By Tim Redmond
Watching the speech in replay tonight, and Jesus, Bush looks terrible. I see none of the old confidence and swagger. He’s stumbling over words. He looks like he’s aged dramatically (like Carter did after the Iran hostage crisis). The wheels are coming off.
And it was fun to watch Anderson Cooper just skewer the plan …..
By Tim Redmond
By now you’ve all heard or read about the exceptionally uninspiring speech, but if you want to read the full text, it’s here. Beyond thinking that Bush is delusional — 20,000 new troops in Baghdad? This really is becoming Vietnam again — I can only say that he has handed the Democrats the best opportunity in many years. This strategy will fail — and the Dems who come out loud and clear now, and say it ‘s bound to fail, and call for a quick withdrawal — will be well poised to run for president in 2008, when the GOP is in free fall .
By Tim Redmond
There’s a website up from Democracy in Action that lists all the protests set for today and tomorrow against the Bush “surge” in troops. Click here to enter your zip code and use this handy-dandy guide to where to go.
› tredmond@sfbg.com
The biggest challenge facing Democrats in Congress this year is probably also the most boring. They’re going to have to deal with taxes.
I’m not the only one obsessed with this. Really, I’m not. Edmund L. Andrews got into it in the New York Times on Jan. 4, noting that the new Democratic leadership is utterly ducking the question of how to handle some of the major fiscal headaches that are going to rear their ugly heads.
Bear with me while we run some numbers.
The Iraq War is going to cost $100 billion in 2007, maybe more if Bush gets his troop "surge." Fixing the problem that causes more and more middle-class people to shoulder an extra tax burden under the alternative minimum tax will cost $50 billion. The Bush tax cuts — which the president wants to make permanent — are another huge-ticket item, maybe $170 billion a year (based on estimates from the Brookings Institution).
So that’s $320 billion to deal with — even before the Democrats spend a penny on any new initiatives or so much as talk about making Social Security solvent.
And, of course, there’s a $340 billion budget deficit, which keeps adding to the federal debt, which is a number so big that nobody can really comprehend it, so I won’t bother here except to say that the interest payments alone are $400 billion a year.
The Democrats have already announced they want to see any new spending come with a revenue source and any new tax cut proposals identify reductions in existing spending that would pay for them. All well and good — except that the Iraq War isn’t part of the federal budget. Bush just keeps coming back for money every few months, and Democrats who don’t want to be accused of refusing to support the troops in the field wind up voting to give him all of it.
Now let’s go to the political calculus, which is even uglier.
The only major politician I know of in the last electoral cycle who talked honestly about taxes and government spending was Phil Angelides, who (as some of you may remember) ran for governor of California. He was slaughtered.
That’s why the Times reports the following:
"Even as Democratic leaders continue to accuse Mr. Bush of having a reckless fiscal policy, they have refused to discuss dismantling his tax cuts or even to engage in a debate with him about the best way to stimulate economic growth.
" ‘It’s always the same old tired line with them — "Tax and spend, tax and spend, tax and spend," ‘ said Senator Kent Conrad, the North Dakota Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. ‘We’re not going there.’ "
No, so far they’re not. They’re just moving ahead, making promises and proposing policy, without saying either that spending on Iraq has to be cut dramatically or that somebody has to pay more taxes to fund it.
Even by Bush’s most optimistic projections, the national budget will be in the red until 2012. By then he and his crew will all be safe on the golf course, their retirements secure.
And apparently, the Democratic leaders are willing to continue to duck, continue to go into debt, continue to screw up the economy, and continue to burden our kids with the results of our greed, fear, and stupidity.
Nancy? *
By Tim Redmond
Robert Byrd is 89 years old, and still truckin’ along. He lnterrupted the Senate’s opening prayer this week, shouting “Yes Lord” and “yes in Jesus’s name.” Ted Kennedy pantomimed tuppling from a bottle during the high points of the Byrd show.
By Tim Redmond
Has anyone else noticed how much Gavin Newsom is starting to look like Lt. Commander Data?
By Tim Redmond
I think Luke Thomas at FCJ is the first one to officially claim to have unofficially announced that Matt Gonzalez is really running for mayor. But everyone in town is talking about it, and the typical discussion is around not whether but when he will join the race.
There are two conflicting schools of thought here. Some think Gonzalez would need to get in soon if he’s going to raise money and be taken seriously. Others (including, I suspect, Matt himself) would rather wait until the end of the summer and get in at the last minute.
Personally, I think the late-entry plan is a mistake. Four yeas ago, nobody expected Gonzalez to enter the race; he wasn’t even a factor in the discussions. I was on a tv show with him about three months before he wound up entering the race, and we both agreed that it was unlikely there would be any candidates beyond Gavin Newsom, Tom Ammiano and Angela Alioto. There really was a last-minute draft-Gonzalez movement when it became clear that Newsom was headed for an easy victory; part of his appeal was the novelty of it all.
Of course, he pissed a lot of people off, especially in the queer community, but jumping in and effectlively shooting down Ammiano’s campaign. But I don’t think it was a sneaky pre-meditated strategy. Gonzalez can be an impulsive guy; he just decided one day to go for it.
This time, anything he does late in the game will be seen as nothing more than a political strategy. It will look as if he’s intentionally holding back to see who else runs, to let the race play out a bit, and to give himself an advantage. That won’t fly so well in 2007.
There’s already too much talk; too many people have too much riding on this. We need a progressive candidate, and if it’s not Gonzalez, then perhaps someone else will enter (and Gonzalez will look like a spoiler at the end). If he’s going to run — and I hope he does — he should decide soon and get on with it.
I called Gonzalez today, and he insisted that he hasn’t made any announcement, prive or public, official or unofficial. “I’m not running for mayor,” he said. “I’ve made that point over and over again. I have said that I’ve thought about it, and I have. But I’m not getting in anyone’s way, and if another strong candidate wants to run, they should go ahead.”
I told him that I think he needs to make a final decision soon, and rule himself out if he isn’t going to run. “I agree with that,” he said.
By Tim Redmond
Three interesting items today that reflect on the state of the SFPD:
David Hill is convicted of second-degree murder in the killing of Officer Isaac Espinoza. That means he’ll get life without parole — but not the death penalty. From the start of this case, D.A. Kamala Harris refused to push for death, in part because she doesn’t support the death penalty but also because she insisted that it was very unlikely a jury would return a verdict of first-degree murder here. The cops went batshit on her. Guess what? She was right.
The feds put a 60-year-old woman in prison for cutlivating medical marijuana — with the help, Fog City Journal charges, of of a San Francisco cop. Yet another example of the SF cops working with the feds to contravene local law.
The Chron finally reports on the resignation of OCC director Kevin Allen but missed the larger point: The Police Officers Association apparently cheered Allen’s resignation, which was based in part on health issues. When will the chief tell her troops to stop acting like thugs?
By Tim Redmond
This one is really amazing, even by the standards of our current theocracy: The National Park Service is selling a book in the Grand Canyon bookstore that argues that the canyon was created by Noah’s flood. And “The Grand Canyon Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush Administration appointees,” the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says.
For starters, after my long years in Catholic school, I think I can pretty safely argue that Noah’s flood didn’t take place in North America; most biblical scholars place it in the Middle East, and say he landed on Mt. Ararat.
But never mind that level of hokum; this suggests that the creationists have gotten so powerful that even basic geology is held hostage.
Rep. George Miller, soon to take over the committee that oversees the park service, might want to look into this.
By Tim Redmond
The NY Times today has it about right on tax policy: The Democrats are ducking for cover while Bush continues to demand that his insane tax cuts be made permanent. Lyndon Johnson was forced to recognize in the 1960s that he couldn’t have both a Great Society and the Vietnam War at the same time without figuring out how to pay for it all, but back then, it wasn’t considered political suicide to raise taxes on the rich. (Let’s remember: Even under RIchard Nixon, the top tax rate for the very very rich reached 80 percent. Today it’s 34 percent.)
At some point, Nancy Pelosi, as the speaker, is going to have to make a choice: Start to cut spending on the war — by a lot — or talk about at the very least repealing the Bush tax cuts.
Of course, the third choice (and perhaps the most likely) is to continue to duck, continue to go into debt, continue to screw up the economy and continue to burden our kids with the results of our greed, fear and stupidity. Nancy?
By Tim Redmond
Luke Thomas had the scoop first, and now SF Gate is reporting that indeed Annemarie Conroy has — as the report puts it — “resigned” from her $250,000 a year job in emergency services.
Of course, she really had no choice — the supes had eliminated the position weeks ago.
By Tim Redmond
Cindy Sheehan is already upstaging the House Democrats and pushing the antiwar movement to play a greater role in the new Democratic Congress. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is going to have to deal with this sooner or later.
For now, I can’t even get Pelosi’s office to tell me if she’ll make a statement in support of Josh Wolf
By Tim Redmond
The Ex reports this morning that Mayor Newsom claims he’s just “seconds away” from cutting a deal with Google and Earthlink to provide free WiFi in the city. So this will be tossed to the supervisors pretty soon — and already, Newsom is pulling the usual mayoral line, which is to demand that the deal be accepted as is, without a lot of changes.
Newsom will say that it took 10 months of complex talks to reach this point, and that if the board starts micromanaging the contract and making a lot of amendments, the entire deal could fall through. We’ve heard this same line over and over again.
The supes can’t be intimidated here, and I don’t think they will be. Because the deal that I’ve heard described is not terribly good for the city. For starters, the free wifi is pretty weak, 300 Kbs; to get a decent speed on your connection, you need to pay. Then there’s the long term aspect — it would lock the city into a private vendor for as long as 16 years.
I don’t think the supes should go along with this — at least not until there’s a good-faith effort to look into a city-run system.
› tredmond@sfbg.com
Every time I have a problem with my cable TV service, I’m reminded how much I hate Comcast and why the city ought to be running its own municipal cable system.
The latest saga: a couple days ago, late in the afternoon, I was hanging out with my kids, and I noticed that we’d lost the signal on the TV. Yes, I am a terrible parent — the kids don’t need to watch TV at all, certainly not in the afternoon on a weekday. But I wanted to watch a football game (which doesn’t count against the ban on weekday TV), and Vivian, who is 4, wanted to watch the cheerleaders, which is my own personal nightmare, but what can I do? The damn tube didn’t work. I called Comcast.
A service tech told me that someone needed to come out to the house and look at the connection and set up an appointment for the next day, between 4 and 8 p.m. I hate these four-hour service windows, and the repair people are badly overworked and always late, but whatever: I rearranged my entire afternoon and evening schedule and sat at home waiting for the knock on the door. It never came.
Around 7 p.m. it occurred to me to call and see what was up. A computerized voice told me there was no scheduled service appointment at my address. Three times I tried to connect to a human being; three times I heard "please wait" over and over before the line disconnected.
I finally got through to someone by choosing sales instead of service (they always come to the phone to sell you stuff), and a nice sales staffer promised to route me to a service rep. Ten minutes later the line went dead again.
Hanging up on customers is not good, and blowing off a repair call without so much as a phone call when someone is sitting at home for four hours waiting is pretty lame. I don’t give up easy, so I went to Comcast.com and found a way to get a live chat with a tech (it’s not easy to find, but it’s there). Someone named Jennifer came on, accessed my cable box remotely, and — after 30 minutes of back-and-forth — told me it was broken and that I should go get a new one. No shit. Thanks, Jen.
Even in this world of high-end broadband, live chat on the Internet is slow and clunky. Jennifer and I spent half an hour accomplishing what would have taken about 45 seconds on the phone. Why couldn’t I speak to a live human being? Why won’t anyone at Comcast answer the phone?
Comcast spokesperson Andrew Johnson told me that the storm and power outages had messed up Comcast’s call centers, which is understandable. But this isn’t the first time this has happened to me (or, judging from the sorts of calls I get, to many of you).
Meanwhile, I really look forward to dealing with EarthLink and Google over wi-fi problems (see "Free Wi-Fi — for Everyone," this page).
We don’t have to put up with this shit. Cable and broadband are rapidly merging, and they’re part of the city’s basic infrastructure. San Francisco can run its own system, make enough money to pay for the operations many times over, cut rates — and be a whole lot more accountable when things go wrong.
What are we waiting for? *
By Tim Redmond
If you haven’t seen the truly grim footage of Saddam Hussein’s hanging, you can view it here. Luke Thomas posted it on Fog City Journal, but I don’t think any of the other local sites have links up.
I understand why people avoid this sort of thing: It’s really nasty to look at. But there’s a reason Americans should see it, and (with the advent of cell-phone cameras, and soon, little cameras hidden in all sorts of other gadgets) footage of executions, including California killings, is going to become more and more common.
The United States has tried hard to make executions seem almost clinical: The electric chair and the gas chamber have been replaced with lethal execution, which is supposed to be painless. We know that isn’t always true; in fact, killing someone is never pretty and is never going to be pretty.
And if the state is going to do the killing, the public needs to know what it’s paying for.
In this case, we paid for a hanging. Don’t kid yourself — your tax dollars paid for that rope and those gallows. And the United States, which controls virtually every move the Iraqi government makes, was happy to alllow this to go forward.
God bless America.
By Tim Redmond
The bloggers are having a bit of fun with The Chronicle’s front-page New Year’s Eve assertion that San Francisco’s Golden Age is here again. I have to agree with Beyond Chron — the story was an embarassment that quoted only conservative, wealthy San Franciscans and ignored much of the city.
Yeah, reporter Carl Nolte, who is a good guy (and my neighbor in Bernal Heights) made the point that there have always been problems in San Francisco, including today. But his overall theme — that all this new development and soaring housing costs are somehow good for the city — is a crock.
I’m always the optimist, and I think that 2006 was a great year for local politics. But a “Golden Age?” No: what’s happening in the local economy is that San Francisco is becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. We are building housing for people who don’t live here, and destroying jobs for people who do.
I’ve argued in the past that in a boom-band-bust city, the busts are often better than the booms. That’s because the single greatest quality-of-life issue for most people (the non-rich) in San Francisco is the cost of housing. This boom is only golden for a very few.
› tredmond@sfbg.com
It’s been quite a political year in San Francisco. And 2007 is going to be better.
I was talking to my friend and colleague Steve Jones just before Christmas about the folks in the Mayor’s Office (and elsewhere) who still think a progressive vision for San Francisco — a city where the rich pay their fair share, where the public sector provides a wealth of services to the public, where money doesn’t rule politics and elected officials are accountable, a place where tenants are protected and land use is determined by community needs and not developer demands, a city that serves as a model for the rest of the country — is just some sort of wild and pointless fantasy. And Steve and I agreed: in 2006 the progressives won a lot of the key battles, and the so-called moderates who have no vision at all were on the defensive most of the time.
We’ve had setbacks. Things aren’t perfect. But I’ve been living in this city and watching politics for a long time now, and I can honestly say that we’re making progress.
San Francisco has a program that’s aimed at providing health insurance to everyone. San Francisco has a living-wage law. San Francisco has laws that require sizable payments to tenants who are being evicted and that require employers to offer sick days. San Francisco is going to elect its next mayor under a public-financing system that might actually allow genuine candidates who lack downtown money to compete.
San Francisco is demanding that cops actually walk beats in high-crime areas and seriously talking about demanding that almost two-thirds of all new housing be available at below-market rates. San Francisco is moving to provide public power in Hunters Point and at Treasure Island.
And none of that came out of the Mayor’s Office.
The policy debates in this city are happening at the Board of Supervisors, where district-elected representatives are pushing progressive ideas that would never have gone beyond the wild-dream stage 10 years ago.
We’re not all the way there. We still fight with each other and let our egos get in the way. We’re still trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that state and federal laws limit how far we can go to raise money and protect the vulnerable. We still aren’t quite willing as a city or a progressive movement to commit to income and wealth redistribution (at home here, not in Washington or Sacramento), a cause that defines all that we think about and do — and we need to, or in the end nothing else matters.
We haven’t kicked out Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and created a full-on public power system yet. Black kids are still dying from gunfire in record numbers. We don’t have a candidate for mayor.
And all of the people who read this will think of other things we haven’t done, because we in the progressive movement love to complain and argue and we’re never satisfied — which is, in the end, a good thing.
And the big-money greedheads who have had their greasy paws on the levers of power in this town since the Gold Rush aren’t about to surrender. Every step forward is still a struggle.
But we kicked their asses in District Six — and that was one where both sides were in full-court press and everyone knew it mattered. They have come to realize we are not just crazy dreamers.
I love this town. Happy new year. *
By Tim Redmond
The line between campaign consultant and lobbyist has always been far too fuzzy — but now the Center for Public Integrity has issued a report on how the revolving door can lead to terrible public policy. A central example in the report:how San Francisco consultant John Whitehurst and his firm, Barnes Mosher Whitehurst Lauter, “traded on its campaign connections to lobby for changes in California law and city zoning, paving the way for high-rises that will dramatically alter the San Francisco skyline along the eastern waterfront.”
It’s a fascinating tale of how Whitehurst parlayed his ties with Gavin Newsom’s mayoral campaign and Mark Leno’s Assembly campaign to win approval for 40-story luxury condo buildings. It shows exactly how sleazy local politics has become.
By Tim Redmond
Well, now I’m not the only one speculating about the possibility of Carole Migden deciding to run for mayor. Sasha at LeftinSF floated it out Tuesday, and SFist weighed in on it today.
All of this, of course, goes back to the story that Mark Leno may challenge Migden for her state Senate seat, a prospect that has political reporters and insider-politics junkies (including me) buzzing around madly.
But when you actually think about if for a second, there are a few good reasons for everyone (including Leno) to take a deep breath and consider what this could mean. For starters, Midgen and Leno don’t really disagree on a lot of major issues. So the campaign would be all about things like “effectiveness” and personality — and that kind of race has the prospect of turning very negative and very ugly very fast. The battle would split the progressive community, and, as one observer put it to me, “there would be blood everywere, and it could take years to heal the wounds.”
I’m not syaing Leno shoudn’t do it — I like to see incumbents face a challenge, and this is a democracy and he has every right to run for any office he wants. But this is about more than Leno and Migden; there’s a progressive movement in this town, and we’ve got a lot of battles to fight.
I know Leno and Migden aren’t on the best of terms right now, but I think Sup. Tom Ammiano has the right idea. “Before this goes any further,” he told me, “Mark and Carole really need to sit down and talk.”
And I’d love to evesdrop on THAT conversation.
PS: Lest I sound too negative about a Leno challenge, let me quote a local activist who knows both politicians well: “Leno fights for his issues. He’s a real hard worker. Carole pushes the right button on the issues, but a lot of us think she’s missing in action. She shouldn’t be talking to Leno — she should be back here talking to us.”
And if the prospect of a challenge gets Migden to pay more attention to her constituents, that’s only a good thing.
By Tim Redmond
I grew up in the 1960s, the era of elementary school bomb drills and “duck and cover.” I thought we’d gone beyond all of that, but apparently not: i just received from the federal Department of Health and Human Services a “Wallet guide for the media” called “Preparing for terrorism and other public health emergencies.” It folds out into a nice handy tip sheet on what to do if we’re attacked by mustard gas, nerve gas, antrax or a number of other awful things. In most cases, of course, there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do except “immediately seek medical care.”
My favorite item, though:
“Nuclear device — powerful bomb involving splitting of atoms. Comes in various sizes and types, producing various levels of destruction.
“First actions: Do not look toward the explosion …. Lie on the ground and cover your head.”
Then bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.
San Francisco is spending $250,000 to create an economic development plan, and that’s probably a good thing. The city’s economy is changing; development pressure is threatening small businesses and light industry; local people can’t find jobs; and more and more residents are working out of town — it’s exactly the sort of situation that calls for some intelligent planning.
The current project, sponsored by the Mayor’s Office, is the result of a ballot measure approved two years ago that requires the city to measure the economic impact of policy decisions. For the most part, the legislation, by Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, is aimed at stopping progressive initiatives, but if it gets San Francisco headed in the right economic direction, that will be well worth a quarter million dollars.
If.
See, I’ve talked to the economist who is heading up the study and to the person in the Mayor’s Office who is coordinating it, and I’m afraid that they’re coming very close to missing the point.
The final study won’t be completed until the end of January, but the Board of Supervisors got a sneak preview a couple weeks ago, complete with a PowerPoint presentation and lots of the kind of talk that seems coherent only to academic economists. (Under “Conclusions,” the summary recommends that we “invest in and diversify the engines of innovation in the knowledge sector.” Whatever that means.)
The actual research in the preliminary documents seems fairly solid, and the evidence, while not surprising, is still alarming: San Francisco has lost thousands of families, jobs that don’t require a college degree are vanishing, and the income gap between the increasingly wealthy high end of the population and the increasingly squeezed middle and working classes is growing.
But missing from the study so far are what I consider the two most important factors in economic development in this city: housing and land use.
I work for a small business, and I have to hire people, and I can tell you that every small businessperson in this town (except the ones who have vast stores of venture capital to spend) is facing the same problem I am: it costs too much to live here. And if their businesses are operating in the eastern neighborhoods, they’re also facing the very real prospect that they may lose their leases and their places of business to make room for more million-dollar condos that their employees can’t afford, which will fill up with more people who work in Silicon Valley.
Last week I spoke with Ted Egan, the Berkeley economist who is heading up the project for ICF Consulting. He understands that locally owned businesses are the key to the local economy and that replacing imports and expanding exports is a crucial goal. But he also said that “housing outcome isn’t on our plate.”
That, I guess, is because the city defined the study that way. Jennifer Matz, who is deputy director at the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, told me that her office would be coordinating with city planners but that housing and land use were beyond the scope of this report.
If that’s the case, it won’t be a terribly useful document. SFBG
The lawsuit that seeks to stop the monopolization of daily newspapers in the Bay Area isn’t just a business dispute. Real estate investor Clint Reilly argues that he would be personally harmed by the deal (which gives him standing to sue), but in reality, this is about the future of mainstream news media in one of the nation’s largest and most politically active markets. If the Hearst Corp. and Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group have their way, it’s entirely possible one corporate entity could effectively control every single significant daily paper in San Francisco, southern Marin, the East Bay, the South Bay, and the Peninsula. And since TV and radio news stations tend to take their cues from the daily papers, that means one corporate entity would decide, to a great extent, what sort of local news will be available to several million people.
It’s more than a legal issue. It’s a major public policy issue — and that’s why the papers shouldn’t be allowed to fight this out in secret.
On Dec. 21 the Guardian and Media Alliance, a nonprofit media activism organization, filed a motion in federal court seeking to intervene in the Reilly lawsuit and asking Judge Susan Illston to unseal the key records in the case. Our point: this is a huge national story, and the public interest in knowing what the biggest and most powerful newspaper chains in the country are planning for the Bay Area is clear and overwhelming.
But the way the big chains have set things up, there’s no way for the public to find out much of anything — except what Hearst and MediaNews want us to know. Under the terms of a court order the chains wrote and got approved, anything — evidence, briefs, depositions, even legal motions — the newspaper barons want to mark secret is automatically sealed. Of course, the newspaper lawyers can decide to publicize anything they want to put out to bolster their side of the story. In other words, the newspapers — which, after all, are accused of trying to violate antitrust laws and create a media monopoly in the region — have complete control of what information does and doesn’t come out of the trial. That’s exactly how they want it — and exactly how things will go if they get away with their merger plans.
It’s hard to fight the big chains. Almost every experienced media lawyer in town works for or has partners who work for one of the chains, so they all have conflicts of interest. The news media organizations, like the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the California First Amendment Coalition, and the Society of Professional Journalists, all have board members who work for the chains.
And of course, the big newspapers themselves, which love to fight to unseal court records in other cases (like billionaire Ron Burkle’s divorce case), are all either involved or have allies who are involved, so they won’t touch the case.
So it’s fallen to the Guardian, an independent paper, and Media Alliance, an independent activist group, to work with the First Amendment Project, an independent public interest law firm, to promote the public interest in unsealing the records.
We know there’s a lot of information that ought to be out in the light of day. Already, one document discussed in open court shows that Hearst, which owns the Chronicle, has discussed ad sales, printing, and distribution deals with Singleton’s group — which is supposedly a competitor. What else do these companies have planned for the Bay Area? Will Hearst and Singleton wind up in some sort of joint operating agreement? Is this the end of daily newspaper competition? Will one billionaire publisher be able to put a conservative spin on all editorial coverage in the region? The public has a right to know.
Court documents are presumed public, and the newspaper chains have shown no reason why anything other than a few narrowly defined records should be kept secret. Judge Illston should revoke the secrecy order and open up the key documents in the Reilly case.
PS Where is the federal Justice Department? Where is outgoing state attorney general Bill Lockyer or incoming AG Jerry Brown? We haven’t heard a word from any of the public officials who ought to be intervening in this case. At the very least, they should support our efforts to open the records.
PPS: If Hearst and the big chains get away with sealing these documents, it will set a terrible precedent for future cases in which business interests want to keep secret information that ought to be in the public domain. How can any of these big media companies ever go into court in the future (as they have done in the past) to push for unsealing court record when they have gone to such lengths to seal their own records?
PPPS To see our legal brief, press release, and links to media coverage, go to www.sfbg.com.
By Tim Redmond
So City Planning Director Dean Macris thinks the San Francisco skyline is not distinctive enough. Today’s Chron quotes him supporting an 80-story tower next to the new transbay terminal:
“The current skyline is very flat, and needs some peaks to create a more distinctive look.”
Excuse me: Dean Macris is responsible for much of what the skyline looks like today. He defined the rules for highrises in 1984 with his Downtown Plan, and the uglification has proceeded apace ever since. The skyline is filled with walls of tombstones because city planning under Macris and then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein was driven entirely by developers who wanted to make vast amounts of money. Esthetics were never an issue; bulk and density was where the profit was, so that’s what we got.
What a crock of shit.
