Democrats Archives — Page 24 of 26 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Is Nancy Pelosi up to it? Here are some telling details

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January 2, 2007

By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)

“PELOSI TO BE PUT TO THE TEST,” trumpeted Tuesday’s Chronicle front page lead story.
The Guardian has been down on Pelosi ever since she led the campaign to privatize the Presidio
and then refused to debate the issue at the time or in subsequent campaigns. But
she is now in a key leadership spot, at a critical time in U.S. history with the crises of Iraq and Bush,
and we wish her well. We hope she rises to the occasion and at minimum satisifies her hometown dailynewspaper, if not the Guardian on the other end of town.
But there are many telling details, as I like to call them, that raise some doubts.

First, Maureen Dowd’s lead comment in her Dec. 20th New York Times column.
Dowd wrote, “The only sects that may be more savage than Shiites and Sunnis are the Democratic feminiist lawmakers representing Northern and Southern California.

“After Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman had their final catfight about who would lead the House Intelligence
Committee, aptly enough at the Four Seasons hair salon in Georgetown, the new speaker passed over the knowledgeable and camera-eager Ms. Harman and mystifyingly gave the consequential job to Silvestre Reyes of Texas.” Dowd then polished off Reyes by pointing out that Reyes, when questioned by a reporter for Congresssional Quarterly, didn’t know whether Al Quaeda was Sunni or Shiite (he is “profoundly Shiite,” as Dowd said) and didn’t seem to know who the Hezbollah were. “‘Hezbollah,'” he stammered. “‘Uh, Hezbollah. Why do you ask me these questions at 5 o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish?” He couldn’t answer in either English or Spanish.

Second, Steve Lopez from the Los Angeles Time found a few days later that Pelosi’s office was annoyed when Lopez called her Washington office and asked if Pelosi was going to “correct her blunder and reverse the appointment” of Reyes, as Lopez put it in his Dec. 27th column. He quoted Jennifer Crider, the Pelosi spokeswoman,as asking why Lopez was still interested in the story.

“Well,” Crider wrote, “partly because the committee has the name INTELLIGENCE in it. And partly because I’m still embarrassed as a Californian to have a San Francisco representative pick the one guy fom Texas who seems to know less than Bush. Lopez continued, “Couldn’t Pelosi reconsider, I asked Crider, even if Pelosi and Harman have their political differences?” Crider replied that Reyes “misspoke.” Lopez wrote that, “in the interest of national security and in the Christmas spirit, I’m sending Reyes a book I found at Amazon.com. It’s called ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Middle East conflict.'”

Third, Pelosi and her local and Washington office refuse to respond to the entreaties of the supporters of Josh Wolf, the journalist jailed on orders of the Bush administration for refusing to give up videotapes he took of a demonstration in San Francisco. She and her office refuse to meet with Josh’s mother and supporters and she refuses to respond to questions about the case from the Guardian beyond saying through a spokesperson that she can’t interfere because it is a “legal matter” (which is nonsense, it is a political hit on journalism and San Francisco by the Bush administration). Pelosi does say that she does support a federal shield law for reporters, which is fine as far as it goes but it is not on her first l00 hour agenda or any other visible agenda. Josh, let us emphasize, is a constituent of Pelosi’s, and he is the only journalist in jail in the U.S. for refusing to give up material to the government, and soon will have been in jail longer than any journalist ever’ Question: If Pelosi refuses to even meet with Josh’s mother on such a serious journalistic and public policy issue, how can she be expected to effectively lead the charge against Bush and the war?

Fourth, Pelosi gives every signal, publicly and privately, that she won’t be leading a strong charge against Bush and the war and the sudden surge and acceleration of more troops into Iraq. She has already made it clear she won’t use the only real levers of power the Democrats have (impeachment proceedings and the the power of the budget to defund the war) or even the bully pulpit of her new office. As her constituents in San Francisco and the voters in the last election have made clear, there’s a misbegotten war on and they want it stopped and they don’t want Bush to be following fellow Texan LBJ in Vietnam by sending in more troops, more troops, more troops, to surge and accelerate in Iraq. They want U.S. troops out of this relentless descent into civil war maelstrom.
So: keep the pressure on Pelosi to try to insure she represents the real San Francisco values. That starts with peace and dissent on the war and Bush. B3

Postscript: Meanwhile, the New York Times reports Tuesday in a story headlined, “A Party, with Pelosi Front and Center,” that her party schedule is a splash of “Pelosi-palooza.” Anne E. Kornblut writes that “In a three day stretch of whirlwind events beginning on Wednesday, Mrs. Pelosi will celebrate her heritage (at the Italian Embassy), her faith (in a Roman Catholic Mass), her education (at Trinity College), her childhood (in Baltimore) and her current home (in a tribute by the singer Tony Bennett of ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco fame.'”) Okay, okay, but the tantalizing question remains: Pelosi can throw a party but is she smart enough and tough enough to go up against Bush and the war gang at this critical juncture and represent the real San Francisco values of her constituency? Follow along at the Guardian, at sfbg.com, and on the Bruce blog.
B3

Stop the Iraq escalation

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December 26, 2006

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EDITORIAL The more the evidence shows the war in Iraq is a failure that’s only getting worse, the deeper the denial seems to be at the White House. Earlier this month President George Bush made clear that he wouldn’t follow the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations for a withdrawal deadline. Now he’s going a huge step in the opposite direction: he’s suggesting the United States send as many as 30,000 more troops to Iraq. This is insanity and another good reason why Congress needs to begin hearings on impeachment.

Almost everyone who is paying any attention to the situation thinks more US troops would be at best a waste of a lot of lives and money and at worst a cause of further instability in the region. General John Abizaid, the senior military commander in the Middle East, told the New York Times that bringing more soldiers into Iraq from abroad would only increase tensions. "[Abizaid] argues that foreign troops are a toxin bound to be rejected by Iraqis, and that expanding the number of American troops merely puts off the day when Iraqis are forced to take responsibility for their own security," the Times reported Dec. 19. General George W. Casey Jr., who commands the ground troops in Iraq, agrees with that assessment. According to the Washington Post, the Joint Chiefs of Staff do too — and are arguing against expanding the US force.

The clear majority of military leaders agree that the armed forces are stretched too thin by this war; that units being forced into repeated, longer deployments are coming unglued; and that there simply aren’t enough available troops to meet Bush’s goals. That means existing deployments would drag on even longer, more reservists would be called up, more National Guard units would be sent into a war they were never trained to fight — and it means more and more soldiers will be coming back in body bags.

But Bush (who has argued in the past against "politicizing" military decisions) doesn’t seem to care. He has asked the Pentagon to look at adding between 15,000 and 30,000 more troops to the quagmire and will likely announce in early January that he will escalate the war instead of moving to end it.

Not all the Democrats are standing in his way either: Sylvester Reyes, the new head of the Intelligence Committee, told Newsweek recently, "We’re not going to have stability in Iraq until we eliminate those militias, those private armies. We have to consider the need for additional troops to be in Iraq, to take out the militias and stabilize Iraq…. I would say 20,000 to 30,000 — for the specific purpose of making sure those militias are dismantled, working in concert with the Iraqi military."

That nonsense has to stop. The Democrats control the Senate and House today for exactly one reason: people in this country are sick of the war. If the Democratic Party wants to remain in power for more than two years and have any chance of recapturing the White House, incoming speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid need to immediately make clear that they won’t allow Bush’s plans to go forward.

Fiscal sanity alone makes a compelling argument: Bush’s escalation would bring the total cost of the war in Iraq to $600 billion — more than the United States spent in the entire Vietnam War (even adjusted for inflation).

The quickest way to end this madness is for Congress to cut off funding for any additional troops — and for the leadership to allow articles of impeachment to be introduced, debated, and voted on. *

The bigger picture

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December 22, 2006

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Considering the potential impacts of the First DataBank litigation, which easily reach the billions of dollars, and the evidence that two companies with big footprints in San Francisco (Hearst, which owns the Chronicle, and McKesson, one of the city’s biggest corporations) may have conspired to cheat consumers, this story has gotten very little press coverage.

And the news reports that have run have missed some major points.

The suit, brought by a group of unions scattered over the northeastern United States, charges that McKesson Corp, and First DataBank, a publication owned by Hearst, conspired to artificially and arbitrarily raise prescription drug prices costing health plans (such as the ones maintained by the plaintiffs’ unions), private insurers and state Medicaid offices approximately $7 billion between 2001 and 2005.

Pharmaceutical industry publications have covered the news, but otherwise, it has been relegated to the business press (the Hearst-owned Chronicle caught up to the story weeks after the plaintiffs proposed a settlement deal with First DataBank and dumped it in the business section).

When such stories are assigned to a business reporter, they can take a different dimension. The business press has a tendency to focus on how this type of litigation might negatively impact Wall Street — rather than emphasizing how class-action suits are a tool for consumers to pursue relief when they believe Big Pharma (or any major corporation for that matter) has broken the law.

Some flaws in the coverage and facts that the press hasn’t played up are listed below:

* A McKesson spokesperson told the Chronicle that the company “would certainly support a move away from [average wholesale price] that created a more logical and stable reimbursement structure for all parties in the health-care system.” But the plaintiffs contend, relying on an untold number of internal e-mails and memos obtained by their attorneys, that McKesson and First DataBank both knew exactly what was going on and actively worked to keep it a secret. McKesson flat-out denies it knew anything about what was happening to First DataBank’s published average wholesale price. But according to one e-mail cited in legal papers, the alleged scheme was so controversial that the two companies scorned drug producers who smelled legal trouble after becoming aware of it and attempted to back away.

* McKesson today is still working to recover from a $9 billion accounting scandal that in 1999 led four executives from a subsidiary to plead guilty to conspiracy and securities fraud and nearly landed two more behind bars before a federal jury deadlocked on three charges with a single holdout vote. U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan has not yet announced whether his office will attempt to retry the two men.

* In 1998, the Federal Trade Commission blocked attempted mergers by the nation’s four largest drug wholesalers, which would have reduced the number to two. McKesson wanted to acquire the company AmeriSource Health Corp., and a company called Cardinal Health attempted to acquire Bergen Brunswig Corp. AmeriSource and Bergen did, however, ultimately merge with one another bringing the number of major wholesalers to just three. Even though the original deal was stopped, McKesson quietly revealed in 2005 through a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the FTC had requested documents from the company and was investigating whether it had engaged in anticompetitive practices with other major wholesalers in order to limit competition. At the time that McKesson and Amerisource’s proposed merger was halted in 1998, then FTC-director William Baer expressed serious concerns about two corporations dominating a substantial portion of the drug wholesale market. “If allowed to merge into two firms, the two surviving companies would control over 80 percent of the prescription drugs sold through wholesalers in the country,” he said at the time. “That means higher prices for prescription drugs and a reduction in the timely delivery of these drugs to hospitals, nursing homes and drugstores, which could affect patient care.”

* First DataBank has had its own problems with the FTC. The company was founded in 1977, and Hearst purchased it in 1980. Federal records show that in 1998, Hearst bought another $38 million company that owned one of First DataBank’s only real competitors, Medi-Span. A later investigation by the FTC revealed that Hearst had failed to turn over key documents to the Justice Department’s antitrust division during the sale. As a result, the feds slapped Hearst with a $4 million fine in 2001, at that time the largest pre-merger antitrust penalty in U.S. history. The FTC also belatedly concluded that Hearst’s ownership of Medi-Span gave it a monopoly over the drug database market and not only required that Hearst give up Medi-Span but forced the company to disgorge $19 million in profits generated from the acquisition.

* Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, a health-care reform non-profit based in Oakland, told us that in past years, the state legislature has been more likely to cut the Medi-Cal budget than to look seriously at how the pharmaceutical industry might be manipuutf8g drug prices. He said only after a tough battle in Sacramento this year were Medi-Cal cuts originally supported by both Democrats and Republicans stopped. “From a state perspective, when faced with a budget shortfall, it is easier to look first at simply providing less services than the politically and operationally tougher job of trying to find savings from drug companies or others,” he said. In recent years at least, several state attorneys general, including California’s Bill Lockyer, began probing evidence that the average wholesale price was not only known to be an inaccurate benchmark by industry insiders for drug reimbursements, but that manufacturers, too, had participated in infutf8g those prices in a method similar to what McKesson is alleged to have done. Health-care policy wonks say the average wholesale price has been a problem for decades.

Schemes such as the one alleged in the First DataBank litigation are highly complex, making it difficult for laypersons to identify them. Unfortunately reporters and editors have also been known to avoid such stories like the plague, because they’re seemingly too difficult to summarize and not as sexy as local crime and celebrity gossip — even though billions of dollars could be at stake.

Gavin Newsom’s datebook

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December 20, 2006

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EDITORIAL Kirsten Gillibrand, a newly elected member of Congress from Hudson, NY, has made a simple promise that could have dramatic impacts — and that should serve as a model for public officials like Mayor Gavin Newsom. Gillibrand, according to the New York Times, has promised to post her work calendar — all of it, including the names of lobbyists she’s met with — on the Web at the end of every day. It’s hardly an onerous task — any competent staffer can do the work in a matter of minutes. And it will, she says, give her constituents a clear idea of what she’s doing to earn her public salary.
There’s a broader benefit, of course: by releasing a full account of how she spends her time, Gillibrand will go a long ways toward eliminating what the Times calls “the secrecy that cloaks the dealings of lawmakers and deep-pocket special interests.” A broad-based move like this will help restore voters’ faith in government — a huge deal for the Democratic Party and for the future of American politics. Incoming House speaker Nancy Pelosi ought to join Gillibrand and direct the rest of the House Democrats to do the same.
And we hope Mayor Newsom is paying attention.
Newsom is not a terribly accessible mayor. His public appearances are typically crafted to give him the spotlight without any potential for embarrassment. He’s refusing to comply with the will of the voters and appear before the Board of Supervisors to answer questions. And despite the provisions of the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance, he continues to resist publicizing his full schedule.
Wayne Lanier, a retired scientist who lives in the Haight Asbury, has been trying for some time to get the mayor’s calendar and on Dec. 11 filed a complaint with the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. What Lanier wants ought to be pretty straightforward information: there’s no reason the mayor can’t provide a list of whom he met with last week and whom he’s scheduled to meet with next week. But even when the mayor has provided that sort of information in the past, it’s been limited and spotty: all kinds of supposedly private meetings don’t make the list. It’s a good bet he’s involved in all manner of talks with lobbyists and deep-pocket interests who are never publicly identified.
Newsom is up for reelection next year and so far has no visible challengers. So it’s even more important that he not duck public requests for information. He should do exactly what Gillibrand promises to do: tell the public, promptly and without undue redaction, just how he’s spending his time.SFBG

A memo to constituents of Rep. Nancy Pelosi

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December 15, 2006

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

To fellow San Franciscans:

Now that even the San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst has declared in a lead front page story that Pelosi will legislate
“from the middle,” the Guardian recommends at minimum three specific proposals for her constituents to push theincoming speaker of the house to do to seriously represent San Francisco values.

l. Pelosi needs to allow Congress to start impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. Bush has rejected the modest recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and Friday’s New York Times reported in one story that Sen. John McCain as saying in Baghdad that the “military considers sending as many as 35,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq” and another story that “Top commanders appear set to urge larger U.S. military.” Only impeachment proceedings will provide the leverage to halt the terrible losses of blood and treasure. See current Guardian editorial link above “Impeachment is now the only option.”

2. Pelosi needs to use the power of her new office to help pass a federal shield law that would uphold the rights of journalists and news outlets to protect the identity of their sources and to keep possession of their unpublished/unaired material. In the meantime, she needs to help push the Bush administration to stop wrongfully persecuting Joshua Wolfe, a 24-year-old freelance videophotograher now in federal prison in Dublin for refusing to give up his unedited tapes of a 2005 demonstration in San Francisco. He is the only journalist in jail in the U.S., has been in jail longer than any U.S. journalist ever and may stay in jail until the new federal grand jury is impaneled next July. She ought to also help push the Bush administration to hold its fire against two reporters from the Chronicle who face l8 months in jail for refusing to reveal the sources of a grand jury investigation in the Balco scandal. My feeling is that these abusive actions against the press in San Francisco by the Bush adminstration have targeted our city because of its San Francisco values, in this case its tradition of dissent and anti-war activity. Pelosi could start on this issue and promote lots of good will by meeting with the mother and supporters of Wolf. (See link below.)

3. Pelosi needs to introduce and push a a bill to eliminate the Presidio Trust, return the land to the National Park Service where it belongs, and overturn the precedent that is leading to a conservative movement to privatize the National Park system. She made the original mistake of leading the move to privatize the Presidio, on the phony argument of saving it from the Republicans, but now her Democrats are in power and it is time for her to right the wrong. Otherwise, the private Presidio Trust will keep asking for and getting tens of millions of federal money to subsidize a private, commercially driven, ruinous park operation, without sunshine and accountability, without any city zoning control, in growing opposition to neighborhors. Most important, the Pelosi park principle will further fuel the move to privatize the national park system. In effect, Pelosi created the model for the theft of one of our greatest resources, the national park system. (See Guardian editorial link, “A key test for Pelosi.”)

These are some real San Francisco values for Pelsoi to support. If she doesn’t, she risks leaving a legacy for failing to stop the Iraq War and selling off the Presidio and establishing the precedent for selling of our national parks. B3, celebrating San Francisco values since l966

PS: How to help Josh after the jump

A key test for Pelosi

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December 12, 2006

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EDITORIAL Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s signature legislation came out of a Republican Congress. It was shortly after Newt Gingrich and his gang took control of the House that Pelosi began moving to privatize the Presidio; she argued that the GOP majority would never fund a real national park in San Francisco and the only way to prevent Congress from trying to sell off the land the military no longer wanted was to find a mechanism that wouldn’t cost any money and would be palatable to the archconservatives who were calling the shots.
When she’s criticized for the bill — and that’s been happening a lot lately — she replies, in effect: we had no choice. If we wanted to save this remarkable 1,400-acre parcel of land, we had to play the Republicans’ game. And indeed, her approach was everything that the Gingriches of the world liked: instead of using tax dollars to fund a national park (something that had been done since the birth of the National Park System), she created the semiprivate Presidio Trust, which was charged with raising enough cash through development and rents to pay the park’s own way by 2013.
Now we have George Lucas operating a commercial office building in the middle of the park and housing renting out at top market rates to wealthy tenants and a plan to turn a former hospital near Lake Street into a dense luxury condo complex — and, in general, the future of the park being driven by commercial interests.
But things are different now: Pelosi, not Gingrich, is calling the shots. The Democrats control both houses of Congress, the president is a lame duck bogged down in a war that is making him more unpopular by the day — and for the first time since the Sixth Army moved out and the privatizers moved in, there is no political reason why Pelosi can’t amend her bill and change the way the Presidio is run.
It’s clear that the current system isn’t working. The federal government keeps pouring big money into subsidizing the private ventures in the park. The Sierra Club, which initially supported Pelosi’s bill, is now demanding reform.
This is a test of how Pelosi will use her new power — and whether she was telling the truth when she blamed the privatization of the park on Republicans. She needs to introduce and push a bill to eliminate the Presidio Trust, turn the land over to the National Park Service, and manage it in the interest of the public, not private profit. SFBG

Impeachment is now the only option

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December 12, 2006

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EDITORIAL We can all stop hoping and pretending now: the facts are in. No matter what anyone right, left, or center says, no matter what the truth is on the ground, no matter how clear and powerful public opinion has become, President George W. Bush isn’t going to change anything about the war in Iraq.
That’s what we saw from the president’s press conference with British prime minister Tony Blair on Dec. 7 and from his statements since. He’s not going to start withdrawing troops, and he’s not going to negotiate with other regional powers.
The Iraq Study Group report has its flaws. It talks about diplomatic discussions with Iran and Syria, but it stops short of describing the real reason the United States is bogged down in the Middle East (the lack of a coherent energy policy that doesn’t rely on foreign oil). It suggests that the United States should leave the job of rebuilding Iraq to Iraqis but fails to state that the country responsible for all the problems should play a role in paying for its solutions. And it would leave thousands of US soldiers in Iraq as advisers for the long term, putting them in serious jeopardy.
Still, it’s at least a dose of badly needed reality. The report acknowledges that the Bush administration’s current policies have made an awful mess of Iraq, that the situation is deteriorating, and that continuing the current path isn’t an acceptable option. And it recommends that all combat forces leave Iraq by 2008.
That such a broad-based, bipartisan panel would reach that conclusion unanimously isn’t really that much of a surprise. Everyone with any sense in Washington and around the world these days agrees that the United States needs to set a timetable for withdrawal. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who initially supported the war and has long argued that some good could still come out of it, wrote Dec. 8 that the group’s recommendations “will only have a chance of being effective if we go one notch further and set a fixed date — now — for Americans to leave Iraq.” Even conservative syndicated columnist George Will noted the same day that “the deterioration is beyond much remediation.”
As long as the United States retains combat troops in Iraq, they will be the target of sectarian violence and the focus of that war. When they leave, the Iraqis will have no obvious villain, and there might be an actual hope for a long-term resolution.
The notion of an all-out Kurd versus Shiite versus Sunni civil war isn’t going to make anyone in Damascus or Tehran happy, since those two governments will be caught in the middle. And a clear statement from the United States that American troops will be leaving on a specific date not too far in the future is, the majority of experts agree, the only way to bring all the parties to the table for a serious and meaningful discussion.
And yet Bush and Dick Cheney remain alone, aloof, refusing to acknowledge that military victory in Iraq is utterly impossible and that the old mission of establishing a US client state in the Middle East will never be accomplished.
The death toll for US troops is approaching 3,000. The cost is running at $250 million a day. This simply can’t be allowed to continue. If Bush and Cheney refuse to begin a withdrawal program, then Congress needs to act decisively on two fronts.
The first is to inform the president that under the Constitution, Congress has the sole power to declare war and this Congress will no longer pay for Bush’s military adventure in Iraq.
But there’s a larger problem here. Bush and Cheney have lied to the American people, taken us into war on the basis of fraudulent information, and violated their oaths of office. Back in January we called on Congress to begin debating articles of impeachment; the GOP-controlled House wasn’t about to do that. But things are different now. The voters have made it very clear that they don’t like the president’s war, and the Democrats have a clear mandate for change.
Impeachment is serious business, but Bush has left us no alternative. We can’t simply allow the war to continue as it has been, year after bloody year, until Bush’s term expires.
The only thing holding up impeachment hearings is the word of the incoming speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who said during the campaign that option was “not on the table.” Well, it ought to be on the table now. Pelosi should publicly inform Democratic leaders in the House who support impeachment that she won’t block an impeachment effort. And her constituents in San Francisco need to keep the pressure on her to allow Congress to move forward on its most important responsibility in decades.
This isn’t going to be easy. Even the San Francisco Chronicle now acknowledges that Pelosi is governing like a moderate. It will take a reenergized peace movement and a huge new national mobilization to put pressure on her and every member of Congress. But the stakes are too high to wait. It’s time to start, today. SFBG

{Empty title}

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December 8, 2006

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We can all stop hoping and pretending now: The facts are in. No matter what anyone, right, left or center says, no matter what the truth is on the ground, no matter how clear and powerful public opinion has become, President Bush isn’t going to change anything about the war in Iraq.
That’s what we saw from the president’s press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair Dec. 7th, and from his statements since. He’s not going to start withdrawing troops, and he’s not going to negotiate with other regional powers.
The Iraq Study Group report has its flaws. It talks about diplomatic discussions with Iran and Syria, but it stops short of describing the real reason the U.S. is bogged down in the Middle East (the lack of a coherent energy policy that doesn’t rely on foreign oil). It suggests that the U.S. should leave the job of rebuilding Iraq to Iraqis, but fails to state that the country that created all the problems should play a role in paying for their solutions. And it would leave thousands of U.S. soldiers in Iraq as advisors for the long term, putting them in serious jeopardy.
Still, it’s at least a dose of badly needed reality here. The report acknowledges that the Bush Administration’s current policies have made an awful mess of Iraq, that the situation is deteriorating, and that continuing the current path isn’t an acceptable option. And it recommends that all combat forces leave Iraq by 2008.
That such a broad-based, bipartisan panel, which includes hard-core conservatives like Edwin Meese III and Alan Simpson, would reach that conclusion unanimously isn’t really that much of a surprise. Everyone with any sense in Washington and around the world these days agrees that the U.S. needs to set a timetable for withdrawal. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who initially supported the war and who has long argued that some good could still come out of it, wrote Dec. 8 that the group’s recommendations “will only have a chance of being effective if we go one notch further and set a fixed date – now – for Americans to leave Iraq.” Even George Will noted the same day that “the deterioration is beyond much remediation.”
Let’s face it: Iraq as a modern nation is entirely an artificial construct, lashed together by the British out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. There are bitter, ancient divisions between religious, ethnic and tribal groups, and it’s no surprise that once the dictatorial central government of Saddam Hussein was overthrown, the factions would have trouble working together. Now, through U.S. bungling, they are engaged in what can only be called a civil war.
As long as the United States retains combat troops in Iraq, they will be the target of sectarian violence and will be the focus of that war. When they leave, the Iraqis will have no obvious villain, and there might be an actual hope for a long-term resolution.
The notion of an all-out Kurd vs. Shiite vs. Sunni civil war isn’t going to make anyone in Damascus or Tehran happy, since those two countries will be caught in the middle. And a clear statement from the U.S. that American troops will be leaving on a specific date, not too far in the future, is, the majority of experts agree, the only way to bring all the parties to the table for a serious and meaningful discussion. That could lead to a United Nations conference, among all the regional powers; the final outcome might be a division of Iraq into several states, as Senator Joe Biden and others have suggested.
And yet, Bush and Cheney remain alone, aloof, refusing to acknowledge that military “victory” in Iraq is utterly impossible and that the old mission of establishing a U.S. client state in the middle east will never be accomplished.
The death toll for U.S. troops is approaching 3,000. The cost is running at $250 million a day. This simply can’t be allowed to continue. If Bush and Cheney refuse to begin a withdrawal program, then Congress needs to act, decisively, on two fronts.
The first is to inform the president that under the Constitution, Congress has the sole power to declare war, and this Congress will no longer pay for Bush’s military adventure in Iraq. Congress should set a deadline for troop withdrawal and announce that funds for the war will be cut off on that date.
But there’s a larger problem here. Bush and Cheney have lied to the American people, taken us into war on the basis of fraudulent information, perpetrated an unjust and unjustifiable war and violated their oaths of office. Back in January, we called on Congress to begin debating articles of impeachment; the GOP-controlled House wasn’t about to do that. But things are different now. The voters have made it very clear that they don’t like the president’s war, and the Democrats have a clear mandate for change.
Impeachment is serious business, but Bush has left us no alternative. We can’t simply allow the war to continue as it has been, year after bloody year, until Bush’s term expires.
The only thing holding up impeachment hearings is the word of the incoming speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who said during the campaign that that option was “not on the table.” Well, it ought to be on the table now. Pelosi should publicly inform Democratic leaders in the House who support impeachment know that she won’t block an impeachment effort. And her constituents in San Francisco need to keep the pressure on her to allow Congress to move forward on its most important responsibility in decades.
This isn’t going to be easy. It will take a re-energized peace movement and a huge new national mobilization. But the stakes are too high to wait. It’s time to start, today.

Pelosi’s solid start

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December 4, 2006

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By Steven T. Jones
Now, the Guardian hasn’t always seen eye-to-eye with our congressional rep, incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. In fact, it’s fair to say the relationship has been downright chilly as she’s made compromises to attain her leadership post and we’ve wanted someone to take stronger stands against the unchecked rise of Bush-brand imperialism, corporatism, and theocracy.
But I’m happy to see her take a strong stand against letting the hawkish Jane Harman take over the House Intelligence Committee, making the solid choice of Rep. Silvestrie Reyes instead. And I’ve recently been convinced by Assemblyman Mark Leno that even her apparent gaffe of unsuccessfully backing John Murtha for the number two slot wasn’t the disastrous error in judgment that the mainstream media made it out to be.
Instead, Leno argues that it was a shrewd move that sent a strong message to her troops: if you support me, as Murtha has done on the war and other key issues, then I’ll support you (even in uphill fight where the media is waiting to mock me). Even if there’s only some truth to that view, it at least neutralizes the incident and offers some hope that the Democrats might to up to the challenges they face.
The next big test will be whether she allows John Conyers and other strong Bush critics to push for the release of records related to the Iraq War, which could turn up some truly damning data that would then test Pelosi’s pledge not to pursue impeachment. There’s still lots to do and pitfalls at every turn, but for now, I’m willing to hold my fire and offer my support. Go Nancy!

The new Iraq-war media offensive

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November 16, 2006

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The American media establishment has launched a major offensive against the option of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

In the latest media assault, right-wing outfits like Fox News and The Wall Street Journal editorial page are secondary. The heaviest firepower is now coming from the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA — the front page of The New York Times.

The present situation is grimly instructive for anyone who might wonder how the Vietnam War could continue for years while opinion polls showed that most Americans were against it. Now, in the wake of midterm elections widely seen as a rebuke to the Iraq war, powerful media institutions are feverishly spinning against a pullout of U.S. troops.

Under the headline “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say,” the Nov. 15 front page of the Times prominently featured a “Military Analysis” by Michael Gordon. The piece reported that — while some congressional Democrats are saying withdrawal of U.S. troops “should begin within four to six months” — “this argument is being challenged by a number of military officers, experts and former generals, including some who have been among the most vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies.”

Reporter Gordon appeared hours later on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show, fully morphing into an unabashed pundit as he declared that withdrawal is “simply not realistic.” Sounding much like a Pentagon spokesman, Gordon went on to state in no uncertain terms that he opposes a pullout.

If a New York Times military-affairs reporter went on television to advocate for withdrawal of U.S. troops as unequivocally as Gordon advocated against any such withdrawal during his Nov. 15 appearance on
CNN, he or she would be quickly reprimanded — and probably would be taken off the beat — by the Times hierarchy. But the paper’s news department eagerly fosters reporting that internalizes and promotes the basic worldviews of the country’s national security state.

That’s how and why the Times front page was so hospitable to the work of Judith Miller during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. That’s how and why the Times is now so hospitable to the work of Michael Gordon.

At this point, categories like “vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies” are virtually meaningless. The bulk of the media’s favorite “vehement critics” are opposed to reduction of U.S. involvement in the Iraq carnage, and some of them are now openly urging an increase in U.S. troop levels for the occupation.

These days, media coverage of U.S. policy in Iraq often seems to be little more than a remake of how mainstream news outlets portrayed Washington’s options during the war in Vietnam. Routine deference to inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom has turned many prominent journalists into co-producers of a “Groundhog Day” sequel that insists the U.S. war effort must go on.

During the years since the fall of Saddam, countless news stories and commentaries have compared the ongoing disaster in Iraq to the
Vietnam War. But those comparisons have rarely illuminated the most troubling parallels between the U.S. media coverage of both wars.

Whether in 1968 or 2006, most of the Washington press corps has been at pains to portray withdrawal of U.S. troops as impractical and unrealistic.

Contrary to myths about media coverage of the Vietnam War, the
American press lagged way behind grassroots antiwar sentiment in seriously contemputf8g a U.S. pullout from Vietnam. The lag time amounted to several years — and meant the additional deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and perhaps 1 million more Vietnamese people.

A survey by the Boston Globe, conducted in February 1968, found that out of 39 major daily newspapers in the United States, not one had editorialized for withdrawing American troops from Vietnam. Today — despite the antiwar tilt of national opinion polls and the recent election — advocacy of a U.S. pullout from Iraq seems almost as scarce among modern-day media elites.

The standard media evasions amount to kicking the bloody can down the road. Careful statements about benchmarks and getting tough with the Baghdad government (as with the Saigon government) are markers for a national media discourse that dodges instead of enlivens debate.

Many journalists are retreading the notion that the pullout option is not a real option at all. And the Democrats who’ll soon be running
Congress, we’re told, wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — dare to go that far if they know what’s good for them.

Implicit in such media coverage is the idea that the real legitimacy for U.S. war policymaking rests with the president, not the Congress. When I ponder that assumption, I think about 42-year-old footage of the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

The show’s host on that 1964 telecast was the widely esteemed
journalist Peter Lisagor, who told his guest: “Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole
responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy.”

“Couldn’t be more wrong,” Sen. Wayne Morse broke in with his sandpapery voice. “You couldn’t make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States. That’s nonsense.”

Lisagor was almost taunting as he asked, “To whom does it belong then, Senator?”

Morse did not miss a beat. “It belongs to the American people,” he shot back — and “I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy.”

The journalist persisted: “You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.”

Morse’s response was indignant: “Why do you say that? … I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you’ll give them. And my charge against my government is, we’re not giving the American people the facts.”

Morse, the senior senator from Oregon, was passionate about the U.S. Constitution as well as international law. And, while rejecting the widely held notion that foreign policy belongs to the president, he spoke in unflinching terms about the Vietnam War. At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Feb. 27, 1968, Morse said that he did not “intend to put the blood of this war on my hands.”

And, prophetically, Morse added: “We’re going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world.
It’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don’t like to face up to it.”

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Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is out in paperback. For information, go to:www.warmadeeasy.com

Money has stopped talking

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November 15, 2006

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by Amanda Witherell

Here’s another, less lauded “San Francisco value.” Page A18 of the November 14 New York Times (sorry, folks…they don’t seem to have it online…) had a tally of the most expensive House races in millions spent. It shows that those who spent the most, lost the most. Just like here in San Francisco!

Republicans outspent Democrats in nearly all the seats the chart lists, and the races they won, they only spent marginally more than their foes. The only Dems to beat them in dollars were Maria Cantwell over Mike McGavick, Bill Nelson over Katherine Harris, and Hillary Clinton over John Spencer (We know where that money’s really going…)

The races where spending was relatively equal, for the most part, Republicans edged Democrats — and yet that party is still opposed to reasonable campaign finance reforms. Maybe they like spending money. I’ve never run for office…maybe it’s like a really posh shopping spree.

EDITOR’S NOTES

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November 14, 2006

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
I started getting all the usual calls last week, from all of the usual national media outlets, with all the usual questions that a local political reporter gets when a local politician makes good. “Who is Nancy Pelosi, really? What do her constituents think of her? Is she going to bring Burning Man and gay marriage to Washington?”
My answer to everyone, from the liberals to the conservatives, was exactly the same:
Relax. There’s nothing to get excited about. Pelosi is by no means a San Francisco liberal. She’s a Washington insider, a born and bred politician who cares more about power and money than she does about any particular ideology.
I’m glad the Democrats are in charge, and Pelosi deserves tremendous credit for making that happen. But she’s not about to push any kind of ambitious left-wing political or cultural agenda.
Just look at her record. Pelosi was weak on the war and late in opposing it. She was the author of the bill that gave that well-known pauper George Lucas the lucrative contract to build a commercial office building in a national park. She worked with Republicans such as Don Fisher of the Gap on the Presidio privatization and set a precedent for the National Park System that the most rabid antigovernment conservatives can love.
Just this week Bloomberg News reported that Pelosi is working with Silicon Valley venture capital firms to weaken the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley law, which mandates strict accounting procedures for publicly held corporations.
And just a couple of weeks before the election, she told 60 Minutes that same-sex marriage is “not an issue that we’re fighting about here.”
I think it’s pretty safe to say she’s never been to Burning Man.
Pelosi, who is backing antiwar but also anti-abortion Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha for majority leader, has an agenda for her first 100 hours. It’s nice moderate stuff — raising the minimum wage (to all of $7.25 an hour), lowering interest on student loans (but not replacing loans with grants), and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower-priced drugs (but not making Medicare a national health insurance program for every American). Tactically, it’s brilliant: there won’t be a lot of national opposition, and Bush will look like a heel if he vetoes the bills.
In fact, as a political strategist and tactician, Pelosi has proven brilliant. She’s whipped together a dysfunctional party and led the most important electoral change to this country in more than a decade.
Along the way, though, she’s pretty much stopped representing San Francisco. On issue after issue, her constituents are way to the left of her. This fall she didn’t even bother to show up in the district (except to extract money for Democratic congressional campaigns around the country). She spent election night in Washington.
There are a lot of people who think that’s fine. Now that she’s speaker, she’ll be able to do a lot for this city, particularly when it comes to bringing in federal money. I appreciate the fact that her work on the national level, which often involved running away from San Francisco, will allow more-progressive Democrats like Los Angeles’s Maxine Waters to chair powerful committees that can go after White House cronyism and corruption.
But if the right-wing talk show hosts are worried about San Francisco liberals like me, they can take it easy: Nancy Pelosi is not one of us. SFBG

Turning point

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November 14, 2006

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› news@sfbg.com
It’s amazing what the New York Times can find newsworthy. On a night when progressives in San Francisco racked up an impressive list of victories — and the popular mayor, often described as a rising star in state and national politics, got absolutely walloped — the nation’s newspaper of record led an online report on city politics with this gem: “A bike-riding member of the Board of Supervisors apparently won re-election while his wife was reported to have screamed an epithet at opponents.”
The Times story, by Jesse McKinley, called it “just another night in San Francisco’s iconoclastic politics,” meaning, apparently, that only in this city would a politician ride a bicycle and only here would a politician’s wife use foul language in public.
Please.
For the record: Sarah Low Daly — who watched her husband, Chris, get pummeled mercilessly for weeks by brutal attack ads paid for by, among others, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association — did dismiss “those motherfuckers” with a colorful epithet that no less than the vice president has used on the floor of Congress but that can’t ever appear in the New York Times.
But allow us a little context here.
Daly’s wife had every right to celebrate on election night — and every right to slam the forces that were so unwilling to accept a living wage for local workers, sick pay for employees, requirements that developers pay for affordable housing, and the rest of Supervisor Daly’s progressive agenda, which had made him the subject of a Karl Rove–style smear campaign.
And the Times (as well as the embittered blogger at the San Francisco Sentinel who leveled personal insults at the supervisor’s wife) utterly missed the point of what went on in San Francisco last week.
This was a watershed in city politics, an election that may turn out to have been every bit as important as the 2000 ballot that broke the back of the Brown-Burton machine. It was evidence that district elections work, that downtown money doesn’t always hold the day — and that Mayor Gavin Newsom made a very bad political mistake by aligning himself with some of the most intolerant, unpleasant, and ineffective forces in local politics.
NEWSOM THE LOSER
We ran into Newsom’s press secretary, Peter Ragone, the day after the election and asked him the obvious question: “Not a very good night for the mayor, huh?”
It was a hard point to argue: Newsom put immense political capital into two key races and was embarrassed in both of them. He worked hard for Rob Black, the downtown candidate trying to oust Daly in District 6, showing up at Black’s rallies, walking the streets with him, talking about the importance of the race, and helping him raise funds. His handpicked contender in District 4 was Doug Chan, a former police commissioner. Black lost by 10 percentage points; Chan finished fourth.
And a long string of progressive ballot measures that the mayor had opposed was approved by sizable margins.
Ragone began to spin and dissemble like crazy. “We endorsed [Black and Chan] but didn’t put a lot into it,” he said despite the fact that Newsom spent the last two weekends campaigning for his two favorites.
“The real key for us was Hydra Mendoza, who won [a seat on the school board],” Ragone said.
Yes, Mendoza, who works as the mayor’s education adviser, was elected — but she already had a strong base of support as a former leader of Parents for Public Schools and might very well have won without the mayor’s help.
Besides, if Newsom saw her as a top priority, why did she finish second in a race for three positions, behind Green Party candidate Jane Kim? And how significant will it be to have Mendoza on a school board that now has a solid progressive majority, one she’s not a part of?
Ragone shrugged again, sticking to his line.
But the Mayor’s Office can’t spin away the fact that, as pollster David Binder put it at a postelection event, “I don’t think Newsom had a very good night.”
“It showed that we had a progressive turnout and this is a progressive town,” Binder said.
Boris Delepine, a campaign veteran and Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s board aide, went even further: “This election ranks up there with the 2000 supervisorial races as far as I’m concerned.”
In other words, progressives battled the downtown interests and won.
The most exciting race was in District 6, where Daly’s expected reelection was thrown into doubt a few weeks ago by some polls and the onslaught of downtown attacks on Daly (which Binder jokingly referred to as “a deforestation project” for all of the negative mailers).
The problem was that most of the material just attempted to savage Daly without really making the case for why Black would be better. That appears to have backfired.
In fact, the assault served to galvanize Daly supporters, who stepped up a vigorous campaign in the final push. “It was very efficient and very effective,” Binder said.
Or as Daly put it to his supporters on election night, “We were under attack…. San Francisco values were under attack, and you responded like nothing before. Five hundred volunteers were in the streets today to say this district is not for sale.”
The message from the Tenderloin, inner Mission, and South of Market was resoundingly clear: with district elections downtown can’t simply buy a seat on the board anymore. Money is powerful — but an organized grassroots campaign can still prevail.
The impact for the mayor is more than just the loss of a potential board ally. Newsom found himself in District 6 working closely with SFSOS — a group that has become so nasty and is so reviled, even two of its key founders, Senator Dianne Feinstein and financier Warren Hellman, have walked away in disgust.
“If all things were equal, I’d just as soon that SFSOS went away,” Hellman told us.
It’s not going to help the mayor’s reputation to be seen in that sort of company.
A HIPPER DUFTY
The District 8 race showed the power of district elections in a different way.
From the start it was going to be tough for Alix Rosenthal, a straight woman, to defeat incumbent supervisor Bevan Dufty, a gay man in what has always been a gay district. But Rosenthal says her candidacy had a clear impact on Dufty — during the late summer and fall, the onetime solid mayoral ally moved a few noticeable steps to the left, supporting Sup. Tom Ammiano’s universal health care bill and voting with the progressives (and against the mayor) for police foot patrols.
“Dufty became a much hipper person after I challenged him,” Rosenthal said.
Dufty told us the challenge made him work harder but had no impact on his votes. “What you saw on foot patrols was an immense amount of frustration with the police chief’s failures to lead the department,” he said. “That had nothing to do with this race.”
Binder pointed out that District 8 has a higher percentage of registered Democrats than any district in the city, and Dufty locked down party support early on. And even though Dufty’s voting record was less progressive than his district, he remains popular. “There are people who think he doesn’t vote the right way on the issues, but nobody thinks he doesn’t try hard,” Binder said.
The District 4 race was not only a test of the power of the mayor’s coattails in a district where Newsom has always been popular. It was also a test of how ranked-choice voting works in complex election demographics.
From early this year, when it became clear that incumbent Fiona Ma was going to the state assembly, Newsom and his allies tapped Chan as the candidate they would promote. That was an odd choice for Newsom, who claims to be a public power supporter: Chan’s law firm has received more than $200,000 in legal fees from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in just the past two years, and like his alliance with Black in District 6, the Chan endorsement put him on the side of one of the least popular actors on the local political stage.
And in the end, the mayoral support meant little: Chan finished fourth, after Ron Dudum, Ed Jew, and Jaynry Mak.
There was a certain amount of nervousness on election night when Dudum emerged atop the candidate list at the prospect that for the first time in a generation, the board would be without Asian representation. Four Asian candidates appeared to have split the vote, allowing Dudum to win.
But when the ranked-choice voting program was run Nov. 10, that concern evaporated: the new system allowed Asian voters to divide their preferences without risking that sort of vote-split result. When it was all over, Ed Jew emerged the winner.
As Jew told us, “I think it showed that having so many Asians benefited the top Asian vote-getter.”
GREEN DAYS
The school board and community college board races get less press than the top of the ticket, but as citywide contests, they can be even tougher for progressives. And this year the Green Party had some surprising victories.
Jane Kim, a Green, finished top in the balloting — remarkable considering that she didn’t have the endorsement of the Democratic Party. Mendoza came in second, followed by Kim-Shree Maufas. That puts three new members, all of them women of color, on the board and shows that activists frustrated by the votes of longtime incumbent Dan Kelly could defeat someone who until recently was considered a shoo-in for reelection.
Peter Lauterborn, a Kim supporter, was ecstatic about the win. “This is a massive triumph,” he said. “We beat the money and we beat the establishment.”
The same goes for the community college board, where John Rizzo, a Green, appears to have edged out Johnnie Carter, bringing new reform blood to an ossified and often corrupt agency.
Binder attributed the strong finishes by Kim and Maufas to their endorsements by the Guardian, the Democratic Party, and other lefty supporters. He was surprised by Rizzo’s apparent victory (absentees could still change the outcome) but most on the left weren’t. Rizzo had a lot of grassroots support and ran a strong campaign.
Similarly, Mirkarimi — who attended the postelection briefing along with fellow supervisor Daly — didn’t agree with Binder’s line on the school board, noting that the defeat of Kelly and the election of Kim and Maufas were strong endorsements for the stand that the current board lefties — Mark Sanchez, Sarah Lipson, and Eric Mar — have taken against positions by autocratic former superintendent Arlene Ackerman and her downtown backers.
“We got four votes on the school board,” was how Delepine put it, adding, “President Sanchez, man.” SFBG
Steven T. Jones and Alix Rosenthal are domestic partners. Tim Redmond wrote the analysis of the results in District 8. Amanda Witherell contributed to this story.

Ranked choice spreads

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November 10, 2006

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By Laura Beth McCaul
While the Democrats’ congressional takeover and Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation are making headlines, election day set off another trend that may not be on the tip of voters’ tongues, but could change the way democracy works in the United States.
Instant runoff voting (IRV), or ranked choice voting – which has been in place in San Francisco for two years — was on the ballot in four jurisdictions and all won with significant approval. Minneapolis, Oakland, Davis and Washington’s Pierce County all approved measures that will eliminate separate primary elections and allow voters to rank the candidates from their first to last choice.
Steven Hill, director of the Political Reform Program at the New America Foundation, said IRV “speaks to a lot of people who feel like the current system is not working and they want a political system that is going to open it up and give more choices. Instant runoff voting really fulfills a need that makes them feel like their vote counts.”

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November 9, 2006

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Josh Wolf at 81 days

By Sarah Phelan

Spoke to jailed freelance videographer/blogger Josh Wolf by phone on his 81st day at Dublin Federal Correctional Institute. (Wolf clocked 31 days during his first stint, was released on bail, only to get sent back inside when the 9th Court rejected his appeal.)
“This is like the world’s worst summer camp,” joked Wolf, who keeps busy with lots of reading, writing and Scrabble-playing. “Though the people I play Scrabble with keep leaving.”

Wolf hopes to be free when the Democrats take over Congress in January 2007, in part because Martin Garbus, a big shot First Amendment lawyer, is now his lead attorney.

“I’m lucky to have such illustrious counsel. Garbus had been referred to me before I went to jail the first time, but I wanted to meet him face-to-face. Then, while I was inside, an inmate had a copy of Garbus’ 300-page long book, Heroes and Traitors. I read it in four hours straight.”

Another reason for hope: On October 11, Wolf’s legal team filed paperwork with the 9th Circuit in the hope of a rehearing, given that the panel’s decision in his case appears to conflict with a prior decision of the court, in which sessions in which a police officer sought counseling following a contentious and fatal shooting were given protection from investigators’ prying eyes.

In Wolf’s case, he’s being asked to produce video-out takes of a July 2005 anarchist protest turned violent–something he fears the police want to access so they can profile members of the anarchist community.

“The alleged arson of a police car is serious, but so is the chilling effect of trying to get a reporter to work as an arm of the government,” says Wolf, who has only 14 days to go before he tops former New York Times’ reporter Judith Miller’s 95-day stint inside.

“I’m looking forward to being out in the fresh air, walking around –and meeting you face to face,” says Wolf, who believes TV coverage of his case has been adversely affected by Dublin’s ruling that he can only give interviews by phone and that they can’t be taped.

“TV news doesn’t want to report what Josh Wolf says if there’s no voice and no face to go with it,” he observes. As for the fact that the two Chronicle reporters who printed leaked grand jury testimony in the BALCO steroids scandal remain outside, while Wolf remains inside playing Scrabble, is that evidence of preferential treatment of the corporate media, or evidence that the feds had something to gain in their “war on drugs’ by the leaked testimony getting out in print? Stay tuned.

Josh Wolf: 81 days inside, Scrabble Master