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Politics Blog

Margaret Brodkin, former DCYF director, honored as ‘Community Builder’

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By Rebecca Bowe

A little more than a month after Mayor Gavin Newsom asked former Department of Children, Youth and their Families director Margaret Brodkin to step down from her post, community support for her work is still very much in place. At an annual fundraising event called Soul of the City, hosted by the San Francisco Organizing Project on Feb. 23, Brodkin was honored with a Community Builder Award.

Brodkin, who is currently serving as director of the New Day for Learning Initiative, a project aimed at galvanizing efforts for a more just and comprehensive educational system in the city, thanked the crowd who had gathered at a Mission District restaurant for the Soul of the City celebration. But she also expressed disappointment about being removed from her position at DCYF, which she was appointed to in 2004. “I lost a job that I was very devoted to and felt I’d lived a lifetime to do,” she said. On the day that she was asked to step down, the mayor’s office issued a press release to put a good face on it, but Coleman Advocates for Children & Youth worried that her dismissal set the stage for a “possible raid, erosion, or elimination of the children’s fund and other critical services for our kids and families.”

Meanwhile, members of SFOP and others working on education issues in the city are gearing up for tough work ahead on pending budget cuts that could affect schools and youth programs. The coalition has had success in the past: Last April, the organizing project spearheaded an effort to protect the jobs of 535 teachers from seven schools in the county whose employment was threatened by state budget cuts. Facing pressure from parents and teachers, city officials agreed to release $20 million from the city’s Rainy Day Reserve to reinstate the teachers’ salaries. But with the dismal financial landscape on the state and local levels, another battle looms ahead. “How can I tell my daughter to do the best she can when the education is not available?” asked Michelle Antone, a SFOP community leader, whose daughter attends school at Sanchez College Preparatory School.

Chron flackery poses as news

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By Tim Redmond

David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has a few choice words for the Chron in Columbia Journalism Review. He’s got a good point — the Chronicle basically ran a Hearst press release as news on the front page.

Reminiscent of the days when the Chronicle and the old Examiner formed a joint operating agreement in the 1960s. The deal, which changed journalism and the newspaper business in San Francisco forever, was announced in a small, brief item that ended: “Neither publisher could be reached for comment.”

Details of Chronicle ‘s cost-cutting/closing scenarios emerge

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Text by Sarah Phelan

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Proposed cuts at the Chron will be painful and could even be fatal for the city’s most influential daily.

Cutting half the Chronicle’s staff. Outsourcing operations. Busting the union. Selling the Chronicle to media baron Dean Singleton. Closing down the paper entirely.

All these equally strange and bleak media futures were hovering on the Chronicle’s horizon, as representatives for the paper and Hearst Corporation met with leaders of the Northern California Media Workers Guild today, in an effort to keep the Chronicle open, after Hearst announced it will close San Francisco’s daily paper, if cost-cutting plans don’t pan out.

After a morning meeting spilled into the afternoon, representatives from Northern California Media Workers Guild released a bulletin, saying they met with reps from the Chron and Hearst to discuss “the cost-cutting proposal.”

“We opened the meeting by underscoring our commitment to our membership and the community to do all we can to reach an agreement that will keep The Chronicle open and return it to profitability,” Guild representatives stated.

But Jerry Roberts, a former Chronicle managing editor, burst out laughing, when informed by phone that one of the aims that emerged from that meeting was to return to profitability a paper that has lost $50 million a year.

“That will definitely be an uphill slog,” said Roberts, who left the Chronicle seven years ago to become editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press and is now an adviser to the Daily Nexus, UC Santa Barbara’s student newspaper.

The Chron — for sale? Shut down?

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By Tim Redmond

Well, that’s the news, anyway. Frank Vega, the publisher, sent a memo out to employees today that lays out some grim options (thanks, SFIST for breaking the story and running the memo):

Memo from Frank Vega, Chairman & Publisher
February 24, 2009

Dear Fellow Employees:

The rapidly declining economy, coupled with severely declining advertising revenues, is forcing nearly every newspaper company to re-think how it conducts business while continuing to serve its respective communities.

Despite all of our best efforts as an organization, The Chronicle continues to show staggering losses each week. Recent staff and expense reductions have not stemmed these losses, which are only worsening in the present economy. In response to our financial picture and the bleak economic forecast for the foreseeable future, our management team has begun a series of cost-saving initiatives designed to alleviate those losses.

First and foremost of these cost savings will be a significant reduction in force across all areas of our operation affecting both represented and non-represented employees. We will shortly begin discussions with union leadership on proposals. Our current situation dictates that we accomplish these cost savings quickly. Business as usual is no longer an option.

If we are unable to accomplish these reductions in the immediate future, Hearst Corporation, which owns The Chronicle, has informed us that it will offer the newspaper for sale or close it altogether. We know these are painful times for everyone and we face difficult choices. We share in the sincere hope that we will reach agreement with all parties involved on the concessions needed to continue to operate and provide the Bay Area with a quality newspaper.

I will update you throughout this process. Thank you for your support and good work, particularly in economic times that are difficult for all of us.

Now, I agree with the SFIST folks — this could be a shot across the bow to the unions, a message that they better accept deep job and pay cuts or lose everything. Vega is known for being a tough negotiator who wore a gun to work during the Detroit News-Detroit Press Press strike in 1995. And even he’s had a hard time getting costs under control at the Chron, which is still losing roughly $1 million a week. I doubt that Hearst would actually shutter the only major daily paper in San Francisco. Particularly since Vega has negotiated a contract with a Canadian company to print the paper on fancy new presses — and it would be expensive as hell to get out of that.

On the other hand, the green-eyeshade guys in New York aren’t going to tolerate these losses much longer. And if the Chron goes on the block, you have to wonder: Who’s going to buy it?

Garamendi leads the way on reform

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Some California heavy hitters, led by the Bay Area Council and including Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, are meeting up in Sacto today to talk about a California Constitutional convention (pdf).

The idea: The state’s such a mess right now that we might as well get a group of people (not elected legislators) together and rewrite the rules for governing.

It’s either a brilliant idea or a horrible one, depending, to a great extent, on whether the progressives in this state have it together to influence the outcome. Otherwise, we’ll wind up with all sorts of awful stuff in there.
Guardian report Rebecca Bowe is there, and will be blogging on it later today, but an interesting element is already emerging. I just got a copy of Garamendi’s speech, and the Lt. Guv, who based on his history would seem to be the most moderate to conservative Democrat, is going out front on the reform platform:

“We have tied ourselves in knots with the two-thirds vote requirement. It’s time to go back to what this nation established years ago – a majority rule plan, plain and simple, on every issue,” Garamendi said. “That would solve a lot of problems. Whatever the minority party is, they should not dominate the policies of the state of California. That’s the two-thirds vote requirement on appropriations including the budget and taxes.”

That makes him the only leading Democrat in the governor’s race who is willing to say publicly that the Legislature ought to be able to raise taxes on a 55 percent vote.

Attorney General Jerry Brown, who built his early career on political reform, is running for the fences and hasn’t taken any position on the 2/3 requirement.

And San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who ought to be the liberal in the race, is kinda sorta playing the halfway game. Eric Jaye, his campaign manager, told me today that Newsom supports reducing the threshold for budget approval – but hasn’t decided about the tax threshold.

“It’s a question that’s been posed to him and he’s exploring it,” Jaye said. “There’s no question that the current system’s broken and needs to be fixed.”

Yes, it needs to be fixed – but fixing it by allowing the Democratic majority to pass a budget, and then allow the Republican minority to hold the state hostage because the anti-tax nuts won’t approve the spending measures, is worse than no fix at all.

So the lineup for gov is already shaping up in odd ways, with Garamendi becoming the populist reformer, Brown acting like the kind of politician he used to despise, and Newsom getting left behind with the really squishy can’t-take-a-stand center.

People’s History lessons

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By Steven T. Jones

If there is a Bible of the modern American progressive movement (and there probably isn’t, given our skepticism about divine revelations), it would probably be A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
For many of us, it was like a lightbulb that illuminated the flipside of the fables we were told in school. And once we understood our country’s history from the perspective of its losers and the vanquished, we instinctively knew that making progress meant finally dealing honestly with our past and with the people being left behind in the present.
Voices from that seminal book will emanate from the stage at Mission High School this Thursday is a special, star-studded performance that includes Zinn, Benjamin Bratt, Josh Brolin, Diane Lane, Boots Riley, and Robin Penn Wright. Unfortunately, the performance sold out quickly, but it’s just nice to know it’s there.

Weighing in on the “Wrecked Park Department”

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By Ben Terrall

Hundreds of Recreation and Park Department workers and their supporters, family, and friends packed a Recreation and Park Commission hearing on proposed budget cuts to the department on Thursday. Overflow attendees watched the hearing on a large screen in another room.

They warned that the cuts will decimate violence prevention programs and have other serious long-term costs to San Francisco, while criticizing the purported privatization savings as a costly illusion. And still, the commission voted unanimously to approve the package of cuts.

SF health care, for the record

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By Tim Redmond

I’m glad to see that our new president is giving San Francisco credit for taking a big step forward toward universal health care. But this is a bit misleading:

“Instead of talking about health care, mayors like Gavin Newsom in San Francisco have been ensuring that those in need receive it,” [Obama] said.

Actually, Sup. Tom Ammiano and his colleagues developed Healthy San Francisco. Newsom joined in later, after the hard work was done. Ammiano has been very good about letting Newsom take some of the glory, but it’s a bit annoying for the rest of us to see a guy who has never been good at developing and implementing his own programs get so much praise for someone else’s work.

Purple Ticket Blues

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Text by Sarah Phelan

When Sup. Chris Daly recently asked that a measure “commending Sen. Dianne Feinstein for her successful chairing of the 2009 Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies” be sent to committee for a hearing, some folks asked, what gives?

Turns out that Daly holds Feinstein responsible for the infamous purple ticket holder fiasco, in which thousands of Obama volunteers were stuck at gates and in tunnels, thereby missing the historic inauguration of their candidate,

“As chair of the inaugural committee, Feinstein was responsible for major f-ups in terms of lack of organization,” Daly told the Guardian. “Because of these failures, thousands, most of them core Obama volunteers, missed his inauguration.”

To date, the inaugural committee has apologized and Feinstein has initiated an investigation, but many ticket holders like Lindsay O’Grady aren’t satisfied.

The parking bitch

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By Diane Sussman

There is a subterranean cache of parking spaces in the city that, if justly liberated, could get hundreds of cars off the streets.

I refer to landlords, many of them absentee bridge-and-tunnelers, who are using garage spaces that rightfully should be reserved for tenants’ cars as free storage units for their personal possessions or as permanent parking spots for their own infrequently used cars.

I personally know of two buildings – one a four-unit building in Potrero Hill and the other a 10-unit building in Alamo Square – whose tenants have been forced to vie for street parking for years because their landlords are otherwise occupying the space.

Even more galling, these same landlords have “no parking” signs posted on these garages, and have no qualms about towing or ticketing when their theoretical “driveways” are blocked. (Note to landlords: In typical shit rolling downhill fashion, these displaced tenants often block the bona fide working garages of people who do use their garages to come and go from work, errands, doctor visits and so on. Their justification: “There was no place to park.”)

It’s time for the city to get hip to this cynical practice and eradicate it. Garages should be for the people who live there — in this case, the tenants (who, let’s not forget, are paying some of the highest rents in the country for their apartments). Here are my ideas for accomplishing this.

1. Establish an anonymous tip line for tenants to report landlords who are using their garages in their buildings as storage units. If a landlord is reported, the DPT (or if there is no existing bureaucracy for this, then someone should invent one) should do an inspection. Landlords in violation should be forced to clean out the garages and offer space to their tenants.

2. Landlords who want the space for their personal use – and who have permission from a kindly car-free tenant – should reimburse the tenant at a rate commensurate with long-term parking fees in the city.

3. Landlords whose garages have no cars moving in and out should be prohibited from towing cars blocking the space. Instead, they should allow their tenants to permanently occupy the space, either by parking in the driveway or parallel to the curb in front the driveway (perfectly legal). If multiple tenants want a shot, the landlord should offer a fair rotation.

Incidentally, the DPT does not allow people with non-working garages to issue citations. “No, not allowed. No,” said a DPT dispatcher. “You must be able to demostrate that you can get your car in and out – we will absolutely make you open that garage door to prove it.”

All I’m saying is, let’s add some spirit to the letter of the law.

New push to legalize drugs

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By Steven T. Jones

At a time when the recession is forcing tax increases and deep cuts in government spending — and when California is being ordered by federal judges to substantially reduce its prison population — this would seem to be the ideal moment to end the costly, wasteful war on drugs.
That’s the hope of Assembly member Tom Ammiano, who tells the Guardian that next week he will introduce legislation to decriminalize and tax marijuana, a move that might instantly turn a huge drain on the public treasury (at least $17 billion a year nationally, and closer to $50 billion once related costs are figured in) into what saves the state from financial ruin, given that pot is California’s number one cash crop.
“This is long overdue,” said Ammiano, who will work on the measure with John Vasconcellos, who represented the Silicon Valley in the Legislature for 38 years and was the last legislator to really carry the banner for legalizing marijuana. In fact, Ammiano says he’s basically reintroducing Vasconcellos’s bill from 2004, which went nowhere.
Meanwhile, another former member of the Board of Supervisors, Carol Ruth Silver, this week resigned as director of SF’s Prisoner Legal Services program out of frustration with the large number of nonviolent drug users in the San Francisco jail, joining a new Law Enforcement Against Prohibition campaign for the legalization of all drugs.
As she told the Guardian, “The jail is full of people who should not be there.”

A couple of interesting candidates

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By Tim Redmond

A couple of interesting candidates looking at runs for those even-numbered supervisorial seats in 2010.

In district two, where the progressives have never had much of a chance (Gavin Newsom, then Michela Alioto-Pier), Janet Reilly, who ran a strong race against Fiona Ma for state Assembly, told me she’s looking at the race. She’d be well financed – her husband, Clint Reilly, is one of the top campaign donors in the city and she’s proven she can raise money on her own. She’s clearly not as far to the left as John Avalos or Eric Mar, but it’s a conservative district – and she’s a smart, articulate woman with strong policy ideas who would probably vote with the progressives some of the time and would be independent of the mayor.

Then there’s district 6. I’m starting to sense that Jane Kim isn’t pushing herself out there as a candidate right now — but another activist is, and his campaign raises some interesting questions.

Paul Hogarth, managing editor of BeyondChron, an online newspaper, is planning to file a statement of intent to run sometime this spring. “Yes, the rumor is true. I’m the candidate who can get things done for the District — having worked in the community for about 9 years,” he told me by email.

I like Paul, and I like BeyondChron, which by any standard is part of the progressive community. We’ve had some disagreements, but that’s pretty common in the San Francisco left.

And he’s certainly qualified – he’s a lawyer, a former Berkeley Rent Board commissioner, and has been a tenant organizer with the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. He’s also been pretty active in the Democratic Party and has shown some solid journalistic instincts and abilities.

So I just assumed that he would take a leave of absence from Beyond Chron when he launched his campaign. I mean, it’s a brave new world, and the line between journalists and activists has been getting pretty blurry, but I’m not sure how you can be the managing editor of a political newspaper, and actively report on and write about local politicians and campaigns, when you’re actually running for office yourself.

But no – when I asked Paul about that, he told me he saw no conflict at all. I tried to reach his boss, Randy Shaw, by phone but after we played tag a little, I went to email and asked:

“Hi, Randy, sorry we didn’t connect by phone today. I hear Paul is running for D6 supe; how you going to handle that at BeyondChron? Can he possibly cover local politics while he’s running for office? Strikes me as a problem.”

Shaw’s response:

“Why?

I pursued it: “Well, one reason is that people will think he’s promoting his own interests by the way he covers candidates and issues. For example, there might be a perception that he was writing more positive things about people who endorsed him. It’s pretty basic journalistic ethics. I have immense respect for Paul, and I don’t think he’d do anything unethical, but in the media. appearance matters. I know you aren’t a traditional news outlet, but people trust and respect you in part for your independence.”

Shaw: “This recalls a past discussion I’ve had with the Guardian, where it became clear we have different views of activists as journalists.”

I don’t recall that discussion, although I’m sure it happened, since I talk about this stuff all the time. I am an activist and a journalist, and the Guardian is a newspaper that cares about and promotes causes. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with BeyondChron, which is part of Randy Shaw’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic shop, covering the city from a pro-tenant, progressive perspective. I’m glad BeyondChron is around.

But there’s a difference between writing about and promoting causes that you care about and promoting something that gives you, personally, a direct financial or career benefit. How will we know that a piece Paul Hogarth writes about a local politician isn’t tainted by the fact that he wants that person to endorse him?

Paul seems to be aware of the problem; when he wrote about Mark Leno in the state Senate primary, he was careful to run disclosures like

EDITOR’S NOTE: As a private citizen, Paul Hogarth has endorsed Mark Leno in the State Senate race. He does not play an advisory role in the campaign, nor did he coordinate with Leno’s staff in writing this article.

Fair enough. Full disclosure is good. But what’s he going to do now – stop writing about local politics? Or end all his articles with

EDITORS NOTE: Paul Hogarth is running for supervisor in District 6, but none of the commentary about any other office holder here should be construed as a possible pitch for an endorsement?

And what if one of the other candidates argues that his paid promotional platform is in fact an in-kind campaign contribution? I’m not sure I’d buy that – there’s a First Amendment issue here – but the Ethics Commission might consider it worth investigation, which would be a huge distraction to both the candidate and his online newspaper.

It’s going to be tricky. That’s all I’m saying.

Layoffs take effect tomorrow for 236 city employees

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By Rebecca Bowe

February 20 is a date that many city workers have probably looked toward with anxiety ever since Mayor Gavin Newsom first announced the 2008-09 midyear budget cuts. Tomorrow, 236 layoffs of city employees will take effect, signifying the first (but not the worst) of several waves of job cuts that will be dealt in an effort to remedy budget shortfalls for the current fiscal year and the 2009-10 fiscal year. On March 20, another 22 city employees will lose their jobs, and two months from now, yet another 94 layoffs will become effective, according to Deputy Controller Monique Zmuda. All of these pink slips are being distributed to address the current year’s budget deficit.

Many of the layoffs that will take effect tomorrow are concentrated in the Department of Public Health. According to a breakdown of layoffs by department provided by the City Controller’s office, 49 are unit clerks in DPH, another 21 are nursing assistants and 13 are licensed vocational nurses. (These numbers don’t include unfilled positions that were eliminated from the budget.)

But these blows won’t be the heaviest: On May 1, an unknown but likely much larger number of layoffs will take effect as part of the city’s attempt to remedy the 2009-10 budget shortfall, which is projected to be more than $500 million. “I’m assuming that’s going to be much larger because we are working with a larger deficit,” Zmuda said, but added that she did not yet know what that number would be.

Talk about making sausage ….

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By Tim Redmond

The budget deal taht came down early this morning is ugly. One Republican, Sen. Abel Maldonado, was able to hijack the process and make some crazy demands. He singlehandly forced the Democrats to get rid of a 12 cent increase in the gas tax, costing the state billions. Then he forced the Democrats to accept a statewide ballot measure for an open primary system, which the progressives hate. (Open primaries allow Republicans to vote for Democrats who are more moderate; Nancy Pelosi went to Congress in an open primary, beating then-Sup. Harry Britt. Britt won among the Democrats, but Pelosi got enough Republican votes to give her the job.) Assemblymember Tom Ammiano told me the budget package was bad enough but he simply couldn’t swallow the open primary measure. “A lot of us didn’t vote for it,” he said. But it passed anyway, with the simple majority it needed, and that (along with a long list of other awful stuff) bought Malonado’s vote.

Ammiano’s statement on the deal reflects what a lot of progessives think:

No one is happy about the service cuts, layoffs and tax increases that were a necessary part of this plan. In voting for this budget, I want to acknowledge that we have made painful cuts to vital human services that serve the poor and the elderly as well as deep reductions in education spending for our schools. We did so with great reluctance in the hope that some of these cuts will be restored through the recently passed federal stimulus bill.

The respite we have after closing this budget shortfall is short-lived and there is a long, difficult road ahead to restore our fiscal stability. The approved plan did take a step in that direction by including a rainy day fund that will help us offset budget cuts in future years

Brian at Calitics has a nice line here about Maldonado’s hypocrisy. And there’s a nice analysis here of what the package really looks like.

State Sen. Mark Leno told me that part of the problem was that the Republican caucus was a mess — the GOP leader, Dave Codgill of Modesto, was part of the budget negotiations, but when he agreed to accept tax increases, many of his colleagues refused to go along. Leno says Codgill was a “profile in courage” — he knew that voting for tax hikes would harm, and possibly doom, his career as a Republican in a conservative district, but he did what had to be done to keep the state solvent. And when the GOP lawmakers balked, Leno announced on the floor that the should either follow their leader or find a new one. A few hours later, that’s what happened — Codgill was removed as minority leader and replaced with an even-more-ardent anti-tax guy, Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth of Riverside County, who wanted to scrap the entire budget and start over with a “no-new-taxes” plan. That was just pure political posturing — it was never going to happen.

What a mess. I’m with Jean Ross of the California Budget Project, who says that , “If this year’s budget negotiations don’t increase public support for reducing the vote requirement for approval of a budget and tax increases, it is not clear what will.”

Bay Guardian lawyers win major award

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The Dream Team: From left, paralegal Karen Douglas, Craig Moody, Guardian publishers Jean Dibble and Bruce Brugmann, Ralph Alldredge and Rich Hill.

By Tim Redmond

California Lawyer magazine has given the attorneys who represented the Bay Guardian in our predatory-pricing case against SF Weekly a CLAY award, citing the case as one of the most important legal battles of 2008.

The legal team of Ralph Alldredge, Rich Hill and Craig Moody – all solo practitioners – won the coveted award, which reflects the significance of a victory by a local business against a predatory chain.

In what the magazine called “a David and Goliath face-off,” the Guardian sued the Weekly and its chain parent, Village Voice Media, alleging that the big publishing outfit had for years sold ads below cost in an attempt to damage the locally owned competitor.

A jury found unanimously in favor of the Guardian, and awarded us $6.3 million. Judge Marla Miller later raised the damages to $15.6 million. With attorney’s fees and interest, VVM now owes us roughly $20 million. The case is on appeal.

Congrats to Ralph, Rich and Craig, who labored for years on this case, at every moment and every level fighting a bigger and better-financed opponent that went through a string of large and small law firms, seeking someone who could stand up to our team. In the end, the law, the facts and three tough, smart attorneys were on our side, and the SF Weekly just couldn’t compete.

The case is on appeal.

Organize around progressive priorities

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By Steven T. Jones

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), the only progressive independent in Congress, last night told a capacity crowd in the Unitarian Universalist Church that now is the moment for aggressive grassroots organizing around progressive issues, lest big-money interests destroy the possibilities raised in the November election.
“Politics is something that happens 365 days a year,” he said, later adding, “We’re going to have to develop the strongest grassroots movement this country has ever seen.”
His words resonated especially strongly with me because I had just come from another meeting that illustrated exactly what he was talking about. More than 200 people answered the call of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition to organize an aggressive, detailed advocacy campaign to ensure the city builds all 56 proposed bicycle projects when a court injunction gets lifted later this year.
“We are embarking tonight on the biggest, most ambitious project the Bike Coalition has ever taken on,” SFBC director Leah Shahum told the crowd. “We’re in a fine position to get the whole enchilada, all 56 projects.”
But that will only happen if bicycle advocates are organized, smart, and bold. And Sanders said the same is true for all this country’s most pressing problems, from scaling back our imperial overreach to overcoming greed and severe economic inequities to creating a national health plan.

D.I.Y. campaign-finance search? Good luck with that!

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By Rebecca Bowe

This week, the Guardian offers a look at the biggest spenders in local politics, using SF Ethics Commission campaign-finance data from 1998 to 2008. The Ethics’ Campaign Finance Database is an excellent tool for answering questions about which organizations have given money to which causes and candidates over the years, but the system could be a lot more user friendly.

For instance, plunging into the bowels of the SF Ethics Commission database to try and find out who’s opening the fattest wallets come election time isn’t as easy a task as the average voter might hope. Although the information is a matter of public record that’s available to everyone, there is no ranking system that makes the highest donors easy to spot – so researchers literally have to pick through tens of thousands of data rows in order to spot the high contributions. Meanwhile, there are limitations with the short-cut method of finding such information, which is to use the “Advanced Search” function on the city agency’s Web page. That search engine spits back incomplete results: Our No. 2 top donor, for example, doesn’t show up, even though a comprehensive search of the campaign-finance spreadsheet from 2001 reveals that he contributed some $3.5 million to his own run for mayor.

Newsom says no budget crisis

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By Tim Redmond

Well, what do you know? The mayor doesn’t think San Francisco has a budget crisis. At least, that’s what he told the Chronicle’s editorial board::

“We’re not in a crisis, but we’re acting as if we are,” Mayor Gavin Newsom said in a phone interview over the weekend. “We’re paying our bills, there’s no threat of IOUs.”

Um, a few months from now the mayor and the supes have to figure out how to cut half the discretionary money in the General Fund. That’s pretty much the definition of a crisis. And while Board President David Chiu is holding meetings and talking about it, the mayor is acting like we can worry about this tomorrow. Tra la la.

Ringling animal abuse trial continues

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By Steven T. Jones
Former Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus elephant handler Tom Rider — a key witness in a landmark elephant abuse civil case and a source for the cover story expose that I wrote in August — testified today in Washington DC federal court about alleged abuse of endangered Asian elephants that he witnessed.
“He testified that during his employment at Ringling Bros., he observed the bull hook being used in a manner that caused elephants to bleed hundreds of times. He stated that all the elephants had bloody hook marks and boils at one time or another. Mr. Rider went on to testify that he complained to his supervisor and others at Ringling Bros. about the elephant mistreatment and his job was threatened as a result,” said attorney Tracy Silverman with the Animal Welfare Institute.
Rider and the other plaintiffs in the case have been harshly criticized by Ringling lawyers, so I asked Silverman how Rider fared. “Tom did well. He was on the stand for awhile facing a tough cross examination, but he hung in there and his passion and devotion for the elephants really showed,” she said.
Also expected to testify this week as an expert witness for the plaintiffs (who hope to wrap their case up by the end of the week) is Colleen Kinzley, general curator of the Oakland Zoo. The trial is expected to wrap up by the first week in March, with a verdict that could severely restrict the circus’s use of elephants.

Wolf mugged, more Ryan fallout

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Text by Sarah Phelan

With Congress about to reconsider a media shield bill, here’s another reason why legislators should protect reporters from being forced to reveal confidential sources: it could help prevent reporters from getting mugged by the folks who they might otherwise meet in prison while being held in contempt for refusing to reveal their sources.

That at least seems to be the take away message from the February 4 mugging of Josh Wolf, who says he was attacked outside Volare’s Pizza on Haight Street by Terrell Trammell, 28, who he met when both were inmates of Dublin Federal Correction Center.

Wolf, who spent a record-breaking 226 days in prison for protecting source materials from then US Attorney Kevin Ryan, who has since become Mayor Gavin Newsom’s director of Criminal Justice, wrote about the attack in the Palo Alto Daily Post, where he works as a reporter.

Trammel was in Dublin at the same time as Wolf, following a series of violent events that included Page Street Mob members trying to murder Trammel in 2004, in retaliation for the murder of mob member Eugene Hill.

But on the night of February 4, both Wolf and Trammell were “free”, when Wolf ran into Trammell while waiting for food at Volare’s Pizza.

‘I talked to him about Greg Anderson,” Wolf recalls, referring to the Barry Bonds’ trainer, who was also at Dublin during Wolf’s tenure, ” and how I’d heard they were going after his wife,” Wolf recalls, And who has the better pizza in town. He asked me where I was working, and and I asked him, and he said, right here

“As I walked home with a box of pizza in one hand and two sodas in the other, I heard Trammell call from across the street, “Got a light?”” Wolf writes for the Daily Post. ” I awkwardly fished out a lighter from my pocket as he crossed the street. But when I went to hand it to him, I was greeted with a punch to the face. The pizza went flying.”

Wolf also describes how a friend of Trammell’s joins in, and how Trammel reaches into Wolf’s pocket and takes his iPhone, and then runs away.”

Reached by phone, Wolf told me that once he contacted Sup. Ross Mirkarimi about the attack, “everyone was bending over backwards to help,” and how he subsequently found himself in the awkward position of having to identify Trammell in a line-up, but that it was either do that or “wait for him to come back for me, like the school yard bully.”

Asked why Trammel attacked him, Wolf wasn’t sure: the iPhone seemed a likely motive, but then again, Wolf didn’t exactly “follow prison code,” while he and Trammel were inside.

Wolf also noted that while he was incarcerated the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution in his support, but that as far as he knows, Mayor Gavin Newsom never signed the resolution. Fact or Fiction? Stay tuned.

If you think this guv is bad ….

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By Tim Redmond

And he is bad, one of the worst in modern history … just consider one of the leading GOP contenders to succeed him. Meg Whitman — who doesn’t want to raise taxes on the rich but doesn’t seem to have any other ideas about balancing the budget — announced in her first public campaign appearance :

“Californians can no longer afford the government they have. … “I will give them the government they deserve.”

The government we deserve? That’s pretty harsh.

Getting in gear

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Photo by Tim Daw

By Steven T. Jones
Tonight at a meeting open to its 10,000 members, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is launching a campaign to push for rapid approval of the 56 bike projects studied in the city’s long-derailed Bike Plan, which will likely be approved this summer, ending a nearly three-year court injunction against any new bike projects.
And if you want to learn more about those projects and their traffic impacts, you can attend a lunchtime forum that the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association is holding tomorrow, or you can read next week’s Guardian for a complete analysis.

Free the prisoners, a case study

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By Steven T. Jones
Cases like this — nonviolent drug offenders sent back to prison on bullshit parole violations — make a mockery of claims that California can’t significantly reduce it’s prison population without endangering public safety.
The New York Times is right: we can and should substantially decrease our prison population.

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