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Nevius now attacks supes

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So C.W. Nevius, who doesn’t live in San Francisco and loves to whine about homeless people, has shifted his attack to the San Francisco supervisors. In a rambling and typically vitriolic column, he insists that the supes have wrecked Mayor Gavin Newsom’s efforts to clean up Golden Gate Park.

Here’s what really happened: Newsom, through Sup. Bevan Dufty, introduced a bill that would have further criminalized homelessness. Sup. Tom Ammiano asked the obvious questions: Is it fair to make camping in the park a crime if there’s noplace else for people to go? Shouldn’t there be some sort of link between available shelter and criminal penalties? Shouldn’t the city demonstrate that there are alternatives before arresting homeless people? And most important, will this sort of legislation actually work?

For doing his job, and not simply rubber-stamping the mayor’s bogus proposal, Ammiano gets slapped. That’s incisive journalism, Chuck. Go team.

Milking it

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Here are a few things I learned at Saturday’s debate among the three Senate candidates, which was sponsored by the Harvey Milk LGLT Democratic Club:
– Mark Leno is desperately seeking Milk’s endorsement and thinks he can get it by pointedly attacking and trying to discredit incumbent Carole Migden (a strategy that may backfire).
– When shoved, Migden shoves back hard (also a strategy that may backfire).
– Joe Alioto-Veronese doesn’t belong on the same stage as Leno or Migden — and, frankly, doesn’t seem ready for a Senate race (being named “Alioto” just ain’t enough) — but he clearly thinks he can run to the right of the main event and have a shot.
– I came up with far too many questions for my role on the media panel at the event, and maybe I should have worn something a bit more stylish.
– There’s still a very long way to go in this race…and it ain’t gonna be pretty.

Do we need the peakers?

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Joshua Arce has an interesting opinion piece in the Examiner in which he argues that San Francisco doens’t need the new Peaker plants at all.

The argument, in essence, is that Mirant could keep running its least-polluting turbine for a few more years, and by then the city will have renewable alternatives.

I like the idea — except for one key point. If there’s a choice between a city-owned plant that pollutes a little bit and a privately owned plant that pollutes a little bit, and the levels of pollution are roughly equal, I’ll take the city-owned plant any time. If we own it, we can control it; we can shut it down whenever we want. If it’s privately owned, any effort to mandate a shutdown on any particular date will be a legal and political hassle.

So sure, let’s add as little fossil-fuel generation to the southeast as possible — but if we’re going to have one turbine running, let’s have it be the one the city owns.

Great Anti-nukes news!

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Assemblymember Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine) has withdrawn a ballot initiative that, if passed by voters, would have allowed more nuclear power plants in California. In a statement on his website, DeVore says:

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. While I am disappointed we will not be moving forward on a nuclear power ballot initiative for 2008, I am heartened by the fact that over the next two years we should see applications to build 32 new reactors in America. Eventually, California will catch up to reality.”

Yeah. Will do.

A Reuters article published today reports that the initiative was pulled for lack of support and DeVore plans to introduce a bill in January. Try, try again.

The initiative, if passed, would have overturned a 1976 state law banning the construction of new nuclear plants until a safe, reliable solution for the waste is established.

Speier vs. Lantos? Finally ….

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So there’s finally a candidate willing to challenge Tom Lantos. This has been floating around since early last year , but it appears to be serious now, and it’s much overdue.

Speier isn’t the most progressive politician in California (or even in the district) but she’s a lot better than Lantos. Naturally, I assume Rep. Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the incumbents will support Lantos, but he’s way out of touch with his district and should have (been) retired long ago.

Why no Newsom?

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So it looks as if two former mayors — Willie Brown and Dianne Feinstein — are going to be the chairs of a campaign for a new 49ers stadium. It’s a bit odd, especially since the chief consultant to the current mayor, Gavin Newsom, is helping run the campaign … does Eric Jaye think Feinstein and Brown play better in the city right now than his main client, who just got re-elected with more than 70 percent of the vote?

We only got penciled in?!?

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So, there’s this cool thing called the Sunshine Ordinance, which allows people to access public records generated by our dear city family, including the daily calendars of the Mayor, City Attorney, and all department heads.

A group of Sunshine activists have been trying to get copies of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s calendar regularly emailed to them, but rather than just hit the forward button, a mayoral aide dutifully copies the daily calendar into a Word document, prints it out, turns it into a PDF, and THEN sends it, attached to an email.

Sounds efficient. Needless to say, the calendars arrive in fits and spurts — days, weeks, months after originally requested.

A new batch came in today, which the activists posted on the PROSF group email list. I was clicking through it, checking out what the Mayor’s been up to when I noticed a glaring omission.

According to my calendar, on October 1, 2007, me and my fellow editorial staff met with Mayor Newsom at 11:30, here at SFBG headquarters.

According to his calendar, no such meeting occurred.

One could reasonably infer that someone redacted that bit of information for some bullshit security reason. However, there are several other entries on several other days showing the Mayor met with the Examiner editorial board, the Chronicle editorial board, and — in a whirlwind press tour on October 12 — the editorial boards of the World Journal, Sing Tao Daily, and Ming Pao. (Sorry for all the PDFs. That’s how the Mayor rolls.) He also regularly met with anonymous local and national press members throughout the month of October.

No censure for DiFi

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Well, the move to censure Dianne Feinstein was shot down by the Democratic Party, but not before party Chair Art Torres was forced to give a painful, embarassing speech about it.

Goodbye, Jim Rivaldo

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The City Hall rotunda was packed last night for the Jim Rivaldo memorial. I knew him as a political guy, a campaign consultant and activist with a strange and wonderful sense of humor and a big heart. But many of the people who spoke, including Judge Ellen Chaitin, her husband, defense lawyer V. Roy Lefcourt, and their two children, talked about Jim as a part of the family, an honorary uncle who loved kids and acted like a kid himself, to the very end. There were, safe to say, plenty of tears — and plenty of smiles and laughs as the speakers reminded us of how fun, and funny, he was. Which would have made Jim Rivaldo very happy.

Thanks to Luke Thomas for the photo.

Hearing on corporate welfare for airlines

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A disingenuous ploy (reported by us but mostly ignored by the other media outlets in town) by the Hotel Council and Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier to have San Francisco taxpayers give millions of dollars in corporate welfare payments to the national airlines will be heard Monday at 11 a.m. by the Board of Supervisors Government Audit and Oversight Committee. The three-person committee is weighted in favor of the conservatives on the board, and this will likely be the only opportunity for public testimony, so come by the board chambers if you want to help counter the politically influential Hotel Council. Also on the agenda is a proposal by Alioto-Pier to increase taxi gate fees.

All Barry, all the time

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Yes, this is news. The guy who broke the all-time home run record has been indicted. It even belongs on page one of the local paper. But is it the most important thing happening in the world right now, worth two-thrids of the entire Chronicle front page, the top six or seven minutes of the evening newscasts and all the talk shows?

No, it’s not. I have to agree with Dave Zirin: This is a silly indictment and a distraction from the real issues of the world.

I almost (almost) feel sorry for Barry Bonds. Think about his dilemma here: He goes before a grand jury, and is promised that if he tells the truth, he will never be prosecuted for it — and anything he says will remain totally secret. But Bonds knows better; there’s no way his testimony will remain confidential. Whatever he says is going to leak out (guess what — it did), and if he admits anything, his career is over.

Of course, if he hedges, then he can be indicted for perjury (if the U.S. Attorney’s Office has nothing better to do, which it apparently doesn’t).

I heard somone ask on Forum this morning why Bonds just didn’t tell the truth to the grand jury. That assumes, of course, that he’s guilty, that he actually lied, and I have no way of knowing that. But let’s, for the purpose of argument, say he did lie. Why? Perhaps because he didn’t trust the grand jury process. That’s a reasonable point of view that later events totally vindicated.

Does that justify lying under oath? Of course not. But I can understand what he must have been thinking.

Obama rocks SF

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Guardian photo by Lane Hartwell
Presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s speech last night in Bill Graham Civic Auditorium looked more like a rock concert than political rally, with a crowd of about 7,000 snaking through San Francisco for almost a mile and taking several hours just to get inside, past the metal detectors and large contingent of Secret Service agents. “I am fired up!” he told the enthusiastic crowd when he finally appeared on stage at 9 p.m., about two hours late.
Many attendees I interviewed before the speech were eager for Obama to take a bold stand — to come out and finally support gay marriage, socialized medicine, fundamental political reform, or leaving Iraq completely rather than having massive permanent U.S. military base there — and he didn’t go there, sticking to a fairly safe platform.
But his rhetoric was still inspiring and he captured the potentially epic nature of this race: “What’s next for America? We are at a defining moment in our history. The nation is at war. The planet is in peril.” And he took a couple of veiled swipes at frontrunner Hillary Clinton — “When I’m the Democratic nominee, my Republican opponent will not be able to say I voted for the Iraq War because I didn’t.” — and the timidity of his party: “The triangulation and poll-tested positions, because we’re afraid of what Mitt or Rudy will say about us, just won’t do it…If we’re going to seize the moment then we can’t live in fear of losing.”

Click below to listen to Obama’s full speech of about 30 minutes:


Part 2

BONDS INDICTED

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Fifty-three comments in 20 minutes. Extraordinary. Here’s the original press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Natalya LaBauve
November 15, 2007 (415) 436-7055

WWW.USDOJ.GOV/USAO/CAN Natalya.LaBauve@usdoj.gov

BARRY BONDS INDICTED FOR PERJURY ARISING FROM HIS TESTIMONY IN THE BALCO INVESTIGATION

Indictment also includes charge of obstruction of justice.

SAN FRANCISCO – United States Attorney Scott N. Schools, Special Agent in Charge Scott O’Briant of the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation and Special Agent in Charge Charlene Thornton of the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced today that a federal grand jury in San Francisco indicted Barry Lamar Bonds, age 43, of Beverly Hills, California, on November 15, 2007, with four counts of perjury, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1623(a), and one count of obstruction of justice, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1503(a).

Bonds is charged with knowingly and willfully making false material statements, regarding his use of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing substances, while under oath during his testimony before the federal grand jury that was conducting the investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (“Balco”), and with obstructing justice in the same investigation. A copy of the indictment is attached to this press release.

The penalty for perjury is up to five years imprisonment and three years of supervised release. The penalty for obstruction of justice is up to ten years imprisonment and three years of supervised release. However, any sentence following conviction would be imposed by the court after consideration of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and the federal statute governing the imposition of a sentence, 18 U.S.C. § 3553.

Bonds is scheduled to make his initial appearance before United States Magistrate Judge James on December 7, 2007, at 9:30 a.m. in San Francisco.

An indictment contains only allegations against an individual and, as with all defendants, Mr. Bonds must be presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

Matt Parrella, Jeff Nedrow, and Jeff Finigan are the Assistant U.S. Attorneys who are prosecuting the case. The prosecution is the result of an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Electronic court filings and further procedural and docket information are available at https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl.

Judges’ calendars with schedules for upcoming court hearings can be viewed on the court’s website at www.cand.uscourts.gov.

All press inquiries to the U.S. Attorney’s Office should be directed to Natalya LaBauve at (415) 436-7055 or by email at Natalya.LaBauve@usdoj.gov.

Leno wants a piece of the ship

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Assemblymember Mark Leno told me yesterday that he’s going to pursue one of the suggestions in our oil-spill editorial and see if the state can put a lein on the Cosco Busan. That way California could compensate the local crab fishers, whose livelihood is in danger, and get the money back directly from the ship’s owners.

The crab folks are hurting: The governor has suspended all fishing in and around the Bay and within three miles of the coast. And local processing facilities can’t accept crab, so they’re shut down.

But there are still big crab boats from Oregon, Washington and Vancouver that come down and place crab pots outside of the three-mile limit, Leno told me, and then haul the crab back up north — where it gets processed and sent back down here as “safe.”

It will be a nightmare trying to sort out who actually owns the ship, and if the crabbers sue, it could take many, many years before they ever see the money; the fishermen who sued Exxon over the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill still haven’t seen a penny of the $5 billion they won at trial.

So seizing the ship and putting leins on it may be the only way anyone’s going to see any compensation for this mess.

Lightly Oiled Plovers in Hawaii…

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…may be a bad joke, but this is funny!

Spinning Newsom

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I attended SPUR’s regular post-election wrap-up yesterday, which was a bit irregular in that it was almost a week after the election (owing to the delayed election results) rather than the next day and it wasn’t hosted by respected local pollster David Binder. Instead hosting duties were split three ways among consultant Jim Stearns (engineer of the big win this election, Yes on A/No on H), consultant and number cruncher David Latterman, and pollster/hired gun Ben Tulchin of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, whose work I have quibbled with in the past.
And once again, Tulchin claimed to be objective and pointed out that he doesn’t work for Newsom before going on to play the spinning pro-Newsom partisan. “It was historic, it was a landslide, and the mayor and his team deserve a lot of credit,” Tulchin gushed, going on to argue that this election showed the mayor had coattails and was now a force to be reckoned with — all evidence to the contrary.

Censure Dianne!

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I’ve wanted to do this since about 1982, but now there’s a grassroots movement in the California Democratic Party to censure Sen. Dianne Feinstein over her decision to support Michael Mukasey for attorney general.

The party leadership’s going to go nuts over this, but the blogger/grassroots/progressive movement within the party is going to make it into a major issue. How fun.

The vacationing mayor

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This hasn’t been that big a deal in the local press, but isn’t it pretty screwed up that the mayor of San Francisco, the day after an oil spill that was causing catastrophic environmental problems in his city. took off to Hawaii on vacation?

I mean, he’s supposed to be in charge here, supposed to be a leader. He could have postponed his trip a few days, right?

Newsom’s numbers back up

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Another set of election results are in, and now Gavin Newsom is up above 72 percent. Interesting that he’s picked up as the precinct ballots are counted; obviously, the absentees were particularly conservative this time around.

PG&E’s Tag on the Golden Gate

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photo courtesy of wmchu on flickr

I’ve ridden my bike across the Golden Gate Bridge hundreds of times, and often stopped to watch the sunset or to look down at the awesome power of the tide ripping by, but yesterday, for the first time, I walked all the way across. I noticed something I’d never seen before.

On the south tower, tucked among all the brass plaques noting the officials and feting the feat of construction that is the bridge, there was a monument to Pacific Gas & Electric, thanking them for donating all the lighting for the bridge.

I was standing with my friend, who’s an electrician, and who wryly noted that it’s PG&E that really won in that deal — the free lighting fixtures just translates to another guaranteed customer.

But what I was thinking was, gee, there was all this dust-up and opposition to any corporate sponsorship of the bridge to raise a portion of the $60 million for future repairs. Despite assurances from authorities that the bridge wouldn’t be renamed or adorned with company banners, it seems that nobody was interested in having the name of a corporation anywhere near the bridge or its immediate environs.

And here we have a corporation that has a long, litigious relationship with San Francisco, that costs taxpayers and ratepayers millions of dollars, and that regularly tries to purchase our goodwill through massive greenwashing campaigns and big dollar donations — and their name is bronzed right onto the bridge.

Nice. Classy.

Pay Back’s A Bitch

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What’s newsworthy about Board of Supervisor President Aaron Peskin changing his vote three weeks ago on Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier charter amendment tightening laws controlling the Ethics, Elections and Sunshine Commissions?

Nothing—except the real reason the Chronicle’s running dogs of the press were dragged out of their kennel this weekend to tear into Peskin’s Oct. 23 change-of-heart vote: the Gap’s Don Fisher is pissed off that he poured $185,000 into Prop. H, only to see it fail on the Nov. 6 ballot. So, now, he and his Republican allies are punishing Peskin for having the nerve to place the ultimately successful Prop. A on the ballot, thus defeating their well-heeled efforts to turn San Francisco into a giant parking lot.

What was the Coast Guard thinking?

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SFist has posted a link from BoatingSF that shows the path of the Cosco Busan, based on freely available data that even amateur boaters have. The Chronicle reports that the Coast Guard knew the ship was headed for the bridge. The Vehicle Tracking Service on Yerba Buena Island has sophisticated radar and GPS gear and can watch every damn boat on the Bay; why didn’t anyone tell the captain and pilot to get back on course?

The oil spill — how to help

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Well, in the end we need to recognize that this was a disaster waiting to happen with thousands of ships coming into the bay carrying nasty fuel oil and a Coast Guard that appeared to be lackadasical about the potential for disaster.

But for now, sfist has a nice handy guide on how you can help.

Newsom keeps dropping

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New election results are out, and Mayor Gavin Newsom’s winning percentage continues to drop. He’s gone from the high 70s in early returns to 68 percent now. Quintn Mecke is now in second place, with almost 8 percent, and Harold Hoogasian is in third with 6.5 percent. These numbers will change more, and probably not in Newsom’s favor: Although the results page says that 94 percent of the precincts have been counted, only about half of the mayoral votes are tallied so far. That’s because the counting machines don’t handle ranked-choice voting the way they’re supposed to, so unless a voter fills in three choices for mayor, the machine kicks the ballot out and it has to be hand counted.

So look at Newsom coming in with a final vote of less than 65 percent. It’s almost certain that he’ll get fewer votes than he did last fime around (although that was a tightly contested election.)

Prop. A continues to widen its margin of victory. Oddly, though, and quite inconsistent with my election-night proclamations, Prop. E, the question-time measure, is actually LOSING votes as the election-day precinct totals come in. That’s a surprise — typically progressive measures that lag in the absentee count pick up several points, and sometimes more, when the precincts are tallied.

It’s not over yet — there are still 40,000 more absentee votes out there.

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