OK, this is just priceless. Our celebrity Mayor Gavin Newsom and his fiance actress, Jennifer Siebel, on Saturday went weightless during a flight out of Moffett Field as part of a promotional effort by a company charging $3,500 per head to experience zero gravity in a diving airplane. The Zero G Experience send out this picture in a press release that contained this purple prose: “During the unforgettable weightless escapade, Newsom and Siebel flew like Superman, flipped like Olympic gymnasts and enjoyed 10-times more hang-time than the world’s best basketball player. The newly engaged duo floated on cloud nine as they danced mid-air in the rare and exalted state of weightlessness.”
It’s good to be the mayor.
- No categories
Politics Blog
Newsom in space
Moth Madness
Good to see the plan to spray the Bay Area with Little Brown Apple Moth-related pesticide get major ink in the Chronicle.
While the debate rages over as to whether spraying a pheromone-containing pesticide over urban areas is an efficient and public health-protective way to deal with the moth, one thing is for sure.
Having small planes fly low over your home for hours on end is extremely unpleasant.
“It was like an air raid,” is how a friend who lives in Santa Cruz described her experience of the aerial spraying that took place in Santa Cruz last fall, using crop dusters. in a questionable effort to completely eradicate this tiny moth.
“Their engines sounded like motorbikes, only overhead,” says my source, adding that though she did experience any adverse health effects, “the experience was very invasive.”
“The worst part is knowing it could happen again and again, for years,” she adds.
To find out what the California Department of Food and Agriculture is planning for your region, check their website
And to see what citizens opposed to the spraying think, check out the California Alliance to Stop the Spray‘s site.
Susan Leal’s fate to be sealed 9 am, Feb. 20?
Looks like this is the time and date that Leal’s future as SF PUC general manager will be decided:
2/20/08 Agenda Special Meeting San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
Published: 02/15/2008 | Updated: 02/15/2008
Published By: Commission
MAYOR
Susan Leal
GENERAL MANAGER
Michael Housh
SECRETARY
ORDER OF BUSINESS:
1. Call to Order
2. Roll Call
CLOSED SESSION
3. Public comments on matters to be discussed in Closed Session.
4. Motion on whether to assert the attorney-client privilege regarding the matter listed below as Conference with Legal Counsel.
THE PUBLIC UTILITIES COMMISSION WILL GO INTO CLOSED SESSION TO DISCUSS THE FOLLOWING ITEM:
5. Pursuant to Government Code section 54957 (b)(1) and San Francisco Administrative Code section 67.10 (b), discussion and possible action on a Public Employee Dismissal, Number of Employees Affected: 1.
FOLLOWING THE CLOSED SESSION, THE PUBLIC UTILITIES COMMISSION WILL RECONVENE IN OPEN SESSION.
6. Announcement following Closed Session.
7. Motion regarding whether to disclose the discussions during Closed Session.
ADJOURNMENT
In the dark with Susan Leal and PG&E
vs. 
During last night’s City Desk News Hour, the Chronicle’s Marshall Kilduff, Cecelia Vega, Rachel Gordon, Marisa Lagos, and I were discussing SFPUC appointments and the ouster of manager Susan Leal — which I blamed at least in part on PG&E’s influence — when suddenly the power went out in the television studio. Wow, we joked, PG&E was really playing hardball now. The lights and cameras came back on after about 10 minutes and we finished the show, careful not to again anger those with power (well, OK, not really).
Yet the real news on the SFPUC/PG&E/Leal front was made on the second half of the show (which is actually taped earlier in the day, whereas our part is live) when host Barbara Taylor interviewed Leal, her first extended comments since she was inexplicably fired by Mayor Gavin Newsom and then hit by a car in front of City Hall. Leal said she was more shocked than anyone that she was sacked by Newsom — who, to her face, said she was doing a fine job — and she still doesn’t fully understand it. But she did lay out some possibilities, including her public power moves that upset PG&E and innovative green programs that upstaged the moribund Mayor’s Office.
If you have Comcast cable, check out the show on Channel 11 when it replays tonight and Sunday night, both at 8:30 p.m.
The Weekly’s expert, laid low
The chain that owns the SF Weekly brought its star witness to court today, a Harvard economist with a stack of academic credentials who typically works for oil companies and who charges $1,075 an hour. He delivered quite a lecture on his own economic theory of predatory pricing – and then was laid low by a little newspaper called the Bodega Bay Navigator.
Some background before we get into the juicy details.
I was an economics major way back when. I have sat through many lectures by learned economists, have read their learned papers, and have tried to keep up somewhat on the dismal science. And I can say without hesitation that most academic economists live in a world devoid of reality.
Economists try to study human behavior as it’s manifested in markets, but they don’t want to be confused with people who actually study human behavior. They will tell you they aren’t (gasp) sociologists; they want to make everything fit in nice little mathematical theories.
To do that with such non-mathematical concepts as the actions of a small business and its owners in a community, you have to make a lot of assumptions. That’s what economists do; they make assumptions. They assume, for example, that all the participants in a market have the necessary knowledge and information to make the proper decisions. They assume that random factors like politics, love, passion, pride, anger, envy or simple nastiness are never part of the economic equation. They assume that everyone in a marketplace acts “rationally.”
That, of course, is an irrational assumption, particularly when it comes to small businesses (and even more so when it comes to the alternative press). If all of us in this business had acted rationally, there would be no Bay Guardian. There would be no SF Weekly, New Times or Village Voice Media. The entire alternative press exists because some utterly irrational people with little background in business and no rational hope for success decided to start little newspapers. They were – and many still are – motivated by politics, community service, excitement and a lot of other things, but rational business motives were never really high on the list.
Which brings us to the eminent Dr. Joseph Kalt.
The Dick and Susan show
The battle over the future direction of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission took a dramatic turn Feb. 12.
A super majority of the Board voted to reject mayoral appointee Ryan Brooks, but Sup. Chris Daly joined mayoral allies Sups. Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, Chris Daly and Sean Elsbernd, thus leaving the Board one critical vote short of the super majority currently required to reject mayoral appointees to the PUC, the city agency that wields control over Hetch Hetchy water and power, and San Francisco’s sewage and waste water systems.
DIck Sklar testifying before the Board, as he battled for his PUC seat
These votes came after Sups. Sophie Maxwell and Bevan Dufty declared it was time for new blood on the board, Sup. Sean Elsbernd argued that the PUC-related charter amendment, which the Board has just placed on the June ballot and which requires only six Supervisors to reject a PUC appointee, is a better way to secure a new commission, and the 73-year-old Sklar, who has been ill with pancreatic cancer, appeared in person to deny, amongst other things, allegations that he is a PG&E flak.
Weekly publisher admits below-cost sales
The former publisher of the SF Weekly admitted today to a key part of the Guardian’s lawsuit against the Weekly and its corporate parent.
Chris Keating, who was the Weekly publisher between 2004 and 2006, was on the stand for cross-examination by Guardian lawyer Ralph Alldredge. After a lengthy discussion in which he discussed numerous examples of efforts to win ads away from the Guardian by cutting rates, Alldredge asked him directly:
“You knew those [prices] were below your cost, right?”
Keating replied, “Yes.”
That’s a significant admission: The Guardian is claiming that the Weekly sold ads below cost with the intent to harm the locally owned paper. That’s a violation of California law.
Where were you when the war started?
Five years ago next month, San Francisco was essentially shut down by protests as the United States invaded Iraq, capping a series of large demonstrations urging our leaders not to launch an offensive war that we knew would be a disaster. The Guardian offered the most comprehensive coverage of those protests, and now we’re reexamining that momentous time to explore what it meant — then, now, and for the future.
I’ve written a bit about the project here, and I’m now conducting interviews with some of the significant players and thinkers from that time, but I also want to hear from you. How did you make your voice heard before the war? What did it mean to you? How has it affected you to watch all of our worst predictions come true? What does it mean to the future of this country and to the notion of democracy?
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section, or send them to me at steve@sfbg.com. Thanks.
The SF Weekly’s war of attrition
Another fascinating day in court in the Guardian’s predatory-pricing lawsuit against the SF Weekly and its corporate owner. The Weekly is now well into its defense case, and the lawyers for the 16-paper chain that owns the paper are making the same arguments they’ve made all along. And they aren’t holding up very well.
The Guardian, as readers of this blog know by now, is claiming that the Weekly and Village Voice Media, the chain formerly known as New Times, sold ads below cost in an effort to harm the local competitor.
Today’s main witness was Jed Brunst, the company’s Phoenix-based CFO. H. Sinclair Kerr, the Weekly’s lead attorney, asked Brunst why New Times decided to buy the Weekly in 1995. “We saw San Francisco as a very vibrant market,” Brunst testified. “We saw it as an opportunity to make money and to practice good journalism.”
It was clear that Brunst was well prepared – much of his testimony seemed pre-rehearsed, which is not terribly surprising. Lawyers in a case like this typically make sure their own witnesses aren’t going to surprise them.
But Brunst got out of the box with a big problem: He said the chain saw San Francisco as a good opportunity to make money. And it became clear as the day went on that the Weekly had never made any money at all. Neither had the East Bay Express, which New Times bought in 2001. Both lost huge amounts of cash.
Mixed verdict on SFPUC appointments
Guardian reporter Sarah Phelan reports from City Hall that the Board of Supervisors has voted 8-3 (with supervisors Michela Alioto-Pier, Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu in dissent) to reject the reappointment of Ryan Brooks to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. But in a surprising and inexplicable move, Sup. Chris Daly flipped his vote on the reappointment of Dick Sklar, providing the swing vote in favor of the nominee of Mayor Gavin Newsom. Sklar, with lots of supporters present, was approved 7-4.
Daly’s move surprised those who have sought to reject the pair and there’s now widespread speculation on what kind of deal Daly cut with the high-profile Sklar supporters (even Sen. Ted Kennedy was making calls on Sklar’s behalf), but Daly made few credible comments to reporters. Check back here later for Sarah’s full report.
P.S. The board also failed to muster the votes to block the mayor’s three new Municipal Transportation Agency appointments. All in all, it was one of Newsom’s better days at the board since he moved into Room 200.
Newsom’s Friday Special
Budget Analyst Harvey Rose says he couldn’t believe it when he got a call from the San Francisco Chronicle reporters on Feb. 8, asking him to comment on a draft report that Mayor Gavin Newsom had just released — five days before the Board of Supervisors was scheduled to see the report’s final, authorized version.
Rose’s draft, which Newsom did not invite the Guardian to read, reportedly slams the Mayor for taking more than $1 million a year from the budgets of several city departments, including the Human Services Agency and the Municipal Transportation Agency, and using these funds to pay the salaries of 11 staffers.
“I was absolutely appalled, because I never issued that report,” Rose told the Guardian, explaining that, in the interests of objectivity, he lets audited departments see a draft before he delivers the final version to the Board.
“It’s totally inappropriate to discuss a not yet signed report,” Rose said.
Sup. Jake McGoldrick who commissioned the report, called Newsom’s leak, “a serious breach of trust, a Karl Rovian move.”
“They wanted to spin the story their way, do a character assassination on Harvey Rose, instead of having a civil, open discussion,” McGoldrick said. “It’s not so much the report that disturbs me, as the way the Prince formerly known as the Mayor is handling the report.”
Even Newsom ally Sup. Sean Elsbernd said the Mayor broke normal auditing procedures.
“Usually, reports aren’t released until the t’s are crossed, and the i’s are dotted,” Elsbernd said.
Mike Lacey ducks the big ones
I missed the trial on Friday, so if the SF Weekly’s hit man, Andy Van De Voorde, wants to take a swing at me for posting information on the testimony, fine: I’m smiling, Andy. (I’m also not the only person in the courtroom from the Guardian who knows what’s going on and can take notes.)
But before we get to the day’s events, let me do my all-too-regular Van De Voorde correction file. From his most recent blog:
“What’s your official title?” asked Weekly attorney H. Sinclair Kerr Jr. in what is a traditional first question for witnesses.
“I’m the executive editor of the company and apparently the mascot,” Lacey replied.
The remark was a reference to testimony from Guardian executive editor Tim Redmond, who last week said under oath he thought of Lacey as a New Times mascot.
Um, no Andy. I didn’t say that, under oath or otherwise. That testimony was from Jennifer Lopez, who used to work for the SF Weekly.
And jeez, Andy’s in court every day.
Another correction:
[Guardian attorney Ralph] Alldredge was also skeptical about why [New Times CEO Jim] Larkin hasn’t attended the trial—an odd question given that he could have subpoenaed the New Times executive.
Actually, Andy, you might check with your lawyers: This is a California case, and as long as Larkin doesn’t live here and can’t be found within the borders of the state, we can’t subpoena him. Interesting that he hasn’t shown up once for the trial; if he had, we could have compelled him to take the stand and answer a few questions.
Now then, since we have that cleared up, let me go to the day’s events. Here’s our report:
Mike Lacey took the stand in the Guardian’s predatory pricing trial against the SF Weekly and had some trouble answering some key questions.
The editor in chief of the SF Weekly’s parent chain, the VVM/New Times/SF Weekly, said at one point that the SF Weekly was a better paper in “most all respects” to its competitor, the Guardian.
Lacey said that the Weekly was better in layout, stories, design, graphics, readers, everything. Also, he said that the Guardian was “obsessed with City Hall and City Hall minutiae” and the city was full of young people who didn’t vote and weren’t interested in politics and they came to the Weekly.
If the Weekly is such a better paper, Guardian Attorney Ralph Alldredge prodded on cross examination, why does the Weekly sell its advertising at rates so much lower than the Guardian? Why doesn’t a Weekly advertising sales person sell its advertising space at a rate higher than the Guardian? Why doesn’t the Weekly command a premium price?
Lacey ducked the questions.
Predatory pricing: A primer
The jury in the Guardian’s lawsuit against the SF Weekly got a primer today on how prdatory pricing by a big chain works.
Guardian controller Sandy Lange took the stand, and outlined the results of information she’d compiled on below-cost sales by the Weekly and the East Bay Express. The Guardian is charging that Village Voice Media, formerly known as New Times, which owns the Weekly and until recently owned the Express, has been selling ads below the cost of producing them to harm a competitor.
That’s a violation of California law.
Lange explained how she and other Guardian staffers and legal assistants had entered into an Excel spreadsheet some 20,000 sales transactions from the Weekly and the Guardian, involving 128 accounts, over eight years, from 1999 to 2007. In each case, the computer tracked whether the Weekly’s ads were sold below cost — and how often those cut-rate sales were linked to the Guardian either losing a client or being forced to cut prices to salvage the deal.
The spreadsheet showed that in 91 percent of the transactions, the Weekly’s sale price was below cost. That’s consistent with data Lange presenting showing that the Weekly had consistently lost money. In 2003, she noted, the cost of producing a page of the SF Weekly was $1,936.17 — and the paper’s revenue was just $1,634.36. That meant the Weekly was losing about $300 for every page it produced. A few years later, the gap had grown: The cost of producing a page was $2,730 and the revenue was $1,900 — meaning the Weekly was losing $800 a page.
How was this possible? Simple: The chain kept pouring in money from its 15 other markets to prop up San Francisco and the East Bay.
Then Lange explained her correlation report: In 34 percent of the transactions involving below-cost sales, the Weekly’s rate-cutting was associated with the Guardian deeply discounting its own ads (threatening the financial viability of a local paper with no deep-pockets parent). And when she added in the accounts that the Guardian lost entirely after the Weekly’s predatory pricing, the total came to 66 percent.
In other words, in two-thirds of the cases where the Weekly had sold below cost, the Guardian had either had to follow suit and sell for less than the ads were worth — or lost the account and the business.
Lange also presented charts that showed how the predatory behavior had eroded the Guardian’s share of the local alternative-weekly ad market.
On cross-examination, Weekly attorney Ivo Labar tried to argue that the market itself had shrunk. In 2000, he pointed out, the two papers together sold $13 million worth of display ads. By 2007, that number had shrunk to $8.8 million. “Isn’t it true,” Labar asked, “that advertisers chose to spend only $8.8 million in 2007?”
Lange said she disagreed with the premise of the question. “Because of your predatory pricing,” she testified, “you put negative pressure on the market.” In other words, the Weekly depressed the costs of all alt-weekly ads in San Francisco.
Labar then pointed to a handful of accounts in which the Weekly either sold ads for a higher price than the Guardian or the Guardian appeared to have lost the business for reasons that had nothing to do with price, and tried to discredit the entire report on the basis of a few examples. That’s been the Weekly’s practice in this case: Take a clear trend (years of below-cost pricing) and clear results (damage to the Guardian) and try to poo-poo it by saying there are a few cases here and there that don’t fit the pattern.
Lange’s testimony will continue tomorrow morning.
“Never surrender!” Romney surrenders
Welp, the boardroom Mormon is out, and now it’s up to Bridge Over River McCain and Huckabee Hound to feast on his Republican delegates’ innards. (I think. These caucus rules are so twisted I’m sometimes wishing we were back before the days of Hubert Humphrey McGee.)
I must say I rejoiced when Giulievil bit it, even though I wanted him in as a spoiler. There must be a lot of backroom arm twisting (waterboarding?) among the Reps right now to get Huck out of the race as well, before the rest of the religious unright leap right into his sweaty drag queen man hands.
A side note: has anyone else noticed how much Romney and McCain both look like waxen marionette creations from Thunderbirds?
Eeeeery
Anyway, Romney said “If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror,” according to the AP.
He also said he had to step aside “Because I love America in this time of war …”
I think that says it all for the Republicans in general, no?
Gee, the SF Weekly is bored
Some interesting evidence emerged in the Guardian’s lawsuit against the SF Weekly and its corporate parent today, most of it in the form of depositions from witnesses. If you were looking for the kind of drama we had yesterday, this was fairly mundane stuff — but if you listened to what a former publisher of the Weekly said in his depositions, it showed exactly why this case has gone to trial.
Before I start on that, though, one note: I’m trying to play this fairly straight, and not get into personality stuff, but I have to say: The Weekly’s hit man, Dandy Andy Van De Voorde, is … how else can I say this? Making stuff up.
From the lead of his blog (if you can call it that) tonight:
After yesterday’s fireworks from Bruce Brugmann, Guardian attorneys returned to their plodding ways Wednesday, subjecting the jury to an entire day of testimony from witnesses who weren’t there.
Brugmann, who treated the court to a three-hour display that included spluttering, shouting and fist pounding yesterday, sat quietly in the gallery as his lawyers put on a noticeably dull performance that had at least two jurors visibly napping at times
Um … I was there yesterday, and I can say with absolute certainty that Bruce Brugmann never once pounded anything with his fist and never shouted. That’s just wrong. It didn’t happen. (I don’t know what “sputtering” is, so I can’t comment on that.)
And Andy: Most bloggers use links to connect to other stuff they’re talking about. You’ve blasted me a few times, but your poor readers don’t have the help of these simple little bits of HTML code that let you go from one blog to another so they can see what you’re attacking. It’s not that hard; I bet someone at your 16-paper chain could teach you how to do it.
Now then, back to the story:
Most of the morning was devoted to the (admittedly unexciting) reading of the deposition of Chris Keating, who until early 2007 was publisher of the SF Weekly and group publisher for the Weekly and the East Bay Express. Keating started out the deposition insisting that when he came to San Francisco (and to a paper that was losing lots of money) he was determined to control expenses and bring them into line with revenues.
In fact, he testified, one of his primary goals was to raise ad rates.
But somehow, that didn’t happen. The losses kept rising — and, apparently with Keating’s permission, the Weekly continued to sell ads below cost.
In fact, Keating admitted that “given the level of costs, [the Weekly was] not pricing at a level to cover those costs.”
In other words, the Village Voice Media chain, which owned the Weekly, was selling ads below what it cost to produce them.
There are three elements required to prove the Guardian’s case: The Weekly and Express had to be selling ads below cost, for the purpose of harming a competitor, and there had to be damages.
Keating as much as admitted to the first part.
Then he proceeded to come close to admitting to the second.
In a Sept. 26, 2005 email that was presented to the jury, Keating, discussing a national ad buy, said the Weekly and Express “would give the most amount of rate break to get the business over the Guardian. If that means I net $18 an inch I’ll take it.”
Keating had previously said that the Weekly needed to sell ads for at least $18.75 to $19.25 an inch to make any profit.
And his deposition was filled with references the the Guardian as the Weekly’s main competitor (a fact that undermines the chain’s argument that the San Francisco market is so diversified that the head-to-head between the Guardian and the Weekly is only a small part of the competitive landscape.)
Evidence admitted this morning showed that the Weekly prepared regular “Guardian reports” on how the locally owned paper was doing in ad count — and that there was no other competitor that rated that sort of treatment.
The Guardian lawyers also presented parts of the deposition of Jed Brunst, the chain’s top financial officer, who was asked what happened when the Weekly was losing money and couldn’t pay its bills. Simple, he said: The Weekly got “cash advances from the parent.”
Did those “advances,” he was asked, come with promissory notes or anything else that would suggest they were loans?
No, Brunst said. Nothing like that.
In other words, the chain was propping up a money-losing operating in San Francisco, which was selling ads below cost in an effort to get the business away from the Guardian.
That’s quite a set of admissions. Sorry Dandy Andy was bored.
Obama Girl didn’t vote
What?!? Amber Lee Ettinger, Ms. “I Got a Crush on Obama,” didn’t even turn in a ballot?
Up until now, I took her commitment to politics so seriously …
Original title: “I Got a Crush on Free Publicity”
Weekly tries a “gotcha” — and fails
It was a wild day in court in the Guardian’s lawsuit against the SF Weekly. Bruce Brugmann took the stand. He generally made the SF Weekly’s lawyer look silly – but the Weekly’s out-of-town hit man, Andy Van De Voorde, was almost giddy with his attempts to say that Bruce Brugmann did poorly as a witness.
I’m biased, of course (so is the hit man), but I have to disagree: Bruce laid out the Guardian’s history, explained how the Weekly had attacked us, and stood up remarkably well under a cross-examination that may have given Van De Voorde something to write about, but didn’t really present many relevant facts to the jury.
Several times during cross examination, Weekly attorney H. Sinclair Kerr tried to pull the legal equivalent of a “gotcha.” He kept pushing the notion that the media marketplace in San Francisco is so crowded with so many competitors that the Weekly and the Guardian really aren’t fighting over a discrete slice of that market. Bruce had none of it. Kerr kept trying to get Bruce to talk about competition in general and kept trying to get him to admit that the Weekly isn’t our biggest or most important competitor; Bruce would have none of it.
“I’m talking about competition in general,” Kerr said at one point.
“Well, I’m talking about competition with New Times,” Bruce replied.
Kerr tried to say Bruce wasn’t much of a publisher because he didn’t go on sales calls, but Bruce made quick work of that, too, saying that he was the Guardian’s editor as well, that editors generally don’t do sales calls, that we have a sales staff to do that, and besides “I’m a busy guy – I’m blogging.”
The jury members laughed.
Photos from Obama’s party at the Fairmont
The crowd here grumbled loudly when CNN announced that Hillary had a substantial lead in California. But the state is far from lost to Clinton. A massive portion of California’s voters submitted absentee ballots that have not been counted. And as we pointed out earlier, even if the rest of the state’s Democratic establishment goes for Hillary, San Francisco would rather share a tumbler of bourbon with Obama. Here are some images from his Super Tuesday party at the Fairmont Hotel in downtown SF:
Hillary campaign headquarters
By around 9:30 pm it seemed clear at Hillary’s campaign HQ that she had won the popular vote in California. A full room and diverse crowd gathered around the blaring TV, cheered and chanted her name. Rev. Amos Brown spoke to deafening cheers as he questioned the substance behind Obama’s rhetoric but praised the “two fine democratic competitors.” Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting spoke briefly.