By Steven T. Jones
SFist has a nice wrap-up on the fallout from its outing of Newsom flack Peter Ragone as a liar, but the Chron’s Matier & Ross not only buried the story halfway through today’s column, they also missed the point. Ragone didn’t just get his “hand caught in the cookie jar” by pretending to be someone he’s not online — he appeared to have told journalists and the public direct and bald-faced lies to cover up what he did, a sin for which he still hasn’t come clean.
That was the focus of the resolution Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin proposed during yesterday’s meeting, which calls for all public information officers on the city’s payroll to abide by ethical standards accepted by the public relations industry, including honesty. After all, these people work for us. We pay their salaries, not Gavin Newsom, and we don’t pay them to subvert the public interest in honest, open government. Kudos to Peskin for trying to take the high road on this sordid incident.
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Politics Blog
SockPuppetGate redux
So clean you can eat off ’em
by Amanda Witherell
Hey Mission residents: there’s a public hearing tomorrow morning at 9 am, Room 400 in City Hall about street cleaning. The city is planning on having a lot more of it in the neighborhood, which means more sweeping up of newspapers and broken glass, but also more moving of your car and more getting of parking tickets. It affects everyone from Cesar Chavez to 19th Street and everything east of South Van Ness. If you have a Department of Public Works poster saran-wrapped to the street pole or tree in front of your house, they’re talking to you. You can double-check here, and roll down to City Hall tomorrow morning to give your two cents.
Who’s the poseur at City Hall?
By G.W. Schulz
San Francisco has always been notoriously behind statewide on skatepark construction, despite the relatively small monetary investment they require and the high civic value they produce. One spot already exists at Crocker Amazon Park, but it’s largely regarded as mediocre. Conservative states years ago were funding the construction of skateparks through their public works departments and allowing young skaters to participate in the designs. Shit, rural Kansas was doing it a long time ago.
Peter’s principles (or lack thereof)
By Steven T. Jones
Before hitting the latest news of ethics problems in the mayor’s office, and the brilliant segment that KGO-TV’s dogged investigative reporter Dan Noyes has done to highlight them, it’s important to offer some context and perspective.
Mayor Gavin Newsom imported veteran Democrat Party flack Peter Ragone to be his press secretary upon taking office three years ago. Ragone didn’t really know San Francisco that well, but he seemed to understand the national political landscape and therefore became a trusted adviser to our ambitious mayor. The gay marriage move was brilliant, shoring up Newsom’s support in the city’s queer community and positioning him as a civil rights leader for future campaigns.
Yet along the way, Ragone seemed to forget that Newsom was the mayor of San Francisco at a time when progressives controlled the Board of Supervisors and couldn’t simply be dismissed. Over and over, Ragone spun stories to reporters about the incompetence and/or malevolence of progressives or other critics of the mayor — often attacking or belittling the journalists when they expressed skepticism — until he had very little credibility left with any of us (something I say as someone who regularly talks with journalists from all the other major news outlets in town).
So when the SFist discovered that some posters to their site were actually coming from Ragone’s computer, and Ragone avoided answering questions about it and opted to instead claim on the site that allegedly pseudonymous John Nelson was a real person, his best friend actually, who often stayed at Ragone’s house during the early morning and late night hours when he posted — most people simply assumed Ragone was lying.
I wanted to give Ragone the benefit of the doubt and asked whether I could meet John or otherwise get some verification for his existence. Ragone said no, and said, “I don’t think I’d like to see my friends and family put through the wringer of San Francisco politics.”
Unkinking the Armory
by Amanda Witherell
Looks like you can’t just set up a porno film studio in San Francisco anymore. Neighborhood groups are looking to have more say in how kinky the Armory building at 14th and Mission is going to be now that it’s been purchased by kink.com for filming fetish flicks. So the Mayor’s office and the city’s planning department are scheduling some meetings to hash it all over in fine San Francisco style. It sounds like they sort of wish it became pricey penthouses after all and the mayor’s disgraced flak, Peter Ragone has turned on the spin, lamenting the loss of an opportunity to fill the building with affordable housing. No word yet on when those meetings will be, but we’ll be sure to let you know.
Wired magazine wins
By G.W. Schulz
As we’ve reported online, federal Judge Susan Illston has largely ruled in favor of the Guardian and Media Alliance and has opened several documents originally filed under seal in Clint Reilly’s civil suit alleging that the Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group are conspiring to monopolize the Bay Area’s newspaper market. A Santa Clara County judge ruled against one of Silicone Valley’s biggest public companies last week and opened up court records to the press and public in a shareholder suit alleging problems with backdated stock options to top executives.
But coincidentally, Illston ruled in yet another open-records case recently that the feds have to pay Stanford’s Cyberlaw Clinic $67,000 to cover legal fees regarding its court-based effort to obtain records of the Department of Homeland Security’s US-VISIT system.
CoCo Times editor moves on
By G.W. Schulz
Looks like former Contra Costa Times editor Chris Lopez has at least found some part-time work blogging for NewAssignment.net. His most recent entries highlight technological innovations at some of the nation’s big dailies, including a video obituary of Art Buchwald that appeared on the New York Times Web site.
An early January post notes that the McClatchy chain of newspapers, which owns the Sacramento Bee, has purchased the “Famous” blogs, including FresnoFamous.com and ModestoFamous.com.
The tough CoCo Times editor was unexpectedly let go from the paper in October after Denver-based MediaNews and William Dean Singleton bought the scrappy daily along with a group of other Bay Area papers. Lopez helped Singleton win a Pulitzer while working at Singleton’s flagship Denver Post.
Putting the Sixties to rest
By Tim Redmond
I’m been meaning to write something for a while now about the recent Black Liberation Army arrests, but it’s tricky: I don’t believe in shooting anyone, and killing a cop is a heinous crime, and there is no statute of limitations on murder, nor should there be.
But somehow, I feel the same way about this case as I did about the Sara Jane Olsen case and all these other efforts to get criminal indictments for things that happened in the heat of the 1960s, when there was, in some ways, a low-scale civil war on in this country — and both sides were doing some nasty stuff.
If you want to indict the alleged members of the BLF for shotgunning a cop, fine. Then how about indicting Henry Kissinger for war crimes? How about tracking down and indicting all the living FBI agents who illegally wiretapped radicals? How about indicting some federal agents and Chicago cops for the killing of Fred Hampton? The list goes on.
I’m thinking that if we really want to go down this road, we should create a 1960s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It the South Africans could deal with their bloody history that way, so can we.
Otherwise, the balance of indictments hardly seems fair.
Fiber: A big fat pipe all the way into your home
By Sarah Phelan
If you’ve read the 196-page study of fiber-to-the-premise that was posted online by he City’s Department of Telecommunications and InformationServices the same week that Mayor Gavin Newsom was whooping it up in Davos, Switzerland, you’ll know that the report concludes that municipal fiber-to-the-premises is the most visionary way for San Francisco to go. Oh, and that to really bridge the digital divide, he city should build a pilot fiber network in the San Francisco Enterprise Zone–a 12-square mile economic development area that includes Bay View, Hunter’s Point, South Bayshore, Chinatown, Mission District, Mission Bay, Potrero Hill, South of Market, Tenderloin and the Western Addition.
“FTTP is the holy grail of broadband, a fat pipe all the way into the home or business,” states the executive summary, “but in the near future is only available for a privileged few located in the limited areas of private-sector deployment.”
Noting that private sector networks aren’t meeting this growing demand for bandwidth and speed in an affordable manner, the report states that “in this context of private sector disinterest, municipal FTTP would rank San Francisco among the world’s most far-sighted cities—by creating an infrastructure asset with a lifetime of decades that is almost endlessly upgradeable and capable of supporting any number of public or private sector communications initiatives.”
According to the report, fiber allows “numerous competitors to quickly and inexpensively enter the San Francisco market and offer competing, differentiated broadband services and access,” facilitates “democratic and free market values,” “affordable access” “economic development” and enhances, “the City’s reputation for visionary and pioneering projects; promoting major development initiatives such as revitalization zones.”
The report also notes that fiber “provides a highly reliable, resilient backbone for existing and future wireless initiatives,” supports current and future public safety and government communications systems, saving the City enormous unending cost of leasing circuits from telephone companies, and provides a higher quality, higher capacity, more reliable, more secure transport for key city users such as law enforcement, fire, emergency management and public health.”
In other words, it’s the kind of system that would be a life saver following a major earthquake.
None of which means that we shouldn’t be doing wireless, just not the
flawed Google Earthlink deal that Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing.
Jealous!
by Amanda Witherell
I was in seventh grade when the Gulf War started and I remember watching news coverage of the bombs over Baghdad from the back row of my history class and having no clue what it meant. Welcome to the vast and sometimes disturbing plateau that is American public education.
Which is why I’m jealous of all the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders at San Francisco’s public schools who will have Addicted to War as a supplemental text in their history classes.
Virtual Newsom
By Steven T. Jones
Mayor Gavin Newsom may be unwilling to appear in person before the Board of Supervisors, but he’s using his trip to the World Economic Forum to reach out to citizens of the virtual world Second Life. The cyber-Gavin gave a long but not terribly illuminating interview, although he did joke that we now have a virtual mayor “just in case the public gets fed up with the real me.” I listened for some of the “new ideas” he claimed he would bring back from the Swiss Alps, but instead it sounded like he developed some new sympathies for poor, misunderstood corporate titans, such as the oil executive who wants to save the world for his children. How touching.
Matt Smith hates San Francisco
By Tim Redmond
That’s the only conclusion I could reach after reading this piece of garbage that was until recently sitting high on the front page of the SF Weekly website.
It’s fine for journalists to be cynical. It’s fine to challenge the conventional wisdom. But all I got from this piece — and frankly, all I get a lot of the time from Matt Smith — is how much San Francisco sucks, how lame all of us who love this city are, how stupid local politics is, and how nobody who is a part of the fabric of this town is anything but a witless moron who can’t possibly live up to Mr. Smith’s standards.
Matt: Why do you live here?
Will the real Peter Ragone please stand up?
By Steven T. Jones
The scrappy political blog SFist has consistently, insightfully, and with an infectious sense of voyeuristic glee been dogging Mayor Gavin Newsom and his many missteps of the last year, becoming a go-to site for local political junkies. As such, Newsom’s prickly press secretary Peter Ragone and a few other Gavin supporters have taken to posting comments defending their guy.
Well, now it seems the SFist has caught Ragone apparently pretending to be a John Nelson, posting comments slamming SFist and slobbering all over Newsom. Like the SFist, I called Ragone’s numbers trying to get a comment and/or confirmation, but was unsuccessful.
What the hell is going on in the mayor’s office? Has their bunker mentality completely overwhelmed their sense of ethics, accountability to the public, and service to the city? Personally, I’m going to redouble my efforts to dog the mayor and put some hard questions to him — as soon as he gets back from skiing in Switzerland with his girlfriend.
More carnage at SF Weekly’s sister papers
By Tim Redmond
Damn, I’d sworn off going after New Times/Village Voice Media, the parent company of SF Weekly, for at least a few days, but shit keeps happening.
Will Swaim, the editor of the OC Weekly, which was one of the papers absorbed when New Times took over the Village Voice, has resigned, citing “philosophical differences” with management. That was inevitable, but it sucks: Swaim is a good guy, a good editor and ran a good paper.
And the editor at the Minneapolis City Paper (ditto, formerly a Village Voice paper) resigned under pressure and was quickly replaced. Why? Here’s what the Star-Tribune says:
“I’m not sure anyone was surprised that it happened, only that it took so long,” said David Brauer, a media analyst for Minnesota Public Radio who once wrote for City Pages. “Village Voice/New Times is known for being aggressively apolitical or libertarian. Steve, although he had a pox on both Democrats and Republicans, was mostly a lefty radical guy.”
So the dismantling of the progressive papers that used to be part of the Village Voice franchise continues.
The media blows a media story
By Tim Redmond
The Bay Guardian and Media Alliance have succeeded in getting about 90 percent of the previously secret records in the Clint Reilly media consolidation case opened to public review.
But you wouldn’t know that from reading the news stories in the monopoly dailies that the suit challenges.
In fact, the press coverage of Judge Illston’s ruling shows very neatly how media consolidation and a lack of competition throttle public access to the news.
None of the local dailies (all of them owned by big chains involved in this case) got the story remotely right. The Chronicle’s Bob Egelko, who is normally a decent legal reporter, reported only that Judge Illston had ordered the release of “some MediaNews Group records” but “allowed MediaNews and the Hearst Corp., owner of The Chronicle, to protect most of the documents they had sought to keep sealed.” The seven-paragraph story ignored the main point: When we filed the motion in court to unseal the records, the newspaper barons immediately agreed to make the bulk of the material public. There are thousands and thousands of pages of legal material filed in the case so far, and the publishers didn’t even contest our contention that most of it should never have been sealed in the first place.
“MediaNews Group and Hearst were asked by Media Alliance and the Guardian before they intervened to unseal everything. They declined to unseal anything,” said Jim Wheaton, attorney for the First Amendment Project, which represented us. “But as soon as Media Alliance and the Guardian moved to intervene and unseal, MediaNews and Hearst surrendered on almost all the sealed documents. They fought only to keep some parts of five exhibits and one brief sealed, which comprised 19 separate excerpts (of which six were duplicates, leaving only 13 distinct items).
There’s a lot of legal gobbledegook here, but for the record, here’s how Wheaton explains it:
The following documents were originally filed under seal, in their totality (with court docket numbers):
o Motion for Temporary Restraining Order (“TRO”) and Order to Show Cause (“OSC”) (#70)
o Declaration of Daniel Shulman (#70)
o Memorandum in Support of (“ISO”) Plaintiff’s Motion for TRO and OSC (#71)
o Declaration of Daniel R. Shulman ISO Plaintiff’s Motion for TRO and OSC, including all exhibits thereto. (#72)
o Reply Memorandum ISO Motion for TRO and OSC (#88)
o Supplemental Declaration of Daniel R. Shulman ISO Motion for TRO and OSC including all exhibits thereto (#89)
o Memorandum ISO Motion for Preliminary Injunction (“PI”) (#91)
o Second Supplemental Declaration of Daniel R. Shulman ISO Plaintiff’s Motion for PI, and all exhibits thereto (#91)
o Plaintiff’s Supplemental Memorandum ISO Motion for PI (#96)
o Second Supplemental Declaration of Daniel R. Shulman, including all exhibits thereto (#97)
o Third Supplemental Declaration of Daniel R. Shulman ISO plaintiff’s motion for PI, including all exhibits thereto (#108)
o All 34 exhibits attached to the various Shulman declarations (#s 70, 72, 89, 91, 97, 108)
o Declaration of James M. Asher in Response to OSC Regarding Application for PI and three Exhibits thereto (# 102) (These are all duplicates of other items already filed under seal.)
She has ordered ALL of that unsealed, except for:
o part of two pages from Reilly’s Reply Memorandum ISO of the TRO (#88)
o portions only of just six of the 34 exhibits attached to the Shulman declarations (and their duplicates in Asher’s declaration); the declarations themselves were completely unsealed
Everything else was unsealed. All parts of all the memoranda, all the declarations, and all the other exhibits were unsealed.
Also – and this is key – Illston gave the Guardian and Media Alliance the right to remain legal interveners for the duration of the case, giving us standing to immediately seek the release of any future documents filed under seal.
In one of the nastier little twists to this story, Egelko referred only to “a media group and a weekly newspaper” without ever mentioning Media Alliance or the Bay Guardian.
I send Egelko an email, and he said the reference to the Guardian was cut for space.
The Contra Costa Times ran an Associated Press story by David Kravets that was even worse. The headline: “Judge denies request to unseal MediaNews, Hearst suit papers.” The summary: Illston denied almost everything the Guardian and Media Alliance wanted.
The San Jose Mercury News ran four paragraphs of the same AP story.
That story was, as I’ve pointed out above, utterly inaccurate, embarrassingly so. I called Kravets and asked what had happened, and he acknowledged that he had left out the background – the fact that the media barons, in response to our case, had agreed to unseal most of the records. “I plead guilty to leaving out the background,” he said.
Wheaton is contacting AP and the Chron to seek corrections; we’ll let you know.
In the meantime, think about what happened here: The Times and the Merc, both owned by Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group, run the exact same inaccurate AP story on a major media case involving their parent companies. The Chron, which is supposedly their competitor, runs its own inaccurate story. None of these people (representing the free press of Northern California) are acting like competitors, and none of them give any support or credit to a major effort at opening up the federal courts.
Welcome to the monopoly media world of the Bay Area, 2007.
Fun with whistleblowers!
By G.W. Schulz
Every six months or so, the San Francisco Controller’s Office releases a summary of the numerous whistleblower complaints it receives from citizens and municipal employees alike.
No names are attached, unfortunately. And attempts by the Guardian in the past to obtain details of the complaints and resulting investigations through sunshine requests were rebuffed by the controller. Ed Harrington’s office argued that publicity might inhibit potential whistleblowers from stepping forward.
But for now, at least, we’ve got a good idea of which city and county offices are housing ill-behaved employees and what’s been done to stop them.
Webb for president!
By Steven T. Jones
Even with Democrats retaking Congress and making tentative moves for economic justice and against this disastrous war, political communications have been less than inspiring these days. And President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech last night was a sad and dismal nadir to his sad and dismal presidency. Yet we still had to endure standing ovations that included Democrats for all his dreary non-points and poll-tested platitudes. Ugh, it was almost enough to make a political junkie want to kick the habit.
Then, Jim Webb spoke.
Holy Democratic revival, Batman, this was a knockout! I’ve never seen the opposition party response so thoroughly outshine a State of the Union speech, with all the pagaentry they entail. Webb, a military man turned junior senator from Virginia, eloquently and forcefully drove home the economic justice and anti-war points that most Ameircans believe in, but which Democrats have generally been too timid to really bring. But Webb brought it!
Sadly, his speech was followed by tepid, throwaway remarks from Democratic presidential hopefuls Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton, although Bill Richardson was a bit better. Yet Webb has now set the gold standard for how Democrats should be talking. Either the other contenders will take the cue and start aggressively speakng truth to power, or we’re likely to see a serious grassroots effort to get Webb to run. Progressives aren’t going to have a lot of patience for ending this ill-conceived war and reversing the ruling class’ exploitation of the masses — which were the two main subjects of Webb’s speech. Democrats have their moment, and if Pelosi — who has said impeachment is off the table — doesn’t forcefully challenge this imperial presidency with everything she has, it looks like we have a new kid of the block who will.
Guess how many hotel rooms there are in SF?
By Sarah Phelan
10,000? 30,000? 100,000?
If you guessed 32, 952 rooms, you’re correct–and must be digesting the same economic reports that I’ve been calling bedtime reading this week.
According to a report fresh out of the Controller’s office, the lowest point, in terms of filling all those rooms, was the winter of 2001-2002, when 50 percent were vacant. (Remember, that was the grim post 9/11 moment, when people were afraid to fly to the USA, in case they ended up being flown into a hotel high-rise, instead of staying in one.)
The highest point? June 2000, the height of the dot-com boom, when occupancy peaked at 91.7 percent.
“These numbers suggest that it is practically impossible for a visitor to be able to find a room in the City on any given day of any given month,” the report observes, the kind of observation that just begs to be contradicted…
Maxwell to Mirant: Abandon Potrero Power Plant
by Sarah Phelan
Sup. Sophie Maxwell has introduced a resolution urging Mirant Corporation to abandon permanently its efforts to operate the Potrero Power Plant, and reaffirming the City’s commitment to closing the plant as soon as feasible, and urging all interested State and federal agencies to facilitate the closure, so the site may be developed in a manner more in harmony with surrounding neighborhoods and sound public and environmental health.
Sean is Queen ‘til February
by Sarah Phelan
Today was the first official Question Time at City Hall and, since Mayor Gavin Newsom was not in town, being tied up, among other things, at economic forums in Switzerland, Board Chair Aaron Peskin asked Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who Newsom has appointed as Acting Mayor in his absence. if he wanted to address the policy questions, instead.
“I’m not sure how hard I should laugh right now,” sputtered Elsbernd. “If we took this logically, I could stand up here and have a conversation with myself.”
“Most substitute mayors don’t exercise the full mayoral powers,” interjected Sup. Chris Daly. “Though there are some notable exceptions,” he added. Daly was of course referring to his own October 2003 surprise, in which he
The SOTU response
By Tim Redmond
–It says a lot about the state of the media when Sen. Dick Durbin decides that instead of doing TV interviews, he’ll respond to the speech by blogging on DailyKos. Complete with some really dopey pictures. (Look, look, here I am, blogging! I may be a U.S. Senator but I can actually type on a computer, like the real people! I’m a blogger! Whoo Hah!)
–Chris Matthews argues that Jim Webb’s response is the strongest Democratic response to a GOP State of the Union speech since Ed Muskie responded to Nixon in 1970. That’s a strong statement, but it’s pretty clear that Webb was the right guy for this job: He pointedly noted that he, and his brother, and his son, had all served in active duty in the Marines (unlike Bush), and that leaders who send troops to war have a responsibility to make honest judgements.
–CNN says that Bush is already a lame duck Duh.
The State of the Union is ….
By Tim Redmond
Pathetic.
It’s as if nothing that has happened over the past four years has made any difference to the president. He started off by saying that the private sector, and tax breaks, were going to solve the health-insurance crisis, which is demonstrably wrong. Then he went on — and on — talking about the war on terror, and trying, yet again, as he has done over and over with no success, to tie the war in Iraq to Osama Bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks.
My favorite line: “This is not the fight we entered, but it’s the fight we are in.” Excuse me: A lot of us pointed out out from the start that this was exactly the fight we were entering. The mess that is Iraq is no surprise — it’s exactly what everyone with any sanity predicted would happen.
State of the union, uncensored
By Tim Redmond
This is pretty funny.
Pop Matters hates the new Village Voice
By Tim Redmond
I know all this talk about what New Times has done to the Voice can get a bit tiresome, but I can’t resist any article that calls Mike Lacey “a Philistine who hates New York City.” Enjoy.