SFBG Blogs

SPANKING THE PRESS: Matt Taibbi and turd-tossing apes at the New York Post

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By G.W. Schulz

The absolute best (and darkest) moments in Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi’s book on the 2004 presidential election are not when he attacks the contemptible political antics of the candidates themselves, but when he savagely launches mortar shells at the national press corps trailing along on the campaign planes.

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His most memorable direct hit is leveled at the New York Post and its election coverage under the weighty tutelage of media mogul Rupert Murdoch in a single, brilliant paragraph:

“It’s always a little surprising to remember that the New York Post has a ‘Washington bureau chief’ filing ostensibly factual stories from the Hill about the movements of the president and other real, breathing government officials. The effect of reading these touchingly earnest impersonations of credible journalism is a little like watching Koko the gorilla play with a kitten or punch the ‘buttons’ on a toy telephone. My God, you think. It’s so human! But sooner or later Koko plugs her ears with her own turds again, and she’s back to being just another loveable ape.”

Our illustrious executive editor, Tim Redmond, may actually dislike our praise of Taibbi’s ferocious Post critique. Long-time Guardian readers familiar with the paper’s old design know Tim adores the Post’s screaming banner headlines and splashed them similarly across the Guardian’s former front-page template for years without shame.

Josh is free! Join me at the press conference on the City Hall steps at 5 p.m. today

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See Sarah Phelan’s story on the Guardian website at sfbg.com. Much more to come, B3

We see dead people: Traipsing through the valley of the Bay Area kings, all dead as coffin nails

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It’s always a grand old, gruesome time visiting Mountain View Cemetery at the dead edges of Oakland. The Bay’s most historic burial ground was designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who also had a hand in NYC’s Central Park and Yosemite, and encompasses so many generations, grandiose sacrophagi, weird crypts, oddball mausoleums, and intriguing headstones that one’s head begins to spin, imagining all the dead people roaming Gold Rush ‘Fisco, bunkered down during WW II, forever dying young and leaving a beautiful monument.

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Busty pinup sphinxes guard one once-very-wealthy dead person’s house. All photos by Kimberly Chun.

The Moore Brothers were inspired by Mountain View to make their last album, and guarens, you’ll be similarly transported, drawn inexorably back, back, back, to visit it again, again, again, to look for more pyramids.

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Believe it or not, this is one of two sizable pyramids at Mountain View Cemetary.

I’ve yet to glimpse the lasting resting spots of author Frank Norris, artist Thomas Hill, architects Julia Morgan and Bernard Maybeck, and railroad builder Charles Crocker, but I have marveled at the stony facade of candyman Ghiradelli’s crypt and checked out the lovely, mossy, creepy pond deeper into the grounds. You can spend hours here amid the crumbling headstones from the 1800s.

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A sweet little ’30s-era angel – with a rave-ready whistle around her neck.

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Disarray in the forgotten corners of the cemetary.

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The tombstone reads “Rest at last, dear one.”

There was a daytime mini-rave/party going on atop one hill the day I last visited. But you can do it the official way: free docent-led tours begin at 10 a.m. the second Saturday of each month and last about three hours. The next one is April 14. You can also arrange your own tailored outing by contacting Mountain View Cemetery, 5000 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, at (510) 658-2588.

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For reals? “Mother and Baby 1901”?

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Gimme danger, little stranger

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Guardian contributor and Battleship playa Gene Bae wants to sing the praises of the band Little Claw:

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Rock ’n’ roll used to be dangerous. To engage in it at all was to be an outsider, a rebel unfit for genteel society. These days, however, rock ain’t much more than nostalgia – and the biggest danger is possibly throwing one’s back out lifting an amplifier. That’s why Little Claw are such a relief. A trio from Hamtramck, a little Polish American village just outside Detroit, Little Claw make rock ’n’ roll that’s once again unhinged.

Drummer Hendrik sounds more interested in beating up his kit than laying down beats. Kilynn’s and Heath’s guitars spew dissonant chord progressions and riffs too retarded to even call garage. The space between sounds is cavernous. Into this emptiness, Kilynn fearlessly wails. Lyrics such as “I killed my father<\!s>/ I wear his head like a crown” might make one think of Jim Morrison. But you get the feeling Little Claw’s psychedelic visions would probably make that poseur wet his leather pants.

Bands this volatile don’t come along too often or last too long. With only a few hard-to-find releases to its name – and with another coming on Ecstatic Peace – its three-show swing through the Bay Area is not to be missed.

Little Claw play Thursday, April 5, 9 p.m., $6. Knockout SF, 3223 Mission, SF. (415) 550-6994. Also Saturday, April 7, 6 p.m. (early show!), $5. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. Also Saturday, April 7, 10 p.m., call for price. Peacock Lounge, 552 Haight, SF. (415) 621-9850

Join the Josh Wolf vigil during mediation starting at 8 a.m. Monday at the federal building in San Francico

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Josh’s mother asks that people turn out this morning (Monday, April 2) from 8 to 9 a.m. when Josh Wolf will be brought from his federal prison cell in Dublin to another round of mediation between Josh’s attorneys and the federal prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office.

Liz Wolf-Spada writes to her growing email list of Josh supporters, “It would be a great show of support for Josh if we could turn out a big crowd tomorrow morning outside the federal building. At the last mediation, as Josh was being driven into the basement car entrance, he spotted a supporter holding a sign out front and it meant a great deal to him.

“A large presence of supporters would also show the feds and the press that Josh’s support is broad and that we are determined to see him released immediately. As Josh’s lawyers are under orders not to speak about the mediation process, we know very little about what will take place tomorrow, but it is certainly an opportune moment to visibly demonstrate our support for Josh and demand once again that the federal government release him from his unjust imprisonment.”

She also reports that Josh’s father has begun an ongoing vigil that will continue until Josh is released. The vigil will start each morning between 8 and 9 a.m., outside the Philip Burton federal building in San Francisco, and will be held each week day until about 6 p.m.

I plan to drop by the vigil as often as I can and I hope you do too. My wife Jean and I have just returned from the mid-year meeting of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) in Cartagena, Colombia, where we were successful in getting this influential and highly respected free press organization to condemn Josh’s imprisonment and demand his release from jail. (See my previous blog item).

South of the border, the journalists are up against regimes that tolerate the murder and imprisonment of journalists on a regular basis. To deal with this situation, IAPA issues strong resolutions, sends in missions to investigate and protest and seek to get the prisoners released from jail. In the case of murdered journalists, it has a successful impunity program where it sends in missions to investigate, turn the evidence over to government prosecutors, and then beat on the government until the murderers are successfully prosecuted.

I told IAPA delegates, who have fought Peron in Argentina, Pinochet in Chile, Castro in Cuba, Chavez in Venezuela, and narco forces in Columbia, that I never thought I would see a journalist imprisoned for so long in the U.S. for such a ridiculously unjust crime: Josh’s refusal on journalistic principle to refuse to release videotapes he took at a 2005 demonstration in San Francisco.

Josh’s alleged “crime” was a local issue, involving a play by the local cops and Police Officers Association, to circumvent the state shield law and take the phony case to the Bush Attorney General in Washington. To the Bushies, the case was red meat: they could send a “don’t mess with us or else” message to San Francisco, center of anti-war dissent and protest, and to journalists throughout the land. The Bush/Rove/Gonzales firing of the eight U.S. attorneys general for political reasons only makes the point in 96 point Tempo Bold that Josh is a victim of the Bush law of intended political consequences. For more on IAPA, go to its website at IAPA.com.

I think we need an IPI-type mission to free Josh Wolf. Meanwhile, join the vigil and join the Liz email tree: liz_wolf_spada@yahoo.com. B3

WHAT: Vigil for Josh during mediation

WHERE: Phillip Burton Federal Building , 450 Golden Gate Avenue, in the San Francisco Civic Center

WHEN: Vigil starts around 8 a.m. and will continue through the day.

WHAT: Daily vigil for Josh

WHERE: Phillip Burton Federal Building, 450 Golden
Gate Avenue

WHEN: Begins around 9 a.m. each weekday until Josh is released

THE COCKS OF CORPORATE WOLVERINES: Punk’s Not Dead. It’s just rotting in Dede Wilsey’s asshole.

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By G.W. Schulz

Poor 7×7 magazine. They try so hard to sound authoritative on all the subjects they cover. And to be sure, they’re quite good at publishing photo spreads of wealthy philanthropists forcing bleached-white terrified grins like hostages hearing a your momma joke from a bank robber.

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But if the subject doesn’t involve skin-tight “Juicy Couture” maternity jeans (page 16 in the April issue), or how to get naked with a stranger using feng shui (page 54 in the April issue – it’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds), then their coverage is likelier to fall flat on its face with an embarrassing thud.

For instance, punk rock is all the rage these days at San Francisco’s rag for the richest. A magazine like 7×7 understands counterculture and punk rock about as well as a dog understands irony. They’ll just never quite get it. (Do we really have to point any of this out?)

But with the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park hosting an exhibit for queen-of-the-punk-aesthetic fashion guru Vivienne Westwood, and the documentary Punk’s Not Dead appearing at the upcoming SF International Film Festival, the city’s opulently rich have decided shit is all about curling your lips and pumping your Prada purses defiantly in the air.

O’Reilly blog

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SF Chronicle in Trouble?

By Tim O’Reilly

I hate to play Valleywag, but I’m hearing rumors that the San Francisco Chronicle is in big trouble. Apparently, Phil Bronstein, the editor-in-chief, told staff in a recent “emergency meeting” that the news business “is broken, and no one knows how to fix it.” (“And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.”) Reportedly, the paper plans to announce more layoffs before the year is out.

It’s clear that the news business as we knew it is in trouble. Bringing it home, Peter Lewis and Phil Elmer Dewitt, both well-known tech journalists, were both part of layoffs at Time Warner in January (they worked for Fortune and Time, respectively), and John Markoff remarked to me recently that “every time I talk to my colleagues in print journalism it feels like a wake.”

Meanwhile, Peter Brantley passed on in email the news that “a newspaper newsletter covering that industry publishes its own last copy”:

“The most authoritative newsletter covering the newspaper industry issued a gloomy prognosis for the business today and then, tellingly, went out of business.
Many newspapers in the largest markets already “have passed the point of opportunity” to save themselves, says the Morton-Groves Newspaper Newsletter in its farewell edition. “For those who have not made the transition [by now], technology and market factors may be too strong to enable success.”

We talk about creative destruction, and celebrate the rise of blogging as citizen journalism and Craigslist as self-service advertising, but there are times when something that seemed great in theory arrives in reality, and you understand the downsides. I have faith both in the future and in free markets as a way to get there, but sometimes the road is hard. If your local newspaper were to go out of business, would you miss it? What kinds of jobs that current newspapers do would go undone?

Click here for source and blog comments

Bulgay-rian? Just hum along

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AZIS — the Bulgarian Romani chalga singer is delightfully gender-neutral (gender bothful?) — and recently was voted the 21st most important Bulgarian in history. YES. He also ran for Bulgarian parliament, but didn’t win enough votes to qualify for a seat. NO. Now, he’s become a YouTube phenomenon, especially among young gay bears and their admirers — or people who miss Marilyn Manson, worship Walter Mercado, are really into Turkish oil wrestling/ naked gymbunny construction workers, or just wish we had more awesome freaks in our US pop-culture roster. Where are our real freaks? Shaving your head? Please. Bulgaria’s beating us, bitches!

Watch the above clip (of AZIS’s mega-hit, No Kazvam ti stiga) … and disbelieve!

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Comic pusher: Tha Funky Worm

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Intern Sam Devine slips between the photocopied covers ….

Down by Union Square tourists clog the streets like automatons bent on material satisfaction. You can almost hear their thoughts humming beneath their skulls like the cable car cord beneath the road.

“mmm…Neiman Marcus…bzzit…shoe sale… must…buy…”

What you can hear – all too often – are the guys who ask for change:
“Spare change?” “Help the homeless, tonight!” “Street Sheet, Street Sheet.” “Would you like to buy a comic book, sir?”

Wait: what?

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Thom creates beautiful art, as honest and brutal as the life he leads. You can find him pushing his photocopied mini-comics next to the Street Sheet sellers on O’Farrell and Powell. If he sounds familiar, you probably used to see him at 16th and Valencia hawking “Mission Mini-Comix.”

I picked up three of his little books the other week on St. Patty’s day: Burritos are the Best, The Sun Also Sets, and Tha Funky Worm – “You know,” said Thom in his West Coast stoner drawl, surrounded by the green, white and orange mayhem of the afternoon. “Like that Ohio Players cut.”

Healthy Saturdays gaining ground

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By Steven T. Jones
Environmentalists and alternative transportation activists are winning some key endorsements in the run up to next month’s second annual Healthy Saturdays showdown. Mayor Gavin Newsom vetoed the Golden Gate Park road closure to cars last year and doesn’t seem interested is pushing for a compromise on a measure he criticizes as too polarizing (ironically, his detachment from the issue is precisely what’s feeding the polarization). But last year’s swing vote on overrriding the veto, Sup. Bevan Dufty, has indicated an openness to supporting it this year. And that became all the more likely last night when the San Francisco Democratic Party County Central Committee (DCCC) endorsed the measure. They join other key Dufty allies in endorsing the measure, including the Harvey Milk Democratic Club and Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, as well as the Young Democrats club and both Senate contenders: Mark Leno and Carole Migden. The first committee hearing on the measure is April 9.

An Experiment: Hang up that Hangover

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By Molly Freedenberg

The jury’s out on what exactly causes a hangover. Some say it’s dehydration. Others claim there’s something in the alcohol itself that poisons you. I even had a nutritionist once tell me that it’s essentially a large-scale sugar crash (since alcohol is a sugar, it’s like eating nothing but Snickers bars for seven hours and then wondering why you feel like crap the next morning). I don’t know about any of those, but I’d like to add something to the list: our bi-annual FEAST supplement. That’s right. I’ve been editing this baby (to be published April 4) for almost a month now, and doing my job well (which translates into: eating and drinking as much as possible at as many places as possible) has meant waking up half that month’s mornings with a dry throat, fuzzy brain, rumbly tummy, and insatiable hunger for sleep.

After discussing this phenomenon with my coworkers, who I roped in to doing my “research” with me, I decided it was time to do a Guardian-wide experiment. In a building full of people who know how to play as hard as they work, someone must have the perfect hangover cure. And even if no one did, with drinkers this devoted, surely we’d have plenty of opportunities to test the snake oils we’ve all heard about but never tried (Almonds before drinking? Primrose oil? Lemon juice in black coffee? And strangest of all: running? Are you kidding me?).

And so.

La Bodega boogies forth

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Guardian contributor Tomas Palermo knows his Caribbean beats – so check his Umoja Soundsystem when it returns with its first regular night in three years, tonight, Thursday, March 29: La Bodega!

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Resident DJs Palermo, B-Love (Farmer Brown), Similak Chyld (Butterfly, SF), and guests like this Thursday’s DJ Marcella (LadyLu/SoulAfrique) promise “crucial Afro-Latin, Brazilian, reggae, Caribbean, and soul vibes” every Thursday from here on out.

It starts at 10 p.m. and goes late at Otis, 25 Maiden Lane at Kearney in downtown SF. And it’s free, free, free… so free yourself.

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MediaNews exec bails

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By G.W. Schulz

Just caught up with the scoop that young MediaNews executive Eric J. Grilly has resigned from the company to take over online operations for Philadelphia’s two largest newspapers. The papers were purchased by a group of investors calling themselves Philadelphia Media Holdings last year for well over half-a-billion dollars from the Sacramento-based McClatchy Company.

Grilly made good money at MediaNews and it’s difficult to imagine that his $350,000 annual salary could be topped to run some Web sites, but maybe he was simply looking for fresh air and, you know, esteem. As far as journalistic reputation goes, the Philadelphia Inquirer, included in last year’s purchases, had a stellar reputation for tough investigations under Knight-Ridder, though it did suffer layoffs and bleeding.

Grilly became a MediaNews exec first in 2000 and only just last year ascended to the post of MediaNews senior vice president. His dad retired from a MediaNews corner office around the same time.

Canadians politely begin invasion of Bay Area

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By G.W. Schulz

Word arrived today that Transcontinental, the Canadian company hired by the San Francisco Chronicle to build a shiny, new billion-dollar press, has been scouting locations in the East Bay city of Fremont for the facility. The Chronicle signed a 15-year outsourcing contract with Transcontinental, which also publishes La Presse, the Globe and Mail and the New York Times in Canada, last November.

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Fremont development manager Lori Taylor confirmed they’d received calls from the company, but they haven’t heard from Transcontinental since last month. She said Newark was also a rumored location for the plant.

The Chronicle‘s deal with Transcontinental served a crushing blow to the Web Pressmen and Prepress Workers’ Union Local 4, one of the nation’s oldest such unions. Local 4’s current contract with the Chronicle, reluctantly signed by the rank-and-file last year, expires in three years and there are no assurances Transcontinental will hire any of the union’s over 200 workers meaning a possible end to its tumultuous relationship with the Chronicle and its parent, the Hearst Corp.

The weakly sunblock

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By Tim Redmond

Yeah, so the SF Weekly is taking a swipe at Kimo Crossman (and, naturally, at us) this week. Will Harper’s item isn’t terribly insightful or funny, and just plays into the Phoenix-based paper’s general distaste for unconventional activists.

But Harper (and a lof ot the others who think it’s fun and easy to whack away at the likes of Crossman and his over-the-top battles for open government) forget where all of this came from. Kimo Crossman got obsessed with government secrecy because he had such a bad experience trying to get public records. He wanted to find out about the Newsom wi-fi deal (which, true to form, the Weekly also loves). And he kept running into brick walls.

I understand. I find the same thing at City Hall, all the time. Under City Attorney Dennis Herrera (and his excellent and principled press aide, Matt Dorsey), it’s gotten a lot better, but overall, most city departments still make it far too difficult for the average citizen to get basic information about what’s going on.

If anyone is to blame for Crossman’s somewhat unwieldy campaign, it’s Mayor Newsom, who insisted that Google and Earthlink had the right to keep their wi-fi proposals mostly secret.

There has always been an easy solution to people like Crossman: Just give them the damn records. Nothing bad will happen. Really.

PS: Someday soon, when metadata is regularly released as part of public-records requests, Will Harper or someone else at the Weekly will use that info to write a really good story about City Hall. You suppose they’ll thank that crazy Kimo Crossman?

Bush at Jesus Camp

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By Tim Redmond

Now THIS is really scary.

The rigors of retail

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By G.W. Schulz

From yesterday’s Examiner:

“The show could be over at a Santa Rosa music store whose owner was jailed after she refused to turn out the lights. Lisa Reed remained in jail much of Friday on suspicion of stealing electricity from PG&E to power her store without paying. Reed, the owner of Epiphany Music and Recording, rewired the store to keep the lights on after PG&E took her off the grid for not paying her bills for a year, authorities alleged.”

Is shit going that badly in the retail biz these days? On the other hand, stealing electricity is pretty punk rock.

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In releted news, Idolator is reporting that Rough Trade Records plans to open a storefront in London despite industry-wide plummeting CD sales and the slow death of Tower Records. Perhaps there’s a little life left in the retail side of the industry after all. Or, consumers have smartly used technology to circumvent corporate leeches, and the greedheads can’t figure out how to make up for it. The only survivors will be those who managed to hang on to a little indie cred. Maybe that’s being way too hopeful.

Newsom’s internal dialogue

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By Steven T. Jones
Nobody seems to be buying Gavin Newsom’s line that the taxpayer-funded campaign events that he calls town hall meetings are actually a “substantive dialogue” with the community. And it’s downright funny to suggest that these ridiculous events are comparable to the policy discussions that voters asked Newsom to engage in with the Board of Supervisors, something he’s refused to do. But it appears that the Newsom campaign plan is to just keep their heads down, plow forward, and hope they can convince half the city’s voters they’re honestly and effectively doing the city’s business.

The plan might just work, but there’s a huge downside that I don’t think he’s taken into account.

There’s Something About Monica

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By Sarah Phelan

“Congress could try to force Monica Lewinsk–or Monica Goodling, rather–to testify….” NBC’s Pete Williams tagging the Alberto Gonzales interview.
(You can’t make this shit up.)

666 days until Bush is history

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By Sarah Phelan
When a friend gave me a Bush countdown clock, it was registering 1,111 days until Bush will be gone.
At first, I was excited. (You can see the seconds hand ticking away.)
The next day, I was pissed off. (There were still 1,110 days of Bush and Cheney to go.)
434 days later, and a Justice Department official has just taken the Fifth in the firing of the US Attorneys scandal.
The House has set a date for withdrawal from Iraq.
The Senate is debating the same.
Climate change is no longer in doubt, but it’s clear that the Bush admin worked hard to cloud the issue.
It’s also clear that Cheney had a hand in the leaking of Valerie Plame’s name and the falsification of prewar intelligence that led the US to invade Iraq, kill thousands, maim thousands more and spend billions.
666 days is a spooky length of time for this nation to continue to be misled, misinformed–and mistrusted.
Impeach Bush and Cheney now.

Political priorities

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By Tim Redmond

I know, I know: everyone is obsessed with Elizabeth Edwards’s cancer. But should that really be the lead of the Chronicle’s story about a presidential candidate’s visit to the Bay Area — or might John Edwards actually have some policy positions to talk about?

Video shows why caging Wolf sucks

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By Sarah Phelan
Josh Wolf wasn’t the only person to film the July 8, 2005 G-8 protest. Nor was he the only person to be interviewed by the FBI. But he is the only person to be incarcerated for refusing to give up his video outtakes of the protest. This latter reality lends weight to Wolf’s suspicion that the reason the federal government jumped on the case is connected to the Bush administration’s obsession with anarchists. The truth is that there is no footage of the attack om the police officer on Wolf’s tapes, but there is footage of Black Bloc anarchists talking into his camera.

Transgender videographer Dina Boyer, who works for AccesSF Channel 29 and is not an anarchist told the Guardian that about three weeks after she filmed the July 8, 2005 protest—and posted outtakes of it online under an assumed alias—FBI officials showed up at her home.

Housing poor people one press release at a time

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By G.W. Schulz

The mayor has threatened a few times now to do something about the city’s aging public housing stock, mostly via press release. He’s at it again, via press release, of course.

We wrote two weeks ago that due to federal funding cuts, public housing residents are already experiencing increased security risks like robbery and assault at some of the developments around town. At this point, much has been said about the otherwise deplorable living conditions public housing residents already face here, from mildew to perpetually broken appliances, without having to worry about robbers armed with hammers and knives.

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Plaza East development before 2001 reconstruction

Candlelight vigil for murdered Nicaraguan immigrant

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By G.W. Schulz

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Friday vigil for Ruby Ordenana, aka Ruby Rodriguez

Supporters of the strangulated Nicaraguan immigrant and transgendered sex worker Ruby Ordenana held a candlelight vigil for her on Friday at Indiana and Cesar Chavez streets in Potrero Hill where her body was found stripped of clothing March 16.

Police were finally able to identify her last Thursday and are still trying to figure out what happened. Another transgendered sex worker was found beaten and raped in the same area last summer, so people are reasonably enough a little freaked out. Just 27 years old, Ordenana faced all manner of obstacles already, even in San Francisco, without having to face the threat of a violent assault.

We haven’t found any updates on the investigation so far, but good sam bloggers should keep posting the SFPD’s homicide division phone number for witnesses to call with information: 415-553-1145.

Some clown called into the Chronicle complaining about the paper’s respect for Ordenana’s MTF gender identity. What’s it to you, pal? Your crime blotter has to be politically sterilized, too? He even suggested such reporting was to blame for the Chron’s declining circulation. Uh, yeah. And by extension, perhaps, the city’s homicide rate could somehow be directly linked to the Chron‘s declining circulation. That probably has more to do with industry factors and the Chron‘s dorky lifestyle coverage, e.g. the lackluster sex column. Just my guess, goober.