “Water Board can close Mirant,” 11/25/08), and Maxwell and City Attorney Dennis Herrera are moving on that front. But the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), which controls the state’s grid, has in the past argued that the city needs a certain amount of generating capacity within its borders, and could force the Potrero plant to keep running.
Maxwell originally supported a plan to replace the in-city generation capacity by installing city-owned combustion turbines that would run only during periods of peak demand. But that plan failed after both environmentalists and PG&E opposed it. Now she’s pressing an alternative that would use new transmission cables, one owned by PG&E, to eliminate the need for power plants in the city.
That might work – but it would still leave the city in PG&E’s clutches, and while it would eliminate a source of pollution in southeast San Francisco, the city would still be using dirty power from PG&E’s nuclear and fossil-fuel plants elsewhere.
The best long-term solution is to build city-owned renewable generation to replace Mirant. The city’s community choice aggregation plan is moving in that direction. But ultimately, San Francisco will only reach aggressive clean energy goals if it controls its own fate.
Maxwell’s ordinance should be amended to clearly mandate a study that examines the feasibility of a public power system in San Francisco. It that’s not in the final version, the bill should be voted down.
Ammiano says Happy Hanukkah
Today’s Ammianoliner:
Happy Hanukkah! Throw a latke at any antisemite making a speech.
(From the home telephone answering machine of Assemblyman Tom Ammiano Monday, December 22, 2008.)
Will Durst: If the shoe fits, hurl it
By Will Durst
The President of the United States looked into the sole of another foreigner- twice- as a pair of shoes was flung at him during a Baghdad press conference on a surprise visit to Iraq. And though a lame duck, he proved to be one hell of a ducker. Some might say “the mother of all duckers.” The biggest shock may be how well he went to his left. And thank god it WAS a surprise visit or the assailant might have had time to assemble an arsenal more potent than his size 10s. Any half way decent computerized re-enactment would surely show size 13 Timberlands clipping their intended target.
An international outcry has arisen over the actions of Muntadhar al Zaidi the irate Iraqi TV reporter slash shoe- flinger. Not because of his “if the shoe flies, hurl it” philosophy, but because his aim was so ducking bad. And he stopped after two shoes. That’s right. For the first time in what may be recorded history, a person is the recipient of worldwide scorn for not being a centipede. A female centipede. Because then chances increase tenfold he would have had a matching handbag or fifteen to lob as well.
Ammiano: Rick Warren to wear lipstick
Today’s Ammianoliner:
In a conciliatory gesture Rick Warren will wear lipstick. “Obama, what was that remark about a pig?”
(From the home telephone answering machine of Assemblyman Tom Ammiano Friday, December 19, 2008.)
Editorial: Beyond the bloody cuts
Editorial for Wednesday’s Guardian (12/17/08):
Beyond the budget cuts
The crisis is an opportunity–a chance to examine how the city’s current revenue sources are unfair, unstable, and unwieldy
Click here to read EDITORIAL.
EDITOR’S NOTES
By Tim Redmond
San Francisco’s not ready to make $118 million in budget cuts.
Click here for full editor’s notes.
Ammiano throws high heel at governor
Today’s Ammianoliner:
Girly man throws high heel at governor. Budget this.
(Tom, Tom, watch your enunciation. It is hard to tell if you are saying ‘Budget this” or “Budget dish” and I had three people listen in. Don’t let them knock you off stride in Sacramento.) B3
Will Durst: Giving governors a bad name
By Will Durst
(Durst is a comedian who writes a little. He is the author of “The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing, the Common Sense Rantings from a Raging Moderate.”)
Hats off to the Illinois Governor for shooting so high above and beyond the normal arc of political malfeasance that he’s probably annoyed NASA by interfering with satellite traffic. After years of highlighting nuances and scrutinizing minute distinctions, it’s downright thrilling to finally find someone acting crookeder than a dump truck full of dissembled wire hangers. Excuse me. I mean, finally finding someone GETTING CAUGHT acting crookeder than a dump truck full of dissembled wire hangers. Not everyday the FBI arrests a sitting Governor at his house at 6 in the morning: We’re talking movie of the week here. I see Casey Affleck in a bad wig. With Aaron Eckhart as Patrick Fitzgerald.
Rod Blagojevich has lined himself up to be the fourth Chief Executive of the Land of Lincoln since 1974 to be offered a long- term residency at the Gray Bar Hotel. That Springfield Capitol building must be quite a feat of social engineering. It seems to work like a halfway house in reverse. He has single handedly smashed all doubts that Chicago is to corruption what Santaland is to elves. What Los Angeles is to plastic surgery stitching. Upper Michigan and deer ticks. The list goes on. Seattle and mildew. See.
Save the Small Business Assistance Center
As hard times get harder, the small business community is ever more essential to San Francisco
By Bruce B. Brugmann
(Scroll down for this week’s editorials, after the jump)
As the mayor’s drastic package of cuts fall on the Supervisors at their Tuesday meeting,
the questions abound: Why so fast? Why not more discussion and more hearings? Why make the cuts as several supervisors leave the board? Why not wait until the new board is sworn in in January? Why let Mayor Newsom drive the cuts, the agenda, and the timing almost unilaterally?
And there is a key question our editorial points out for Wednesday’s edition:
“Why are we talking about cutting the $800,000 Small Business Assistance Center, which actually helps the most important sector of the economy, when there’s $10 million, much of it redundant, in the mayor’s Office of Economic Development?”
As hard times get harder, the small business community is ever more essential as the city’s economic engine. Small businesses create the most net new jobs in the city, according to major Guardian studies. According to a 2006 study by Economist Kent Sims, Former Mayor Frank Jordan’s economic chieftan, small businesses helped moderate the 2000 to 2004 recession’s negative employment and earnings impact on San Francisco households.
Sims also found that small businesses released less than l0 per cent of their employees during the recession while large businesses released more than 20 per cent of their employees, despite the fact that the two groups of businesses had similar shares of pre-recession private employment. Further, he found that small business layoffs generated about 2l per cent of the negative employment and earnings impacts on San Francisco households in 2003, compared with 79 per cent for large businesses. And of course we all know that it is the small businesses that keep our neighborhoods friendly, vibrant, and economically productive. For example, on the economic point, the Guardian’s Shop Local campaign may put $l00 million into the local economy, immediately. (We are asking our 600,000 or so readers to spend at least $l00 in a locally owned business.)
You get the point. Now more than ever, small business ought to be nourished and protected, not put to the slashers once again at City Hall. The supervisors need to keep the Small Business Assistance Center in the budget and, if necessary, slash the mayor’s $10 million Office of Economic Development. And then the supervisors should take a deep breath, postpone the final vote until the new board comes in, and start considering the realistic progressive agenda advanced in the editorial and stories in the Guardian. B3
REPORT: Recommendations on Political Appointments
Center for American Progress
REPORT: Let’s Get It Started
What President-Elect Obama Can Learn from Previous Administrations in Making Political Appointments
By Anne Joseph O’Connell
Key recommendations
WASHINGTON, DC—If President-elect Obama follows the example of recent presidents, he will finalize his initial top picks for the cabinet and heads of other major agencies by Inauguration Day but will take much longer to select individuals for lower layers of the bureaucracy. Staffing these lower but still critical positions is remarkably challenging. It takes many months to get the first wave of appointees into the bureaucracy. Once filled, these positions do not stay occupied for long. And near the end of a term or administration, these political positions empty out yet again.
Barry Bonds’ grand adventure
By Dick Meister
Barry Bonds is excited. “Really excited!” he exclaims. “It’s awesome really gets your blood pumpin”
Ah, he must mean how it felt blasting those record-breaking 762 homeruns during his quarter-century as a Major League Baseball superstar. No, his baseball career apparently behind him, Barry is finding his excitement elsewhere these days. He keeps the adrenalin flowing by shooting and killing animals for fun and profit as a spokesman for Christensen Arms, a Utah company specializing in high-powered hunting rifles.
You can see Barry at work in a new seven-minute online video, shot for his employer in the woods of Saskatchewan. He seems to be enjoying himself immensely, laughing, shouting gleefully, seemingly breathless with excitement, as dramatic background music pulses loudly.
Peter Scheer
Click here to read Peter Scheer’s Monday, January 12 op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle,
Obama should keep his BlackBerry.
Will Durst: The Clueless Cup
The coveted Clueless Cup is falling out of the clutches of the Bush staff for the first time in eight long years
By Will Durst
n an upset worthy of Marin Day School covering the spread against the Green Bay Packers through the first three quarters of a spirited scrimmage at Lambeau Field, the coveted Clueless Cup appears to be on the verge of falling out of the clutches of President Bush’s staff for the first time in 8 long years. And the usurper is a little known agency that has blissfully slipped the bonds of reason and floated into the chasm of ludicrous self- delusion. Or to put it in layman’s terms: delivered another Congressional report.
Wackier than a Sumo wrestler in tap shoes, these pointy headed nincompoops from Cambridge, Massachusetts, (where else?) have caught dense in a bottle and driven it to a new area code. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, they have reached the irrefutable conclusion… er, the results of one of their studies is indicative of…, and they are quite certain of its validity… that, yes, your suspicions were correct, we are indeed… in a recession. They said that. Monday.
Ammiano, O.J. Simpson, and the mayor
Ammiano is back: Today’s Ammianoliner:
O.J. Simpson finally has enough time to watch Mayor Newsom’s seven and a half hour speech.
(From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano (whoops, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano) on Dec. 8, 2008.)
And so the pressing question of the day remains: Will Sacramento change Tom Ammiano and his San Francisco sense of humor? B3
Let us watch closely. B3
Kim Gale, the world’s nicest guy, 1941-2008
Kim Gale
1941-2008
By Bruce B. Brugmann
A celebration of the life of Jeremy Kimball (Kim) Gale, a colorful Guardian graphic artist who died on Friday, Nov. 28th, in Marin General Hospital of diabetes and renal disease, will be held at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 11th, at the Paper Mill Creek Saloon in Forest Knolls in Marin County. He was 67.
It is most fitting that Kim’s memorial service will be held in a saloon. He loved the Paper Mill and he loved saloons and he loved to attend and put on parties.
Kim was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and graduated from the New England School of Arts in Boston, then headed west and ended up in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. He soon made his way to the Bay Guardian newspaper and our cramped little office at 1070 Bryant Street. There he found a home, fast friends, a cast of characters, his kind of muckraking left politics, a rollicking good time, and a perfect place for his free-spirited lifestyle.
He was also a talented graphic artist who could do everything from whipping out illustrations on deadline, to designing front pages, to laying out and pasting up pages quickly, to keeping things flowing with professional casualness. Best of all, he could make sense out of and fit nicely into our often chaotic production department.
He was a big guy, with the build of a high school football tackle on a winning team, and he had enormous stamina and energy. I remember him standing at his drawing board, hour after hour, grinding through the piles of ad and editorial copy, and getting the page flats to the printer on time. Then he would head out to the old Ribeltad Vorden bar near Precita Park for his second job of the day as a bartender. Some of us would follow him to the Ribeltad, where Kim would again be standing, this time behind the bar pouring us drinks until closing time.
Through all the pressures of production and bartending, Kim was always the essence of affability and good humor. I never saw him angry or raise his voice. He was, as we often remarked at the Guardian, “the world’s nicest guy.”
Kim loved our Guardian parties and could outlast anybody at the bar or on the dance floor. “He could organize a party like few others,” according to his brother Jon. “He put together a full day of fun for nearly 200 people for his 40th birthday. There were two nationally known bands and other musicians who performed. Children of all ages, their parents and grandparents danced, ate grilled ribs, and barbecued oysters and the wine flowed freely.
“When he was 17, he put together an ice-skating party that included half of Portsmouth High School and college students home on Christmas break. That party was talked about for years. When I attended my 40th high school reunion, it seemed my classmates asked about my brother before they asked me what I’d been doing over the years. Everybody loved Kim. He was a load of fun.”
His favorite job, after leaving the Guardian, was working as a public relations man for the Golden Gate Fisherman’s Association. Executive Editor Tim Redmond remembers Kim calling him one day and asking if he wanted to go fishing. “Sure,” Tim said, quite startled, “but why do you want me to go fishing?” Kim replied, “Because that’s my job, to take reporters out fishing.”
It was the perfect job for Kim – beer, fishing, and a chance to talk with interesting people. He loved every minute and often seemed to marvel at the fact that he was actually getting paid to do it.
Tim and then Reporter Martin Espinoza spent a day with Kim drinking beer and fishing out on the Farallone Islands. With Kim’s guidance, they caught lots of fish and Kim would give the name and nature of each fish.
Kim transformed his fishing expertise into a fishing report and website. Kim had a host of sources out on the lakes and rivers and he would call them and find out where the fish were biting and how to catch them. He put the information up on his website and fisherman would pay to visit the site.
Kim lived for many years in Forest Knolls where, according to daughter Natasha Pemberton, “he enjoyed visiting and dancing with friends at the Pepper Mill. He also loved fishing, telling stories, and being surrounded by family and food. We will remember him for his sense of humor, love of life, and his gentle, good heartedness.”
Kim was preceded in death by his parents Arline and Edwin and son Christopher. He is survived by his brother Jon Gale of Waterboro, Maine, daughters Justine Huntsman of Twist, Montana, and Natasha Pemberton, of Lagunitas, and partner Zoila Berardi, of Grass Valley, and the entire “Berardi” clan, as Natasha puts it. Condolences may be sent to Tashapemberton@hotmail.com.
Nat Hentoff’s Last Column
Click here to read, Nat Hentoff’s Last Column: The 50-Year Veteran Says Goodbye
Click here to read the Guardian’s politics blog, How New Times ruined the LA Weekly.
Click here to read Stephanie Clifford’s December 30th article in the New York Times, Village Voice Lays Off Nat Hentoff and 2 Others.
Michael Moore: Bailing out Detroit
Here’s one of my favorite rationales for bailing out the Big Three auto manufacturers. B3
Click here to view Michael Moore on COUNTDOWN with Keith Olbermann Dec 3, 2008.