Progressive

A word from the sheriff on the mayoral mix

Zelda Bronstein
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A word from the sheriff on the mayoral mix

One of the names that’s getting thrown around a lot in the discussions of the interim mayor is Sheriff Mike Hennessey, who’s been in his job longer than I’ve been in mine, and that’s a good while. The idea is that Hennessey — generally a good progressive, and lately very outspoken on Sanctuary City — would serve for the rest of Newsom’s term, but not run for re-election; he wold be the classic “caretaker” mayor.


I’m dubious about the caretaker idea. A short-termer would have to deal with massive budget problems — but without any real power to make long-term decisions. But as far as I can tell, nobody in the local press has bothered to call Hennessey and ask what he thinks, so I gave him a jingle today. As always, he called me right back and was friendly and spoke off the cuff with his usual sense of humor.


The bottom line: He’s fine with the job he has now. He’s never really wanted to be mayor. But if the supes wanted him, he wouldn’t say no.


“It’s realy not something I’m lusting after,” Hnnessey said. “But if the supervisors decide they need a steady hand, someone who has been before the voters, I’d be willing to do it.”


He would also be utterly uninterested in running for re-election. In fact, he’s not even sure he’s going to run for sheriff again; he’s still relatively young (early 60s) but has 32 years in the job and is probably looking forward to a nice semi-retirement. Serving out Newsom’s term would make that decision easy.


On the other hand, he was quick to point out that a caretaker mayor couldn’t do a lot. “The first five months you’d be working on the budget, then the election cycle would start up and you’d just have to try to stay out of the way,” he told me. “You can’t municipalize PG&E in one year.”


Which I think is about right. There are some key pieces of legislation that Newsom has vetoed that a short-termer like Hennessey might be willing to sign, but all the real major decisions would be put off for a year. And the progressives would be giving up the chance to put someone in the mayor’s office would could run for re-election on a progressive platform.


Mike’s not to fond of my bright idea of asking all the potential mayoral candidates to show up and answer questions at a public board hearing, either. “I think that’s a really bad idea,” he said with a laugh. “Because I wouldn’t want to do it.”


 

Alerts

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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alert@sfbg.com

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 17

 

“The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires”

Will corporations consolidate power over the Internet the way they have with television — or will it remain a source of free-flowing information? The Commonwealth Club presents a conversation on the possibilities with Tim Wu, author; policy advocate, and professor at Columbia University.

5:30 p.m., $8 members, $20 nonmembers

Commonwealth Club

595 Market, 2nd floor, SF

(415) 597-6700

THURSDAY, NOV. 18

 

Halt, thief!

To draw attention to the National Day of Action Against Wage Theft, the San Francisco Progressive Workers Alliance holds a rally and press conference highlighting how low-wage workers can have their wages withheld from them.. National surveys show that 68 percent of low-wage workers report minimum-wage violations, illegal pay deductions, denied overtime pay, and other forms of economic exploitation.

11 a.m., free

SF City Hall,

Polk Street steps

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett, SF

crain100@gmail.com, shawsan@cpasf.org.

 

Fight the right

The International Socialist Organization presents Alan Maass, editor of the SocialistWorker.org and author of The Case for Socialism, giving a lecture entitled “The Right Turn in U.S. Politics: How It Happened … and What We Can Do To Stop It.”

1 p.m., free

CCSF Ocean Campus,

Statler Wing Room 14

Phelan and Juson, SF

iso@norcalsocialism.org

(415) 452-5481

SATURDAY, NOV. 20

 

A Progressive platform

The West Coast Regional Congress hosts plenary sessions and workshops on living-wage jobs, universal health care, affordable housing, Social Security, high-quality education, progressive taxation of corporations and the wealthy, and peace and self-determination.

9 a.m., free

Horace Mann Middle School

3351 23rd St. SF

(415) 863-1225

 

Be the change

Aimee Allison moderates a free talk on “Weaving through Change: Identifying Intersections Between Education, Health and Economics.” In the organizers’ words, “the event aspires to provide a safe space for discourse and structure to improve the quality of our thoughts, our actions, and most important, our results as change agents.”

9 a.m.–2 p.m., free

Laney College

900 Fallon, Oakl.

(510) 464-3424

SUNDAY, NOV. 21

 

The Legacy of Thanksgiving

This Free Land Project event brings together artists, activists, and communities to explore the complex history of Thanksgiving and acknowledge the legacy of US colonialism and genocide against Native Americans. Featuring Audiopharmacy, Jeremy Goodfeather, Mohawk , Yvonne Swan, Sinixt Arrow Lakes Nation Raw-G.

7 p.m., $10–$25 sliding scale

La Peña Cultural Center

3105 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 849-2568 2

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 437-3658; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

Will reapportionment change California?

Zelda Bronstein
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Will reapportionment change California?

Probably not. The voters confirmed that the job of drawing new district lines next spring will be done by an independent (and unaccountable) commission whose makeup will not reflect California’s. (Five Republicans and five Democrats in a state where Democrats far outnumber Republicans?) But Brian at Calitics makes the case that it won’t matter much — and he’s hit on a really important point about California politics.


The voters have already gerrymandered themselves, in a sense. The liberals tend to live with liberals, the conservatives with conservatives. And any reasonably compact, fair district lines will reflect that.


In fact, the Fall Line Analytics map that Calitics cites makes an excellent case for splitting California into two or three states — one along the coast from Sonoma to Los Angeles, one in the Central Valley (including San Diego) and perhaps a third including the far-northern counties, which have wanted to secede for a while anyway. Then the coastal residents could have a progressive state with taxes on the wealthy to fund services, and the conservatives can try to survive in a low-tax heaven of their own. (And if you really think wealthy people will leave San Francisco and Silicon Valley and L.A. to move to Fresno for lower taxes, you’re as crazy as some of our blog trolls.)


The interesting twist on this all, though, is that there’s pretty good evidence that the population in California has shifted somewhat away from the coasts in the last decade and moved somewhat inland. Which means that Los Angeles and the Bay Area may wind up losing Congressional and state Legislative seats to the traditionally more conservative areas.


The data also suggests, though, that a lot of the new residents of the inland areas are Latino — and the way that Latino vote breaks may play a far more significant role than the redistricting commission.


 

Questions for the next mayor

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 The progressives on the Board of Supervisors are a long way from united on a possible mayoral candidate, and if they can’t come together, the person who finishes Gavin Newsom’s term will be a compromise candidate, either a short-term caretaker (not the greatest option) or someone who’s more in the moderate camp but a candidate the left can work with — for 2011 and possibly four years after that.

We’re glad to see the proposal by Sup. John Avalos to begin the mayoral selection process early. Picking a mayor in a mad scramble on the day Newsom steps down is a recipe for chaos — and potentially a bad outcome. And as the process begins, the last thing the city needs is a mayor chosen through a backroom deal.

But it’s entirely appropriate for progressive board members to set some standards and to ask the people who are angling for the job to make clear exactly what their positions would be on key policy issues.

In other words, anyone who wants to be the interim mayor — and possibly mayor for the next five years or longer — should have to answer, directly and without hedging, question like these:

How much new revenue does San Francisco need to solve its budget problems, and where, specifically, should it come from? This is the central issue facing the city, now and for the indefinite future. San Francisco’s budget has a structural deficit of at least $250 million, and it simply can’t be closed by cuts alone. What taxes will you pledge to support — and put political capital and fundraising clout behind when they go on the ballot?

What specific programs ought to be cut? Everyone likes to talk about the city living within its means, but that ends up leading to a series of death-by-1,000-cuts decisions that year after year devastate services to the poor. Don’t tell us you need to look at budget figures and work it out later; the big-ticket items are no secret. What’s on the chopping block — and what isn’t?

Will you work to promote public power? How will you expedite community choice aggregation, and will you support a ballot measure to replace Pacific Gas and Electric Co. with a full-scale municipal electric utility?

What are your law enforcement priorities? If money’s tight, should the San Francisco police be hassling nightclubs, or should more resources go into the homicide division? How important are foot patrols, and which neighborhoods should get them? Will the SFPD and juvenile authorities continue to turn young people over to federal immigration authorities?

Who should pay to fix Muni? Should the burden of paying for the transit system fall primarily on the riders (through fare increases and reduced services) or should big downtown businesses and retailers (the major beneficiaries of the system) pay more? Should car owners pay higher fees (including parking fees and congestion management fees) to subsidize transit? Which specific fees would you be willing to push for?

Who should the city build housing for? Right now, much of the new housing stock is aimed at the very rich — and San Francisco is turning into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. Would you set housing policy to conform with the city’s General Plan assertion that more than half of all new housing should be below market rate? How would you make that balance happen? Should the city spend a significant amount of money for affordable housing, and who should pay for it?

Do you agree that public sector jobs are as important as private sector jobs in San Francisco? Would you support the tax plan proposed by Sup. David Chiu?

Do you support giving the supervisors appointments to all major commissions?

Do you think the city should be doing more to stop TICs and condo conversions and to preserve existing rental housing?

That’s just the beginning of a long list of questions — but the progressives and other supervisors  on the board should make sure they have answers before agreeing to support anyone, as a caretaker or interim mayor.

 

Replacing Newsom: no reason to wait

Zelda Bronstein
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Replacing Newsom: no reason to wait

Randy Shaw’s calling on the supervisors to wait, and let the next board pick the next mayor. I don’t get his argument. In fact, it seems to me that there’s every reason for this board do its Charter-mandated job.


Think about it: everyone on the board has served for at least a year and a half, and some for a lot longer. They’ve been around enough to have some sense about how political decisions are made and some experience making tough calls. Two of the people who appear to be the new supes — Malia Cohen and Mark Farrell — have never held any elective office before. And if the decision is left to the new board, the first thing that group of 11 people, including four newcomers, will have to do — minutes after they’ve taken the oath of office — is make perhaps the most important decision any of them will face as supervisors.


And in that case, backroom deals made in the interregnum will play and even bigger role.


There’s no “rush.” I don’t think the board should choose a new mayor tomorrow. But I think the supes ought to get the process going — and do it in a way that is open and honest and gives the public faith in the results.


If you want to be appointed by the board to a commission or task force, you have to go before the Rules Committee and be vetted. The committee members ask questions. There’s testimony. Why should the mayor’s job be any different?


The process that makes the most sense would go like this: Starting this week, the supervisors nominate candidates for interim mayor. Everyone nominated is contacted and asked if he or she is interested in the job. Then the ones who want to serve — either as a “caretaker” or with the hope of running in the fall — appear at a series of hearings of the full board, sitting as a Committee of the Whole. Every supervisor gets to ask questions; the candidates respond, and the whole thing is open to the public.


When that’s done — in a couple of weeks — the board can select the best candidate. That person would then start forming a transition team and prepare to take office January 4th, when Newsom becomes lieutenant governor; the board would simply ratify its choice that day.


I’m not going to argue about whether the incoming board is more or less “progressive” than the current board. I am going to suggest that experience matters, that there are serious problems for the new mayor to take on, that the mad scramble approach (the way board presidents are elected) is a bad way to choose a new mayor and that there’s plenty of time to do this right, in the open, between now and January.


 


 


 


 

KPFA’s Morning Show purged

Zelda Bronstein
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KPFA’s Morning Show purged

KPFA has always been part radical-left radio station and part radical-left soap opera. It’s a collection of talented shit disturbers supervised at times by wildly incompetent managers who report to a highly political elected board that is so packed with agendas it’s hard to imagine how anything ever gets done.


Every time KPFA and its parent Pacifica Foundation have money problems — and like most progressive organizations, money problems are a fact of life — there are layoff talks and discussions of cutbacks that lead to protests, counterprotests, and full-blown rehtorical wars.


And yet, every morning, I tune my radio to the Morning Show, and somehow, what comes over the airwaves is solid progressive journalism. Hosts Brian Edwards-Tiekert and Aimee Allison, with  the support of news director Aileen Alfandary, always put on a good show (full dislosure: I’ve been a guest on it a few times).


So I was startled Nov. 10th to hear a show piped in from Los Angeles — and to learn that the entire Morning Show crew, including both Edwards-Tiekert and Allison, had been summarily fired.


The way Pacifica Executive Director Arlene Englehardt has described it, the move was made entirely for budgetary reasons. No question: KPFA’s budget is in the red, and that station had to borrow money to make payroll recently. And since the KPFA staff is unionized, layoffs are supposed to be made by seniority, which Englehardt also said tied her hands.
But actually, Edwards-Tiekert has more seniority than other people who weren’t alid off — and I have to say, this looks a lot more like a programming decision than a simple layoff.


It’s also a kind of crazy move: KPFA lives on listener support, and the Morning Show is the most lucrative program on the station when it comes to pledge drives. KPFA listeners want local content; in fact, since the Morning Show staff was laid off, listenership has plummetted. Figures I’ve obtained on web listenership (which is easy to track, and at KPFA ultimately tends to be similar to the overall listenership tends) show that the peak audience dropped more than 60 percent after the station started piping in outside content.


I can’t get Englehardt on the phone (possibly because of the Veterans Day holiday) but she made her case on KQED’s Forum Nov. 10th. You have to listen to this show; it’s only half an hour. Elglehardt is on with Larry Bensky, a former KPFA staffer, Polk Award winner, and one of the most respected progressive media voices in the country. And frankly, Bensky tears her arguments apart (in his brilliant, logical way) pointing out the insanity and inconsistency of what she’s done here.
 
I guess they’re going to try to do a new Morning Show, but I don’t know who is going to host it; according to Edwards-Tiekert, the unionized staff have agreed not to take each other’s jobs. And it’s hard to find people with the kind of experience and skill it takes to do something as complicated as hosting the Morning Show on KPFA.


I’ve tried in the past year to stay out of the drama at KPFA — I’m a KPFA member, a longtime supporter and a fan of what the station does, and I don’t think contant media scrutiny and leftist harping about every single cut and personnel decision in tough financial times does any good for the progressive cause. But this one seems to be a big mistake, and I don’t see how Englehardt is going to fix it.


You can listen to the last Morning Show talking about all of this and read the staff’s comments, and the details of how this went down, at the KPFA staff blog here.



 

Downtown’s one-two punch on RCV

Sasha Cuttler
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Downtown’s one-two punch on RCV

Examiner columnist Ken Garcia and Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius – the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of pro-downtown propagandists – today put out a pair of hit pieces on San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting system, with Garcia stridently calling for its repeal. But if there was ever a good argument for ranked-choice voting, it’s the fact that these two bozos don’t like it.

They use this election’s results to make a case that this system is confusing, slow, and undemocratic, even though the reality is closer to the opposite. They moan that some supervisorial races don’t have clear outcomes yet and that doing RCV tabulations requires more work now by election’s officials, conveniently leaving out the fact that all four contested supervisorial election would be headed for costly and divisive runoff elections a month from now under the old system.

As for being undemocratic, it’s anything but. Would it be more democratic if the D10 race was decided by a runoff between Marlene Tran and Tony Kelly because the African-American vote was divided among too many candidates, rather than going to Malia Cohen, who most D10 voters voted for as one of their top three choices? Doesn’t it count for anything that a majority of D2 voters apparently didn’t want Janet Reilly to represent them? Similarly, in Oakland, it seems clear that a majority of voters did not want Don Perata to be their mayor, and so they listed Jean Quan in their top three votes. And did anyone really want to see progressive Jane Kim and Debra Walker slug it out in a D6 runoff election?

No, what this coordinated attack on RCV is really about is how democratic it really is, letting the people rank their choices from a plethora of options, rather than having our leaders chosen in a low-turnout election when downtown and the rich have a far better opportunity to determine the winner. It’s just too bad that these two columnists aren’t honest enough to admit who they’re shilling for.

As for my more detailed reporting on RCV and its renewed chances for promoting real political coalition-building – the essence of democracy – check out next week’s Guardian.

Yee launches mayoral bid as supervisors consider their options

Sasha Cuttler
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Yee launches mayoral bid as supervisors consider their options

Amid the jockeying for position on who will be San Francisco’s next mayor, Sen. Leland Yee this morning filed paperwork at the SF Elections Department to form a mayoral exploratory committee before a throng of journalists who were invited yesterday for a big “announcement.”

Yee diligently hit his talking points and did little to divert from a script emphasizing his deep local roots, his belief in being a humble public servant, and how this action was “beginning a conversation with San Franciscans” about “what they want of their city government and their next mayor.” Yee used the word “conversation” so many times that an AP reporter asked him to explain his issues and reasons for running without using the word “conversation,” a word Yee still slipped into his answer.

Meanwhile, members of the Board of Supervisors yesterday introduced competing motions for naming an interim mayor to replace Gavin Newsom while he leaves in January to become lieutenant governor. Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, and Chris Daly are seeking to have the board vote on a replacement mayor as soon as next week, while Board President David Chiu asked the board clerk’s office to develop a framework and process for choosing a new mayor. Asked whether he has the six votes needed to take up the matter next week, Avalos told the Guardian, “That’s my hope, but we’ll see.”

While Yee seems focused on winning the mayoral election next fall, rather than winning six votes on the board now, he told reporters, “I have the highest regard for members of the Board of Supervisors…They have a tremendous challenge in front of them and I wish them well.”

In his prepared statement that listed his contact person as Jim Stearns, a political consultant who usually works for progressive candidates and ballot measures, Yee sought to differentiate himself from Newsom, who has had hostile relations with the board throughout his seven-year tenure. “I want to see the Mayor work with, and not against the Board of Supervisors,” Yee said in that statement.

Asked by the Guardian to elaborate on what appears to be a critique of Newsom, Yee demurred. “I’m not going to judge this mayor. History will do that,” he said.

Playing it safe for now could be a sound strategy for Yee, who would be the city’s first Chinese-American mayor and who has a history of endorsing progressive candidates and positions, but who also just raised and spent more than $1.2 million (much of it in big corporate donations that far exceed limits on local donations that his committee will now allow him to begin collecting) on his uncontested Senate reelection, including giving six-figures to Stearns and spending almost as much on polling.

Stearns tells the Guardian that, consistent with his message today, Yee will run a very positive campaign. “We’re going to run a different kind of campaign, a very collaborative campaign,” he said. “This city deserves a different kind of campaign where people are just firing their guns at each other.”

Music Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Music listings are compiled by Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Weekly Picks.

WEDNESDAY 10

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bobs Café Du Nord. 8pm, $24.

Chicago Afrobeat Band Boom Boom Room. 9:45pm, $8.

Delorean, Lemonade, Butterfly Bones Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $16.

Grinn and Barrett, Coyotes, Red Light Circuit El Rio. 8pm, $5.

Have Special Power, Poison Control Center, Guitar vs. Gravity Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

Derick Hughes Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $16.

Gregg Laswell, Harper Blynn Independent. 8pm, $15.

Mae, Terrible Things, Windsor Drive Bottom of the Hill. 8pm, $14.

Terry Malts, Devon Williams, Lilac Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Personal and the Pizzas, Natural Child, Wrong Words Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Slick Rick Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $25.

Stars, Delays Fillmore. 8pm, $27.50.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Qbar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm, $3. Jualina More!, Joshua J, and guests spin booming, booty-shaking beats.

Fixup 222 Hyde; www.fixupsf.com. 9:30pm, $5. Bass music monthly with special guest Submerse.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

Jam Fresh Wednesdays Vessel, 85 Campton, SF; (415) 433-8585. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Slick D, Chris Clouse, Rich Era, Don Lynch, and more spinning top40, mashups, hip hop, and remixes.

Mary-Go-Round Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 10pm, $5. A weekly drag show with hosts Cookie Dough, Pollo Del Mar, and Suppositori Spelling.

Mods vs. Rockers Make-Out Room. 9pm. With Nectarine Pie and mod, garage, punk, and new wave DJs.

RedWine Social Dalva. 9pm-2am, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Daddy Rolo, Young Fyah, Irie Dole, I-Vier, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St, SF; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

THURSDAY 11

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Leila Broussard, Bess Rogers, Allison Weiss Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

Marc Broussard Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $30.

Collie Buddz and New Kingston, Los Rakas Independent. 9pm, $30.

Candy Claws, Chain Gang of 1974, Blackbird Blackbird Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

Ghostface Killah, Sheek Louch, Music by Frank Dukes Slim’s. 9pm, $22.

Jack Grisham and the West Coast Dudes, Stagger and Fall Thee Parkside. 9pm, $10-12.

Mayer Hawthorne and the County, Gordon Voidwell Bimbo’s 365 Club. 8pm, $16.

Mental 99 El Rio. 7pm, free.

RJ Mischo Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $16.

Nitzer Ebb, //Tense//, Soft Metals, Terminal Twilight Mezzanine. 8:30pm, $20.

Taxes, Fake Your Own Death, Kill Moi, DJ Ted Bagel Radio Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Tyrone Wells, Andrew Belle, Crown Point Café Du Nord. 8pm, $18.

Yo Mama’s Big Fat Booty Band Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $8.

Zoobombs, Uzi Rash, Cruddy Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $10. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz with special guest Black Pearl 504 spin Afrobeat, tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

CakeMIX SF Wish, 1539 Folsom, SF; www.wishsf.com. 10pm, free. DJ Carey Kopp spinning funk, soul, and hip hop.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Good Foot Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm, free. With DJs spinning R&B, Hip hop, classics, and soul.

Jivin’ Dirty Disco Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 8pm, free. With DJs spinning disco, funk, and classics.

Kissing Booth Make-Out Room. 9pm, free. DJs Jory, Commodore 69, and more spinning indie dance, disco, 80’s, and electro.

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St, SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Motion Sickness Vertigo, 1160 Polk, SF; (415) 674-1278. 10pm, free. Genre-bending dance party with DJs Sneaky P, Public Frenemy, and D_Ro Cyclist.

Peaches Skylark, 10pm, free. With an all female DJ line up featuring Deeandroid, Lady Fingaz, That Girl, and Umami spinning hip hop.

Roger Sanchez Vessel. 9:30pm, $10-20. “The Return of House Tour” with Sidney Samson.

Wax Candy Ambassador, 673 Geary, SF; www.ambassador415.com. 9pm, free. Disco-licious party jams with Andre Lucero, Worker, Travis Dalton, and Sergio.

FRIDAY 12

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

“Bohemian Carnival” DNA Lounge. 9pm, $20. With Vau de Vire Society, Gooferman, Bambi Killers, and DJ Smoove.

Doomtree, POS, Dessa, Sims, Cecil Otter, Mike Mictlan, Lazerbeak, Paper Tiger, Rec-League Slim’s. 9pm, $15.

Emmitt-Nershi Band, Hot Buttered Rum Special String Band Independent. 9pm, $25.

Holy Shit, Bitter Honeys Knockout. 9pm, $7.

Talib Kweli Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $26.

Mayday Parade, Breathe Carolina, Every Avenue, Artist vs. Poet, Go Radio Regency Ballroom. 6pm, $20.

Narrows, Skinwalker, New Trust Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

Charles Neville, Youssoupha Sidibe and the Mystic Rhythms Coda. 9pm, $17.

Nosaj Thing, Toro Y Moi, Jogger Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $18.

Number Prophets, Pebble Theory, Heart Touch Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Rod Piazza and Mighty Flyers Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $22.

Rocket Summer: Bruce Avary, his instruments and your voices, He Is We, Travis Hayes and An-Nhein Le Thee Parkside. 9pm, $15.

Le Serpent Rouge, Mardi Love and Zoe Jakes, Brass Menazeri Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $21.

Sista Sekunden, Roller, Lecherous Gaze, Fast Asleep Submission, 2183 Mission, SF; www.sf-submission.com. 9pm, $8.

This Charming Band, For The Masses Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $12.

Young Offenders, Northern Towns, Sydney Ducks Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Paul Dresher Ensemble ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.odctheater.org. 8pm, $18.

SF Jazz High School All-Stars Concert Jewish Community Center, 3200 California, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $5-15.

3 Leg Torso Red Poppy Art House. 8pm, $15.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Hobbyhorse Red Vic, 1665 Haight, SF; www.myspace.com/redvicsessions. 7:45pm, $2.

Marco Periera and Brasil Guitar Duo Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.omniconcerts.com. 8pm, $24-38.

DANCE CLUBS

Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island, SF; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs B-Cause, Vinnie Esparza, Mr. Robinson, Toph One, and Slopoke.

Fo’ Sho! Fridays Madrone Art Bar. 10pm, $5. DJs Kung Fu Chris and Makossa spin rare grooves, soul, funk, and hip-hop classics.

Fubar Fridays Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5. With DJs spinning retro mashup remixes.

Good Life Fridays Apartment 24, 440 Broadway, SF; (415) 989-3434. 10pm, $10. With DJ Brian spinning hip hop, mashups, and top 40.

Heartical Roots Bollywood Café. 9pm, $5. Recession-friendly reggae.

Hot Chocolate Milk. 9pm, $5. With DJs Big Fat Frog, Chardmo, DuseRock, and more spinning old and new school funk.

Rockabilly Fridays Jay N Bee Club, 2736 20th St, SF; (415) 824-4190. 9pm, free. With DJs Rockin’ Raul, Oakie Oran, Sergio Iglesias, and Tanoa “Samoa Boy” spinning 50s and 60s Doo Wop, Rockabilly, Bop, Jive, and more.

Some Thing The Stud. 10pm, $7. VivvyAnne Forevermore, Glamamore, and DJ Down-E give you fierce drag shows and afterhours dancing.

Strictly Video 111 Minna. 9pm, $10. With VDJs Shortkut, Swift Rock, GoldenChyld, and Satva spinning rap, 80s, R&B, and Dancehall.

Treat Em Right Elbo Room. 10pm, $5. Hip-hop, funk, and more with DJs Vinnie Esparza and B. Cause, plus guest Primo.

SATURDAY 13

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Blisses B, Tyler Matthew Smith, Vandella Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $10.

Cat Party, Pins of Light Bender’s, 800 S. Van Ness, SF; www.bendersbar.com. 10pm, $5.

Dead to Me, Cobra Skulls, Thousand Watt Stare, Invalids Thee Parkside. 9pm, $10.

Full On Flyhead, Stomacher, Swoon, Nosebleed Academy Slim’s. 9pm, $14.

Hank IV, Carlton Melton, Circle Pit, Outlaw Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Hot Lunch, Spider Fever, Harderships El Rio. 9pm, $7.

Junip, Sharon Van Etten Independent. 9pm, $20.

Talib Kweli Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $26.

Charles Neville, Youssoupha Sidibe and the Mystic Rhythms Coda. 10pm, $17.

Over the Rhine, Lucy Wainwright Roche Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $25.

Sista Monica Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $22.

Trophy Fire, Ash Reiter, Foolproof Four Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Two Headed Spy, Deeper, Thumper, Cold Steel Renegade Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Dean Wareham Fillmore. 9pm, $25.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Jazz Mafia, Realistic Orchestra, Latryx Mezzanine. 9pm, $20.

Jazz Sawyer 3rio Coda. 7-9pm, $5.

Paul Dresher Ensemble ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.odctheater.org. 8pm, $18.

3 Leg Torso San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St, SF; www.ticketweb.com. 10am, $5-18.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Banda de Turistas, Pacha Massive Elbo Room. 4pm, $5.

Broceliande Seventh Avenue Performances, 1329 Seventh Ave, SF; www.sevenperforms.org. 7:30pm, $15-20.

Go Van Gogh Café International, 508 Haight, SF; www.cafeinternational.com. 7pm.

Slavic Soul Party! Swedish American Hall (above Café Du Nord). 8pm, $30.

DANCE CLUBS

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Foxxee, Joseph Lee, Zhaldee, Mark Andrus, and Nuxx.

Bootie DNA Lounge. 9pm, $6-12. Mash-ups with guest DJ Axel.

Frolic Stud. 9pm, $3-7. DJs Dragn’Fly, NeonBunny, and Ikkuma spin at this celebration of anthropomorphic costume and dance. Animal outfits encouraged.

Prom Milk. 9pm, $8. Wave not Wave DJs Jacob Fury and Mario Muse spin rock ‘n’ roll at this prom-themed dance party.

Rock City Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5 after 10pm. With DJs spinning party rock.

Same Sex Salsa and Swing Magnet, 4122 18th St, SF; (415) 305-8242. 7pm, free.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

Spotlight Siberia, 314 11th St, SF; (415) 552-2100. 10pm. With DJs Slowpoke, Double Impact, and Moe1.

Tormenta Tropical Elbo Room. 10pm. Electro cumbia with DJs Spoke Mathambo and Mshini Wam, Zuzuka Poderosa, Disco Shawn and Oro 11, and Panamami.

SUNDAY 14

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Macy Blackman and the Mighty Fines Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $15.

Cornershop, Tyde, Mar Carroll Independent. 8pm, $25.

High Places, Soft Circle, Sun Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Erin Mckeown Café Du Nord. 8pm, $15.

Nile, Ex Deo, Psycroptic, Keep of Kalessin Slim’s. 7:30pm, $30.

Tennis, Eulogies Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Thralls, Reverse Dotty, Spiro Agnew Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Sepia Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $22.

Vijay Iyer Trio Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7pm, $30-50.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Rosanne Cash Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7pm, $25-65.

Hammerlock, K-9 Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, dubstep, roots, and dancehall with DJ Sep, J Boogie, and guest Spliff Skankin’.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Hacienda Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF; www.decosf.com. 10pm, $3. Classic electronic tracks with DJs Inquilab, Robots in Heat, Tristes Tropiques, and guest Chris Orr.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. “Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers.” Got that?

Pachanga Coda. 5pm, $10. Salsa with DJs Fab Fred and Antonio, plus Orquesta La Moderna Tradición.

Play T-Dance DNA Lounge. 5pm-midnight, $25. House with DJ Rich Russ and DJ John LePage.

Swing Out Sundays Rock-It Room. 7pm, free (dance lessons $15). DJ BeBop Burnie spins 20s through 50s swing, jive, and more.

Tensnake Public Works, 161 Erie, SF; www.publicsf.com. 9pm, $10. Cosmic disco.

MONDAY 15

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Alejandro Chavez, Korelenko, Upwords Movement El Rio. 7pm, $7.

Pomegranates, Oh No Oh My, Big Tree Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Rattlesnakes, Silent Comedy, Scrote with Stripminers, Pink Snowflakes Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Lonely Forest, Alright Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Thermals, Night Marchers, White Fang Independent. 8pm, $16.

Nico Vega, Imagine Dragons, Saint Motel Café Du Nord. 8pm, $10.

DANCE CLUBS

Black Gold Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm-2am, free. Senator Soul spins Detroit soul, Motown, New Orleans R&B, and more — all on 45!

Krazy Mondays Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. With DJs Ant-1, $ir-Tipp, Ruby Red I, Lo, and Gelo spinning hip hop.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. With DJ Gordo Cabeza and guests playing all Motown every Monday.

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with Decay, Joe Radio, and Melting Girl.

Manic Mondays Bar on Church. 9pm. Drink 80-cent cosmos with Djs Mark Andrus and Dangerous Dan.

Musik for Your Teeth Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St., SF; (415) 642-0474. 5pm, free. Soul cookin’ happy hour tunes with DJ Antonino Musco.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl, SF; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Skylarking Skylark. 10pm, free. With resident DJs I & I Vibration, Beatnok, and Mr. Lucky and weekly guest DJs.

TUESDAY 16

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bright Blues, Drums and Color, Moonshine and the Drugs Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Cermak, Califia El Rio. 7pm, free.

Curse of Panties, Red Light Mind, Stowaways Hotel Utah. 9pm, $6.

Fat Tuesday Band Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $15.

Generalissimo, Pegataur, Nero Order Café Du Nord. 8:30pm, $10.

Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos, Jookabox, Burnt Ones Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $16.

Bruno Mars, Donnis Slim’s. 8pm, $19.

Perfect Circle Fillmore. 8pm, $40.

Sole and the Skyrider Band, Egadz and Edison, Epcot, DJ Bomarr Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Twiztid, Blade, Mclordz and Sauce Funky, Kung Fu Vampire Regency Ballroom. 7:30pm, $23.

Vaccuum, Unlearn, Kruel, Neo Cons Knockout. 9:30pm, $5.

DANCE CLUBS

Alcoholocaust Presents Argus Lounge. 9pm, free. With DJ Ken Prank and DJ Grenadine.

Brazilian Wax Elbo Room. 9pm, $7. With Samba de Raiz featuring Jorge Alabe, plus DJs Carioca and P-Shot.

Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro.

Share the Love Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 5pm, free. With DJ Pam Hubbuck spinning house.

Womanizer Bar on Church. 9pm. With DJ Nuxx.

Dodging bullets

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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14
Dodging bullets

steve@sfbg.com

Progressives in San Francisco dodged a few bullets on election night, which was the highest hope that many held in a campaign season dominated by conservative money and messaging. The Board of Supervisors retained a progressive majority, Prop B’s attack on public employees went down, the wealthy will pay more property transfer taxes, and — perhaps the best news of all — Gavin Newsom is leaving for Sacramento a year before his mayoral term ends.

But economically conservative and downtown-backed campaigns and candidates scored the most election-night victories in San Francisco, killing a temporary hotel tax hike pushed hard by labor and several progressive-sponsored ballot measures, and winning approval for the divisive sit-lie ordinance and Prop. G, removing Muni driver pay guarantees, which had the widest margin of the night: 65-35 percent.

“Ultimately, downtown did well,” progressive political consultant Jim Stearns told us on election night, noting how aggressive spending by downtown business and real estate interests ended a string of progressive victories in the last several election cycles. He cited the likely election of Scott Wiener in District 8 and the strong challenge in District 2 by Mark Farrell to perceived frontrunner Janet Reilly, who had progressive and mainstream endorsements.

A preliminary Guardian analysis of reported spending by independent expenditure committees shows that groups affiliated with downtown or supporting more conservative candidates spent about $922,435, the biggest contributions coming from conservative businessman Thomas Coates and the San Francisco Board of Realtors, compared to $635,203 by more progressive organizations, mostly the San Francisco Democratic Party and San Francisco Labor Council.

That spending piggy-backed on national campaigns that were also skewed heavily to conservative and corporate-funded groups and messaging that demonized government and public employee unions, playing on people’s economic insecurities during a stubborn recession and jobless recovery.

Stearns said voters are having a hard time in this economy “and they don’t like to see the government spending.” He said national polls consistently show that people are more scared of “big government” than they are “big corporations,” even if San Francisco progressives tend to hold the opposite view.

And even that narrow defeat came after an almost unprecedented opposition campaign that included every elected official in San Francisco except the measure’s sponsor, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, and both the labor movement and many moderate groups.

“The campaign on this was extraordinary and caught fire at the end,” Alex Clemens, founder of Barbary Coast Consulting, said at SPUR’s Nov. 4 election wrap-up event. In particular, the message about how much Prop B would increase the health care costs on median-income city employees seemed to resonate with voters.

“We are really happy that Prop. B is going down because it was such a misguided measure. It was not well thought through,” Labor Council President Tim Paulson told the Guardian at the election night party labor threw with the San Francisco Democratic Party at Great American Music Hall. “San Francisco voters are the smartest in America.”

Paulson was also happy to see those voters approve taxing the transfer of properties worth more than $5 million, “because San Franciscans know that everyone has to pay their fair share.”

In the Board of Supervisors races, it was basically a status quo election that shouldn’t alter the body’s current politics dynamics much. Sup. Bevan Dufty will be replaced with fellow moderate Scott Wiener in D8 and Sup. Chris Daly by progressive Jane Kim in D6. The outcome of races to replace ideological wobbler Sup. Sophie Maxwell in D10 and conservative Michela Alioto-Pier in D2 may not be conclusively known for at least a few more days (maybe longer if the close races devolve into lawsuits), but neither is a seat that would diminish the board’s progressive majority.

Progressives could have made a gain if Rafael Mandelman had won in D8, but he was seven points behind Wiener on election night and even more after the initial ranked choice tally was run on Nov. 5. And in D6, fears that downtown-backed candidate Theresa Sparks might sneak past dueling progressive candidates Jane Kim and Debra Walker never materialized as Sparks finished far behind the lefty pair.

Consultant David Latterman, who worked for Sparks, told us on election night that he was surprised to see that Kim was the choice of 32 percent of early absentee voters “because we targeted those voters.” By comparison, Walker was at 20 percent and Sparks was at 21 percent in the initial returns, which tend to be more conservative. By the end of the night, Kim had 31.3 percent, Walker 27.7 percent, and Sparks just 16.5 percent.

“If she did that well with absentees, it seems like it was Jane’s race to win. If they choose Jane, they wanted Jane. It’s just that simple,” Latterman told us on election night.

At her election night party, Kim credited her apparent victory to a strong campaign that she said fielded 400 volunteers on Election Day, most wearing the bright red T-shirts that read “See Jane Run” on the back. “I feel good,” Kim told the Guardian. “What I’m really happy about is we ran a really good campaign.”

In the end, Kim’s campaign was put over the top by the second-place votes of Sparks’ supporters, with 769 votes going to Kim and 572 to Walker in the first preliminary run of ranked-choice voter tabulations. But despite the bad blood that developed between progressives in the Kim and Walker campaigns, Board President David Chiu, an early Kim supporter, sounded a conciliatory note, telling the Guardian on election night, “Given where Debra and Jane are, I’m glad that we’re going to keep this a progressive seat.”

How to fight the GOP

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
How to fight the GOP

OPINION Now what?

Now we need to build a grassroots progressive movement — wide, deep, and strong enough to fight the right and challenge the corporate center of the Democratic Party.

The stakes are too high and crises too extreme to accept “moderate” accommodation to unending war, regressive taxation, massive unemployment, routine foreclosures, and environmental destruction.

A common formula to avoid is what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the paralysis of analysis.” Profuse theory + scant practice = immobilization.

It’s not enough to denounce what’s wrong or to share visionary blueprints. Day in and out, we’ve got to organize for effective and drastic social change, in all walks of life and with a vast array of activism.

Yes, electioneering is just one kind of vital political activity. But government power is extremely important. By now we should have learned too much to succumb to the despairing claim that elections aren’t worth the bother.

Such a claim is false. For instance, consider the many hundreds of on-the-ground volunteers who rejected the paralysis of analysis by walking precincts and making phone calls to help reelect progressive Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Arizona). Grijalva won a tight race in the state’s southwestern district and will return to Congress next year — much to the disappointment of the corporate flacks and xenophobes who tried to defeat him because of his strong stance against the state’s new racial-profiling immigration law.

The mass-media echo chamber now insists that Republicans have triumphed because President Obama was guilty of overreach. But since its first days, the administration has undermined itself — and the country — with tragic under-reach.

It’s all about priorities. The Obama presidency has given low priority to reducing unemployment, stopping home foreclosures, or following through with lofty pledges to make sure that Main Street recovers along with Wall Street.

Far from constraining the power of the Republican Party, the administration’s approach has fundamentally empowered it. The ostensibly shrewd political strategists in the White House have provided explosive fuel for right-wing “populism” while doing their best to tamp down progressive populism. Tweaks aside, the Obama presidency has aligned itself with the status quo — a formula for further social disintegration and political catastrophe.

The election of 2010 is now grim history. It’s time for progressives to go back to the grassroots and organize with renewed, deepened commitment to changing the direction of this country. If we believe that state power is crucial — and if we believe in government of, by, and for the people — it’s not too soon to begin planning and working for change that can make progressive victories possible in future elections. 

Norman Solomon is co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death.

The next mayor

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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108
The next mayor

tredmond@sfbg.com

By the time a beaming Mayor Gavin Newsom took the stage at Tres Agaves, the chic SoMa restaurant, on election night, enough results were in to leave no doubt: the top two places on the California ballot would go to the Democrats. Jerry Brown would defeat Meg Whitman in the most expensive gubernatorial race in American history — and Newsom, who once challenged Brown in the primary and dismissed the office of lieutenant governor, would be Brown’s No. 2.

It might not be a powerful job, but Newsom wasn’t taking it lightly anymore. “We can’t afford to continue to play in the margins,” he proclaimed proudly, advancing a vague but ambitious agenda. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with California that can’t be fixed with what’s right with California.”

But around the city, as results trickled in for the local races, the talk wasn’t about Newsom’s role in the Brown administration, or the change the Democrats might bring to Sacramento. It was about the profound change that could take place in his hometown as he vacates the office of mayor a year early — and opens the door for the progressives who control the Board of Supervisors to appoint a chief executive who agrees with, and is willing to work with, the majority of the district-elected board.

At a time when the Republican takeover of Congress threatens to create gridlock in Washington, there’s a real chance that San Francisco’s government — often paralyzed by friction between Newsom and the board — could take on an entirely new direction. It’s possible that the progressives, long denied the top spot at City Hall, could put a mayor in office who shares their agenda.

This could be a turning point in San Francisco, a chance to put the interests of the neighborhoods, the working class, small businesses, the environmental movement, and economic justice ahead of the demands of downtown and the rich. All the pieces are in place — except one.

To make a progressive vision happen, the fractious (and in some cases, overly ambitious) elected leaders of the progressive movement will have to recognize, just for a little while, that it’s not about any individual. It’s not about David Chiu, or Ross Mirkarimi, or Chris Daly, or John Avalos, or Eric Mar, or David Campos, or Jane Kim, or Aaron Peskin. It’s not about any one person’s career or personal power.

It’s about a progressive movement and the issues and causes that movement represents. And if the folks with the egos and personal gripes and career designs can’t set them aside and do what’s best for the movement as a whole, then the opportunity of a generation will be wasted.

Folks: this is a hard thing for politicians to recognize. But right now it’s not about you. It’s about all of us.

It’s an odd time in San Francisco, fraught with political hazards. And it’s so confusing that no one — not the elected officials, not the pundits, not the lobbyists, not the insiders — has any clear idea who will occupy Room 200 in January.

Here’s the basic scenario, as described by past opinions of the city attorney’s office:

Under the state Constitution, Newsom will take office as lieutenant governor Jan. 3, 2011. The City Charter provides that a vacancy in the Mayor’s Office is filled by the president of the Board of Supervisors until the board can choose someone to fill the job until the end of the term — in this case, for 11 more months.

So if all goes according to the rules (and Newsom doesn’t try to play some legal game and delay his swearing-in), David Chiu will become acting mayor on Jan.3. He’ll also retain his job as board president.

On Jan. 4, the current members of the Board of Supervisors will hold a regularly scheduled Tuesday meeting — and the election of a new mayor will be on the agenda. If six of the current supervisors can agree on a name (and sitting supervisors can’t vote for themselves) then that person will immediately take office and finish Newsom’s term.

If nobody gets six votes — that is, if the board is gridlocked — Chiu remains in both offices until the next regular meeting of the board — a week later, when the newly elected supervisors are sworn in.

The new board will then elect a board president — who will also instantly become acting mayor — and then go about trying to find someone who can get six votes to take the top job. If that doesn’t work — that is, if the new board is also gridlocked — then the new board president remains acting mayor until January 2012.

There are at least three basic approaches being bandied about. Some people, including Newsom and some of the more conservative members of the board, want to see a “caretaker” mayor, someone with no personal ambition for the job, fill out Newsom’s term, allowing the voters to choose the next mayor in November, 2011. That has problems. As Campos told us, “The city has serious budget and policy issues and it’s unlikely a caretaker could handle them effectively.” In other words, a short-termer will have no real power and will just punt hard decisions for another year.

Then there’s the concept of putting in a sacrificial progressive — someone who will push through the tax increases and service cuts necessary to close a $400 million budget gap, approve a series of bills that stalled under Newsom, take the hits from the San Francisco Chronicle, and step out of the way to let someone else run in November.

The downside of that approach? It’s almost impossible for a true progressive to raise the money needed to beat a downtown candidate in a citywide mayor’s race. And it seems foolish to give up the opportunity to someone in the mayor’s office who can run for reelection as an incumbent.

Which is, of course, the third — and most intriguing — scenario.

The press, the pundits, and the mayor have for the past few months been pushing former Sup. Peskin as the foil, trying to spin the situation to suggest that the current chair of the local Democratic Party is angling for a job he wouldn’t win in a normal election. But right now, Peskin is no more a front-runner than anyone else. And although he’s made no secret in the past of wanting the job, he’s been talking of late more about the need for a progressive than about his own ambitions.

“If the board chose [state Assemblymember] Tom Ammiano, I would be thrilled to play a role, however small, in that administration,” Peskin told us.

In fact, Peskin said, the supervisors need to stop thinking about personalities and start looking at the larger picture. “If we as a movement can’t pull this off, then shame on us.”

Or as Sup. Campos put it: “We have to come together here and do what’s right for the progressive movement.”

Two years ago, the San Francisco left was — to the extent that it’s possible — a united electoral movement. In June, an undisputed left slate won a majority on the Democratic County Central Committee. In November 2008, Districts 1, 3, 5, and 11 saw consensus left candidates running against downtown-backed opponents — and won. In D9, three progressives ran a remarkably civil campaign with little or no intramural attacks.

The results were impressive. As labor activist Gabriel Haaland put it, “we ran the table.”

But that unity fell apart quickly, as a faction led by Daly sought to ensure that Sup. Ross Mirkarimi couldn’t get elected board president. Instead that job went to Chiu — the least experienced of the supervisors elected in that class, and a politician who is, by his own account, the most centrist member of the liberal majority.

This fall, the campaign to replace Daly in D6 turned nasty as both Debra Walker and Jane Kim openly attacked each other. Walker sent out anti-Kim mailers, and Kim’s supporters charged that Walker was part of a political machine — a damaging (if silly) allegation that created a completely unnecessary rift on the left.

And let’s face it: those fights were all about personality and ego, not issues or progressive strategy. Mirkarimi and Daly have never had any substantive policy disagreements, and neither did Walker and Kim.

In the wake of that, progressives need to come together if they want to take advantage of the opportunity to change the direction of the city. It’s not going to be easy.

“We’re good at losing,” Daly said. “I’m afraid we’re doing everything we can to blow it.”

The cold political calculus is that none of the current board members can count on six votes, and neither can Peskin or any of the other commonly mentioned candidates. The only person who would almost certainly get six votes today is Ammiano — and so far, he’s not interested.

“I know you never say never in politics, but I’m happy here in Sacramento. Eighty-six percent of the voters sent me back for another term, and I think that says something,” he told us.

It’s hardly surprising that someone like Ammiano, who has a secure job he likes and soaring approval ratings, would demur on taking on what by any account will be a short-term nightmare. The city is still effectively broke, and next year’s budget shortfall is projected at roughly $400 million. There’s no easy way to raise revenue, and after four years of brutal cuts, there’s not much left to pare. The next mayor will be delivering bad news to the voters, making unpleasant and unpopular decisions, infuriating powerful interest groups of one sort or another — and then, should he or she want the job any longer, asking for a vote of confidence in November.

Yet he power of incumbency in San Francisco is significant. The past two mayors, Newsom and Willie Brown, were reelected easily, despite some serious problems. And an incumbent has the ability to raise money that most progressives won’t have on their own.

Chiu thus far is being cautious. He told us his main concern right now is ensuring that the process for choosing the next mayor is open, honest, and legally sound. He won’t even say if he’s officially interested in the job (although board observers say he’s already making the rounds and counting potential votes).

And no matter what happens, he will be acting mayor for at least a day, which gives him an advantage over anyone else in the contest.

But some of the board progressives are unhappy about how Chiu negotiated the last two budget deals with Newsom and don’t see him as a strong leader on the left.

Ross Mirkarimi is the longest-serving progressive (other than Daly, who isn’t remotely a candidate), and he’s made no secret of his political ambitions. Then there’s Campos, an effective and even-tempered supervisor who has friendly relationships with the board’s left flank and with centrists like Bevan Dufty. But even if Dufty (who I suspect would love to be part of electing the first openly gay mayor of San Francisco) does support Campos, he’d still need every other progressive supervisor. Campos also would need Chiu’s vote to go over the top. Which means Chiu — who needs progressive support for whatever his political future holds — would have to set aside his own designs on the job to put a progressive in office.

In other words, some people who want to be mayor are going to have to give that up and support the strongest progressive. “If there’s someone other than me who can get six votes, then I’m going to support that person,” Campos noted.

Then there are the outsiders. City Attorney Dennis Herrera has already announced he plans to run in the fall. If the board’s looking for a respected candidate who can appeal to moderates as well as progressives, his name will come up. So will state Sen. Mark Leno, who has the political gravitas and experience and would be formidable in a re-election campaign in November. Leno doesn’t always side with the left on local races; he supported Supervisor-elect Scott Wiener, and losing D6 candidate Theresa Sparks. But he has always sought to remain on good terms with progressives.

All that assumes that the current board will make the choice — and even that is a matter of strategic and political dispute. If the lame duck supervisors choose a mayor — particularly a strong progressive — you can count on the San Francisco Chronicle, Newsom, and the downtown establishment to call it a “power grab” and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the winner.

“But choosing a mayor is the legal responsibility of this board and they ought to do their jobs,” Peskin said.

The exact makeup of the next board was still unclear at press time. Jane Kim is the likely winner in D6 and has always been a progressive on the School Board. She’s also close to Chiu, who strongly supported her. If Malia Cohen or Lynette Sweet wins D10, it’s unlikely either of them will vote for a progressive mayor.

Newsom also might try to screw things up with a last-minute power play. He could, for example, simply refuse to take the oath of office as lieutenant governor until after the new board is seated.

Chiu’s allies say it makes sense for the progressives to choose a mayor who’s not identified so closely with the left wing of the board, who can appeal to the more moderate voters. That’s a powerful argument, and Herrera and Leno can also make the case. The progressive agenda — and the city — would be far better off with a more moderate mayor who is willing to work with the board than it has been with the arrogant, recalcitrant, and distant Newsom. And if the progressives got 75 percent of what they wanted from the mayor (as opposed to about 10 percent under Newsom), that would be cause to celebrate.

But to accept that as a political approach requires a gigantic assumption. It requires San Franciscans to give up on the idea that this is still, at heart, a progressive city, that the majority of the people who live here still believe in economic and social justice. It means giving up the dream that San Francisco can be a very different place, a city that’s not afraid to defy national trends and conventional wisdom, a place where socioeconomic diversity is a primary goal and the residents are more important than the big companies that try to make money off them. It means accepting that even here, in San Francisco, politics have to be driven by an ever-more conservative “center.”

It may be that a progressive can’t line up six votes, that a more moderate candidate winds up in the Mayor’s Office. But a lot of us aren’t ready yet to give up hope.

Additional reporting by Noah Arroyo.

Editor’s Notes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Editor’s Notes

tredmond@sfbg.com

Way back in 1986, Tom Hsieh Sr., an architect and one of the most conservative members of the Board of Supervisors, called his colleague Harry Britt — by all accounts the most liberal supervisor — and asked for a meeting. The way both men described it to me at the time, Britt was a little mystified; why would someone who was on the opposite end of the political spectrum want to be pals?

Well, it turned out that Hsieh had a message for his colleague. "Someday," Hsieh told Britt, "the gays and the Asians will be running this town, and we might as well get along."

It’s taken a while, but Hsieh (whose son is a moderate-to-conservative political consultant and activist) was prophetic. One of the little-noticed facts about this supervisorial election is that the majority of the members of the next Board of Supervisors will be either Asian or gay. And the odds are pretty good that the person in the Mayor’s Office in 2012 will be Asian (David Chiu, Leland Yee, Phil Ting) or gay (Tom Ammiano, David Campos, Mark Leno).

I mention that bit of interesting history as a sort of a prelude to the fascinating historic challenge facing progressives in San Francisco today. At a time when the rest of the country seems to be drifting (at least for the moment) to the right, San Francisco has a chance to go to the left. There hasn’t been a mayor the progressives supported in this town in at least 20 years (and that’s if you count Art Agnos, which is a bit of a stretch). With Gavin Newsom (will he be San Francisco’s last straight white mayor?) leaving early in his term, the supervisors could profoundly change the direction of the city.

And they could also duck, punt, or make a terrible mistake.

If the board wants to appoint someone who’s going to promote a progressive agenda, that person not only needs to be able to get six votes in January, but hold on to the seat until November — when the competition will be intense. And any progressive mayor will be vilified by the local daily papers, mocked by the national media, and held to an almost impossible standard by his or her constituents.

You wonder why anyone would want the job.

But taking on that insane challenge is also about history, and about proving that this city is (still) different. And the person in the job is going to need a whole lot of help and support. I have to believe that we’re up to it.

How not to choose a mayor

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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5
How not to choose a mayor

EDITORIAL There are plenty of good arguments among progressives about who would be the best person to replace Gavin Newsom as mayor and how the Board of Supervisors should make that decision. It’s a complicated situation: The next mayor will face a horrible budget deficit, all sorts of tough decisions — and then face the voters in 10 months. And if the board appoints a progressive, that person will face a hostile daily newspaper and several well-funded opponents in the fall.

But we know there are some very bad scenarios, some things the board and the potential mayor contenders shouldn’t do — because in the end, the process needs to be free of any sort of backroom taint.

Here are some basic ground rules for the next two months.

Newsom shouldn’t try to mess around with the selection of his successor. The mayor decided to run for state office with the full knowledge that he would leave behind a vacancy that the supervisors would fill. He has no business playing political and legal games to skew the results. For example, some say Newsom is considering delaying his swearing in, now set for Jan 3, 2011, for a week to prevent the current supervisors from voting on an interim mayor. That would be a bad faith, manipulative move. He made his choice; now he needs to get out of the way and let the City Charter process work.

The current board should have a fair shot at electing Newsom’s replacement. The day after Newsom takes office as lieutenant governor, the current board will meet for one last time — and by law, they should and will have a chance to find a candidate who can get six votes to serve out Newsom’s term. Any parliamentary moves that serve only to delay the vote and push the decision to the new board would be inappropriate.

The idea of a “caretaker” mayor is fraught with problems — and Willie Brown shouldn’t even be on the list. Newsom is pushing the idea of a true interim mayor, someone who won’t run for the job in November and will simply keep the lights on for 11 months. That means ignoring the city’s serious structural problems. A caretaker would have no authority and little ability change things. And the notion that’s being floated around of former mayor Willie Brown stepping in is disgraceful. Brown was a terrible mayor, and a rerun of that nightmare — even of only 11 months — is the last thing San Francisco needs.

Kamala Harris shouldn’t be a player in this game. If Harris, the current district attorney, is elected state attorney general, her job will be open too — and it’s easy to see how Newsom could use that as a plum to get his way. If Harris resigns before Newsom is sworn in, Newsom would get to appoint her replacement — and if that appointee is currently on the Board of Supervisors, Newsom would get to fill a seat on the board too. Harris needs to stay out of that unseemly sort of deal.

All the rules and procedures need to be made public, now. The legalities of this transition are tricky. Could the current board appoint an interim mayor now, knowing that a vacancy will occur, or must they wait until Newsom has actually resigns? Could Newsom delay his swearing in? The supervisors need to get legal advice on every possible scenario — and make it public. The last thing anyone needs in this confusion period is secrecy.

Plenty of people will be unhappy with whatever plays out. But if the process is bad, the result will be a mayor with no legitimacy.

Alerts

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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alert@sfbg.com

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 10

 

Protest a Mexican dam

Help keep a village in Mexico from being flooded. Come to the Mexican Consulate to protest construction of the El Zapotillo Dam, which would submerge the town of Temacapulín, Jalisco, and provide water to a neighboring state that already loses 40 percent of its water supply in transmission. Join families of Temacapulín in a musical and peaceful protest to stop the dam.

12 p.m.–1p.m., free

Mexican Consulate

532 Folsom, SF

www.internationalrivers.org/node/5908

THURSDAY, NOV. 11

 

SF Public Press party

Join the nonprofit SF Public Press for drinks and appetizers, pick up a free copy of its latest newspaper, and meet the people who pull it all together.

5:30 p.m., $20 general admission

The Mechanics’ Institute

57 Post, SF

www.sfpublicpress.org

 

Watch The Big One

Michael Moore’s hilarious cross-country road movie plumbs the depths of corporate America, asking the question: at a time when corporations are posting record profits, why are so many Americans still in danger of losing their jobs? Moore embarks on a one-man campaign to persuade Fortune 500 companies to reconsider their downsizing decisions.

7:30 p.m., $5 donation

Humanity Hall, 390

27th St., Oakl.

www.humanisthall.net/wp/2010/10/17/film-the-big-one-2/

 

Rally Against KPFA’s cuts

Union workers at America’s first listener-sponsored radio station, KPFA 94.1 FM, have mobilized to oppose imminent cuts to KPFA staffing by their parent organization, the Pacifica Foundation. The Morning Show, Against the Grain, Hard Knock Radio, and KPFA Evening News all appear slated for severe program changes and/or decimating cuts.

4:30–6:30a.m., free

1925-29 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Berk.

www.kpfaworker.org

SATURDAY, NOV. 13

 

Indybay’s 10th Anniversary Celebration

Indybay, a hub for independent progressive news and activism, has been thriving for a decade, along with SF Bay Area and Santa Cruz Independent Media Centers and other projects. To celebrate and honor its many contributors, come hear form a diverse lineup of speakers from across Northern California discussing independent media’s role in social and environmental justice movements.

12 p.m., $10 donation

Continental Club

1658 12th St., Oakl.

www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/09/11/18658427.php

SUNDAY, NOV. 14

 

Cultivating a Legacy of Hope

Be a part of the Filipino/American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity (FACES) first-ever community celebration, marking 10 years of building environmental justice and solidarity between the U.S. and the Philippines. Event features a palengke (market) of sustainable crafts, live performances from spoken word poet Aimee Suzara, Diwa Kulintang Ensemble, and guitarist Theresa Calpotura, along with delicious Filipino foods and more.

2–4:30 p.m., free

Bayanihan Community Center

1010 Mission St., SF

www.facessolidarity.org 2

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 255-8762; or e-mail alerts@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

The “Democratic Machine” myth

Zelda Bronstein
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The “Democratic Machine” myth

Okay, I read the gloating from Randy Shaw about Jane Kim defeating the “Democratic Party Machine,” which, as far as I can tell, seems to consist of the Democratic County Central Committee and the Bay Guardian. (As I’ve said before, if I were that powerful, things would change around this city ….)


It annoys me because machine politics were once a harsh reality in this town. But not these days.


Let’s look seriously at the supposed immense clout of the DCCC. Everyone from Shaw to The Chron’s C.W. Nevius has been freaking out over the ability of the local Democratic Party to control who gets elected to the Board of Supervisors. And while I think it’s a good idea to have prgoressives control the local party (this is, after all, San Francisco), even a cursory look at election results suggests that this vaunted machine isn’t really running much of anything.


In every contested race for supervisor — every single one — the candidate endorsed first by the DCCC appears headed for defeat. It’s not just D6; The DCCC endorsed DeWitt Lacy in D10, and he finished well out of the picture. The person leading that race today, Tony Kelly, wasn’t even in the DCCC’s top three. The panel backed Rafael Mandelman in D8; Scott Wiener won. The party gave its nod to Janet Reilly in D2, and if early RCV results hold, she’s in serious trouble.


Here’s the facts: With district elections, and a weak mayor, power is far too diffuse in San Francisco today for anyone to operate a political machine. District races this time around weren’t about the DCCC; they were about local campaigns organizing around local issues.


The DCCC helped Debra Walker somewhat in D6 , but it also hurt: In the end, Kim won with a campaign that painted Walker as an old-school machine party politician — and, interestingly enough, according to Paul Hogarth, she won by reaching out to the more conservative voters:


We focused on pitching her biography as a Stanford and Berkeley graduate, who is a civil rights attorney. And Jane Kim was the kind of young professional these voters could relate to. 


If Randy Shaw was right, and a powerful Democratic party machine ran city politics, we wouldn’t all be scratching our heads and wondering who the hell the next mayor will be. I can tell you right now: Aaron Peskin, the titular head of this mighty machine, is pretty far out of the running. Sup. David Chiu, who has pretty much cut ties with Peskin and worked to elect Kim, is one of the top mayoral contenders. It’s also entirely possible that Mark Leno — who is by no means part of any Peskin operation — will wind up in Room 200.


Labor — supposedly part of this machine, too — can’t even agree half the time on its own endorsements — witness the United Healthcare Workers local splitting dramatically with its Local 1021 brothers and sisters in SEIU. UHW backed Wiener, Theresa Sparks and Steve Moss — all candidates opposed by Local 1021.


It’s an unsettled time in local politics, and I hope that the progressives who care about issues, not personalities and silly labels, can come together and choose a mayor who will support a progressive agenda. But that will be a close call, and no doubt will involve a temporary coalition that will fall apart as soon as the deal is done.


Because right now, nobody’s calling the shots in local politics. Just look at the facts on the ground. 

Election over, what next?

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Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based columnist who has covered political and labor issues for a half-century as a reporter, editor , author and commentator. Visit him at his website, www.dickmeister.com.

OK, the election is over and labor, Democrats and the other good guys came up a bit short. But what now? What next for the good guys?

 Well, for starters, organized labor and its Democratic Party allies must be ready to block Republican plans to try to enact legislation that would cut taxes for the very wealthy, slash Medicare funding, and possibly even privatize Social Security. I know that may sound alarmist and far-fetched. But that’s what Republican leaders are actually talking about.

After all, the GOP’s anti-labor corporate allies spent nearly a billion dollars on the election and they damn well want their money’s worth.  Larry Cohen, president of the communications workers union, thinks it’s getting like the way elections were 100 years ago when the big trusts and robber barons made sure their voices were the only ones heard during election campaigns.

Not yet, Larry. Not quite. Unions were able to make a lot of highly effective noise that helped elect some important pro-labor Democrats and defeat several Tea Party candidates and other anti-labor wackos who argued, as the AFL-CIO’s Mike Hall notes, “that government should do nothing to improve the economy or protect working families during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

Let’s me take a little closer look at how the election went for organized labor and its political friends in two of the country’s most important states politically, numbers one and two in population, California and Texas.

In California, as the AFL-CIO says, unions were a key factor propelling notably pro-labor Democrat Jerry Brown to the governorship and pro-labor Democrat Barbara Boxer to a third term in the Senate. Those victories were especially sweet, since the opponents of Governor-elect Brown and Senator Boxer were former business executives with tons of money, including their own, to spend on their campaigns.

Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman spent more than $141 million of her own money on her losing campaign against Jerry Brown for governor. And though Carly Fiorina, former Hewlett-Packard CEO, spent several million of her own money on her campaign, the total was nowhere near the obscene amount that Whitman pulled from her own pocket for her campaign.

Anyway, Meg Whitman lost, and good for Californians for making that happen.  Labor couldn’t imagine a worse anti-labor governor than Meg Whitman, or more labor-friendly governor than Jerry Brown, a worse anti-labor senator than Carly Fiorini, or more labor-friendly senator than Barbara Boxer.

It was a bit different in most other states. As Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro of the California Nurses Association notes, the election of Democratic, pro-labor candidates in California “provided a national alternative to the conservative, corporate-oriented economic program that won so many other races nationwide.”

DeMoro praised California’s voters “for seeing through the fool’s gold promises that the path to economic recovery and job creation is through corporate tax breaks and shifting more wealth and resources to those who need it the least.”

The news isn’t so good out of Texas, where, as Jim Lane of the People’s World  says, “the second largest delegation to the U.S. House of  Representatives, already heavily leaning to the right, tilted drastically further on November 2 – plus, many of the most popular Texas Democratic leaders were defeated.

The re-election of Gov. Rick Perry was more bad news for labor and its allies, given what the People’s World’s Lane notes as Perry’s “far-right, anti-worker vision.” Reporter Lane says “progressive Texans are not looking forward to extending the years of being shamed about their home state, as we have been since GW Bush took the national stage.”

But at least the Texas labor movement was able to run what Lane calls “a strong and largely independent political campaign.”  Unions even dared to run “one of their own,” former national AFL-CIO official Linda Chavez-Thompson, for lieutenant governor. But, as Lane notes, “Like all other statewide Democratic candidates, Chavez-Thompson’s campaign was buried by big money.”

So, what next for Texas, California – the whole country?

What’s next should be in large part to carry out what AFL-CIO and Democratic Party leaders have been advocating for many years – rebuilding of our long crumbling infrastructure

 President Obama has a plan that calls for rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads, laying and maintaining 4,000 miles of railway tracks, restoring 150 miles of airport runways and , in doing so, providing badly needed jobs for many of the country’s millions of unemployed workers.
 
That’s how labor and political leaders can – and must – begin to deliver on their election campaign promises to, above all, do what it takes to create “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based columnist who has covered political and labor issues for a half-century as a reporter, editor , author and commentator. Visit him at his website, www.dickmeister.com.

Pelosi seeks to remain her party’s leader

Sasha Cuttler
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3
Pelosi seeks to remain her party’s leader

Nancy Pelosi has announced that she is running for House minority leader, citing the need to defend health care and Wall Street reforms and Social Security and Medicare. And my friend Donnie Fowler, a top national Democratic Party consultant, thinks that’s a very good thing, even if I have a few doubts.

“She is a fighter and can bring the majority back in 2012 and no one more progressive would beat her,” Fowler said as he shared the news of Pelosi’s announcement, responding to my skeptical initial reaction. He said that having Pelosi remain in a leadership position was the best hope for pushing San Francisco values in a tumultuous country that has moved the House far to the right.

The Bay Guardian and other leading San Francisco progressive voices have criticized Pelosi for allowing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to drag on, for not taking stronger stands on gay rights (from same-sex marriage to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy), and for pushing flawed reforms of Wall Street and the health care system that left big corporations with too much power.

Fowler said Pelosi is “better in term of ideology and she’s a strong fighter,” but he conceded that she’s also a pragmatist, so she’ll often fight for outcomes that are not nearly as progressive as she would prefer, as she’s done recently. “She fights hard for what she can get today,” said Fowler, who has played leading roles in Democratic presidential and other campaigns and came in second in the race to chair the national party a few years ago. “Over the last two years, she has felt throttled by other parts of the Democratic Party and other leaders in Washington.”

But many of the moderate to conservative Democrats who have made Pelosi’s life so difficult were voted out of office on Tuesday, leaving a far more liberal caucus. “The biggest hit was to moderates and Blue Dogs, just because of where they live,” Fowler said, citing people such as Rep. Chet Edwards, who represented George W. Bush’s Crawford, Texas district, which now went Republican. “The caucus is going to be more liberal.”

Does that mean that Pelosi could sound a more full-throated defense of progressive values as minority leader? Yes, Fowler said, she could and should, but he’s still not sure whether she will. “The Democrats have got to say what they believe, they have to stand up for progressive values, and they have to be unashamed about it,” he said, noting that the centrist waffling was a factor in the party’s defeat this week, moreso than a genuine desire of the electorate to bring back the Republicans. “If you won’t stand up for yourself, people won’t believe that you’ll stand up for them.”

Right now, moderate Democrats are already starting to make the case that the party needs to be more economically conservative. Rep. Heath Shuler, a Blue Dog Democrat from North Carolina, has announced his intention to run for minority leader on a pro-business platform. It’s also possible progressives could mount a challenge from Pelosi’s left, such as Reps. Barbara Lee (who was the only vote against invading Afghanistan in 2001), Dennis Kucinich, or Raul Grijalva (the Arizona Democrat who co-chairs the Progressive Caucus with Rep. Lynn Woolsey).

Yet Fowler continues to believe that Pelosi is the best person to lead the party back through what’s expected to be a difficult couple years. But does it play into Republican hands to stick with their greatest foil, someone whose liberal politics and connection to a famously liberal city made her the focus in GOP attack ads?

Fowler dismissed that notion, saying that Republicans are going to demonize whoever leads the party. He said the Democrats could elect the most conservative good ole boy with a thick Southern accent “and they’ll still call him a liberal socialist.”

So then why not nominate an actual liberal socialist, someone who can bring a stronger critique of this country’s economic and political systems and set the country up for a more fundamental shift in 2012, someone like Lee, Kucinich, Grijalva, or Woolsey? To Fowler, that’s a bridge too far. Even with a more progressive caucus, he doesn’t think they could win, and he doesn’t think the party ought to move that far to the left anyway.

But what do you think, Guardian readers? Is this a time for Democrats to stay the course, or is this perhaps a moment for progressives to step up – unafraid of the Tea Party rhetoric – and start pushing everyone from President Obama on down to finally address inherent flaws in this country’s unsustainable economic and political systems?

Mayoral question perplexes the pundits

Sasha Cuttler
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Mayoral question perplexes the pundits

Today’s post-election analysis session at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association featured the usual room full of smart political minds from across the ideological spectrum – including those of hosts Alex Clemens and David Latterman – but nobody had any real insights into the big question on everyone’s minds: who will be the next mayor?

Everyone agrees that Gavin Newsom is headed to Sacramento in January, and state law calls for him to become lieutenant governor (and resign as mayor) on Jan. 3. At that point, Board President David Chiu becomes acting mayor, and the current Board of Supervisors is scheduled to meet Jan. 4 and could vote for a new interim mayor. The newly elected board takes office a week later and as its first order of business it will elect a new president, who becomes the new acting mayor, and if the old board can’t elect an interim, then the new one could elect an interim mayor, who would serve until after the mayoral election in November.

It’s tough enough for anyone to get to six votes, particularly considering supervisors can’t vote for themselves, but the deal-making could also involve the district attorney’s job. If Kamala Harris holds her slim current lead for attorney general, the new mayor would get to appoint her replacement. And if Rep. Nancy Pelosi decides to resign, that plum job would mix things up further. So everything is revolving around the vote for mayor right now.

“Everything comes back to this,” Latterman said, as he and Clemens basically had to shrug off questions about who has the inside track to be mayor. There are just too many variables involved, too many possible deals that could be cut, too many ambitious politicians in the mix, not to mention innumerable outsiders who could be tapped (hmmm…Mayor Jones, it does have a ring to it).

Latterman, a downtown consultant who helps update the Progressive Voter Index (created by SF State Professor Rich DeLeon), noted that the citywide results in the election once again showed that the overall city electorate is more moderate than progressive, particularly because the districts that have the strongest voter turnout (Districts 2, 4, and 8) are also some of the city’s most conservative.

As a result, he said, “The city is not voting for a far left mayor come November, so [progressives] will do whatever they can to get a mayor now.” Progressives are indeed hoping to get one of their own into Room 200 in January, and they hope that would allow whoever is chosen to win over enough voters to remain after November.

As a result, conservatives and most moderates will dig in, with many pushing the idea of a “caretaker mayor” so the playing field between left and right is still fairly even this fall.

“This is a World Series for political junkies,” Clemens said, who had the funniest way of casting the question: Normally, about 11 people run for mayor and the whole city picks one, he said, “but this is the opposite.” These 11 supervisors have the whole city to pick a mayor from, and at this point, it’s anyone’s guess who that will be.

Election 2010: How the late absentees are breaking

Zelda Bronstein
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Lots of votes still to count in San Francisco — as of this morning, the Department of Elections said there were about 80,000 absentee and provisional ballots in the hopper. But some have been counted yesterday and today, and we can draw some conclusions.

Typically election-day absentees break fairly close to the way election-day votes break, and Kamala Harris is citing that — and her campaign’s own analysis — to claim victory;

“Uncounted ballots will only bolster Kamala Harris’s lead, as they will reflect Harris’s strong Election Day advantage.”

In San Francisco, though, I’ve seen progressive measures that won on election day go down to defeat when the late votes, which were not as conservative as the early absentees but more conservative than election-day votes — were counted.

We now have the newest results from the DOE, and a little quick math gives us some interesting trends. In D2, Janet Reilly has (marginally) increased her lead over Mark Farrell. She’s gone from 6253 yesterday to 6512 today, a pickup of 259 votes. Farrell picked up only 223. So Reilly will probably still lead this race when all the votes are counted, but the RCV calculation will depend entirely on whether supporters of the third and fourth candidates, Abraham Simmons and Kat  Anderson, were voting for Anyone But Reilly or were willing to put Reilly as a second choice.

In D6, Jane Kim picked up about 100 votes over Debra Walker, enough to make her the clear front-runner. Again, though: Do the more conservative Theresa Sparks votes go to Kim,  whose supporters tried to portray Walker as part of a liberal machine and who touted her support for Prop. G, or do a sizable number go to Walker, another LGBT candidate?

D10? Not much has changed.  Tony Kelly picked up 65 votes. Lynette Sweet picked up 80. Malia Cohen picked up 72. Steve Moss picked up 64. The rankings aren’t going to change much. But this will be the mother of all RCV elections — and we’ll know more tomorrow, when DOE does its first RCV pass.

 

 

 

Election 2010: Labor and progressives dodge a bullet

Sasha Cuttler
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Bucking a national conservative, anti-government political trend, San Franciscans stayed with some fairly progressive politics on election night, rejecting a measure to demonize public employees (Prop. B), giving progressive John Rizzo far more votes than his City College of San Francisco board rivals, and taking far more liberal positions in state ballot measures and candidates than California voters, who were already far to the left of national voters.
“We are really happy that Prop. B is going down because it was such a misguided measure. It was not well thought through,” San Francisco Labor Council President Tim Paulson told the Guardian at the party labor threw with the San Francisco Democratic Party at Great American Music Hall. “San Francisco voters are the smartest in America.”
Paulson was also happy to see those voters approve Prop. N, taxing the transfer of properties worth more than $5 million, “because San Franciscans know that everyone has to pay their fair share.”
Another labor priority, Prop. J, the temporary hotel tax increase, lost by a narrow margin after Mayor Gavin Newsom and his downtown allies opposed it, and the online travel company spent millions of dollars to bury Prop. K – a Newsom-created rival measure that would have closed a loophole that lets the company avoid paying the hotel tax.
Rizzo said he was happy to far outpoll Lawrence Wong and Anita Grier as the three incumbents ran uncontested for their City College board seats, which should put him in a leadership position in the troubled district. “There is a tradition at City College that the highest vote getter gets the presidency, so I’m pretty happy,” Rizzo told us on election night.
There were some conservative victories in San Francisco, including approval of Prop. L, which criminalizes sitting or lying on sidewalks, and Prop. G, which will reduce Muni operator wages and change work rules after getting the approval of about 63 percent of voters.
“Ultimately, downtown did well,” progressive political consultant Jim Stearns said, noting how aggressive spending by downtown business and real estate interests ended a string of progressive victories in the last several election cycles, including the likely election of Scott Wiener in D8 and the strong challenge in D2 by Mark Farrell to perceived frontrunner Janet Reilly, who had progressive endorsements.
Stearns said national polls have shown that people are more afraid of big government than big corporations, whereas progressives tend to hold the opposite view. “That national atmosphere definitely had an impact on even races locally,” Stearns said.
But in San Francisco, the progressives retain a strong position in the political debates to come.

Election 2010: Progressives keep D6 seat

Sasha Cuttler
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Election 2010: Progressives keep D6 seat

While the outcome of the D6 supervisorial race won’t be known until all the ranked choice ballots get counted, it is clear that the seat will stay with the progressives as Jane Kim and Debra Walker vie to see how many voters liked them second best. And that was good enough news for Board President David Chiu.
“Given where Debra and Jane are, I’m glad that we’re going to keep this a progressive seat,” Chiu, a Kim supporter, told us at their election night party in the new club Public Works, which is right next to Kim’s Mission Street campaign headquarters.
The latest results show Kim with 3,780 votes (31.3 %), Walker with 3,337 votes (27.7%), and downtown-backed Theresa Sparks with 1,985 votes (16.5%), and the rest divided among 11 other candidates.
“I feel good,” Kim told the Guardian, although she seemed a little weary from running a strong campaign, noting that they had 400 volunteers on the street today, most of them wearing the bright red T-shirts that read “See Jane Run” on the back. “What I’m really happy about is we ran a really good campaign.”
Kim supporters on hand included Sup. John Avalos, transit activist Dave Snyder, progressive activists Julian Davis and Sunny Angulo, Chiu board aides Judson True and Cat Rauschuber, and a large group of young Asian-American activists.
“I really want to encourage people to get to get to know each other,” Kim told the crowd. “We live in a big city and a really diverse district.”

Election 2010: D6 comes down to Sparks

Zelda Bronstein
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Here’s what’s going to make the D6 race so interesting as RCV plays out: The second-place votes of all the minor candidates won’t be enough to put either Walker or Kim over the top. The final decision about which progressive will be supervisor is going to come down to the second-place votes of a candidate who was seen by progressives as the one to beat: Theresa Sparks. Who were the Sparks voters — and how will they allote their second-place votes? I don’t think anyone knows for sure — but that’s what will determine the next D6 supervisor.

Music Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

Music listings are compiled by Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 3

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Hudson Bell, Winechuggers Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $10.

Aloe Blacc with the Grand Scheme, Maya Jupiter, DJ Matthew Africa Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $14.

Caldecott, Spooky Flowers, Guns for San Sebastian, Ansel Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

Paula Cole Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $26.

Dr. Dog Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Lila Downs Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $25-65.

Elsinore, Dot Punto, Elissa P, Ash Reiter Elbo Room. 9pm, free.

Sean Hayes, Arann Harris and the Farm Band Independent. 8pm, $17.

Hypnotist Collectors, Sweet Bones, Starfish in the Clouds Milk Bar, 1840 Haight, SF; www.milksf.com. 9pm.

Candye Kane Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $18.

No Joy, La Sera, Wax Idols Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Eliza Rickman, Chris Trapper, Jason Adamo Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

Ryuichi Sakamoto Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $30-37.50.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita Moore hosts this dance party, featuring DJ Robot Hustle.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

Jam Fresh Wednesdays Vessel, 85 Campton, SF; (415) 433-8585. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Slick D, Chris Clouse, Rich Era, Don Lynch, and more spinning top40, mashups, hip hop, and remixes.

Mary-Go-Round Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 10pm, $5. A weekly drag show with hosts Cookie Dough, Pollo Del Mar, and Suppositori Spelling.

RedWine Social Dalva. 9pm-2am, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Daddy Rolo, Young Fyah, Irie Dole, I-Vier, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St, SF; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

THURSDAY 4

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Natacha Atlas Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $25-65.

Bayside, Senses Fail, Title Fight, Balance and Composure Regency Ballroom. 7:30pm, $18.

Avi Buffalo, AB and the Sea, Colleen Green Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $14.

Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, High Five Revival Café Du Nord. 8:30pm, $16.

Djavan Warfield. 8pm, $37.50-62.50.

Dr. Dog Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Foxtail Somersault, Tomihira, Vir, Tracing Figures Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Grand Nationals, Good Luck Jimmy, Uncle Frank and the Co-Defendants, Ash Gray Hotel Utah. 8pm, $8.

Mean Jeans, Shannon and the Clams, Margaret Doll Rod, Therapists, Skumby Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

Monarch, Trees, Al Qaeda Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Two Door Cinema Club, Generationals, Funeral Party Slim’s. 8pm, $17.

Joe Louis Walker Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $20.

Wild Thing, SF Blows Knockout. 9:30pm, $5.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $10. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz spin Afrobeat, tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Club Jammies Edinburgh Castle. 10pm, free. DJs EBERrad and White Mice spinning reggae, punk, dub, and post punk.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Electric Feel Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 9pm, free. With DJs subOctave and Blondie K spinning indie music videos.

Good Foot Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm, free. With DJs spinning R&B, Hip hop, classics, and soul.

Holy Thursday Underground SF. 10pm, $5. Bay Area electronic hip hop producers showcase their cutting edge styles monthly.

Jivin’ Dirty Disco Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 8pm, free. With DJs spinning disco, funk, and classics.

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

Lacquer Beauty Bar. 10pm-2am, free. DJs Mario Muse and Miss Margo bring the electro.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St, SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Peaches Skylark, 10pm, free. With an all female DJ line up featuring Deeandroid, Lady Fingaz, That Girl, and Umami spinning hip hop.

FRIDAY 5

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bear in Heaven, Lower Dens, Sun Airway Independent. 9pm, $14.

Darondo Café Du Nord. 9pm, $15.

Rick Estrin and the Night Cats Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $20.

Funk Revival Orchestra, Karyn Page Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $10.

Mark Growden a.Muse Gallery, 614 Alabama, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. 7:30pm, $20-90.

Hillstomp, McDougall Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

I The Mighty, Of Shape and Sound, 5606, Hometown Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $12.

Ray Manzarek and Roy Rogers Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $18-25.

Moanin’ Dove, Goldenhearts with Kaboom String Band, Linda Perry, Soft White Sixties Cellspace, 2050 Bryant, SF; www.tiny.cc/3uvwz. 8pm, $12.

Patsychords, Coyote Grace, Alessi’s Ark, Kelli Scarr Hotel Utah. 8pm, $8.

La Plebe, Lenny Lashley’s Gang of MDC, Classics of Love, Nino Zombi Slim’s. 8:30pm, $15.

Roche, Sex Worker, Bookworms Li Po Lounge. 8pm.

Walken, Lesbian, Grayceon Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $8.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Francis Wong Old First Church, 1751 Sacramento, SF; (415) 474-1608. 8pm.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Afrofunk Experience Coda. 10pm, $10.

Heather Ambler and Jim Goodkind Mercury Café, 201 Octavia, SF; (415) 753-7855. 7:30pm, free.

Brass Tax Amnesia. 10pm, $5.

SambaDa Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $16.

DANCE CLUBS

Bearracuda DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10. House music dance party for bears and other wildlife, with live performances by Christeene, Smash-Up Derby, and more.

Braza! Som.10pm, $10. One-year anniversary celebration with DJ Spinna, plus residents Kento, Vanka, and Elan and live batucada with Fogo Na Ropa.

Club Dragon Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 9pm, $8. A gay Asian paradise. Featuring two dance floors playing dance and hip hop, smoking patio, and 2 for 1 drinks before 10pm.

Deeper 222 Hyde, 222 Hyde, SF; (415) 345-8222. 9pm, $10. With rotating DJs spinning dubstep and techno.

Dirty Rotten Dance Party Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, $5. With DJs Morale, Kap10 Harris, and Shane King spinning electro, bootybass, crunk, swampy breaks, hyphy, rap, and party classics. Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island, SF; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Family Vibes Elbo Room. 10pm, $8-10. Dub, bhangra, and Latin with Non Stop Bhangra, Locura, and Surya Dub,

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs B-Cause, Vinnie Esparza, Mr. Robinson, Toph One, and Slopoke.

Fubar Fridays Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5. With DJs spinning retro mashup remixes.

Good Life Fridays Apartment 24, 440 Broadway, SF; (415) 989-3434. 10pm, $10. With DJ Brian spinning hip hop, mashups, and top 40.

Hot Chocolate Milk. 9pm, $5. With DJs Big Fat Frog, Chardmo, DuseRock, and more spinning old and new school funk.

Oldies Night Knockout. 9pm, $2-4. Doo-wop, one-hit wonders, and more with DJs Primo, Daniel, and Lost Cat.

Rick Preston, Michelle Sanz, Christian Intrigue Triple Crown. 9pm. Spinning house to raise money for the American Red Cross to help victims of the San Bruno disaster.

Popscene vs. Loaded Rickshaw Stop. 10pm, $10. With Young the Giant, Geographer, DJ Aaron Axelson, and DJ Omar.

Rockabilly Fridays Jay N Bee Club, 2736 20th St, SF; (415) 824-4190. 9pm, free. With DJs Rockin’ Raul, Oakie Oran, Sergio Iglesias, and Tanoa “Samoa Boy” spinning 50s and 60s Doo Wop, Rockabilly, Bop, Jive, and more.

Some Thing The Stud. 10pm, $7. VivvyAnne Forevermore, Glamamore, and DJ Down-E give you fierce drag shows and afterhours dancing.

Strangelove Cat Club, 1190 Folsom, SF; (415) 703-8965. 9:30pm, $6. With DJs Tomas Diablo, Joe Radio, Fact 50, and Prince Charming spinning goth and industrial.

SATURDAY 6

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Big Light, Big Universe, Scraping for Change, Distorted Harmony, Lost Cosmonauts, Body or Brain Great American Music Hall. 7pm, $15.

Browntown West, Okie Rosette, Starr King Pops Bottom of the Hill. 2:15-5:15pm, $15. Starr King Elementary School benefit.

Colour Revolt, Cast of Thousands, Polaris at Noon Bottom of the Hill. 9:30pm, $10.

David J with Jill Tracy, Oddbird, Five Beats One Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $15.

Evolution: The Ultimate Tribute to Journey, La Ventana Slim’s. 9pm, $16.

Ruth Gerson Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

Mark Growden a.Muse Gallery, 614 Alabama, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. 7:30pm, $20-90.

Laurie Morvan Band Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $20.

Ledisi Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.sfjazz.org. $30-75.

Left Alone, Rocketz, Howlers, Bum City Saints Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8-10.

Magic Leaves, Moccretro, Spurm Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $6.

Mondo Drag, Your Cannons, Rachel Fannan Fivepoints Arthouse, 72 Tehama, SF; (415) 989-1166. 8pm, $5.

Pepper, Fishbone, Pour Habit Warfield. 8pm, $28.

Small Black, Class Actress, Young Prisms Independent. 9pm, $14.

Mavis Staples and Billy Bragg Fillmore. 8pm, $36.50.

Chelsea TK and the Tzigane Society, Love Dimension, Moon Balloons Hotel Utah. 9:30pm, $6.

Trans Am, Nice Nice, Jonas Reinhardt, Beat Broker Rickshaw Stop. 8:30pm, $15.

Jody Watley Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $28-36.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Roy Haynes and the Fountain of Youth Band Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $25-65.

“Switchboard Music Festival Preview” Porto Franco Records Art Parlor, 953 Valencia, SF; (650) 678-8020. 8pm, $15. With Telepathy and Happy Hour Jazz Quintet.

Zachary James Watkins, Kenneth Atchley Li Po Lounge. 9pm, $5. With films by John Reily with soundtracks by Lars Hidde and Charles Kremenak.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Africa Rising feat. DJ Jerimiah Coda. 10pm, $10.

Magic System, Les Twins Mezzanine. 8pm, $30.

Tango No. 9 Noe Valley Ministry, 1021 Sanchez, SF; www.noevalleymusicseries.com. 8:15pm, $17.

DANCE CLUBS

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Foxxee, Joseph Lee, Zhaldee, Mark Andrus, and Nuxx.

Debaser Knockout. 9pm, $5. Nineties alternative with DJ Jamie Jams and Emdee.

Everlasting Bass 330 Ritch. 10pm, $5-10. Bay Area Sistah Sound presents this party, with DJs Zita and Pam the Funkstress spinning hip-hop, soul, funk, reggae, dancehall, and club classics. Fire Corner Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 9:30pm, free. Rare and outrageous ska, rocksteady, and reggae vinyl with Revival Sound System and guests.

Foundation Som., 2925 16th St., SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm.

Gemini Disco Underground SF. 10pm, $5. Disco with DJ Derrick Love and Nicky B. spinning deep disco.

HYP Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 10pm, free. Gay and lesbian hip hop party, featuring DJs spinning the newest in the top 40s hip hop and hyphy.

Kontrol Endup. 10pm, $20. With resident DJs Alland Byallo, Craig Kuna, Sammy D, and Nikola Baytala spinning minimal techno and avant house.

Leisure Paradise Lounge. 10pm, $7. DJs Omar, Aaron, and Jet Set James spinning classic britpop, mod, 60s soul, and 90s indie.

New Wave City: Duran Duran Tribute DNA Lounge. 9pm, $7-12. With DJs Skip and Shindog.

Rock City Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5 after 10pm. With DJs spinning party rock.

Saturday Night Soul Party Elbo Room. 10pm, $10. Sixties soul with DJs Lucky, Phengren Oswald, and Paul Paul.

Souf Club Six. 9pm, $7. With DJs Jeanine Da Feen, Motive, and Bozak spinning southern crunk, bounce, hip hop, and reggaeton.

Soundscape Vortex Room, 1082 Howard, SF; www.myspace.com/thevortexroom. With DJs C3PLOS, Brighton Russ, and Nick Waterhouse spinning Soul jazz, boogaloo, hammond grooves, and more.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

SUNDAY 7

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Terry Adams Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $25.

Azalea Snail, Werewolves, Art of Shooting, Technicolor Yawn Hemlock Tavern. 5pm, $7.

Circa Survive, Dredg, Codeseven, Animals As Leaders Regency Ballroom. 7pm, $20.

A Decent Animal, Manatee, Graham Patzner Hotel Utah. 8pm, $7.

George Glass, Grimoon, Silent Pictures Knockout. 9pm, $7.

Johnny Flynn, Cheyenne Marie Mize, Goh Nakamura Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

Kegels, Penny Dreadfuls, Dead Panic Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Rubbersidedown, Burn River Burn, Dead Neck Café Du Nord. 8pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Kally Price with Old Blues and Jazz Band, Emperor Norton’s Jazz Band Amnesia. 9pm, $7-10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

José James and Jef Neve Florence Gould Theatre, Legion of Honor, 100 Legion of Honor Dr, SF; www.sjfazz.org. 2pm, $30.

Yellowjackets: The Jeff Lorber Fusion feat. Randy Brecker and Eric Marienthal Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7pm, $25-65.

DANCE CLUBS

Afterglow Nickies, 466 Haight, SF; (415) 255-0300. An evening of mellow electronics with resident DJs Matt Wilder, Mike Perry, Greg Bird, and guests.

Call In Sick Skylark. 9pm, free. DJs Animal and I Will spin danceable hip-hop.

Dance Social Knockout. 5pm, free. Northern soul, Motown, rocksteady, and more with DJs Dr. Scott and Revival Sound System.

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

DJ Anthony Atlas Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, free.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, dubstep, roots, and dancehall with DJ Sep, Vinnie Esparza, and guest Antiserum.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. “Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers.” Got that?

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Zax.

Pachanga Coda. 5pm, $10. Salsa with DJs Fab Fred and Antonio with Jesus Diaz y su QBA.

Swing Out Sundays Rock-It Room. 7pm, free (dance lessons $15). DJ BeBop Burnie spins 20s through 50s swing, jive, and more.

MONDAY 8

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Average White Band Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $25.

Marc Cohn, Sahara Smith Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.ticketmaster.com. 8pm, $38.50.

Combichrist, Aesthetic Perfection, (iVardensphere), God Module, DJ Decay Slim’s. 7:30pm, $24.

Heavy Independent. 8pm, $14.

Lucabrazzi, Vatos Locos, Spawn Atomic, Bckup Razor Elbo Room. 9pm, $5.

Supervillains, Ballyhoo!, Agent Deadlies Bottom of the Hill. 8:30pm, $10.

KT Tunstall, Hurricane Bells Warfield. 8pm, $30-40.

DANCE CLUBS

Black Gold Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm-2am, free. Senator Soul spins Detroit soul, Motown, New Orleans R&B, and more — all on 45!

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with DJs Decay, Joe Radio, and Melting Girl.

Krazy Mondays Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. With DJs Ant-1, $ir-Tipp, Ruby Red I, Lo, and Gelo spinning hip hop.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. With DJ Gordo Cabeza and guests playing all Motown every Monday.

Manic Mondays Bar on Church. 9pm. Drink 80-cent cosmos with Djs Mark Andrus and Dangerous Dan.

Musik for Your Teeth Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St., SF; (415) 642-0474. 5pm, free. Soul cookin’ happy hour tunes with DJ Antonino Musco.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl, SF; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Skylarking Skylark. 10pm, free. With resident DJs I & I Vibration, Beatnok, and Mr. Lucky and weekly guest DJs.

TUESDAY 9

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Average White Band Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $16-25.

Brookhaven Amnesia. 9pm.

Nectarine Pie, TRMRS, Apache Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

OK Sweetheart, Parlor Hawk, Desert Noises, Sean Barnett Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Weekend, Grave Babies Independent. 8pm, $15.

Kurt Vile and the Violators, Soft Pack, Purling Hiss Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

DANCE CLUBS

Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro.

Share the Love Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 5pm, free. With DJ Pam Hubbuck spinning house.

Womanizer Bar on Church. 9pm. With DJ Nuxx.

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