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Editors Notes

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The pope isn’t coming to San Francisco. Too bad; a few of us have a few things to say.

When the last pope, John Paul II, came here in 1987, it felt kind of like a circus. The dude loved theater, and there was plenty of it to go around — he made a point, for example, of meeting with Clint Eastwood, who was then the mayor of Carmel, which gave my friend Victor Krummenacher of Camper Van Beethoven the chance to make up "Monterey Pope Festival" T-shirts. A few enterprising sorts made photos of Eastwood with a gun in his hand telling the Holy Father: "Go ahead, bless my day."

When JPII showed up at the Mission Dolores, some jokers who lived across the street hung a huge banner that read: "The pope is a wanker."

I, of course, didn’t want to miss the show.

It turned out that getting a press pass for the pope’s visit was a little tricky, especially for a reporter for an alternative newsweekly who made no secret of his disdain for the local Catholic hierarchy. But I went to Catholic school and have a good old Irish name, and I wasn’t going to let this one get away.

So I filed my application with the locals, and had it rejected. The day before the pope was due to arrive, I called the archdiocese headquarters to ask who was really in charge of papal press. After a bunch of squirming, they admitted there was a special monsignor in a downtown hotel who made the final decisions. I got his name; I called the hotel and got the suite, where his secretary told me he was seeing nobody, that the deadline had passed, and that, in the vernacular, I was SOL.

But my father taught me well: priests drink bourbon, monsignors drink Scotch. So I picked up a nice single-malt and made my way to the holy press room. I pitched a fit of sadness to the secretary (my poor sainted mother, who was praying for me even now, would be in tears if she thought I’d missed the chance to see His Holiness) and that got me through the door.

The monsignor looked up and told me there was no way anyone was getting credentials the day before the visit and he’d never heard of my newspaper anyway. I pulled out the bottle, and he smiled.

"Bless you, my son," he said. "I think we can do business."

So I got the special Pope press pass, and saw the Popemobile, and saw the big wanker banner, and had a grand old time — and other than the fact that the city tore up all the bushes along the papal route so nobody would plant bombs, the city was pretty quiet.

That would not be the case today.

The new pope isn’t just a wanker — he’s pissing off all sorts of people, including his own believers. Queer groups, women, people who believe in stem cell research, people who believe in sex education for kids, people who think that wiping out family planning and prenatal programs for third-world women to avoid even the slightest mention of abortion … they got a beef with this guy. And they’re more active than ever.

So Benedict, the former Cardinal Ratzinger, won’t make it to SF. Damn. Despite Mayor Newsom’s embarrassing hide-the-ball game, we did a pretty good job on the Olympic torch. And the pope would be too big to hide.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Everybody knows the Democratic Party’s superdelegate problem: if Barack Obama wins the popular vote, as he probably will, and wins the highest number of elected delegates, as he almost certainly will, and the party leaders turn to Hillary Clinton instead, there will be a revolution in the rank and file that could damage the party for years to come.

But in San Francisco, that happens all the time.

The local Democratic Party is run by the Democratic County Central Committee, and 24 of the members are elected, democratically. But every Democrat who holds an elected office representing San Francisco, and every Democratic nominee for office, automatically gets a seat on the committee, too — so you’ve got another eight or so (it varies) people on the panel who are the local equivalent of superdelegates. US Sen. Dianne Feinstein is on the county committee. So is Board of Equalization member Betty Yee and state senator Leland Yee. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a seat. Rep. Tom Lantos was on the committee until he died; his replacement, almost certainly Jackie Speier, will take over his slot this week.

Of course, none of those high-powered types ever show up for committee meetings. They send proxies, either trusted advisors or staffers from their local offices. And often — all too often — those superdelegate proxies are the deciding votes on local issues.

See, the committee may not be the highest profile office in the land, but it has a fair amount of local clout. The central committee decides what position the Democratic Party takes on local issues — and that means both influence and money. The party endorsement on ballot measures can be influential, particularly when it comes with a place on the official party slate card.

These days the committee has a majority of elected progressives. But it’s not an overwhelming majority — since half the seats are apportioned by Assembly districts, half the grassroots members are from the west side of town and tend to be more moderate. And not all of the eastsiders are progressives.

So on key endorsements this year — for San Francisco supervisor, for example — the majority of the elected delegates will probably vote for the progressives. But a minority will support the slate backed by Mayor Gavin Newsom — and the superdelegates will mostly go along.

So the Newsom slate at the very least will block the progressives from getting the endorsements. In fact, for a progressive candidate or ballot measure to get the party nod in a contested race requires an almost impossible majority of the elected members.

It can be infuriating.

Supervisors Chris Daly and Aaron Peskin, who often don’t get along, are working together to get a solid progressive slate elected to the DCCC this June. It’s a good idea, and there’s a good chance many of the 24 slate members will win. But the will of the voters won’t matter if the superdelegates can still weigh in and screw up any real reform.

I suppose it’s possible to change to rules to kick the superdelegates off the committee, but that would be a brutal battle. And there’s a much easier solution:

The committee needs to eliminate proxy votes.

Feinstein can’t use a proxy to vote on the Senate floor. Pelosi can’t send a proxy to vote in the House of Representatives. Proxies aren’t allowed in the state Legislature. Why should the DCCC be any different?

If Dianne Feinstein really cares about Gavin Newsom’s slate of supervisorial candidates this fall, then she can show up at the committee meeting and vote. Otherwise the grassroots, elected delegates get to decide. Seems fair to me.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was away with the kids and missed the state Democratic convention in San Jose, but from what I hear, it was quite the show. The big local news, of course, was that Assemblymember Mark Leno blocked State Senator Carole Migden from winning the party’s endorsement for her reelection bid. That’s a big victory for Leno, who is trying to unseat her.

And the way a lot of my favorite blogs told the story, it was also a victory for the grassroots activists in the party: the Sacramento establishment, they say, was working for Migden.

I don’t think that’s entirely true; both sides had their heavy hitters. And I’m going to sound a note of caution here: Leno and his team papered the hall with some nasty negative fliers attacking Migden, not just for her travails with the Fair Political Practices Commission but for her driving record.

Leno told me he had to educate the delegates in a short period of time and that the fliers contained "nothing but facts." Which is true. But I don’t think he needs to go negative on Migden; she’s doing a fine job of that herself. And the attacks open ugly wounds in the community and could help the third candidate, Marin’s Joe Nation.

Leno needs to keep a tight leash on his campaign team as this heads for the finish.

And now we pause for a brief reflection on the First Amendment.

Matt Smith over at the SF Weekly took a shot at us last week, arguing that our lawsuit would somehow damage his paper’s ability to produce good journalism. Migden was in court this week to argue that the state shouldn’t prevent her from spending campaign money in violation of campaign-finance rules. Both claims rely on a dangerous interpretation of one of the most important pieces of law in the history of the world.

Smith’s theory: since we nailed the Weekly and its corporate parent for predatory pricing violations, we are somehow guilty of seeking to force the chain to cut back its editorial staff.

We heard the same sort of argument in court, and I suspect the Weekly‘s lawyers will trot out the First Amendment on appeal. Gee, they will say, the government can’t tell a newspaper how much to charge for its ads. That’s unconstitutional.

In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that the Weekly, not the Guardian, has been the paper attacking the First Amendment. The whole notion that James Madison had in mind when he introduced the Bill of Rights was that a free marketplace of ideas made for a more free and democratic society. Big chains that swallow independent papers limit that marketplace, particularly if, like the SF Weekly‘s owners, they enforce ideological consistency. Chains that try to kill other papers are even worse. That’s what our lawsuit was about.

Then there’s Senator Migden, whose legal papers cite one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of my lifetime, Buckley v. Valeo, which says that money is speech and that the rich can spend whatever they want on political campaigns. Again, the problem is the marketplace of ideas: if one side can corner the market with cash, there’s no free exchange. Campaign finance laws, properly written, don’t diminish the First Amendment; they enhance it. So do fair-competition laws in the media. Because both promote what Madison had in mind — a level (or at least relatively fair) playing field of ideas.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

A couple of decades ago, the American Civil Liberties Union sued San Francisco over the cross on Mount Davidson. The issue was pretty simple — a religious symbol on public land — but the furor was insane: critics attacked the ACLU up, down, and sideways and acted as if the separation of church and state was some form of blasphemy.

Yes: even in this tolerant, secular city, people get amazingly bent out of shape over this stuff. In fact, when I called Mission Police Station this week and asked why churches are allowed to use the middle of Guerrero Street for free parking on Sundays, Sgt. Larry Gray tried to talk me down.

"Tim, Tim, you don’t want to go up this tree," Gray, who is a charming and funny man, told me.

Sorry, Sarge, but I’m going there.

See, if you live in the Mission, it’s pretty hard to ignore. Double parking and parking in the medians is strictly illegal, and people get stiff tickets for it — except on Sunday morning, when churchgoers get a complete pass.

The churches don’t have to get permits or pay the city a fee or anything. According to Gray, there really aren’t any rules. The cops just look the other way.

"It’s a San Francisco tradition that goes back a hundred years," Gray told me. "They used to do the same thing with horses and buggies."

I know, I know, tradition and all. Last Sunday was Easter, for Christ’s sake, and I ought to give the believers a break. And on one level, it’s not that big a deal at all. The streets are still passable, mostly, although it’s a little more dicey for bikes and cars to coexist on a narrower strip of pavement. Traffic isn’t a big deal on Sundays (mostly), and if it is, people shouldn’t be driving so much anyway.

But nobody else gets to do this.

If you go to see the (secular) Mime Troupe in Dolores Park and you stick your car in the middle of the street, you get a ticket. If you drink at a (secular) bar or eat at a (secular) restaurant and you leave your car in the Valencia Street median, you get cited. You can’t double park while you run in for a (secular) cup of coffee at Muddy Waters.

So, with all due apologies to Sgt. Gray and the good people of faith, I have to ask again: Why do the churches get something nobody that else does? Am I the only one who thinks this is a bit sketchy?

I continue to get calls from people who are furious about the state’s plan to spray chemical pheromones from helicopters over San Francisco in August as a way to wipe out the Light Brown Apple Moth. Assemblymember Mark Leno and state Senator Carole Migden both are fighting it. Mayor Gavin Newsom wrote the governor this week to urge a health study before the spraying starts.

An environmental impact report is underway, but the state and the feds are calling this an emergency (the LBAM damages crops) and they’re planning to go forward no matter what.

I fear the only way to stop this is in court, with a challenge to the EIR — its timing, validity, the emergency declaration, etc. City Attorney Dennis Herrera ought to take this on. Thousands of people with young kids in the path of the spray would be immensely grateful.

Editor’s Notes

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"At 11 a.m., Thursday, March 20, I found myself at the corner of Market and Beale streets, looking at the startling emptiness of the Financial District." (See "The days SF stood still," [03/26/03]).

That’s where I was five years ago. You remember where you were, too: it was one of those moments in time that nobody forgets. Shock and Awe lit up the sky over Iraq, President George W. Bush announced the glorious military victory that was on the way, and the politicians — even the Democrats — were so busy praising the troops in the field that nobody stopped to ask how this was all going to end.

As we report this week, the major newspapers didn’t, either. In fact, in a survey by Editor and Publisher magazine, more than 75 percent of the papers supported Bush’s arguments for war. The airwaves were filled with generals and admirals talking up the invasion; the antiwar movement was marginalized.

And while the mainstream media were waving flags and cheering, the alternative press was presenting the other side of the issue. "Bush’s war represents a dangerous turning point for the United States," we wrote on March 26, 2003.

I sent out an e-mail to my colleagues in the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies this week asking how many of the weeklies were strongly against the war, and the answers started pouring in immediately. Tucson Weekly. San Diego City Beat. Boulder Weekly. Monterey Coast Weekly. Boston’s The Phoenix. The North Coast Journal. Random Lengths. The Memphis Flyer. Rochester City Newspaper. Creative Loafing. And that’s just a few of the names on the list.

Overall, the independent and alternative media were in the vanguard, providing the information that the big outfits wouldn’t.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The week that the San Francisco Unified School District sent out preliminary layoff notices to 535 teachers, the New York Times Magazine devoted much of its special money issue to educational philanthropy. It’s a vicious kind of irony.

The United States heads into a deep recession, but for a new generation of multibillionaires, it’s another gilded age. Fortunes built over the past 15 years or so put the likes of Carnegie and Rockefeller to shame, and as the guys from Google recently proved, it’s still going on.

And the tax laws are more favorable to the rich than they have been at any time since the 1920s, so less and less of that greater and greater concentration of wealth is available for public priorities such as education.

But that’s OK, the Times says: Bill and Melinda Gates are giving a lot of money to schools. Something like $350 million a year. Wow! That’s enough to make up for maybe 10 percent of the current cuts to school districts in just the state of California. Thanks, Bill.

I don’t think anyone with the last name of Gates or Buffet reads the Guardian every week, but I bet a copy or two makes its way down the Peninsula to the Googleplex and maybe Oracle headquarters, so I’d like to make a suggestion here to the very rich.

You want to make a difference with your philanthropy? Well, you could start by funding a massive educational campaign to convince Californians that public education works and is valuable, then underwrite a ballot initiative to raise income taxes on people like yourselves. That would do more good, for more kids, for more years into the future than any amount of grantmaking on planet Earth.

But maybe that’s asking too much. Maybe that’s not measurable or accountable enough. Maybe you can’t put the test scores on a computer graph and track the day-to-day impact or your investment the way you can track your stock prices.

So let’s try something else. Maybe you could save one school district.

That’s right: one school district. A big one. Somewhere in urban America. I’d suggest the San Francisco Unified School District in the great state of California, but I’m biased. Just pick a district where the public money falls far short of the educational needs that also has a credible, competent elected school board running things.

And instead of setting up charter schools or building new gyms or concert halls with your name on them, put a big chunk of money — say, $3 billion — in a trust fund that would generate a few hundred million a year, forever. And then let the local school board spend it.

Sure, you’ll get some corruption. Sure, some of the money will be wasted on stupid pet projects or dumb ideas. But that’s going to happen whatever you do. And I would argue that right now, if the San Francisco schools got an additional $300 million a year, no strings attached, on top of the existing state funding, the public schools would improve radically, a generation of kids would be far better prepared for life, the achievement gap would close up a good bit, and there would be quantifiable, measurable progress on every possible metric.

And suddenly, maybe even the tax-averse people of California would realize that well-funded schools are worth paying for.

Sergei? Larry? Anyone?

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

When Jerry Brown was governor of California, he was almost done in by the Mediterranean fruit fly. So he knows a thing or two about bug infestations and aerial spraying.

It was 1981, and Brown, approaching the end of his second and final term, was running for a spot in the United States Senate. He was the odds-on favorite to win the seat being vacated by the Republican S.I. Hayakawa; his chief Republican rival was a mild-mannered and hardly charismatic San Diego mayor named Pete Wilson.

But that summer, the fruit flies, known as medflies, started showing up in residential areas, mostly in gardens and fruit trees outside of San Francisco. Farmers worried that the pest could spread to the central valley and points south — and experts warned that the state stood to lose $1 billion per year if the agricultural industry got hit.

The flies breed rapidly and turn fresh fruit to mush. That would have been bad for growers. Even worse, the rest of the country was so worried about the tiny creatures that any sign of a commercial crop infestation might have led to a nationwide boycott of California produce.

Brown, still the staunch environmentalist, ordered the California Conservation Corps to strip the fruit off trees in the affected areas, and he ordered the release of millions of sterile flies to interrupt the mating cycles. As it turns out, the shipment of supposedly sterile flies from a Peruvian lab included at least some that were fertile; Brown argued that the error prevented the ecologically sound alternative from working.

But for whatever reason, the flies continued to spread — so the chorus from agribusiness got louder and louder. They wanted aerial saturation spraying of the pesticide malathion.

But Brown resisted. "All I could think about," he told me 10 years later, "was poison raining down from the sky."

That’s all a lot of environmentalists could think about too. The governor was knocked around like a ping-pong ball, to the delight of a mainstream media that never much liked or respected Jerry Brown. And in the end, he caved: helicopters, flying five abreast in military-style formation, began carpet bombing hundreds of square miles of mostly residential areas, dumping a chemical that a lot of critics argued could have untold long-term health effects.

The indecision pissed off the conservatives. The final outcome pissed off the environmentalists. Brown lost the Senate race.

When I talked to him about the decision, it was 1991 and I was writing a book — and Brown was mounting a surprisingly strong run for president. In retrospect, Brown thought the spraying was wrong. He thought he had to do it, but he felt horrible about it. Back then, he was a progressive populist.

And now he’s California’s attorney general, and he’s defending the state’s plans to bombard San Francisco, Marin, and the East Bay with an artificial pheromone wrapped in tiny plastic bubbles to eradicate the light brown apple moth (see page 10). I know all the arguments, but please: I have two little kids now. It’s a nasty chemical, raining down on us from the sky.

The medflies came back. So will the moths. Brown wants to come back to his old job too. You wonder if he’s learned anything.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

There comes a time in any campaign, a political consultant once told me, when you just have to hang up the phone, stop looking at polling data, walk away from the office, and leave it in the hands of the voters. You do everything you can; you work every angle, make the case every possible way you can … and in the end, someone else is going to decide. You can only hope that if you told the truth, played by the rules, and showed why your side was right, in the end you’ll come out on top.

And sometime around the day this issue hits the stands, the Guardian‘s case against the big national chain that owns the SF Weekly will go to the jury. We have the facts on our side. We have the law on our side. We have the truth on our side. And all we can do now is hope the jury sees it.

If you haven’t been following this on the blogs or in the paper: we’re suing the Weekly and Village Voice Media, which used to be known as New Times, for predatory pricing. Our claim is that the Weekly (and until recently, the East Bay Express, which VVM just sold) has been selling ads below cost for the purpose of hurting a local, independent competitor.

Over the past three weeks I’ve been in the courtroom almost every day, watching the story unfold. I’ve learned a lot: the Weekly, for example, has lost money every single year since New Times bought it in 1995. In the past few years the losses have only escalated (to nearly $2 million per year). The paper is still publishing because the corporate parent in Phoenix has shipped more than $16 million to San Francisco to prop it up.

That’s pretty good evidence of the first part of our claim: if the Weekly keeps losing money, the paper is clearly selling ads below cost.

I’ve also seen evidence that the Weekly prepared special Guardian reports every month to send to Phoenix, that the Weekly‘s publishers devoted a special section of their regular financial reports to competition with the Guardian, and that the senior staff regularly talked about the war they were waging on us. Three witnesses testified to hearing Mike Lacey, one of the principals of VVM, announce that he wanted to drive the Guardian out of business.

I’ve seen memos and heard testimony showing the Weekly paid its sales staff bonuses to take ads away from the Guardian. I’ve seen a study showing that in 91 percent of key accounts, the Weekly sold below cost — and in 66 percent of those cases the Guardian either lost the ad or had to deeply discount rates to keep it.

I’ve heard witnesses from the Weekly‘s side testify that the Guardian was just one of many competitors in the market and that they treated it no differently than any other publication. I’ve heard misdirection and lies so blatant that I’ve wanted to stand up and point my fingers at the witnesses and call them out and demand they be indicted for perjury.

And now a jury will have to sort that out. In the end, I think this is a pretty clear case: we are a small, locally owned independent business under assault by a chain competitor that is vioutf8g state law in an effort to take monopoly control of the market. I think we’ve proved that. We’ll know soon.

Editor’s Notes by Tim Redmond

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom is all hot and bothered about the report by the Board of Supervisors budget analyst saying Newsom has taken $1 million that is supposed to pay for homeless services and Muni and used it to pay his own staff. The mayor says it’s all just a personal attack on him by the supervisors. He also says other mayors have done the same thing. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Phil Ginsberg, the mayor’s chief of staff, called the report "bullshit." (Actually, the Chronicle, in its infinite decorum, used the term "bull-," to avoid offending the tender values of its readers.)

OK, look: there are politics going on here. The supervisors and the mayor aren’t getting along, the mayor has unleashed a rather savage attack on board president Aaron Peskin, Peskin is going after some of the mayor’s commissioners, and maybe Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who asked for the report, had some sort of political motivation. Or perhaps McGoldrick, who doesn’t tend to like this sort of bullshit, just got mad that the mayor was doing something funky with the taxpayers’ money.

Whatever. Nobody is denying the factual accuracy of the report. And if Newsom wants to make an issue of it, he ought to get beyond the politics and the accusations and just tell us:

Does he really think this is a good way to spend city funds?

Should the Human Services Agency, which is responsible for the most needy and broke people in town, be spending $95,000 per year to pay for a mayoral press aide? Does that money really help the homeless? Is there a good argument that having a media flack in Newsom’s shop defending the mayor’s homeless policies helps save lives, provide housing, or get substance abusers into recovery?

Fine, Mr. Mayor: perhaps you can elucidate it.

Was Stuart Sunshine, until recently Newsom’s chief transportation aide, really worth $203,000 per year? Did paying him that salary out of Muni’s budget help improve bus service? I dunno, maybe it did. But I haven’t heard Newsom tell me how.

Is it fair — and is it a good idea — at a time when every city department is being asked to cut back, when crucial city programs are being reduced or eliminated, when it’s going to be an ugly year for the public sector in general and San Francisco in particular, for the mayor to be filling his staff jobs on someone else’s dime?

That’s the real issue here: if Newsom thinks his high-paid staffers in his newly renovated office are doing such a bang-up job that two underfunded city agencies ought to be writing their paychecks, then the public is welcome to listen to his pitch. But there is nothing political or personal about asking the questions; that’s exactly what the supervisors ought to be doing.

Newsom is the chief executive of San Francisco. He sets the policies; he hires the senior staff. He can be upset with the legislators who are the checks and balances of his power, and he can disagree with the conclusions of a report that the board’s budget analyst has produced. But to call it bullshit when he knows it’s true (and when he knows from his own experience that Harvey Rose, the budget analyst, is widely respected for his fairness) … well, that just sounds defensive. Bad place to be, Mr. Mayor.

Editor’s Notes by Tim Redmond

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

There are plenty of stark contrasts between the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns, starting with the fact that all of the Republicans sound like morons and both the Democrats have credible policy ideas that they appear to have thought about.

But the thing that struck me most in the week before the California primary was the tone of the GOP debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, where John McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Ron Paul spent an inordinate amount of time arguing over who was the most authentic conservative.

The c word came up about every five seconds. I’m a right-wing conservative! No, no, I’m even more conservative. Hey, I’m so conservative I think all the immigrants ought to be lassoed with a chain and dragged back to Mexico behind a Hummer. Romney even hit McCain for winning the New York Times endorsement, saying that means he isn’t a real conservative.

And I wondered: what would the world be like if the Democrats were arguing over who was the best liberal?

Imagine if Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fought over who can be most trusted to reverse the 25-year trend of economic and social inequality in the United States, who would most effectively tax the rich and shift some of the wealth to the middle class and poor. Imagine if they fought over whose health care plan would move the nation toward a single-payer system with no private insurance participation? Clinton: "I’ll cut the defense budget so fast that the military-industrial complex will think it’s 1976 all over again." Obama: "Yeah? Well, I’ll eliminate 90 percent of the nuclear arsenal, quit selling high-tech weapons to trouble spots around the world, and institute an excess-profits tax on any corporation that milks the taxpayer in a defense contract." Take that.

I have a friend who’s in the political consulting business; he works on big national campaigns and does high-level strategy for the Democratic Party. He’ll laugh when he reads this; when I say this kind of stuff, he shakes his head and says, "This is a conservative country."

But I don’t believe it.

Another political consultant, a guy who’s run some of the most important liberal campaigns in the state over the past couple of decades, stopped by our office a few weeks ago, and after he talked about an energy plan he’s pushing, I took him aside and asked one of my favorite questions:

How much money would it take — what kind of a campaign would you have to run, and for how long — to counter a quarter century of brilliant, effective right-wing propaganda and reconvince the American people to have faith in the public sector? What would we have to do to make people think — as they did during the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s — that government is part of the solution, not part of the problem? If some rich person put up a billion dollars, could you do it?

"It wouldn’t take that much," the guy said. But from the look on his face, I suspect he thought it would be close.

I used to blame the media for all of this, but I’ve been in the media for a very long time now, and I don’t think it’s that easy. Somewhere along the line the bad guys figured out that if they repeated their message often enough and funded their think tanks and promoted their political leaders, eventually they’d sell a scam of cosmic proportions to the electorate. We could tell our story too, if we thought it was important enough.

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When the political consultants get their focus groups and test the slogans that will guide political policy in California, the one that comes out near the top all the time is "living within our means." That’s why Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger used the line (as many of his predecessors have done) to try to make his brutal, bloody budget cuts sound eminently reasonable. The hardworking taxpayers of this state have to live within their means, right? They can’t spend more money than they have. So when the state comes up short, the governor and the legislature just have to do what’s necessary to make payment due balance with accounts received.

But it’s a misleading metaphor.

Imagine you’re working at a full-time job, just barely managing to cover the bills, and all of a sudden, through no fault of your own, your boss decides to cut your pay by 15 percent. Life wasn’t exactly easy before; now it really sucks. Now the essentials are at risk — you can’t pay the rent and put food on the table and buy clothes for your kids without going into debt. And sure, you can borrow for a while and run up the credit cards, but it won’t work in the long term and will wind up costing you a lot more.

And your boss smiles and tells you to live within your means.

This is what’s happened to California. The people who operate the public services (schools, parks, hospitals, etc.) that we all depend on just saw their income cut radically. The state already tried borrowing, but the interest alone is going to cost $2 billion this year; California, like so many Californians, is having trouble with its debt load.

So what would your typical breadwinner try to do? Well, he or she would complain about the pay cut and fight to get that money back, look for another job, possibly moonlight…. In other words, those hardworking taxpayers would try hard to find a revenue-side solution. For the state, that means raising taxes. Focus-group that one, Mr. Governor.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

There’s a January report from the San Francisco Controller’s Office that says the city’s transportation policy is failing.

It doesn’t say that in so many words — that might have gotten some media attention — but the implication is clear.

The report is on the taxicab industry, always a fascinating topic, and it’s filled with charts and graphs discussing how much money the cab companies make and how little the drivers make. But in the middle of all of that is a remarkable paragraph that says:

"The resident population in San Francisco appears to be increasing. Since 2000, the Department of Finance reports it has grown by 4.7 percent, or by approximately 0.6 percent per year. Although the Census Bureau believes San Francisco lost population from 2000 to 2005, it too has reported population increase since 2005. Muni trips have slightly declined over the same period — a cumulative negative change of 2.5 percent — while vehicle registrations in San Francisco have increased by 1.5 percent. This suggests that residents may be substituting away from mass transit and into private and personal transport modes."

That reads like, well, a Controller’s Office report, but here’s the translation: More San Franciscans are driving cars. Fewer are taking Muni. It’s not exactly shocking news to anyone who pays attention to traffic patterns in town, but it’s a serious indictment of city policy.

The statistics show a couple of things. One is that the city is, indeed, getting richer — generally speaking, wealthier people are more likely to use private cars. Another is that Muni hasn’t been performing: all of the national and local data show there’s a direct correlation between on-time transit service and ridership (and of course there’s a direct, or rather inverse, correlation between the number of people riding Muni and the number of cars on the streets.)

But what it says to me is that city hall doesn’t really consider the car glut a top priority.

There is no official city goal to reduce the number of cars in town or the number of car miles traveled or the number of vehicles on the streets. The city Planning Department continues to base its land-use decisions on projections of increased car traffic (which has to be accommodated with more garages). Nobody’s calling for a five-year plan to turn the trend around.

It’s going to be a big year for transit policy: the city’s Transit Effectiveness Study comes out in February, and the report on congestion management should be done in June. Perhaps the supervisors can use that information to create goals, timelines, and programs that will reduce — instead of accommodate — cars on the streets.

I’m part of the problem, and I know it: I drive a car, and I drive it too often. I do it because it’s difficult to get my kids to and from school on a bus.

That’s one of the tricky parts of this equation (school buses in a city where everyone has choice and kids from any neighborhood can go to any school), but I have to say, the parking lot at McKinley Elementary School is packed every single morning with people driving schoolkids. You’d think the city could work with the San Francisco Unified School District — maybe organize car pools. Maybe the mayor’s $130,000 per year global warming coordinator could get involved.

We could start with a citywide survey: Why do you drive? Where? What would get you out of your car? Aim for 5 percent per year. It’d be better than what we’re doing now.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I had this eerie feeling last week as news reports began to come in of a naval engagement in the Strait of Hormuz. It was starting to feel like 1964.

The way the initial stories had it, a group of Iranian speedboats approached the USS Port Royal and the USS Hopper in the narrow strait, which controls access to the Persian Gulf. Commanders on both ships went on high alert and ordered their gunners to track the speedboats. They were probably responding to a Navy war game simulation of a few years back, in which a swarm of small boats was able to attack and disable a United States warship.

It got worse: as the small craft approached, the ships received a radio message in English, warning that "I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes." The ships’ captains were within a few seconds of directing their crews to open fire.

Now it turns out, according to the Guardian of London, that a widely known radio hacker who calls himself Filipino Monkey — a guy who often pesters ships in the Gulf — may have been the one sending the radio message. There was, apparently, no real threat.

But the George W. Bush administration has protested to the Iranians, the Navy commander in the Gulf says he takes the threat of attack on US ships "deadly seriously," and Bush has personally warned that "provocative actions" could lead to military retaliation.

Let’s see now: On Aug. 2, 1964, the US destroyer Maddox was conducting a spy mission in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam, when the captain reported coming under attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The destroyer opened fire, and aircraft from a nearby carrier pursued the boats, allegedly sinking one. Two days later the Maddox and another destroyer fired on what they said were hostile targets in the gulf.

Turns out both reports were total lies, the hostile actions by North Vietnam fabricated, and the entire event almost certainly set up as a casus belli — and the result was a war that killed 50,000 US troops.

And we know Bush wants to attack Iran. Eerie.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

My brother called me from the East Coast over the weekend to ask if I was still alive and my house still standing. He’d been watching CNN, which apparently was showing nonstop reports of terrible storm carnage in Northern California, complete with breathless voice-overs talking about hurricane-force winds.

"Yeah," I told him. "It rained."

It was windy too. Some trees came down, my roof leaked a little, and some people who built houses on unstable hillsides learned what happens to unstable hillsides when it rains. None of this is terribly unusual or strange. It’s just that people in San Francisco aren’t used to living in a world where there’s actual weather. You’d think a place that could be shaken into dusty wreckage any minute by the inevitable earthquake would be a little less freaked about precipitation.

Still, I found a bit of a lesson here.

Just hours after the storm broke, while the bold and adventurous tech pioneers of Google were still huddled in their homes and afraid to go to work, the San Francisco Department of Public Works had crews on the streets clearing fallen trees. The response was stunningly efficient — the stuff that couldn’t be chopped up right away was hauled off to the side so cars could get through. By that evening the worst of the fallen timber was corralled and being cut up with chain saws. It’s fun to talk about the lazy, inefficient public sector, but frankly, the DPW did its job.

And 36 hours later, the efficient, private utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., still couldn’t get the power back on along Third Street.

We got a press release Friday from the Democratic Leadership Council, which runs the Bill Clinton wing of the party and has long supported Democrats who hew to the center-right. The DLC folks call these hawkish neocons "new Democrats." And according to their Jan. 4 statement, the "New Democrat of the Week" was … San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom.

Newsom got the award for "his continued commitment to reducing his city’s carbon footprint," which is fine and lovely. But it came the same week he announced, in a very DLC style, that he was bringing Kevin Ryan, the former United States attorney, on board as the head of his criminal justice council.

Ryan’s a right-wing prosecutor, a George W. Bush appointee who was in charge of the witch hunt and persecution that sent videographer Josh Wolf to jail for 226 days. Why, exactly, is a guy who has no respect for the First Amendment working for the mayor of San Francisco?

Newsom’s big plans to shake up his administration seem to amount to firing Public Utilities Commission general manager Susan Leal (who can’t be fired right now because she’s on job-related disability) and replacing her with controller Ed Harrington. Leal had to go because she might run for mayor in four years against whomever Newsom and chief consultant Eric Jaye handpick (Assessor Phil Ting seems to be the choice right now) and because, as Sup. Bevan Dufty put it, "PG&E was not happy about her."

Sounds like an award-winning strategy to me.

PS Our predatory-pricing case against the SF Weekly and its parent company goes to trial Jan. 14 in San Francisco Superior Court with Judge Marla Miller presiding.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

So you want the heartwarming Christmas story, and it almost happened: A 17-year-old girl in Los Angeles girl was dying of leukemia. She’d received a bone marrow transplant, and for some complicated and unexpected reason, her liver began to fail. The doctors at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center said she’d die without a liver transplant.

As it turned out, a liver was available and the operation could have gone forward — except that the girl’s insurance company, Cigna, refused to pay. This set off a furor — the California Nurses Association organized a protest, word got out on Daily Kos (thanks to blogger Eve Gittleson), and hundreds of people jammed Cigna’s phone lines, marched in front of company headquarters, and generally made such a stink that after 10 days of delay, on Dec. 20, the insurance giant caved and approved the operation.

But there’s no happy ending here: on Dec. 21, Nataline Sarkysian died. The nurses say that if she’d had the transplant as soon as possible, the outcome might have been different. I’m not a doctor and I wasn’t there, so I’m not going to wade into that one.

Here’s what I’m going to say:

Anyone who thinks it’s possible to reform our health care system while leaving these kinds of decisions in the hands of private, profit-seeking insurance companies needs a transplant of the cerebral cortex.

There are cases like this one all the time — people who suffer because health insurance has become a big business that’s all about the bottom line. It’s not news that these big companies routinely reject valid claims and pay their employees bonuses based on how many people are denied health care.

There is no perfect way to provide health care for the entire population of the United States. Any structure that we create will by its nature be large and prone to bureaucratic snafus. There are always going to be limits on resources and hard decisions: Should an insurance pool cover liposuction for an actor who needs to lose 10 pounds for a starring role? (Probably not.) Should it pay for the same treatment for a morbidly obese person who is at risk of heart failure? (Probably so.) Should an 80-year-old person get a kidney transplant while a 23-year-old is left waiting? (I don’t know; do you?)

But I do know that if you leave those decisions in the hands of people who will make more money if they choose one path, then the path of one of the most important public policy issues in the nation will be selected on the basis of greed. That’s the fundamental flaw in our health care system.

I thought the comments of Rose Ann DeMoro, the head of the CNA, regarding the Sarkysian case were right on point. "Every politician who thinks the answer to our health care crisis is more insurance should stop and think about Nataline Sarkysian," DeMoro said. "Insurance is not care."

That’s exactly what’s wrong with the plan the governor and the State Assembly have passed.

Sure, it’s better to have people insured than uninsured. Universal insurance means fewer people getting very sick and dying for lack of primary care. It means fewer people jamming public hospital emergency rooms. But it doesn’t mean everyone’s going to get adequate or decent medical treatment — not as long as health insurance is in the hands of people who consider it first and foremost a big business.

Editor’s Notes

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› Tredmond@sfbg.com

A friend of mine used to play defensive end for one of the big football schools, one of those places that are constantly in the top 10, win a few national championships, and send a couple of people to the NFL every year. The football players had their own dorm, far away from everyone else on campus. The mirrors in the bathrooms were stainless steel instead of glass, so they wouldn’t get broken when the guys got a bit out of control.

Everybody juiced. That’s what my friend told me. If you wanted to star at the national level and you thought you had a chance at the pros, you took steroids. You just did. It was part of the deal.

So I had a hard time getting agitated about the Barry Bonds scandal, and I’m still having a hard time getting agitated about the Mitchell Report. What, nobody knew there were drugs in major-league baseball? Does anyone believe the owners weren’t encouraging it? Buffed-up players sell tickets.

And now there’s talk of asterisks — the idea that anyone who may have used steroids shouldn’t remain in the record books or in the Hall of Fame without some sort of formal indication that the milestones might be tainted — which strikes me as silly. How will we know for sure who did what when? Are we basing all of this on Mitchell Report–style hearsay? How about the people who may have juiced or may have just worked out harder and suddenly started performing better?

How about the fact that almost every professional athlete today has the advantage of better nutrition, better training, and better medical care than even the most lucky and privileged had 50 years ago?

Besides, steroids are chickenshit.

See, when I look out the window of my office near Mission Bay, I see this fancy new University of California complex that’s going to be home to a huge, brand-new industry based on genetic technology. I’m in favor of stem-cell research, and I have no problem with using embryonic cells, but I think we need to understand what we’re doing here before unregulated private and public sector researchers start doing some truly funky stuff.

Tali Woodward wrote about this in the Guardian three years ago, and plenty of others have been talking about it. It’s going to be possible pretty soon (in 10 years? 20?) to alter the genetic makeup of a fetus to select for or enhance certain characteristics. Some couples may want a boy or a girl. Some may want to avoid a family history of hemophilia or heart disease.

And some may want a kid who can run really, really fast or has exceptional vision, lightning reflexes, and the strength to hit a baseball 500 feet.

Lee Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton, talked about this in 1997 in a book titled Remaking Eden (Avon Books). His thesis, in part, was that certain human beings — the "GenRich" — will be born with powers and abilities far beyond those of the weaker "Natural" class.

And which people do you suppose will play professional sports?

When there’s so much money at stake and the private sector is running the game, steroids are going to seem like lemonade. That’s what we should be getting agitated about.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I think 2008 is going to be the year when we decide as a city if we’re serious about San Francisco.

We’re going to decide if we want this to be a place where working people can live, a place that isn’t just a playground for the rich, a place where the people who drive the buses and clean the hotel rooms and teach in the schools can get to work without commuting 50 miles.

And it’s not going to be an easy choice.

See, there’s a city charter amendment headed for the November ballot that would set aside a fairly good-size chunk of money, around $30 million per year, for affordable housing. It won’t solve the city’s housing crisis — that would take at least three times as much money, maybe more — but it will, for the first time, create a large, predictable fund of money that can be used and leveraged over the next decade to try to create the type of housing this city desperately needs.

And not entirely coincidentally (see: the subprime mortgage crisis), the voters will be considering this in a year when the city is looking pretty broke.

So the mayor, who hates this charter measure (and who won’t talk seriously about raising new revenue), is going to go all over town and tell everyone that we can’t afford it, that it will mean even more service cuts, that it’s fiscally irresponsible … that whole line. He’ll try to blame the supervisors for the cuts in Muni and the Health Department and the library — and then he’ll run his own candidates in the November board elections, all of whom will oppose the housing measure, and he’ll try to sell them as responsible managers of the city’s treasury.

And all of us will have to make some choices:

Do we recognize that if we can’t build enough low-cost housing, San Francisco will cease to exist as we know it? Are we willing to look at the long run and realize that there will always be good and bad budget years, and that saving the city’s middle-class base is actually good management? Are we willing to accept that the budget should be balanced by new taxes on the rich and not by abandoning everyone else?

God, I hope so. Happy holidays. *

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I don’t like the George Lucas building at the Presidio. I don’t like the idea of an 850,000-square-foot commercial office complex (with a Starbucks!) in a national park, and I don’t like the fact that Lucas got a $60 million tax break for locating in one of the most desirable locations on Earth. But at least the Star Wars man made some effort to ensure his $350 million headquarters looks a little bit like the historic buildings around it.

And by that standard, I really hate the plans for the new Don Fisher museum.

Fisher wants us all to think he’s a great guy because he’s going to spend his own money to build a grand hall to display his own modern art for all of his adoring subjects to see, and he’s hired a fancy architect to design it. But check out the drawings — the thing is an abomination. It looks like something an alien dropped out of another galaxy far, far away and into the parade grounds of an old military base. It has no context, no connection whatsoever to anything that’s already there. I’m sorry, but it’s ugly. Butt ugly.

And it really doesn’t belong in the Presidio.

Think about it for a second: This is a part of the city that has almost no public transportation. The old Sixth Army headquarters was never set up to handle hundreds of thousands of visitors (on the contrary: like most military bases, it was designed around security, with limited, narrow access gates that could be quickly closed down). The roads aren’t wide, the nearby city streets are already pretty crowded, and there isn’t a lot of parking.

So anything that brings large numbers of tourists in large numbers of cars to the center of the Presidio is going to be a problem. It’s nuts that the Presidio Trust is even considering this project — either the museum is going to be a waste of everyone’s time and money because it doesn’t attract visitors or it’s going to be a nightmare of traffic and crowds.

If the great Mr. Fisher wants to put his art on public view, he could offer to donate or loan it to the existing Museum of Modern Art, which is situated downtown, near tourist hotels and lots of transit. But he doesn’t want to do that; the way I’ve heard it, the MOMA folks weren’t quite ready to bow down and let Fisher run the place any damn way he wanted. So he took his art and walked away.

Since he’s worth more than a billion dollars, he could also buy an existing building near MOMA or buy a parking lot and build a museum, but Fisher wants to pollute the Presidio instead. And guess what? He thinks he’s going to get away with it.

See, he helped Rep. Nancy Pelosi create the privatized park, and he was one of the original trust members, and this is how the rich think: We took this land from the public. We’ll do with it exactly anything we please.

Pelosi made sure the San Francisco government has no direct say over this decision, but the supervisors should at least try to fight it. They should hold hearings on this, pass a resolution opposing it, call on Pelosi to oppose it (and blast her publicly if she won’t), refuse to provide municipal water and sewer service, refuse to make traffic improvements … and make it clear what this is: a billionaire’s attempt to stick it to the rest of us.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

OK: a 26-year-old German exchange student was stabbed in the Outer Sunset two weeks ago by a man who appeared to be homeless. It was a terrible incident, an awful crime; we’ll all stipulate that. And although C.W. Nevius, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist, splashed it all over the front page of the Sunday paper Dec. 2, it really shouldn’t have anything to do with how the city sets homeless policy.

But it’s got me thinking.

Nevius is apparently shocked that there’s been a sudden increase in the number of homeless people living in the Sunset. I could have told him and the mayor and the police department a month ago that this was going to happen.

See, thanks to a series of Nevius columns about homeless encampments in Golden Gate Park, Mayor Gavin Newsom got election-year tough this fall and created special teams to go into the park and roust the residents. The mayor, of course, said that all he wanted was to get people into shelters, to get them treatment, to provide them the support that he insists his administration is delivering.

But the fact is, there aren’t enough decent places for all of these people to live. Some day, I still believe, the people in San Francisco (and the people who run the country and the state) will come to their senses and realize that it’s entirely possible to end urban poverty, but that it will take big chunks of money, multiple billions of dollars, and that the wealthy people who like to complain about the folks on the streets will have to pay higher taxes to make it happen. We live in a rich city and a rich country; we can afford to build housing and create jobs and fund welfare programs. We just don’t want to — because we’re Americans and we’ve been told for a couple of generations now that we don’t have to sacrifice for social progress.

In the meantime, no law-enforcement crackdown or Care Not Cash program or shelter system is going to end homelessness in San Francisco. There are going to be people living on the streets because they can’t afford to pay rent on even a nasty single room and they don’t want to deal with the rules and structure of the shelter system.

And I have to wonder:

Weren’t we all better off when we let them sleep in the park?

I know that’s not a terribly satisfying approach to public policy; I know there were and are problems (dirty needles, human waste, befouling of valuable and rare public space) associated with the camps. I know that in theory nobody should be camping in Golden Gate Park; as one city resident reminded me at a neighborhood forum not long ago, the park isn’t a wilderness — it’s a garden.

But nobody should be sleeping in doorways or on sidewalks or in makeshift shelters in industrial areas either. I refer you to paragraph five above.

I ask you (and Newsom and Nevius): where are these people supposed to sleep? No, the park isn’t a home, but a camp hidden in a rarely used corner is more of a home than a bed in a nasty, crowded shelter where you have no rights at all, not even the right to come and go when you want. I know where I’d rather sleep.

Maybe, in the spirit of harm reduction, we should just leave the park campers alone.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Asbestos is nasty stuff. It’s the scariest kind of environmental contaminant: you often can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it, it hangs around for a while, and it’s hard to get rid of. Asbestos fibers are tiny, invisible to the naked eye — and once they get in the air, they don’t tend to settle quickly. A single fiber can take eight hours to fall six feet in utterly still air; with the wind blowing, the stuff can float around for days or weeks. If you inhale it, you don’t typically notice, and there’s no easy test for exposure. But it sticks around in your lungs forever and can cause cancer and other deadly diseases 10 or 20 years down the road.

At that point, of course, it’s nearly impossible to prove exactly where and when you were exposed.

I learned all of this years ago when I was writing about asbestos contamination in the San Francisco public schools. For years the stuff was used as insulation (and as linings in automotive brake pads), and for good reason: it’s essentially a rock that you can weave into something resembling cloth. And because it’s a rock, it’s tough and doesn’t burn. Of course, when the insulation coverings get old, as they did in the schools, and the asbestos starts to leak out, you have a public health emergency of such major proportions that schools have to be shut down and lots of expensive, difficult remediation work done.

Now there’s another asbestos story in San Francisco, and it’s a more tricky one: Lennar Corp., which has the master redevelopment contract in Bayview–Hunters Point, has been digging up an area that’s full of naturally occurring asbestos. The area badly needs economic development, so it’s harsh to ban any type of construction there. And I think it’s possible to build safely in the area — but it’s complicated and expensive, and since there are residents (and schoolkids) nearby, there’s zero margin for error. You have to be willing (or forced) to watch every whiff of dust, to monitor the air with sophisticated equipment — and to shut down work the moment it appears that the dust isn’t being or can’t be controlled.

That doesn’t mesh well with a financially troubled company that is trying desperately to avoid costly construction delays.

As Sarah Phelan reports on page 16, a Lennar manager who was threatening to shut down work because subcontractors weren’t controlling asbestos-laden dust was fired and is now suing. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District is threatening multimillion-dollar fines. Yet Lennar is still complaining that any effort to shut down the site, even for short periods of time, would be unfair — because, the company says in a confidential memo, that would cost $40,000 a day.

This doesn’t sound like a company that can be trusted — yet Mayor Gavin Newsom now wants to give the outfit even more public land. A measure headed for the June 2008 ballot would allow Lennar to develop thousands of homes at Candlestick Point — and possibly build a new stadium for the 49ers. The stadium deal is pure political bullshit; Newsom doesn’t want to be accused of "losing" the local football team, so he’ll toss whatever public cash he can scrape up in the Niners’ direction. But the team wants to leave, the stadium does little for the neighborhood economy, and Lennar is going to keep cutting corners (and public safety) to improve its bottom line.

Sounds like a bad deal to me.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Sup. Aaron Peskin hates billboards, and mostly I agree with him — the whole damn world feels like a commercial these days, and it’s nice to be able to walk around a few parts of the city and not be surrounded by giant illuminated ads. But as Election Day approached this fall, I felt like something was missing from San Francisco.

October in this city used to mean brightly colored campaign festoonery on lampposts, utility poles … anywhere anyone could legally stick a sign promoting or attacking a candidate or ballot measure. Yeah, it got a bit ugly, and yeah, it was one more way that people with money were able to get their message out and get a leg up on the people who weren’t well funded. And it was always a mess in late November, when the campaigns conveniently forgot to take their posters down. But it also, I think, served to remind everyone that an election was coming up.

That doesn’t matter so much when the office of the president of the United States is on the ballot, because most people at least know that’s going on. But this year only about 30 percent of voters bothered to go to the polls — and since San Francisco has elections at least twice per year and not all of them feature a high-profile race, it’s not a bad idea to do something festive to get everybody thinking about them.

So while I didn’t oppose Peskin’s ordinance banning campaign signs on public property, I’m thinking maybe we should modify it a bit. I’m not sure exactly how; maybe we set aside a small amount of money from the public campaign fund and give local artists modest grants to come up with wild and colorful posters announcing the election and encouraging people to vote. We let churches and nonprofits hang signs celebrating anniversaries and special events — why not public art celebrating our semiannual bout of obsessive democracy?

Just a thought.

And here’s another:

I have friends who are employed in the world of philanthropy (that is, they either administer grants or seek them), and we were all complaining the other day about how people like Bill Gates get to set international health policy. When Gates decides something’s a problem, it suddenly has vast resources — and his opinion about world health isn’t always shared by experts in the field.

In a better world we would tax Gates and Microsoft at a level that would provide adequate resources for our elected representatives to make choices about global problems, but these days the rich don’t pay taxes — yet they can set policy. So I had a suggestion:

What if Gates decided to give, say, a billion dollars to some needy urban public school district? I don’t know — Detroit or Jackson, Miss., … or San Francisco. My friends, who understand how these things work, said I was nuts; much of that money would immediately be lost to corruption.

Maybe — but what if it weren’t a lump sum? What if the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just doubled the annual budget of the San Francisco Unified School District for the next 10 years? What if the "project," so to speak, was to demonstrate how effective the public sector can be at educating kids if the resources are available?

And maybe after 10 years the Gates folks could do a massive public relations campaign and people would realize that higher taxes for public schools might make for a better society.

Happy Thanksgiving. *

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I called labor activist Robert Haaland a few days after the election to chat about what the victory of Proposition A meant, and I wound up interrupting his vacation in Maui. I shouldn’t feel so bad — anyone who takes his cell phone on vacation and returns calls from political reporters has nobody to blame but himself … but still, I wanted to get off the phone quickly and let him get back to his sun and sand and Bikram yoga.

It wasn’t happening. Even from Hawaii, even with all of us in a celebratory mood over the way the progressives stomped Don Fisher, Haaland had a somber note to share.

"Queer progressives were missing in action on Props. A and H," he told me. "I think they were spending all their time fighting over Mark and Carole."

What he meant, of course, was that people active in the LGBT community spent their energy these past two months in organizing (and bickering over) the Harvey Milk Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Democratic Club’s endorsement for the June 2008 State Senate race. The two candidates, Assemblymember Mark Leno and incumbent Carole Migden, are both, generally speaking, progressive politicians. They both have active, loyal groups of LGBT supporters, and they have both poured considerable effort into getting the Milk club endorsement, which puts a stamp of progressive legitimacy on the winner.

But if you’ve followed the whole mess on the www.sfbg.com politics blog, you know it’s been nasty and bitter. The meeting at which the club decided (or maybe didn’t decide) when to schedule its formal endorsement vote was a mess of procedural questions, shouting, alleged violations of Robert’s Rules of Order, utter confusion at the end, and recriminations afterward. A lot of people who used to like one another are still steaming about it, using epithets we typically save for the Republicans in Washington DC.

I’ve said this before, and I’m going to do it again, as loud as I can:

Knock it off. All of you.

Look: Leno is running against Migden. You can think that’s a bad and divisive political idea or you can think that he has every right to seek office in a democracy and hold an incumbent accountable. It doesn’t matter; the race is on. Next June we’ll all be voting for one or the other.

And five months later control of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will be in the balance, and we will desperately need a united progressive front to make sure that Gavin Newsom’s allies don’t win. We can’t afford to be mad at one another. We can’t afford an ugly progressive split. We can’t afford to let the Leno-Migden race devolve into personal attacks. We can’t be demonizing one another.

Don’t start with your he-did-it-first-she-did-it-first stuff either. Nobody’s completely innocent here; both sides have said and done things that have inflamed the situation.

I’m an idealist and an optimist; that’s how I survive. I actually believe that this city, and this movement, is mature enough politically to have a race like Migden vs. Leno without leaving lasting scars that will hurt all of our causes for years to come.

But when I mentioned to a downtown operative the other day that I was worried that people like Debra Walker and Howard Wallace will wind up hating each other, he told me gleefully that "Don Fisher would happily pay money to see that."

Think about it.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I’ve been talking to the folks at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association about housing. It’s been an interesting conversation — SPUR has been known largely as an advocate for downtown development and rarely as a beacon of progressive wisdom.

But these days there are people on staff who really care about urban issues, and they aren’t always wrong. So when Dave Snyder, SPUR’s transportation person, who was formerly the director of the SF Bicycle Coalition, phoned and asked me to come by and discuss the Guardian‘s call for a new housing policy, I was happy to pay a visit.

And after talking to SPUR’s executive director, Gabriel Metcalf, and policy director, Sarah Karlinsky, I realized that we agree on a basic frame of reference.

San Francisco is in a state of crisis that threatens the future of the city. Housing isn’t just another policy issue to debate; it’s the central factor shaping the future of the city. If we do nothing — in fact, if we go along as we have been doing, building a few thousand units of market-rate housing and some affordable units on the side — we’re heading for disaster. This will become a city where only rich people can live, where a few working-class and poor folks are tolerated but the majority sentiment favors the very wealthy. It will be a city unlike the one so many of us love. The politics will be much more financially conservative. Social liberals like Gavin Newsom will be fine, but anyone who dares talk about business paying for health care or taxes supporting social programs will be irrelevant to electoral politics. As Calvin Welch likes to say, who lives here votes here.

The SPUR board has a lot of downtown types and developers, and some of them probably think it would be a fine thing if San Francisco became a city of wealthier homeowners. I don’t think the staff are of the same view. Snyder, Metcalf, Karlinsky, and I all agree: what’s happening now is simply unacceptable.

We part, sharply, when we talk about solutions. Metcalf argues that building lots and lots of housing, of all kinds — tens of thousands of units a year, bringing San Francisco to the density of Paris — will eventually bring down costs and make the city affordable again. And failing to build enough market-rate housing will just put more pressure on the existing housing stock, driving up prices even more.

That position requires a certain faith in market–based solutions, and I’ve always argued that the economics of San Francisco housing are too unusual for traditional thinking. Luxury condos in this city are like jails and freeways: you build them, they fill up, and the problem you set out to solve is still there. The new housing downtown isn’t keeping down prices (or demand) in the neighborhoods; it’s creating its own new demand.

When I suggested that we stop building new housing for the rich until we have, say, 40,000 new units for low-income and middle-class San Franciscans, Snyder jotted down some figures and told me the price tag for that much affordable housing would be $8 billion. Actually, if some of the housing is put into land trusts and is available for purchase by middle-income people, that number drops a bit, and if you leverage state and federal money, the amount San Francisco has to raise drops again, maybe to $2 billion or so. Still, it’s a very big number.

And it’s a very big problem. And in one sense, if we don’t solve it, nothing else really matters.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The battle over propositions A and H isn’t just about transportation. Sure, Prop. A is about reforming Muni, and Prop. H claims to be about neighborhood parking, but as Steven T. Jones reports on page 18, this is really about whether a Republican billionaire can buy a San Francisco election with a populist-sounding theme.

And it’s about whether this city is mature enough and its residents smart enough to recognize that everything the George W. Bush administration (and the Ronald Reagan administration and the entire Republican establishment over the past quarter century) says is fundamentally wrong: Progress sometimes requires sacrifice. You can’t get something for nothing. And government can be the solution, not just the problem.

Everyone in this town knows that global warming is real and is a problem. Everyone knows that society has to make some changes. And everyone with any sense knows that one of those changes involves reducing the use of private automobiles, particularly in cities.

Transit planners can tell you that the relationship between cars and buses in San Francisco is brutal. Every car on the streets creates traffic, which slows down buses. Every time the buses slow down, more people want to drive their cars. And the further this loop of doom continues, the worse the impact on livability in the city and the viability of the planet will be.

Muni needs a lot of things to make it function better, and Prop. A includes some of them. But one of the biggest things it needs is less traffic downtown — which means fewer cars. That means the city ought to make it inconvenient and expensive to drive into the downtown area.

But Don Fisher, of the Gap fame, wants to give downtown developers the right to build as much parking as they want. That’s what Prop. H would do — and his campaign is deceptively appealing. He’s running against the "social engineers" at City Hall, trying to get everyone who hates looking for a parking space to support him.

That way leads to disaster. I hope we don’t listen.

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