By Steven T. Jones
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest hypocritical move to undermine California’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions shouldn’t surprise anyone. He has always been a political opportunist who seized the environmentalist label last year simply to score political points. The LA Times did the definitive piece on the ruse a couple months back, which closes with Arnold’s own secretly recorded admission about the fraud. Most recently, The Economist magazine analyzed how unlikely California is to meet its lofty goals for addressing climate change. But that’s the idea, right? Politicians set ambitious goals that make them look good today, with deadlines set for well after they’re out of office.
The only surprise here is that anyone is surprised. Then again, the Chronicle did endorse the guy last year (facilitating a deceptive and rapid rehabilitation of his once tattered image), so maybe they’re feeling a little foolish in retrospect.
- No categories
Politics Blog
Arnold’s thin green veneer
Downtown’s car obsession
By Tim Redmond
So the developers and some businesses want to build more parking in San Francisco. We’ve seen this game before; in the past, the supervisors have been able to shoot it down, but now it may go before the voters. Here’s the part of the argument that infuriates me:
Supporters claim the initiative, sponsored by the San Francisco Council of District Merchants Associations, prepares The City for an expected influx of vehicles during the next five years.
Why is there an “expected influx of vehicles?”
Why is the city constantly looking for ways to plan for more cars?
Why isn’t it official city planning policy that the number of cars in San Francisco will decrease over the next five years?
This is the great lie of urban planning (as practiced by developers and their advocates): First you “project” more cars (or more jobs, or more population or whatever). Then you automatically have a case to build — more garages, more parking lots, more condos, more highrise office towers — for your “projected” demand. And, of course, once you bild million-dollar condos, they fill up (perhaps with globe-trotting wealthy people looking for pieds-a-terre, but whatever), thus fulfilling the “projections,” and once you make room for more cars, you’ll get more cars in a city that already has too many.
These “projections” are a bogus, self-fulfilling prophecy. Let’s project a city we really want, and plan for that one.
Scooting Away with a Bang
By Sarah Phelan
George W. Bush clearly enjoys fireworks.
With a huge uproar going on over his July 2 decision to spare former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby a 30-month prison sentence, Bush is now stoking the flames by saying he won’t rule out a pardon.
Boom! Boom-boom-boom! Kapow, kapow, pow!
I can see G.W., kicking back at the ranch this Fourth of July, and laughing at all the bloggers like me who will spend today sounding off over his decision to let Scooter scoot away, instead of doing what folks outta do on July 3: stock up on Catherine wheels and bottle rockets.
“I made a judgment, a considered judgment, that I believe was the right decision to make in this case,” Bush told CNN as he left the Walter Reed Medical Center.
Was he enjoying the mental image of more leftists exploding, as it hit them that he, GW, had the nerve to talk about letting Scooter go scott free, even as he was finishing up visiting wounded vets of the war in Iraq. Kaboom, Kabul!
Or maybe the irony was lost on him.
So, will there be no justice in this whacked out, fireworking world?
Valerie Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson told CNN today that Bush’s decision puts the president himself under suspicion of a cover-up in the case.
“I think there is a very real suspicion now that the president himself is an accessory to obstruction of justice in this matter,” said Wilson, whose wife worked in the CIA’s counter-proliferation division, before Bush, Cheney, Scooter, Wolfowitz et al decided that invading Iraq would make for really great fireworks.
I guess Bush et al are banking that, come next Fourth of July, we’ll all have forgotten who Scooter, Robert Novak, Richard Armitrage and Karl Rove are. Funny how some darn big explosions can distract from the truth.
CCA: FULL STEAM AHEAD
by Amanda Witherell
This afternoon Mayor Gavin Newsom signed legislation permitting the city to move forward with its plan for Community Choice Aggregation.
Rumors were flying around all week that Newsom might veto, especially after his press conference coup with PG&E last week. PG&E is none too keen on this CCA thing.
That’s because it intends to kick PG&E’s ass at the renewables game. But what’s a little friendly competition? The plan is for the city to build or buy 51 percent of our electricity from renewable sources, which is permitted under a state law pushed by Carole Migden in 2002, and some 30 percent more than what PG&E is offering. Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Ross Mirkarimi have spent the last few years hammering out legislation and what they came up with was passed by nearly all their fellow board members. (Alioto-Pier and Jew were the no-go’s.)
Newsom issued a letter expressing his concern that the plan must “meet or beat” PG&E’s rates in the first 60 days, but ended on a lighter note with his commitment to “moving forward expeditiously.” He’s asked the SFPUC to get on it by July 15. They’ll be issuing a Request for Information, followed by a formal call for proposals for more wind, water, and sun power in the city.
Paris Hilton is not news
By Tim Redmond
Holy shit — watch Mika Brzezinski try to argue that on MSNBC and get treated rather shabbily by her male co-anchors.
There’s fire, a shredder, a sniffing scene — and a very good journalistic point. Don’t miss it.
Fiona Ma and the cops
By Tim Redmond
Thanks in part to a San Francisco legislator, a bill to reform police secrecy is dead in the water. SB 1019, by state Sen. Gloria Romero of Los Angeles, did in the Assembly Public Safety Committee when not a single committee member would move to consider the bill. Assembly member FIona Ma, who represents San Francisco, sits on the committee; she as among those who killed the bill.
BeyondChron has a pretty good summary of this, including the astonishing information that one of the police unions threatened to scutle the Legislature’s attempt to amend term limits if this bill passes.
The bill is still (barely) alive, and could come back for reconsideration — if Ma would stip kowtowing to the cops and agree to at least bring it up for a vote.
The Nation blasts SF Weekly’s parent
By Tim Redmond
Long, detailed article in the Nation this week by John Wiener on how sharply the LA Weekly has declined since Village Voice Media, the parent company of SF Weekly, took over.
It’s exactly what a lot of us predicted: No more endorsements. No more progressive politics. No more reporting or commentary on the war in Iraq. Sad.
Who paid for Migden’s billboards?
By Tim Redmond
There’s been a fair amount of flap over the big billboards featuring Carole Migden that appeared all over the Third Senate District around Pride weekend. The messages — describing Miden as a leader and thanking her for her work — don’t include any statements identifying the donor who paid for them. That’s led some to suggest that it’s a clandestine gift from Clear Channel, which owns the billboards.
But according to Michael Colbruno, a former Migden aide and close ally who now works for Clear Channel, there’s another explanation:
The billboards, he told me, are “issue advocacy” ads — which means they’re not regulated by campaign-finance disclosure laws. They were purchased, he said, by an individual or entity that is not a campaign committee — and Clear Channel won’t say who it is.
“It’s not a political sale,” he said. “It’s an independent advocacy ad, and the payment information doesn’t have to be disclosed.”
I asked him if Clear Channel charged the ad buyer full price or perhaps offered a discount. “We don’t disclose rates,” he said.
The ads sure look political to me: One of them thanks three local legislators for supporting the infrastructure bonds — Migden, Don Perata and Leland Yee — and pointedly leaves out another member of the local delegation, Mark Leno, who also supported the bonds, and who happens to be challenging Midgen in next year’s state Senate primary.
But what Colbruno is telling me is that an unknown donor has just done a huge favor for Migden, worth potentially tens of thousands of dollars — and the public will never know who it was.
Leno, not surprisingly, was furious to hear about this:
“The only way this situation can be considered legal is if the suggestion is that these billboards are issue-advocacy ads and not campaign related — but anyone who believes that is a fool,” Leno told me. “If anyone tried to thank me this way, I would tell them no and make them take it down.”
I’m pretty dubious, too — I’m sure Migden knows who paid for the ads, and she ought to tell the rest of us.
Finally, a real Chicken takes on Newsom
Chicken John’s was among the first “Faces of Burning Man”
the Chronicle ran as part of their series a couple years ago.
By Steven T. Jones
We’ve seen people dressed as chickens mocking Mayor Gavin Newsom and progressives who are too chicken to run against him, but now we have Chicken John announcing that he’s running for mayor. You know Chicken John, right? The showman, the provocateur, the facilitator of art and innovation, the guy with the fake mustache and the cool bus and Army Street address and the truck that runs on trash, the MC of the Ask Dr. Hal Show. Yeah, THAT Chicken, aka John Rinaldi. Well, he’s decided to run for mayor and called upon the San Francisco underground to rise up and support him. Will they? Will Chicken follow through if they don’t? What issues will this enigmatic political newbie stake out? Will Newsom debate him? I don’t know the answer to any of this or, frankly, how I feel about it. But there is one thing I do know: the mayor’s race just got a helluva lot more interesting.
Chicken’s announcement follows:
Pelosi’s SPUR earmark
By Tim Redmond
Nancy Pelosi has stuck a $231,000 earmark in the federal budget to help the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association build a new Urban Center in San Francisco. The move stirred up some controversy on the floor of the House today, when Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who likes to criticize earmarks, asked whether federal money ought to be going to a private nonprofit think tank.
It’s a relatively tiny amount of money — the who-really-gives-a-shit level — and some good progressive people love the idea of a SPUR Urban Center — a downtown building that could be a community center of sorts for city planning issues. I’m not sure I hate it myself.
“We want to become much more public and democratic,” Jim Chappell, SPUR’s president, told me when I called him just now about the earmark. Pelosi’s money, he said, “is a statement of confidence in our cities and our program by a federal government that has declared war on cities.”
But SPUR has over the years been way on the wrong side of a lot of important planning issues, and is still dominated by developers and their architects, and … I don’t know. It struck me a worth noting.
This is ugly
By Tim Redmond
Another sign that Bush has shifted the Supreme Court successfully in his direction: The Court just ruled that schools can’t use race in school assignments. Everyone at SFUSD was waiting for this ruling, most of us hoping that the court would allow some consideration of race in placing students. Since the district stopped using race, the level of segretation in the schools has climbed.
So now the new superintendent has another big challenge.
The Chronicle’s looney
By Tim Redmond
The San Francisco Chronicle apparently thinks a retired Wall Street Journal reporter who now lives in Berkeley and who wrote a remarkably homophobic piece on San Francisco politics way back in 1995 is the perfect persion to comment on the current Board of Supervisors. His piece, on SFGate, has the headline “Clown Show: The Board of Supervisors SF deserves? His point, it appears, is that the large queer community in San Francisco and the looney liberals here have elected a bunch of crazies to the board.
I would ignore this shit, except that it comes in the wake of all the Chris Daly bashing (much of which is factually inaccurate — Daly never accused the mayor of doing cocaine) and will, no doubt, fuel a new attack on district elections.
So let’s be real here: This district-elected board is hardly a crew of wackos. The board has done exceptional work over the past few years, passing landmark legislation that has put San Francisco in the forefront of American cities on progressive policy.
Hamsterdam in the Tenderloin?
By Tim Redmond
Now here’s a fascinating harm-reduction (and crime-reduction) idea. Drug sales are happening anyway; why not regulate them in one designated area?
Daly won’t back down
By Steven T. Jones
Sup. Chris Daly has been getting beat up by Team Newsom, the Chronicle, the Examiner, and Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, but at today’s Board of Supervisors meeting, he showed no sign of retreat or remorse. In fact, he’s giving as good as he gets in some hilarious and poignant ways. As the meeting began, he distributed to the press copies of a letter to Mayor Gavin Newsom making clear “I did not accuse you of using cocaine” and asking for an apology, and handed out a printout of his latest blog post, in which he labels the concerted attack on him “Operation Eric Jaye” and chides Alioto-Pier for being an out-of-touch elitist who only seems to show up for work when it’s time to carry water for the mayor.
Journalists chuckled and pointed out the funniest passages to one another as the board rapidly fired through its business. But the real fun began when it came time for the supervisors to introduce new legislation and Alioto-Pier announced her previously announced proposal to create a code of conduct for supervisors.
Guardian photo by Charles Russo
Court smacks SF Planning Dept.
By Tim Redmond
The Chron buried the news deep in the local section, but a June 22 state Court of Appeal decision on the validity of the Housing Element of the city’s General Plan was a huge slap in the face to the mayor and the planning director.
In essence, the court ruled that the city can’t adopt the new Housing Element without doing an environmental impact report. You can read the decision here.
I’ll admit: The folks who sued, a group of West side homeowners who don’t want more density in their neighborhoods, are not my favorite activists. I’ve never thought it was fair that all the density had to go on the East side of town, and that nobody West of 19th Ave. even had to think about it.
That’s the essence of the suit: The Housing Element might encourage more housing on the West side of town, and might allow housing without a lot of parking, and that might lead to congestion and traffic issues. As my old friend Ron Curran used to say, Boo Fucking Hoo: The rest of us in town have lived with those issues for years, and anyone with any sense knows that new housing in this overdeveloped town will need to be transit-oriented and not car-oriented.
Still, the plaintiffs made an excellent point: The Planning Department should have done an EIR on the Housing Element. IN fact, the Planning Department should do a lot better in the environmental review department generally. You just go forawrd with these big projects and zoning changes and refuse to acknowledge the impacts, and you’re eventually going to get smacked.
Lennar’s Bad News Bears
Marc McGuire, a tile contractor from San Diego, and CALPASC’s Brad Diede on CNBC this spring to discuss accusations that Lennar has been extorting its contractors
A few months ago, we reported how Lennar had been giving contractors a choice between a rock or a hard place: reduce their unpaid invoices by up to 20 percent—or be excluded from bidding work for a minimum of six months.
Today comes word that the company, which is poised to build condos on most of San Francisco’s underdeveloped lands, including Bayview Hunter’s Point and the decommissioned Hunters Point Shipyard, has just posted a second quarter loss–and it is expecting more losses this year.
Blaming high inventories and dropping real estate prices, and with his company reporting losses of $1.55 per share, Lennar President and Chief Executive Stuart Miller announced, “As we look to our third quarter and the remainder of 2007, we continue to see weak, and perhaps deteriorating, market conditions.”
This time last year, the nation’s biggest home builder was posting a profit of $324.7 million, or $2 per share. But Lennar not alone in its real estate woes. As its quarterly revenue slips 37 percent to $2.88 billion (compared to $4.58 billion this time last year,) the National Association of Realtors reports that sales of existing homes fell for a third straight month in May, the median sales price declined for a record 10th consecutive month and the inventory of unsold homes reached its highest level in 15 years.
Or as Miller put it, ” The supply of new and existing homes has continued to increase resulting in declining home prices across our markets.”
And here comes the part that should really sound the alarms in San Francisco, where a large number of subcontractors look to Lennar for their daily bread. Asked what Lennar intends to do about its financial picture, Miller said his company is “focused on expenses, reducing construction costs and pushing sales to manage inventory.”
With Mayor Gavin Newsom having hastily amended the BVHP redevelopment plan so the Navy could hand the hazardous shipyard over to Lennar for clean up, (despite the company’s ongoing problems monitoring asbestos dust on an adjacent parcel of land), all so he can try and keep the 49ers in town, here’s hoping all the agencies that regulate and oversee Lennar, and not just the local impacted communities, will be watching this project like hawks.
The Mayor’s Offensive
By Sarah Phelan
Photo by Charles Russo
Mayor Gavin Newsom only shows up to self congratulatory budget events that seek to make him look good
Mayor Gavin Newsom is happy to be center stage when it comes to attacking Sup. Chris Daly. At last week’s budget rally, Newsom made it look as if Daly had unilaterally decided to cut funding to pothole repairs and police academies. (In reality Daly was responding to Newsom’s cuts to affordable housing and public health.)
This week, Newsom made it look as if Daly had randomly decided to talk about unsubstantiated allegations that the mayor was doing cocaine, while sleeping with the wife of his campaign manager. (In reality, Daly was referring, in the context of Newsom’s proposed cuts to substance abuse treatment programs, to the mayor’s self-professed alcohol problem, as well as his refusal to deal head on with widespread whisperings about cocaine use.)
Either way, and without a declared challenger in the mayor’s race this fall, bashing Daly is a far easier for the Mayor than say, explaining to poor folks why you are proposing cutting funding for programs that help poor poeople, such as affordable rental housing in favor of increasing funding for programs that help the middle class, such as affordable homeownership. Or explaining why you are cutting the only 24-hour homeless shelter in town, when your proposal to add rangers to Golden Gate Park strongly suggests the homeless situation is getting worse.
So it came as no surprise that Mayor Gavin Newsom chose not to mingle with the hundreds of poor folks that lined up last night at City Hall to talk about the damage that his proposed cuts to affordable housing and public health will inflict on them and their already fragile communities.
As the rules stand, the Mayor doesn’t have to attend such hearings, but his absence from the trenches (he wasn’t around for Tuesday night’s Beilensen hearings either, when 300 people showed up to talk about the true cost of cutting substance abuse treatment and other public health programs–a hearing which has received almost no media coverage other than a fixation with Daly’s “cocaine” remarks) led Sup. Tom Ammiano to observe, “I think there is not a full accounting by the mayor himself to this budget when he does not have to attend these meetings.”
With Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier cooking up Ms. Manners rules of engagement for the Board of Supervisors following what she deems “offensive” comments by her colleague Sup.Chris Daly, how about her also asking the Mayor to be present for the annual budget hearings, during which folks wait for hours, just to speak on the record for a couple minutes?
Because Newsom’s absence, in the face of all this budgetary angst among people of very limited means, is beginning to come across as more than a tad offensive.
White lines
By Steven T. Jones
Sup. Chris Daly may have crossed a line by suggesting during a budget hearing that Mayor Gavin Newsom uses cocaine, but the mayor isn’t entitled to his overblown righteous indignation. Why? Because he’s the one who left open this question earlier this year when he responded to revelations of his sexual improprieties and alcohol abuse with the blanket dismissal “that everything you’ve heard and read is true and I’m deeply sorry about that.” Then he refused to answer any questions on either issue, with only a couple exceptions weeks later involving friendly journalists (including CBS’s Hank Plante, who asked about cocaine and Newsom didn’t directly answer, something Daly rightly called an “artful dodge”). Newsom is now simply reaping what he has sown. He has proven himself to be untrustworthy and willing to say or do anything to get out of a jam — or to simply avoid answering questions not to his liking — so it’s hard to put too much stock in statements like, “I am associated with something that I don’t do, never have, not even in the realm of reason should someone even accuse me of this.”
Sex, Lies and Videotapes
By Sarah Phelan
with editorial research by Joseph Plaster
photo by Terrie Frye
Admit it! Would you even be reading this story if Daly hadn’t said “allegations of cocaine use”?
For those few running dogs of the press who actually hung around for Tuesday night’s four-hour hearing on proposed cuts to public health programs, Sup. Chris Daly’s comments on Newsom’s substance abuse problems seemed, well, entirely appropriate.
As the two reporters who were actually there know full well, Daly’s speech, which lasted eight minutes, only spent 30 seconds referring to allegations of Newsom’s cocaine use. The rest of the speech focused on the reality that there’s been an annual ping-pong match going on between the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors, ever sinceNewsom came to power. In this match, Newsom proposes making cuts to public health programs–and the Board objects. Then those impacted have to show up to protest at City Hall. At which point, the Board’s Budget Committee responds by restoring funding to the programs that Newsom has once again targeted.
FIRE DRILL AT THE CHRON BUILDING!!! Oh wait, it’s just empty from all the cuts. Sorry.
By G.W. Schulz
During a conversation we had recently with a certain interview subject regarding layoffs at the Chron, this person was sure to correct us by distinguishing between actual “layoffs” and “buyouts.” Well, sure, buyouts might taste slightly better, but they’re both still poison for your career. Just ‘cause management prefers to call them something else doesn’t make “downsizing” settle any easier.
More announced departures at the Chron, by the way, if that’s the description you’d prefer. A foreign and national correspondent named Anna Badkhen who reported from Iraq, Kashmir, Chechnya and New Orleans after Katrina is leaving for the Boston Globe. She was also a one-time Moscow bureau chief for the Chron. Romenesko picked up a memo from the Globe on the move.
Another familiar byline, Patrick Hoge, is leaving after nearly 20 years at the Chron. He wrote regularly about homelessness, health care and mental illness. Reporter Glen Martin, also with the Chron for nearly 20 years, is leaving as well.
Meanwhile, as we noted earlier, the Merc has officially announced 40 newsroom cuts. No one knows yet who’s leaving, but there will be no buyouts, we’ve gathered. Buyouts. Layoffs. Whatever they’re calling them.
Anyway, guess what! The San Jose Newspaper Guild is offering one-time grants of $500 for families caught in a financial crises as a result of the cuts! That should about cover the mortgage, utilities, groceries and the kid’s flu medicine for about, oh … a week?
Old Chron building, c. 1900
Merc announces 40 newsroom layoffs
By G.W. Schulz
Well, it’s not the 60 or so jobs former San Mateo County Times editor John Bowman said were pending, but it’s still a big hunk of the Merc‘s newsroom. And no one can argue this will mean more news. In fact, considering reporters are asked everyday to do more with the Web (like a quick online story plus their full-length for the deadwood edition) those surviving cuts at the dailies should be getting a little pissed off by now.
On the other hand, they’re probably just grateful to still have jobs. Wonderful way to keep the rank-and-file in line. Merc reporter Pete Carey corrects our earlier numbers, too, explaining that 15 people were laid off from the paper in December while more than 50 people were bought out before the most recent round of cuts was announced. (Buyouts aren’t a dreamy alternative to layoffs, by the way, no matter how management prefers to characterize them.)
Police-records legislation on its way to state Assembly just as SFPD officer is charged with lewd act
By G.W. Schulz
UPDATE! Here’s an SB 1019 alert from the Northern California ACLU.
Have you caught up with this week’s lurid law-enforcement story involving an SFPD officer facing criminal charges in the East Bay for sleeping with a 14-year-old prostitute? Scaaaaaaandalous.
If formal criminal charges had never been brought against the 37-year department veteran and he merely faced internal disciplinary proceedings for having sex with an underage girl in his car, there’s a chance you never would have learned about it. The state Supreme Court in a now-infamous decision handed down last year blocked the public from being able to access police disciplinary records.
If police hadn’t discovered the two in Sgt. Donald Forte’s civilian car at the dead end of an East Oakland street and the lewd act had simply been reported by a colleague internally, how else could the public have ever learned that a police officer had allegedly committed statutory rape?
Outside of a possible leak, the public may never have known a thing.
Two stories we published this week were also affected by that Supreme Court decision. Our story on three sheriff’s deputies in San Francisco accused in federal court by former county-jail inmates of assaulting them was limited in part because some personnel records generated in the case were designated confidential by a judge, so we couldn’t look at them.
Mack Woodfox alleges he was beat while in custody
Merc workers plan protest of job cuts
By G.W. Schulz
UPDATE! I failed to include a date for the protest first time around. It will be this Tuesday, June 26.
Employees of the embattled San Jose Mercury News announced earlier today that they intended to picket the newspaper over expected job cuts at the peninsula daily.
The jobs of 30 ad-production workers will immediately be affected, and editorial and composing room employees were already facing planned cuts.
The paper also announced today that it would be getting rid of its Perspective section, which appears on Sundays, due to “relatively low readership.” We reported recently that the Chronicle has been considering a similar cut to its Insight section, from which longtime editor Jim Finefrock was recently let go.
Production-side employees from the Merc represented by the Northern California Media Workers Union planned a protest for today stating in a press release that the cuts would only help to expand the newspaper empire of William “Lean” Dean Singleton, head honcho for MediaNews Group, which leads a consortium of newspaper companies that owns the Merc along with just about every other major daily in the Bay Area save for the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Merc’s union complained that some MediaNews Group positions had already been outsourced to India from Contra Costa County and Pleasanton.
Nudity Merited
By Sarah Phelan
Photo courtesy of Jack Gescheidt’s Tree Spirit Project.
A City of Oakland plan to cut down 224 trees along Lake Merritt has stalled, thanks to a Friends of the Lake lawsuit. Then this Saturday, traffic stalled as demonstrators stripped, some climbing into the tall eucalyptus trees, while others prefered to keep their feet on the ground. But was their nudity merited? Eucalyptus trees tend to arouse the passions of both types of Tree People. Those who love all trees, and those who love all other trees except eualyptuses. So, why are some people hating on eucalyptuses? Does the City of Oakland share their grounds for hate? and what were the nudies thinking?