Election

Daly Cleans Up Dirt

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By Sarah Phelan

No wonder District 6 Sup. Chris Daly wants to clean up election finance dirt.
Last November, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, the Police Officers Association, the Building Owners and Managers Association and San Francisco SOS participated in massive independent expenditure campaigns in a dirty and ultimately unsuccessful effort to unseat District 6 Sup. Chris Daly.
These dirty tricks included push polls that planted nastily negative ideas about Daly, such as he hates the police–smears hat were then followed by what Daly’s aide John Avalos describes as “robocalls from Mayor Gavin Newsom,” plus mailers featuring pictures of Daly that make him look like he’s crazily shouting at the police. Nice.
These kinds of hit jobs were financed by money that originated from GGRA, POA, BOMA, and SFSOS.

The search for Spocko

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› news@sfbg.com

For the better part of a year starting in late 2005, San Francisco blogger Mr. Spocko waged a quiet campaign against right-wing talk radio station KSFO, 560 AM. He wrote to its sponsors and played for them explicit portions of the station’s programming, such as shock jock Lee Rodgers’s call for antiwar protesters to be "stomped to death … just stomp their bleeping guts out."

The idea was to educate corporations about exactly what they were sponsoring, in the hope that Spocko’s work might staunch the free flow of hateful rhetoric. He also posted these audio clips on his blog, Spocko’s Brain. Several advertisers pulled their ads as a result of his campaign. But after MasterCard decided to cancel its KSFO spots in July 2006, Spocko said hostile commenters started to arrive on his blog and declare that he was in legal jeopardy.

"They said things like ‘They’re going to find you and sue you for everything you’ve got,’ " Spocko told the Guardian by telephone, the only way he will be interviewed because of fears for his personal safety if people learn his true identity.

Spocko suspected people at the station were behind the threats and forged on with his campaign. Then, on Dec. 22, 2006, lawyers for KSFO’s parent company, ABC — a division of Disney — sent Spocko’s Internet hosting company a cease and desist letter. The letter asserted Spocko’s clips of KSFO content were copyrighted material and demanded they be taken down from his site immediately. 1&1 Internet, the hosting company, not only complied but went one step further. It shut down Spocko’s Brain.

That’s when things got crazy.

Mike Stark — a bare-knuckle liberal blogger who famously asked Sen. George Allen, the Virginia Republican who was ousted in the last election, if he ever spat on his wife — took up Spocko’s cause. Within days scores of like-minded bloggers had posted the KSFO audio clips on their own blogs, essentially daring Disney to come after all of them. By the first week of the new year, the mainstream media — including USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New York Times — had gotten hold of the story.

Spocko’s battle against KSFO took on the dimensions of a media turf war, with the right’s traditional ally, talk radio, pitted against the new and largely left-wing online media. Spocko was suddenly and reluctantly famous, despite the fact that few actually know who he is. KSFO and Disney "made me a public figure," he told us. "[Now] in their mind I’m fair game."

Spocko cites right-wing hit pieces — such as the book KSFO’s Melanie Morgan wrote about Cindy Sheehan, American Mourning — as examples of what happens to lefties who stick their necks onto the conservative-media chopping block. But he also fears something much worse than character assassination. He passed along an e-mail in which someone said he "sounds like a terrorist." Morgan and her fellow KSFO hosts regularly advocate harsh treatment for terrorists, to put it mildly.

"Morgan has told her one million members in Move America Forward [a pro–war on terror ‘charitable’ organization that Morgan chairs] and all her listeners that I’ve smeared her, I’ve attacked her, I’ve threatened her security," he told us. "That’s scary as hell."

Despite his professed fears, Spocko has held his ground. On Jan. 25 his lawyer, Matt Zimmerman, sent ABC a strongly worded letter demanding that it officially retract its cease and desist letter to Spocko’s old hosting company. Zimmerman works at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which fights for people’s online freedom.

"[ABC-Disney] were clearly in the wrong here," Zimmerman told us. "They shouldn’t be in the habit of sending out baseless threats without following through on them."

At issue is whether Spocko’s posting of KSFO’s content constitutes what is known as fair use, an aspect of US copyright law that allows for certain limited usage of protected materials. Zimmerman’s letter to ABC goes through the standard four-point criteria for testing fair use. But more important, Zimmerman and Spocko say Disney did not even bother to follow the correct procedure for removing copyrighted material from a Web site.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 established a protocol for corporations to follow when they believe their materials have been poached. According to Zimmerman, however, Disney did not cite the DMCA in its letter to 1&1 Internet. Disney simply threatened 1&1 with unspecified legal action if it did not take down Spocko’s clips, and 1&1 caved.

"If they were serious about their beliefs that this was a copyright infringement, they could have sent a takedown notice" as specified in the DMCA, Zimmerman said. "But they didn’t do that."

Spocko’s lawyer also had some choice words for 1&1, the hosting company. Under the DMCA, Internet service providers are protected from liability, so long as they too follow proper protocol under the act. But because Disney did not cite the DMCA, Zimmerman said, 1&1 was not in any legal peril. The company "was under no obligation" to pull Spocko’s blog, he asserted. "People should be aware that in this case [1&1] decided that their own interests were more important than their customer’s."

Neil Simpkins, a 1&1 spokesperson, told the Guardian, "We are not a judicial system here. [This] issue is between Spocko and whoever is the owner of the copyright." When asked if 1&1 had consulted with legal counsel of any kind before pulling the blog, Simpkins answered that it had. But when asked for the names and contact information of his company’s legal advisers, Simpkins didn’t provide them. Officials at KSFO and ABC refused to comment for this story.

With the help of the EFF and his blogger allies, Spocko has found another ISP. Computer Tyme Web Hosting now carries his blog, which is back up and running. Some Spocko’s Brain readers have continued the campaign against KSFO. According to the blog, one Spocko devotee got the California state affiliate of the Automobile Association of America to pull its ads from the station.

But Spocko hasn’t yet posted any new audio clips nor has he contacted any advertisers since his run-in with KSFO’s parent companies. Spocko is conflicted. Part of him wants to jump back into the fray. But after the media maelstrom last month, he’s holding back, at least until ABC and Disney respond to his lawyer’s letter.

"I need to pay attention to what’s right, [but] I also need to pay attention to the real world," he said. "Media conglomerates can be ruthless."

Despite his newfound circumspection, he still believes KSFO and its fans will come after him. He even speaks of the outing of his true identity as a foregone conclusion.

"After my 15 minutes [of fame] are over — and I’m at 14:58 right now — they’ll still be out there, and they’ll still be pissed off," Spocko said. "And after they out me, I don’t know how this is going to impact me." *

More than the affair

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OK: Let’s all stop and take a deep breath.

Gavin Newsom did something almost unbelievably, incalculably stupid. He’s in a lot of political and possibly legal trouble. But in the end, it was just an affair – yes, an affair with a subordinate, which is a real problem, but nobody’s dead, he hasn’t started a war, the city isn’t about to collapse and the world will keep turning. It’s silly to talk about Newsom resigning over this, the same was it was silly for the Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton over an Oval Office blow job.

Besides, there’s a much bigger problem here.

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For months, long before this tawdry story made the front pages, it’s been clear that the mayor of San Francisco wasn’t focused on the job. For whatever reason (and there may be many reasons) Newsom has been checked out for quite some time now. As we reported Jan 10, he never does public events that haven’t been carefully scripted. His relations with the Board of Supervisors are damaged beyond repair. He’s offering absolutely nothing in the way of leadership on the murder epidemic, the housing crisis, Muni’s meltdown, or much of anything else. He’s had plenty of time for glamour and glitz, for movie stars, rides on the Google corporate jet and the glitterati at Davos – but not much energy for the gritty reality on the streets of his city.

He is, we noted in our cover story, “the imperious press release mayor, smiling for the cameras, quick with his sound bites and utterly unwilling to engage in any public discussion whose outcome isn’t determined in advance.”

And whether we like it or not, this latest “lapse in judgment” – and Newsom’s embarrassing failure to deal with it properly – is only going to make things worse.

To be blunt, for a lot of reasons that have little to do with this week’s tabloid sensation, we don’t see how Gavin Newsom can effectively run San Francisco for another four years. This latest mess isn’t a scandal as much as it’s a symptom of Newsom’s shaky grip on the frighteningly tricky world of high-stakes politics. He’s acting like a dizzy kid at a rock-star party who doesn’t have the maturity to handle what’s coming at him. Even his close allies have warned us that the wheels are coming off his administration. It’s not even clear that he wants to be mayor.

For the good of the city (and the causes he claims to care about) he’d be better off announcing now that he isn’t going to run for re-election.

That wouldn’t be the end of his political career – plenty of people (John Burton comes to mind) have taken some time off from politics to deal with their personal lives, and come back much stronger. It might be the best thing Newsom could do for himself.

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If Newsom stays in the race, he will quickly (and for perhaps all the wrong reasons) be seen as deeply politically vulnerable. And when a local politician is looking bloodied, the sharks start to circle. The potential for a feeding frenzy – with half a dozen or more politicians who suddenly see City Hall Room 200 beckoning starting to jockey for support and stab each other in the back – is all too real. That’s a bad way for progressives to proceed.

Running for mayor is serious business, and if there’s going to be a strong candidate challenging Newsom on the issues, the left needs to think about who it ought to be. Who has the experience and skills to take on the campaign? Who can appeal to a wide enough group of voters to win? Who as the sort of record and platform that progressives can support and unite around?

Those discussions need to start soon. But they need to be deliberate and thoughtful. Newsom’s political (and yes, personal) failures have given progressives an opening. There’s a chance to elect a mayor who really represents San Francisco values, in deeds as well as words. Let’s take it seriously.

Where’s the beef on LGBT issues?

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OPINION Common wisdom says that Mayor Gavin Newsom has forever endeared himself to the LGBT community by issuing marriage licenses to queer couples shortly after coming into office in 2004. Even though a state court later declared those licenses invalid (the city is appealing), Newsom’s popularity among queers doesn’t appear to have diminished. This is despite the fact that the Newsom administration has actually done little in terms of some of the major issues facing the community.

Let’s take a look at a few of those issues:

• Housing for people with AIDS. A couple months after the "winter of love" at City Hall, Newsom appointed Jeff Sheehy as AIDS czar. An AIDS activist and former hate-crime-victim advocate in the District Attorney’s Office, Sheehy was supposed to help the mayor formulate AIDS policies. But it was a volunteer position, and the major concern of people with AIDS — affordable housing — was never addressed. Two years later Sheehy resigned the post. Meanwhile, the city’s affordable housing crisis still leaves many low-income people with AIDS desperately scrambling for a place to live after they are evicted by real estate speculators looking for a quick buck in the tenancy-in-common market. The situation is so bad that the AIDS Housing Alliance dubbed the Castro "the AIDS eviction capital of the world."

• Liaison to the LGBT community. Apparently, former mayor Joe Alioto initiated this position in 1973. Newsom’s appointment was not a community activist but someone who worked in advertising. Founder of Gays for Gavin in the 2003 mayoral election campaign, James "Jimmer" Cassiol served for almost two years before he too resigned. His major duty seemed to be representing the mayor at LGBT functions.

• Homelessness among queer youth. While Newsom is quick to tout his Care Not Cash and Operation Homeless Connect programs as solutions to one of the city’s most enduring and heartbreaking problems, he failed to mention youth in general and queer youth in particular in his recent state of homelessness address. To date, only a handful of queer youth have received city-sponsored housing — in a hotel on Market Street, which Castro supervisor Bevan Dufty secured. More hotel rooms are supposedly on the way.

• Affordable housing for seniors. A proposed Market-Octavia Openhouse project for queer seniors won’t actually provide housing for those who need it the most: people with incomes below 50 percent of the area median income. The Newsom administration has done little to alleviate the lack of affordable housing for seniors, especially queer ones.

As the old woman in the ’70s commercials used to ask, where’s the beef? When it comes to queer issues, there is none. There’s certainly a lot of talk, many public appearances by the mayor and his representatives at queer functions, and the general promotion by Newsom and his staff of the idea that in San Francisco the LGBT community matters.

But if you’re poor, a senior, or homeless, it’s a different story altogether. *

Tommi Avicolli Mecca

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical, southern Italian, working-class queer performer, writer, and activist whose work can be seen at www.avicollimecca.com.

A new direction for City College

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EDITORIAL It’s time — way past time — for new leadership on the San Francisco community college board. The panel has devolved over the past few years into a patronage-and-sleaze cesspool allowing an out-of-control chancellor to play games with public money, piss off neighborhoods with ill-conceived development projects, and damage the programs and reputation of the school.

The incumbents who have controlled the board for years — Lawrence Wong, Natalie Berg, Rodel Rodis, and Johnnie Carter — have been active participants in all the problems, and we’ve argued repeatedly that all of them need to go.

In this past fall’s election, a challenger, John Rizzo, defeated Carter, giving the board a very different political character. There are now three solid reform votes on the board — Rizzo, Milton Marks III, and Julio Ramos — and one, Anita Grier, who can be cajoled and convinced to join the right side most of the time.

The board will be meeting Jan. 25 to choose a new president, and by most accounts none of the three top reformers can win the job — but Grier probably can, and she’s a decent choice. At the very least, she won’t play the sort of role that Berg has played in the past as a nonresponsive, unaccountable call-up vote for the chancellor. The vice presidential slot is trickier; there’s a move afoot to award that job to Wong just to preserve some political balance. That would be a huge mistake.

Just look at the recent record: several years ago City College took millions of dollars in bond money that was earmarked for a performing arts center and shifted it to pay for a new gym with a swimming pool that will be rented to a private school across the street. Now the college has approved a $122 million budget for a new 17-story high-rise in North Beach that has the neighbors up in arms — and school officials say they aren’t required to abide by the city’s zoning laws.

The board needs a dramatic turnaround, and the only way to make that happen is to ensure that none of the old guard are in any positions of power. Since Rizzo is new to the board, the best candidate for vice president is Marks, who should have been president last time around but was aced out by Berg and her allies.

It’s been an unwritten tradition on the college board that the person who gets the most votes becomes president; in 2004 that was Marks, who came in with more than 160,000 votes. This time it’s Grier.

Based on their respective popularity with voters, the choice between Marks and Wong for vice president is a no-brainer. Wong was reelected with just 88,000 votes — half as many as Marks.

But that’s not the biggest issue. The real point here is that Wong has no business serving as an officer of the community college board, and Marks does.

Electing Grier and Marks won’t solve all the problems at City College — but it will be a big step in the right direction. *

Control of resources

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Among the usual tidings of war and occupation, the recent holiday season brought news that hundreds of people had been burned alive in a pipeline explosion in Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria and its largest city. They were gathered around a section reportedly ruptured by a criminal gang of "bunkerers" siphoning petrol from the state-owned oil company prior to selling it on the black market.

In a cutting irony wasted on few in Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer (the fifth largest importer to the United States — and rising) has struggled for years with a serious fuel shortage. Within the crowded Abule Egba district of Lagos, where December’s horrible scene took place, low-paid workers and their families often forgo caution in the event of a pipeline rupturing to fill pails and cans with the desperately needed liquid, either for use in their own vehicles and home generators or for resale on the black market, where a small amount can equal several weeks’ wages.

To read the news reports on these accidents (if that’s the right term for such acts of desperation) is usually to miss much of the complex picture lying behind the scenes in Africa’s most populous and oil-rich country. The politics of oil in Nigeria reaches deep into an increasingly fractured society and far beyond its national borders.

Needless to say, it’s a lot for a lone actor-playwright to take on, even one playing multiple characters over the course of two hours. But young solo performer Dan Hoyle seems to thrive on such challenges. Developed with and directed by veteran solo performer Charlie Varon, Tings Dey Happen brings the 25-year-old Hoyle’s American theater audience a powerfully etched human-scale impression of the scope of oil politics in Nigeria as he discovered it during a 10-month trip in 2005 as a Fulbright scholar.

Without benefit of costume or scenery and with merely an atmospheric sound design (courtesy of David Hines) and some key lighting shifts (by Patti Meyer), Hoyle soon establishes his setting with a series of quick-change characterizations amid a bustling city street in Lagos. Affecting the pidgin English that is the lingua franca of Nigeria and smoothly transitioning through various postures and demeanors, Hoyle re-creates his reception as a white American sore thumb. From there we travel with him widely, from stops at the US Embassy and local bars frequented by expat oil workers to the network of swamps and streams in the delta known simply as "the creeks," the territory of dozens of militia groups at war with the state and one another for the liberation of the delta and a share of the oil money.

In all, Hoyle plays more than 20 characters based on people he met and interviewed. There’s also a friendly Nigerian stage manager who does not hesitate in taking exception to the character Dan’s sometimes overly downbeat treatment of the subject matter or spurring the crowd to let go of its Bay Area mind-set and try to adopt a more Nigerian one.

Hoyle also gained access to some highly placed people in Lagos. In addition to a somewhat unctuous US ambassador, for instance, Dan memorably meets the antigovernment rebel leader and Ijaw warlord Asari (a.k.a. Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, or Asari Dokubo), the Muslim militant whose forces have declared war on the Nigerian state and the oil companies who they (with justification) say have usurped and wreaked havoc on Ijaw land.

Throughout, Dan is glimpsed only in stories told by those he met. He’s the young white American who’s (remarkably) neither a Christian missionary nor a petrochemical engineer; who wants, crazily, to study oil politics (prompting one wag to advise him to practice ducking, as he’s sure to be shot at); who, to one local’s amazement and consternation, doesn’t know how to fix a computer.

Tings is a history lesson and a political lesson — even a geography lesson (the Niger Delta "is like your Mississippi Delta," the stage manager explains with knowing understatement, "but there are more guns"). But the show is also very much an entertainment and a display of performance prowess. Hoyle — whose first solo endeavor, Circumnavigator, was followed by Florida 2004: The Big Bummer, a report from a front line in the last presidential election — has made this multicharacter reportage-bricolage his forte, backing it with the limber facility of a physically disciplined actor and natural mimic.

There’s a certain admirable audacity in Hoyle’s Nigeria project, not just in his fearless reconnaissance of deeply troubled waters — especially among the battle-hardened rebels of the creeks — but in his willingness to boldly assume the voices and personae of ordinary Nigerians, to step inside their perspectives and encourage his American audiences to follow.

In what’s perhaps an overly eager attempt to please, however, his characters tend to be eccentrics. And in some cases the characterizations feel more put on, along the lines of caricature, than fully embodied. While invariably absorbing, the sum of these parts may also lend a skewed impression of the average Nigerian. There’s no mention, for example, of the nonviolent resistance led by women and student organizations against the exploitation of Nigerian people, land, and resources. (The only female character essayed in Tings is a sympathetically indignant prostitute.)

Moreover, the play’s two hours could stand trimming and focusing (a malaria-fueled fever dream in which Dan is visited by competing advice givers Graham Greene and Richard Pryor, for example, is only weakly funny and hence all the more tangential). These quibbles aside, Hoyle’s work brings a burgeoning talent to a still woefully neglected subject that, as presented here, is both absorbing in its dramatic complexity and urgent in its political import. *

TINGS DEY HAPPEN

Through Feb. 10

Thurs.–Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 5 p.m., $15–$22

Marsh

1062 Valencia, SF

(415) 826-5750

1-800-838-3006

www.themarsh.org

>

Newsom’s political team shits the bed

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By Tim Redmond

Gavin Newsom has always had sharp, well-paid political advisors, starting with consultant Eric Jaye. His public-relations operation has been well-honed, his every move designed to keep those popularity ratings soaring and keep him on the fast track to higher office.

But the wheels are starting to fall off this train.

There was, for example, the drinking issue, and his fight with Dan Noyes. That was just stupid: Newsom should have just laughed off the whole thing. Most San Francisco politicians drink; I would, too, if I were the mayor. (Well, I’m not the mayor, and I still drink.) Willie Brown, Newsom’s predecessor, as known to enjoy an occasional glass of wine, even with lunch, and lord knows — lord knows — what kind of partying he was doing in the evenings. But he didn’t care what people said about it; hey, whatever. This is a guy who impregnated his chief fundraiser and shrugged it off so quickly that it never became a political issue.

You get defensive about this stuff and it looks like you have a problem. That’s where Newsom is right now.

Then there’s the whole “question time” issue, which has become even more of a political embarassment.

I don’t know which political genius on the mayor’s staff told him it would be best ot ignore a vote of the public and refuse to comply with Proposition I. And I don’t know if that same genius told him to hold a “town hall meeting” instead. But it wasn’t a banner day for Team Newsom; in fact, the whole affair was a political disaster.

Steve Jones had fun with it. The SF Party Party had fun with it. Even the Chronicle story made Newsom look like a fool.

Randy Shaw thinks Newsom is acting on his own: “No political consultant would advise a Mayor to get on the wrong side of the popular foot patrol and question time issues, or to start battling with the media when facing re-election.”

But I’m not so sure. Newsom doesn’t do much of anything without political advice. I think he is, indeed, losing it — but so is his hot-shot political team.

The Stop Online Expression Act

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Now that Congress is back in session, I’m bracing myself for the resurrection of the Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act. This is yet another bill, in a long line dating back to the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act, that attempts to curtail free expression online by raising the specter of child abuse. First proposed at the end of last session, the bill is the brainchild of Sens. John McCain and Charles Schumer.

Leaked drafts of the Stop Online Exploitation of Our Children Act read like a speech squasher’s gift list. The bill requires the government to create a list containing the e-mail addresses of known sex offenders — probably compiled from various state databases of sex offenders. All online publishers, including bloggers and blog aggregators like LiveJournal, will be forced to police everything posted on their sites, searching for e-mails from this list. If they find a match, publishers must delete the accounts associated with the offending e-mail address — as well as anything the owner has published on the site. Failure to do so will result in steep fines. Fines will also be imposed if publishers fail to report behavior that might involve child porn or obscene behavior.

Here are four good reasons to oppose this legislation:

1. It imposes an undue burden on small publishers. Under the proposed rule even small bloggers, chat room operators, social networking sites, and webzine publishers will have to comb through the content on their site, looking for things that appear to have been written by people on the list of sex offenders that the government will compile. In practice this will probably mean that sites offering community forums, such as Alternet and even Slashdot, simply have to stop allowing people to post. There will be too great a risk that they’ll be fined if they miss a post by an alleged sex offender.

2. It misses the target. Keeping e-mail lists and deleting things written by "sex offenders" is dangerous because the category is very capacious. In states like Texas, people arrested for streaking or public nudity are classed as sex offenders. In Illinois, convicted skinny-dippers (i.e., people engaging in "public indecency") must register as sex offenders. In addition, many databases of sex offenders have been shown to be full of errors — and it’s possible for two people to have very similar e-mail addresses. Too many innocent people will get caught up in this net and find their words deleted from the Web.

3. It will not stop people who are currently committing crimes. This proposed law focuses on persecuting people who once engaged in criminal acts, rather than people currently engaged in criminal acts. If a former sex offender is posting appropriate messages in a therapy group, or talking with other model-train hobbyists, there is absolutely no reason — other than sheer prejudice — for deleting what he or she has written. In fact, preventing convicted sex offenders from having a social outlet online might lead to more recidivism. Moreover, if publishers are throwing all their energies into hunting down and deleting convicted sex offenders, publishers may not have enough resources to track down nonconvicts who are posting comments that are genuinely harmful to children.

4. It sets a bad precedent by asking untrained citizens to report on one another. Certain groups, such as doctors and therapists, are required by law to report if one of their clients is a danger to him- or herself or others. Schools are required to report suspected child abuse. But these groups are full of professionals who are trained to identify dangerous behavior that may affect children. Publishers are not trained to identify such behavior, nor should they be asked to do so. If we force Web publishers to turn in or silence their fellow citizens, which group will be forced to do it next? Sales clerks? Librarians? Rental car agents? Forcing citizens to turn against one another is not going to prevent crime. It’s only going to spark prejudice and lead to greater social injustice.

Be on the lookout for the next version of the McCain-Schumer "Stop Online Expression" bill — especially as election season draws a bit nearer. Don’t let it fool you. This isn’t about saving the children. It’s about scapegoating and censorship. And it will let the real criminals go free. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who isn’t in your database.

So Bush, like LBJ in Vietnam, is sending more troops into Iraq. So the Guardian will regularly print the surging casualty reports. How many more will die because of Bush’s mistakes?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

On April 2, 2003, as Bush started a preventive war and invaded a small country that posed no danger to the U.S., the Guardian publshed a cover story predicting the U.S. would soon be mired down in the “The New Vietnam,” as our front page head put it. As our editorial warned at the time, “Taking Baghdad will afterward be difficult and bloody–and ruling the divided nation will be, to make a phenomenal understatement, something of a trick…All of this will only lead to increased anti-U.S. anger in the Arab world, more fertile ground for groups like Al-Qaeda to recruit new members, and less security for people in the U.S.”

In his television address Wednesday night, Bush virtually admitted that the horrors the Guardian (and many others) had predicted had come to pass and were “unacceptable” to the nation and to Bush.
Bush’s answer: send in more troops. This hasn’t worked in the past, it won’t work now, and it won’t work in the future. The U.S. can never be an occupying army in the middle of a brutal civil war. The electorate knows this and demanded a change in the polls and the November election. No matter.
Bush decided to escalate and war and the killing.

So the Guardian will regularly run the casualty reports and the statistics that demonstrate that we’ve lost the war, our only option is to accept defeat, and our only solution is a phased withdrawal that minimizes the military and diplomatic losses as quickly and as much as possible.

Meanwhile: to date, 3,020 U.S. military have been killed and 22,834 wounded because of Bush’s mistakes. (See the Maia and George Elfie Ballis report below and their web site for more (see http://www.sunmt.org/intro.html> link below). Specifically:

+U.S. Military killed in action in Iraq Wednesday:4

+Current Total: 3,020

+Wounded total (to l/10/07): 22,834

+Wounded (l2/28-l/l0/07): 120

To update John Kerry’s phrase during the Vietnam War, how many more soldiers will be killed and how many more soldiers will be wounded because of Bush’s mistakes? How many more lives and families of National Guardsmen will be disrupted because of Bush’s mistakes? How many more Iraqi civilians will be killed because of Bush’s mistakes? And who will continue to be the aiders and abetters and enablers as this Bush descent into the maelstrom continues? Keep the pressure on. B3

KILLED IN ACTION

Major Michael Lewis Mundell, 47, U.S. Army, Brandenburg, Kentucky
S/Sgt. Charles D. Allen, 22, U.S. Army, Wasilla, Alaska
Spec. Jeremiah Johnson, 23, U.S. Army, Vancouver, Washington
Petty Officer 3rd Class Lee Hamilton Deal, 23, U.S. Navy, West Monroe, Louisiana
S/Sgt. Alessandro Carbonaro, 28, U.S. Marine Corps, Bethesda, Maryland
S/Sgt. Emmanual L. Lagaspi, 38, U.S. Army, Las Vegas, Nevada
Cpl. Ross A. Smith, 21, U.S. Marine Corps, Wyoming, Michigan
PFC. Javier Chavez, Jr., 19, U.S. Marine Corps, Cutler, California
Lance Corporal Steven L. Phillips, 27, U.S. Marine Corps, Chesapeake, Virginia
Spec. Allan D. Kokesh Jr., 21, U.S. Army, Yankton, South Dakota
Spec. Patrick W. Herried, 29, U.S. Army, Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Cpl. Brandon S. Schuck, 21, U.S. Marine Corps, Safford, Arizona
PFC. Jacob D. Spann, 21, U.S. Marine Corps, Columbus/Westerville, Ohio
CPL. Orville Gerena, 21, U.S. Marine Corps, Virginia Beach, Virginia
Lance Corporal David S. Parr, 22, U.S. Marine Corps, Benson, North Carolina

Although it may not be immediately apparent, every action that we take brings about change. Every word of protest uttered, every letter written, every phone call made, every peace vigil attended; all have a cumulative effect and contribute to the desired result.

We hold the lives of our troops in Iraq in our hands.
We have the power to end this tragic war.
Stand up and speak out for peace at every opportunity.

Please redistribute these casualty reports to your friends, family, elected representatives, and e-mail list. Additional
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Mayor Chicken

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› news@sfbg.com

The format is always the same: Mayor Gavin Newsom shows up at a carefully scouted location somewhere in the city with his perfect tie and perfect hair. He brings a cadre of department heads in tow, sending the clear message that he can deliver government services to the public. He takes a few questions from the audience, but the format allows him to deflect anything tough, to delegate any problems to department heads, and to offer a thoughtful “we’ll look into that” when the need arises.

There is no substantive discussion of anything controversial — and no chance for anyone to see the mayor debate contentious issues.

This, of course, is by design.

Newsom has made it very clear during his first term as mayor that he can’t take the heat. He is the imperious press release mayor, smiling for the cameras, quick with his sound bites, and utterly unwilling to engage in any public discussion whose outcome isn’t established in advance.

He has become Mayor Chicken.

So don’t expect any leadership from Newsom during an upcoming series of what the Mayor’s Office is calling “policy town hall meetings” that have been hastily scheduled this year, beginning Jan. 13 in the Richmond District with a discussion of homelessness. The town hall meeting is just politics as usual for Newsom. Since taking office in 2004, he’s held eight of these stage-managed events.

“He does a good Phil Donahue shtick,” says Sup. Chris Daly, recalling one such town hall meeting Newsom held in Daly’s District 6 after he was elected mayor. “Scripted town hall meetings are smart politics for Newsom.”

Scripted events weren’t what Daly had in mind when he wrote Proposition I, which calls on the mayor to appear before the supervisors once a month to answer questions. And these campaign-style events certainly weren’t what voters had in mind Nov. 7, 2006, when 56.42 percent of them approved the Daly legislation, which asks the mayor in no uncertain terms to appear “in person at regularly scheduled meetings of the Board of Supervisors to engage in formal policy discussions with members of the Board.”

Examiner columnist Ken Garcia — a conservative hack who regularly sucks up to Newsom — recently dismissed the voter-approved measure as “a silly, obvious stunt to play rhetorical games with the mayor,” which is how the Newsom camp would like to spin things. But Daly recalls how when he first mentioned the idea of a mayoral question time — back when Willie Brown was still in Room 200 — he was sitting next to then-supervisor Newsom, “who thought it was a great idea.”

It’s hardly an unprecedented concept. Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, meets with his city’s assembly 10 times a year and presents a detailed report on initiatives and progress. But now Newsom is mayor, suddenly Daly’s idea doesn’t strike him as all that great any more.

While it’s easy to accuse Daly of playing political games, it’s not so easy for Newsom — who loves to talk about the “will of the voters” — to dodge Prop. I. Newsom’s decision to snub voters and avoid real debate was so obvious that he got beat up on both the Chronicle and Examiner editorial pages, on several prominent local blogs, and in television broadcasts. Perhaps that’s why he decided this week to show up and give a speech at the Board of Supervisors inauguration Jan. 8, the first time in years he’s set foot in those chambers. He’s trying to look like he’s complying with voters’ wishes when he’s really doing nothing of the sort.

 

THE “KUMBAYA MOMENT”

It didn’t have to be this way. As board chair Aaron Peskin’s legislative aide David Noyola told the Guardian, immediately after Prop. I passed, Peskin tried to “depoliticize the issue” by becoming the sponsor of a motion to amend board rules.

Peskin’s motion aimed to make space on the board’s agenda for the mayor every third Tuesday so he could address the supervisors on policy matters — a matter he planned to discuss at the Dec. 7 meeting of the Rules Committee.

But two days earlier the mayor took his first jab at ducking the intent of Prop. I. He sent the supervisors a letter in which he claimed that to truly serve the public interest “we should hold these conversations in the community.”

Next, Newsom sent staffers to the Rules Committee hearing, where members discussed how not to force the implementation of Prop. I down the mayor’s throat — and the mayor’s staff claimed they’d be happy to work with the committee to that end.

As a result of this “kumbaya moment,” as Noyola calls it, the Rules Committee decided to continue the item to the following week to have more productive conversation. Meanwhile and unbeknownst to them, 19 minutes into the hearing, the Mayor’s Office of Communications issued a press release outlining Newsom’s intent to hold a town hall meeting in the Richmond District on Jan. 13 — which the mayor said would substitute for complying with Prop. I.

“The Rules Committee was blindsided by the mayor’s press release,” Noyola says.

The mayor, of course, said that all the supervisors were welcome to attend his town hall event and participate in the discussion, giving the appearance he was happy to debate but wanted to do so out in the neighborhoods. But that was a lie: Newsom and his staff knew very well that under state law, the supervisors were barred from participating in any such event.

According to the Brown Act, if a quorum of supervisors wants to be somewhere to discuss business that may be before the board in the future — such as homelessness — and if it wants policy interactions, the clerk must give notice that the supervisors intend to hold a special meeting.

The board actually discussed Newsom’s invitation, and board clerk Gloria Young estimated it would cost $10,000 to $15,000 to staff. It also raised serious procedural and legal questions for the board.

In other words, Newsom knew the supes couldn’t just show up and ask questions.

“But if the mayor wants people to just sit and attend a presentation in the background, like at a speech or a Christmas event, then special meeting notice isn’t needed,” notes Noyola, explaining why Peskin ultimately dismissed the mayor’s invite as “childish” — and why Peskin now says he’d support making question time a charter amendment, thereby forcing the mayor to comply with the will of the voters.

 

WHO’S PLAYING GAMES?

While the Newsom camp continues to dismiss the Daly-authored Prop. I as “political theater,” the supervisor is quick to counter it’s the Mayor’s Office that’s playing games.

“They claim political theater, but if that’s what it takes to get serious policy discussions going, then so be it,” says Daly, noting he has had one private discussion with the mayor in two years, while Sup. Geraldo Sandoval has not talked to him at all. “Newsom claims he has an open door to his office, but so do I — and he’s never been to mine. For the mayor to refuse to discuss important policy items and hide behind ‘I’m afraid of Chris Daly’ is pathetic. Willie Brown probably would have come.”

Daly also observes that San Francisco’s government is structurally unique within California because it represents a city and a county.

“It’s an awkward setup in which there is little formal communication between the board and the mayor,” Daly says, “other than when the board forwards legislation to the mayor for him to approve or veto.”

It’s a structural weakness that hasn’t been helped by the fact that in the three years since he was elected, Newsom only appeared before the board twice — this week and for the board inauguration two years ago — both times giving a brief speech but not engaging in dialogue. It’s an anomaly without precedent in the history of San Francisco. (It’s customary for mayors to deliver their State of the City speeches in the board chambers, but Newsom has done all his at venues outside City Hall.) Most mayors also make a point of occasionally appearing at board meetings (Willie Brown would sometimes even take questions from the supervisors).

On Jan. 8, Newsom slipped in at the last minute and sat next to Peskin until it was his turn to make some brief remarks, an opportunity that immediately followed public comment, during which a baseball-capped woman pleaded with the supervisors to “please kiss and make up with mayor.”

After Peskin welcomed “the 42nd mayor, Gavin Christopher Newsom, to these chambers where you are always welcome,” Newsom rose — and was hissed by a few members of the audience.

“This is a city that’s highly critical of its leadership and that expects greatness from its leaders,” the mayor said. “I have great expectations of 2007…. The key is to work together on the things that unite us…. I look forward to engaging with each and every one of you.”

 

WORKING TOGETHER

This isn’t just politics — there are serious issues involved. Without the monthly question time the Board of Supervisors requested and the voters approved, it’s hard for the city’s elected district representatives to figure out if this mayor actually supports or even understands the issues he claims to champion.

Last year, for example, Newsom was happy to take credit in the national press for the universal health care package that actually came from Sup. Tom Ammiano. But when Ammiano got blasted by business leaders, Newsom didn’t rush to defend the plan; it was hard to tell if he even still supported it.

Business leaders didn’t like that the proposal required employers to provide health care insurance. But Newsom’s own staff recognized that without that mandate, the plan would never work. Did the mayor support it or not?

The situation prompted Sup. Ross Mirkarimi to characterize the mayor’s proposal as “a one-winged aircraft that doesn’t fly,” and it was left to Newsom’s public health director, Dr. Mitch Katz, to confirm that both the voluntary and mandatory pieces of the legislation are joined at the hip. “One can’t successfully move forward without the other,” Katz said at a July 11 board meeting, which Newsom, of course, did not attend.

Since then, the mayor’s commitment to the amalgamated health care package has been thrown into question once again, this time thanks to a lawsuit the Golden Gate Restaurant Association filed only against the employer mandate aspect of the legislation.

The GGRA, which filed its suit the day after the election, is a Newsom ally that funneled more than a half million dollars in soft money into Rob Black’s unsuccessful campaign against District 6’s Daly and into Doug Chan’s coffers for his disastrous fourth-place showing in District 4.

Asked if he knows where the mayor stands on the city’s universal health care plan, Ammiano told the Guardian, “We’ll be meeting with Newsom in the new year and asking for a press conference in which we both pledge to give our continued support for all aspects of plan, but that’s not yet been nailed down.”

Ammiano’s experience is one example of repeated communication breakdowns between Newsom and the board, which have severely hindered policy discussions and the cause of “good government” to which Newsom so frequently pledges his fealty. As a result, Newsom has often ended up vetoing legislation only to reveal in his veto letter that all the legislation needed was a few minor tweaks — changes he might have just asked for had he been more engaged.

Consider how a year ago, Newsom vetoed legislation designed to limit how much parking could be included along with the 10,000 units of housing that were to be built in downtown San Francisco. The legislation was proposed by Newsom’s planning director, Dean Macris, and supported by every member of the Planning Commission but one.

When Newsom caught heat from downtown developers over the measure (see “Joining the Battle,” 2/8/06), he sent surrogates to muddy the waters and make his position unclear until after it was approved by the board. Newsom vetoed the measure, then proposed a couple prodeveloper amendments that hadn’t been brought to the board discussions.

“I’m trying to get the political leaders to come to an agreement because the city needs this,” a frustrated Macris told the Guardian at the time.

A few months later the board was similarly blindsided when it tried to approve legislation that would have created a six-month trial closure on Saturdays of some roads in Golden Gate Park. Newsom’s board liaison, Wade Crowfoot, worked closely with bicycle advocates and sponsor Sup. Jake McGoldrick to modify the legislation into something the mayor might be able to support.

Everyone involved thought they had a deal. Then, for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear, Newsom vetoed the measure. One of the reasons he cited was the fact that voters had rejected Saturday closure back in the 1990s, before the construction of an underground parking garage that still never fills up.

“For what it’s worth, what really sells it for me on this issue of the will of the voters was the shit I went through after Care Not Cash, when the voters supported it and [my critics] did everything to put up roadblocks. And I was making a lot of these same arguments, you know, so this hits close to home,” Newsom told the Guardian a few days after he vetoed Healthy Saturdays.

His words seem ironic: he loves the will of the voters when it suits his interest but not when it requires him to act like a real mayor.

This isn’t the first time Newsom’s been selective in honoring what the voters want: he also refused to hold up the Candlestick Park naming deal with Monster Cable, even though voters rejected it through Proposition H in 2004.

Last October, Newsom’s veto of Mirkarimi’s wildly popular foot patrol legislation led to a humiliating 9–2 override in November, but not before he’d dragged San Francisco Police Department chief Heather Fong with him through the political mud and created an unpleasant rift between himself and his formerly loyal ally Sup. Bevan Dufty.

Newsom has tried to spin his refusal to engage in question time as something other than defiance of voters by proposing the upcoming series of town hall meetings.

“Bringing these conversations to the neighborhoods — during nonwork hours — will allow residents to participate and will ensure transparent dialogue, while avoiding the politicized, counterproductive arguing that too often takes place in the confines of City Hall,” Newsom wrote in his Dec. 5 letter.

But even the Chronicle and the Examiner — neither of which have been supportive of progressives in City Hall — have condemned Newsom for ducking this fight. On Dec. 18, Chronicle editorial writer Marshall Kirduff opined, “There is no end of topics to discuss — a Muni overhaul, a new neighborhood coming to Treasure Island, police policies, the ever-with-us homeless. The city could do with more debate even at considerable risk of dopey rhetoric. That means the mayor should step out of his office, walk across City Hall and face the supervisors. It’s time to bring on the questions.”

Meanwhile, Daly notes the mayor has been spending excessive time out of state, not to mention making frequent trips to Southern California. “I think we should subpoena the guy; he doesn’t know what’s going on,” Daly quips.

A classic example of Newsom’s cluelessness about the local political scene occurred live on TV shortly after 59 percent of San Francisco voted to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Asked during a Nov. 16 City Desk News Hour interview with Barbara Taylor about Proposition J’s passage, Newsom said, “I am told Congress is going to come to a halt next week, and they’re going to reflect on this new San Francisco value. Before you impeach the president, you should consider the guy who would become president. Why don’t you start with the top two?”

Yup, it’s definitely time to bring on those questions. *

Newsom’s first town hall meeting takes place Jan. 13 at 10 a.m. in District 1, Richmond Recreation Center, at 251 18th Ave., SF.

 

Free wi-fi for everyone

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EDITORIAL Basic municipal infrastructure — roads, water and sewer pipes, train tracks, airports, that sort of thing — has traditionally been owned and operated by the public sector, and for good reason: private experiments with toll roads, profit-motivated water companies, and even city rail companies have typically been disasters. The fundamental building blocks that hold a city together are public goods, paid for by tax dollars, for use by all, either free or at the lowest possible cost.

We’ve argued for years that electricity ought to be in that category, and San Francisco is finally taking some cautious baby steps toward public power. But city officials are about to turn what could be the single most significant new piece of infrastructure in our lifetime — broadband Internet service — over to a private consortium. It’s a mistake, and the supervisors shouldn’t go along with the deal.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has made free universal wi-fi a key part of his political agenda, but through a process that’s been secretive and flawed from the start, he has chosen Google and EarthLink to put forward a proposal. As Sarah Phelan reported last week ("Selling Wi-Fi," 12/27/06), the two big tech companies are taking their road show around the city, trying to convince residents and businesses that their plan — which calls for limited free access combined with a fee-based system — will envelop the city in a wi-fi cloud, allowing anyone with a laptop to get instant Internet access anywhere in town, at no cost to taxpayers.

That may be true — but in the process, the city will be giving up a huge part of its future.

Ten years from now, maybe sooner, universal broadband will be as much a part of civic infrastructure as roads are today. Consumers will demand it. Businesses will insist on it. Public education will require it. Providing quality service to everyone — everywhere in town — will be an essential service. Why would we want to leave it to the private sector?

There are all sorts of problems with the Google-EarthLink proposal, starting with its lack of real universal access. Sure, everyone gets a connection — but at 300 kilobytes, it won’t be terribly fast. If you want to be able to quickly download music, videos, or large business files, you’ll need to pay by the month for an upgrade. Low-income folks, in other words, will be stuck in the slow lane. That’s not terribly fair.

It’s also not terribly surprising: these companies are out to make money. And over the years, their bottom line will drive the entire program.

There’s absolutely no need for that to happen. The city’s hired a consultant to look at creating a citywide network of fiber-optic lines under the streets, which is a fine idea, although it would take a few years to build. But even according to the Google-EarthLink consortium’s own estimates, the universal wi-fi network will cost only about $10 million. For a big-city public works project, that’s nothing. Almost every election, we approve another $100 million or so in bonds — for schools, community college buildings, libraries, parks, and police stations, all worthwhile projects. The city’s annual budget is more than $5 billion, and the cost of maintaining the network would run at about $2 million a year. This could turn out to be as important as anything the city ever builds — and it’s chump change.

The supervisors need to put the private wi-fi proposal on the shelf and immediately start plans to place a bond act on the next ballot to build a city-owned wi-fi and fiber-optic system that will offer true universal, free, high-speed broadband access for all. *

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

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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

Cute and cuddly crime statistics

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By G.W. Schulz

Sorry to piss on everybody’s parade, but a slight drop in the homicide rate isn’t exactly an excuse to break out the coke and booze. Then again, it doesn’t take much to get the frat brothers in the mayor’s office amped up for a party. Bro.

With murders down slightly in 2006 compared to the previous year, Gavin Newsom is preparing for a walk down Divisadero with Police Chief Heather Fong, an area where cops say crime has dropped. The event surely will include a healthy dose of media coverage, and going into an election year, Newsom needs all the flashbulbs he can get. In 2004, he melodramatically proclaimed that voters should recall him if the homicide rate isn’t brought down, so technically, he’s safe for now.

But a buried paragraph in the Chronicle’s front-page story from today reveals a key facet of crime statistics that should be taken into account when considering street-level violence and its effect on a city.

“Richmond Police Lt. Mark Gagan said homicide numbers tell only part of the story in Richmond, where a total of 280 people were shot last year. ‘I don’t think just the homicide rate alone is the way to determine whether violence is up or down,’ Gagan said.”

DVD-Arrr! Jason Shamai’s Mexico City Pirate Diary…Uncut!

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One highlight of this week’s 2006 Film opus is Jason Shamai’s tale of DVD buying and watching in Mexico City. Here it is, sans the cuts required for it to fit into the newspaper:

When I got to Mexico City’s main ceremonial drag, where national parades and military marches are flanked by the Art Nouveau-style Palacio de Bellas Artes and the most striking Sears department store building you will ever see, it had transformed into a full-on tent city: blue tarp, camping tents, and thousands of political cartoons (ranging from the dryly satirical to the scatological) flowed east for at least half a mile and filled the Zócalo, the city’s vast central plaza where people had already been camped for weeks. Just a few days before, Mexico’s highest electoral court had confirmed National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderon as the country’s next president. His opponent Andreas Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), who challenged the cleanliness of the election that had him losing by a little over half of a percentage point, had asked that his camped-out supporters stay right where they were until they could force a vote-by-vote recount. The recount had been denied and Calderon was now certain to replace outgoing president Vicente Fox, but AMLO’s supporters were still there in their virtual city within a city.

The P-U-litzer prizes

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Competition has been fierce for the fifteenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes. Many can plausibly lay claim to stinky media performances, but only a few can win a P.U.-litzer. As the judges for this un-coveted award, Jeff Cohen and I have deliberated with due care. (Jeff is the founder of the media watch group FAIR and author of the superb new book “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.”)

And now, the winners of the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2006:

“FACT-FREE TRADE” AWARD — New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

In a press corps prone to cheer on corporate-drafted trade agreements as the key to peace and plenty in the world, no cheerleader is more fervent than Tom Friedman. During a CNBC interview with Tim Russert in July, Friedman confessed: “I was speaking out in Minnesota — my hometown, in fact — and a guy stood up in the audience, said, ‘Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you’d oppose?’ I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I said, ‘You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA,
the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.’”

(Friedman may not have read even the pact’s title; CAFTA actually stands for the Central America Free Trade Agreement.)

LOCK UP THE FIRST AMENDMENT PRIZE — CNN’s William Bennett

Soon after being hired as a CNN pundit, Bennett went on his radio talk show and offered his views on freedom of the press — and on reporters who broke stories about warrantless wiretapping and secret CIA detention sites “against the wishes of the president, against the request of the president and others.” Bennett fumed: “Are they embarrassed, are they arrested? No, they win Pulitzer Prizes. I don’t think what they did was worthy of an award — I think what they did was worthy of jail, and I think this investigation needs to go forward.”

BROKE-BRAIN MOUTHING AWARD — MSNBC’s Chris Matthews

As the movie “Brokeback Mountain” (about a relationship between two cowboys) was gaining attention and audience in January, Chris Matthews appeared on the Imus show to hail “the wonderful Michael Savage” and the talk-show host’s nickname for the movie: “Bareback Mounting.” Matthews and Savage had been MSNBC colleagues until “the wonderful” Savage was fired — after referring to an apparently gay caller as a “sodomite” and telling him to “get AIDS and die.” Now that’s hardball.

CASUAL ABOUT CASUALTIES AWARD — Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch

Echoing an Iraq war talking-point heard regularly on Fox News, owner Murdoch said on the eve of the November election: “The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute.” As FAIR noted, U.S. deaths in Iraq exceed those in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War, not to mention the combined U.S. deaths of all this country’s other military actions since Vietnam — including Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

FRONT-PAGE PUNDIT AWARD — Reporter Michael Gordon and The New York Times

With many voters telling pollsters that they want U.S. troops to leave Iraq, the Times front-paged a post-election analysis by Michael Gordon — headlined “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say” — quoting three hand-picked “experts” who decried the possibility of troop withdrawal. Gordon didn’t tell readers that one of his “experts,” former CIA analyst Ken Pollack, had relentlessly promoted an Iraq invasion based on wildly false claims about an Iraqi threat. Gordon took off his reporter’s hat that night on CNN to become an unabashed advocate for his view that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq would lead to “civil war” (as though civil war weren’t already underway).

“PROVE YOU’RE NOT A TRAITOR” PRIZE — CNN’s Glenn Beck

In November, Beck — an Islamophobic host on CNN Headline News — launched into his interview with Congressman-elect Keith Ellison, a Muslim American, this way: “I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’” Beck then added: “And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.” Is it possible that primetime bigots like CNN’s Beck have something to do with the prejudices “that a lot of Americans feel”?

GROUNDHOG DAY AWARD — Ted Koppel

One role of journalism should be to help the public learn from past government policy disasters in hopes of preventing future ones. But in a New York Times column on Oct. 2, former ABC News star Koppel wrote that Washington should tell Iran it is free to develop an atomic bomb — with a Mafia-like warning: “If a dirty bomb explodes in Milwaukee, or some other nuclear device detonates in Baltimore or Wichita, if Israel or Egypt or Saudi Arabia should fall victim to a nuclear ‘accident,’ Iran should understand that the United States government will not search around for the perpetrator. The return address will be predetermined, and it will be somewhere in Iran.” In other words, no matter what the evidence, Koppel urged our government to attack a predetermined foe, Iran. Didn’t that happen in 2003 with Iraq?

Hold your nose and prepare yourself for 2007.

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

A pirate diary

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When I got to Mexico City’s main ceremonial drag, where national parades and military marches are flanked by the art nouveau–style Palacio de Bellas Artes and the most striking Sears department store building you will ever see, it had transformed into a full-on tent city: blue tarp, camping tents, and thousands of political cartoons flowed east for half a mile and filled the Zócalo, the city’s vast central plaza. Just a few days before, Mexico’s highest electoral court had confirmed National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderón as the country’s next president. His opponent Andreas Manuel López Obrador, who challenged the cleanliness of the election that had him losing by a little more than half a percentage point, had asked that his camped-out supporters stay where they were until they could force a vote-by-vote recount. The recount had been denied, and Calderón was now certain to replace outgoing president Vicente Fox, but López Obrador’s supporters were still there in their virtual city within a city.

And then it was gone. The annual military march on Mexican Independence Day saw to that. In its absence, on other streets all over the capital, another tent city continued to function, one that had been there long before the political mess and will be there long after. It shows up in the morning and gets taken down in the evening nearly every day, and it’s a hugely significant part of Mexico’s economy. In his novel Hombre al Agua, Fabrizio Mejía Madrid describes the miles of blue tarp that are the skin of Mexico City street commerce as the closest thing a landlocked resident can hope for in the way of waterfront property. Pirated movies, albums, and software are absolutely everywhere — you could drown.

According to a study conducted by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the star of the recent movie This Film Is Not Yet Rated, and cited by the Los Angeles Times, in 2005 major studios lost more revenue to Mexican street vendors, $483 million, than to those of any other country on this thieving little planet. You can mark me down as responsible for about $200 of that. In my seven months in Mexico, I went to a grand total of one museum, one cathedral, and zero ancient pyramids. Mostly, I just watched movies. And since — as we all secretly believe or at least suspect — watching movies is better than real life anyway, I ended up doing a lot of it on my return visit, with the friends I somehow found the time and opportunity to meet.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger was my first recruit in the great battle between art and intellectual property law. In it Jack Nicholson plays a journalist who switches identities with the black-market arms dealer who’s died in his hotel, kicking off one Sunday drive of a thriller. Surely, there’s no sleepier suspense film. (Antonioni’s Blow-Up doesn’t count, since it’s an artsy fuck you to suspense films, just as Brian De Palma’s Blow Out is a fuck you to artsy fuck yous to suspense films.) Amazingly, though, the pace never dissolves the tension, despite Antonioni’s gallant attempts to try our patience, like introducing love interest Maria Schneider after a full hour of film. A much less successful test of our patience is Nicholson’s bewildered commentary, which does little more than narrate a movie you couldn’t get lost in if you were blindfolded and spun around really fast. I sat through half of it and was rewarded with one semiprecious jewel: Nicholson’s character was wearing the first digital watch ever made, by Tiffany.

After that humble start, the next day I went on a Mexican film–buying binge. Well, I tried to. You’d think the one thing you’d be certain to find in Mexico is Mexican film. You’d be right about half the time, but those are odds I don’t particularly care for. I found Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven (everywhere, in fact) but not his Japón. I found Alejandro Jodorowsky’s riot-causing Fando y Lis and El Topo (not available on DVD in the United States) but not La Montaña Sagrada. I found Los Olvidados and La Jóven but nothing else by Luis Buñuel, and he was a hard worker in Mexico. Rogelio A. González’s El Esqueleto de la Señora Morales, yes. Carlos Velo’s Cinco de Chocolate y Uno de Fresa, no. And so on. But if you like Vicente Fernández or the masked wrestler Santo, which I’m vaguely ashamed to say I do, god help you if you only have one suitcase.

I also had overwhelming success finding Tin Tan, a Mexican comedian and singer who could be described as sort of like Danny Kaye in a zoot suit. His devotees are as wide-ranging as me and the Beatles. (I recently read that he was supposed to be part of the Sergeant Pepper album cover but suggested that Ringo replace him with a Mexican tree.) By the end of the seven months I spent in Mexico City, the most Spanish I’d learned was a sort of raised-by-wolves level of communication that, though I hoped it came off as charming, made it hard for me to fully understand a movie unless I concentrated like an air traffic controller. Tin Tan was always a comfort because his movies are funny even without translation. My favorite of his movies is El Rey del Barrio, about a man in Mexico City who leads a double life as a poor sweet nobody and a ruthless, flamenco-singing street boss. It costars his brother Ramón Valdéz, from the bafflingly adored El Chavo del Ocho, a ’70s Mexican sitcom in which the titular character is a little kid played by an adult.

Which is lot less annoying and creepy than an adult played by a little kid, as Dakota Fanning’s career has demonstrated. Sadistic revenge fantasies like the Mexico City–set Man on Fire have their place in this world and are hard for me to empirically condemn, but the idea that an already irritable man would take 45 minutes of a movie to avenge Fanning’s death is something I’m just not willing to accept. I can almost never sit through her performances, but we watched this movie at the tail end of a long and drunken night, when civic pride had long since overpowered any vestiges of personal pride. (When Denzel Washington buys a Linda Ronstadt album just blocks away from the spot where we’d bought this very movie, we practically cheered.) The commentary track was sprinkled liberally with Fanning annoyingly and creepily naming people on the set who were great to work with. Why doesn’t the MPAA take a stand against mixing children and commentary tracks?

With Denzel and Dakota out of the way, we moved on to happier territory (at least I did; everyone else had fallen asleep). The Barkleys of Broadway was Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s Technicolor comeback after a 10-year split, and it was the last film they made together. Ira Gershwin’s lyrics are as winning as ever, but his brother was sorely missed. In other sad news, the proud tradition of the fruity character actor had been abandoned with the exclusion of Eric Blore and Eric Blore’s teeth. Oscar Levant’s piano-playing playboy was more than compensation, though (sorry, Blore). The observation, traced to a Frank and Ernest comic strip, that Rogers had to do everything Astaire had to do but backward and in high heels (Backwards in High Heels, a musical about Rogers, comes out next year) might not even be as important as the fact that she could also act circles around the guy, who always delivered his lines like he was about to sneeze.

A couple of days later, in accidental coincidence with Mexican Independence Day, we celebrated with two classics of civil disobedience. The first, The Wild One, was just as unpleasant to watch this time around as the previous time I saw it. No movie has ever given me more desire to smack Marlon Brando’s pouty little face and send him to his room without supper. Ironically, Rambo: First Blood was the perfect complement to the fireworks exploding around us, reminding us that no tyrant, be it the Spanish crown or Brian Dennehy, stands a chance against an organized and pissed-off society — or Rambo. The next morning we watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Fascist fuckfest, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, to break our spirits just enough to keep us showing up for work. I was sad to discover the copy I’d bought on Calle Arcos de Belen for 15 pesos didn’t offer English subtitles — luckily, Pasolini’s nod to the Marquis de Sade speaks the international language of eating human feces.

Next up was Lemon Popsicle, which sounds like a hentai film but turned out to be an Israeli Porky’s with dubbed English dialogue such as "I’d say the brunette’s cherry’s been well busted, for sure." Ignoring their parents’ advice not to get involved with shiksas, the horny heroes spend the whole movie trying to gain comprehensive sexual experience with the pretty girls who don’t go too far, the not-so-pretty girls who go farther, and the crabs-ridden prostitute who’ll take ’em to the moon and back. And somewhere along the way they preside over a monumentally homoerotic penis-measuring contest in the locker room. It’s all so Porky’s I was shocked to discover that it came out a full five years earlier, in 1978, spawning eight sequels and the American remake The Last American Virgin. According to Robert O’Keefe from Wales on imdb.com, Lemon Popsicle is "ONE OF THE BEST FILMS EVER MADE." Considering the emphatic use of caps and that seven out of seven people found his review useful, I have no choice but to defer to him on the matter.

The last thing I saw in Mexico was Woody Allen’s Scoop, which I watched while flying over the northern part of the country. Allen has to work harder for his jokes these days, so it was rough to see the movie’s occasional bull’s-eye apocalyptically mistranslated. Best example: the character originally says, "I was born into the Hebrew persuasion, but when I got older I converted to narcissism." This is so quintessentially him that even a translator who spoke no English at all could’ve assembled a more faithful subtitle than "I had Hindu beliefs, but I converted to Christianity." Of the two lines, though, the latter certainly got the bigger laugh out of me — I even woke up the lady in the next seat. In fact, maybe the translator did it on purpose, to give Allen and his movie the little extra push they needed. After all, that’s what the pirated movie industry is all about. People helping people. It’s beautiful, really. Please don’t turn me in. (Jason Shamai)

JASON SHAMAI’S TOP 10

(1) Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico)

(2) The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania)

(3) Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck, US)

(4) Brick (Rian Johnson, US)

(5) Mongolian Ping Pong (Hao Ning, China)

(6) The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry, France/Italy)

(7) Lunacy (Jan Svankmajer, Czech Republic/Slovakia)

(8) United 93 (Paul Greengrass, US/UK/France)

(9) Adam’s Apples (Anders Thomas Jensen, Germany/Denmark)

(10) Duck Season (Fernando Eimbcke, Mexico)

For a longer version of this article, go to the Pixel Vision blog at www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision.

“I don’t drink Diet Coke. I drink screwdrivers. And bathe in gasoline. ‘Cause I’m a man.”

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By G.W. Schulz

Looks like the San Francisco Police Officers Association is attemtping to remake the Afghan police force in its own Charles-Bronson image.

This month’s POA Journal features a photo of an Afghan police advisor wearing one of the shirts quoting POA president Gary Delagnes from the last election: “I don’t drink Diet Coke. I drink screwdrivers.” If it’s not so clear just yet, Gary Delagnes is a man. A tough man. He drinks screwdrivers. And chews on bullets.

Anyway, the statement came after the San Francisco Firefighters Local 798 announced it would be endorsing Chris Daly in his reelection bid for the District 6 supervisor’s seat over newcomer Rob Black. Matier & Ross at the Chronicle reported first that Delagnes was annoyed about the endorsement (Delagnes and Daly have never gotten along so well, to put it lightly.)

Wise-cracking Local 798 president John Hanley had suggested that perhaps Daly and Delagnes could sit down to discuss their differences over Diet Cokes. But Gary Delagnes doesn’t drink Diet Coke. He’s a man. A tough man. He drinks screwdrivers. And snacks on chainlink. And uses a buzzsaw for a knife when he’s eating t-bone steaks. Some cops had the shirts made up after the now-notorius quote was uttered. Daly, for his part, was none too happy.

There’s no real explanation by the Journal for how the shirt ended up in Afghanistan. But here’s the caption to the photo:

“In this shot, an Afghan police advisor dons one of the infamous t-shirts that appeared after President Delagnes scoffed at the notion that he would enjoy a diet Pepsi [sic] with Supervisor Chris Daly. The shirts were not POA produced or approved, but rumor has it that translation into Farsi will appear shortly.”

Migden and Ammiano

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By Tim Redmond

Well, within a few minutes after my blog on Mark Leno and Carole Migden was posted, Eric Potashner, Migden’s aide and political advisor, called me to say that Migden has endorsed Tom Ammiano for state Assembly and to poo-poo all the talk of a heated Leno-Migden race, which he says he isn’t worried about.

Okay, I believe him. But he should be worried, because it’s real — and unless the term-limits law is modified, I see Leno wanting to go for it.

Anyway, I just got back from the Haight Asbury Neighborhood Council post-election forum, where another fascinating wild-ass scenario was floated: Suppose Migden does the math and decides that she has a better chance running against Gavin Newsom than she does defending her Senate seat against Mark Leno?

After a member of the audience floated her name in the mayoral sweepstakes, Calvin Welch, who has been watching local politics for a very long time, pointed out that Migden is extremely smart — and not afraid to make a bold political decision.

I don’t exactly see it, but it’s a very strange world out there right now.

Girl talk

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› kimberly@sfbg.com
The Gossip’s first show of 2006 in San Francisco wasn’t as likely to get tongues clacking as one I saw several years previously, the night mod, bobbed fireball Beth Ditto pulled a cute, bare-skulled baby dyke from the audience to twist and grind to the tune of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” But on Jan. 27 the mixed queer-straight crowd was yelling just as loud anyway, singing along like budding blues shouters and bopping up and down atop broken glass as a long-haired Ditto wailed through the sweat streaming down her face, swayed us and slayed us. Her best friend during her Alabama school days, Nathan Howdeshell, tugged as many sharp, shocked punk-blues lines out of his guitar as he could while drummer Hannah Blilie pounded home Ditto’s words: you’re standing in the way of control.
Control … undergarments? In women’s circles, control can be such a dirty word, but self-described fat activist Ditto would probably differ and describe it instead as a cry for seizing power, calling for a new team after half a decade of Republican-dominated government.
According to the US Senate Web site, 1992 was the year of the woman — the first time four women (Barbara Boxer, Carol Moseley Braun, Dianne Feinstein, and Patty Murray) were elected to the Senate in a single election year, following the highly combustible Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. The sight of an all-white male committee laying into law professor Anita Hill apparently led many to question the dearth of female senators. I’m sure some powers-that-be would rather that be the sole “year of the woman,” officially mandated by the federal government. But for me, 2006 could have just as easily have fit that descriptor. Even if we didn’t spend its closing month fussing over celeb thunderwear.
This year began with the typically fire-starting “say, ah-women, somebody” salutations of Ditto at Bottom of the Hill and continued through the strong musical showings of local all-female combos Erase Errata and T.I.T.S., the splashy emergence of girl bands such as Mika Miko and Cansei de Ser Sexy, and the newly revived ESG and Slits, which proved to be some of the most exciting musical reunions of 2006. In the fourth quarter, life seemed to rhyme with art, as Nancy Pelosi assumed her role as the first female House speaker and leaders such as Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first elected female head of state in Africa, entered the picture. As 2006 ends with five Grammy nominations for the Dixie Chicks and the girl-group-loving gloss of Dreamgirls, the pendulum of public favor seems to be swinging toward the double–X chromosome side of the block. We’re not even counting the onslaught of Latin pop princesses à la Shakira and Nelly Furtado, reading into Beyoncé’s strident awakening on B’Day (Dreamgirls probably hit a little too close to home for destiny’s chosen child), and paying heed to the escapist serenade of Gwen Stefani. Could feminism be in again?
Perhaps — because you can smell the stirrings of discontent and brewing backlash in the winter wind. The demise of fem-firebrand groups like Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre foregrounded the question “Is the all-girl band dead?” — as the latter’s Kathleen Hanna complained about not getting radio and MTV play on the basis of gender. How else to explain complaints of pretension surrounding the release of Joanna Newsom’s Ys and the fact that the biggest gossip of the year — talked up louder than the Gossip’s Ditto — came in the form of the pantyless pop-tart triad of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan? Even TV’s would-be feminists tut-tutted about the trio’s shaved, bared crotch shots, proliferating online like so many revamped, vamped-up NC-17 Hollywood Babylons and Celebrity Sleuths. Is the image of pop stars flashing cameras news? No, but then most of us never actually saw Jim Morrison’s lizard king or GG Allin’s scabs. Spears’s career was built on the promise of pubescent sex — how does that change when her paycheck is splashed all over workplace monitors? What is celebrity when the highly controlled PR mechanism breaks down and the most intimate component of fame, tabloid poonanny, is served up, C-section and all, in a bucket seat?
So as pop’s eternal girls go wild and skip the thong song and we muse over whether Pelosi and company’s new roles could be the best thing to ever happen to Dubya, especially if he aims to avoid impeachment (mainstream media hand-wringing over frosh Demo centrists possibly going wild is disingenuous — does anyone really expect Pelosi to be as much a partisan pit bull as Newt Gingrich?), we have to wonder how we might transform this turning point, the second (or third or fourth, etc.) coming of the Woman, into something greater than the sum of its disparate, far-flung, all-girl band parts. It’s tempting — and perhaps nutty — to draw rough, symbolic comparisons between the national discussion around Hillary Clinton’s and Barak Obama’s possible presidential runs and the Bay Area’s most arresting musical developments in 2006: the insurgent interest surrounding all-female bands and the buzzy rise of Bay hip-hop and hyphy. Is it time to lay siege to the turf of the Man. Even the oldest schoolee in rock’s girls academy, Joan Jett, can point to Broadcast Data Systems statistics on how more than 90 percent of the songs played on rock or alternative radio are still by men. “It’s institutional, and I’m not quite sure where to attack it,” Jett told me this fall. “Except with the audiences. The audiences forced stations to play ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll.’ So we got to get to that place.”
That place — my space or yours — is wherever women (and men) put together bands to make their own “user-generated content,” as a social networking site might dub it, or “art,” as I prefer to call it, and find the will to take control. Of how they sound and how they get their music out. For a sample overview of that cutting edge, see Chicks on Speed’s recent sprawling triple-CD comp, Girl Monster, Volume 1, with tracks by artists ranging from Kevin Blechdom, the Raincoats, Tina Weymouth, and Boyskout to Pulsallama, Cobra Killer, LiliPUT, and Throbbing Gristle’s Cosey Fanni Tutti. Rewrite musical history and promise you’ll be on volume two. SFBG
KIMBERLY CHUN’S CRAMMED TOP NINE
•Folk talk: Bonnie “Prince” Billy, The Letting Go (Drag City); Beirut, The Gulag Orkestar (Ba Da Bing); Joanna Newsom, Ys (Drag City)
•Hot rock: Awesome Color, Awesome Color (Ecstatic Peace); Erase Errata, Nightlife (Kill Rock Stars); Snowglobe, Doing the Distance (Makeshift); Om, Conference of the Birds (Holy Mountain)
•Interstellar explorers: Akron/Family, Meek Warrior (Young God); OOIOO, Taiga (Thrill Jockey); Grouper, Wide (Free Porcupine); White Magic, Dat Rosa Mel Apibus (Drag City)
•Live, with love: 7 Year Rabbit Cycle, Coughs, Citay, Gossip, Sonic Youth and Mirror Dash, Neil Hagerty, Flaming Lips, Liars, Radiohead, Grizzly Bear
•Odds and ends: Tom Waits, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards (Anti-); Marisa Monte, Universo ao Meu Redor (Blue Note); Girl Monster, Volume 1 (Chicks on Speed); Art of Field Recording: 50 Years of Traditional Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum (Dust-to-Digital)
•Party jams: Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury (Re-Up Gang/Arista); Girl Talk, Night Ripper (Illegal Art); Beck, The Information (Interscope); the Knife, Silent Shout (Rabid)
•Pop nostalgists: Camera Obscura, Let’s Get Out of This Country (Merge); Pelle Carlberg, Everything Now! (Twentyseven); Essex Green, Cannibal Sea (Merge); Pascal, Dear Sir (Le Grand Magistery)
•Solo mio: Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Anti-); Jolie Holland, Springtime Can Kill You (Anti-); Thom Yorke, The Eraser (XL)
•Reissue korner: Cluster; Karen Dalton; Delta 5; ESG; Ruthann Friedman; Jesus and Mary Chain; Milton Nascimento; Ike Yard; What It Is!: Funky Soul and Rare Grooves (1967–1977) (Rhino)

Leno vs. Migden in 2008? Maybe

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By Tim Redmond

This is still at the early whisper stages, but there are a number of people urging Mark Leno to run for state Senate against fellow Democrat Carole Migden in 2008 — and the word is that Leno is actively considering it.

Talk about wild campaigns.

Both are formidable fundraisers and good campaigners, both have had strong bases of support in the city — but Leno seems to be more on the political upswing these days. He’s was just re-elected easily, has few visible enemies in town, and is chairing the powerful Appropriations Committee. Migden angered some local progressives with her strong support of Steve Westly for governor over Phil Angelides (although she can certainly argue that the outcome of the election lends credence to her claim that Westly had a better chance of beating Schwarzenegger).

Leno and Migden have never been best pals; Migden supported former Sup. Harry Britt against Leno in the often bitter 2002 Assembly primary.

Migden’s a fighter; a primary challenge wouldn’t be easy. But the fact that it’s even under discussion suggests that Leno thinks there is some dissatisfaction with the incumbent.

Keep an eye on this one.

Blood in the water

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Mayor Gavin Newsom has long been considered a lock for reelection next year, a belief driven by his same-sex marriage gesture, hoarding of political capital, personal charm, and high approval ratings. Yet Guardian interviews with more than 20 political experts and insiders from across the ideological spectrum indicate that Newsom may now be more vulnerable than ever.
Just as San Francisco politicians are starting to calculate whether to run, the Newsom administration has suffered a series of political setbacks. In November alone, most of Newsom’s picks got spanked during the election, his veto of popular police foot patrol legislation was overridden by the Board of Supervisors, and he was caught off guard by the San Francisco 49ers’ announcement that they were moving to Santa Clara, taking with them Newsom’s hopes of landing the 2016 Summer Olympics.
“Until recently, I didn’t have a lot of hope,” Sup. Chris Daly, whom Newsom unsuccessfully worked to defeat, told us. “Now the progressives have a glimmer of hope. The mayor seems to be hurting from three or four episodes where he was caught with egg on his face.”
To many political observers — most of whom the Guardian allowed to speak anonymously in order to capture their most candid observations and plans — the defeats were indicative of a mayor who seems increasingly disengaged and out of touch. Even Newsom’s strategy of avoiding fights that might hurt his popularity has rankled many of his allies, who complain that this risk-averse approach has allowed the Board of Supervisors to effectively set the city’s agenda.
“This guy does not use one scintilla of his political capital on anyone or anything,” said former mayor Art Agnos, whose name has been dropped as a possible challenger to Newsom but who told us, “I’m not running.”
There are a number of strong anti-Newsom narratives out there, even on his signature issues, such as crime and homelessness, which persist as visible, visceral problems despite increased city spending on homeless services and controversial tactics like police sweeps and one-way bus tickets out of town for vagrants.
The mayor started his term by announcing during a radio interview that if the murder rate rose, he should be ousted from office. It did — remaining at 10-year highs through the past three years — handing his potential opponents a ready-made sound bite. The crime rate could be a powerful weapon when paired with Newsom’s failure to follow up on promises of police reform.
Newsom is still likely to offer up a long list of accomplishments in his usual statistics-laden style. But much of what he tries to take credit for was actually someone else’s initiative, such as the universal health care measure crafted by Sup. Tom Ammiano (who is running for the State Assembly and not taking a third run at the mayor’s office). Adding to Newsom’s problems in November was the lawsuit the Golden Gate Restaurant Association — a Newsom ally — filed challenging the measure.
Almost everyone we interviewed agreed that if Newsom does have approval ratings of around 80 percent, as has been reported, that support is very soft and may significantly erode during the campaign. “His support is an inch deep and a mile wide” was how one political analyst put it.
“His ‘skyrocketing’ approval rating is irrelevant,” one downtown politico told us. “People approve of the mayor like they approve of the color beige. If you fill an arena with 50,000 people and ask them to decide on what color to paint the walls, that color will always be beige. It’s not that they necessarily like beige; it’s that they will accept it as long as those freaks who want hot pink don’t get their way.”
And then there are his personal foibles. Newsom’s choice of girlfriends — from the Scientologist actress to the 19-year-old hostess — has found its way into print and caused the mayor to lash out in brittle ways that have hurt his relations with once-friendly outlets like the Chronicle, which openly mocked Newsom’s televised comments last month about how hard his job is and how he might not run for reelection.
Finally, there are the new electoral realities: this is the first mayor’s race in which challengers will receive public financing from a $7 million fund (almost all of which, Newsom campaign manager Eric Jaye argues, will be aimed at doing damage to Newsom) and the first with ranked-choice voting, allowing candidates to run as a team and gang up on the mayor.
Add it all up, and Newsom looks vulnerable. But that’s only the first part of a two-part question. The trickier part is who can run against Newsom, and that’s a question to which nobody has any good answer yet.
THE FIELD
Among the names being dropped for a mayoral run are Dennis Herrera, Aaron Peskin, Ross Mirkarimi, Matt Gonzalez, Kamala Harris, Mark Leno, Agnos, Susan Leal, Angela Alioto, Lou Girardo, Warren Hellman, Jeff Adachi, Tony Hall, Leland Yee, Daly, Michael Hennessey, Quentin Kopp, and Carole Migden. That’s quite a list.
Yet most say they are disinclined to run this time around, and none are likely to announce their candidacies in the near future, which is when most observers believe a serious run at Newsom would have to begin. Here’s the catch-22: nobody wants to run against Newsom unless his approval rating sinks below 60 percent, but it’s unlikely to sink that low unless there are rivals out there challenging him every day.
Two candidates who already hold citywide office and could aggressively challenge Newsom on police issues are Sheriff Hennessey and District Attorney Harris, both of whom have mainstream credentials as well as supporters in the progressive community. But both have expressed reluctance to run in the next mayoral election, at least in part because they’re also standing for reelection this fall and would need to leave their jobs to run for mayor.
Public Defender Adachi is a favorite of many progressives and could also run on police reform, but his job of representing sometimes heinous criminals could be easy for the Newsom team to attack Willie Horton–<\d>style.
Many of the strongest potential candidates are thought to be waiting four more years until the seat is open. City Attorney Herrera can take as much credit as Newsom for gay marriage and is a tough campaigner and formidable fundraiser who has clearly been setting himself up for higher office. Assemblymember Leno has won over progressives since his divisive 2002 primary against Harry Britt and could be mayoral material, particularly because he’s termed out in two years. But both are allies of Newsom and reluctant to run against him.
Several supervisors and former supervisors would love to beat Newsom, but the road seems steep for them. Daly just got beat up in his own reelection, so his negatives are too high to run again right now. Supervisor Mirkarimi might run, but some consider him too Green and too green and are urging him to wait four more years. Board President Peskin could also be a contender, but some doubt his citywide appeal and note a few bad votes he’s cast.
Challenges from Newsom’s right could include Kopp, the former legislator and judge; Hall, the former supervisor whom Newsom ousted from his Treasure Island post; businessman and attorney Girardo; financier and philanthropist Hellman; and Alioto, who ran last time. But these would-be challengers are generally less liberal than Newsom, who pundits say is as conservative a mayor as a town with an ascendant progressive movement will tolerate.
Finally, there’s Gonzalez, who four years ago jumped in the mayor’s race at the last minute, was outspent by Newsom six-to-one, and still came within less than five percentage points of winning. Many progressives are urging him to run again, noting that he is still popular and has the political skills to highlight Newsom’s shortcomings. But Gonzalez remains cagey about his intentions.
“I don’t believe I’m running for mayor. The chances are slim,” Gonzalez told us. “But I think he needs to be challenged.”
TEAM NEWSOM
Newsom campaign manager Jaye says he’s definitely expecting a challenge. And unlike most observers whom we spoke with, who are surveying the field and not seeing many people jumping in, Jaye expects a crowded free-for-all and a tough race.
“Is it likely to be a highly contested mayor’s race? Sure. Is that a good thing? Yes, I think it is,” Jaye said. “Every race in San Francisco is tough. The school board races here are fought harder than some Senate races.”
But Jaye thinks the new public financing system — in which mayoral candidates who can raise $135,000 will get $450,000 from the city — will be the biggest factor. “That’s one of the reasons I think everyone’s going to run,” Jaye said. “That guarantees it will be a crowded field.”
One political analyst said that’s the best scenario for defeating Newsom. He said dethroning the mayor will be like a pack of jackals taking down an elephant. No single challenger is likely to beat Newsom, but if he’s being attacked from all sides, he just might fall.
As for Newsom’s weaknesses and missteps, Jaye doesn’t agree the mayor is particularly weak and doesn’t think people will turn away from Newsom because of his candid comments on how the job cuts into his personal life.
“One of the reasons so many people like Gavin Newsom is he’s not afraid to be human in public and to be honest,” Jaye said, adding that his candidate is up for the challenge. “He is running for real and will run a vigorous race.”
Jaye concedes that the 49ers issue is difficult: Newsom will be hurt if they leave, and he’ll be hurt if he appears to give up too much to keep them here. The high murder rate and inaction on police reform are widely considered to be vulnerabilities, but Jaye said, “Gavin Newsom gets up every day and works on that problem, and if voters think another candidate has a better solution, they’ll look at it.”
Everyone agrees that candidates will enter the race late — which is what happened during the last two mayor’s races and is even likelier with public financing. If Newsom takes more hits or can’t get his head into the game, the sharks will start circling. “The next three months with what happens with the mayor will be telling,” another political insider told us.
One test will be with Proposition I, the measure voters approved Nov. 7 asking the mayor to show up for a monthly question time before the Board of Supervisors. Newsom reportedly has said he won’t come, which could look cowardly and out of touch to the voters who approved it and to the supervisors, who might make great political theater of the no-show. And if Newsom does decide to show up, most observers believe he might not fare well in such an unscripted exchange.
If Newsom implodes or appears weak in late spring, suddenly all those political heavy hitters will be forced to think about getting in the fray. After all, as just about everyone told us, nine months is like an eternity in San Francisco politics — and Newsom has the best job in town.

Drilling Mexico

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› news@sfbg.com
Macuspana, Tabasco, Mexico — The billboard posted along the scrubby highway running east in the sultry southern state of Tabasco displays lush jungle, a sun-dappled iguana, and a flock of dazzling macaws. “We’re working for a better environment” the giant road sign radiates.
The leafy graphic contrasts starkly with the blighted scenery of this tropical state, where rivers have been contaminated, the fish envenomed, and the corn fields blasted by acid rain that drips from the polluted sky thanks to the efforts of Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), the national oil monopoly and its multiple transnational subcontractors. It is a testament to the fact that Tabasco holds Mexico’s largest land-based petroleum deposits.
But the billboard here in Macuspana — the swampy, oil-rich region settled by the Chontal tribe — was not posted by the Environmental Secretariat to inspire conservationism or even by PEMEX to burnish its tarnished image. No, this pristine scene is signed off by a familiar name for the United States: Halliburton de Mexico. The Houston-based petroleum industry titan’s south-of-the-border subsidiary is PEMEX’s largest subcontractor. Vice President Dick Cheney’s old megacorporation and the largest oil service provider on the planet has been doing business in Mexico for many years.
The privatization of PEMEX, nationalized in 1938 after depression-era president Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated Caribbean coast oil enclaves from Anglo American owners, was right at the heart of Mexico’s still-questioned July 2 presidential election. Right-winger Felipe Calderón, a former energy secretary, is committed to selling off Mexico’s diminishing oil reserves — or at least entering into joint agreements that would guarantee private corporations a substantial quotient of them (the reserves have only 10 more good years, according to the worst-case scenario).
On the other side of the presidential ledger, leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a native of Macuspana who many Mexicans believe actually won the presidency, advocates maintaining the state’s control over PEMEX, an entity that pays for more than 40 percent of the Mexican government’s annual budget, on the grounds that the oil wealth of the nation belongs to the Mexican people and no one else.
Knowing full well which side their bread was buttered on, transnationals like Halliburton rushed to support Calderón — as did Cheney, the corporation’s former CEO (1995–2000), and his running mate, George W. Bush. Both Cheney and Bush have long-standing ties to the Mexican oil industry. Bush’s daddy ran Zapata Offshore, a PEMEX subcontractor, back in the 1960s. His partner Jorge Diaz Serrano, a former PEMEX director, served prison time for an oil tanker kickback scheme. Cheney’s Halliburton somehow finagled its way into lucrative service contracts for the newly opened offshore Cantarell field (said to contain upward of 12 billion barrels) back in the 1990s.
How Halliburton got in on the ground floor smells fishy to National Autonomous University professor John Saxe-Fernandez, who tracks strategic resources. The Cantarell contracts were assigned while Cheney was running the show in Houston. At the same time, the Texas conglomerate was busy across the Atlantic allegedly bribing Nigerian oil officials, according to press reports and a French magistrate.
The truth is the debate about privatizing PEMEX is no longer much of a debate. PEMEX has long since subcontracted virtually its entire exploration and perforation divisions to transnationals such as Halliburton, Fluor-Daniels, and the San Francisco–based Bechtel, leaving PEMEX a virtual shell.
Cheney’s old outfit has grabbed the lion’s share of this billion-dollar prize. Between 2000 and 2005, Halliburton picked up 159 contracts with PEMEX’s Perforation and Exploration division for a total of $2.5 billion, about a quarter of PEMEX’s annual operating budget, according to Saxe-Fernandez. The contracts cover everything from drilling slant and vertical wells to maintaining offshore platforms to logging out a jungle for the drilling of 27 turnkey wells in Tabasco and Chiapas.
With 1,250 employees and thousands of contract workers, Halliburton de Mexico has offices in Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche (the fast-shrinking Cantarell operation); Reynosa Tamaulipas, where Cheney’s boys are helping to exploit the Burgos natural gas fields; and Poza Rica Veracruz, a region in which Standard Oil’s Harry Doherty and Lord Cowry (Weetman Pierson), owner of what eventually became British Petroleum, once ruled with an iron fist and where Halliburton is now combing through what is left of its old Chicontepec field.
Halliburton also maintains offices in Mexico City and Villahermosa Tabasco, from which it oversees its off- and onshore Caribbean domain. Mexico’s Gulf Coast is not Halliburton’s only Caribbean operation. The KBR (Kellogg Brown Root) division of Cheney’s conglom built 207 cells at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002 to house so-called enemy combatants.
Halliburton has had a boot planted in the rebel-ridden state of Chiapas since 1997, three years after the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (known in Mexico as the EZLN) rose up and declared war on the Mexican government after the conglom built a natural gas separation plant in the north of that southernmost state. In 2003, Halliburton won a $20 million contract to expand natural gas infrastructure at Reforma — autonomous Zapatista communities lie south and east of the Halliburton installations.
Both PEMEX’s and Cheney’s associates have their eyes on Chiapas — ample reserves lie under the floor of the Lacandon jungle in areas where the Zapatistas have established their caracoles, or public centers, according to studies by National Autonomous University political geographer Andrés Barreda. Indeed, the first battle between the EZLN and the Mexican military took place near a capped well at Nazaret in the canyons that lead down to the jungle floor near where the Zapatista Road to Hope (La Garrucha, the autonomous municipality of Francisco Gomez) now sits.
According to closely held PEMEX numbers unearthed by Houston oil investigator George Baker, Nazaret was putting out a million cubic feet of natural gas a day when it was capped back in the early 1990s. If Halliburton had been in the picture then, it probably would have picked up the contract, and Dick Cheney, an avid if erratic hunter, would have gotten a chance to exterminate many endangered Lacandon jungle species.
In a religious mood, Cheney once wondered out loud why God did not put the oil under democratic countries, and with that mission in mind, he has set out to democratize foreign oligarchies. His endeavor to bring democracy to Iraq has resulted in more than 50,000 Iraqi dead, civil war, devastation and destruction in every corner of the land, and the systematic sabotage of that nation’s petroleum infrastructure.
Now Cheney and his Halliburton associates say they are democratizing Mexico, having aided and abetted the stealing of the presidential election from López Obrador in favor of Calderón, who would privatize PEMEX. As a member of the Council of Communication, which groups together transnationals doing business in Mexico, Halliburton helped pay for a vicious TV campaign that featured defamatory hit pieces tagging López Obrador a danger to Mexico. Because only political parties can mount such campaigns, Halliburton’s participation was patently illicit, according to Mexico’s highest electoral tribunal.
Planted outside Halliburton de Mexico’s offices in a soaring skyscraper overlooking Paseo de Reforma, where López Obrador’s people would soon be encamped last summer, 80-year-old former oil worker Jacinto Guzman remembered the great strikes (his father was a striker) that had impelled Cárdenas to expropriate the Caribbean complexes where Halliburton now rules — and bemoaned the depredations of Cheney and others of his ilk against what belongs to the Mexican people.
Dressed in a wrinkled suit and hard hat, the old oil worker said he was even more vexed by Halliburton’s participation in the smear campaign to vilify López Obrador.
As he told me, “The gringos think they own our elections too.” SFBG
John Ross is the Guardian’s correspondent in Mexico. His latest book is ZAPATISTAS — Making Another World Possible: Chronicles of Resistance 2000–2006.

Margaret Cho on sex, Good Vibrations–and San Francisco’s answer to the 49ers leaving town

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By Sarah Phelan

There’s something deliciously violent about stand-up comedian Margaret Cho’s voice. Even when she picks up the phone in her hotel room in Philadelphia and says, “Hell-low? This is Margaret,” in that familiar Cho twang, you feel the tigress at the end of the line.
OK, maybe I’m just projecting. Because let’s face it: to call Margaret is to risk ending up as fodder in her next comedy act, especially if you have a British accent and work for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
But that’s OK, because I love this bitch, and I’m glad that Good Vibrations, San Francisco’s legendary retailer and distributor of sex toys and sex education, gave me an excuse to interview her by appointing her to be on their Board of Directors.
“I did it for the free vibrators,” jokes Cho, by way of explaining the Good Vibrations gig. “Seriously, I worked a long time ago at another sex store, Stormy Leather, in the retail store. Before it was just a leather company, making dildo harnesses and clothes and S&M gear, and then it opened a retail store. In fact, I think that was my last daytime job, other than stand-up comedy. Through working there, I learned about Good Vibrations, the sisters’ store, which had a different location, but with the same ideas and philosophies about women and sexuality that help empower us and learn. And I bought a lot of stuff at Good Vibrations. I love Carol Queen and I love the diversity of the people who work there. It’s very much my crowd, my queer friends, lovers and people I know. It’s so familiar. The people who work there are my cup of tea. I enjoy just hanging out there.”
Asked about the thumping the Republicans got in the November 2006 election, Cho laughs. “I’m glad. It only took a couple of all-time gay scandals to turn it around. It was about time. It should have happened a lot sooner. Homophobia is something that worked in our favor this time. Americans are so homophobic. They realize that Republicans could be closet gays –and so they don’t want to vote Republican any more. That’s fine right now. If it works in our favor, it’s gotta be OK. Hopefully, it will lead to people understanding the queer culture more, and at least there’s been some shift in balance.”
In light of the news that the 49ers want to leave San Francisco and SF Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier wants to form a sports commission to keep teams in town, I asked Cho if she could think of any sports that might work better for our city, like competitive gay brunching, perhaps, as recently defined by the Bay Guardian’s cultural editor Marke B.?
.“How about a really bad-ass lesbian softball league,” suggests Cho. “No holds barred. Armed with weapons. Something violent, really empowering and kick-ass.”

Margaret Cho on sex, Good Vibrations–and San Francisco’s answer to the 49ers leaving town

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0

By Sarah Phelan

There’s something deliciously violent about stand-up comedian Margaret Cho’s voice. Even when she picks up the phone in her hotel room in Philadelphia and says, “Hell-low? This is Margaret,” in that familiar Cho twang, you feel the tigress at the end of the line.
OK, maybe I’m just projecting. Because let’s face it: to call Margaret is to risk ending up as fodder in her next comedy act, especially if you have a British accent and work for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
But that’s OK, because I love this bitch, and I’m glad that Good Vibrations, San Francisco’s legendary retailer and distributor of sex toys and sex education, gave me an excuse to interview her by appointing her to be on their Board of Directors.
“I did it for the free vibrators,” jokes Cho, by way of explaining the Good Vibrations gig. “Seriously, I worked a long time ago at another sex store, Stormy Leather, in the retail store. Before it was just a leather company, making dildo harnesses and clothes and S&M gear, and then it opened a retail store. In fact, I think that was my last daytime job, other than stand-up comedy. Through working there, I learned about Good Vibrations, the sisters’ store, which had a different location, but with the same ideas and philosophies about women and sexuality that help empower us and learn. And I bought a lot of stuff at Good Vibrations. I love Carol Queen and I love the diversity of the people who work there. It’s very much my crowd, my queer friends, lovers and people I know. It’s so familiar. The people who work there are my cup of tea. I enjoy just hanging out there.”
Asked about the thumping the Republicans got in the November 2006 election, Cho laughs. “I’m glad. It only took a couple of all-time gay scandals to turn it around. It was about time. It should have happened a lot sooner. Homophobia is something that worked in our favor this time. Americans are so homophobic. They realize that Republicans could be closet gays –and so they don’t want to vote Republican any more. That’s fine right now. If it works in our favor, it’s gotta be OK. Hopefully, it will lead to people understanding the queer culture more, and at least there’s been some shift in balance.”
In light of the news that the 49ers want to leave San Francisco and SF Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier wants to form a sports commission to keep teams in town, I asked Cho if she could think of any sports that might work better for our city, like competitive gay brunching, perhaps, as recently defined by the Bay Guardian’s cultural editor Marke B.?
.“How about a really bad-ass lesbian softball league,” suggests Cho. “No holds barred. Armed with weapons. Something violent, really empowering and kick-ass.”

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