Conservative Archives — Page 29 of 40 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Chronicle and Guardian agree on Garamendi

August 19, 2009

By Steven T. Jones

The San Francisco Bay Guardian and San Francisco Chronicle often differ in our political endorsements. We’re a progressive newspaper and they’re more conservative, particularly on economic issues. So it was a telling coincidence that we each endorsed John Garamendi for Congress is today’s newspapers, making some of the same arguments as we bypassed two other experienced politicians and an attractive newcomer.

The Garamendi campaign had an interesting take on the two papers as it announced the endorsements this morning: “I am honored to have received endorsements from the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Bay Guardian,” said Garamendi. “The Bay Area’s largest newspaper and largest progressive weekly often disagree on a lot of issues, but on the need for experienced leadership in these troubled times, they are in unison. Debates over health care, job creation, and climate change are front and center in Washington, and my three decades in public service have centered on finding innovative solutions to these very real problems. I will represent the people of the 10th Congressional District with the passion and drive that have defined my entire career and remain focused on the serious issues at hand.”

BTW, you can listen to our endorsement interview with Garamendi, as well as Anthony Woods and Adriel Hampton, here.

Chronic debate

August 19, 2009

sarah@sfbg.com

For decades, proponents of marijuana reform have argued that cannabis is less dangerous than alcohol or cigarettes, has legitimate medical uses, and should be decriminalized on the grounds that prohibition doesn’t work.

In 1996, these arguments helped convince California voters to approve Proposition 215, which allows the use of marijuana for medical purposes. And in March, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder signaled a major change in federal drug policy when he said that the Justice Department does not plan to prosecute medical marijuana dispensaries that operate legally under California law.

But the federal government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 controlled substance that has no medical value and a high abuse potential. As a result, cultivation, distribution, and sales of pot primarily occur on the black market, a shadowy mix of small-timers and powerful cartels.

Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) suggests that U.S. growers produced 22 million pounds of marijuana in 2006, worth $35.8 billion, and that California accounted for almost 39 percent of U.S. pot production.

Now, with California’s economy in the crapper, the state budget a mess, and federal judges ordering substantial reductions in California’s prison population, reform advocates are making an intriguing argument: if state or local governments legalize and tax even a fraction of marijuana sales in California, the state could see billions of dollars in new annual revenue and reduced enforcement costs.

Assembly Member Tom Ammiano recalls some laughter in February when he introduced Assembly Bill 390, state legislation to regulate marijuana much like alcohol. "But the budget fiasco has made some people who were dismissive take a harder look," Ammiano said.

A recent California Board of Equalization analysis of Ammiano’s bill estimates that if the state charged $50 per ounce, California would generate $1.4 billion in marijuana taxes annually.

Voters in Oakland also advanced the marijuana policy discussion last month when they approved a special tax on the city’s medical cannabis dispensaries. And in August, a three-judge federal court ruled that California must develop a plan to reduce its prison population by 44,000 over two years.

The public also seems to support making a change. In April, a Field Poll confirmed that for the first time a majority (56 percent) of California voters support legalizing pot.

Depite these advances, Ammiano says he wants to be strategic with his bill, gradually building support. "That’s why we made it a two-year bill," Ammiano said. His bill is scheduled for its first hearing at the Public Safety Committee, which Ammiano now chairs, by year’s end.

But some Bay Area activists aren’t waiting on Ammiano. Last month, Richard Lee, who operates four medical marijuana dispensaries in Oakland, filed initiative paperwork with the state and hopes to gather enough signatures to qualify a Tax Cannabis initiative in 2010.

Ammiano’s bill and Lee’s initiative allow recreational use of marijuana, penalize driving under the influence, and charge a $50 fee per ounce. But they differ around regulation and how to deal with the overarching problem of federal law. Ammiano’s legislation assumes a statewide system that mirrors the federal Department of Alcohol Beverage Control. Lee’s initiative leaves regulation to each county, similar to the patchwork approach to alcohol in other states.

Lee believes his initiative gives people more options. "We can’t order people to break federal law — that would be thrown out," Lee said. "Forty jurisdictions already permit medical marijuana cooperatives in California. So we already have that system, and we’ll follow that reality."

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who authored San Francisco’s medical cannabis dispensary regulations, believes it’s important to lay the groundwork at the local level. He points to the relative lack of growth in new municipalities that allow medical dispensaries since voters approved Prop. 215, calling it evidence of pot-related NIMBYism.

"Everyone says they support it, but they don’t want it in their own backyards," said Mirkarimi, who wants San Francisco to become the first U.S. city to add marijuana to the list of medicines it dispenses. "But the city Attorney’s Office is shy about pushing this envelope."

Mirkarimi wants to follow Oakland’s example and add a gross receipts tax to medical marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco.

But the legalization push has its fervent critics. At a recent Commonwealth Club debate on the economics of marijuana, El Cerrito Police Chief Scott Kirkland, who led the charge to ban medical dispensaries in his city, tried to discredit arguments that legalization will save money.

"I’m very disappointed with the state," Kirkland said, claiming that the BOE’s analysis drew almost exclusively on the work of Jon Gettman, a former director of National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

"We have to have statistics we can rely on," said Kirkland, who then cited the same BOE report — it estimates that pot prices will drop 50 percent and consumption will increase 40 percent — to support his contention that legalization will lead to increased substance abuse.

Kirkland also challenged the notion that Mexican drug cartels will leave once the pot business is legitimized and regulated. "They understand that the money involved is astronomical," he said. "It’s wishful thinking that if you legalize marijuana, all of a sudden the cartels go away."

He also disputed claims that legalization would help empty state prisons. "It’s very common for advocates to associate legalization with reducing the costs of incarceration, but it’s a fallacy," Kirkland said. "It’s very rarely that a person goes to prison for their original offense."

Kirkland topped off his attack by citing the state’s June 19 decision to add marijuana smoke to its Proposition 65 list of substances known to contain carcinogens.

But BOE spokesperson Anita Gore refuted claims that their analysis relied entirely on reform advocates’ research. "Being as this is an underground activity, the resources are limited," Gore said. "But our researchers and economists used econometric models that are generally accepted and looked at all the available resources, which included academic and law enforcement studies."

Gettmann told the Guardian he uses data from NSDUH, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the Office of National Drug Control, and the Bureau of International Narcotics — sources the prohibitionists also draw on. He admits that it’s hard to quantify a black market.

"But it’s easy for anyone to understand basic regulatory economic theory," Getmann said. "Marijuana use produces costs for society, but is largely untaxed. So users and sellers reap benefits, while taxpayers bear the costs."

He believes many advantages of legalization are qualitative. "It’s a better regulatory system for financial and fiscal reasons and for restricting access on the part of teenagers," Gettman said.

Stephen Gutwillig, state director of the Drug Policy Alliance, points to research by the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, which found that arrest rates for everything in California have declined since 1990 — with the exception of low-level marijuana crimes. CJCJ’s research shows that rates for this group increased 127 percent since 1990, and 25 percent in the last two years.

"It’s a system run amok," Gutwillig said. He notes that of the 74,000 people arrested for marijuana-related offenses, 20,000 are youth. "The marijuana problem is increasingly becoming a mechanism for social control of young black and brown men in California."

"We feel that money is definitely a fine consideration," he continued. "But even if reguutf8g marijuana didn’t produce a dime, these punitive, wasteful laws must end."

Gutwillig’s group has estimated that legalization would save California’s state and local governments $259.7 million annually in court and incarceration costs alone, a figure DPA researcher Betty Lo Dolce said is very conservative.

"I don’t know if folks have a secondary offenses, so I don’t know if marijuana was legalized, if they wouldn’t be in state prison," Lo Dolce said. "Or conversely, if they may not have been arrested for drug-related crimes, but then those charges got dropped and they ended up inside because of secondary drug-related offense."

Bruce Mirken, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project, believes that advocates of California’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) should have to justify that the program does some good.

"The idea that enforcing prohibition and seizing 5.5 million plants last year would be less costly than legalizing is crazy," he said.

But what about the public health costs?

UCLA pulmonologist Dr. Donald Tashkin said that the state added marijuana smoke to its Prop. 65 list, based on finding carcinogens in that smoke. "But you cannot translate chemistry into chemical risk because you have to take into account potential opposing effects," Tashkin said.

His research has found no association between heavy marijuana use and increased risk of lung cancer and pulmonary disease. Conversely, he and Dr. Donald Abrams, a cancer researcher at UCSF, have found that THC, marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient, has an anti-tumor effect.

"The bottom line is that you cannot use pulmonary risk as a justification for not legalizing it," Tashkin said.

Dr. Igor Grant, director of medical cannabis research at UC San Diego, said the question around marijuana smoke is quantity. "It’s not like cigarettes," he said. "Most people don’t smoke 20 joints a day for 20 years. But even if it was declared safe for patients, you wouldn’t want parents filling the room with smoke."

James Gray, an Orange County judge and a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, believes marijuana is here to stay. "Instead of moralizing and punishing people for failing on moral chastity grounds, let’s manage its use," Gray said. "If people are using it, they should be able to know what’s in it."

The most harmful thing about marijuana, Gray contends, is jail. "The remedy is far more dangerous than the disease itself," he said. "There are thousands of people in prison because they did nothing but smoke pot, and a dirty drug test was a violation of their parole…. But I understand that some people in law enforcement stand to lose a great deal, and that the Mexican cartels are going to invest a lot of money in Madison Avenue advertising."

Lee, too, acknowledges the opposition, but remains hopeful. "People are coming out of the closet," he said. "That’s what caused the gay rights movement to take off. It’s starting to happen around marijuana use."

The ring

August 12, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

COVER STORY Going to the DNA Lounge during the middle of the day is a strange proposition. But on a Saturday afternoon in late June, the San Francisco bar is filled with a hundred or so people, including, strangely enough, Kris Kristofferson, whose son Jody is trying out a different kind of public career. There’s a smattering of people hanging out on the balcony level, but most of us are pressed against metal guard rails that surround a ring set up in the center of the dance floor. Professional wrestling has, ahem, put a stranglehold on venue, and it’s the middle of the show.

A newcomer with a spiny bi-hawk and spiked shoulder pad named Nate Graves — a muscle-bound cross between a Mad Max 2: Road Warrior extra and the guy from Prodigy — is set to fight "the Mexican Werewolf," El Chupacabra, a local favorite who wrestles in multicolored face paint and prosthetic fangs. Even when entering the ring, both wrestlers’ movements tell a story; the newcomer is stiff and deliberate, a menacing behemoth, while the significantly smaller El Chupacabra darts around in unpredictable bursts.

The bell rings, and the two exchange some preliminary holds and throws before drubbing one another with loud, theatrical strikes. I’m sandwiched between a stylish young woman in her early 20s, noticeably buzzed, and an average looking dude in a Giants shirt. They spend most of the fight leaning over me to hassle each other. The young woman really has it out for Chupy. As the newcomer hoists our protagonist into the air, she screams for the larger man to "drop him on his fucking head."

Wrestling’s harshest critics tend to view it as a theater of violent, regressive, antisocial posturing. But a decidedly gleeful atmosphere permeates the venue. El Chupacabra wriggles out of the precarious position, and the two adversaries call for an impromptu toast in the spirit of the nameless unifying energy that takes hold during a wrestling event.

FOUND IN THE FOG

Fog City Wrestling is a year-old promotion based out of San Francisco. Relatively unknown in the grand scheme of indie wrestling — most of the larger promotions are based on the East Coast — FCW has nevertheless carved out a comfortable niche in the Bay Area, already home to several smaller federations. The promotion may be relatively new, but professional wrestling in San Francisco has a lengthy — if often ignored — history. Fans who grew up in the era of WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) CEO Vince McMahon Jr.’s homogenized "sports entertainment" empire may be surprised to learn that Northern California as a whole was once home to one of the hottest wrestling promotions in the country.

Throughout the pre-WWE (then the World Wide Wrestling Federation) 1960s and 1970s, promoter Roy Shire’s Big Time Wrestling, a Bay Area extension of the once powerful National Wrestling Alliance, regularly showcased some of wrestling’s big-name stars and future legends, such as local hero Pat Patterson, Superstar Billy Graham, and Rocky Johnson, whose son Dwayne briefly dabbled in the sport of kings as The Rock. Though Shire’s mini-empire extended all the way to Sacramento, the Bay Area was the promotion’s home base. Selling out the Cow Palace on a regular basis, Big Time Wrestling exemplified a halcyon period when pro wrestling was vibrant, gritty, and regional.

Big Time Wrestling owed part of its success to the territorial wrestling industry it existed in, a system where local feds dominated the markets of their particular region. In contrast to the major performers of today, most wrestlers weren’t beholden to a specific promoter, leaving them free to travel the country. But Shire’s own ingenuity was key to his fed’s notoriety.

According to long-time wrestling photographer, columnist, and all-around avid fan Mike Lano, the promoter — a former wrestler — was regarded by his wrestling business contemporaries as a promotional genius. For Shire, personality and a dynamic, athletic wrestling style were paramount. "[He] demanded excellence from his wrestlers," Lano says. "Matches had to be excellent or he would yell and chew the guys out." This democratic booking philosophy, which favored talent and originality over marketability, is closer to the indie wrestling scene of today than to the monolithic WWE.

The Bay Area’s diversity played a major role in Shire’s booking strategy. He promoted wrestlers of color as some of Big Time Wrestling’s top stars, a savvy move that allowed the multifaceted Bay Area to see itself represented heroically in the ring. Afa Anoa’i Sr., better known to wrestling fans as Afa the Wild Samoan, followed in the footsteps of his legendary uncle, "High Chief" Peter Maivia (Rocky Johnson’s father-In-law), who commanded a massive Pacific Islander fan base. Though he was a journeyman by nature, returning to the Bay to wrestle for Shire’s promotion was always a special experience for the Wild Samoan. "Because we [had] a lot of my Samoan population there, sometime[s] [the] fans [would] get out of control and a riot [would] break out in the crowd," he remembers via e-mail. "But it was all good."

This story demonstrates a common truth in wrestling: when the drama in the ring speaks to one’s own experiences and sensibilities, the event as a whole is that much more fun and engaging.

THE POLITICS OF WRESTLING

Fog City Wrestling promoter/cofounder Dominick Jerry started out as a Humboldt County concert promoter before relocating to San Francisco with his wife in 2003. Booking FCW’s matches and storylines, he tells me, gives him the opportunity to play around with the politics of mainstream wrestling, a compelling provisional touch I suspect won’t be on WWE’s agenda any time soon.

Mainstream wrestling is often criticized for its socially conservative slant, a turn-off for many fans whose personal beliefs are less "kill the evil foreigner." But Jerry feels that in a town as singular as San Francisco, a promotion needs to cater to local sensibilities to survive. He cites, among other regional overtures, a handful of appearances by Differ’nt Strokes star Todd Bridges (no doubt drawing from his experiences battling the Gooch) as an appeal to ’80s nostalgia.

Jerry is also interested in the reinvention of character types that a small SF-based promotion would allow for, and quite possibly necessitate. "Wrestling is not a sport that’s very sensitive to race," he tells me over the phone. "But at the same time, it plays on race and it knows it. I see that I have a chance to change things and do things a little different."

He expresses pride in a recent storyline that saw a Middle Eastern wrestler named Sheik Khan Abadi become the promotion’s most popular wrestler, genie pants and all. (Abadi recently relocated to Florida. When I interviewed the East Bay-born wrestler, he fondly recalled his experience wrestling in SF: "They cheered me ’cause they thought I wrestled well and [because] I was wrestling for them. That was one of the greatest feelings ever — to be respected for what I do, and not just typecast for being Middle Eastern.")

The opening match on Fog City Wrestling’s Saturday afternoon card sees your standard square-jawed tough guy face up against longtime California indie star Angel the Hardcore Homo. On the one hand, the persona borders on minstrelsy — it’s a sort of hybrid between the implicit button-pushing of Gorgeous George and lucha libre’s rodeo clown-like "exotico" type. But the match itself tells a less straightforward story. Angel is clearly the hero in the contest, reconfiguring some of the mainstream’s predictable gay panic tropes into a slapstick offensive that plays off his opponent’s increasingly comical discomfort. Toward the end of the match, two teenage-looking guys standing across from me start an "Angel" chant.

On the surface, San Francisco doesn’t seem like the kind of community that goes in for (nonironic) professional wrestling. But scanning the crowd, I notice a sizeable number of bohemian types — an Unknown Pleasures shirt even made an appearance a few shows back. Outside the venue, would they readily admit to their fandom, or at least to their interest in wrestling? Perhaps this insecurity is on its way out.

For a true believer, self-consciousness isn’t a problem. Fog City Wrestling’s Jerry doesn’t see indie wrestling strictly as a subculture. "Everybody knows pro wrestling," he gushes. "Everybody might not admit they like pro wrestling, but everybody does. If it’s on TV, as opposed to Regis and Kelly, you’ll probably put on pro wrestling."

WE NOW RETURN TO THE EVENT, ALREADY IN PROGRESS

When I ask wrestleophile Mike Lano what the Bay Area has to offer that is missing from mainstream wrestling today, he responds with a common sentiment. "They [pro wrestling territories] were all unique. The television was unique, the talent was unique. Guys were not reading promos off a teleprompter or being told what to say by script writers." Fans today may not be getting an entirely comparable experience to the glory days — the DNA Lounge is a long way from the Cow Palace, for one thing. But the spirit of originality Lano remembers from the Shire days has carried over, bringing with it the simple pleasure of watching two colorful characters go at it on a Saturday afternoon.

The main event of Fog City Wrestling’s Saturday bill is a slice of unadulterated pro wrestling traditionalism. Dylan Drake is one of FCW’s marquee stars. He’s a dapper-looking guy with floppy brown hair of a non-threatening length. His name is an alliteration, like Clark Kent. His hirsute opponent has the biblically sinister moniker Malachai, and sports an enormous beard — wrestling shorthand for pure evil.

During a main event bout, there’s a feeling of conclusiveness to everything, like the ghost of Howard Cosell is narrating the action in the crowd’s collective mind. Each punch or hold becomes an ultimate moment that all preceding punches and holds of the show have foreshadowed. This is one of the last vestiges of Big Fight atmosphere, the Ali-and-Frazier effect, or, in keeping with the wrestling aesthetic, Rocky Balboa and Thunderlips. Sure enough, ironic detachment and snarky asides die an undistinguished death amidst the consecrated buzz.

Whether or not the majority of the audience are wrestling diehards, prodigal childhood fans, or just looking for an excuse to drink during the middle of the day, some dormant instinct takes hold as the fight commences. In true wrestling fashion, the match ends in a massive donnybrook of interference and conveniently bad refereeing, postponing the inevitable denouement for another month or two. This is pro wrestling, after all. We head home to a Sunday morning coming down.

Dead heat

August 11, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

TREND Summer’s not over, but it might not be too soon to identify Michael Jackson’s passing as the touchstone cultural event of season. Icons and paradigms have been crumbling at a remarkable clip: California narrowly avoided a financial abyss, stalwart businesses folded, major pop and art figures died. New Langton Arts, a venerable San Francisco alternative gallery, may not survive the season.

Art museums are inherently rigid institutions. As much as they’ve been loosening up with livelier programs, they exist to present, collect, and protect the ever-fracturing canon. It’s difficult not to survey San Francisco’s big-ticket summer shows without considering recessionary measures. As endowments shrank, it was widely reported that museums would be tightening their belts by concentrating on their collections rather than on creating expensive new shows, and by presenting exhibitions for longer stretches of time. These shifts seem more like retrenchment than exciting revisions.

The de Young Museum’s current "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" exhibition is perhaps more interesting as a barometer than as a well-designed (albeit to resemble a deluxe burial chamber) state-of-the-art showcase of ancient artifacts. It is, first and foremost, a return to proven formulas. Tut was the subject of the first museum blockbuster, and it worked like gangbusters for the de Young in 1979. Back then the boy king seemed to compete with a vibrant Farrah Fawcett for poster space on teen walls, but currently, evidence of him outside of banners on SF light poles seems scant. The pharaoh’s not the media darling he once was, but apparently the Fine Arts Museums, of which the de Young is a part, is banking on him. (Ironically, Tut is organized by a subsidiary of AEG Live, which also produced the ill-fated Michael Jackson tour.)

Tut is firmly placed as a multiseason blockbuster, a cash cow to be milked into spring. He’ll be followed by an Impressionism show, another safe bet the de Young has made before. The Legion of Honor’s print retrospective devoted to John Baldessari — an uncharacteristically contemporary artist for the space — will be followed in December by a Cartier jewelry show.

The Tut exhibition’s press preview was bolstered by official optimism and ample refreshments. There was a spread of Middle Eastern nibbles and pyramid-shaped servings of custard, and media reps left with gift bags containing a catalog and chocolates. It seemed like the old days, before endowments took their Madoff hits. There was a panel of speakers in the theater. Fundraiser socialite Dede Wilsey said she wished her sons were as successful as the king. Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, spoke of Tut discoveries with entertaining bluster. Gavin Newsom worked the civic booster angle, touting a power trio of summer museum shows: "Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities" at SFMOMA ("Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004" had yet to open), "Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949" at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and Tut at the de Young. Although each of these exhibitions puts forth a specific viewpoint on its subject — the Chagall show is driven by the fascinating sweep of political and theatrical history while "Natural Affinities" probes an artistic dialog — the list of names sounded emphatically conservative, even for summer blockbuster season. There’s not a living artist in the bunch.

This isn’t so strange — after all, big institutions follow Hollywood models by packing the houses with mainstream fare and saving the more thoughtful offerings for fall. Both SFMOMA and the de Young exceeded audience expectations last summer with their Frida Kahlo and Dale Chihuly shows, respectively. The de Young take was reportedly bumped up by brisk sales of pricey pint-size Chihuly sculptures. And due to the practice of sometimes booking shows years in advance, these offerings were in place before the downturn. How are they faring?

The de Young won’t release attendance figures until a show has closed — in the case of Tut, that means after March 28, 2010. A museum publicist could offer a cagey comment that "response from visitors has been phenomenal." (This despite the steep nonmember ticket price of $27.50.) SFMOMA is more forthcoming. It unofficially stated that Adams/O’Keefe held steady but admissions spiked when Avedon opened, almost recalling Kahlo crowds. (These exhibitions have a $5 surcharge.)

The Avedon show is handsome, with images of the famous in crisp black and white. So many of the subjects, though, are emphatically of another era — iconic celebrities and political figures who have passed. Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe, César Chávez, and various Kennedys, among others, are figures that continue to embody their cultural power in Avedon’s pictures. And Tut more than maintains his royal allure — gold holds its value. But finance gurus also tout making more unusual investments in times like these, and one hopes that our institutions will use this moment to engage in some portfolio diversification. *

CHAGALL AND THE ARTISTS OF THE RUSSIAN JEWISH THEATER, 1919-1949

Through Sept. 7

Contemporary jewish Museum

www.thecjm.org

GEORGIA O’KEEFE AND ANSEL ADAMS: NATURAL AFFINITIES

Through Sept. 7

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

www.sfmoma.org

TUTANKHAMUN AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PHAROAHS

Through March 28, 2010

De Young Museum

www.famsf.org

The BART police review plan

July 29, 2009

By Tim Redmond

The BART Board has released a final draft of its new police-oversight policy, and you can comment on it at a public meeting tomorrow (Thursday) at 6:30 PM at the Joseph Bort Metro Center Auditorium, 101 Eight St. Oakland.

There’s a lot to digest; you can read the whole thing here (PDF). In essence, the Board would create an 11-member citizen oversight commission and an independent police auditor; the auditor would investigate complaints and the commission would monitor the auditor.

It’s going to be a fairly conservative commission — each of the nine BART Board member gets to appoint one commissioner, and it’s a fairly conservative BART Board. And — in a move that’s pretty shocking — BART wants to allow the police unions to appoint their own rep to the commission. (A final member would be chosen at-large by the entire BART board).

And here’s the big problem: The auditor can’t impose discipline — that’s up to the police chief (who reports, by the way, to the BART general manager, not the BART Board). Nothing weakens civilian oversight more than a police chief who won’t discipline the troops, and I suspect that’s what’s going to happen at BART, where the chief didn’t even bother to show up for most of the community meetings on civilian oversight.

Newsom loses Eric Jaye

July 27, 2009

By Tim Redmond

While everyone’s fussing over Chris Daly’s residence, here’s some seriously big political news. Eric Jaye, who was Mayor Newsom’s campaign manager almost from Day One, who has been one of his closest advisors and who has had his fingers in much of what’s happened in the Mayor’s Office all these years, just quit the Newsom for Governor campaign.

Jaye told me only that there was “a difference of opinion about campaign direction.” There was also, I suspect, a difference of opinion in general — some might call it a power struggle — between Jaye and Garry South, Newsom’s high-priced Southern California-based strategist.

For starters, it takes much of the campaign focus out of San Francisco — Jaye helped Newsom create his political image through local programs and policies. It also shifts the campaign a big step toward the dark side — South is a conservative political triangulator who was close to former Gov. Gray Davis.

This could change not just the shape of the Newsom campaign but of policy here in San Francisco. Who’s going to tell the mayor what to do?

Bitter medicine

July 22, 2009

news@sfbg.com

The Democratic Party has been promising a major overhaul of the health care system for a generation or more. Now, with President Barack Obama and his party’s congressional leaders in a strong position to finally reach that elusive goal by next month, this should be a momentous time for the reform movement.

So why are so many health reform advocacy groups unhappy?

The answer involves policy and process. Rather than pushing for the single-payer system that many progressive groups demand and say is needed, Democratic leaders immediately opted for a compromise plan they hoped would be acceptable to economic conservatives and the insurance industry.

But Republicans are still calling them socialists for doing it, while the insurance industry — which loves the portion of the legislation that requires everyone to buy coverage — is still spending $1.4 million a day to either kill the complicated bills or turn them to its advantage.

When congressional Democrats unveiled America’s Affordable Health Choices Act (HR 3200) on July 14, many reformists thought a long-awaited, dramatic overhaul to a broken system was close at hand. The insurance companies would finally be made to adhere to ethical practices, and the Democrats would defend their plan to establish a government-run health insurance option that could compete with private insurers and keep them in check.

“American families cannot afford for Washington to say no once again to comprehensive health care reform,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), who chairs the crucial House Education and Labor Committee.

The Democrats’ bill does address some critical flaws in the health care system. It would greatly expand Medicare to ensure coverage for low-income individuals, and would subsidize coverage for those earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, defined as $43,320 for an individual and $88,200 for a family of four. The bill would forbid insurance companies from denying coverage to patients based on a preexisting condition, age, race, or gender. It would eliminate co-pays for preventative care and establish a cap on annual out-of-pocket expenses. To pay for it, the proposal would create a graduated tax on households earning more than $350,000 a year, with the top bracket being a 5.4 percent levy on incomes of more than $1 million.

Progressive members of Congress threw their support behind the bill because — and only because — it included the public option. “The public option is central to our support of health care reform,” read a statement from the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma), who chairs the CPC, was quoted in the Huffington Post as saying, “We have already compromised. More than 90 percent of the progressive caucus would vote today for a single-payer system. And so for us to compromise and get behind a really good strong public plan, I mean that’s as far as we’re going.”

While that statement indicates the precarious nature of the current legislation — which will likely be weakened further as it works its way through the process and merges with legislation from the more conservative U.S. Senate — many progressive groups aren’t even willing to go that far.

COVERAGE ISN’T CARE

Many single-payer supporters say some reform is better than none, and that the passage of HR 3200 would represent a major win. “We can advance many of the principles that we support with the House bill,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California and an organizer for the national reform advocacy group Health Care for America Now. The nation, he believes, needs to endorse principles such as universally covering Americans and making sure patients aren’t left alone “at the mercy of the private insurance industry.”

Yet other groups fear this cure would be worse than the disease, sending millions of new customers into a private insurance system that simply doesn’t work, and compounding existing problems.

“We’re still pushing for a national single-payer bill,” Dr. James Floyd, a health reform researcher with the nonprofit group Public Citizen, told the Guardian. “While we’re open to other options, we haven’t seen anything [in proposals by Democratic congressional leaders] yet that is acceptable.”

That position has plenty of support among the general public and reform-minded organizations, for whom single-payer continues to be the holy grail.

The current proposal “doesn’t change the system one bit,” said Leonard Rodberg, a member of Physicians for a National Health Program, who works in health policy. “These bills are requiring that people buy insurance, but there are no numbers about how much the insurance would cost. And if the cost of the insurance is still too high, you can remain uninsured.”

And as negotiations center on the government-run insurance option, the concept of scratching the status quo and offering free Medicare-like health care to every American instead has fallen to the wayside.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) got 84 co-sponsors for his single-payer bill, HR 676, and hearings were held in June to explore the option. But congressional leaders then took it off the table. The reasons why seem to be as much about political will as they are about campaign contributions from the insurance industry. As one high-level congressional staffer told us, many lawmakers won’t back a single-payer system in part because they “don’t want to have to respond to being accused of being a socialist by the right wing.”

Then there’s the insurance lobby. “They spend hundreds of millions,” the staffer said. “They lobby Congress, and they provide millions to campaigns. They have Fox News. But the single-payer movement is growing leaps and bounds.”

Rodberg said the insurance industry would love to see a mandate to buy insurance approved at a time when insurers are losing customers because the economy is shedding thousands of jobs each month. “This is a bailout for the insurance companies,” Rodberg told us. “But there’s absolutely nothing in this legislation that will control costs, because it just leaves it to the insurance companies and the market.”

Dr. Jim G. Kahn, president of the California Physicians’ Alliance and a professor at UCSF with expertise in health policy, told us he believes the proposed bill falls short of the goal of comprehensive, universal coverage. “‘Universal’ was recently redefined by [Montana Sen. Max] Baucus as 95 percent — i.e., 15 million uninsured,” Kahn told us via e-mail. “Reaching even that level will be hard, due to the complexity of enforcing an ‘individual mandate’ on families with only modest income (and hence no subsidies). And in eagerness to reach that level, more and more people will become underinsured, with inadequate coverage and a further boost in already high medical bankruptcy.”

Medical debt contributed to nearly two-thirds of all bankruptcies in 2007, according to a study in the American Journal of Medicine. The majority of those afflicted were solidly middle-class homeowners at the start of their illness, and most had private health insurance.

Health Care Now, a hub for single-payer grassroots groups, is planning a large rally in Washington, D.C., for July 30, the anniversary of the founding of Medicare, on which many single-payer plans would be based. “Single-payer is the only plan that would truly be universal and contain costs,” said Katie Robbins of Health Care Now, arguing that the current plan pushed by congressional leaders “doesn’t protect us from the ills of the insurance-based system as we know it.”

Other progressive groups are withholding judgment for now, hoping the good aspects will ultimately outweigh the bad. “We’re digging through them now. We support a bill that has a true public option, and the House bill has that,” said Consumer Watchdog’s Jerry Flanagan. “But we really dislike the individual mandate [to purchase health insurance]. The insurance companies really don’t want the public option, but they really want the mandate.”

LEAVING OPTIONS OPEN

Even if single-payer isn’t going to be the national model yet, advocates say it’s crucial that states such as California be allowed to experiment with the option anyway. Single-payer advocates in Congress have insisted the health care legislation be amended to explicitly allow states to do single-payer (otherwise, federal preemption laws and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act might prevent states from doing so).

On July 17, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) successfully inserted such an amendment into the bill that cleared the House Committee on Education and Labor with a 25-19 vote, which included significant Republican support. The amendment was opposed by Miller, indicating Democratic Party leaders oppose the change and may ultimately succeed in stripping it from the bill.

“George Miller is a longtime supporter of a national single-payer plan and health care reform. The truth is, however, there are not enough votes in the House or the Senate to pass a final bill that contains single-payer language. That is unfortunate but it is also the truth,” Miller spokesperson Rachel Racusen told the Guardian.

California is a hotbed of single-payer activism. Even a leading candidate for state insurance commissioner, Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) — who appeared on the steps of San Francisco City Hall on July 15 to receive the endorsements of a long list of local elected officials — has made single-payer advocacy a central plank in his campaign.

The movement is so strong in California that it actually had legislators vying for who would get to carry its banner. San Francisco’s own state senator Mark Leno, a longtime single-payer supporter, was selected this year to take over the landmark single-payer legislation previously sponsored by termed-out legislator Sheila Kuehl, which has passed twice, only to be vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“The more I dive into this issue, the more convinced I am that the answer has to be single-payer,” Leno told us. “The only reform that truly contains costs is single-payer.”

Leno doesn’t fault Obama for taking a more cautious stance — but he does believe the federal government shouldn’t block states like California from creating single-payer systems. “States should be incubators of trying different proposals. We have a great history with that,” Leno said.

But even with a Democratic governor, there’s no guarantee that single-payer would be approved. Mayor Gavin Newsom is running for governor, featuring health care reform in his platform. He chairs the U.S. Conference of Mayors National Health Care Reform Task Force, which is pushing for approval of the Obama plan. But even Newsom won’t promise to back the Leno plan.

“He doesn’t think single-payer is the best option now,” Newsom’s campaign manager Eric Jaye told us when asked whether Newsom would sign the legislation as governor. “He hopes and believes that as governor he will be supporting a national public option.”

But in the end, the governor may not matter. Leno said the political reality in California is that voters, rather than legislators, will need to approve the single-payer system. The funding mechanism for any ambitious health care plan would require a two-thirds vote in the legislature, a political impossibility.

“The difference in California is the voters will have the final say. And I’m excited about that. The voters of California will be able to say to the insurance companies, ‘We’ve had enough, now go away,'” Leno told us. He said he expects a ballot campaign in 2012.

Of course, it won’t be that simple. Leno knows that the insurance industry will spend untold millions of dollars to defend itself and a “status quo that is only working for them, not for anyone else. This is an enormously powerful industry and they control the debates.”

“Our effort here in California is an educational one. We have from now until the election in 2012 to make the arguments,” Leno said.

THE COST OF INSURANCE

Testifying at a hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee in June, Geri Jenkins, a registered nurse and the co-president of the California Nurses Association, related the story of Nataline Sarkisyan. The 17-year-old girl needed a life-saving liver transplant, Jenkins explained to Congress members. “But CIGNA would not approve it,” she told them, “until I, and hundreds of others, protested. During one of the protests, I was with Hilda, Nataline’s mother, when she got the call of approval.”

Hilda’s relief didn’t last long. By the time the hurdle had been cleared, Jenkins testified, “it was too late. Nataline died an hour later.”

Nataline’s story sparked national outrage, and it has since become a flagship tale highlighting all that is wrong with this country’s health care system. But as the debate about health care reform continues inside House and Senate committee chambers, discussion about “universal health care” — a phrase with a simple ring to it — has grown murkier.

“We have a universal health care system now,” Flanagan said, referring to how all Americans with serious medical conditions have a right to treatment — even if that treatment comes with great expense in an overcrowded public hospital emergency room. “It’s just the most inefficient system imaginable.”

With the August congressional recess coming up fast and Obama leaning on Capitol Hill to shift into high gear on an issue that was a hallmark of his campaign, the pressure is on to vote on the historic health care reform legislation within weeks.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee passed a health care reform bill July 16 that is similar to the House bill, with the vote split along party lines. Now, national attention has turned to the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Baucus, which continued its efforts last week to achieve a bipartisan bill.

Many of progressive reform advocates simply don’t trust the players in Washington, D.C., to get this right, particularly Baucus. “He’s the voice of the insurance companies in the Senate,” Flanagan said.

A recent article in the Washington Post estimated that the insurance industry is spending an estimated $1.4 million per day to influence the outcome of the health care legislation, and pointed out that many of the lobbyists were Washington insiders who had previously worked for key legislators, such as Baucus.

The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan nonprofit research group that tracks money in U.S. politics and operates the Web site opensecrets.org, launched an intensive study of health care sector lobbyist spending, including cataloguing industry contributions to individual candidates from 1989 to the present. Baucus received more industry campaign contributions in that time than any other Democrat, the CRP study reveals, with a total of $3.8 million. Henry Waxman (D-<\d>Los Angeles), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, received a total of $1.4 million in that same time, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) received $1.2 million.

Starting in the 2008 election cycle, the health sector gave more to Democrats than to Republicans, according to the CRP’s analysis.

To overcome that kind of money and influence, advocates say it was crucial to wield a credible single-payer option — a sort of death penalty for the insurance industry — for as long as possible.

“Having single-payer discussions on the table really informs the debate over the public option,” Flanagan said. “But by removing single-payer, it made the public option the left flank.”

Flanagan, like many, is worried about how a 900-page bill will turn out. “There are a thousands ways to get it wrong,” he said. “An easy way to get it right would be to just do a single-payer system.” ————

HEALTH CARE BY THE NUMBERS

• Uninsured Americans: 47 million

• Uninsured Californians: More than 6.7 million (about one in six)

• African Americans without health insurance in California: 19 percent

• Latinos without health insurance in California: 31 percent

• Whites without health insurance in California: 12 percent

• San Franciscans without health insurance: 15.3 percent

• Rise in health-insurance premiums from 2000 to 2007 in California: 96 percent

• Projected rise in health care costs per family without reform: $1,800 per year

• Percentage of bankruptcies attributed to an individual’s inability to pay medical bills: 62 percent

• Percentage of Americans who skip doctor visits because of the cost: 25 percent

• U.S. rank of 19 industrialized nations on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions: 19

• Jobs that would be created by extending Medicare to all Americans: 2.6 million

• Annual U.S. spending on billing and insurance-related administrative costs for health care: $400 billion

Sources: Health Care for America Now, American Journal of Medicine, Physicians for a National Health Program

SF leaders back Jones and snub Alioto-Pier

July 15, 2009

By C. Nellie Nelson

Numerous city officials gathered this morning on the steps of City Hall to endorse Assembly member Dave Jones in his run for state insurance commissioner, even as rumors that Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier may run for the same office were finally reported in the Chronicle and Examiner. Still, the city leaders opted to side with out-of-towner Jones over the more conservative Alioto-Pier.

Local Democratic Party chair and former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin introduced the candidate, saying that a real reformer is needed to run the Insurance Commission of California. City Attorney Dennis Herrera followed, exhorting that he could not think of a better candidate for consumers. Herrera described how most health insurers “gender rate” – charging as much as 39 percent more to insure women – and stated that Jones is committed to ending the disparity, which has already been outlawed in 10 states.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu also spoke briefly in support of Jones, noting that the candidate had brought together the largest number of officials to endorse his candidacy.

The nativists are restless

June 30, 2009

news@sfbg.com

The comments sections of the Guardian‘s Politics blog and the San Francisco Chronicle‘s SFGate Web site have been lit up over the past week with angry (and sometimes overtly racist) denunciations of Latino immigrants, triggered by the latest Chronicle stories challenging San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policies and by Guardian revelations that Chronicle writer Jaxon Van Derkeken accepted an award and substantial cash payment from a controversial nativist group.

While Van Derbeken, two Chronicle editors interviewed by the Guardian, and other critics of San Francisco’s longstanding policy of not notifying federal authorities about the arrests of undocumented immigrants have denied trying to stir up nativist furor, the tone and content of many of these comments seems to indicate they’ve done exactly that.

The saga began June 19 when we published “Chronicle accepts award and cash from anti-immigrant group” on our Politics blog. The story began: “San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken recently accepted an award and cash prize (he refuses to say how much) from the Center for Immigration Studies — which a Southern Poverty Law Center report in February 2009 criticized for its overtly racist roots and extreme anti-immigrant agenda — for his controversial articles on San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policies.

“CIS paid for Van Derbeken to accept the award at the National Press Club and conservative Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders to introduce him earlier this month, an appearance they used to make derogatory comments about San Francisco, its values, and local immigrant rights activists, while saying little to rebuke the group for stirring up hateful nativist furor around what has become perhaps the country’s most divisive issue.”

Van Derbeken would only address the issue by e-mail, sending us two terse replies to our inquiry and refusing to answer most of our questions, including much how cash he received for a prize that we discovered paid $1,000 in 2001 (the complete e-mail exchange is include in our post).

“No one should mistake their decision to endorse my work for my endorsement of theirs,” was Van Derbeken’s most substantive comment, although he refused to offer an opinion on CIS or the SPLC report, which he didn’t read until after accepting the award. “I haven’t drawn any conclusions about it.”

CIS executive director Mark Krikorian, author of The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal (2008, Sentinel), responded to our inquires with an e-mail blaming the “jihad against dissent from the elite consensus for open borders” and referring to a column he wrote for National Review Online criticizing SPLC’s fundraising.

But in the past, Krikorian has called for the federal government to cut off funding to San Francisco and even prosecute local elected officials, writing in his CIS blog, “Local neutrality on immigration is no longer possible. Every jurisdiction in the country has a choice to make: Either buttress federal efforts at immigration control or subvert them. San Francisco has chosen the second option. It should now learn the consequences.”

We did phone interviews with Van Derbeken’s editors, Managing Editor Steve Proctor and Assistant Managing Editor Ken Conner, who both defended the stories and the decision to accept the award. Neither would reveal how much cash was involved, and neither would admit that it represented validating a group that recently has been vying for mainstream legitimacy.

“All issues have proponents and opponents,” Proctor told us, equating the award to those given for education and legal affairs reporting and denying that the immigration issue is more divisive and controversial. “At the end of the day, it isn’t about this group but about Jaxon’s stories,” Conner told us.

Those stories continued in high-profile fashion a few days later as Van Derbeken essentially rewrote a June 21 Los Angeles Times scoop about how San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris allowed a half-dozen undocumented immigrants to enroll in a rehabilitation program rather than turning them over to the feds. The details became front-page lead news stories in the Chronicle on June 22 and 23.

Local immigrant rights activists criticized the Chronicle stories and the paper’s decision to accept the CIS award and money.

“When I read these kind of stories that lead us down a dark path and play on people’s fears and paint immigrants with a broad brush — as a threat, as criminals, as dangerous to the community — I do think that there are anti-immigrant nativist centers egging on reporters like Jaxon down this dark path by giving him cash awards,” Phil Hwang, a staff attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told us. “It’s part of the strategy these anti-immigrant groups are employing. It’s why they created this award. And if you look at who founded CIS and their vision, it’s clear that they believe America is under threat from non-white immigrants,”

Angela Chan of the Asian Law Caucus, whom Van Derbeken mentioned by name in his CIS award speech, said she is worried this latest round would weaken Harris’ support for Sanctuary City policies. That’s what happened to Mayor Gavin Newsom last fall, when Van Derbeken wrote the stories CIS honored.

“I’d hate to see another series of anti-immigrant scapegoating being used to make hasty policy decisions that violate the rights of immigrants, tear apart families, and increase the state of terror in immigrant communities,” Chan told us.

Harris, who is running for state attorney general, defended her decision to let undocumented immigrants complete the Back on Track program after their presence was brought to her attention, but has since changed the policy to bar them from enrolling. “No innovative initiative will ever be created without some unanticipated flaws to be fixed along the way, but this must not stop us from tackling tough problems with smart solutions,” she said in a prepared statement.

“These are tough economic times,” Hwang added. “People are very nervous about their jobs. And that is often when the [anti-immigrant] rhetoric ramps up.”

The Chronicle writer and editors and Krikorian stopped responding to Guardian inquiries. But the blogs were lit up with comments — hundreds of them from around the country at the bottom of Van Derbeken’s latest stories — that had some disturbing themes, accusations, and suggestions. They indicate that the radical nativists are using this issue — and the Chron‘s spin on it — to promote a dangerous agenda.

Here’s a small sampling:

•<\!s> “Illegal aliens are like a plague.”

•<\!s> “Kick out all Illegals, return the city to its rightful owners”

•<\!s> “For God’s sake, STOP pandering to the ILLEGAL ALIENS and get rid of them!”

•<\!s> “Anyone caught crossing the border illegally should be shot as a spy.”

•<\!s> “The border ought to be land mined.”

•<\!s> “What is this sham that diversity is great? It is tearing this country apart.”

Such sentiments — which we usually counter on the Guardian Politics blog — were met with silence by Van Derbeken.

The mobility of space

June 30, 2009

sarah@sfbg.com

Jason Henderson is standing on Patricia’s Green in Hayes Valley, shielding his eyes from the midsummer sun, as he explains how this area, which once lay in the shadowy underbelly of the Central Freeway, was reclaimed as a pedestrian-friendly park.

"In 1989 the freeway went all the way to Turk Street," said Henderson, an assistant professor of geography at San Francisco State University, describing how the raised concrete roadbed, built in the 1950s, cut across this neighborhood and blocked the sky — until the Loma Prieta earthquake hit and damaged the final section so badly it had to be torn down.

That natural disaster triggered a public discussion about the use of the surrounding space, and a 15-year fight that culminated in 2005 in the dedication of the Green, which is part of the Octavia Boulevard Project. Neighbors and business owners pushed the city to convert a damaged freeway into a landscaped park.

That sort of change fascinates Henderson. "I am interested in how people move around cities, and how urban space is configured for movement," he said.

The young professor was raised in New Orleans and wrote his dissertation on transportation and land use debates in Atlanta — which, as Henderson notes, is "the poster child for sprawl but became a hotbed in the ’90s of a national discourse about how we should grow, which became this very interesting debate about reurbanizing."

Henderson’s research focuses on the politics of mobility. He decided to move to San Francisco in 2003 because he saw it as an opportunity to live in a city where a car is not necessary and to study the history of the city’s freeway revolt, which began in the 1960s.

And while he is proud of this park, which was dedicated as Hayes Green then renamed for the late Patricia Walkup, a Hayes Valley resident who tirelessly advocated for the park until her death in 2006, Henderson thinks the local politics of parking have reached "a spatial stalemate."

"During the freeway revolt of the 1960s, San Francisco rejected the freeway but not the automobile," Henderson explained. "But even as San Francisco residents decided that they did not want big gashes of freeway through their waterfront, the Marina, and Golden Gate Park, the city continued to have laws that said every housing unit was to have one parking space.

"So the city adopted a transit-first policy on paper, but didn’t take space away from cars. And if you don’t do anything, you’re not solving the problem."

The problem in San Francisco is what he called the "essentializing of cars."

"A core idea within the parking debate is that there is a universal love affair with the automobile," Henderson explained. "But Obama is downsizing GM and Chrysler, and for the first time since 1960, vehicle miles traveled have started to go down. Until last year, the mantra was that Americans are going to drive. But then we found out that at $4 a gallon, this country freaks out and changes."

Earlier this year, Henderson published a paper that analyzes the city’s politics of parking through the lens of two ballot initiatives from the November 2007 San Francisco election.

"San Francisco’s parking debate is not just about parking. It is a contest over how the city should be configured and organized, and for whom," Henderson wrote in his paper, titled "The Spaces of Parking: Mapping the Politics of Mobility in San Francisco."

His research led him to conclude that progressives, who want to make the city more bike- and public-transportion friendly, are pitted against the more conservative elements (he calls them neoconservatives), who want to increase space for parking and cars at all costs, with the moderate (or in his words, "neoliberal") factions tangled in between.

Part of Henderson’s critique involves estimating the hidden costs of parking — and as it turns out, that can be done using Google and Craiglist. According to a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency 2008 fact sheet, there are an estimated 320,000 on-street parking spaces in San Francisco, including metered spaces, each consuming, on average, about 160 square feet.

According to a 2002 presentation by Jeffery Tumlin, a national transportation consultant, if the city rented these spaces for the lowball rate of $1,000 a year, San Francisco would rake in $320 million annually.

There would be no shortage of demand — market prices are way higher. Henderson’s review of Craiglist unearthed folks who looking to rent parking spaces in San Francisco and willing to pay from $100 to $500 a month.

But SFMTA — which issues more than 89,000 residential parking permits annually and recently opted to cut Muni service and routes and increase fares on public transit rather than extend parking meter hours to balance its budget shortfall — decided to increase the cost of these parking permits, starting July 1, by only $2, from $72 to $74 — per year. That’s less than 10 percent of market value.

The resulting revenue will be dedicated to the cost of administrating the program — not to offset the hidden costs of parking, which include carbon dioxide emissions, air pollution, congestion, and occupying valuable space.

Henderson is intrigued by the relationship between parking policy and a complex set of factors that include public health, obesity, and the cost of affordable housing. He notes that if a city’s housing policy requires developers to provide a parking space for each housing unit, too often developers don’t build that housing, or build it smaller, or build it as part of a luxury complex.

"The progressive response to this dilemma is to try to get government to eliminate the one parking-space-per-unit goal and cap the total amount of parking built. Meanwhile, the neocons, who believe government should be active in creating more parking, rail against more bus lanes," Henderson said.

As he notes, common to both groups is the desire for government to help them achieve their vision.

"Much as we see San Francisco as a progressive place, it’s also peopled by neoliberals and very conservative folks — and progressive and neoliberals coalesce on the issue of ‘smart growth.’ And there are lot of progressives who have a car and say, ‘I don’t want to be car dependent; I’d like to do city share, but I’d feel stranded.’ And those who say ‘I always want to have my own car, but I only drive it once a month.’"

Conceding that "tweaking the system" will cost money, Henderson cites congestion pricing as an area where the various factions can find agreement.

"The important question is, what will the revenue be used for?" Henderson said, noting that some will argue that if you charge motorists to use roads, then the money should be used to improve the roads, which is what has happened with toll roads in Texas.

But in San Francisco, activist are pushing the opposite approach. "Whereas the sustainable transportation movement in San Francisco wants to use the revenue from congestion pricing to fix Muni and discourage driving," he continued.

In his paper on parking policy, Henderson details exactly how parking allocations push up the price of housing — and change the face of ongoing developments.

A typical off-road parking space takes up 350 square feet when room to move in and out is factored in — and that’s comparable to many offices and living spaces in San Francisco. The parking alone costs $50,000 to $100,000 to develop — a cost that’s passed on to the homebuyer.

But in most neighborhoods, developers can’t avoid parking, because of planning laws. "This means that neighborhoods like the iconic North Beach simply could not be built today," Henderson wrote, noting how mandatory parking provisions mean that the lower floors of new buildings are likely to contain parking garages, not storefronts and cafes, and garage entrances take away street parking and limit where street trees can be planted.

"But at least contesting car space is on the table in San Francisco" Henderson said. "That makes it an intriguing bellwether for other places."

Editor’s Notes

June 30, 2009

tredmond@sfbg.com

Lucy Dalglish, the director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, is about as much of a national leader on open-government and free-speech issues as we have in this country. She’s been watching (and fighting) the battle against government secrecy for more than a quarter century as a reporter in St. Paul, a media lawyer, and since 2000 the head of RCFP. So when she sounds an alarm, it’s worth listening.

And at the annual conference of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, she warned that the decline of daily newspapers — something those of us in the alt-media often treat as a spectator sport, jeering at the losers who for years couldn’t figure out how to print news people wanted to read — is going to have a serious impact on open government.

The thing is, conservative, weak, and lame as so many dailies were, they have been the ones funding almost all of the major freedom-of-information lawsuits and organizations. The case law that protects the news media (including bloggers) from nuisance libel suits? That came from The New York Times. The law preventing the government from using prior restraint to block the publication of material it thinks might damage national security? The New York Times. The most important open-government cases in the nation? Mostly filed by medium-sized dailies like The Press Enterprise in Riverside.

I’m not here — lord knows, I’m not here — defending the likes of Knight-Ridder and Copley and Scripps-Howard, which are mostly very conservative newspaper chains that have decimated news coverage, kowtowed to the powerful, and screwed up a lot of communities. But Dalglish has a point: as the old guard in the media spirals into decline, who’s going to take up the free-speech and open-government banner — and by that I mean, who’s going to put up the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes to file and defend these key lawsuits and keep these organizations alive?

"It isn’t," Dalglish said, "going to be Google."

The Chronicle ran a story June 29th talking about the growing discussion of the need to reform Proposition 13. It was mostly a political piece, looking at the popularity of the measure and the complications of trying to change a law that has pretty much defined public finance in California for 30 years.

Robert Cruickshank at Calitics.com brought up something in response to the Chron story that hadn’t really occurred to me:

"Since 1978," he wrote, "California has experienced two massive housing bubbles. The 1980s bubble, which seemed large at the time, was primarily focused on California and caused widespread unaffordability before the 1989 crash. The 2000s bubble was a nationwide phenomenon, but Prop. 13 played a role by removing a brake on housing inflation. If homeowners saw tax assessments rise in relation to their values, instead of being largely fixed at the rate at the time of purchase, it seems unlikely we would have had the enormous and destructive boom and bust in the housing market we witnessed."

So Prop. 13 causes high housing prices. Probably high rents, too. Worth thinking about. *

Madison Young: our favorite art slut

June 24, 2009

By Juliette Tang. Check out Madison in this our Hot Pink List 2009!

Madison Young: renaissance porn star. She is most famous for being an adult entertainment performer and director, but she’s also a writer, blogger, sex educator, artist, and the founder of San Francisco’s Femina Potens Gallery, an art space dedicated to bringing visibility to the artwork of female, queer, and trans artists in our community. For Madison’s work as an advocate of queer empowerment in our community – and for personally making sure (via her www.madisonbound.com Web site) that we have plenty of access to hot queer BDSM – we’re showcasing Madison in our upcoming Queer Issue (this Wednesday!) in honor of Pride Week.

Madison recently sat down with the San Francisco Bay Guardian to discuss her work in pornography, the philosophy of Femina Potens, and the importance of art and advocacy in our community.

SFBG: You founded Femina Potens in 2001. How did you come up with the concept of the gallery, one that advances the art of women, queer, trans, and kink communities in SF? Why do you personally feel it is important for these artists to have a space to express themselves and showcase their work?

MY: I always knew that I wanted to create a physical space for artistic growth, collaboration and community connection. When I moved to San Francisco in 2001, I realized the focus that I wanted that space to have due to a lack of existing physical spaces for women and trans community dialogue around art and sex. Femina Potens fills that void. We have created an accessible and visible physical space in the heart of the Castro where the voices of visual, literary, and cinematic artist are being heard. We are breaking down barriers between the artist and audience, creating interactive art works, blurring the lines of gender and alternative sexual cultures, and creating a space for artistic growth of emerging artists who are exhibiting or reading side by side with queer literary and artistic legends like Michelle Tea, Annie Sprinkle, Carol Queen, Inga Muscio, Daphne Gottlieb and more. Its important for us not only to have transitory festivals and events at other organizations spaces but for our community to have a physical space where their work is celebrated. Creating spaces like Femina Potens allows women and trans community an honest reflection of their experiences and their lives. It also encourages more people in the community to exhibit their work. Our audiences range in gender and sexuality, attracting a crowd that is drawn to cutting edge art, alternative sexuality, avant-garde performances, and flocks of tourists who are interested in the “San Francisco Experience”.

SFBG: What sparked your interest in art? How would you describe your level of involvement with the general artistic community?

MY:I grew up in a very small conservative farm town and then the suburbs of Ohio. I always felt like an outsider. I was constantly trying to stretch my wings for something more. I was instantly drawn to theater and art from my first elements of exposure to this world. In a life where I felt unable to to express myself emotionally, I found art in its many forms to be the purest most honest expulsion of what was going on inside of me. Art was a way to connect to others and to communicate. Art was a way to get out of my head and into my body. I convinced my mother to let me attend a performance art school in downtown Cincinnati for my junior and senior year. That is where I truly found myself and knew that art would always be a part of my life. I often tell people that the first sexual experiences that I had were those that happened on a stage in a black box theater. That is where I first was able to let myself go and to energetically connect in an intimate way with another person.

SFBG: Do you think there are noted artistic, political, or ideological differences between the work exhibited at Femina Potens and that of more mainstream galleries?

Nativists revive Willie Horton tactic

June 24, 2009

By Steven T. Jones

As the Chronicle once again pushes its anti-immigrant crusade with another front-page, above-the-fold story – clearly trying to badger District Attorney Kamala Harris into joining their descent into raw nativism – the central argument seems to be a flashback to another episode of racist-tinged political manipulation.

Conservative SF Examiner columnist Ken Garcia yesterday wrote that the issue comes down to two words: Edwin Ramos. He is the undocumented immigrant accused of a San Francisco murder, with the implication being that the murder wouldn’t have happened if he and his ilk had been deported. That argument also underlies the latest alleged outrage, because Alexander Izaguirre also committed a crime instead of being deported or kept in prison on a minor drug charge.

But I think the latest nativist campaign comes down to another two words: Willie Horton. He was the criminal that Republicans used in TV ads to paint 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis as soft-on-crime, an underhanded tactic that played heavily to racist fears and stereotypes.

The price of normal

June 23, 2009

news@sfbg.com

With a 2010 state proposition on gay marriage in the works and a national gay rally on the Washington Mall being planned for October 10-11 of that year, it’s obvious that more and more of the LGBT community’s resources are being funneled into the battle for marriage equality, while other causes go begging.

Already gay marriage has become a black hole that is sucking untold amounts of money, time, and energy out of our community. In the 2008 election alone, gay marriage supporters raised $43.3 million to defeat Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative that California voters passed by 52 percent. It may be the biggest chunk of change the community has ever spent for a single fight.

A QUESTION OF PRIORITIES

I’m not against gay marriage. If queer couples want to be as miserable as straight ones, that’s their choice. Marriage is a failed institution. With a 54.8 percent divorce rate nationally and a 60 percent rate here in California, there’s no doubt in my mind that heterosexual "wedded bliss" is more of an oxymoron than a reality.

What’s troubling to me as a queer activist of almost 40 years (much of that time spent on economic justice work) is that, with the tremendous amount of homelessness, poverty, and unemployment in our community, we are spending so much dough on the fight to give a minority of folks — those who opt for tying the knot — rights and privileges that straight married folks have.

Sure, it’s unfair that married straights get tax breaks, not to mention the status of next-of-kin for hospital visits and medical decisions when one partner is ill, and queers don’t. Altogether, married couples have 1,400 benefits, both state and federal, that domestic partners and single people don’t enjoy. It’s a matter of simple justice that the playing field be leveled. Only a right-wing idiot could disagree with that. Now, if only we could fight to give everyone (including singles) those 1,400 benefits.

For me it’s a question of priorities. We are living in scary times. Unemployment is sky-high; millions are without healthcare, including children; foreclosures are robbing homeowners and tenants alike of their housing; and business collapses are leaving a lot of people out in the cold and unable to pay the rent or the mortgage.

DINKS NO MORE

The queer community is no better off.

It’s a popular misconception that queers have a lot of disposable income. The "double income, no kids" (DINK) myth was promoted in the 1980s by gay publishers who wanted to expand their advertising base and their profits. These days, to read many gay publications, you’d think that all queers are going on fabulous vacations and buying expensive clothes, jewelry, and electronic gizmos.

That myth was easily dispelled by a recent study, "Poverty in the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Community," published this March by the Williams Institute at UCLA. Like "Income Inflation: the myth of affluence among gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans," the groundbreaking 1998 study by M.V. Lee Badgett of the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Williams report found that many members of our community aren’t shopping ’til they drop. They can barely afford to put food on the table.

Nationally, 24 percent of lesbians and bisexual women are poor compared to 19 percent of heterosexual women; 15 percent of gay and bisexual men are poor compared to 13 percent of heterosexual men.

Queers aren’t just low on cash — we’re homeless, too. A 2006 report, "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth: An Epidemic of Homelessness" from the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force and the National Coalition on Homelessness, showed that 20 percent to 40 percent of the 1.6 million homeless youth in America identify as LGBT. In San Francisco, the number of queers in the homeless youth population (estimated at 4,000 by the Mayor’s Office) is "roughly 44 percent," according to Dr. Mike Toohey of the Homeless Youth Alliance in the Haight.

Brian Basinger of the AIDS Housing Alliance says that 40 percent of people with HIV/AIDS, in the city once acclaimed for its care of those with the disease, are either "unstably housed or are homeless." In the Castro, Basinger said, there are only "12 dedicated HOPWA beds" for people with the disease. HOPWA (Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS) is a federal voucher program for low-income people with AIDS that is similar to federal housing assistance program Section 8.

Certain members of our community don’t fare much better in the area of employment. A 2006 survey by the Guardian and the Transgender Law Center reported that 75 percent of transgender people are not employed full-time, and 59 percent make less than $15,299 a year. A mere 4 percent of respondents earned more than $61,200, the then-median income average for San Francisco.

Fifty-seven percent of trangendered people said they suffered employment discrimination, demonstrating the need for the inclusion of "gender identity" in the federal Employment Non-discrimination Act. Human Rights Campaign, a national gay organization, and out Congress member Barney Frank (D-Mass.) cut transgenders out of that legislation the last time it was up before Congress.

It could all get a whole lot worse.

AXING THE FUTURE

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to lop at least $81 million from California’s AIDS budget, including money for AIDS drugs, leaving low-income people stranded without their medication. Senior services are also on his cutting block, including $230.8 million from in-home services and $117 million from adult health-care programs. (As we go to press, the state Legislature is working to restore the AIDS money to the budget.)

Mayor Gavin Newsom, in his proposed city budget cuts, is axing $128.4 million from public health and $15.9 million from human services. There’s no doubt these cuts in health and human services will severely affect people with AIDS, seniors, youth, the homeless, and others in our community who can least afford to pay for the city’s budget shortfall.

The millions spent on gay marriage in the past few years could have gone a long way in these lean times. It could have helped make the proposed queer senior housing project, Open House, a reality. With 88 units in the works at 55 Laguna St., the site of the old UC extension, it will be the only such housing for LGBT seniors in San Francisco.

The money also could have funded housing in the Castro for homeless queer youth or people with AIDS. It could have been used as seed money for a much-needed war against poverty in the LGBT community.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF LIBERATION

The queer movement hasn’t always been this obsessed about getting hitched. Forty years ago this week, drag queens and others fought back against the cops who were raiding a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s West Village. Three days of protests led to the creation of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a revolutionary group dedicated to the sexual liberation of all people. GLFers weren’t looking to walk down the aisle or form binary couples. In a desire to "abolish existing social institutions," as the NYC branch of GLF said in its statement of purpose, some GLFers explored polyamory (more than one relationship at a time).

That’s why I edited Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation, just published by City Lights Books, a collection of writings by former GLF members and other gay liberationists. I wanted to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Stonewall and the birth of GLF with a reminder of who we were and what we did. After all these years, I still don’t want to head to the chapel to get married.

When it really comes down to it, gay marriage is a conservative issue. It’s about wanting to fit in, to be like everyone else. Beyond the important issues of tax breaks and next-of-kin status — and the fact that if any institution exists, it shouldn’t discriminate against queers — marriage is ultimately a means of normalizing binary queer relationships, especially for gay men who have always enjoyed the freedom to be promiscuous. It’s a way to try and rein in our libidos, though the prevalence of extramarital sex among straight couples — 50 percent for women, 60 percent for men, according to a recent issue of Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy — shows that marriage doesn’t come with a chastity belt.

It also doesn’t come with any guarantees, as researchers discovered in Sweden, where queers were able to contract for same-sex partnerships from 1995 until recently, when full same-sex marriage was instituted. According to a study by the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, Swedish queers have been divorcing in high numbers, like their straight counterparts, who have a divorce rate that’s just a little higher than the United States.

For queers in Sweden, that’s the price of being normal.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca, who has been a queer activist since he was involved with the Gay Liberation Front at Temple University in Philadelphia in the early 1970s, is editor of Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation (City Lights Books).

Chronicle continues anti-immigrant crusade

June 23, 2009

By Steven T. Jones

Jaxon Van Derbeken and the San Francisco Chronicle continued their crusade against undocumented immigrants today, expecting elected officials in San Francisco to be accountable to federal immigration authorities while resisting accountability for their own unethical collusion with a controversial anti-immigrant group.

At issue is a Los Angeles Times story about how District Attorney Kamala Harris – who is running for attorney general, a fact that likely played a role in the hit piece – allowed a half-dozen undocumented immigrants to enroll in a rehabilitation program rather than turning them over to the feds. The Chronicle essentially rewrote the Times story under Van Derbeken’s byline and ran it as its splashy lead news story.

Harris told the Times that it’s not her job to enforce federal immigration policies, a stand that has been San Francisco’s official Sanctuary City policy since the ‘80s when Dianne Feinstein was mayor. But Van Derbeken and anti-immigrant groups like the Center for Immigration Studies – which recently gave Van Derbeken an award and large cash payout for his work on the issue – have been pushing for more local cooperation with federal immigration crackdowns.

The Chronicle has refused to say how much money Van Derbeken received for an award that was worth $1,000 a few years ago (CIS has also refused to disclose the figure despite our direct questions), or to address the validation of CIS’s controversial views that acceptance of the award represents, or to offer a position on CIS’s demands and quest for mainstream legitimacy, or to explain or apologize for the derogatory comments that Van Derbeken and conservative Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders made about San Francisco and immigrant rights activists during his acceptance speech earlier this month.

While Van Derbeken did briefly raise the concern during his speech that innocent San Francisco residents could get deported under federal immigration policies, he has resisted accepting the immigrant rights community’s call for due process to play out before deporting local residents (often to a country they know little about and where they have no support system) and dividing up families in order to satisfy the increasingly vitriolic demands of nativist groups.

Mr. Prez — just don’t fuck things up worse

June 22, 2009

By Tim Redmond

I heard a lot of discussion on KQED’s Forum this morning about President Obama and his affronts to the queer community, and several callers — all folks who claimed to be “supportive of the the LGBT community” — suggested that the president is doing the right thing by taking it slow. First, he has to fix the economic mess, restore the banking system, put about 10 million people back to work, close the Guantanamo Bay torture chamber and create a national health-care system. Then, after he takes a little nap and has a nice healthy snack, he can get to work on human rights and equality.

Bill Clinton, one caller said, screwed everything up by moving too fast; his health-insurance reform collapsed, Congress wouldn’t go along with allowing gay people to serve openly in the military, and before long, the Republicans were kicking his ass all over Washington.

I know the song: A president only has a certain amount of political capital, and he can’t just go flinging it all around at once. And he needs Congress for his health plan, and overturning the Defense of Marriage Act or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell could alienate those same moderates who might be the swing votes on health reform. He also has to deal with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose district may include the single largest concentration of active queer people in the United States, but who long gave up representing San Francisco. She’s more worried about electing Democrats in conservative districts to keep her majority and her power — and if that means lesbian and gay people have to go the back of the bus for a while, oh well. That’s politics.

But there are so many things Obama could do, right now, without Congress (and without making a big fuss) that would make a huge difference to the queer community. He can’t get rid of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — but as commander in chief, he can simply order the office of the Judge Advocate General of each of the services to suspend indefinately all prosecutions seeking to discharge service members for homosexuality. The military doesn’t do everything right, but the one thing the leaders of that august institution understand is taking orders. Just tell them to stop kicking gay people out — and not to make a big deal of it. Then the problem will at least be something we can ignore while Obama is taking his sweet time and collecting political chits to deal with it properly.

Same thing with DOMA. I don’t know who exactly approved the legal brief defending that law — and I suspect somehow that Obama himself never read it — but that shit has to go. Just withdraw that brief, submit another one that doesn’t compare homosexuality to incest (and that’s kind of badly written and not particularly persuasive), and hope to god the government loses.

Yeah, the president ought to stand up publicly for equality — and unlike Willie Brown, who thinks that’s never going to happen, I suspect it will. By the end of his first term, he’ll come around. But in the meantime, Mr. President, remember the Hippocratic Oath of politics: First, don’t fuck things up worse.

Chronicle accepts award and cash from anti-immigrant group

June 19, 2009

By Steven T. Jones and Sarah Phelan

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken recently accepted an award and cash prize (he refuses to say how much) from the Center for Immigration Studies – which a Southern Poverty Law Center report in February 2009 criticized for its overtly racist roots and extreme anti-immigrant agenda – for his controversial articles on San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policies.

CIS paid for Van Derbeken to accept the award at the National Press Club and conservative Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders to introduce him earlier this month, an appearance they used to make derogatory comments about San Francisco, its values, and local immigrant rights activists, while saying little to rebuke the group for stirring up hateful nativist furor around what has become perhaps the country’s most divisive issue.

Van Derbeken and Ken Conner, the Chron’s assistant managing editor for news (who the reporter consulted before accepting the award), told the Guardian that they see nothing wrong with accepting the award and they don’t see it as validating the views of a group that has been desperately seeking mainstream credibility with which to push its anti-immigrant agenda.

“No one should mistake their decision to endorse my work for my endorsement of theirs,” Van Derbeken wrote via e-mail in response to questions, although he wouldn’t offer an opinion on the CIS agenda. He said he was unaware of the SPLC report when he accepted the award, and now that he’s seen it, he wrote, “I haven’t drawn any conclusions about it.”

Conner also dismissed concerns that accepting the award and its cash supplement amounts to validating the group and letting it benefit from the Chronicle name. “We don’t think that’s true. They gave us this award. We didn’t seek it,” Conner told us.

This one’s ugly

June 17, 2009

news@sfbg.com

The most painful and divisive city budget season in many years was just getting under way as this issue went to press, with dueling City Hall rallies preceding the June 16 Board of Supervisors vote on an interim budget and the board’s Budget and Finance Committee slated to finally delve into the 2009-10 general fund budgets on June 17.

Both sides have adopted the rhetoric of a life-or-death struggle, with firefighters warning at a rally and in an advertising campaign that any cuts to their budget is akin to playing Russian Roulette, while city service providers say the deep public health cuts proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom will also cost lives and carry dire long-term costs and consequences.

Despite Newsom’s pledges in January and again on June 1 to work closely with the Board of Supervisors on budget issues, that hasn’t happened. Instead, Newsom’s proposed budget would decimate the social services supported by board progressives, who responded by proposing an interim budget that would share that pain with police, fire, and sheriff’s budgets — which Newsom proposed to increase.

Rather than simply adopting the mayor’s proposed budget as the interim spending plan for the month of July, as the board traditionally has done, progressive supporters proposed an interim budget that would make up to $82 million in cuts to the three public safety agencies and use that money to prevent the more draconian cuts to social services.

“It’s the start of a discussion to figure out what that number should be. I don’t know where we’re going to end up,” Sup. David Campos, who sits on the budget committee, told us.

Board President David Chiu said Newsom did finally meet with him and Budget Committee chair John Avalos on June 15 to try to resolve the impasse. But he said, “We didn’t hear anything from the mayor that would change where we were last week.” They planned to meet again on June 19.

“What we proposed represents the magnitude of the challenge we face this year,” Chiu said of the interim budget proposal, seeming to indicate that supervisors are open to negotiation.

The real work begins the morning of June 17 when the Budget and Finance Committee dissects the budgets of 15 city departments, including the Mayor’s Office, of which Avalos told us, “I don’t think the mayor has made the same concessions as he’s had other departments make.”

The next day, another 13 city departments go under the committee’s microscope, including the public safety departments that were spared the mayor’s budget ax and even given small increases, and the budget of the Public Defenders Office, where Newsom proposes cutting 16 positions.

“This creates a severe imbalance in the criminal justice system,” Public Defender Jeff Adachi told us. “Why is he cutting public defender services while fully funding police, fully funding the sheriff’s department, and essentially creating a situation where poor people are going to get second-rate representation?”

That theme of rich vs. poor has pervaded the budget season debate, both overtly and in budget priorities that each side is supporting.

BUDGET JUSTICE

Hundreds of people whose lives would be affected by cuts marched on City Hall under the banner Budget Justice on June 10. Some of San Francisco’s most vulnerable citizens, including homeless people, immigrants, seniors, and public housing residents, turned out for the march, chanting and waving signs asking the mayor to “invest in us.”

Sups. John Avalos and Chris Daly delivered resounding speeches mirroring the anger in the crowd, and promised to fix the budget by reallocating money to protect the city’s safety net. Daly charged that even as services to the city’s vulnerable populations are being slashed, “the politically connected and the powerful get huge increases.”

Avalos took the podium just before heading into City Hall to lead the Budget and Finance Committee meeting and implored the hundreds of people gathered out front to make their voices heard. “Mayor Newsom, he told us, he said, ‘We have a near-perfect budget.’ Do we have a near-perfect budget?” Avalos asked, and then paused while the crowd cried out, “Nooo!!!!!”

During an interview discussing Newsom’s budget priorities, Avalos twice made references to The Shock Doctrine, using the Naomi Klein book about how crises are used as opportunities to unilaterally implement corporatist policies. “We have a budget deficit that is real, but it’s being used to do other things,” Avalos said. “I look at it as a way to remake San Francisco. It’s a Shock Doctrine effect.”

He referred to the privatization of government services (an aspect of every Newsom budget), promoting condo conversions and gentrification, defunding nonprofits that provides social services (groups that often side with progressives), and helping corporations raid the public treasury (Newsom proposed beefing up the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development by a whopping 32 percent).

“It’s things that the most conservative parts of San Francisco have wanted for years, and now they have the conditions to make it happen,” Avalos said.

Much of that agenda involves slashing services to the homeless and other low-income San Francisco and de-funding the nonprofit network that provides services and jobs. “There’s an effort to say nonprofit jobs aren’t real jobs, but they are an important economic engine of the city,” Avalos told us. Those cuts were decried during the June 10 budget rally.

“What people don’t realize,” Office & Professional Employees International Union Local 3 representative Natalie Naylor said, “is that everything that’s being proposed to be cut from the city is creating no place for homeless people to go during the daytime. I don’t think Newsom’s constituents realize that we’re going to see more homeless people on the street than ever before.”

Pablo Rodriguez of the Coalition on Homelessness told the crowd that he was furious that the mayor would make such deep cuts to social services. “Stop riding on the back of the homeless, and the seniors and the children and all the community-based organizations,” Rodriguez said. “Why make the poor people pay for the rich people’s mistakes? The poor people didn’t make the mistakes.”

WHOM TO CUT?

The public safety unions were equally caustic in their arguments. An announcement for the Save Our Firehouses rally — which was heavily promoted by members of the Mayor’s Office and Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign team — claimed that “the Board of Supervisors voted to endanger the progress that we’ve made in public safety by laying off hundreds of police officers, closing up to 12 out of 42 fire stations and closing part of our jail.”

Actually, all sides have said the interim budget probably won’t lead to layoffs, station closures, or prisoner releases, but those could be a part of next year’s budget.

Tensions temporarily cooled a bit in the days that have followed, but the two sides still seemed far apart on their priorities, mayoral spin aside. Asked about the impasse, Newsom spokesperson Nate Ballard told the Guardian, “The mayor has already included over 90 percent of the supervisors’ priorities in the budget. But he’s against the supervisors’ efforts to gut public safety. He’s willing to work with people who have reasonable ideas to balance the budget. Balancing the budget with draconian cuts to police and fire is unreasonable.”

Campos disputed Ballard’s figure and logic. “I don’t know where that number comes from,” Campos said. “A lot of the things we wanted to protect, the mayor cut anyway.”

Campos said Newsom’s slick budget presentation glossed over painful cuts to essential services, cuts that activists and Budget Analyst Harvey Rose have been discovering over the last two weeks. “I felt the mayor has done a real good job of presenting things to make it look like it’s not as bad as it really is,” Campos said.

COMMITTEE WORK

Avalos expressed confidence that his committee will produce a document to the full board in July that reflects progressive priorities.

“We’re going to pass to the full board a budget that we have control over,” Avalos said, noting that a committee majority that also includes Sups. Campos and Ross Mirkarimi strongly favors progressive budget priorities.

He also praised the committee’s more conservative members, Sups. Bevan Dufty and Carmen Chu, as engaged participants in improving the mayor’s budget. “I think the tension on the committee is healthy.”

Ultimately, Avalos says, he knows the board members can alter Newsom’s budget priorities. But his goal is to go even further and develop a consensus budget that creatively spreads the pain.

“Ideally, I want a unanimous vote on the Board of Supervisors,” Avalos said.

In the current polarized budget climate, that’s an ambitious goal that may be out of reach. But there are some real benefits to attaining a unanimous board vote, including the ability to place revenue measures on the November ballot that can be passed by a simply majority vote (state law generally requires a two-third vote to increase taxes, but it makes provisions for fiscal emergencies, when a unanimous Board of Supervisors vote can waive the two-thirds rule).

Avalos has proposed placing sales tax and parcel tax measures on the fall ballot. Other proposals that have been discussed by a stakeholder committee assembled by Chiu include a measure to replace the payroll tax with a new gross receipts tax and general obligation bond measures to pay for things like park and road maintenance, which would allow those budget expenses to be applied elsewhere.

But Avalos said Newsom will need to step up and show some leadership if the measures are going to have any hope of being approved. “To get the two-thirds vote we need to win a revenue measure in this bad economy is going to be really hard,” Avalos said.

“The mayor is open to new revenue measures as long as they include significant reforms and are conceived and supported by a wide swath of the community including labor and business,” Ballard said.

Sup. Sean Elsbernd — one of the most conservative supervisors — has repeatedly said he won’t support new revenue measures unless they are accompanied by substantial budget reforms that will rein in ballooning expenditures in areas like city employee pensions.

“Pension reform. Health care reform. Spending reform. One of the above. A combination of the above,” Elsbernd told the Guardian when asked what he wants to see in a budget revenue deal.

Avalos says he’s mindful that not every progressive priority can be fully funded as the city wrestles with a budget deficit of almost $500 million, fully half the city’s discretionary budget. “It’s a crappy situation, and we can make it just a crummy situation.”

Newsom collaborates with firefighters on budget rally

June 12, 2009

By Steven T. Jones

Despite recent denials about collaboration between the Mayor’s Office and the firefighters union – both of which are represented by political consultant Eric Jaye – the Mayor’s Office is actively involved in organizing and promoting a firefighters rally before this Tuesday’s board meeting on the interim budget.

The rally is being promoted on Facebook by top mayoral advisor Mike Farrah, who has indicated that he will attend along with Jaye, Rob Black (who Newsom backed for supervisor, but who now works for the Chamber of Commerce), and former Newsom flack Jennifer Petrucione.

Also invited by Farrah are Newsom press secretary Nathan Ballard, Chamber VP Jim Lazarus, Sup. Sean Elsbernd, conservative pollster Ben Tulchin, political consultant Tom Hseih, Examiner editor Jim Pimentel (who helps write editorials endorsing John McCain and denying climate change), and Newsom staffers Catherine Dodd, Wade Crowfoot, Daniel Homsey, and Dariush Kayhan.

Yup, that sound like independent grassroots advocacy at its best. Or Team Newsom’s version of it anyway. Meanwhile, the firefighters union continues its alarmist media blitz equating budget cuts to recklessly endangering San Francisco. Ridiculous. This department has always had tons of fat to trim, and the current scare tactics are utterly shameless.

The two Newsoms

June 10, 2009

steve@sfbg.com

More on SFBG
>>Links to our complete Newsom coverage, from 2006 to the present (Microsoft Word)

There are two Gavin Newsoms: the mayor San Franciscans have gotten to know over the last six years, and the candidate running for governor.

The contrast is dramatic. The central persona being pushed by the Newsom campaign — that of a postpartisan progressive who has united fractious San Francisco around innovative, common sense solutions to the most vexing problems using his considerable courage and political skills — seems like pure fiction to most City Hall watchers.

Here’s Newsom, the candidate, kicking off his campaign and describing a harmonious local political scene: "We stopped fighting over who was going to be in charge and started working together to find solutions."

Here’s the reality: Newsom is a politically isolated mayor who refused to heed the voter directive to meet regularly with the Board of Supervisors or take part in budget negotiations involving key community stakeholders. His spokespeople regularly belittle and deride progressive supervisors and organizations. He has vetoed consensus legislation on tenant protections, police foot patrols, new revenue measures, and new parking policies. He is proudly taking campaign credit for other people’s initiatives he once opposed. He has been absent from some of the most important policy debates in the city. He has demanded the resignations of all appointees and top officials, even those protected by contracts and fixed terms. His dysfunctional, politicized office has been criticized for its secrecy by both the civil grand jury and Sunshine Ordinance Task Force and for its emphasis on loyalty over competence by past and current employees.

He is utterly unwilling to engage with people who disagree with him. In fact, he refused the Guardian‘s month-old request to discuss the issues raised in this article.

"It’s like a Wizard of Oz creation. You pull back the curtain and there’s nothing there," said Aaron Peskin, who was regularly vilified by Team Newsom when he served as president of the Board of Supervisors. "He is kind of an empty, sad guy and his handlers have managed to create a persona that is fake and false."

A close examination of Newsom’s record and statements shows a history of contradictions. He has supported and opposed public power, decriminalizing marijuana, requiring employers to help pay for the city’s universal health care system, temporarily closing some streets to cars, shelter and treatment on demand for the homeless, higher clean energy standards, and a long list of other issues.

He called for Muni to be free, then insisted on doubling Muni fares.

You’d think this would be a formula for political failure, that eventually California voters would figure out the fraud. But that’s not necessarily true. The reality, political professionals told us, is that the general public just doesn’t care about the details of his mayoral tenure. Such nuances don’t translate well into a statewide campaign.

Newsom’s platform and persona are what voters want to hear right now — and they’re just believable enough to be an easy sell for modern media manipulators.

But the public ought to be paying attention — because the record suggests that Newsom is hardly a great candidate for governor.

FOR THE RECORD

The policy initiative Newsom cites most frequently on the campaign trail is Healthy San Francisco, a plan to provide health care to all city residents, mostly by requiring employers to provide health insurance to their workers or pay into a city program that covers visits to city clinics and hospitals.

"In my city, we’re well on our way to universal health care. How can we afford it? Well, we’re proving what you already know: it’s less expensive to keep people well than it is to treat their sickness," Newsom said in his announcement speech.

"Mayor Gavin Newsom isn’t waiting for the politicians in Sacramento to solve this problem — he’s created the only universal health care program in the country," reads the Newsom campaign Web site.

It may be true that preventive care saves money over the long run, but that has nothing to do with how San Francisco affords this program. And Gavin Newsom never created it.

First of all, Healthy San Francisco wouldn’t exist if then Sup. Tom Ammiano (now a member of the California Assembly) hadn’t spent years fighting for a universal health care plan paid for by employers.

And while Ammiano was being savagely attacked over the idea by the business community, a key constituency of the mayor, Newsom sat on the sidelines until Ammiano lined up enough votes to approve the plan. At that point, Newsom introduced his own health plan, worked with Ammiano to merge the two, and has been taking credit for it around the country ever since.

Ammiano credits labor, not Newsom, with doing the hard work of fighting business community opposition to Healthy San Francisco. "The mayor’s role was that we would keep him updated, but I don’t think he thought it was going to happen," Ammiano told us. "There’s no doubt he came along for the ride."

Going through the issues on Newsom’s campaign Web site, there are a startling number of claims that don’t match his record. A few examples:

"California must be ready for a wide range of natural disasters … [and] man-made disasters as well — terrorist attacks, hazardous material and oil spills, and biological and chemical threats," said the mayor, whose latest budget includes a 24 percent cut to the Office of Emergency Services and who appointed unqualified (but politically connected) Republican hack Annemarie Conroy to head OES, and who remained on vacation in Hawaii as San Franciscans responded to the Cosco Busan oil spill, the biggest in San Francisco Bay.

"In the midst of a national economic crisis, San Francisco’s economy has remained strong … Mayor Newsom — building on his experience in the private sector where he built a thriving enterprise of 15 businesses and created 1,000 jobs — has transformed the city’s economy," his campaign wrote. Yet in his latest budget, he argues how weak the city’s economy has become and uses the crisis to slash spending on public health, social services, building inspections, and other essential services in the biggest government downsizing in the city’s history. Biotech businesses have located in the city, as Newsom has often touted, but they aren’t paying any city taxes because of a measure he sponsored exempting them.

"Working largely with existing resources, Mayor Newsom has applied a little common sense and a lot of innovation to help turn San Francisco public schools into a statewide model for educational achievement," writes the campaign. But despite regularly claiming credit for schools in his stump speeches, Newsom has had little to do with the San Francisco Unified School District, which has avoided layoffs mostly because of support from city funds (thanks to a voter-approved measure authored by Ammiano) and a parcel tax spearheaded by downtown financier Warren Hellman and others. Newsom also has done little to help find solutions to the most controversial issues plaguing the school district in recent years, such as eliminating JROTC, school closures, desegregation, and the divisive tenure of former Superintendent Arlene Ackerman. Indeed, his biggest role was defending a superintendent so polarizing the board of education fired her.

That has been the most common complaint about Newsom from both his political allies and opponents: he’s always been unwilling to spend his political capital on anything that might help the city or solve its problems.

The polls may show that Newsom’s popular, but he has never been able to translate that into political success. Despite spending a record-setting $7 million and nearly two years on his first mayoral campaign, Newsom only beat the poorly funded, last-minute campaign of Matt Gonzalez by about five percentage points.

Two months into his first term, on March 3, 2004 Newsom’s signature Workforce Housing Initiative went down hard, as have most of the ballot measures he has supported. The one notable exception was last year’s Proposition G, a measure Newsom created along with U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein to give Lennar Corp. the exclusive right to develop more than 10,000 homes and a new football stadium on Hunters and Candlestick points and through much of southeast San Francisco. That plan remains the centerpiece of Newsom’s housing policy even as the housing market and the value of Lennar’s stock have both collapsed.

When it comes to the Board of Supervisors, Newsom’s candidates lose almost every time there’s a closely contested race. In the last election, Newsom backed Joe Alioto, Ahsha Safai, and Sue Lee, all top fundraisers in their respective districts — and all of them lost. Even in ultra-liberal District 9, where one of three well-qualified progressive candidates was virtually guaranteed to win, Newsom backed a business-friendly also-ran.

Two years before, Newsom gave his strong support to Doug Chan in conservative District 4 and Rob Black in District 6, home to Newsom nemesis Chris Daly. Newsom actively campaigned for both men harder than he has for any other supervisorial candidate — and both lost.

Newsom even lost control of his own party. While he was campaigning for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party presidential primary, Daly, Peskin, and the progressives put together a campaign to take control of the Democratic County Central Committee, besting Newsom-backed alternatives.

That’s not to say Newsom isn’t a shrewd politician. Indeed, the one move that put him on the national political map was the same one that ensured his popularity and reelection in San Francisco: his decision to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples shortly after taking office in 2004.

There’s no evidence to refute Newsom’s claim that this was a principled decision stemming from his outrage at federal efforts to ban same-sex marriage. But as a side benefit, the move made Newsom of beloved figure among LGBT voters (who mostly cast their ballots for Gonzalez in 2003) and transformed Newsom from an ambitious and privileged young politician to an early civil rights leader in the eyes of many.

THE WAY HE WORKS

When Newsom unveiled his 2009-10 budget, it wasn’t in the Board of Supervisors Chambers, where there’s plenty of room for the press and public and where mayors have traditionally held these events. Instead, he made the announcement in his private inner office. And even though he invited local journalists, he filled the small room with department heads and supervisors and made the media peer in from an adjoining room. Then he spoke for nearly an hour and concluded the event without taking questions.

"I look forward to working with the Board of Supervisors," Newsom said, but nobody believed him. He made that same promise in January and then refused to work with supervisors or even to signal his intentions with the direction of this secretive budget.

It was an event that was in many ways emblematic of Newsom’s tenure as mayor, which he has always insisted be conducted on his terms, even when those terms contradict provisions of the City Charter, ignore his supposed partners in governance, or infer an almost kingly power that denies the notion of checks and balances on power.

"It’s totally top secret. They’re trying to control the message as much as possible," Sup. John Avalos, chair of the boards’ Budget Committee, told us before the event. "It’s going to be a gubernatorial campaign event, with a carefully crafted message that has more statewide implication than local implications."

Newsom visited the supervisors fewer times than any mayor, a trend with both real and symbolic meaning. Former Mayor Willie Brown was often criticized for heavy-handed tactics, but at least he was engaged with the political process by being willing to take on his political opponents and fight it out in public.

Newsom ended the tradition of delivering the legally required State of the City speech at the board chambers, instead holding it in locations around the city that emphasized something his political advisors found important.

Then last year, he dispensed with the speech entirely and highlighted what a tech-savvy hipster he is by releasing a set of marathon YouTube videos, 7.5 hours in all, and calling it his State of the City speech, a stunt that was universally panned by local journalists, even by normally sycophantic Examiner columnist Ken Garcia.

Newsom’s administration earned repeated condemnations from the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force for withholding public documents and information, from internal e-mail to his daily schedule.

"Withholding information is the name of the game for this administration. It’s how they work," Avalos said.

Newsom had developed such a reputation for political disengagement that voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition I in 2006, calling for the mayor to show up at Board of Supervisors meetings once a month for policy discussions. But Newsom simply refused to go, deriding the idea as "political theater" and announcing that he would instead hold regular forums in the community, which turned out to be highly scripted political events with department heads required to attend.

It wasn’t the last time he would use department heads as campaign props. The next year, in September 2007, Newsom suddenly decided (without seeking any legal advice first) to ask for resignation letters from all department heads and top officials, as well as appointees to city board and commissions.

Although he cast it as a bold, fresh move to shake things up, Newsom didn’t have the authority to do so. Many commission members serve fixed terms to prevent the mayor from exercising just this kind of political pressure on supposedly independent bodies.

Ultimately Newsom accepted only a few of the more than 200 resignations he requested. But the message was clear that Newsom was in charge and that he demanded the personal loyalty of those who serve in city government. Not long after, he summarily fired two popular and effective department heads — Susan Leal at the Public Utilities Commission and Margaret Brodkin at the Department of Children Youth and Families — because they were taking independent steps and not following the mayor’s script.

CHARACTER AND CONNECTIONS

Newsom is campaigning as a man of integrity. "I’m not the kind of person who says one thing in private and does another in public. You will know where I stand," he told the California Democratic Party Convention on April 25.

Yet at the end of January 2007, we got a telling peek at the actual moral fiber of Team Newsom. That was the week a pair of simmering scandals burst into public view, both of which were handled disingenuously by Newsom (see "Newsom’s scandals," 2/7/07).

The first was an incident in which Newsom’s press secretary, Peter Ragone, was caught by the SFist blog using fake names to post comments to that and other blogs attacking Newsom’s critics. When confronted about it by the Guardian and other journalists, he lied and blamed the posts on an imaginary friend, only admitting the truth once he was finally cornered.

But that admission was overshadowed by even bigger news that day, Jan. 31, when the San Francisco Chronicle printed a long-rumored story about Newsom’s affair with his political appointments secretary, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, who was married to Newsom’s reelection campaign manager and close confidante, Alex Tourk.

Newsom held a brief press conference to admit that "everything you’ve heard and read is true and I’m deeply sorry about that" and say he was getting back to business. He took no questions.

The next day he announced he had a drinking problem and was seeking help from the Delancey Street Foundation. Again, he took no questions and offered no answers about how he was casually dealing with that intensive (and politically connected) program (see "Sorta, maybe an alcoholic," 2/28/07).

A month later, controversial press secretary Ragone was moved from the Mayor’s Office to Newsom’s reelection campaign. Today, Ragone is the spokesperson for the gubernatorial campaign.

His replacement, Nate Ballard, has been every bit the scorched earth political operative, using glib put-downs to respond to serious requests for information and offering up belittling one-liners to attack progressive supervisors. Together with political consultant Eric Jaye, the ambitious trio is widely considered to be running the Mayor’s Office.

For years, Team Newsom has been perceived as looking beyond San Francisco and failing to establish any significant political base here.

"He’s not put together any kind of coalition. He is sort of an island," University of San Francisco political science professor Corey Cook told us.

Neither has Newsom been the reliable representative of business interests the downtown power brokers thought they were getting when they dumped money into his 2003 mayoral campaign. Many privately grumble that their desires have taken a back seat to Newsom’s personal ambitions.

But there are several well-documented examples of Newsom flipping his position on an issue after getting a call from a high-profile supporter. The first significant one came in December 2005 when Gap, Inc. founder Don Fisher convened a meeting to demand that Newsom oppose an ordinance limiting the amount of parking that could be built along with housing in the downtown core, progressive legislation championed by Newsom’s planning director Dean Macris.

Fisher and other downtown power brokers were angry with Newsom for being disengaged and letting progressives take control of the city’s agenda. As Guardian reporting later revealed (see "Joining the battle," 2/8/06), Newsom agreed to oppose the legislation and support an alternative written by a group of developer attorneys, which went nowhere. He eventually vetoed the good legislation, demanded some pro-developer loopholes, and signed the weakened legislation.

Another notable corporate-inspired flip-flop came last year when Pacific Gas and Electric Co. urged Newsom to reverse his support for installing two city-owned combustion turbine power plants, which he complied with within two weeks of the May 5 request (see "Ongoing threat," 5/21/08).

Critics contend that PG&E didn’t want any public power projects, and even though Newsom told the Guardian that he supported public power during both of his mayoral election endorsement interviews, he went along with PG&E’s wishes (claiming it was really about fossil fuel generation, not public power).

But within a few months Newsom decided he was actually against public power, using the new stance as his reason for opposing the Clean Energy Act (which would have set high renewable energy standards and created a study asking whether public power was the best way to meet those goals). After PG&E spent more than $10 million, the most ever on a San Francisco campaign, the Clean Energy Act was soundly defeated last November.

Yet confronting Newsom about any of his contradictions, flip-flops, and unsavory actions can get questioners black-balled. KGO-TV reporter Dan Noyes was shut out of the Mayor’s Office after he asked tough questions. And earlier this year, Newsom blocked me on Twitter after I publicly questioned his penchant for the communications medium (and the spelling errors that riddled his tweets).

"He’s notorious for having a thin skin," Ammiano told us, relaying a recent incident in which Newsom called Ammiano early one morning to yell at him after a blog quoted Ammiano for raising concerns that Newsom’s budget cuts are undermining the Healthy San Francisco program.

Peskin used these adjectives to describe Newsom: narcissistic, defensive, insecure, petulant, thin-skinned, and paranoid.

"Like a lot of people who come from privilege, he’s a do-gooder. And that, a lot of times, doesn’t allow him to see the forest for the trees," Ammiano said.

It is that gulf between how Newsom is and how he presents himself that frustrates many San Franciscans.

"If Gavin Newsom were as effective as he’s selling himself as, we certainly wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in," said Debra Walker, a progressive activist, member of the Building Inspection Commission, and candidate to replace Chris Daly on the Board of Supervisors. "The problem is, he’s charming. He does well at power points and engaging the audience. He’s good. But we all know it’s empty. He doesn’t have much to do with government. He’s just not engaged."

Cook told us that Newsom "has not worked closely with the Board of Supervisors." But as he runs for governor, he’s attempting to portray that political isolation as a kind of strength.

"In this economic environment," said Barbara O’Connor, a political communication professor at Sacramento State University, "it’s the only message he has."

DOES IT MATTER?

Whether or not Newsom fits the image of the postpartisan pragmatist he’s running as, most political experts say that’s what Californians — frustrated that the two major parties have essentially fought to a stalemate — are looking for right now.

"The whole postpartisan argument is more or less where voters are here in California," Cook said.

"They want someone who’s going to come in and take charge," O’Connor said. "You want something good at win-win conflict resolution, but not someone who will do anything for votes."

It’s unclear at this point whether Californians will see Newsom as a smarmy politician pandering for votes, or the real deal example of a next-generation political leader.

"There are disconnects and there are hypocrisies, but they’re not going to matter a helluva lot. He’ll get to play this game on his ground," said David Latterman, a San Francisco political consultant who works with moderates like Newsom.

"We forget what the average person out there thinks or cares about," he continued, referring to San Francisco political insiders. "Local city politics bores more people. The stuff he hasn’t done well is stuff nobody cares about."

Latterman says Newsom has an amazing ability to survive his many scandals and shortcomings and remain popular. "The guy is Teflon, he really is. Newsom is a charming guy. In a crowd, people like him."

This isn’t an assessment everyone agrees with. Certainly Newsom can come off as arrogant, a trait displayed during his "it’s coming, whether you like it or not" speech on same-sex marriage that the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign used so effectively against him in television ads.

O’Connor said she recently moderated a panel Newsom was on and wasn’t impressed. "I was amazed at how facile he is. He has a long way to go to being able to connect to the person."

Cook and Latterman say Newsom has presided over a city that has shown real leadership on health care, environmentalism, technological innovation, and other issues Newsom is running on. "Newsom, as the leader of the city, gets credit for that," Latterman said.

That may infuriate San Franciscans who know more about Newsom, but that anger isn’t likely to cause Newsom too many problems on the campaign trail. The stronger he gets hit by San Francisco progressives, the more he can use those attacks to explain why SF wackos are so hard to work with.

"He’s trying to turn all those things into positives, saying that’s why everyone hates him. It’s Arnold 101," Cook said.

Newsom’s playing hard to the youth vote, boasting of how many fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter that he has — but not all his positions are in step with young voters.

Ammiano noted how Newsom opposes his legislation to legalize and tax marijuana, an issue that polls strongly with young people and that could help the state’s fiscal crisis. Ammiano said he asked many of Newsom’s young volunteers at the recent California Democratic Convention (although few were from San Francisco) about the issue, and they were surprised at Newsom’s position. "A lot of the young people who supported him at the Democratic convention did not know he’s not supporting my marijuana bill [Assembly Bill 390]," Ammiano told us.

There’s also the fact that Newsom opposed this moment’s big change candidate, President Barack Obama. Instead, he joined with most political establishment Democratic stalwarts and backing Hillary Clinton in the primaries.

In fact, some of Obama’s California supporters are looking to bring a candidate who shares their values into the race and have formed a group called Change Candidate for California to recruit a gubernatorial candidate.

"We’re not convinced that Mayor Newsom is the best candidate to lead us out of this crisis," said Steve Fowler, one of the group’s founders. "We are inspired by the Obama campaign and we want a leader who can reengage Californians with their state."

O’Connor also thinks there’s a good possibility others will get into the race: "It’s not a good field on either side and you may see some people come in as a result."

Yet for now, Newsom the candidate looks like a strong contender, despite his myriad flaws.

"But the question is, How does that brand govern?" Cook said.

Being the postpartisan maverick may play well at the polls, but Gov. Schwarzenegger is proving that it translates into being unable to govern the state effectively or find common ground between the two polarized parties.

"It’s a good campaign position," Cook said. "But I don’t think this is a viable governing strategy for California."

Is this really our only choice?

June 3, 2009

By Tim Redmond

Now that Antonio Villaraigosa appears not to be running for governor, the most populous state in the nation, the world’s eighth-largest economy, is headed for a very ugly choice. The Democratic Party has exactly two prominent candidates to run California — Jerry Brown, who has become a conservative with his no-new-taxes pledge and his tough-on-crime stuff, and Gavin Newsom, who has been a pretty awful mayor of San Francisco.

Is this the best that the state can do?

It might be — and here’s the problem. In a state this big, with more than 36 million people, a race for governor is all about image. It’s about television ads and media hype — and most people don’t pay attention to the details. Brown is ahead in the polls almost entirely because of name recognition; he’s the attorney general, has been govenor before, his dad was governor, he’s run for president — people have heard of him. Liberal Democrats who are older and remember when he was the dynamic young, progressive leader think back fondly to those days. Democrats who are more moderate look at his hard-ass love-developers-and-cops tenure as mayor of Oakland. Nobody has any idea how he would fix the state’s economy; I don’t think he knows himself.

Newsom is catching up, and will make this a close race, because he’s the new young face — and because he’s got a team of consultants and producers who are experts at creating false images. He’ll run as the “green mayor,” although he’s opposed the most important environmental measures in the city. He’ll run as a sensible leader who balanced a budget with no borrowing or taxes (although he’s doing it by destroying the local safety net). What most voters won’t see is the arrogant, petulant guy who has surrounded himself with fawning accolytes and nasty hit men. They won’t see a person who is way over his head in his current job, and has no business moving on to a much bigger one.

And that’s what we’ve got.

I wasn’t kidding last week when we talked about splitting up the state. It sounds like a radical idea, but think about it: If we were electing a governor of the coastal counties between Sonoma and Los Angeles, Jerry Brown wouldn’t even be a factor — and a lot of smart, experienced progressives would have a shot at the job. We wouldn’t be facing this ugly choice of finding someone either bland or conservative enough to appeal to the Central Valley. The voting population would be much smaller, and thus the vast sums of money that candidates have to raise would be significantly reduced.

We might even get a good governor.

In the meantime, we have to do better than this. Is there nobody else out there, no real change candidate who might actually be able to take on the serious problems facing California?

How to repeal Prop. 8

June 2, 2009

EDITORIAL When the late Sup. Harvey Milk was fighting to defeat the Briggs Initiative, a statewide ballot measure that would have barred gay people from teaching in public schools, he repeatedly made the point that the more Californians met and interacted with openly gay and lesbian people, the less likely the voters would be to sanction discrimination. Mayor Gavin Newsom made the same basic point in his statement following the horrifying Supreme Court decision that legalized discrimination in this state.

"I know many of my fellow Californians may initially agree with this ruling," he said, "but I ask them to reserve final judgment until they have discussed this decision with someone who will be affected by it.

"Please talk to a lesbian or gay family member, neighbor, or coworker and ask them why equality in the eyes of the law is important to every Californian."

That ought to be the theme of the November 2010 ballot measure that seeks to overturn Proposition 8.

It’s going to be a tough, uphill battle — after all, the voters just passed Prop. 8 last fall. But the campaign against it was, almost everyone now agrees, fatally flawed — the TV ads spoke in platitudes, there was almost no use of the words "gay" or "lesbian," and, perhaps most important, no coherent, grassroots effort to convince swing voters by making connections between them and the queer community. And there was far too little outreach to black and Latino voters.

And the tide of national sentiment is turning, far faster than anyone expected. Maine and Iowa recently legalized same-sex marriage. The New York Assembly has passed a marriage equality bill and, if it clears the state Senate, the governor has promised to sign it. By the time the 2010 election rolls around, gay marriage will be sweeping the country, and California will be way behind. And, of course, every year a new group of 18-year-olds gets the right to vote — and that demographic is heavily in favor of marriage equality.

So there’s no question that Prop. 8 can be overturned — and placing the issue on the same ballot as the governor’s race will sharpen the issue, force the candidates to take a stand, and generate additional voter turnout.

This time, though, the campaign has to be much more inclusive. The soft-pedal-homosexuality-and-pretend-queers-don’t-exist approach didn’t work. The write-off-the-black-community-and-religious-voters gambit backfired. Harvey Milk was right: Gay people and their allies need to be everywhere in this next fight, and need to take the message directly to those moderate voters who are going to think differently about someone they have met and talked to than about some image the right-wing nuts have conjured up.

Straight supporters of same-sex marriage need to be deployed properly. Newsom spent much of his time during the No on 8 campaign appearing before adoring crowds in places like the Castro District, which was a waste of time; he needs to be in Walnut Creek. African American ministers like the Rev. Amos Brown ought to be visiting churches in conservative areas and trying to make inroads. Art Torres, the former chair of the state Democratic Party, came out this spring and is popular among Latino voters.

We agree with Newsom. It’s time to start this campaign, now. But this time, let’s get it right. *

Supervisors fail to reject MTA’s “cars first” budget

May 27, 2009

Board President David Chiu and Sup. Sophie Maxwell joined their more conservative colleagues–Sups.Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, Bevan Dufty an Sean Elsbernd–today in voting not to reject the Municipal Transportation Authority’s 2009-10 budget.

As a result, proposed fare increases and service cuts To MUNI will go ahead. And so far there are only verbal promises from MTA executive director Nat Ford that his agency will examine the feasibility of extending parking meter hours in the city’s downtown core, even though the MTA is facing 10 million to $15 million deficit-thanks to the state’s ongoing budget mess and as yet unresolved union negotiations,

Here’s hoping the progressives on the Board find a way to keep it together during the upcoming battle over the Mayor’s budget, which is due next Monday, June 1.

The Golden State’s extreme makeover

May 27, 2009

news@sfbg.com

California’s an amazing place, a state with a history of starting trends that sweep across the nation. It has crowded cities and spectacular wilderness, agriculture and high-tech industries, 840 miles of coast, 163,000 square miles of land and 36 million people.

And it’s proving almost impossible to manage.

The governor and the Legislature can’t solve a catastrophic budget deficit. More than two-thirds of the state’s residents have lost faith in both branches of government. As the political problems get worse and worse, the most influential lawmaking that goes on tends to come from inflexible, often flawed ballot initiatives run and funded by wealthy interests. A May 14, 2009 story in The Economist summed it up with the headline, “California: the ungovernable state.”

The collapse of this year’s budget deal at the ballot on May 19 is just the latest example of the state’s structural failure. And across the spectrum, from the left to the right, from the farmers in the Central Valley to the liberals on the coast, Californians are starting to realize that something major, something dramatic and profound, has to be done.

Over the past few months, a wide range of proposals have cropped up, including a call for a new Constitutional convention and a radical restructuring of the state Legislature. And the prospect of 60 million people eventually living in this dysfunctional political nightmare has led even relatively moderate thinkers to consider the most intriguing, and problematic, option of all: should we break up the state of California?

Same-sex marriage advocates were dragged on an emotional roller-coaster ride in mid-May when a false report surfaced declaring that the Supreme Court had overturned Proposition 8. A flurry of excitement whirled through cyberspace — only to come crashing down when it was revealed to be a gaffe originating with some Twitter user who’d read an out-of-date news report. In fact, on May 26, the Supreme Court upheld Prop. 8.

To many, the tease served as a sour reminder that the ballot measure that struck down same-sex marriage and sent emotional shockwaves throughout the Bay Area, had prevailed in the November 2008 statewide election — despite an overwhelming defeat in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, some 250 miles from the Bay Area, emotions are still running high over the passage of a different ballot measure, which some Central Valley farmers have come to regard as not merely a sore subject but as the last straw. Organizing under the banner Citizens for Saving California Farming Industries, they’ve summed up Proposition 2 — which requires farm animals to be penned in larger spaces — as “allowing the mass numbers of farm-uneducated city dwellers to dictate farm policy.” The group fears that the ramifications will be an out-migration of farmers at a time when agriculture is already facing severe economic woes. Before Prop. 2 becomes effective in 2015, they hope to place a measure on the ballot to cleave California in two — so that, as dairy farmer and Citizens for Saving California Farming Industries board member Paul Olson puts it, “We can do our thing, and you guys can do yours.”

And while the move comes from the conservative side of the state, that’s a sentiment a lot of liberals could live with.

Conservative Central Valley farmers and LGBT communities in San Francisco may as well inhabit different planets, yet they mutually contribute to one another’s frustration with state law. Governing California means acting in the interests of more than 36 million individuals, a population surpassing that of Texas — the nation’s second-largest state — by more than 12 million. By 2050, the state’s population is projected to balloon to 60 million, according to the California Department of Finance.

Disparate viewpoints are just one reason for the wedge perpetually driven into California’s gears. Polarized politics make it exceedingly difficult for the state Legislature to find common ground, resulting in gridlock.

Some of the reasons for that are quirks in the state Constitution and bad political decisions by the Legislature. California is the only state in America that requires a super-majority — two-thirds of both the Assembly and the Senate — both to pass a budget and to raise taxes. And in the past two decades, Democratic leaders in Sacramento have gone out of their way to draw Legislative lines that protect and maximize Democratic representation. That helps the majority party, but it’s had a polarizing impact: the GOP districts tend to be much more conservative, and the lawmakers they send to the state Capitol have, at this point, all signed a pledge never to raise taxes.

“They believe if they compromise with the Democrats, it will be the end of their political careers,” said state Sen. Mark Leno. “And in most cases, they’re probably right.”

But in a larger sense, the problem is inherent in the fractured makeup of this gigantic state. The truth is, Californians no longer share a vision for what the state is and ought to be. The Republicans have become a radical right minority that has the ability to paralyze state government, and the Democrats can’t muster the statewide support to take control.

“The institutions that are premeditated on cooperation fall apart when you don’t have a middle,” noted U.C. Berkeley political scientist Bruce Cain, an expert on California politics. “We’re at a point where people want to change the institutions.”

With California’s financial house torn asunder, 5,000 state-employee job losses in the works, tensions mounting over water shortages, and deep cuts to education and other critical services, it’s no wonder Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger himself recently questioned whether the state is actually governable. In fact, the single point that seems to resonate across California’s entire spectrum is that its government needs a major overhaul.

Historical context puts the current problems in a bit of perspective. As a recent report by the New America Foundation notes, the population of California today is roughly equal to the population of the entire United States at the end of the Civil War. “The Americans of 1870 lived in a nation of 37 states, each with its own independently-elected officials responsible for and accountable to their own geographically distinct political units” the report states. “The Californians of 2008 live in a ‘nation’ without states — a nation comprising more than a half dozen regions, each with its own economy, ecology, and political culture.”

The foundation titled its report “Personalized full representation for California’s regions.” It recommends dividing the state into eight ministates and expanding the Legislature to a 360-seat unicameral body and electing members both directly and through proportional representation based on party.

“This would fundamentally change the formula of politics in California,” said Steve Hill, director of the Political Reform Program for the New America Foundation. It would, for example, encourage regional thinking — there would be a delegation elected from the Bay Area, one from the Central Coast, one from the Gold Country, etc. In effect, California would be treated as what it nearly is — a country — with broad issues addressed by representatives from what amount to states.

It makes a lot of sense. The current governing model was devised for a much smaller, less diverse, and less complicated state. And it worked remarkably well for a fairly long time. The rule that required a two-thirds majority to pass a state budget wasn’t much of a problem before 1978.

“That year was a turning point,” Cain notes. “That was the year the cave men got elected and the antitax people became much more aggressive about using the initiative.” It was, of course, the year that the infamous Proposition 13 forever changed how the state was financed. Prior to Prop. 13, much of what local government did, including education, was funded through property taxes. Once that initiative rolled back property levies and essentially barred any future increases, cities and counties saw their fiscal base begin to collapse. The state — which was flush with cash in the late 1970s — stepped in and agreed to bail out local government and public schools.

That’s one reason the size of the state budget has grown so dramatically in the past 30 years — with local property tax revenue all but frozen, Sacramento has had to take on the burden.

It was also the beginning of a political polarization that has only gotten worse as the needs of poorer and urban Californians have run up against the refusal of conservatives in the Central Valley and far south to even consider new sources of state revenue.

Solutions for resuscitating California’s system are as diverse as the state’s demographics. Ask progressives, and they’ll say the extreme right-wing drags the rest of the state backward and that we have to get rid of the two-thirds majority and elect a Democratic governor. Ask conservatives, and they’ll blame it on liberals ramming their ideals down everyone else’s throat.

Rick Jacobs, founder and chair of the Courage Campaign, an organization that was instrumental in building opposition against Prop. 8, says the two-thirds majority requirement to pass the state budget is a critical problem. “This lunacy of acquiring a two-thirds vote — it truly is lunacy,” Jacobs says. “It is the biggest reason that our state is … headed toward financial ruin. It’s because the far right-wing of the Republican Party holds the budget hostage every chance they get. And it distorts the way the state works and creates the problems we’re seeing.”

But Olson, a dairy farmer from Tulare who’s working alongside Republican former Assembly Member Bill Maze on an effort to “downsize California” by trimming the 13 coastal counties spanning Marin to Los Angeles, stands with Maze in saying that ditching the two-thirds majority rule would worsen California’s predicament. “Any attempts to make it easier to pass the budget, I think, would be devastating,” he says. “This state has a tremendous spending problem.”

And in fact, it’s not going to be easy to repeal the two-thirds majority rule. In 2004, a measure to make that change was walloped, losing by a 2-1 margin. A poll in January showed that 55 percent of the voters would support lowering the threshold for passing a budget — but not for raising taxes. Nobody likes gridlock, but a lot of Californians seem unwilling to trust the Democrats to run things by themselves.

So what if the Central Valley farmers got their way and kicked the coastal areas out of California? The easterners would reside in a state where 31 of 45 counties would be dominated by Republican voters. San Franciscans would reside in a state where 12 out of 13 counties had Democratic majorities. The coastal state would almost certainly have a Democratic governor and an overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature. There would be none of the current budget gridlock. The farmers might be a bit disappointed in their efforts at eliminating agricultural regulation: Prop. 2 would still have won in the inland counties, though by a much smaller margin.

The call to split up California isn’t new. There have been some 200 serious attempts to break apart the massive state. Discontentment in southern California in 1850 gave way to a call to separate from territory to the north. The early 1980s saw a push to cut the state evenly in half. In 1993, Shasta County Assembly Member Stan Statham made a pitch to break the state into three.

Gail Fiorini-Jenner, a Siskiyou County high school teacher and writer who is married to a cattle rancher, has coauthored two books about the State of Jefferson, the subject of a secession movement dating back to 1850. The would-be state encompasses northernmost California counties and southernmost Oregon counties, and the push to break away hit a fever pitch in 1941 when secessionists blocked traffic in Yreka with calls to secede. The onset of World War II put it to rest, according to Fiorini-Jenner, and while new efforts have resurfaced since, she doesn’t believe the rest of California would ever agree to let go of such a resource-rich area. That hasn’t deterred people from posting road signs welcoming motorists to Jefferson, or establishing Jefferson Public Radio. And, like the Central Valley farmers, the sentiment that would-be Jefferson residents are unlike other Californians still prevails.

“We just see ourselves as being different,” Fiorini-Jenner says.

Frank Gruber, a Santa Monica attorney who sits on the board of the California Studies Association, has written on and presented his idea of splitting California into four states. “I don’t have any illusions that it might actually happen,” Gruber laughs.

His four-state solution would consist of a 15-county coastal state spanning Mendocino to Ventura counties; a 35-county inland state spanning from the northern state border to Kern County; a seven-county Southern California state, and the freestanding State of L.A. “On the national level, California is an anemic giant,” Gruber told the U.C. Berkeley Faculty Club during a talk on the subject. “Our two senators represent 37 million people — about the same number as the 44 senators of the 22 smallest states.

“What we need,” Gruber told Berkeley faculty members, “is a no-fault, amicable divorce, because all Californians need state government that is closer to the people, and state government needs constituents who have more similar needs, who have a more common purpose.”

Is it really crazy to say that California isn’t really a state any more, or that most people who live here might actually be happier if they were governed by people who more directly shared their political views?

“I think the temptation to think this way is a result of all the social sorting that’s going on,” Cain noted. Liberals tend to want to live on the coast; conservatives flock to conservative areas.

Imagine, for example, a three-state solution. The northern counties could form their state of Jefferson, where pot would be legal and gun control would be limited. The coastal communities from, say, Sonoma down to Los Angeles would have a state with a rational tax policy, good public schools, healthy social services, same-sex marriage, and liberal social policies. The Central Valley, the Inland Empire, and San Diego could have their GOP heaven of low taxes and limited services — until they saw what it was doing to their lives.

“The danger, of course, is that you’d be creating a Mississippi in the Central Valley,” Cain said.

In addition, Leno added, “There would be a huge influx of people who desperately need services who would leave the valley and head for the coast.”

On the other hand, each of the states would have a healthy economic base (agriculture in the valley, information technology on the coast, and pot in the north). Each would be larger than many current U.S. states.

At the very least, it’s worth talking about.

Another stab at fundamental reform — this one keeping California intact as a state — is beginning to look like it will move forward. It’s fascinating (and a bit scary).

The Bay Area Council, a San Francisco-based group of business CEOs, says it’s working in everyone’s interest by rallying support for a statewide convention that would open up California’s constitution for debate. The council organized a summit this past February to stimulate dialogue around the idea (see “Blaming the System,” 3/4/09). Since then, Schwarzenegger has publicly voiced support for a constitutional convention.

“The state government is no longer our partner in getting anything done,” says BAC spokesperson John Grubb. “It’s such a place where ideas die that it’s created this incredible stasis. Any solution is better than just letting things sit as they are.” Another problem, in Grubb’s view, is extraordinarily low approval ratings — about 14 percent — for the state legislature. “When you get to that point where the leadership has that little trust, does democracy even function? We would argue that, no, it is no longer functioning in our state. So we need a new system.”

It’s not just business doing the talking. Jacobs, the liberal Courage Campaign founder, echoes this idea. “We have to press ‘reset,'<0x2009>” he says. The Courage Campaign is one of many groups partnering with BAC to move forward the effort to hold a California Constitutional Convention.

Of course, opening the Constitution can be a frightening prospect — once you go in that direction, all sorts of special-interest nut cases might try to insert their causes. But everyone involved agrees that social issues (like abortion and civil rights) should stay out of the discussion. The priorities, Jacobs said, should be “No. 1 — the way the government works. No. 2, the initiative process. Three, term limits.” For progressives, he says, the goal will be “engaging the progressive movement that has taken hold in this country so we can have our state back.”

Hill says the New America Foundation’s idea of regional delegations and proportional representation is going to be part of the discussion: “If that’s not on the table,” he said, “then I’m not even interested.”

The Council expects to fork over around $25 million for each of two November 2010 ballot measures that would ask voters two things: whether they should be empowered to call a convention, and if such a convention should be called. There’s also the uphill climb of gathering 1.6 million signatures, an expense that works out to around $2 a pop, Grubb says.

But the council feels it’s worth the investment. “Every day of budget delay costs $40 million,” Grubb points out. “So two days of budget delay pay for what we’re trying to do here. These things are relative.”

Mark Paul, senior scholar and deputy director of the California program at the progressive New America Foundation, voiced support for the idea. “The voter anger and apathy that marked the [May 19] special election are signs of the governing paralysis California has inflicted upon itself through decades of piecemeal, incremental reform,” he said. “The people want government to work but have made normal functioning impossible. Only by rethinking our constitution can California hope to get out of this self-imposed bind.”

Not everyone is thrilled with that concept, though. “I can see a constitutional convention becoming a free-for-all, with every interest group trying to capture the process,” Cain said.

He’s also not so excited about the mandate for major reform. “We get into an economic crisis, and everyone starts to talk about change,” he said. “Then by the time we get around to looking at our serious problems, the economy recovers and we all forget about it.” ———— P>ARE TWO (OR THREE) CALIFORNIAS BETTER THAN ONE?

In the 2008 election, California voters elected President Barack Obama with 61 percent of the vote, leaving McCain in the dust with just 37 percent. They also voted in favor of Proposition 8, banning gay marriage on a vote that was split 52.3 percent to 47.7 percent.

Here’s how it would have played out if California were split into two or three different states. (P.S. — only 59 percent of eligible voters actually voted.)

DOUBLE TROUBLE: DOS CALIFORNIAS

(Based on Proposal by Citizens for Saving California Farming Industries*)

“West California”

(Alameda, Contra Costa, Los Angeles, Marin, Monterey, San Benito, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, San Mateo, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Ventura counties)

Population: about 15.7 million

Democratic-majority counties: 12

Republican-majority counties: 1

Votes for president: Obama 67.9%, McCain 27.5 %

Votes on Prop. 8: no 51.7%, yes 45%

“East California”

(Alpine, Amador, Butte, Calaveras, Colusa, Del Norte, El Dorado, Fresno, Glenn, Humboldt, Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Lake, Lassen, Madera, Mariposa, Mendocino, Merced, Modoc, Mono, Napa, Nevada, Orange, Placer, Plumas, Riverside, Sacramento, San Bernadino, San Diego, San Joaquin, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Solano, Sonoma, Stanislaus, Sutter, Tehama, Trinity, Tulare, Tuolumne, Yolo, Yuba counties)

Population: about 21 million

Democratic-majority counties: 14

Republican-majority counties: 31

Votes for president: Obama 52.4%, McCain 45.4%

Votes on Prop. 8: no 39%, yes 55%.

Does not take into account Proposal to split up two counties.

AND THE DEVIL MAKES THREE (CALIFORNIAS)

“North California”

(Mendocino, Humboldt, Trinity, Del Norte, Siskiyou, Shasta, Lassen, and Modoc counties)

Population: just over 500,000

Republican-majority counties: 6

Democratic-majority counties: 2

Votes for president in 2008: Obama 49.2%, McCain 46.5%

Votes on Prop. 8: yes 53%, no 40%

“West California”

(Alameda, Contra Costa, Los Angeles, Marin, Monterey, San Benito, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, San Mateo, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Sonoma, Ventura counties)

Population: about 16 million

Republican-majority counties: 1

Democratic-majority counties: 13

Votes for president: Obama 68%, McCain 27.4%

Votes on Prop. 8: yes 42.6 %, no 52.2%

“East California”

(Alpine, Amador, Butte, Calaveras, Colusa, El Dorado, Fresno, Glenn, Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Lake, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, Mono, Napa, Nevada, Orange, Placer, Plumas, Riverside, Sacramento, San Bernadino, San Diego, San Joaquin, Sierra, Solano, Stanislaus, Sutter, Tehama, Tulare, Tuolumne, Yolo, Yuba)

Population: about 20 million

Republican-majority counties: 24

Democratic-majority counties: 12

Votes for president: Obama 52.5%, McCain 45.4%

Votes on Prop. 8: no 38.9%, yes 55.7%

Sources: California Secretary of State voting records; U.S. Census Bureau 2008 population data

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