A very funny Yes on H video:
Tim Redmond
Same-sex marriage good for the economy
The opponents of same-sex marraige have raised $25 million. That’s amazing: $25 million to stop people from getting married.
But apparently, it’s working. The Newsom ad has been effective, and now No on 8 folks are issuing a wake-up call to their supporters.
In the meantime, I really like the Sonoma State University study that shows how same-sex marriage is good for the economy. Sonoma County alone could see $112 million in benefits.
More jobs, more money into the economy in a depression … and these nut cases are spending $25 million to stop it?
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
Way back in the 1980s, when Willie Brown was the untouchable speaker of the State Assembly and by all accounts the second most powerful politician in California, he came to an event at the San Francisco Press Club and gave a few dozen reporters a lesson in how to defeat a ballot measure. I’ll never forget it.
A group of reformers — some Republicans, many unhappy with Brown’s leadership — placed a measure before the voters that would have taken the power of drawing legislative districts away from the State Legislature and given it to a panel of retired judges. The Democratic leadership, which had used its redistricting power with shameless brilliance to create safe seats for Democrats, wanted to kill the proposition, but polls showed it passing by a good margin.
So Brown went to the notorious Los Angeles political consulting firm of Berman and D’Agostino (a.k.a. BAD Campaigns). "And they told me," Brown announced to the audience, "that any piece of legislation has something in it that can be used to upset and confuse the voters. You just have to find the fatal flaw."
So the BAD boys decided to run against the judges. Brown turned on a TV his aides had set up and showed the reporters a series of TV ads. None mentioned redistricting. They didn’t mention the legislature. They didn’t give you any idea what the ballot measure was about. Instead they featured a bunch of shadowy figures in black robes, raising their right hands and swearing to uphold party loyalty. "Judges belong in the courtroom, not the back room," an ominous-sounding voice-over said.
Thanks to the grossly misleading ads — and Brown’s ability to raise millions to blanket the airwaves with them — the redistricting plan was defeated. Brown was positively gleeful about it.
I keep thinking about that when I watch the cable-TV ads against Proposition H. The ads feature a series of people — Hunter Stern, who works for PG&E’s house union; John Hanley of the SF Firefighters Union; and Sup. Carmen Chu, who has become a wholly owned subsidiary of PG&E — talking about losing the right to vote on revenue bonds.
Nobody ever votes on revenue bonds. In California, we vote on general obligation bonds, which are backed by taxpayers. Revenue bonds are backed by a defined revenue stream; airports, ports, and other agencies issue them all the time.
And none of this has much to do with the substance of Prop. H, the Clean Energy Act, which sets renewable energy goals and calls for a study of the city’s energy options. Yes, Prop. H would allow the city to sell revenue bonds for new energy facilities — but the city issues revenue bonds (without a vote of the people) for all sorts of enterprise projects.
So what happened here is that Eric Jaye, PG&E’s political consultant, realized that the Clean Energy Act was polling well and looked for something he could use as a fatal flaw. Like the judge in the back room. He settled on the revenue bonds, manufactured a right that doesn’t exist, and pretended that Prop. H would take it away.
I’m sure Willie Brown — who collected $200,000 in legal fees from PG&E last year — is proud. *
Look what the free market does for housing
San Francisco has approved or built thousands of new high-end condos, and if the free-market theory is right, as supply is increased, rents should start coming down.
But look! They aren’t.
San Francisco is an utterly irrational housing market. You can build luxury condos til the cows come home and it won’t bring down rents.
Do we really need the Blue Angels?
Whoops, too close, everyone’s dead
By Tim Redmond
The Chron did its usual puff piece on Fleet Week today:
Windows will rattle, dogs will howl and a lot of people will complain about the ruckus. But those cries are traditionally drowned out by cheers from enthralled fans, and also drowned out by the jet engines.
I hate to be a killjoy, but there’s more to this story.
I’ll admit — I love cool technology, and the F/A 18 is a boss jet. I always appreciate amazing human skill, and the people who fly in the Blue Angels are phenomenal pilots. In the abstract, it’s a fun show to watch.
But this is a big city, and it’s a city with a big antiwar movement, and this expensive show of military might is really pretty ridiculous.
I got an interesting letter from journalist Rick Knee this morning in response to the KTVU news coverage. He makes some good points.
$850 billion reasons to vote for Sheehan
My brother called me this morning a bit upset. He runs a small construction firm in upstate New York and he’s bummed about the bailout bill.
“I think I’m the only company in the United States that isn’t getting something out of this,” he said. “I should be making wooden arrows or importing rum.”
And, indeed, as MSNBC reports, there are lotsa goodies in the bill:
Tucked into pages 262 and 263 of the bill, for example, are provisions that will aid the manufacturers of “certain wooden arrows designed for use by children.” The bill will exempt the arrows from an excise tax of 39 cents. There are also tax breaks for race-track owners, for rum imported from Puerto Rico, for worsted wool makers, Hollywood film and television production companies and on and on.
Cindy Sheehan is having fun with this; she and her pals took to the Hyatt hotel across from the federal reserve with a message:
Those North Virginia commies
Gee, this campaign is getting weird. John McCain’s brother suggested this weekend that Northern Virginia is “communist country.”
But, ooh, they love Omama there.
Congressman goes to prison in drag
Whoa, this is special.
According to a story in the Pasadena Weekly, Rep. Dana Rhorabacher — a nutcase if there ever were one — has decided that Sirhan Sirhan was part of an “arab conspiracy” to kill RFK — and dressed in drag to secretly interview the admitted assassin in prison.
The fun thing about this is that there’s a large and active Sirhan-Shirhan conspiracy underground out there, folks who attempt to linke the RFK killing to the JRK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, the CIA, the Bay of Pigs, Israel, the Mob and many more shadowy characters.
And now we have Dana as Diana digging into this lovely mess. What a great country.
I
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
I was walking down Ocean Avenue the other day, and I stopped for a second to chat with two volunteers who were handing out literature for John Avalos, the leading progressive candidate for supervisor in District 11. Since everyone wants to know about the Guardian endorsements, which don’t come out until next week, we got to talking about District 9, where three good candidates are contending to succeed Sup. Tom Ammiano, who is heading to Sacramento and the state Legislature.
One of the Avalos workers was supporting Eric Quezada. The other was supporting Mark Sanchez. "But we’re still friends," the Sanchez backer said.
The supervisorial races would be very different without ranked-choice voting.
There are people who like the relatively new system, which allows voters to choose three candidates in ranked order. There are people who think it’s too confusing, or leads to the wrong outcome. But I think I can say, as someone who lives in District 9 and is in the epicenter of that very heated campaign, that a race that offers voters a choice between Sanchez, Quezada, and David Campos — any of whom would make an excellent supervisor, and all of whom have different strengths to offer — wouldn’t be possible under a traditional electoral system.
Three progressive candidates in an old-fashioned election might very well split the left vote, and leave the door open for someone like Eva Royale — a much less appealing candidate who’s backed by the mayor. There would have been a huge power struggle early on, and some of the candidates would have been under immense pressure not to run, and their backers would be running around trying to cut the other folks off at the knees.
In this case, though, one of the three good guys is going to win — and it will probably be the one who gets the most second-place votes. So it’s in everyone’s interest not to go negative. If Sanchez, say, started to attack Quezada, the Quezada backers would get mad and leave Sanchez off their ballots — and that would hurt Sanchez when the second-place votes are counted.
So everyone has been pretty well behaved in D9; I’ve heard a few whispers here and there, and a few people have tossed off a few nasty comments, but overall the candidates and their supporters recognize that it’s better to stay positive.
So let me shift for a second to District 3.
There’s a real threat in Chinatown–North Beach, and his name is Joe Alioto. As the brother of Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, the nephew of former Sup. Angela Alioto, and the grandson of the late mayor Joe, Alioto has a legendary political name. He also has big downtown backing. And his politics are, if anything, to the right of his sister, who is one of the worst members of the current board.
Based on polls I’ve heard about, there are two candidates who have a chance to beat him — David Chiu and Denise McCarthy. Chiu, a member of the Small Business Commission, will almost certainly get hammered by downtown. McCarthy, who has run the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center for many years, may get hit, too. And this one, like D9, will come down to the second-place votes.
The last thing McCarthy and Chiu can afford is to attack each other. There’s been some of that going on, and it has to stop. If the progressives want to win District 3, Chiu and McCarthy have to realize that, like it or not, they are a team.
Bailout economics 101
Dennis Kucinch, who voted against the bailout, has a remarkable basic lesson on how the bailout would have worked. In a letter to his supporters, he writes:
Here is a very quick explanation of the $700 billion bailout within the context of the mechanics of our monetary and banking system:
The taxpayers loan money to the banks. But the taxpayers do not have the money. So we have to borrow it from the banks to give it back to the banks. But the banks do not have the money to loan to the government. So they create it into existence (through a mechanism called fractional reserve) and then loan it to us, at interest, so we can then give it back to them.
Confused?
This is the system. This is the standard mechanism used to expand the money supply on a daily basis not a special one designed only for the “$700 billion” transaction. People will explain this to you in many different ways, but this is what it comes down to.
The banks needed Congress’ approval. Of course in this topsy turvy world, it is the banks which set the terms of the money they are borrowing from the taxpayers. And what do we get for this transaction? Long term debt enslavement of our country. We get to pay back to the banks trillions of dollars ($700 billion with compounded interest) and the banks give us their bad debt which they cull from everywhere in the world.
Who could turn down a deal like this? I did.
Actually, Kucinich is pretty close. The point he misses is that much of the money won’t be borrowed from banks but from other countries, primarily China, that have a surplus of cash and want to invest in the U.S. But the sentiment is right.
The other bailout bill
With all the sound and fury around the failure of the Bush bailout bill and the stock market collapse, I see very little talk of the alternatives that are out there.
For example, two Bay Area representatives, Barbara Lee of Oakland and Lynn Woolsey of Petaluma, have their own bailout bill, supported by the Progressive Caucus. There’s a good discussion of it at Calitics. The Lee-Woolsey bill includes a transaction tax on risky financial instruments and mortgage reform.
I wonder if the House will take that up next.
San Francisco’s 14 billionaires
The new Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans is out, and San Francisco seems to be doing just fine, thank you. This city — which can’t fund decent services for the homeless, which runs a structural budget deficit every year because it can’t raise enough revenue to cover basic city functions — has 14 billionaires.
They run from Larry Page (Google) at $15.8 billion to poor old Walter Shorenstein, who barely makes the cut at $1.3 billion.
And they are a reminder that this is a very rich city that can afford to do a lot better for its poorest people.
Here’s the list:
Larry Page (Google)
Steven Roberts (leveraged buiyouts)
Riley Bechtel (Bechtel)
Steven Bechtel Jr.(Bechtel)
Ray Dolby (Dolby)
Gordon Getty (oil)
William Randolph Hearst III (Hearst)
John Pritzker (hotels)
John Fisher (Gap)
Robert Fisher (Gap)
Thomas Steyer (finance)
William FIsher (Gap)
Don Fisher (Gap)
Doris Fisher (Gap)
Walter Shorenstein (real estate)
Let’s remember those names next time the mayor says the city doesn’t have enough money.
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
District elections changed everything. You can see it in the interviews we’ve been doing with candidates for supervisor. Ten years ago, most of the incumbents were political hacks, bought and paid for by the mayor and downtown. So were most of the serious candidates challenging them.
We didn’t tape the interviews back then, but I remember them well: we spent a lot of time arguing with people, trying desperately to find some reason why people who had raised more than a quarter of a million dollars to run for citywide office might possibly be worth endorsing. We spent hours arguing among ourselves about who was the least awful, trying to count to five or six to fill a slate, knowing that some of the candidates we were backing had no chance of winning — or that they were, at best, marginally acceptable.
Now almost every district has good candidates: people who have roots in the communities they want to serve, people with credible ideas about addressing the city’s problems — people who seem to be more interested in progressive policies than in making the mayor or campaign contributors happy. The problem we have this year, in some districts anyway, is not finding one tolerable candidate — it’s choosing between several very good ones.
Check it out for yourself: all of the interviews this year are on the Web, at our sfbg.com Election Center.
Of course, there are still some people who don’t get it. Sue Lee, who was once an aide to a district-elected supervisor named Nancy Walker, told us she thinks the last at-large board was better than this board, and that she’d support some sort of modification (read: repeal) of district elections.
(Excuse me, Sue: that last board was the group that then–mayor Willie Brown referred to as his "mistresses" who needed to be "serviced.")
And downtown hates the district board, because money can’t control district supervisors. So I think we’ll keep hearing about a repeal effort. I understand there are already focus groups being convened on the subject. I would never support a candidate who wasn’t fully, completely, aggressively committed to district elections — but I think it’s also important to support candidates who are going to make a functioning, as well as activist, board.
Lee also sounded like a Ronald Reagan administration official at an Iran-Contra hearing; she couldn’t remember which Pacific Gas and Electric Co. official had told her to oppose the Clean Energy Act, and she had a hard time taking a stand on anything else. Ron Dudum was even tougher to pin down. We spent an hour asking him to say he was in favor of or against any policy at all — anything — and we got absolutely nowhere. (Oh, he thinks the city has a spending problem, not a revenue problem, but he couldn’t tell us what he would cut.)
Eva Royale, who is running in District 9, told us she supports public power but opposes Proposition H. Huh?
Ahsha Safai, who is running in District 11, sent me an e-mail that said he couldn’t be bothered to come in for an endorsement interview. Joe Alioto, who is running in District 3, never returned my phone calls. That’s just lame; even Mayor Gavin Newsom, whom we criticize almost every week, comes down to talk to us at endorsement time.
We’ll come out with our recommendations Oct. 8. But for a preview of how it’s going, check out the Election Center. Never a dull moment.
SPORTS: Make Martz the head coach
By A.J. Hayes
As temping as it was to run down the middle of Geneva Ave. shrieking “Forty Fuckin’ Niners” after San Francisco’s 31-13 blowout of Detroit on Sunday, let’s remember that the 2007 49ers also won two of their first three contests before disintegrating into putrid tire fire.
But while the record is exactly the same as it was heading into Week Four last season, the two clubs are worlds apart. While last season’s 2-1 Niners team was timid, plodding, conservative, scared and clueless, this Niners club is confident, experimental, focused and just a bit cocky. Over their first three games the 49ers have scored 76 points; it took seven games last season to get there.
For the first time since Steve Mariucci left the team five seasons ago, the 49ers are starting to resemble the 49ers and not a confused NFL Europe squad.
Thank you Mike Martz.
Without the addition of Martz as offensive coordinator this season, it’s very likely this fall’s Niners club would be a redo of last season’s abomination.
The Niners fortunes changed for the better when San Francisco head coach Mike Nolan was essentially forced to bring in the darning Martz to run the team’s offense.
But the former Super Bowl coach of the St. Louis Rams has done more than rework the passing attack. Martz has infused hope and excitement back into the once proud franchise where last year there was none.
Martz is a renegade in the Bill Walsh tradition, someone who’s always a step ahead of the competition and not afraid to play games with the oppositions head. Does anyone think that back-up, back-up tight end Delanie Walker, who caught a touchdown Sunday, would be even remotely involved in the game plan if Martz wasn’t on board?
Which leads to the next point: The Niners have to start thinking about retaining Martz beyond this year.
Mormons against same-sex marriage
Did you know that Mormon religious groups are claiming to have donated a full 35 percent of the money to repeal same-sex marriage this November?
As Julia Rosen writes on Calitics:
Look, I don’t have anything specific against Mormons. It’s just that when a specific religious institution decides to play a large role in a political battle, it weirds me out. Separation of chuch and state….
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
The Democrats, who control both houses of the state Legislature, lost badly on the state budget. They caved in, they sold out — and the worst part is, they had very little choice.
The state can’t keep running forever without a budget. I think we could have gone a little longer, and the Democrats could have turned up the public pressure a bit more, but in the end, it probably wouldn’t have mattered a bit. A small number of anti-tax Republicans from very conservative districts now control the entire state budget process.
And the worst part of that is, I’m not sure we can change that. So I’m thinking we should try something else.
Just about everybody knows by now that California is one of only three states that requires a two-thirds Legislative majority to approve a budget. The state Constitution also requires a two-thirds vote to raise taxes. So unless the Democrats can take control of both houses by a 67 percent majority, the GOP can exert a veto over any attempt to close a budget deficit with anything but deep, draconian cuts.
And the Republicans who hold sway aren’t the moderate types who might want to negotiate. One reason the Democrats control both the Assembly and the Senate is that they’ve been experts at drawing legislative lines, shoving large majorities of Republicans into a small number of districts. That means more Democrats in Sacramento — but it also means that many of the Republicans represent areas where there’s little chance a Democrat can challenge them — and where the voters will rebel against any representative who raises taxes.
"The Republicans have no incentive ever to raise taxes," Assemblymember Mark Leno explained to me recently. "They all fear that if they vote for a tax increase, they will lose their seats. And history shows that they are right."
That’s why the polls show an overwhelming percentage of Californians want better schools — but the state budget will take billions away from education, putting the next generation of Californians at risk.
So the buzz in more progressive circles in Sacramento is starting to focus on a constitutional reform that would eliminate the supermajority for budget approval. But that would only be meaningful if we also scrapped the two-thirds rule for new taxes — and that’s going to be a tough sell. I can see the money flowing by the tens of millions into a campaign to keep legislators from raising taxes. And given the fact that the public in general doesn’t trust the Legislature, it’s possible that battle will be lost.
Over and over, starting with Proposition 13 in 1978, California voters have approved anti-tax measures. I hope we can turn that tide around, but I think we also need a backup plan.
See, it doesn’t take a supermajority to give cities and counties the right to raise taxes on their own.
Leno, for example, has a bill that would allow cities to impose their own car taxes. In San Francisco, we’re talking big money, $50 million or so — enough, perhaps, to blunt the impact of the state’s cuts to public schools and public health. It might be easier to push for the passage of that sort of measure than for statewide Constitutional reform.
Let cities pass their own income taxes. Let counties impose oil-severance taxes. Amend Prop. 13 to allow higher taxes on commercial property.
Then maybe San Francisco and Berkeley and Los Angeles will wind up with better schools and parks and streets and hospitals, and Orange Country and the other anti-tax havens will see their public services collapse as the state keeps cutting. Maybe after a while they’ll get the point.
Sports: A San Francisco Yankee’s tribute to the old house
By A.J. Hayes
Every team needs a second-string catcher, and from 1948-56, San Francisco native and current Peninsula resident Charlie Silvera was owner of the plumb back-up backstop job in baseball, caddying for Yogi Berra with the powerhouse New York Yankees for nine seasons.
While playing behind a future Hall of Famer didn’t allow Silvera much playing time, it did allow him to be part of one of the greatest dynasties in baseball history. The Yankees won seven American League pennants and six World Series championships, including five straight from 1949-53.
Yankee Stadium will be demolished after this season to make way for a parking lot for the state-of-the-art new Yankee Stadium, set to open in 2009. On the eve of the final game ever to be played in the original big ballpark in the Bronx, Silvera, now 83, and still active in baseball as a major league scout with the Chicago Cubs, talked about his memories of the big ballpark in the Bronx.
San Francisco Bay Guardian: It’s ironic that after the Yankees great history of winning, Yankee Stadium will close (on Sunday, Sept. 21) with the Yankees most likely not advancing to the playoffs for the first time since 1995.
Charlie Silvera: Yeah, It’s too bad the place will close on a losing note, but what can you do – 26 world championships are pretty good for one place. There are a lot of people who hate the Yankees and they are gloating now. I say let them gloat. Look at the rings we have collected over the years.
SFBG: When your were growing up in the Mission District, the city had the Seals of the Pacific Coast League, but as far as major league baseball was concerned, did the city root for the Yankees?
CS: Oh yeah, San Francisco was a Yankee town no doubt about it. Look at all the city kids who played for them: Tony Lazzari, Lefty Gomez, Frankie Crosetti and of course Joe DiMaggio who I saw play for the Seals when I was a kid. I was a Seals fan first, but also rooted for the Yankees. My idol was Bill Dickey, the Hall of Fame catcher.
A Prop. M for housing
Editors note: This is something I have supported and written about in detail. Marc makes the case nicely — T.R.
By Marc Salomon
San Francisco’s future as a creative and diverse progressive beacon is at risk due to the Planning Department’s Eastern Neighborhoods plan. The planning staff has decided the city’s need for luxury housing is so significant that it has set the development bar too low, allowing big builders to cash in on market rate housing.
Planning staff has labored to produce an inelegant community benefits and affordability model that has so many unproven moving parts it might barely work for current conditions but cannot be counted upon to provide for changing circumstances in the future.
But there is an existing successful city policy, passed by the voters in 1986 to control office sprawl, that can serve as a model for harnessing the insatiable demand to build profitable luxury housing, both for the benefit of existing San Franciscans as well as those of the non-rich who would seek refuge here in the future as so many of us did in the past.
Proposition M imposed a 950,000 square foot annual limit on office space. When applications to build exceed that cap, developers may offer up additional sweeteners to increase the chances of their projects being permitted.
The Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task force broke off from Eastern Neighborhoods planning process in 2004, and is nearing completion on its democratic, participatory, community-based plan. One policy that has caused consternation among the development types, who expect to run planning processes unhindered, has been a proposal to replicate Prop M, but this time, applied to housing.
Lotsa press on Prop. H
The SF Weekly is usually against anything we’re supporting (they love to bash the left over there, and particularly like to bash us), but to my astonishment, along with his typical snide comments, Benjamin Wachs actually has some intelligent comments on the Clean Energy Act:
The city has the right -even the duty- to plan responsibly for its future, and then follow-up. Prop H shouldn’t even need to be on the ballot, it should be standard practice. Yes, let us evaluate our options and pick the best one. I wish the city would run its economy, law enforcement, and housing offices the same way. To be clear: anyone who is against Prop H isn’t against public ownership of utilities – they’re against planning.
Randy Shaw’s on the case, too. He’s a little dubious about the political hopes for Prop. H, since it doesn’t fit his own rule of “Keep it Simple,” and he suggests that the measure may get buried in the PG&E propaganda and the flood of other stuff on the ballot. The problem is, you can’t make a serious clean-energy initiative simple; there’s just too much policy involved. And if it were simpler, PG&E would call it “a simplistic solution.”
We all knew from day one that PG&E had endless money and would spend whatever it thinks is necessary to defeat Prop. H. But Shaw acknowledges that
With Mark Leno, Susan Leal, and Bevan Dufty taking high-profile roles in backing Prop H, the initiative has a broader and more diverse base than its similar predecessors.
And the Yes on H campaign is only really starting.
If this wasn’t going to be close, PG&E wouldn’t already be pulling out all the stops.
Sarah Palin kills wolves
My nine-year-old son and I just finished reading Jack London’s White Fang together, so I’m particularly vulnerable to stories about wolves, and this ad is especially grisly If you want to help Defenders of Wildlife air it in markets where it might help, there’s a donation link included.
By the way, Robert Haaland has put together a nice set of links on Palin’s record here.
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
Let’s look at what happens when a mayor who lacks political courage decides to run for higher office.
On Wednesday, Sept. 3, shortly after returning from the Democratic National Convention, where he sought to impress the bigwigs, Gavin Newsom announced that a plan to issue municipal ID cards to undocumented immigrants would be put on hold.
Newsom had always supported the plan. His staff realized it made tremendous sense: when thousands of city residents aren’t eligible for drivers licenses or passports, and can’t prove their identity, then they become a permanent underclass. They can’t open bank accounts (and are preyed on by unscrupulous check-cashers). They fear even talking to the police, since they can’t provide ID on demand (and thus are reluctant to come forward as crime victims or witnesses). They can’t take books out of the public library or easily access the public health system.
A city ID card costs the taxpayers almost nothing and helps prevent crime. It’s part of a very sensible Sanctuary City program, based on a time-tested premise: if official San Francisco doesn’t intimidate or threaten to deport the city’s undocumented residents, those residents won’t live in fear of official San Francisco. That’s better for everyone, immigrants and citizens alike.
But over the past month or so, the San Francisco Chronicle has been running a crusade against the sanctuary laws, digging up a few immigrants who committed felonies and managed to avoid deportation and using those stories as fodder for a sensational assault on the policy.
There was a time, I think, when Newsom might have stood up to it. But now he wants to be governor, and the notion that the press (and his competition in both parties) might portray him as soft on crime and too friendly to immigrants has scared him silly.
So Newsom decided to tell the press that the ID program — a very small part of the overall sanctuary ordinance — would be suspended "until a thorough review has been completed to ensure that every aspect of the program complies with all applicable state and federal laws."
Never mind that the ID program, sponsored by Sup. Tom Ammiano, passed the Board of Supervisors 10-1. It’s city law; Newsom has no authority to suspend it. And the City Attorney’s Office has already done a thorough review to ensure that it’s legal — that happened when Ammiano first introduced the bill.
Never mind that Ammiano — who was infuriated by the mayor’s statement — has been meeting with Newsom’s staff and is convinced the plan will go into place this fall, pretty much as planned.
Never mind that the entire episode will just scare off potential applicants for the cards and undermine a program that the mayor’s advisors know makes good civic sense.
See, this isn’t about San Francisco anymore. It’s all about Sacramento. It’s about the Governor’s Office — which means it’s also about Orange County, and the Inland Empire, and all those more conservative places where voters don’t like immigrants and think San Francisco is too liberal. If Newsom wants to replace Arnold Schwarzenegger, he needs votes in those parts of the state — and instead of standing on principle and saying that he’s a politician you can trust even when you disagree with him, he’s pandering to the lowest common denominator.
The governor’s race is still two years away. This shit has only started.
The truth about Sarah Palin
More or less, that is.
This is the best thing I’ve read today, I think (with the possible exception of the story on polyamorous speed dating).
The budget stalemate never ends
Folks in Sacramento are telling me that the state may be without a budget for another month or more. Of course, it’s largely due to the fact that California requires a 2/3rds majority to raise taxes — which means a handful of Republicans, who have signed pledges never to raise taxes, can hold the entire state hostage.
Robert at Calitics has a good line on the need for reform — but there’s no way a Constitutional amendment will happen before 2010. So until then, the Democrats are over a barrel, and eventually will probably have to agree to borrow money to cover the deficit — with no new taxes.
The problem is that, whatever the columnists and critics say, the Republicans have no incentive at all to accept a budget that raises taxes — and they have every incentive not to. Thanks in part to skillful Democratic gerrymanders, the GOP districts tend to be very conservative. And any Republican who breaks his or her pledge and agrees to raise taxes will be targeted for extinction.
It’s an ugly situation, and even Schwarzenegger can’t get the members of his party to move an inch.
How bad will it have to get before the public demands reform? Pretty bad.