Government

Supes ask AG to drop last SF8 charges

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By C. Nellie Nelson

Late last week, three members of the Board of Supervisors signed a letter urging Attorney General Jerry Brown to drop the charges against the remaining defendant of the San Francisco 8. The letter, signed by Supervisors Eric Mar, John Avalos and Chris Daly, calls the prosecution misguided: “Based on ‘confessions’ and other testimony extracted by torture and denial of right to counsel, this prosecution has been a disservice to the people of San Francisco.” They point out that the case has cost the city millions of dollars already.

In June Sup. Mar introduced a similar resolution urging the attorney general to drop the charges against the seven men (one had had charges dropped previously) to the Board’s Government Audit and Oversight Committee. The Committee opted to send the resolution to be heard by the full Board, but ended up postponing when budget disagreements literally overtook City Hall.

Then in early July, the prosecution agreed to drop the charges against five of the men, and allowed two men to accept much lesser charges, where they were credited with time served and received only probation. The one remaining defendant is Francisco Torres, who declined an offer to plead guilty to a lesser charge.

The case being largely dismissed, the board tabled the resolution. As there is now just one attorney and assistant, compared with an original team of sixteen attorneys, so the next hearing on the case was postponed to October 9.

The Attorney General’s office had not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment by Monday evening.

Prison report: CDCR won’t admit mistakes

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By Just A Guy

Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. His blogs typically run twice a week.

It was a good week for Jaycee Dugard, who was discovered after being imprisoned for 18 years in an Antioch backyard. But it wasn’t a good week for the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office, which missed several opportunities to solve the case, including two visits to the home of Phillip Garrido, the paroled sex offender who is charged with kidnapping Dugard.

But at least Contra Costa Sheriff Warren E. Rupf had the courage to admit the mistakes, ask forgiveness and take steps to assure that something like this would never happen again.

What was the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation response? Remember, CDCR is responsible not only for people in prison but for people on parole. In typical fashion, agency spokesman Gordon Hinkle denied that anything had gone wrong or that CDCR had been remiss in any way, and said that that the parole agent had gone in Garrido’s backyard but because of the way it was situated didn’t find anything strange.

Wait: These agents visited a registered sex offender’s house once a month, yet found nothing awry?

Far be it for the people at CDCR to even admit that they are doing a poor jobs. They never admit responsibility for anything. Yet they are tasked with rehabilitation.

Isn’t a key component of the rehabilitation process admitting your mistakes? What kind of example does it set when the entity so concerned about the public’s safety is incapable of admitting it has done something wrong performed poorly?

Examples like this should make it obvious that CDCR is not protecting you but protecting itself through a continuous enterprise of lying, hiding the truth, covering up the facts and skewing information in order to paint a picture or inmates as unrepentant evildoers bent on destruction — while coloring itself as a benign bureaucracy with the unenviable job of keeping us at bay by “walking the toughest beat.”

The beat is so “tough” that the parole agents didn’t thoroughly investigate the back yard of a convicted sex offender. I guarantee my parole officer would investigate my back yard if it were in such disarray – at the very least, the yard was ripe to be a meth lab and Garrido’s deranged rants would be a cause for concern.

But you know what one of the big problems with the scenario is? The parole agent probably had 200 people to watch, 100 of them no nonviolent offenders, so he or she didn’t have time to thoroughly investigate what was going on.

Wait – it was 18 years! Good job, CDCR.

Government’s number on priority is to protect the public, but with that comes a responsibility to define what the public is being protected from. Do we really need to be protected from a casual drug user, or even addict (any more than we need to be protected from a casual drinker or even an alcoholic)? If drugs were decriminalized, taxed and regulated by the FDA — or even handed out free to registered addicts – a large percentage of our property crimes would disappear. The black market would collapse, prices would drop and drug-related murders would decline.

But most important, parole officers wouldn’t have to be so overwhelmed that they don’t have the time to investigate the jungle-like backyard of a convicted rapist who believes he was inspired by God to commit atrocities on teenage girls.

Who are the real criminals here?

Protecting babies from fire and chemicals

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news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Profit-driven companies are fighting an expensive and underhanded battle to keep their toxic fire retardants in California’s furniture.

Senate Bill 772, authored by Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), seeks to exempt certain children’s furniture from California’s fire code, thereby allowing manufacturers the option of forgoing toxic fire retardants and giving consumers the opportunity to raise their babies around chemical-free furniture. But lobbying efforts last week stalled the bill in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, where it will be reconsidered Aug. 26.

California’s onerous standards for fire safety are unique. According to Technical Bulletin 117, established by the California Bureau of Home Furnishings, all furniture manufactured in California must be able to withstand an open flame for 12 seconds without igniting.

While there are other methods that meet California’s standards, such as barriers and safer chemicals, the cheapest way for manufacturers to meet TB 117 is to pour toxic, halogenated chemicals that act as fire retardants into all upholstered furniture.

This means that fire retardants are put in most things in your house — your couch, your mattress, your baby’s pillows and strollers. The companies producing the fire retardants are huge multinational corporations — Albermarle, Chemtura, ICL Industrial Corp. and Tosoh — spending millions on lobbying and in drafting nonprofit fronts.

The fire retardants go by a variety of technical names: polybrominated diphenyl ether, halogenated substances, TRIS, BFRs, CFRs … the list goes on. That chemical family is halogenated chemicals. The only one that is legal in all consumer products is decabrominated diphenyl ether, referred to as DECA. Some of the chemicals that are known to be toxic are only banned from certain products, such as pajamas in the case of TRIS, but are still being poured into everyting from electronics to clothing to upholstery.

SB 772 specifically focuses on four pieces of children’s furniture. After reviewing years of data, the Bureau of Home Furnishings found that bassinets, nursing pillows, strollers, and infant pillows have never caused fire causality. Leno contends, "There is no need to pour chemicals into products that are not fire risks."

Numerous studies and agencies, including the National Toxicology Program and the California Environmental Protection Agency, have linked halogenated chemicals to cancer, thyroid disease, reproductive problems, ADHD, child autism, and long list of other ailments. Some, like Seth Jacobson, spokesperson for Citizens for Fire Safety, argue that the studies are exaggerated and "not scientifically valid".

Any manifestation of these diseases may take years to see or are complicated by other factors, making correlations to specific chemicals difficult to pinpoint. Russell Long of Friends of the Earth believes that this is a comparable scenario to the asbestos crisis of the 1980s. Asbestos was a common household chemical long suspected of toxicity and in 1989, after numerous health and legal battles, the EPA banned it. Decades later the federal government is still spending billions in liability lawsuits affecting more than 600,000 people.

Another issue is bioaccumulation — these chemicals don’t stay put. According to Leno, these chemicals don’t bind to materials. Instead they fall to the floor and become part of dust. In 2006, the California EPA reported that "PBDEs have been measured in house and office dust, indoor air, plant and animal-based foods, terrestrial and marine animals, and in human breast milk, blood, and fat."

In 2008, scientists from UC Berkeley, Harvard, and the Silent Spring Institute found that the levels of PBDEs in Californians are twice as high as other U.S. regions. The California EPA has reported that the highest tissue concentrations of PBDEs are found in California aquatic life, with rising levels in San Francisco Bay harbor seals. Long believes "this is one of the biggest toxic threats facing Californians today".

This is Leno’s second attempt at passing a bill involving these particular issues. The first, SB 706, introduced last year, sought to directly ban the use of toxic fire retardants. SB 706 was named the Crystal Golden-Jefferson Act, in memory of a 41-year-old firefighter who died of work-related, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It is believed she developed the condition after breathing in dioxin (a highly toxic carcinogen) that was released from burning flame-retardants. Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Maine have already passed bills banning dioxin and have started phasing it out.

Banning chemicals is hard to do. Richard Holober of the Consumer Federation of California says that the petrochemical industry will slightly alter a banned chemical, "sort of chasing one version after another." In the United States, chemicals are mass-produced and distributed until they are found to be dangerous. In Europe, chemicals must be proven safe first.

The most outspoken opposition to both bills, SB 706 and SB 772, is a group called Citizens for Fire Safety. The group, headed by Jacobson, argues that fire retardants saves lives, noting that since California established TB 117 California structure fires have dropped by about 60 percent. Records from the National Fire Protection Association show a drop of 32 percent between 1980 and 2000. Yet other states, including New York, show a drop of 40 percent without a similar fire regulation. The drop can easily be ascribed to an increase in smoke detectors, better education, and more regulations on cigarettes: the number one fire instigator.

Citizens for Fire Safety’s funding is suspicious. Its Web site clearly states "a portion of our funding&ldots;comes from various chemical industry leaders." Indeed, Jacobson says he has no problems accepting funding from the same companies that manufacture the chemicals in question. Leno believes Citizens for Fire Safety is a "concerted business effort to confuse the public."

This nonprofit front is just one of the extraordinary efforts of the chemical companies to stop bills of this nature. According to Holober, the bromine companies spent between $6 million and $9 million on lobbyists and efforts to derail SB 706. This is the largest amount spent by a consumer-interest group in lobbying efforts, Leno and Holober say.

Public records show that the two biggest lobbying efforts on behalf of Citizens for Fire Safety represent the Citizens for Fire Safety Institute, (which is funded by chemical corporations) and a PR group representing the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum. The BSEF represents all the major brominated flame-retardant companies.

Joe Kerr, president of Orange County Professional Firefighters Association Local 3631, makes more reasonable objections to SB 772. Kerr opposes the deregulation until "all the principals are brought to the table. Get the burn ward doctors, and the environmentalists, EPA, and Mark Leno together — because there are good arguments on both sides." In the meantime, Kerr doesn’t want to "throw the baby out with the bathwater." He also voices concern that some consumers will stop buying California products if the state’s fire standard is lowered.
SB 772 is a deregulatory, pro-environment bill that gives the market the option to decide. Any product that does not meet regulations will be labeled accordingly. Leno voiced concern that the labels will confuse the issue and many amendments have been made about where the labels should be placed.
Although the bill was approved by the full Senate in June, heavy lobbying efforts prevailed in the Assembly and it fell three votes short in the Assembly Appropriations Committee last week. Reconsideration has been granted for next week when the bill will need nine votes before it can proceed to the Assembly floor. If SB 722 does not get nine votes, it will be another year before it can be heard again.

Newsom’s leak

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EDITORIAL At the heart of the conflict over Sup. David Campos’ recent sanctuary legislation is a basic issue of civil rights: Should a young San Francisco immigrant arrested by the local police be treated as innocent until proven guilty — or should that person face deportation, even if the arrest is bogus and no formal charges are ever filed?

All Campos wants to do is establish that an arrest is not a conviction — and, as anyone who works with youth or immigrants in the city knows, thousands of innocent people are picked up by the police every year, sometimes because of simple mistakes, more often because the local cops have a propensity to arrest young people of color in disproportionate numbers.

And under current city policy, anyone arrested on felony charges who lacks proper documentation can be turned over to federal immigration authorities. And even if the suspect turns out to be innocent, he or she can be deported. That’s not fair, not consistent with the city’s sanctuary policy — and, according to the ACLU, not legally defensible.

But Mayor Gavin Newsom, not content with arguing the merits of the legislation (a battle he would clearly lose), has taken the remarkable step of leaking to the San Francisco Chronicle a confidential opinion from City Attorney Dennis Herrera that warned of the potential legal downside of the Campos measure. The Chron quickly turned the memo into a front-page story, proclaiming that the legislation "would violate federal law and could doom [the city’s] entire sanctuary city policy." Newsom was quick to chime in: "The supervisors are putting at risk the entire Sanctuary City Ordinance, which we’ve worked hard to protect," the Chron quoted the mayor as saying.

For starters, that’s blowing the situation way, way out of proportion. Herrera’s office writes these memos all the time. Any piece of legislation that might have legal ramifications gets this sort of review — and in many, many cases, the supervisors and the mayor simply go ahead anyway. Two of Newsom’s biggest initiatives — same-sex marriage and the city’s health care law — involved serious legal issues, and it’s almost certain that Herrera formally warned the supervisors and the mayor that going ahead could lead to lawsuits. Newsom, properly, proceeded with the legally risky moves.

And while we haven’t seen Herrera’s memo, people familiar with it agree that it never said that the existing sanctuary law is at any real risk. Yes, some anti-immigrant group could sue the city over Campos’s bill. And yes, some court could conceivable invalidate not only this law but a lot of other city immigration policies. But nobody has ever successfully sued to overturn the current law, which has been in effect for almost 20 years.

Of course, there are, and will be, legal issues with the Campos bill. But now that the mayor has leaked the confidential memo laying out those concerns, any right-wing nut who does want to sue will have the ammunition prepared. And Newsom’s action makes the prospect of a suit — one that will cost the city a lot of money — far more likely.

In other words, the mayor has put his own city’s treasury at risk, possibly vioutf8g city law in the process, in order to undermine a piece of legislation that he doesn’t support. This has all the hallmarks of the mayor’s new gubernatorial campaign team, led by consultant Garry South, who is known for his vicious, scorched-earth battles. South, we suspect, advised Newsom that appearing soft on illegal immigrants would play poorly in the more conservative parts of the state — and that a tactic that puts his own city at risk was an appropriate way to respond.

And Newsom, to his immense discredit, went along.

This is a big deal, a sign that the mayor is putting his higher ambitions far ahead of his duty to San Francisco. "In my eight years in office, I saw hundreds of these memos," former Board President Aaron Peskin told us. "I saw plenty of material that I could have leaked that would have been useful to me politically. But all of us on the board, across the political spectrum, understood that you just don’t do that. Because if you do, it tears the government apart."

We’re journalists here, and we never support government secrecy. We have consistently defended reporters who publish leaked documents (and would do so here, too, despite our criticism of the way the Chron played this story). And there are times, many times, when it’s best for city attorneys and the officials who get their advice to let the public know what those memos say. We support whistleblowers and principled city employees and officials who defy the rules of secrecy and tell the public what’s really going on.

But Newsom was serving no grand public interest purpose here. He was simply using confidential legal advice to attempt to thwart a political opponent, for the purpose of promoting his own ambitions. That’s alarming. If Newsom wants to be taken seriously as a candidate for governor, he needs to demonstrate that he can stand up to his political advisors — and so far, he’s failing, miserably.

P.S.: Sup. John Avalos has asked the Ethics Commission and the city attorney to investigate the leak, which is fine — but this shouldn’t become an attack on the right of the press to publish confidential documents. None of the investigators should try to question the Chron reporters to seek the source of the leak — particularly since Newsom has as much as admitted, to the Guardian‘s Sarah Phelan, that he was the one who authorized his staff to hand out the memo. *

Made in USA

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

DRUG LIT You can go to these places. Reading Righteous Dopefiend (University of California, 392 pages, $24.95), I kept trying to pinpoint, via clues in the text, where on "Edgewater Blvd." — Bayshore — the homeless heroin addicts whose lives the book chronicles were encamped. You want to know if you’ve walked by them. Because what pulls you through this often dense ethnography are finely drawn portraits of the brutal lives of individuals.

Philippe Bourgois, a professor of anthropology and medicine who taught for a while at UCSF (he’s now at the University of Pennsylvania) and Jeff Schonberg, a photographer, spent nearly 12 years with a core group of 10 homeless drug addicts in and around the Bayshore area. In Righteous Dopefiend they’ve created a devastating, blow-by-blow indictment of the countervailing forces that conspire to keep these people — Hank, Petey, Tina, Carter, Felix — on the margins.

Of course, the authors recognize that the members of the group they’re following bear some responsibility for the day-to-day atrocity their lives have become. But they track these lines back carefully, conducting extensive interviews with family members, former employers, and ex-spouses who live more (or at least much less precariously) in the "mainstream." Part of what’s revealed in these back stories reminded me of William T. Vollmann’s argument, in his book Poor People (Ecco, 2007), about "accident prone-ness": that the cultures of poverty, addiction and marginalization have a snowball effect within individual lives. Meeting medical — or court — appointments becomes impossible without transportation; sores and open-container tickets turn into abscesses and bench warrants.

The book is divided into nine parts, each detailing an aspect of the everyday lives of the homeless addicts. In "Falling in Love," over the course of interviews, monologues, and Schonberg’s overwhelming black and white photographs, we watch the trajectory of Tina and Carter’s on-again, off-again romance. The chapter is bracketed by "Intimate Apartheid" and "A Community of Addicted Bodies," which illustrate the particulars of the group’s estrangements (from within and without) and its focal, primary romance — with heroin, crack, and alcohol.

In "Making Money," the few legal, and many more illegal, means of getting enough cash to fix are catalogued and considered. Bourgois considers the obsolescence of blue-collar manufacturing jobs, nationally and particularly in rapidly gentrifying cities like San Francisco. What interests the authors here, as elsewhere, are the ambiguously symbiotic, even parasitic relationships employers have with the homeless. One boss who relies on a member of the group pays him exactly enough for a bag of heroin, ensuring that he’ll be at work again first thing the next day.

Throughout the first-person narratives, Bourgois threads his argument: that the institutions, ostensibly set up to serve this body of addicts (from the police-state to community clinics) are, like the employers, both dependent on them (for government funding, menial labor, etc.) and ultimately at cross-purposes with them. The services senselessly undercut one another, forming a no-place for the homeless to barely survive in, characterized by the either/or of living purely by chance, in extreme squalor, or in a permanent maze of bureaucracy. So the Edgewater homeless carve out a life in between, under the freeways but with methadone treatment or an SRO perpetually on the horizon. It’s a shell game where the addict always loses.

There are plenty of good reasons to get this book and read it. If you’re interested in homelessness, addiction, or in the public health issues surrounding IV drug use, this is an excellent source of information. The authors treat their subject brilliantly and with great compassion. It is also a hell of a story, and it’s local. These people walk by you every day and should not remain invisible.

Chronic debate

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sarah@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what about the public health costs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is your film on drugs

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Movies and drugs were made for each other — depiction-wise that is, beyond experience-enhancing audience and creativity-enhancing (or canceling) maker usage. Too bad legality and morality so frequently messed with that perfect union. Herewith a highly selective, hardly definitive list of the medium’s

resulting greatest freakouts. It excludes the following: really obvious stuff, like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Reefer Madness (1936); most horrific withdrawal sequences (that’s another article); and scenes in which performers really do appear very high (inevitably, Dennis Hopper).

Case Study: LSD (1969) Your friends at Lockheed Aircraft Corp. crafted this cautionary educational short in which our heroine, already "pretty jacked up on marijuana," drops you-know-what. She then goes downtown for a hot dog. But when she’s about to consume that tasty snack it turns into a troll doll on a bun, begging for mercy because "He had a wife and seven kids at home to support." Then the screaming starts.

The Big Cube (1969) A spoiled stepdaughter and predator playboy attempt to drive wealthy widow Lana Turner insane by serially dosing her. What’s perhaps most amazing about this awesomely awful potboiler is that Turner’s acting is even worse when her character is straight.

The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) Before he’s ready to shelve pacifism once again to kick fascist butt, Tom Laughlin’s counterculture vigilante must go deep into his New Age White Dude’s identification with Native American spirituality by doing peyote in the desert. This attempt to separate ego from self is in fact the most egomaniacal drug trip in the history of cinema, equating Tom/BJ with the soaring national bird and Jesus Christ.

Go Ask Alice (1975) There may be no wrong-trip scene freakier than this TV movie’s one in which our teen runaway protagonist and a temporary traveling companion are made to bark like dogs for an older couple — the "winner" getting a new boost, the loser getting "punishment" horribly left to our imaginations.

Blue Sunshine (1976) Never grab the wig off a secret U.S. government LSD experiment veteran whose secret baldness "covers" homicidal psychosis. And if you do, this cult horror classic teaches, stay the hell away from the fireplace.

Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984) This DIY punk parody’s all-female band members avenge themselves on their greedy manager by mega-dosing him, resulting in horrific hallucinations of Taco Bell ads and Barbra Streisand Yentl (1983) posters inspire unfortunate delusions of flight.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) On everything, Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro’s Duke and Dr. Gonzo visit Circus Circus — an environment that could induce anxiety attacks in the soberest tourist.

Cookers (2001) This vastly underrated quasi-horror is a one long paranoid wigout. Its three characters are meth cookers holed up in an abandoned rural house until their batch is done. Unfortunately, madness, sexual competitiveness, and the questionably supernatural intervene. The other great meth horror movie so far is Pop Skull (2007), which doesn’t even specify the substance being abused.

Knocked Up (2007) Paul Rudd. Shrooms. Five different types of hotel chairs. Plus "Love, the most beautiful shiny warm thing in the world!"

Garamendi for Congress

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EDITORIAL The Sept. 1 special election to replace Ellen Tauscher (who has taken a post with the Obama administration) in the East Bay’s Congressional District 10 includes a large field with several great candidates. In fact, any of the top half-dozen or so Democratic Party candidates would be an improvement on Tauscher, a member of the Blue Dog Coalition who supported the Iraq War.

All these top candidates are good on the issues, including requiring a strong public option in health care reform (most go even further and support single-payer), ending the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy, withdrawing troops from Iraq and developing an exit strategy for Afghanistan, achieving marriage equality, limiting federal drug and immigration raids, reforming Wall Street, and developing a sustainable energy policy that addresses climate change.

But it’s a tougher decision to choose between the experienced politicians in the race and a couple of attractive newcomers, who argue that fresh faces and new ideas are what’s most needed now in Congress, where the Democratic Party’s huge new majorities have so far produced disappointing results.

The most impressive of these new candidates is Anthony Woods, a smart, charismatic young person of color who has a remarkable personal story. From growing up poor in Fairfield with a single mom and without health insurance, Woods got into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and then went to Harvard, where he earned a master’s degree in public policy from the prestigious Kennedy School of Government.

Then, after doing two tours of duty in the Iraq War and earning the Bronze Star, Woods informed his commanding officer that he is gay. He was honorably discharged from the military and forced to repay the federal government for his college tuition, in the process becoming a cause célèbre in the LGBT community, which has strongly backed his candidacy.

Adriel Hampton, a former San Francisco Examiner political reporter who now works for the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, also brings to the race a fresh perspective and intriguing ideas about using technology to engage more citizens with their government. We’re glad they’re running, but they could each use some more political experience before assuming such an important office at this critical point in history.

Fortunately, there are three Democratic Party office-holders in the race. Joan Buchanan is a member of the California Assembly who is running a strong race, while State Sen. Mark DeSaulnier has a more extensive political background, a long list of endorsers (including Tauscher and Sen. Mark Leno), and a strong voice calling for fundamental reforms of the political system, including being an early proponent for calling a constitutional convention in California.

DeSaulnier was the clear frontrunner and would have made an excellent member of Congress — but then Lt. Gov. John Garamendi dropped his plans to run for governor again and got into the race. It was a game changer. Garamendi has been in public service since he was elected to the Legislature in 1974; he later served as deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior under President Bill Clinton and as California’s first and best insurance commissioner, where he learned to play hardball with health insurance companies.

Garamendi has a forceful presence, progressive values, long relationships with key power brokers and knowledgeable advocates, and an unmatched history of intensive work on the most pernicious problems that Congress is now wrestling with, including health care reform and resource issues. From day one, he would be a leader who would help President Barack Obama move his agenda.

"I have the experience and knowledge we need right now in Congress," Garamendi told the Guardian‘s editorial board. He’s right, and he has earned our endorsement. *

Gascón asks L.A. cops to review Hugues de la Plaza case

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The Chronicle just broke the news that SFPD chief George Gascón is bringing in Los Angeles homicide detectives to review the June 2007 death of Hugues de la Plaza, a San Francisco resident with dual American and French citizenship, who was found stabbed to death in his locked Hayes Valley apartment after a neighbor saw a pool of blood outside.

Huguespic.jpg

Gascón’s decision is yet another indicator that the new SFPD chief is a take-charge guy. And hopefully LAPD will be able to turn up new leads in this two-year old case. A preliminary report, released by the Office of Citizen Complaints weighed in on, earlier this year, found that the de la Plaza case was not a top priority and that the subsequent investigation suffered from a lack of coordination.

As the Guardian previously reported, the San Francisco Medical Examiner was unable to determine how de la Plaza died. SFPD investigators initially thought the case was a suicide and de la Plaza’s death has never been formally ruled as a homicide.

De la Plaza’s family and his ex-girlfriend Melissa Nix rejected the SFPD’s suicide theory and mounted a long campaign to keep attention on his case, convincing the French government to mount its own investigation.

Big top blues

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steve@sfbg.com

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus has returned to the Bay Area, this year plagued by even more evidence that circus employees routinely abuse elephants and other animals than existed last year, when we ran our award-winning investigation on the problem (see "Dirty secrets under the big top," Aug. 13, 2008).

As a result, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums has ordered that an animal welfare officer from the city be assigned to monitor the circus’s Aug. 12-16 run at Oakland’s Oracle Auditorium to try to ensure that the animals aren’t mistreated there.

"At this point, the plan is to provide a humane officer from our animal control to monitor the circus," mayor’s spokesperson Paul Rose told the Guardian. Although he hadn’t gotten a response yet from Ringling officials, Rose said Dellums expects the officer to have full access to the circus. "That’s the plan, to be a part of the operations and to provide oversight."

As we reported last year, Ringling Bros. was headed to trial in a landmark civil lawsuit brought by a trio of animal welfare groups and former Ringling elephant trainer Tom Rider alleging the endangered Asian elephants in the circus’s care were routinely beaten with sharp bullhooks and subjected to other forms of abuse, all in violation of the Endangered Species Act and Animal Welfare Act.

After repeated delays, that case finally went to trial in a Washington, D.C. federal court earlier this year, although Judge Emmet Sullivan has yet to issue a verdict. A follow-up hearing was held July 28 and another is set for Sept. 16, after which a ruling could come any time.

"We hope that after that hearing, we’ll have a ruling from him," Tracy Silverman, general counsel with plaintiff group Animal Welfare Institute, told us. They are seeking declaratory relief that would require Ringling to get ESA permits for taking elephants and injunctive relief preventing certain behaviors. "Our lawsuit has precedent-setting potential for all circuses with elephants."

In the meantime, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals last month released video footage from a six-month undercover investigation that showed various Ringling employees repeatedly beating elephants with bullhooks, something circus officials last year told us doesn’t happen. Officials referred to the tools as "guides."

"Clearly it corroborates everything we said in the trial and have been saying for the last decade," Silverman said of the PETA footage, although she said it was too late for the video to directly affect the trial.

PETA activists appealed to officials in Oakland and other host cities to take some preventive action based on the new evidence. After its stint in Oakland, Ringling heads to San Jose’s HP Pavilion for an Aug. 19-23 run.

"The Mayor’s Office met with PETA to discuss their findings, and we’re reviewing that information and determining the best way to proceed," Rose from the Mayor’s Office told us after the Aug. 7 meeting. Later he told us about the assignment of the animal control officer.

PETA’s RaeLeann Smith said that people have been shocked by the video (which we ran July 22 on the Guardian Politics blog) and that activists will be out in force at the circus showing the video to attendees and trying to persuade them not to go in.

"The video speaks for itself. It wasn’t one employee having a bad day. It was numerous employees on different occasions," she told us. "I believe people will shun the circus once they see this footage."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which regulates Ringling’s treatment of animals, also reviewed the PETA footage and announced that the agency "has initiated a thorough investigation into these allegations."

The agency’s July 28 statement also stated: "Our veterinarians and animal care inspectors are deeply committed to making sure that exhibited animals receive appropriate care and exhibitors comply with the [Animal Welfare] Act. Physical punishment, as alleged in this complaint, is inconsistent with the Act’s standards, and is one of the items our inspectors will look into during their investigation."

Ringling officials did not return the Guardian‘s call for comment, but they previously claimed to treat all animals under their care lawfully and well, and they criticize PETA as a radical animal rights group.

Our story from last year also documented the aggressive tactics Ringling officials have used to silence and retaliate against its critics (at one time orchestrated by former top CIA official Clair George), the political and financial connections of Ringling owner Kenneth Feld, lax enforcement efforts by USDA officials, and the pervasiveness of tuberculosis strains in Ringling’s elephants that are transmissible to humans. Earlier this year, "Dirty secrets under the big top" won first place for best business story in the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club’s annual awards.

Although Ringling is a 139-year-old global institution, there is growing concern in the United States and other countries about animal abuse. The government of Bolivia this month banned the use of all animals in circuses following media reports of animal abuse.

As Silverman said, "The trend is toward better treatment for animals."

Mad women

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TV DAMES I’m sure you’ve heard: the critically lauded Mad Men‘s characterizations are subtle and layered. Its insights into contemporary society, as viewed through the prism of 1960s-era domestic and professional life, are at once nuanced and precisely rendered. Its dialogue is rich in subtext and dramatic allusion. In short, it’s, you know, deep.

But, also, the outfits really rock. And so do the fabulously messed-up women who wear them. Take vixen head-secretary Joan Holloway, as portrayed by flame-haired siren Christina Hendricks. While Joan — a sex kitten who’s all business — bumps her sculptural up-do on the proverbial glass ceiling, the men in the Manhattan offices of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency ogle her "valentine’s heart" rear end. Joanie lives for the attention. Brimming with confidence, smarts, and curvaceous sass, this formidable gal wields her sexuality like a fleshy weapon; 40 years in the future, she could have toppled corrupt government administrations without smearing her lipstick. Instead, she makes the coffee, taunts Serious Career Girl Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) about her weight, and brushes off getting raped by her fiancé in the boss’s office with a terse, ladylike smile. Let’s hope in 1963 her color-coordinated pumps trip over a copy of The Feminine Mystique.

If working city-girl Joan is the show’s sugar-voiced femme fatale, then Betty Draper (lead ad exec Don Draper’s icy, model-perfect wife) is its luridly soapy secret weapon. A young Grace Kelly type trapped in the suburban wastelands of upstate New York, Betty (January Jones) is equally as confused — and formidable — as her urban sex goddess counterpart. It’s hard to believe, for instance, that the Princess of Monaco would slap a neighbor in a grocery store after being accused of an inappropriate relationship with a 12-year-old boy. Or reprimand her cheating husband for his choice of mistress ("How could you, Don? She’s so old.")

Betty’s uptight, provincial-princess façade is also the source for some martini-dry comedy. When a foppish younger man tries to seduce her, she sets him straight. "You’re so deeply sad," he coos. "No, I’m happy," she replies. "It’s just my people are Nordic." Joan stretched out luxuriously on a streamlined chartreuse sofa in a purple shift dress might represent the apex of the show’s downtown aesthetic, but Betty’s delicate upstate hausfrau is its hypocritical, bourgeois soul. When the new season premieres Aug. 16, I’ll be glued to the flat-screen with highball glass in hand, enjoying all the scandals ’60s-era Manhattan and Westchester County have to offer. Like Don Draper, I feel no need to have to choose just one woman, especially when they all offer such distinct, guilty-pleasure charms.

www.amctv.com/originals/madmen

The big prison duck

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EDITORIAL A panel of federal judges has ordered the release of 44,000 California prisoners, sending politicians of both parties scrambling for cover and throwing a crucial issue into the heart of the Democratic campaign for governor.

And so far, both major candidates are ducking, badly.

The state prison system is a mess; any sane person knows that. California incarcerates 170,000 people in facilities designed for less than half that number. Sick inmates don’t get to see doctors; mentally ill or drug-addicted inmates often get no treatment at all. It’s so bad that a federal monitor appointed by the courts has demanded that the state spend $8 billion building new medical facilities for prisoners.

Meanwhile, inmates are crowded into makeshift bunks in gymnasiums and dayrooms. The few modest rehabilitative programs California offers are stretched so thin that many inmates get no job training or violence-prevention skills at all. The parole system is overburdened and focuses far too heavily on people with minor, nonviolent offenses.

And politicians wonder why the state has a recidivism rate of 70 percent.

The solutions aren’t rocket science, either. There’s a clear reason why incarceration rates have jumped so high: harsh sentencing laws, passed by the Legislature and the voters with no concern for the costs of implementation. The state’s three-strikes law is so draconian that thousands of people are serving 25 years to life for nonviolent felonies that typically would carry a sentence of a few years. So the first thing the Legislature and the governor need to do is change the sentencing laws (and give back discretion to judges).

Then there’s a drug problem. California prisons are packed with people serving sentences for drug possession — and most of these people, and society in general, would be better served, at less than half the cost, with treatment programs.

And frankly it wouldn’t be hard to release 44,000 inmates without any new threats to public safety. The vast majority of the inmates in California prisons are going to be released at some point anyway; in fact, the state now releases about 10,000 people a month. The early releases envisioned by the federal courts could simply mean allowing people who have served, say, three years of a four-year sentence to leave prison and shift to the custody of the parole system a few months earlier than scheduled. Many of those people are nonviolent offenders, particularly drug offenders.

With the state in a catastrophic fiscal condition, the cost of corrections ought to be a huge issue for the candidates for governor, particularly the Democrats. Mayor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Jerry Brown ought to be promoting a plan that would end the insanity of "three strikes," offer alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenders and drug addicts, and allow early releases to bring down the current unsustainable incarcerated population.

So what are these candidates, supposedly alternatives to the Republican agenda, saying?

Here’s Brown, quoted in the Los Angeles Times: "Government is established to protect the safety and security of its citizens, and these wholesale releases are totally incompatible with that." Where’s Newsom? We called his campaign press office for comment, and haven’t heard back.

This is unacceptable.

It’s typical for Republicans to use scare tactics and talk about crime as a cheap way to win votes. But Newsom and Brown ought to know better. This is no time for demagoguery — the prison crisis is serious, festering, and a major factor in the state’s financial mess. If the two leading Democrats can’t come up with honest answers, it’s time for someone else to enter the race. *

Daggering: Eric Wareheim shows us how it’s done

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By Juliette Tang

God damn. Eric Wareheim (of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job) has directed a music video for Major Lazer that makes me want to find someone willing to pretend that my ass is a turntable and get down. Watch the above video (and make sure you watch it until the end because 3:14 is, I believe, the most hysterical part of the whole thing).

We’ve been following the Jamaican daggering craze for a while now, but never would we have thought that the venerable Eric Wareheim would take a stab (hah) at interpreting this cultural phenomenon. For those who are unfamiliar, “daggering” is a style of Jamaican dance that basically simulates crazy rough sex. Like, the kind of acrobatic sex only Jamaican daggerers and Cirque du Soleil performers are capable of. One of the moves, called “sky daggering,” literally involves dancers flipping and catapulting themselves onto one another in ways that scare me. Due to the increasing popularity of this form of dance, it’s caused some public controversy, and the Jamaican government has even launched a campaign against “daggeration” and music associated with it are banned from Jamaican airwaves.

Sup. Mirkarimi pushes for transparency in mayor’s security detail costs

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By Rebecca Bowe

secret_agent3.jpg
Image courtesy James Ratcliffe

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi has introduced legislation that would require elected officials to reimburse the city for security-detail costs while traveling the campaign trail, the Chronicle has reported. Mirkarimi has been trying unsuccessfully for more than a month to get the Mayor’s Office to disclose how much is being spent on security for Mayor Gavin Newsom as he campaigns for governor outside San Francisco. In response, he’s been told that revealing that dollar amount would be a security risk.

The legislation also seeks to shine some light another longstanding transparency problem: Newsom’s public calendar. Mirkarimi’s proposed rule would require the mayor to submit a detailed schedule, describing how much time was spent on each activity listed.

The Guardian has noted the mayor’s tendency to reveal only a bare minimum of information in the official schedule he publicizes, telling journalists and concerned citizens virtually nothing about how the people’s business is being conducted.

Sunshine advocate Kimo Crossman, who has been publicly calling for a meatier mayoral calendar for years, pointed out that there are already open-government rules in place that have been ignored. “When the Guardian found out the Mayor Willie Brown was shredding his calendars, part of the Prop G enhancement to [the city’s Sunshine Ordinance] required keeping a very detailed calendar and preserving all correspondence in the Mayor’s office,” Crossman told us via email. “The [Sunshine Ordinance Task Force] has found that [mayor’s office spokesman] Nathan Ballard and Mayor Newsom have willfully violated these provisions and therefore committed official misconduct.”

“Subsequently,” he added, “no behavior has changed.”

Newsom still hiding his schedule

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By Steven T. Jones

In yet another example of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s basic hostility toward transparency in government – exhibited daily by his refusal to release his official schedule – the mayor is officially “to conduct meetings in City Hall” today. With who? Who knows? But it’s all he’s being doing everyday recently as he runs for governor.

Actually, as the Chron reported this morning, Newsom will be swearing in new Police Chief George Gascón this afternoon. Where? When? Who knew? We couldn’t get the highly paid Mayor’s Office of Communications to answer the phone or respond to e-mails with that answer. Some elected supervisors didn’t even know.

Luckily, the Police Department just sent out a release saying Gascón will be available to the media in an hour – in the mayor’s office. Shouldn’t that be the kind of thing that ends up on his daily schedule? This is the same taxpayer-supported political operation that told the Chron last week (buried toward the end of this story) that they removed from the schedule Newsom’s appearance at an event honoring outgoing Chief Heather Fong because they were worried reporters would ask the mayor questions about the resignation of campaign manager Eric Jaye.

Apparently, the Mayor’s Office doesn’t see transparency and accountability as public duties, but simply one more reality to be manipulated as they please.

Mexico report: Science and Indian genocide

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By John Ross

MEXICO CITY — When President Felipe Calderon strode to the flag-bedecked podium in southern Mexico City last May 11th, at the nadir of the spring swine flu panic, and, under the strictest health protocols, lowered his “tapaboca” (surgical mask) to punch the button that would load “The Mexican Genome” onto the world’s computers, the only thing that seemed to be missing was a military band to strike up the National Anthem.

The human genome is the ordering of genes in a determined set of chromosomes that contain all the genetic and hereditary memory of the human organism, i.e. the history of our DNA. Although distinct genomes have been decoded for racial groupings — European Caucasians, Asians, and Africans — science has never before been assigned to decipher the genome of a national state or nation which is, by definition, a political entity, and many here questioned the existence of a “Mexican Genome.”

Despite the nay sayers, Dr. Gerardo Jimenez, director of the National Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), whose scientists did the gene mapping, insists that the 89 deviations from genetic patterns found in other races justifies the national character of the “Mexican Genome.”

Other scientists scoffed at the INMEGEN project. Science writer Julio Munoz Rubio wondered if Calderon’s genome would prompt a genetic explanation for such peculiarly Mexican propensities as “mariachis, tequila, wife-beating, gay-bashing, and racist attitudes towards indigenous peoples.” Would a gene be discovered for electoral fraud and the corruption of public officials, asked one letter-writer to La Jornada, the left daily, pointing out that, according to a government audit, half a million Yanqui dollars appears to have gone missing during the construction of the INMEGEN headquarters in the south of the city.

Calderon’s political opponents also questioned the timing of the announcement of the discovery of the Mexican Genome during a health crisis that had been tainted by his administration’s overreaction to the swine flu pandemic after a six-week delay in alerting the public to the contagion.

The president countered his critics by lauding the cost benefits that the decoding of the Mexican Genome would mean for public health care. Cost effective preventative medicines and treatments could now be delivered to confront the nation’s Number One killers, diabetes and obesity. So-called “personalized” drugs would now be designed to deal with the health problems of the Mexican people. “Super Positive News!” read the crawl on the Univision report about the “Mexican Genome.”

But which Mexicans will be the beneficiaries of this cutting edge science? Mexico is, indeed, many nations. The vast bulk of the population — 80 million out of 103 million people — is of mixed European and indigenous stock (65% of the genetic material identified in the Mexican Genome is listed as “Amerindian”.) On the other hand, Mexico is home to 57 distinct ethnic groups or “peoples” (15 to 20 million, a fifth of all Mexicans) whose genetic make-up is distinct from the Mestizo population.

California: Fragmented, or what?

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By Tim Redmond

Calitics is awash with talk about the new Field Poll on California demographics And although the SF Chron has ignored it, ol’ Dan Walters at the Sacto Bee is all over it, lamenting that the poll shows “the division of a once-cohesive society into its many component parts.”

Robert Cruikshank takes issue with Walters:

California’s society has never, ever been cohesive. Not in the 20th century, not in the 19th century, not even during the dozens of millennia of Native American settlement. Certainly our electorate hasn’t been cohesive. Until the 1950s state politics were defined by an urban-rural split with a crosscutting cleavage (apologies for the poli sci jargon) of intensive racial division. Even after the legal barriers of racial exclusion came down at mid-century segregation and discrimination persisted.

All of which is certainly true. He continues:

Some fragmentation is likely to continue. Californians are continuing to self-segregate according to political preference, leaving only the newer and affordable exurbs as the few places in the state up-for-grabs.

And blames the political structure:

What I see as the main problem facing California is obsolescence. Our government and our politics are still stuck in 1978. We’ve had fragmentation and a well-governed state, and fragmentation and a badly-governed state. That suggests to me we need to look at a system of governance that has remained almost unchanged since 1978 despite all the demographic changes reported in the Field Poll.

Again, true — and getting rid of the two-thirds majority for budget approval would make a big difference. It wouldn’t, however, undo all of the other awful things about state politics, including Prop. 218, which makes it almost impossible for local government to raise taxes, and Prop. 13, which is in many ways the root cause of the state’s total economic meltdown.

Paul Hogarth at Beyond Chron imagines

a California where the state legislature passes a budget by majority rule, and you can register to vote on Election Day. Three Strikes has been reformed to require the third “strike” to be a violent felony, and we have single-payer health care. The wealthy pay a higher income tax rate, and – just like in Alaska and Texas – oil companies must pay a modest tax for the privilege of extracting oil.

And Hogart argues that the progressives need to take back the initiative process to make that happen.

For once, I’m going to be the downer here: I don’t see progressives winning a whole lot of major statewide initiatives that make structural reforms in California government. We can win one or two — we can certainly overturn Prop. 8, and maybe repeal the two-thirds tax rule.

Did Newsom forget to mention COPS cash during budget talks?

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By Rebecca Bowe

The San Francisco Police Department received $16.5 million in federal funding through the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) hiring grant program, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced July 28.

That’s a lot compared with the sums allocated to other cities throughout the country, but it’s just a fraction of the $89 million that Mayor Newsom and then-Police Chief Heather Fong requested for the SFPD in mid-April. So did the mayor mention that the city had applied to receive millions for the police from the federal government when the budget talks were going on?

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian that he was never informed that the city had applied for the COPS grant. “If in fact an application was submitted, then in my opinion it’s incumbent upon the mayor’s budget office and the police department to inform us of this,” Mirkarimi told us, adding that in his opinion, it should have come up during the budget talks.

City Hall’s collaborators

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

As the Board of Supervisors prepared to give final approval to the city budget July 21, Sup. John Avalos, who chairs the board’s Budget and Finance Committee, told his colleagues the budget deal that he and President David Chiu negotiated with Mayor Gavin Newsom is "ushering in a new spirit of cooperation and collaboration at City Hall."

But at the end of the day, frantic last-minute revisions and indignant criticism from Avalos’s progressive colleagues felt more like a family feud than the culmination of a team effort. Avalos and Chiu were able to restore $44 million of Newsom’s proposed cuts and got the mayor to promise to fund progressive priorities, such as public health and social services. Progressive supervisors, however, voiced deep skepticism about whether Newsom can be trusted.

To make matters more complicated, the messy conclusion of San Francisco’s budget process coincided with the news that Sacramento officials had finally struck a state budget deal that proposes borrowing more than $4 billion from local government coffers. So the city’s spending plan, balanced with no small amount of pain, may already be thrown out of balance.

Compounding that problem, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that San Francisco voters will have an opportunity to weigh in on new tax measures that could help soften the blow of rapidly declining city revenues this fall, a situation that could quickly test this "new spirit of cooperation."

The tension at the July 21 meeting stemmed from Newsom’s decision last year to close a massive cash shortage by making midyear cuts aimed at the heart of the progressive agenda — even after giving his word that he would not do so.

In some cases, the money was never allocated to begin with. According to a report prepared by the city’s budget analyst, "The Board of Supervisors approved $37,534,393 in monies that were restored in the FY 2008-2009 budget, which include $30,657,078 in General Fund monies and $6,877,315 in non-<\d>General Fund monies. Yet $15,627,397 in restored monies were either cut to meet mid-year reductions or never expended."

The mistrust generated by this episode and others prompted Sups. Chris Daly, Ross Mirkarimi, and David Campos to push for a series of last-minute changes that were designed to shield critical services from future cuts and give the board some power in its dealings with the Mayor’s Office.

"We need a hedge. We need a contingency. If we put a number of items on reserve … it gives us leverage," Mirkarimi noted. A Campos motion to place $45 million on reserve from the city’s seven largest departments was approved by the progressives on a 6-5 vote. Mirkarimi also succeeded in winning approval for a motion to move $900,000 from the trial courts to restore cuts to the Public Defender’s and District Attorney’s offices.

Other proposals failed to win over Avalos and Chiu, such as Mirkarimi’s pitch to target reserve funding for mayoral projects, including the Community Justice Center, 311 call center, and Newsom’s bloated communications staff. Daly’s suggestion to put $300 million on reserve also went nowhere.

"We are on the border of tearing apart a lot of goodwill," Avalos warned. "A $300 million reserve gets to toxic levels. I would be remiss in not saying that the mayor did give us his word. I believe that there was a new Board of Supervisors elected and … a new spirit of negotiation and collaboration in City Hall."

But Daly, making scathing references to "Gavin Christopher Newsom" as he fumed about budget cuts, clearly wasn’t buying it. Also on the afternoon’s agenda was his proposal to place a charter amendment on the ballot that would force the mayor to fund board-approved programs in the budget.

"Without it, we only have blunt instruments at our disposal," Daly said. "A blunt instrument is to take a significant fund, put it on reserve and have a hostage to make sure the administration doesn’t use this most significant loophole. This is crafted to allow a majority of the Board of Supervisors to place a special marker on an appropriation that the board feels strongly about."

But Daly’s idea went down in flames after Chiu and Avalos voted no along with Sups. Michela Alioto-Pier, Bevan Dufty, Sophie Maxwell, Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu. Afterward, Daly left the chambers and later returned to circulate a letter addressed to Chiu reading, "I am no longer interested in serving as Chair of the Rules Committee or Vice Chair of the City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee."

Daly wasn’t the only one not feeling this new spirit of collaboration. All the last-minute changes clearly exasperated Elsbernd, who paced his corner of the room for much of the meeting, rubbing his forehead, and looking irritated. Eventually, Elsbernd and Chu were the only two votes against the final budget.

The prospect of new revenue measures also dimmed at the meeting. A proposal to place a measure on the November ballot calling for a 0.5 percent sales tax hike fell short of the eight votes it needed (Alioto-Pier, Chu, Dufty, and Elsbernd voted no). And it’s still too early to say whether a move to place a vehicle tax on the ballot can move forward because it’s contingent on state legislation.

The state’s funding raid could also hit the city hard. Leo Levenson, budget and analysis director with the San Francisco Office of the Controller, told the Guardian the city stands to lose $71 million in General Fund dollars and $32 million in other funds, although those numbers were still in flux at press time.

"The state must repay these funds within three years with interest," Levenson explained. "It is likely that San Francisco could be able to borrow money to mitigate the short-term financial impacts of this proposal, since the state is legally obligated to repay the funds within three years."

If the state goes after the gas tax, it could impact the city’s General Fund by an additional $18 million, Levenson noted, "so the city would need to backfill this reduction to sustain basic street cleaning operations."

So budget season isn’t over yet.

Gabrielle Poccia contributed to this report.

A big Newsom “oops!”

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By TIm Redmond

Okay, here’s a big cringe-worthy oops from the Newsom for Governor website.

The mayor loves to talk about technology, and on his campaign website he talks about transparency:

Online Government for Transparency: Mayor Newsom has used technology to cultivate an ongoing conversation with San Francisco residents and to put city services online to increase accessibility and transparency. He recently launched SFrecovery.org to allow citizens to track and provide input on how San Francisco spends federal stimulus dollars and 72hours.org to better prepare San Francisco in the case of a disaster or emergency. And San Francisco’s government television station was recently ranked first among nearly 500 government agencies archiving streaming media content from government meetings.

Anyone who has followed Newsom knows he’s the last person who ought to be bragging about transparency — the guy won’t even release his daily schedule.

But here’s the cringe: Click on sfrecovery.org.

I don’t think that’s what the mayor had in mind.

Prison Report: The magical zip gun

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By Just A Guy

Editors Note: Just A Guy is an imate in a California state prison. His blogs run twice a week, typically on Mondays and Thursdays, although it’s sometimes hard to communicate from behind bars. You can read his last post here.

I am going to write about the budget deal and cuts to education, corrections and program spending. But I have to talk first about what’s happening at California State Prison, Solano yet again: The magic roaming zip gun.

About ten days ago officers in Building 6 “discovered” a note saying that “the blacks have a zip gun and three shells.” The entire institution was put on modified program and a search was conducted of Building 6, but no sip gun was found. Imagine that!

This morning we learned that Building 22 on Facility 4 is going to be searched because there’s a zip gun there now. We don’t know all the details yet, but do know that all programs have been shut down — except, of course, the programs that make money for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, like the Prison Industry Authority and the Substance Abuse Program, which receives money from the federal government.

This is at least the fifth time since March, 2008 that the magical roaming zip gun has made its presence known. The fifth time that programs beneficial to the inmates have been shut down — and likely the fifth time that no zip gun will be found. You can’t find what doesn’t exist.

It’s rather like the state passing a budget cutting $9 billion from education and only $1.2 billion from corrections. Wait! The schools will get the money back when times are better. Of course, by the times things are better, a lot of these could-have-been educated people will be in prison as they resorted to crime to make a living without a degree.

Obama plugs single-payer…sort of

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By Steven T. Jones

Only a single-payer system eliminates health insurance companies, which are portrayed as predatory pirates in this cartoon by Consumer Watchdog, with music by the Austin Lounge Lizards.

As President Barack Obama held a prime time news conference yesterday to boost his health care reform efforts, he tried to recast the imperative as saving the system for the average American rather than focusing on the 45 million Americans without insurance. But in the process of defending his plan, he also subtly reinforced the need for the single-payer system, as discussed in our cover story this week.

When asked about the approximately 2 percent of Americans that will be left uncovered by the Democrats’ plan, Obama said, “I want to cover everybody. Now, the truth is unless you have what’s called a single-payer system in which everyone’s automatically covered, you’re probably not going to reach every single individual.”

As Peter Baker wrote in the New York Times online story yesterday, Obama didn’t explain why he doesn’t then support single-payer, but Baker wrote, “In the past, he has said such a system might be preferable if the country were inventing a new health care structure from scratch but he does not want to completely upend the current system, which does work for many or most Americans.”

Unfortunately, that final statement is bullshit. Polls show most Americans don’t like the current system (56 percent want “major health care reform” this year, 62 percent want more government control over health care, etc.), although right-wing and insurance industry propaganda have made them scared of the change that is needed to realize the president’s goals of holding down costs, emphasizing preventive care, and ensuring universal access to quality and affordable care.

Upending the current system is precisely what needs to happen.

A messy wrap for city budget

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By Rebecca Bowe

Emotions run high and things get messy when there’s so much less cash to go around. Just as San Francisco’s 2009-2010 fiscal year budget was finally approved at yesterday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, the news from Sacramento was that the long-awaited state budget deal bridges California’s gaping budget deficit in part by raiding local-government coffers.

San Francisco’s own hacked-up budget went through a round of last-minute changes at yesterday’s meeting before approval, marking last-ditch efforts by Sups. Chris Daly, Ross Mirkarimi and David Campos to try and preserve add-backs to critical services and safeguard against future cuts. By the time a roll call vote was held on the final budget package, the document had been tweaked enough by last-minute revisions that Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu voted against it. And while those last-minute efforts might preserve some critical services, there’s no guarantee at this point that any new revenue measures will move forward to soften the blow of the cuts that were already made.

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