Government

The new Vietnam

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EDITORIAL And now, President George W. Bush wants to commit another 20,000 troops.

Twenty thousand more US kids, going to fight a war that can’t be won. Twenty thousand more lives in potential danger for no imaginable purpose. This isn’t the "surge" Bush has invoked; it’s an escalation, one reminiscent of the worst days of the Vietnam War, when Presidents Lyndon Johnston and then Richard Nixon sent more and more troops into a quagmire from which there was no good exit. If anything, Iraq is worse: when the United States fled Vietnam, there was at least a stable government to take over.

Bush has given the Democrats a huge opportunity here, a chance to create the sort of political sea change that only comes once or twice a decade. Watergate set the Republicans back for much of the 1970s. The energy crisis and the Iran hostage situation knocked the Democrats out of power in the 1980s, and Bill Clinton’s health care fiasco gave the GOP control of Congress in the 1990s. The Iraq War gave the House and Senate back to the Democrats last fall — and the Bush escalation could give them back the White House in 2008.

This is the end of the Bush presidency. Iraq will poison any Republican who sides with the president and supports the escalation. And it will be political gold for Democratic candidates and leaders — if they are willing to seize the opportunity.

That’s not by any means certain. Bush still has an ace in the perception hole: his spin team will insist that opposing funds for the increased military action will amount to a failure to support the troops. Democrats in Congress have refused to confront that line in the past — and with the party’s fear of being seen as soft on national security, it’s entirely possible that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will be outspoken in their criticism of the policy but cautious when it comes to cutting off funds.

That would be a serious mistake on every level.

Remember: the odds are very good that many of those 20,000 soldiers will never make it home and that many, many more will come home mutilated and maimed. The odds that this surge will succeed in controlling violence in Baghdad are next to zero. And since Bush is acting unilaterally, without congressional assent, the only way to stop this madness is to cut off funding.

Pelosi has been devoting most of her energy and political capital to the rather modest advances of the "100 hours" strategy. But frankly, nothing on her agenda is as important as ending the war. The House and Senate leadership need to move immediately to eliminate funding for any troop escalation. *

The governor’s wimpy health plan

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EDITORIAL The good news — and it’s very good news indeed — is that the governor of California has followed the lead of the city of San Francisco and is talking seriously about a universal health care plan. This is the first time since the early days of the Clinton administration — before the insurance companies destroyed even a modest hope of national reform — that we can sense real momentum toward the creation of a new policy to address one of the most pressing issues in the country.

But let’s be clear: the governor’s proposal falls far short of real reform. It has a few attractive features, but overall it’s underfunded, at points dysfunctional — and ducks the most basic problems with the state’s health insurance system.

Like Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger starts with a failed premise — that private insurance, linked to employment, can somehow solve the problem. The evidence against that is so clear it’s frustrating even to have to make the argument. Private health insurance is expensive and inefficient; the amount of money that’s wasted on overhead and profits is staggering (as much as 30 cents out of every health care dollar never makes it to any hospital or clinic). The incentive to bilk consumers, avoid covering the sickest of patients, and reward suffering is disgracefully high. The fact that the United States is the only Western industrialized country without a functioning national health care program is a direct result of the fact that private insurers run the show.

Employer-based health insurance is a failed system too, an amalgam that grew out of the federal government’s failure to recognize the need for a national health system in the postwar era and the demands of unionized workers for better benefits. Workplaces offer insurance companies what they want — large pools of people among whom to share the risk. But linking insurance to employment is obviously a bad idea at a time when more and more people are working part-time jobs, contract jobs, or a series of different jobs for different companies — and when small businesses (which create most of the jobs in the country) are getting hammered by double-digit annual increases in health insurance premiums.

So any plan that accepts the private-sector hegemony over health insurance is doomed to fail in the long term.

The Schwarzenegger plan has another dangerous component: the proposal would require everyone in the state to buy health insurance (at the risk of criminal penalties for noncompliance). That, of course, is an insurance industry dream — it makes the entire population a captive customer base. And while the governor promises to offer lower-cost plans and subsidies for the poor, there’s nowhere near enough money in his proposal to make private insurance affordable to all. Low-income people would be driven to buy high-deductible plans, which undermine the entire idea of universal health care. And middle-class people who don’t have employer-based plans may be devastated: in San Francisco, for example, a family of four living on $60,000 a year would have to put as much as $10,000 of that into health insurance or risk steep fines.

The overall financing is shaky — the governor is counting on federal funding to help put an additional 630,000 people on the Medi-Cal rolls, but Congress has a long list of spending priorities, and there’s no guarantee this one will make the final cut.

There are things to like about the plan, particularly the goal of covering all children in the state, including the kids of undocumented immigrants. And the very fact that the ambitious governor of the nation’s largest state is willing to stake so much on health care reform is encouraging.

But the legislature is under no obligation to start the discussion with the governor’s plan. There’s already an excellent bill out there: SB 840, by Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D–Santa Monica). Her suggestion: get the insurance industry out of the game altogether and create a statewide fund, with premiums paid by employers and individuals, that would cover all Californians. It would save businesses in the state a fortune (and thus give the economy a jolt), cut down on waste and fraud, allow people to move from job to job without fear of losing health care, and give the government a strong incentive to push for lower drug costs.

That’s where the debate ought to begin. *

Off the record

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Among the mansions and box stores popuutf8g Silicon Valley are several major tech firms at the heart of a stock option backdating scandal that has metastasized through corporate America over the last two years.

The hall of shame includes Juniper Networks, McAfee, Nvidia, Brocade Communications Systems, and most notably for this story, a Mountain View–based firm called Mercury Interactive, which came under scrutiny in late 2004, making it one of the earliest companies identified for allegedly tampering with the lucrative stock options given to employees.

While some of the half-billion-dollar backdating mess at Mercury has appeared in the business press already, additional details contained in a civil lawsuit filed by investors are under seal in Santa Clara County Superior Court, and three news outlets want them opened up by a judge.

"These companies fleeced investors, and the public has a right to know," Karl Olson, an attorney for the outlets, told Judge James Kleinberg during a hearing Jan 5. Olson is representing the San Francisco Chronicle, Bloomberg News, and the Recorder legal newspaper. He added the defendants have "not shown an overriding interest that supports sealing any of these records."

Attorneys for the company and its fallen former executives have not cited trade secrets or proprietary information — commonly used excuses in corporate litigation — as reasons for keeping the filings sealed. Instead, they seem to be worried the documents will paint an even more sordid picture of executive misdeeds than what’s already come out, and they want to block the press from telling the full story.

But there is an interesting irony to the Chronicle insisting it is entitled to access this information. The newspaper’s parent company, the Hearst Corp., asked a federal judge to withhold from the public some of its own company records unearthed amid a federal civil suit leveled against it and other media giants over the summer.

San Francisco real estate mogul Clint Reilly filed an antitrust claim against Hearst and its rival–cum–business partner, Denver-based MediaNews Group, owner of several Bay Area newspapers, arguing that a bid between the companies to share business expenses was illegal. The Guardian has joined an effort with the nonprofit Media Alliance to unseal records related to Reilly’s suit.

But in the Mercury case, attorneys for the company and its former executives complain individuals not listed as defendants "would have their identities revealed and be implicated in alleged misconduct."

Mercury certainly would like to forget its troublesome past. Computer giant Hewlett-Packard is closing out its purchase of the company for $4.5 billion, taking on Mercury’s liabilities and obviously hoping to put the backdating matter to bed.

Nationwide, somewhere between 150 and 200 companies (reports vary) are internally investigating options problems or have received inquiries from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal agency charged with ensuring publicly traded firms reveal essentially every major move they make.

Mercury was founded in 1989 and produces business software for companies worldwide. In another bit of irony, Mercury specializes in making a group of applications designed to help corporate clients fully comply with the new federal financial disclosure rules passed by Congress as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act following Enron’s implosion.

Amnon Landan, the former Mercury CEO who resigned in November 2005 under pressure following an internal probe, is said to have exercised $5.5 million worth of options and sold 1.04 million company shares for a total of $73.6 million "during the period of wrongdoing," according to another suit filed by investors in federal court last spring.

Two additional executives resigned at the same time as Landan. The list of plaintiffs in the federal suit, which charges that Mercury’s backdating imbroglio greatly damaged the company’s market value, includes the retirement system for New Orleans municipal employees.

The value of a stock option is determined by its closing price per share on the day the option is granted. Instead of listing that particular date when the options are later exercised, backdating an option generally involves picking a spot earlier on the calendar. That way, employees of companies that make it big can reap huge windfall profits far bigger than they were entitled to receive. As Duke law professor James Cox somewhat famously described backdating, it’s like betting on a race and knowing who the winner will be.

Silicon Valley’s start-ups during the tech boom relied on hopes and dreams more than directly available cash assets to flashpoint their growth. To attract the best executive talent around, they offered stock options in exchange for hefty salaries. If the top suits performed well from the beginning, when the stock price was low, they could sell the shares much later when their value had climbed sky-high.

But some of the still relatively young companies that dot the fringes of Highway 101 where it weaves toward downtown San Jose are today being charged with failing to inform investors and government regulators just how many zeros were involved in those enriching IOUs.

Defense attorney James Kramer made an important point about backdating, however, to Judge Kleinberg during last week’s hearing. "There is nothing about backdating that is illegal," he said. "The issue is whether you properly account for it."

Yet Mercury didn’t properly account for more than $567 million in compensation expenses over a 12-year period in its SEC filings. And that’s what is illegal. The IRS heavily taxes earnings from backdated stock options, which are akin to tax-free bonuses that aren’t reported to the SEC. Investors say the failure to disclose the backdating exposed the company to heavy tax penalties, money that came from shareholders.

"Throughout the development of the options scandal, Mercury Interactive has been one of the most significant companies for the public to watch, due to both the primacy and seriousness of its options problems," Recorder reporter Justin Scheck wrote in a declaration to the judge last week. The Recorder, which serves about 20,000 readers in the state’s legal community, asked Jan. 5 for Kleinberg to open the records.

Recorder attorney Olson, who regularly represents the Chronicle in such open-records cases, argued in a memo to the court that the desire to shield top Mercury execs from "adverse publicity" and "potentially embarrassing corporate documents" doesn’t justify withholding up to 17 exhibits that Mercury wants to keep away from the press and the public. Petitions submitted to the court regarding the sealed portions of the case are public and were obtained by the Guardian last week.

The defendants’ attorneys said the investors signed a confidentiality agreement early in the suit so that evidence could be more freely exchanged with Mercury during discovery, and they want that promise kept.

"The plaintiffs in the [Santa Clara] suit are not roving attorneys general who are tasked with pursing every defendant who they believe has done something wrong or caused harm to someone else," Brandon Wisoff, a defense attorney in the case, said in a phone interview. "The purpose of a derivative suit is for a shareholder to recover on behalf of a corporation in which he or she owns stock, because he or she is indirectly impacted by any harm that allegedly occurred to the corporation."

The Santa Clara suit’s status as a derivative claim could lead Judge Kleinberg to toss it out, since HP has purchased Mercury. For that reason, Wisoff says, documents produced before the sale aren’t going to be used in court and so shouldn’t be accessible to the public.

"Non-defendant third parties also would have their identities revealed and be implicated in the alleged misconduct" if the records were opened, attorney Thomas Martin wrote in a declaration to the court. In other words, the documents could suggest how much was known about the problems with backdating at Mercury. And that might be of concern to more than just the company’s investors.

Martin, who declined to comment over the phone for us, is representing Kenneth Klein, a former Mercury chief operating officer who left the company in 2003 and has not officially been linked by Mercury to backdating problems but is nonetheless listed as a defendant in the Santa Clara suit.

Thomas and the other defense attorneys argue the investors’ court filings openly cite sealed discovery material, which presumably includes references to Klein’s alleged involvement in or knowledge of backdating, given his status as a defendant, as well as the names of others possibly listed in the documents. They’re arguing Mercury and its executive defendants could not publicly rebut suggestions made by the media about their involvement.

While Kleinberg seemed sympathetic to the notion that the press doesn’t always do the best job reporting on civil allegations, he said it’s a fact of life that most civil complaints — even ones that say "very outrageous things about people and institutions" — fall into the public domain.

But Amber Eck, an attorney for the investors who are now advocating for the filings to be opened, says the complaints made in the suit are far from frivolous and the company’s own board investigation identified who had participated in the misconduct and who knew about it. She said the whole story hasn’t been told.

"There’s a lot saying there was backdating and the amount of the [SEC financial] restatements," Eck said in a phone interview. "But what I was explaining to the judge was that as far as the details on the manner and the process in which it happened … that isn’t really out there yet, and that’s contained in our complaint and the exhibits."

Janet Guyon, an editor at Bloomberg News in New York who has watched the options backdating scandal unfold, told the judge in a declaration that the public deserves a "window into this litigation" to ensure fairness for investors who are expected to trust promises of transparency made by public companies.

"More than 80 companies have announced earnings restatements totaling over $8.8 billion, including $84 million most recently by Apple Computer, which admitted it forged documents recording a directors’ meeting to award its CEO backdated options," Guyon stated. "At least 65 executives or directors have resigned and 300 lawsuits have been filed against 100 companies. Yet little light has been shed on how this practice got started and why it continued." *

Declaration by Bloomberg News editor Janet Guyon to judge Kleinberg on why the Mercury records should be unsealed.


Declaration by local reporter Justin Scheck on why the Mercury records should be unsealed.

Application by attorney Jared Kopel for defendant Kenneth Klein on why the records should continue to be sealed.


Declaration by attorney Thomas Martin for defendant Kenneth Klein on why the records should continue to be sealed.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The biggest challenge facing Democrats in Congress this year is probably also the most boring. They’re going to have to deal with taxes.

I’m not the only one obsessed with this. Really, I’m not. Edmund L. Andrews got into it in the New York Times on Jan. 4, noting that the new Democratic leadership is utterly ducking the question of how to handle some of the major fiscal headaches that are going to rear their ugly heads.

Bear with me while we run some numbers.

The Iraq War is going to cost $100 billion in 2007, maybe more if Bush gets his troop "surge." Fixing the problem that causes more and more middle-class people to shoulder an extra tax burden under the alternative minimum tax will cost $50 billion. The Bush tax cuts — which the president wants to make permanent — are another huge-ticket item, maybe $170 billion a year (based on estimates from the Brookings Institution).

So that’s $320 billion to deal with — even before the Democrats spend a penny on any new initiatives or so much as talk about making Social Security solvent.

And, of course, there’s a $340 billion budget deficit, which keeps adding to the federal debt, which is a number so big that nobody can really comprehend it, so I won’t bother here except to say that the interest payments alone are $400 billion a year.

The Democrats have already announced they want to see any new spending come with a revenue source and any new tax cut proposals identify reductions in existing spending that would pay for them. All well and good — except that the Iraq War isn’t part of the federal budget. Bush just keeps coming back for money every few months, and Democrats who don’t want to be accused of refusing to support the troops in the field wind up voting to give him all of it.

Now let’s go to the political calculus, which is even uglier.

The only major politician I know of in the last electoral cycle who talked honestly about taxes and government spending was Phil Angelides, who (as some of you may remember) ran for governor of California. He was slaughtered.

That’s why the Times reports the following:

"Even as Democratic leaders continue to accuse Mr. Bush of having a reckless fiscal policy, they have refused to discuss dismantling his tax cuts or even to engage in a debate with him about the best way to stimulate economic growth.

" ‘It’s always the same old tired line with them — "Tax and spend, tax and spend, tax and spend," ‘ said Senator Kent Conrad, the North Dakota Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. ‘We’re not going there.’ "

No, so far they’re not. They’re just moving ahead, making promises and proposing policy, without saying either that spending on Iraq has to be cut dramatically or that somebody has to pay more taxes to fund it.

Even by Bush’s most optimistic projections, the national budget will be in the red until 2012. By then he and his crew will all be safe on the golf course, their retirements secure.

And apparently, the Democratic leaders are willing to continue to duck, continue to go into debt, continue to screw up the economy, and continue to burden our kids with the results of our greed, fear, and stupidity.

Nancy? *

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.

 

A reporter stands up to the army

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Oakland freelance writer and radio journalist Sarah Olson has a tall, willowy frame; long silky hair; and a clearly articulated understanding of the reasons she believes that testifying against a source, First Lt. Ehren Watada, would turn her into an investigative tool of the federal government and chill dissenting voices across the United States.

Watada faces a court-martial in February; he’s charged with one count of missing troop movement and four counts of conduct unbecoming an officer — charges that stem from interviews he gave Olson along with other reporters in 2006 in which he openly criticized the Bush administration and the war on Iraq.

Olson faces her own legal nightmare: if she doesn’t testify against Watada, the government can charge her with a felony. That’s potentially more serious than the contempt of court charges against freelance videographer Josh Wolf and San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada.

"My argument for being against having to comply with the subpoena is strictly journalistic, " says Olson, who has been covering the antiwar movement and the conscientious objector movement since 2003. "When the government uses a journalist as its eyes and ears, no one is going to talk to that journalist any more."

Beyond the fear that her own professional credibility will be eviscerated, the 31-year-old Olson objects to journalists, including herself, being asked to participate in the prosecution of free speech.

Although all the Army wants her to do is assert her stories quoting Watada are true, she’s not going along. "The problem I have with verifying the accuracy of my reporting is that in this case the Army has made speech a crime. Watada’s case raises incredibly important speech issues as to what is and isn’t legal for an officer to say. Can Watada’s defense put the war on trial? Can you bring the question of the legality of this war into the discussion? Normally, that wouldn’t be allowed into discussion in a military court, but since he’s been charged with speech issues, shouldn’t he be allowed to have the opportunity to put those statements in context?"

And while her stories and radio broadcasts are readily and publicly available to Army prosecutors, Olson points out, "Once they get you up on the stand, they can ask you anything."

What binds the Olson, Wolf, and Williams–Fainaru-Wada cases are the broader issues of press and speech freedom and the absence of a strong reporter’s shield at the federal level.

"The proposed federal shield laws offers poor protection to journalists, but they probably wouldn’t even cover me, and they probably wouldn’t cover bloggers ever," observes Olson, referring to the legislation currently under congressional consideration.

As for entering into a conversation about who is or isn’t a journalist (as the San Francisco Police Department and the District Attorney’s Office have sought to do in Wolf’s case), Olson says, "[That] is degrading for the whole profession. And what it doesn’t do is stand up for the civil liberties that are constitutionally afforded to everyone, nor does it protect a meaningful and independent press."

"My duty," Olson says, "is the public and its right to know and not to the government. I’m concerned that the Army is asking a journalist to participate in the suppression of free speech." *

She’s a Pakistani tranny, Johnnies

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Tranny of the Year (so far): The New York Times just published an article on Ali Saleem, better known to Pakistani prime time viewers as Begum Nawazish Ali, hostess of the wildly popular (at least among more secular Karachi residents) “Late Night Show With Begum Nawazish Ali.” A self-described transvestite who poses as a “flirty, teasing widow” who’s obsessed with glamor and subtle political commentary, she somehow gets away with some amazing taboo-breaking she-ite on her weekly talk show over there.

alisaleem.jpg

First I melted, then I hit up YouTube. One word: WHAT??? People, I think I’m in love. Anyone who blames the government for her hair color in both Urdu (I think) and English — and addresses her audience as “Johnnies” — has my undying devotion. Work it out, lady.

Localize it

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› news@sfbg.com

In what some experts are hailing as a first for sustainability movements in the United States, a coalition of policy organizations has unveiled a comprehensive campaign to reduce the Bay Area’s reliance on global markets in favor of a more locally based economy.

If the plan is embraced by local government agencies and brought to fruition, it could be the first significant reversal of the decades-long march toward globalization, which encourages powerful multinational corporations to exploit cheap labor and transport goods long distances.

The Bay Area is rife with testaments to globalization, from the rusty shells of once prosperous manufacturing plants to the gleaming big-box chain stores filled with cheap Chinese-made clothing and gadgets, from the customer service call answered in India to the foreign parts in our "American made" cars and computers.

Yet at the same time, there are the countervailing forces of localism. For every grocery store stocked with out-of-season produce grown across the world with petrochemicals by big agricultural corporations, there is a community farmers market selling locally grown organic fruit.

Most of globalism’s many faces have a local equivalent. Consumers can buy a burrito at Taco Bell or El Toro, a hammer at Home Depot or Cole Hardware, a new shirt from the Gap or a recycled garment from Held Over, and a bicycle assembled at a factory in China or Freewheel Cyclery.

Or on a grander scale, utilities can import kilowatts of energy from a coal-fired plant in Utah or buy wind and solar power generated in the Bay Area, city governments can contract with out-of-state corporations or locals, and financial institutions can push the status quo or value a more diversified (if less profitable) economic system.

The idea of the localization movement is to analyze the impacts of those choices and start a discussion of how local governments can facilitate the creation of an economy that is more sustainable and less exploitive, one that is unique to the Bay Area.

BEGINNING THE PROCESS


The coalition, which formed in spring 2006, recently released a 30-page report that details the purpose of its campaign and the group’s initial strategy for achieving its goals. The report, titled "Building a Resilient and Equitable Bay Area," and a two-page summary are available online at www.regionalprogress.org. More than two dozen organizations have already endorsed the report, including Oakland’s and Berkeley’s respective sustainability offices.

The coalition’s members include Redefining Progress, Bay Localize, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), the International Forum on Globalization, and the Center for Sustainable Economy. With the exception of the last, which is in Santa Fe, NM, all of the groups are located in either San Francisco or Oakland.

A key feature of the campaign — and the reason some experts describe the initiative as unique in the United States — is its scope. Efforts to localize individual sectors of regional economies have been under way for years. Berkeley, for instance, is considered a leader in the growing movement to shift from a food system dominated by a handful of giant agribusinesses propped up by federal crop subsidies to a system that relies more on local production and procurement of food. Similarly, many areas are considering ways of creating and encouraging the use of alternative — and local — energy sources to limit dependence on imported oil.

What sets the new Bay Area campaign apart from other localization initiatives is that it seeks to effect change across several sectors of the region’s economy simultaneously. It hopes to do so, in part, by achieving the cooperation and coordination of businesses, government officials, and community leaders at the federal, state, and local levels.

The report defines economic localization as "the process by which a region … frees itself from an overdependence on the global economy and invests in its own resources to produce a significant portion of the goods, services, food, and energy it consumes."

In an interview with the Guardian, John Talberth, one of the report’s primary authors and a PhD economist at Redefining Progress, stressed that economic "isolationism is not the goal of the campaign."

Instead, he said the goal is "reestablishing an efficient balance between imports and products made locally for local consumption." In other words, even if the Bay Area localizes its economy according to the strategy proposed by the coalition, many products would still be imported. The economy would, therefore, remain dependent on global markets — but much less so than it is now.

And that could have significant ramifications for the region, humans, and the planet.

THE PRICE OF PROGRESS


The report acknowledges the benefits of globalization, which has kept consumer prices low and forced corporations to become more efficient. But, the authors note, "it has come at a steep price."

That price includes "a loss of economic diversity, declining real wages and working conditions, increasing inequality, offshoring of environmental degradation, and a concentration of financial capital and economic decision-making in global corporations." The changes have left people "vulnerable to inevitable supply and price shocks in the post peak oil era."

In other words, perhaps global capitalism is reaching the point of diminishing returns. The coalition posits that the antidote is localization, which has great potential "for creating a wider range of local jobs and institutions, shielding our economy from global shifts, increasing the diversity and quality of goods and services we consume, distributing economic benefits in a more equitable manner, and protecting our environment."

The Bay Area is the focus of the coalition’s campaign because its member organizations are located here and because those members believe there is already a great deal of public support in the region for such a project.

Kirsten Schwind, programs coordinator at Bay Localize, told the Guardian there was an "overwhelmingly positive response" to a recent project targeted at supporting local food producers. Both Schwind and Don Shaffer, executive director of BALLE, cited Oakland’s Kaiser Permanente as an example of the increasing number of businesses that are altering their buying habits to favor local sellers. Shaffer also said the Oakland and San Francisco school boards are buying locally produced food and the Oakland City Council is setting targets for local energy production.

But even if much of the Bay Area is receptive to the idea of economic localization, other groups are not. There remains a powerful current of support in government, business, and academia for a predominantly global economy.

Traditional economists, for instance, are reflexively hostile to localization initiatives because such projects do not conform to the concepts embodied in so-called free-trade and free-market theories.

NAYSAYERS


The Guardian interviewed three UC Berkeley professors who do not agree with the report’s view of globalism. None of the professors had read the report — despite the fact that the Guardian forwarded it to them before the interviews — but all said they were familiar with the basic ideas behind localization.

Each expressed a knee-jerk hostility to the concept, but once they began discussing the details of localization, they agreed with the coalition on many points. And the professors’ initial objections to localization — including the notion that it would return economies to a more primitive state and that it is isolationist in principle — were mostly rhetorical and unrelated to the coalition’s specific recommendations.

Two of the professors — Daniel M. Kammen, who teaches in the Energy Resources Group as well as the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Department of Nuclear Engineering, and David Vogel, who teaches in the Haas School of Business, the Political Science Department, and the Goldman School — were immediately opposed to the idea of a comprehensive localization strategy.

Vogel, in particular, seemed at first to make light of economic localization, calling it a "romantic notion that periodically resurfaces," and more than once asked laughingly whether the coalition "expects Bay Area residents to watch only movies made in the Bay Area."

Another professor, Lee Friedman, a PhD economist who teaches at the Goldman School, said, "Globalization is a lot like the problem of gays in the military: mend it, don’t end it."

But Friedman likes the idea — a central one in the report — of including all costs in the price of goods. That’s particularly true of environmental costs. This might raise the price of electronics to pay for their disposal or of gas-guzzling vehicles to pay for their global-warming impacts — both ideas being explored by the European Union.

All three professors also had some very positive things to say about economic localization. Kammen, like Friedman, strongly believes that communities should pursue local — and low-carbon — energy production because the environmental impact associated with producing in a foreign country and shipping to the United States is far greater than that of local production.

"Localization advocates are making some excellent points that people ought to pay attention to," Friedman said. He agreed the Bay Area imports too much of its food. Vogel expressed a similar sentiment, saying that buying locally is a "great idea." He also said localization could help to address urban sprawl. By the end of the interview, Vogel softened his initially dismissive attitude toward localization, deeming "aspects of it interesting and attractive."

Talberth and other coalition members say challenging the economic concepts supporting globalization — like those taught by Friedman and most other economics scholars — is a central task of their campaign.

Critics of traditional economic theory have for a long time been saying that too many economists base their research and resulting recommendations on economic models that bear little resemblance to the way the real world operates.

Although economists often bristle at that criticism, Friedman has acknowledged to his students the flaws in prevailing economic models but said, "Until someone comes up with better models, people shouldn’t complain about the existing ones."

Yet Hazel Henderson, a coalition member and the author of Beyond Globalization, and Talberth say alternatives to the current models are well established and have been around for years. They criticize the fact that economic growth is measured by the gross domestic product (GDP), a simplistic calculus that doesn’t take into account economic activity that is harmful to people or the planet.

They prefer new indicators, like the genuine progress indicator (GPI), that account for costs and benefits the traditional indicators do not factor in. The report calculates the GPI for each of the Bay Area’s nine counties. The European Union has already adopted this kind of alternative measure of an economy’s well-being.

WHAT’S NEXT?


Engaging the public is the coalition’s next big goal. Despite the overall support that Schwind and others say already exists in the Bay Area for localization, they admit there are challenges to mobilizing citizens.

"It’s well documented that people tend not to act unless there is a crisis," Shaffer said. But he also said that "giving people Armageddon scenarios" will not work because such stories are depressing and, more importantly, "people are too busy to think comprehensively about that sort of thing."

Instead, Shaffer and Schwind said the coalition plans on putting out a "positive, hopeful" message focusing on the benefits that will accrue to individuals and communities if they adopt localization.

Beyond getting the public involved, the coalition is encouraging local, state, and federal government organizations to conduct studies assessing the challenges and true costs of relying so heavily on global markets. Talberth acknowledged that:

"Getting [those] assessments done is a big challenge."

Ultimately, the coalition would like the Bay Area to serve as a model of localization for other areas in the United States. Shaffer said the group is "not looking to put a formulaic stamp on other regions" but hopes instead that such places will be influenced to adopt localization measures in light of the Bay Area’s success.

Shaffer said the food and energy sectors, along with retail, are already understood well by consumers, at least intuitively. So he predicts the coalition could achieve significant results in those sectors within five years. Spreading those advances to other parts of the economy could take another 10 years after that.

Shaffer, Talberth, and Schwind all said that change is coming whether people want it or not, mostly due to global warming. So they argue for the Bay Area to embrace change now and begin to make the needed changes gradually, before they are painfully thrust upon us. We can localize our world or simply accept whatever the global economy dishes out. *

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

Executions are gruesome shit

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By Tim Redmond

If you haven’t seen the truly grim footage of Saddam Hussein’s hanging, you can view it here. Luke Thomas posted it on Fog City Journal, but I don’t think any of the other local sites have links up.

I understand why people avoid this sort of thing: It’s really nasty to look at. But there’s a reason Americans should see it, and (with the advent of cell-phone cameras, and soon, little cameras hidden in all sorts of other gadgets) footage of executions, including California killings, is going to become more and more common.

The United States has tried hard to make executions seem almost clinical: The electric chair and the gas chamber have been replaced with lethal execution, which is supposed to be painless. We know that isn’t always true; in fact, killing someone is never pretty and is never going to be pretty.

And if the state is going to do the killing, the public needs to know what it’s paying for.

In this case, we paid for a hanging. Don’t kid yourself — your tax dollars paid for that rope and those gallows. And the United States, which controls virtually every move the Iraqi government makes, was happy to alllow this to go forward.

God bless America.

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

Of Hearst, Singleton, the WLSBs, and the documents of collaboration

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

To get the citizen’s point of view, I have long maintained that every reporter and every editor and every publisher ought sooner or later to be the center of a story and see how the media works.

I found the exercise most instructive when the Media Alliance and the Guardian, represented by the First Amendment Project (Attys. James Wheaton, David Greene, and Pondra Perkins), went into federal court on Thursday to intervene and seek to unseal key records in the Reilly vs. Hearst/Singleton antitrust trial. Our three P.S. organizations put out a press release with the spokespersons listed for contact (Jeff Perlstein from the Media Alliance, James Wheaton and David Greene from FAP, and myself from the Guardian.)

I got several calls from the Associated Press (Terence Chea, who did an excellent story that ran around the country), Kate Williamson of the Examiner, James Allen from the alternative paper Random Lengths in San Pedro (who was rightly agitated about the Hearst/ Singleton deal to buy the Daily Breeze in Torrance and further encroach on his turf), Mark Fitzgerald of Editor and Publisher was in touch, and others. Significantly, even though Hearst and Singleton have a lock on the Bay Area press, not one of their many reporters nor editors contacted me. (Subtle point: that is the wave of the future with these folks). Nobody from Hearst or Singleton even called or checked in to try to make the point that, even though they have five law firms and l2 or so attorneys in federal court heaving and sweating mightily to argue they really aren’t collaborating, they don’t even have to make a show of doing the journalistic minimum of doing an honest story. More: they didn’t even have to put on a show even though the lawsuit was aimed at their Achilles heel: their secret documents of collaboration. And of course they didn’t quote me or, when they did in the case of the Examiner, they mangled my point about why we were suing.

For the record, I said in the press release and in interviews with reporters: “Our intent here is to ensure that the naton’s biggest chains (Hearst, Singleton, McClatchy, Gannett, Stephens), as they move to destroy daily competition and impose regional monopoly in the Bay Area, cannot do so in the dark of night with sealed records that set a terrible precedent for the free press, the First Amendment, and open government.”

And so the two big papers, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, gave us two more wimpy little stories buried deep in their business section. Those who are attentive readers of the Bruce blog would know how to find them. For example, the Chronicle put its wimpy little story in the Daily Digest column just above the fold on page two of the business section under the rousing head, “Media groups want documents unsealed.”

Its last paragraph is classic monopolyese: “(Judge) Illston issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday barring MediaNews and Hearst Corp. from collaborating until at least April 30, when Reilly’s case is expected to go to trial. (B3: Is this premature collaboration? Is it like premature ejaculation?) Attorneys for MediaNews and Hearst have argued that no collaboration plan is in the works but that should one emerge in the future, it would not be illegal.” Repeating for emphasis: “Attorneys for MediaNews and Hearst have argued that no collaboration plan is in the works but that should one emerge in the future, it would not be illegal.”
Marvelous. Simply marvelous. That is Hearst boilerplate corporate policy and it is a classic of self-immolation. Compare it with AP’s version: “On Tuesday, Illston barred Bay Area newspapers owned by MediaNews and Hearst from consolidating some of their business operations until the lawsuit is resolved. When she issued a temporary restraining order against the alliance in November, Illston said she had been under the impression that Hearst’s investment was solely an equity stake, but an April 26 memo had surfaced suggesting it actually was a bid to merge some of their business operations.” Alioto got this scarlet letter in discovery and used it in his brief to show that Hearst was in effect lying in court about its documents of collaboration. The judge quoted from this critical letter, but it is still under seal and so are other key documents that would likely show the Hearst/Singleton plans for regional monopoly. Significantly, the AP story ran in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a Hearst paper.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the bay, the Mercury News
was doing its own wimpy little story in the “Business Digest” in its business section, a two paragraph story with the rousing head “Plaintiffs seek records in antitrust media case.” The story was not even a Merc story, it was pinched without attribution from the AP story (another wave of the future). From now on, I shall refer to these stories as WLSBs.

Over in the near East Bay, Josh Richman did a much better story that appeared in both the Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times (a one reporter-covers-it-all concept that is another wave of the future.) Richman got some good quotes, including a notable one from Joseph Alioto, Reilly’s attorney.
“‘Oh, good, it’s about time,'” Alioto said of the lawsuit filing, adding that it was crucial for all details of an antitrust case. ‘It’s the archetypal example of hypocrisy when major newspapers take the right of the people to know applies to everyone except themselves.'”(Note the copy editing issues, another wave of the future with the staff cutbacks).

Significantly, none of the Hearst/Singleton reporters could get a single Hearst nor Singleton executive to comment on the lawsuit in their own papers. The ducking was delicious. Richman wrote: “Alan Marx, MediaNews’ attorney, declined comment. A Hearst spokesman could not be reached.” The Merc/AP reported: “Hearst officials were reviewing the motion and could not comment Thursday, said spokesman Paul Luthringer. Representatives at MediaNews did not immediately respond to a request for comment.” In short, the nation’s biggest chains are seeking to impose an ever more conservative news, editorial and endorsement line on one of the most liberal and civilized areas of the world, just as they ought to be raising holy hell about Bush, the Patriot Act, and the unending war in Iraq. And they are stonewalling like hell, in federal court and in their own papers, to keep secret the documents of collaboration.

And so there you have it: the state of daily journalism in the Bay Area, Friday, Dec. 22, 2007. There is much more to come. Follow our stories and editorials in the Guardian, on our website, and in the Bruce blog. Things of great moment are in the making.

P.S. Repeating: where the hell are the antitrust attorneys in the U.S. Justice Department? And where the hell is outgoing Attorney General Bill Lockyer and incoming Attorney General Jerry Brown? B3

Eureka! More on how monopoly papers cover monopoly news

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

And so there it was, buried today in the business pages of the Chronicle/Hearst, the Contra Costa Times/Singleton, and the San Jose Mercury News/Singleton, the latest major development in one of the great buried stories of our time in the local daily press.

Editor and Publisher, the trade magazine for newspapers, got this major story right: Its online head read, “S.F. Judge Blocks Hearst/MediaNews Collaboration,” and its strong lead made the key point: “In a victory for a local businessman seeking to overturn a complex San Francisco Bay Area newspaper deal between Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group Inc., a federal judge Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction blocking the chains from collaborating on joint distribution or advertising sales of their papers.”

This was an important ruling in the Clint Reilly/Joe Alioto antitrust case, which stands as the only real impediment to the Hearst/Singleton deal that would destroy daily competition and impose regional monopoly in the Bay Area.
(See Guardian stories and previous blogs.)

But the ruling and the coverage by burial by the Hearst/Singleton press illustrates a major problem with the case: the publishers, who are normally hollering about the government suppression of documents and government manipulation of the news, this time got the documents sealed and so only their side of the story is getting out. Hearst/Singleton got a stringent protective order that gives them essentially unreviewable discretion to control the documents in the case. (Alioto presumably agreed to the order to get an early trial date).

Here’s how this works: Hearst/Singleton designate any document they are producing in discovery as “secret.”Alioto cannot contest that under the order, nor is there any dispute mechanism by which he can challenge it. If Alioto wants the document, he has to accept it under the protective order. Then, if he wants to file it with the court, he has to do so under seal. And, under the protective order, the judge has no discretion and must appeal the seal order. Alioto’s brief is also sealed, if it references the sealed document. This was the case with the critical April 26, 2006 letter from Hearst to Singleton that outlined an agreement to explore joint national and internet adversiting sales as well as joint distribution.

The judge has referenced and quoted the letter and stated in her preliminary injunction order that the letter “is in the form of a potentially binding agremeent” and indicates the two companies have “expressed the desire, if not the intent,” to collaborate in the Bay Area. Yet the letter is under seal, as is another letter the judge has quoted and a whole batch of obviously explosive discovery documents which Alioto got under discovery.

The letter is a publisher document and is not under seal and they can talk about it if they want to. After all, if they want to disclose their own secrets, it is up to them. Thus: the publishers have crafted a protective order that gives them control of the documents, gives the court no power to control its own filings, and no way for anyone to challenge any secret designations. The effect is that the Riley/Alioto filings are secret, the publishers filings are public, the public gets only one side of the story. And then the Hearst/Singleton papers put its side out in wimpy little stories buried in their business sections with wimpy little heads. (Example: today’s Chronicle head, “Hearst-MediaNews ruling extended.” Now there’s a rouser.) And there is no explanation of how the publishers rigged the protective order to promote their side of the story and muzzle Alioto.

All of this amounts to a terrible precedent for Hearst and Singleton and their chain allies (McClatchy, Gannett, Stephens) to be setting in federal court against the free press, the First Amendment, and open government.

Repeating: Thank the Lord for Reilly and Alioto. And where the hell are the federal antitrust attorneys (they are still mucking about, pledging folks to secrecy and then asking softball questions)? And where the hell are outgoing Attorney General Bill Lockyer (who seems cowed by the case and is busy chasing those dread pre-texters in the Hewlett-Packard board room)? And where the hell is incoming Attorney General Jerry Brown (who has announced he is going to continue to live in Oakland under the heavy thumb of Singleton’s Oakland Tribune and his galaxy of East Bay papers, without making a peep to date)? B3

P.S. l: I am not blaming the reporters nor their editors for their patriotic Hearst First and Singleton First coverage. They have the unenviable assignment of covering the monopoly moves of their publishers in New York and Denver that are aimed at savaging their own papers and their own staffs and their own communities. It is not, let us stipulate, a fun job. I hope they are keeping detailed diaries. B3

Gavin Newsom’s datebook

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

Powell, Baker, Hamilton — Thanks for Nothing

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When Colin Powell endorsed the Iraq Study Group report during his Dec. 17 appearance on “Face the Nation,” it was another curtain call for a tragic farce.

Four years ago, “moderates” like Powell were making the invasion of Iraq possible. Now, in the guise of speaking truth to power, Powell and ISG co-chairs James Baker and Lee Hamilton are refueling the U.S. war effort by depicting it as a problem of strategy and management.

But the U.S. war effort is a problem of lies and slaughter.

The Baker-Hamilton report stakes out a position for managerial changes that dodge the fundamental immorality of the war effort. And President Bush shows every sign of rejecting the report’s call for scaling down that effort.

Meanwhile, most people in the United States favor military disengagement. According to a new Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll, “Seven in 10 say they want the new Congress to pressure the White House to begin bringing troops home within six months.”

The nationwide survey came after the Baker-Hamilton report arrived with great — and delusional — expectations. In big bold red letters, the cover of Time predicted that the report would take the White House by storm: “The Iraq Study Group says it’s time for an exit strategy. Why Bush will listen.”

While often depicted as a rebuff to the president’s Iraq policies, the report was hardly a prescription for abandoning the U.S. military project in Iraq — as Baker was at pains to repeatedly point out during a whirlwind round of network interviews.

Hours after the report’s release on Dec. 6, Baker told PBS “NewsHour” host Jim Lehrer that the blue-ribbon commission was calling for a long-term U.S. military presence: “So our commitment — when we say not open-ended, that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be substantial. And our report makes clear that we’re going to have substantial, very robust, residual troop levels in Iraq for a long, long time.”

Baker used very similar phrasing the next morning in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” — saying that the report “makes clear we’re going to have a really robust American troop presence in Iraq and in the region for a long, long time.”

That was 24 hours into the report’s release, when media spin by Baker and Hamilton and their allies was boosting a document that asserted a continual American prerogative to devote massive resources to war in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. And, in a little-noted precept of the report, it said: “The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise.”

In short, the Baker-Hamilton report was a fallback position for U.S. military intervention — and for using Pentagon firepower on behalf of U.S.-based oil companies. But the report’s call for tactical adjustments provoked fury among the most militaristic politicians and pundits. Their sustained media counterattack took hold in short order.

President Bush wriggled away from the panel’s key recommendations — gradual withdrawal of many U.S. troops from Iraq and willingness to hold diplomatic talks with Syria and Iran. War enthusiasts like Sen. John McCain denounced the report as a recipe for retreat and defeat. The New York Post dubbed Baker and Hamilton “surrender monkeys.” Rush Limbaugh called their report “stupid.”

By the time its one-week anniversary came around, the Baker-Hamilton report looked about ready for an ashcan of history. Bush had already postponed his announcement of a “new strategy for Iraq” until after the start of the new year — a delay aimed at cushioning the president from pressure to adopt the report’s central recommendations. Even the limited punch of the report has been largely stymied by the most rabidly pro-war forces of American media and politics.

But those forces don’t really need to worry about the likes of Colin Powell, James Baker and Lee Hamilton — as long as the argument is over how the U.S. government should try to get its way in Iraq.

“We are losing — we haven’t lost — and this is the time, now, to start to put in place the kinds of strategies that will turn this situation around,” Powell told CBS viewers on Dec. 17. That sort of talk stimulates endless rationales for continuing U.S. warfare and facilitates the ongoing escalation of the murderous U.S. air war in Iraq.

Powell’s mendacious performance at the U.N. Security Council, several weeks before the invasion of Iraq, is notorious. But an obscure media appearance by Powell, when he was interviewed by the French network TV2 in mid-September 2003, sheds more light on underlying attitudes that unite the venture-capitalist worldviews of “moderates” like Colin Powell and “hardliners” like Dick Cheney.

Trying to justify Washington’s refusal to end the occupation, Powell
explained: “Since the United States and its coalition partners have invested a great deal of political capital, as well as financial resources, as well as the lives of our young men and women — and we have a large force there now — we can’t be expected to suddenly just step aside.”

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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

Is the USA the Center of the World?

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Some things don’t seem to change. Five years after I wrote this column in the form of a news dispatch, it seems more relevant than ever:

WASHINGTON — There were unconfirmed reports yesterday that the United States is not the center of the world.

The White House had no immediate comment on the reports, which set off a firestorm of controversy in the nation’s capital.

Speaking on background, a high-ranking official at the State Department discounted the possibility that the reports would turn out to be true. “If that were the case,” he said, “don’t you think we would have known about it a long time ago?”

On Capitol Hill, leaders of both parties were quick to rebut the assertion. “That certain news organizations would run with such a poorly sourced and obviously slanted story tells us that the liberal media are still up to their old tricks, despite the current crisis,” a GOP lawmaker fumed. A prominent Democrat, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said that classified briefings to congressional intelligence panels had disproved such claims long ago.

Scholars at leading think tanks were more restrained, and some said there was a certain amount of literal truth to the essence of the reports. But they pointed out that while it included factual accuracy in a narrow sense, the assertion was out of context and had the potential to damage national unity at a time when the United States could ill afford such a disruption.

The claim evidently originated with a piece by a Lebanese journalist that appeared several days ago in a Beirut magazine. It was then picked up by a pair of left-leaning daily newspapers in London. From there, the story quickly made its way across the Atlantic via the Internet.

“It just goes to show how much we need seasoned, professional gatekeepers to separate the journalistic wheat from the chaff before it gains wide attention,” remarked the managing editor of one news program at a major U.S. television network. “This is the kind of stuff you see on ideologically driven websites, but that hardly means it belongs on the evening news.” A newsmagazine editor agreed, calling the reports “the worst kind of geographical correctness.”

None of the major cable networks devoted much air time to reporting the story. At one outlet, a news executive’s memo told staffers that any reference to the controversy should include mention of the fact that the United States continues to lead the globe in scientific discoveries. At a more conservative network, anchors and correspondents reminded viewers that English is widely acknowledged to be the international language — and more people speak English in the U.S. than in any other nation.

While government officials voiced acute skepticism about the notion that the United States is not the center of the world, they declined to speak for attribution. “If lightning strikes and it turns out this report has real substance to it,” explained one policymaker at the State Department, “we could look very bad, at least in the short run. Until it can be clearly refuted, no one wants to take the chance of leading with their chin and ending up with a hefty serving of Egg McMuffin on their face.”

An informal survey of intellectuals with ties to influential magazines of political opinion, running the gamut from The Weekly Standard to The New Republic, indicated that the report was likely to gain little currency in Washington’s elite media forums.

“The problem with this kind of shoddy impersonation of reporting is that it’s hard to knock down because there are grains of truth,” one editor commented. “Sure, who doesn’t know that our country includes only small percentages of the planet’s land mass and population? But to draw an inference from those isolated facts that somehow the United States of America is not central to the world and its future — well, that carries postmodernism to a nonsensical extreme.”

Another well-known American journalist speculated that the controversy will soon pass: “Moral relativism remains a pernicious force in our society, but overall it holds less appeal than ever, even on American campuses. It’s not just that we’re the only superpower — we happen to also be the light onto the nations and the key to the world’s fate. People who can’t accept that reality are not going to have much credibility.”

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

A key test for Pelosi

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

Rock in a hard place

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Who cares what I have to say? I just review video games and write lies about music for pay. You don’t want to read about what kind of “meaning” I gleaned from my experience with music that “really mattered” in 2006, do you?
It’s 4 a.m. I ran out of money one week ago. I ran out of cigarettes at exactly 2:10 this morning, and until I get paid again — in approximately eight days if I’m lucky — I will be eating only things you can prepare by adding hot water. I don’t care about music. I hate music. I hate everything.
Well, I guess I don’t hate AC/DC, especially “Down Payment Blues,” which I think I listen to every day. I used to care about music — a lot, I suppose. I don’t anymore. The only new stuff I listened to this year with any real loyalty — and enjoyment — was a pair of singles from a band I have always hated: “Photograph” and “Rockstar” by Nickelback.
First of all, “Photograph” struck me because I thought it would make an excellent song for a new country dude to cover and have a huge hit with. I elect Tim McGraw to do it, as it sounds enough like “Where the Green Grass Grows,” which is probably what gave me the idea in the first place. This kind of unknown guy Dwayne Wade could do it too. Wade is cool — he’s like the return of John Stewart, who sang “Wild and Blue.” Wait, did I write Dwayne Wade and John Stewart? Ugh. I mean Dallas Wayne and John Anderson. Dwayne Wade is a basketball player. He’s on the Jets. Stewart — I have no idea where that name came from. Sorry, this is what happens when I don’t have cigarettes. I am actually crying right now.
Anyway, I also like the sentimental quality of the lyrics in “Photograph.” I guess I am supposed to quote something here, but I don’t feel like it. Just go listen to the song. You’ll see what I mean. You will also undoubtedly disagree with me. I liked “Rockstar” because it’s funny and also has a big chorus you can sing along with after listening for approximately one second.
One thing that hit me this past week about music in general is that indie rock won’t fucking go away. I don’t understand this. How can people still care about Cat Power or Jacket or Envelope or whatever those lame-ass bands are called? I don’t think there is anything more irrelevant, except maybe college football.
And after hearing this Chromatics EP, Nite, tonight, I also realized the neo–no wave thing is alive and well and suckier than ever. Man, that shit needs to die. What are they putting in the water in Seattle anyway? Anus? I read something about Nite in which the guy said the band was playing a sort of Italo-Euro pop. Is this the new thing, ripping off Italian pop or esoteric European styles that no one likes or cares about? Jesus Christ. I hate America.
With my limited knowledge, I think the only truly interesting and innovative things happening in music are in metal, but writing that is pointless because no one really actually cares about metal — besides those 50 metal fans. So 90 percent of the people who read this will just go back to listening to Arctic Monkeys. Even if they checked out Lamb of God, they wouldn’t like it. I don’t like Lamb of God that much myself — it’s just that they are a mainstream death metal band on a major label and they don’t wholly suck. Also they are not Christian, like seemingly every other “death” metal band right now, which is another disturbing trend today. This is happening because the Christians actually want us all dead. They are trying to bring about the end of the world. The government is helping them. Holy Jesus Lord, I want a cigarette. SFBG
MIKE MCGUIRK’S TOP 10 AC/DC SONGS HEARD WHILE WATCHING STRIPPERS IN THAILAND
(10) “You Shook Me All Night Long”
(9) “Whole Lotta Rosie”
(8) “Let Me Put My Love into You”
(7) “Back in Black”
(6) “Money Talks”
(5) “Stiff Upper Lip”
(4) “Fire Your Guns”
(3) “Safe in New York City”
(2) “Thunderstruck”
(1) “Hells Bells”

Sing out

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The stage floods red, and the guitars churn. This rock is southern grit — a real heartland affair. Onstage, a man with straggly black hair steadies his guitar and returns to the microphone stand: “They’ve never known want, they’ll never know need/ Their shit don’t stink, and their kids won’t bleed/ Their kids won’t bleed in their damn little war/ And we can’t make it here anymore.” The crowd goes off, the band keeps up, and then James McMurtry puts down his guitar.
This is pretty much what preaching to the converted looks like. I should know — I’m up here every night, and I see it all the time. By day I’m a writer, but nights still find me on my balcony perch behind the lighting board at the Great American Music Hall. My voyeur point offers nightly opportunities to study the mechanics of crowds. From here, I’ve learned that hippies twirl, hipsters stand with arms folded, punk rockers still mosh — well, they try — and any alt-country audience worth its salt drains all the Maker’s Mark early in the night.
Still, there are two things that happen during every show. The first, somewhat annoying thing is that at some point someone in the band will say something like “Hey, this place used to be a brothel, you know.” This false statement is typically followed by a joke, statement, or inflammatory song about the Bush administration. The San Francisco crowd — regardless of what kind of night it is — will always go crazy.
McMurtry is at that point in the evening — only he’s played here enough times to forgo the cathouse comment, and he skips right to the hard stuff. “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore” is nothing short of an anthem, a wartime confession that things these days are pretty fucked up. This marks the third time I’ve witnessed a crowd encountering this song. From above, I can see the now-familiar shudders — I see the guitar chords grabbing at the guts, the lyrics pulling at the guilt, and the eyes glazing over with the most dutifully civic of queries: how the hell did we get to this point?
Music has long been a vehicle for dissent. In fact, the protest genre’s history is so strong that some of its most revolutionary battle cries (“The times they are a-changin’,” “God save the queen,” and “Fuck the police”) have become pop culture clichés. Sticks and stones and all of that, but it turns out the right words can pack one hell of a punch.
A few months ago during the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park, a known dissenter rewrote an old song, Leadbelly’s “Bourgeois Blues,” in front of more than 50,000 listeners. It was Fleet Week in the city, and fighter jets roared overhead as Billy Bragg led his crowd through the chorus of “Bush War Blues,” a sea of middle fingers fiercely stabbing at the air.
It seems that we are all tangled up in the newest wave of protest music — and it’s quite a stretch from the “Kumbaya,” peacenik days of yore. Today’s troubadours are mobile. Bragg, McMurtry, and countless other hard-touring artists are playing festivals, midlevel clubs, and bars from coast to coast — resulting in a revolution being waged on stages throughout the land, a series of battles fought one song at a time.
I can’t help but think, as I watch the crowd down below, that at this very moment somewhere in this country, a 13-year-old kid is being shoved into a dark and sweaty all-ages venue. The band onstage is yelling about blood and oil, telling him he’s going to die for his government. The vocalist gives a “fuck you” to our commander-in-chief before launching into another indecipherable, out-of-tune 45-second song. The room goes wild. And the kid, for perhaps the first time, realizes that there is a movement afoot. SFBG
K. TIGHE’S WORKING-STIFF TOP 10
(1) Steve Earle and Billy Bragg on the same stage Oct. 7 at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, flipping off passing aircraft alongside their enormous crowds.
(2) Radio Birdman at the Great American Music Hall on Aug. 31. One of the greatest — and certainly most unexpected — shows of the year.
(3) Black Heart Procession with Calexico at the Fillmore on June 16.
(4) Leaving the Lucero and William Elliot Whitmore show at Slim’s on Oct. 12 with a broken heart, a gut full of whiskey, and a rekindled love for all things banjo.
(5) Seeing so many talented local bands do well this year was definitely a highlight. The barbarasteele and Black Fiction show at Cafe du Nord on Feb. 12 was proof positive that we are sitting on a gold mine.
(6) Nurse with Wound at the Great American, June 16–<\d>17, making naked ladies swim around the stage.
(7) Syd Barrett and Arthur Lee — you bastards. Rest in peace.
(8) Sleater-Kinney’s final SF shows at the Great American on May 2–<\d>3 reminded me why I loved them in the first place — just in time for them to break up, goddamn it.
(9) Dinosaur Jr. and the irreparable hearing damage they caused at the Great American on April 19–<\d>20 made me understand that always wearing earplugs, hiding in doorways, and not standing in front of three Marshall stacks might be good for my overall health.
(10) Someone having the good sense to pull the plug on Lauryn Hill, Great American on July 29.

A sound proposition

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There are huge, expensive, city-sponsored monuments to the arts lined up on Van Ness Avenue, opposite City Hall, and I’ve seen some of the best music in the world performed there.
The formidable San Francisco Symphony took a run at Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at Davies Symphony Hall years back — a feat not dissimilar to juggling chainsaws while riding a unicycle along a plank over a pit of alligators — and pulled it off with both precision and gusto. And more recently, the San Francisco Opera made me, a lifelong doubter of wobbly-voiced wailing, an instant convert. The occasion was a spectacular staging of Billy Budd, Herman Melville’s great tragedy of miscarried justice as hauntingly rendered by Benjamin Britten.
The opera and the symphony — though deriving much of their revenue from foundations, corporate sponsorships, and ticket sales — also enjoy considerable subsidization from government. According to the SF Symphony’s IRS Form 990, it received almost $800,000 in government grants in 2005 alone.
These subsidies are good, but there needs to be a lot more of them — and they need to serve all citizens of San Francisco much more effectively. It could not be said, for example, that a typical Friday night at the SF Opera is either affordable or appealing to a significant portion of the city’s residents.
And it’s certainly not true that there isn’t enough music and art in San Francisco for all its citizens. This place is bursting at the seams with creativity. You could put on a live performance by a local band or DJ crew in Justin Herman Plaza each week for a solid year and not run out of talent.
In fact, that’s not a bad idea! Why not, as a matter of city policy, support the staging of one free, live, outdoor musical performance per week year-round? We can keep it cheap. Once you bring things inside, it gets a bit expensive, stops being DIY, and starts meaning forms, insurance, and union-scale wages — all substantial barriers to entry for your local experimental jazz combo. The space would, in fact, have to be donated — not impossible, but not always likely.
So outdoors it is. Rain or shine. Bring your own PA. Do your own flyering. According to Sandy Lee of the Parks and Recreation Department, the nonprofit rate for using any outdoor musical facility is $500 for as many as 1,000 people. If you want to do one show weekly for a year, that’s $26,000 total. I’ll wager that San Francisco’s major arts funders could easily cover that annual fee through a matching grant program paid directly to Rec and Parks.
That’s a bump on a log in the world of arts funding, and such an arrangement isn’t unprecedented. San Francisco’s Hotel Tax Fund picks up the user fee for the Golden Gate Park Band, which has a regular Sunday gig April through October in the unremodeled band shell in the newly remodeled Music Concourse.
So we’re certain just about everyone will agree that more free live music outdoors would also be pretty much awesome. Now we get to program 52 weeks of free live music in San Francisco. Booking, or perhaps curating is a better term, would be done democratically, ethically, and, of course, pro bono by volunteers called up from the performance and presentation community. Local venue and club bookers, noncommercial and — ulp! — pirate radio DJs, festival programmers, musicologists, and the like. Remember, we have 52 weeks to fill, so there’s room for everyone.
At this point it’s clear that there would be hang-ups to unhang. There would be the danger of favoritism and payola in the booking — underpaid musicians and bookers are often hungry and desperate. There would definitely be aesthetic disagreements. Where, for example, will the punk and metal bands play? The thumping DJ crews? Lee noted that the department is “very sensitive” to NIMBYs opposed to amplified music.
Nevertheless, she said, the city is full of outdoor venues for amplified music, all available for the $500 nonprofit use fee. These include McLaren Park, the Civic Center, Mission Dolores Park, Union Square, Justin Herman Plaza, the Marina Green, and Washington Square. In Golden Gate Park the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival has sprawled magnificently across the Speedway, Marx, and Lindley meadows; both Reggae and Opera in the Park regularly occupy Sharon Meadow; and the band shell, a.k.a. Spreckel’s Temple of Music, is also back in action after being closed for three years during the de Young reconstruction.
“The band shell is open to any group that wants to perform there,” Lee said, and that’s a great place to start.
Get city backing for a pilot program and set up a spring-to-fall season similar to that of the Golden Gate Park Band, whose musicians are volunteers. Shoot for radical diversity in the booking to get a true cross section of the city’s ethnic, cultural, contemporary, and historic musical palette. Schedule performances opportunistically: during lunch hours downtown, at 2 p.m. on a sunny Saturday in the park. Stage local music showcases on weekends or holidays for full afternoons of free music. Pick the lively bands for fog season so folks have a reason to jump around. Switch venues each week to keep the NIMBYs off balance. And remember that commercial radio stations would have to pay the commercial user fee of $5,000 if they want to get in on the game. This will keep things focused on the grassroots.
We must create an expectation for this kind of low-cost local arts subsidy. It’s true that music and culture thrive like weeds in the cracked cement of oppression. But keep in mind that $26,000 for a year of venue-user fees for local music is 3.25 percent of the symphony’s government subsidy. The city can take an unprecedented step in support of genuinely accessible, relevant arts programming. At a time of gutted arts funding around California and the nation, San Francisco could set an example for pragmatic, affordable, nonelitist, human-scale public arts for the entire community.
The only thing stopping us is cultural elitism, NIMBYs, and acres of bureaucracy. Piece o’ cake! SFBG
JOSH WILSON’S TOP 10
•Project Soundwave’s experimental, participatory music showcase
•Godwaffle Noise Pancakes at ArtSF and beyond
•Resipiscent Records release party, Hotel Utah, Oct. 20
•Sumatran Folk Cinema and Ghosts of Isan, presented by Sublime Frequencies at Artists’ Television Access, July 14
•William Parker Quartet, Yoshi’s, May 24. Jazz wants to be free!
•Experimental music showcases staged weekly at 21Grand
•Deerhoof! Castro Theatre, April 27
•Gong Family Unconvention, the Melkweg, Amsterdam, Nov. 3–<\d>5, featuring Steve Hillage playing his first rock guitar solo since 1979, Acid Mothers Temple with the Ruins guesting on drum ’n’ bass, and local guitar superstar Josh Pollock invoking the spirit of Sonny Sharrock with Daevid Allen’s University of Errors (a truly explosive combo including ex-local DJ Michael Clare)
•Hawkwind, the same weekend as the Gong Uncon, in nearby Haarlem, full on with alien dancers, lasers in the stage fog, and Dave Brock announcing the encore: “If fuckin’ Lemmy kin play ‘Silver Machine,’ we kin fuckin’ play ‘Motörhead’!”
•Noncorporate radio in San Francisco: KUSF, KPOO, Western Addition Radio, Pirate Cat

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)

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

Deep water, hard rock

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In a house overlooking the San Francisco Bay, a young painter named Amy (Dena Martinez) hosts a seeming vagabond, Palo (Johnny Moreno), through one long grief-filled night. She’s in numb, guilt-stricken mourning for her husband, a purportedly shallow man who, out of his emotional depth, stepped off his sailboat, into the ocean. Palo, for his part, is convinced he knows Amy as Lila, the woman he once loved, abused, and has been searching for up the long coast from Mexico. So their meeting at the Marina Safeway, where Palo finds Amy stalled in the detergent aisle staring helplessly at the Tide, comes fraught with significance for both while reflecting the humor, irony, and metaphorical richness at work throughout Gibraltar’s brilliantly layered poetry.
The latest work by internationally acclaimed Bay Area playwright Octavio Solís, the San Francisco–<\d>centered drama was commissioned by and premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2005. Its impressive Bay Area debut comes somewhat revised, in an intelligent, well-crafted coproduction by Thick Description with the San Jose Stage Company (which will host it in the South Bay in early 2007). Solís’s relationship with Thick Description goes back a long way — to the playwright’s first major theatrical success, 1993’s Santos and Santos — and despite some unevenness in the generally strong cast, artistic director Tony Kelly’s discerning staging surely reflects, in part, the fruit of this long association.
Scenic designer Melpomene Katakalos renders Amy’s environment, a plank-board living room whose sole furnishing is a futon, with a serene, dreamlike simplicity, as if that futon were a life raft adrift in an endless night. One assumes Amy has taken the handsome but intensely volatile Palo home to her flat as an instinctual reflex betraying her acute loneliness and sexual tension.
Their violent courtship, which takes the form of competing stories, is as much a struggle as a dance, a wrestling with deep feelings and needs worthy of the term Solís uses throughout — duende — the ultimately untranslatable Andalusian term for a kind of soul or spirit, what Federico García Lorca spoke of as coming to life “in the nethermost recesses of the blood.” Visually, it is evoked here in the blackness at the edge of the stage (and also, later, in a poignant unveiling of a canvas entirely painted over in black).
Amy’s and Palo’s dueling stories, or cuentos, form a strong narrative current, pulling other stories, equally suggestive of duende, into the fray: a young man (David Wesley Skillman) whose boyhood grief over his father’s suicide resurfaces in the affair he has with the woman (Vivis) who drove the older man to despair; a police officer (Danny Wolohan) driven to desperation and self-doubt when his wife (Danielle Thys) leaves him for another woman; and finally, the story of Amy’s own involvement with a middle-aged man (Michael Bellino) and his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife (Joan Mankin), which begins to unravel the secret of her own despair. As she replays these scenes, interacting with them in a spot where time and space dissolve, Amy finds herself compelled to rewrite them. “This is not how the cuento ends,” Palo complains. “You’ve changed it. You’ve changed everything.”
Gibraltar’s mediation on love — its ruthless, destructive ferocity and its redemptive promise — shrewdly mimics the forces at work on its eponym, washing over its audience with the turbulent yet creative force of the surf as it constantly reshapes the shore.
GOMEZ FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Alone and horny on Christmas. Not even Mrs. Claus deserves that. But when Cochina (a nickname meaning “pig” bestowed on the title character as a free-spirited child by her deeply repressed and highly authoritarian maiden auntie) responds to this crisis with a militant government-funded abstinence program, she’s asking for some karmic retribution. Thus Marga Gomez’s solo show The 12 Days of Cochina — a revised and politically up-to-date version of her popular 2001 play, sharply staged by Theater Rhinoceros artistic director John Fisher — follows a jilted, sex-starved lesbian through a not exactly Dickensian but still Ebenezer Scrooge–<\d>like reawakening. Fans of the charismatic playwright-performer don’t need telling, but Gomez’s work is consistently funny and smart, and her high-energy performance is as deft as they come.
GIBRALTAR
Through Dec. 17
Thurs.–<\d>Sun., 8 p.m.
Thick House
1695 18th St., SF
$15–<\d>$25
(415) 401-8081
www.thickhouse.org
THE 12 DAYS OF COCHINA
Through Dec. 17
Wed.–<\d>Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Theatre Rhinoceros, Studio Theater
2926 16th St., SF
$15
(415) 861-5079
www.therhino.org

Mining metadata

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The Board of Supervisors’ Rules Committee unanimously recommended Nov. 30 that all parts of a city document should remain in the public domain, including the document’s electronic fabric, or metadata.
If approved by the full board, which seems likely, the decision will signal a victory for a small but vocal group of activists who view metadata as an important front in the battle for public access to government documents.
Metadata is defined as data about data — information that can reveal nuances of a document, such as where it was created, how it was modified, and when it was transmitted. If you know how to use the Track Changes function in Microsoft Word, for instance, you can glean how a document’s numbers were calculated or how its text evolved.
Local activists Allen Grossman and Kimo Crossman argue that such access to city documents is one of our privileges as citizens: we pay for city government to represent us with our tax dollars and therefore have the right to track almost everything it does — down to the faintest of electronic fingerprints on an Excel spreadsheet. Grossman and Crossman got involved with the fight for metadata when board clerk Gloria Young denied their request for a copy of the Sunshine Ordinance in its original Microsoft Word format.
“Are we gadflies, whatever that means?” Grossman asked the Guardian the day before the Rules Committee made its recommendation. “I don’t think so. I think we have an interest in making sure that everyone else knows what’s going on.”
Some city officials say that granting boundless access to documents and their metadata is risky. Deputy city attorney Paul Zarefsky wrote a five-page memo expounding the dangers: it could let hackers into the computer system; it could leave city documents open to manipulation; it could burden city officials with more data awaiting redaction.
He and Young proposed that all city documents should be presented to the general public as PDFs, or portable document formats, which would exclude any metadata from the original document.
The Rules Committee’s recommendation unanimously rejected that proposal. Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi argued that while requests for metadata might be a nuisance to city officials, the city is still responsible for providing “all native data” to the general public that is consistent with the Sunshine Ordinance. When Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Sean Elsbernd agreed, room 263 at City Hall erupted with applause.
“The fact is that we’re entitled to see all public information that is not exempt,” Grossman told us. “To the extent that public information is buried in the other data, the metadata, we’re still entitled to see it.”

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