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Now THIS is scary

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By Tim Redmond

THe Bush Administration is quietly moving to give an eight-member panel appointed by the president the ability to kill any federal program or agency — unlilaterally. I’m not joking; Rollling Stone broke the story, and there’s a post on Daily Kos that lays it out and offers ways to fight back.

Here’s how RS describes it:

“[T]he commission would enable the Bush administration to achieve what Ronald Reagan only dreamed of: the end of government regulation as we know it. With a simple vote of five commissioners — many of them likely to be lobbyists and executives from major corporations currently subject to federal oversight — the president could terminate any program or agency he dislikes. No more Environmental Protection Agency. No more Food and Drug Administration. No more Securities and Exchange Commission.”

I’ve found very little other press on this, but it’s one of the more frightening things I’ve seen in a while.

Dem Greens

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By Steven T. Jones
So the Bay Area’s best and brightest liberals continue to leave the Democratic Party in frustration, the most recent being gubernational candidate, author, and anti-death penalty activist Barbara Becnel, who fought for years to help redeem and save Tookie Williams, who Californians executed last year. When she switched from Dem to Green last week — with Green gubernatorial candidate Peter Camejo at her side — she blasted the leaders of her old party for “allowing race and class bias to dishonor the Democratic Party.” Becnel, a black woman, is part of a trend of people of color jumping ship because the Democrats have failed to take strong and principled stands against war, capital punishment, and a range of other economic and social justice issues. She said the party “has transformed itself from Dixiecrats to Richiecrats — money counts, equal treatment does not.”

Come on, Mr. Sheriff

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By Tim Redmond

Here’s a great idea: Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Ross Mirkarmimi are pushing for a resolution that would call on the San Francisco sheriff to refuse to carry out Ellis Act evictions. Sheriff Mike Hennessey doesn’t seem so hot on this; he says he doesn’t want to face a contempt of court citation and wind up in his own jail.

But hey, it’s a San Francisco tradition: Back in 1977, then-Sheriff Dick Hongisto refused to evict the residents of the International Hotel, and spent five days in jail before relenting. The worst that would happen to Hennessey: He’d be stuck for a few days in his own clink, where I suspect he’d be treated well (and would learn a bit about how the inmates feel day to day). Eventually, he’d probably have to relent, too — but what a glrious legal battle. It would be an other great example of what we call Civic Disobedience — using the clout of the city and the full legal resources of the city to defy an immoral law. Gavin Newsom did it with same-sex marriage. Now, Hennessey has a chance to make history. Go for it, Mike.

An itemized bill for murder

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By G.W. Schulz

Both the Contra Costa Times and the Sacramento Bee ran large Sunday features on their front pages chronicling gun violence in the East Bay and Sacramento County. The Bee published part two of a series on Monday.

The lengthy Times piece focuses on the costs everyone absorbs as a result of shooting deaths and injuries. Reporters Karl Fischer and Sara Steffens follow the bodies and perpetrators through the county court and hospital systems and lay out the bill to taxpayers. The message is this: “You may think the carnage remains mostly in the violent city of Richmond far away from your fortified living room. But you’re paying the price anyway, whether you’re intimately familiar with the tragedy of gun violence or not.”

Private-prison blues

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By G.W. Schulz

Nashville is known mostly as a home for some of the best and worst artists country music has to offer. But the city has quietly played host to something else over the years – privatization. The Nashville business community is dominated in part by the nation’s largest privatization outfits, which earn lucrative contracts performing services for the public sector such as hospital and jail management.

Perhaps the biggest player in the Nashville business scene is the Corrections Corporation of America, which endured the popular wrath of lefty journalists several years ago and almost went bankrupt in the late 90s. CCA’s Tennessee neighbor, the Hospital Corporation of American, attracted slightly more attention recently when a certain prominent stockholder, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, was accused of conflicts of interest. Frist’s family helped found HCA, but the senator has insisted his investments haven’t compromised his capacity to legislate fairly.

But these days, after escaping headlines for a few years, CCA is back.

World War III

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By Tim Redmond

It’s not news that Newt Gingrich announced last week that World War III has begun. Some people in the progressive blogosphere are taking this seriously, saying it signals a new GOP offensive and the possibility that the Bush Administration is going to launch more military action in the Middle East. That’s not what Condi is telling the world, but I gather from what’s buzzing on the wires that I’m not the only one who thinks that the mess in Lebanon could quickly grow into a mess in Iran, and beyond.
The guy who runs my corner store on Cortland Street — not a foreign policy expert, but a native of the region — told me last night that he thinks Hezbollah and the Iranians love practicing with Iranian firepower in Lebanon, because it’s a convenient way to see if the stuff works. Besides, it gets Israel militarily engaged, which gets the Islamic radicals stirred up, which destablizes everything, which is what the luncatics on both sides want. And after all, who cares if Lebanese civilians die?
Tim Kingston, a freelance journalist who used to work for us, calls or emails me every day with the latest death toll; he grew up in Lebanon, and he’s written a piece for next week’s Guardian that explains why this latest assault on “the middle east’s whipping boy” is so painful — and has to be stopped. Watch for it.

Jesus built my veto … It’s a love affair

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By G.W. Schulz

This week’s presidential veto may not have been signed if Bush were forced to call each and every American suffering from a debilitating spinal-chord injury to explain his position on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research.

The dialogue in such a fantasy might have gone something like this:

American suffering from debilitating spinal-chord injury: “Uh, yeah, Mr. President, it’s suppertime and getting to the telephone is a little taxing physically, but I’ll go ahead and accept the collect call. What’s up?”

Make those donuts …

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By Tim Redmond

Wow! A committee chaired by two former police chiefs thinks the police chief should have more power in disciplinary cases. Go figure.

As Joe Pop-O-Pie says, make those donuts with extra grease ….

The rent-control lie

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By Tim Redmond

I’ve been hearing this shit now for more than 20 years: Landlords say the reason there’s no new rental housing built in San Francisco is because of rent control. Never mind that new buildings are exempt from rent-control anyway; it’s that ugly monster in the radical left-wing closet — actual limits on how much a tenant can be gouged — that keeps housing-supply down and thus rents (uncontrolled rents) up.

Now, an economic report on the housing industry prepared for the Mayor’s Office of Housing provides some very different answers. Why is there no rental housing being built? Because developers want huge, insance profit margins — a minimum of 28 percent for large projects — and condos pencil out better than rentals.

You make more money building condos. That’s why nobody’s building rental housing in the private sector. Let’s at least be honest about it.

Olympic schemes

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By Steven T. Jones
Kudos to Sup. Gerardo Sandoval for his voicing skepticism about whether San Francisco should want to host the Olympics in 2016, as Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing. Also, a belated shout out to the two voices over at the Chronicle who aren’t cheerleading over an idea that could be financially disastrous for the city. Clearly, the city’s rich and powerful like this idea, but this is also the same constituency who demanded that every city initiative be subjected to an economic impact analysis. It seems only fair that they subject this idea to the same sort of scrutiny.

Newsom’s pal Daley

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Gavin Newsom happily hosted Chicago Mayor Richard Daley on a working tour of the city today, but as Willie Brown (who is no stranger to cronyism and corruption charges) pointed out on the Will and WIllie Show this morning, Daley might not be the person who an ambitious young Democrat really wants to be linked to right now. Several of his close associates were indicted last year on corruption charges, and a relative was indicted in January.

So far, although the Cook Country Republican party has tried, none of this has stuck to Daley. But you might want to watch those photo ops, Gavin.

Continuing bike battles

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By Steven T. Jones
OK, this entry is just adding some touch-up work to the one below: “Bike battles continues.” I’ve heard some firsthand reports from last weekend’s mini-confrontation between Mayor Gavin Newsom and a bicycle community upset over how the Gav didn’t keep his promise to seek a compromise to the Healthy Saturdays measure he vetoed a couple months ago. Newsom won’t even meet with the bike people to discuss things (big surprise…we hear Newsom is checked out and has been cancelling his regular department head meetings and other gigs. Why? Well, there are nasty rumors about that, which I’ll try to share with y’all asap). But getting back on topic: bike activists gathered to ambush Newsom at the Conservatory of Flowers, where he was to be privately honored for his veto by Coalition for Park Access (ie access to the museums in the park by car, not the park itself). Apparently, the event was not meant for pubic consumption, but the Examiner somehow got it and printed it, much to the event organizers’ dismay. Newsom tried to sneak in a back door, but a camera wielding activist stopped him and got some great pictures (which we’re running in this week’s paper, check ’em out). “I don’t like photos,” our telegenic mayor reportedly said as he blocked the camera with his hand, Hollywood-style. Bike activist and SF Party Party member Ted Strawser summed it up this way: “We are still hoping for the Mayor to show some leadership on this important issue. However, Wednesday’s veto celebration, capping two months of silence, may not bode well. This may not be the last time that Park Advocates get a ‘tell it to the hand’ gesture from Mayor Newsom.”

Daly’s re-election

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By Tim Redmond

Pat Murphy at the Sentinel has a nice recap of a party for Chris Daly, sponsored by Jane Morrison and Agar Jaicks, who are longtime stalwarts of the local Democratic Party. Murphy reports on the usual plaudits from the likes of Tom Amminano and Aaron Peskin, who talked about Daly’s fighting spirit.

I missed the party, but let me add a point. Daly is a political pugilist, of course, and sometimes a bit prickly (he wouldn’t talk to me for weeks after we declined to endorse his Transbay Terminal proposal). But I watched a lot of the budget hearings, and I have to say: It’s not easy chairing that committee, and Daly did a really good job. When he’s not yelling at anyone, he’s actually a pretty fair legislator.

The hemp chronicles

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Assemblyman Mark Leno’s industrial hemp bill is headed for the state Senate, and the OC Weekly’s staff blog has a wonderful interview with the “joint” author, Republican Chuck DeVore. Devore, a lieutenant colonel in the national guard and hardly a pot-smoking San Francisco liberal, just thinks the bill makes good policy sense. Why shouldn’t California farmers be able to grow a product that it’s perfectly legal to import from Canada?

George Skelton of the LA Times has an interesting hit: The guv, he points out, seems to like the nutritional supplements industry, and hemp oil makes for great supplements. Is there any way he can still veto this bill?

FEMA gets a makeover

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By G.W. Schulz

The major news organizations hardly touched it, but a congressional appropriations provision reorganizing and renaming FEMA passed the Senate 87 to 11 last week. To his begrudging credit, Sen. Trent Lott, a Republican from Mississippi, originally wanted to make FEMA a federal agency independent of the Department of Homeland Security, a plan that would have stripped away the enormous layers of bureaucracy some say lead to the slow response to Hurricane Katrina.

FEMA’s director could now – if the restructuring works – directly access the president during states of emergency and move with more flexibility by possessing its own command and control structure during disasters, according to a statement from Lott’s office. Many of Lott’s constituents, of course, were badly battered during last summer’s hurricane season. And FEMA’s response to the storms was not unlike like an emergency vehicle full of paramedics arriving three days late to an accident scene because they had to call their boss at every stop sign.

Bike battles continue

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By Steven T. Jones
It was two months ago this Saturday that Mayor Gavin Newsom vetoed Healthy Saturdays, which would have extended the Sunday Golden Gate Park road closures through the weekend. At the time, he did the political thing and said he was looking for a compromise. But since then, he’s done nothing to follow up or even agree to meet to bike advocates. Yet he did find time on Wednesday evening to get feted by opponents of the measure, who called strangely call themselves Coalition for Park Access, at the Conservatory of Flowers. A few bicyclists got wind of the event and showed up to protest, but their bigger effort will be tomorrow when they show up at the Conservatory of Flowers at 1:30 to educate parkgoers how the mayor is all talk when it comes to creating car-free reactional spaces.

P.S. Anti-bike zealot Rob Anderson — whose lawsuit challenging the city bike plan has temporarily halted most bike projects in the city — lost his mind when he heard about the Wednesday protest, calling on the mayor to remove Bike Coalition executive director Leah Shahum from her seat on the MTA board. Luckily, he was heckled down by members of the PROSF listserve, who informed him that MTA members serve fixed terms and can’t be booted simply for exercising the free speech rights that Anderson himself so often (and irritatingly) proclaims.

Lawsuit over newspaper merger

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By Steven T. Jones
Big but buried news from today’s Examiner: Clint Reilly (with help from attorney Joseph Alioto) is suing to block the big newspaper merger that put most Bay Areas rags under the tight-fisted control of MediaNews (and the unsettling business partnership role in the Hearst Corp., owner of the Chronicle, in the deal). This is a still developing big deal that we’ll have more on next week, but in the meantime, here’s where you can access lots of stories on a business deal that’s bad for journalism in the Bay Area and beyond.

What Can Brown Do For You?

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By Sarah Phelan

Someone needs to take the UPS Poster that says “What Can Brown Do For You” and seriously adbust it, in the light of all the crazy posturing around “illegal” immigration.

Not that I’m inciting anyone, but speaking as a “legal” immigrant, it’s hard to stay silent as Americans build a fence to keep out the people who they underpay to prop up the American “white picket fence” dream.

Good luck with that surreality…

Jason Leopold inspires yet another correction

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By G.W. Schulz

When the controversial journalist Jason Leopold botched a story last May for lefty media purveyors Truthout.org, the Columbia Journalism Review took him out to the woodshed. Ironically, however, CJR was forced to make a correction to their own story in a later editor’s note placed at the bottom of the piece.

Leopold used what he stated were multiple anonymous sources to report that Karl Rove would indeed be indicted for his role in leaking the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to the press. But Leopold got the story all wrong, it appeared, because a month later, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald told Rove’s lawyer that he “did not anticipate” seeking charges against Rove in the scandal.

Windfalls and compromise

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By Steven T. Jones
For anyone who could sort through the sometimes mind-numbing minutiae of land use economics and regulation, today’s Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee contained some interesting insights. Sup. Chris Daly has been trying to strengthen the city’s inclusionary housing ordinance — which now requires most developers build some below market rate units in their projects (12 percent if done on-site, 17 percent for off-site, or an in-lieu fee) — by increasing the percentages to 20-25, changing who qualifies to buy them and how they’re sold, and a few other tweaks. But a consultant report that came out Friday concluded that developers wouldn’t build at that level because that would drop their take below their minimum required 28 percent profit margin for big high rises (or a profit of around $250 million). Daly and housing activists who worked on the ordinance, including Calvin Welch, expressed astonishment developers required that much profit before they’d build, but they read the political handwriting and lowered their percentages to 15 and 20 percent, which pencil out. “What we were confronted with last Friday was political death,” Welch told me. But now, after that and a change grandfathering in current projects, the ordinance has the support from both the Mayor’s Office and leaders in the development community, although the committee punted it for a week to deal with a few details. There’s lots more to say about all this, but I’ll save most of it for my article in next week’s paper.

Healthy Compromises

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Sup. Tom Ammiano and Mayor Gavin Newsom took another step today towards making health care accessible to all uninsured San Franciscans.
The San Francisco Health Care Security Ordinance, which Ammiano and Newsom announced their joint support for July 11, offers access to comprehensive medical services, while requiring that medium and large business meet minimum spending requirement on employees’ health care.
While the agreement is optimsitic, it wasn’t reached without compromise on the employer spending mandate.
From July ’07, when the ordinance would become law, until Jan. 2008, employers will have to provide healthcare for employees who work 12 hours or more. That requirement tightens to 10 and then 8 hours, in Jan. ’08 and Jan.’09, respectively.
Meanwhile, medium sized businesses, (20-50 employees) have until March 31 2007, to start making mandatory payments, (which amounts to about a $1 an hour per worker.
Other tweaks: employers won’t have to make health insurance payments, if their employee has coverage elsewhere (through a parent, a spouse, or presumably another job), but the employee decides who pays.
Of all three compromises, the 12-10-8 compromise spells the greatest danger for the local labor pol (what if stores cut workers’ hours to 11 each per week?)
A special Budget and Finance Committee meeting is set for Monday July 17 at 1pm, and the full Board will discuss it July 18, with a final vote expected on July 25.
With Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Michela Alioto-Pier continue to stand on the sidelines? Will Mayor Gavin Newson step inside the county supes’ chambersn? and How many signatures does the business community need to get a referendum on this matter launched by August 9? Stay tuned.

The taxi “thief”

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By Tim Redmond

This is front-page news in the Chronicle? A weeks-old story that an assistant to a department head was convicted of stealing a $100 necklace 15 years ago?

Let’s check out the facts. The man, Tristan Bettencourt, is now the assistant to the director of the Taxi Commission. He’s filling in as acting director because the commission fired director Heidi Machen in a politically motivated move June 28th.

Back in 1989, Bettencourt was a cab driver when a woman he’d taken to a movie later realized her house had been burglarized and a necklace stolen. She accused Bettencourt. An overworked public defender told Bettencourt that he could be facing six years in prison, and urged him to plead. The way Bettencourt described it to me, he was a 130-pound kid, terrified about doing hard time. He took a deal that kept him out of the violence of the California prison system.

Maybe he’s telling the truth, and he’s innocent. He was poorly advised by a lawyer and took a felony rap. These things happen all the time.

But what if he was actually guilty? Should anyone really care 15 years later?

There’s no doubt that he’s been free from legal trouble since that episode. His conviction was erased from the record because he’d fulfilled his probation. He’s gone on to get a decent job and is supporting himself and contributing to society. Isn’t that something we should all be proud of?

And what possible connection could a small-time burglary bust all those years ago have to do with his qualifications to work for the Taxi Commission?

There’s no secret what’s happening here. The big cab companies are pissed that Machen is cracking down on all their permit scams, and they’re trying to smear her staff. It’s disgraceful that the Chron is playing along.

Jane Mayer in The New Yorker

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By G.W. Schulz

Jane Mayer’s exceptional profile of David Addington in the July 3 New Yorker admittedly confirms much of what we already knew about this presidential administration. But Addington for some time has managed somehow to fly below the radar despite his clear and aggressive leadership role among neoconservatives in the White House.

A solution in search of a problem

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By Tim Redmond

I don’t really know where this comes from; do people have nothing better to do than whine about their neighbors? But I know that in neighbhorhoods like Chinatown, North Beach and yeah, Bernal Heights, where I live, it’s going to be tough on some people who have neither garages nor alleys and could be asked to stick their trash cans in the front hall.

But I have an answer: Paint them wild colors, and call them public art.

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