Sorry for the low-tech rerouting, but: 

If you reached this page because of a link to a numbered item that is no longer on my main page, you can get to it by adding "#" and the number -- e.g. "#267," to the end of the URL above.

1/29/04 10:52 p.m. (Link here.)

Age, grant cuts, and insultingly low MediCal (aka Medicaid) reimbursements have defeated a decent old-fashioned doctor, a doctor who made house calls and thought it was absurd to see patients in 8-1/2-minute appointments.

The time she takes with patients has become both her trademark and part of her financial downfall. She routinely spends an hour with her young patients, checking for subtle physical and emotional changes and discussing prognoses. Recently she conducted more than ten hours of visits with a mother and her two children, who all have a congenital muscle disease that causes profound weakness. Her total Medi-Cal reimbursement: $48.17....

..."We've had a good run," she said. "I've looked for other doctors with my training to keep it going, but there is no interest because there is no money in it. People want to go into research because that is where the money is."

1/28/04 8:12 p.m. (Link here.)

The firm of Malchow, Schlackman, Hoppey & Cooper, apparently employed by San Francisco's anti-panhandling Prop. M campaign and again by the California Urban Issues Project, advertises a specialty in political "targeting," i.e. using "advanced statistical and data mining techniques" to predict which households will respond most favorably to a given campaign message or approach.

Since these folks may have just indirectly helped elect Mayor Newsom, it seems worth knowing what they're doing right. It may hence be worth a look at the "targeting" section of the firm's website, which offers downloadable chapters fromThe New Political Targeting by Hal Malchow. Chapter 9, for example, is on "Targeting Absentee and Early Voters." 

1/27/04 3:35 p.m. (Linkhere.)

Public service announcement [CLARIFICATION: this is for California voters]: if you are not registered either "Democratic Party" or "Decline to State" in time to vote on Super Tuesday, March 2, you will not be able to vote for a 2004 Democratic presidential nominee.

The California Secretary of State's site does not go out of its way to advertise this fact. It's explained backhandedly under the obscure heading, "Decline to State," here, and a little better in the dumbled-down but informative "Easy Voter Guide," which is a joint project of the Secretary of State's office and private civic organizations.

For the horse's mouth, see the California Elections Code provisions in the 2100s and the 13100s. Especially Sections 2151 and 2152 here.

Registration must be 15 days before the election. See Sec. 2102.

1/26/04 12:45 p.m. (Link here.)

I've run across something with possible relevance to the California Urban Issues Project, which identifies itself on its "expenditure lobbyist" registration papers as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, and which ran a bunch of advertising and phone-calling campaigns criticizing Matt Gonzalez' legislative positions during what just happened to be the closing days of his campaign for mayor.

Earlier this year the IRS came up with a revenue ruling that discusses circumstances in which a 501(c)(4) "lobbying" group is really engaging in campaign activity that is taxable under Sec. 527. Take a look at this PDF file, especially Situation 4 on Page 7, and see what you think. 

To be clear, I don't know if the CUIP did pay tax under Sec. 527 or not. If that information becomes public at all -- and I don't know if it's even required to be made public -- the place to look will be the 990 tax form for 2003 that they should file with the IRS this spring. Nonprofits' 990 forms themselves are public information.

I don't know for certain if the CUIP people are doing anything wrong here -- perhaps they aren't -- but maybe someone with a better knowledge of tax law could take a look.

1/25/04 12:50 p.m. (Link here.)

The Matt Gonzalez campaign for San Francisco mayor had some of the New Age flakiness this Dean volunteer discovered at a committee meeting that turned into a meditation session. I hope it's just a growing pain. People whose idea of activism has been mainly cultural are finding their way back into electoral politics, and that's a big enough change to cause an awkward adjustment period. The problem with said flakiness not being necessarily that something like meditation is bad. Meditation is just fine among consenting adults. But imposing what is nearly a religious practice on strangers who have come to one's home to work on an election campaign is beyond rude: it's demanding cultural agreement as a prerequisite for political cooperation. These newcomers to electoral politics still have to figure out something pretty basic: that politics demands a willingness to make new friends.

It's also true that Matt Gonzalez did nearly get to be mayor of San Francisco, partly with the help of people who had not previously learned what needs doing in an election. But he might really have been elected if the central campaign organization had developed closer ties in the southeast of the city. It's seeming like the southeastern (largely African American) Gonzalez organizing group not only had its own headquarters on Third Street, it was almost a separate entity. And the campaign's weakness was that the people at headquarters didn't have a dense enough network of connections with the people on Third Street. I'm not saying there weren't some connections. Just not enough. And in saying this I don't mean precisely to criticize the Gonzalez campaign itself. I mean to criticize the pre-existing geographically if not racially segregated state of friendships and activities among the San Francisco progressives who offered their time to the Gonzalez campaign. And the disinclination of some such volunteers to make new kinds of friends.

True story: there was a moment in the Gonzalez campaign's Mission Street headquarters on Election Day morning when about twenty poll-watching volunteers stood in a circle around an organizer who asked how many were "willing" to go to Bayview/Hunter's Point. (She shouldn't have given them a choice.) Only three hands went up. Some of this might be blamed on means of transportation -- not everyone had cars, and it would have been a long hard slog by bicycle to, say, Double Rock on the steep hill above Candlestick Park -- but some volunteers did have cars and yet didn't raise their hands. So I have to wonder if it mattered that nobody in that circle looked African American. I hadn't realized how isolated downtown activists really are from southeastern activists who want many of the same things -- for example, an end to patronage politics, and critical public attention to the mistreatment of ordinary people by big presumed-liberal institutions like the Department of Human Services and the Housing Authority. This political separation among progressives is weird and bad and yet unfortunately very American. It might just be the main thing that has to change in San Francisco.

Politics involves making new friends. People new to citywide -- or statewide -- or national -- politics need to get used to that.

1/25/04 12:14 a.m. (Link here.)

Which is more embarrassing, the Dean yawp (via Atrios) or John Ashcroft's singing (via TalkLeft)?

1/23/04 9:33 a.m.  (Link here.)

More in the Chron on allegations of city street-cleaners being assigned to campaign work, this time for Willie Brown in 1999.

A further question that the Chron hasn't addressed: since previous stories have reported that at least some of the complainants were in a "welfare-to-work" program, did any of these guys complain to their welfare workers? If so, what action resulted? 

The Chron also has a hasty more general writeup on yesterday's press conference by the People of Color Caucus of the Gonzalez campaign -- in which (full disclosure) I played a small part by inviting a couple of people to speak and by showing up to make sure they got heard. A few corrections are in order to the Chron story: the caucus is not a "new" group; as a campaign volunteer myself, I saw it had a table within Gonzalez headquarters on Election Day. Second, it was not the caucus alone that gathered up the allegations: my understanding is that the complaints were at least in large part gathered by the main campaign's Election Day anti-fraud efforts. Finally, the Chron quotes the Newsom spokesman asking rhetorically why the complaints were not being turned in to authorities. It was not clear if the reporter had asked the people holding the press conference for an answer to this implied slur. I think the answer would have been reasonable. At the press conference, the organizers told me that they did intend to turn in complaints formally. However, I also heard that some of the documentation of Election Day irregularities had ended up in the hands of other members of the campaign who were not yet providing it to authorities. I don't know why not.

1/22/04 4:32 p.m.  (Link here.)

The "California Urban Issues Project" did indeed file its quarterly report on time January 15. This was the report covering its expenditures from October 1, 2003 through December 31, 2003, i.e. during the San Francisco general election and runoff campaigns for mayor.

The CUIP is the "expenditure lobbyist" operation whose name appeared in a lot of anti-Gonzalez mechanized telephone calls and mass mailings during the last days of the December mayoral runoff election.

Many voters received recorded anti-Gonzalez calls, mainly in early December (the runoff election was December 9), though I happened to get one on October 30 (the general election was November 4). The calls variously purported to be from "Sally Smith" or "Susan Smith," as Testpattern and I reported in early December. Several people reported that Caller ID machines showed the originating phone number of these calls to be "1-333-444-5555."

This is what Tim Redmond of the Bay Guardian wrote about the "Sally Smith" call he received -- the one with the particularly unfair script about a property transfer tax proposal that in reality would only have affected sales of high-value properties.

The CUIP's name also appeared on anti-Gonzalez mailers, available in facsimile at Testpattern's site, that gave as return address "41 Sutter St., Suite 1483" -- an address I have since confirmed to be a mailbox at a private mailbox rental shop.

Because the CUIP identified itself as an "expenditure lobbyist," and not as a campaign committee, it didn't have to answer questions about the source of its money. Many of its "lobbying" calls and mailings addressed topics that happened to be campaign issues in the mayoral election, but they did so from within the legal status of a 501(c)(4) organization making expenditures "to influence local legislative or administrative action." The calls and letters were heavy on criticisms of candidate Matt Gonzalez, but they were phrased in terms of Gonzalez' positions on legislation before the Board of Supervisors, not in terms of his candidacy for mayor. Of course, in the runoff elections, both mayoral candidates did happen to be members of the Board of Supervisors.

The CUIP reports total expenditures "to influence local legislative or administrative action" for the October-December period as $221,863.25. The report is signed by James R. Sutton, as "attorney/agent for filer." The business address of the organization is again given as 731 Sansome Street, 5th Floor.

Specific expenses are reported as follows:

To Comcast Cable TV, $90,230.90 for:

Airing of Care not Cash Implementation ad.

Mailer and telephone call opposing reductions in Fire Department staffing; mailer and telephone call opposing increase in real estate transfer tax; mailer, telephone call, and radio, TV and newspaper ads supporting improvement in city's homeless policies and implementation of care not cash initiative; telephone call opposing supervisorial pay raise; telephone call supporting tougher restrictions on senior lending practices; telephone call supporting small buisness new job tax credit; telephone call opposing Supervisor Daly's PUC appointment.

The report says $15,681.90 went to a firm identified as Malchow, Schlackman & Hoppey, which might be a misnomer for the Malchow, Schlackman, Hoppey & Cooper firm that also appeared on the WHOIS for the anti-homeless "YesonM" website in October. The CUIP fourth-quarter payment to this firm is reported to be for:

Production of mailer opposing reductions in Fire Department staffing.

Production of TV ads supporting improvement in city's homeless policies and implementation of Care Not Cash initiative.

By the way, this Fire Department thing is a new one to me. If anyone reading this got a mailer from CUIP about the Fire Department, could you let me know?

1/22/04 11:02 a.m.  (Link here.)

So now we've got allegations of impropriety within the San Francisco Ethics Commission regarding a payments list suggesting the Newsom operation may be paying off some campaign debts through a minimally regulated "Swearing-in Committee."

Heh. I hadn't known Jim Sutton was treasurer for the Newsom campaign. That's the same Sutton, of the "Sutton & Partners" political firm, that worked with the California Urban Issues Project. 

More on the CUIP later today I hope. And I'm off shortly to a press conference (City Hall, 11:30) to be held by the People of Color Caucus of the Gonzalez campaign regarding Election Day irregularities.

Things are coming out of the woodwork here. The next several weeks should be interesting.

1/21/04 4:57 p.m.  (Link here.)

David Lazarus on the SF Chron business page summarizes the creeping privatization of the Iraq war in spine-tingling fashion. Private soldiers, logistics staff and police, it seems, are working for private companies on U.S. public contracts, and sometimes dying private deaths in furtherance of U.S. public policies without notice to the U.S. press or public. 

As Justice Brandeis said long ago, "sunshine is the best disinfectant."  We need new disclosure laws to ensure that private contractors who use public money are accountable to the public in the same manner as public employees now subject to the Freedom of Information Act. A task for a Democratic member of Congress -- ??

1/20/04 9:05 p.m.  (Link here.)

"... Last month a girl in Lincoln, Rhode Island, sent me a letter. It began, "Dear George W. Bush, if there is anything you know I, Ashley Pearson, age 2" -- "age 10, can do to help anyone, please send me a letter and tell me what I can do to save our country."

She added this P.S.: "If you can send a letter to the troops, please put, 'Ashley Pearson believes in you.'" 

Tonight, Ashley, your message to our troops has just been conveyed. And yes, you have some duties yourself: Study hard in school. Listen to your mom and dad. Help someone in need. And when you and your friends see a man or woman in uniform, say, "Thank you." 

And, Ashley, while you do your part, all of us here in this great chamber will do our best to keep you and the rest of America safe and free. ..."

--

May Ashley also retain her right to play a fair part in the management of her home town and country as a voting citizen of a republic. May she retain the right to form and express opinions without fear. May she learn better than to leave the management of her country to the experts. May she understand that freedom is a duty, not a gift. May government of the people, by the people, for the people, not perish from the earth. Amen.

1/19/04 2:17 p.m.  (Link here.)

Shocking:

No, not the first item in this Matier and Ross column, about the Russian Consulate having to throw a high-level diplomatic hissy fit to get five extra parking places in San Francisco.

That's perfectly normal..

What's shocking is the $114,191 per year paid to members of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which, per M&R, meets once a month. The shockingest part is something the columnists don't mention: that the ALRB's cases concern the wages and rights of California farmworkers, who work harder for their hourly pay than anyone else in California. Except, I guess, the ALRB members. Since they're earning as much in a year as a dozen or more farmworkers would, I guess they must be working a dozen or more times as hard.

1/17/04 1:16 p.m.  (Link here.)

Hmmm. Now the street cleaners' charges of being pressured to work and vote for Newsom have made it to the state level. 

Memo to the Secretary of State's office: a few weeks ago a freelancer phoned me who was working on an article about election irregularities. She said the Gonzalez campaign people who had the stack of incident reports from anti-fraud volunteers like me were reluctant to release them, apparently for fear of making Gonzalez himself look like a sore loser. Maybe if the request for the reports came from an authoritative outside requester they might agree to turn them over. There's interesting stuff in that stack.

1/16/04 4:28 p.m.  (Link here.)

MoveOn has a golden opportunity in CBS' rejection of its ad criticizing the Bush defecit. They can use it as a starting point to update the old box-office trick of boosting interest in a show by getting "banned in Boston." Others have:

Every ten years or so, Playboy gets free publicity out of campus indignation at its "Women of the Ivy League" pictorial. Here are samples from Harvard in 1986 (yes, that editorial is by the Jeff Zucker now at NBC) and Yale in 1995.

More recently, David Horowitz has stirred up campus debates by challenging student papers to accept an advertisement in which he argues against reparations for slavery.

The MoveOn people already have a publicity streak going. Now all they have to do, while the money holds out, is keep proposing their ads for high-profile time slots, even in places that don't seem likely to accept them. A rejection gets publicity. An acceptance gets the ad aired. How about Fox News next?

It ends up with everyone curious about the ad itself and wondering if the thing is really too dreadful to broadcast.

Now you're curious too, aren'tcha? Here, if you haven't seen it yet, take a look at the MoveOn winners, especially the melancholy, understated top entry, "Child's Pay."
 

1/16/04 3:10 p.m.  (Link here.)

San Francisco update: Gavin Newsom is shocked, shocked, at the allegation that city-contracted street cleaners were pressured to vote for him, and naturally he wants a full investigation. 

Nothing yet from the Ethics Commission on the California Urban Issues Project quarterly report, due yesterday, in which this group is required to describe its "lobbyist" spending during the crucial election months. They [clarification: the commmission, that is] say they're operating with reduced staff today due to the long weekend, and to check back Tuesday.

1/16/04 12:43 p.m.  (Link here.)

The San Francisco-area suburb of Orinda has just forced an interfaith religious group to withdraw its plans for a homeless shelter in a vacant library building. Many prosperous residents answered news of the shelter plans with a level of unreasoning panic that's hard to describe except by analogy to the "gay panic" that results in bashings. Reactions, unbelievably, included a campaign to recall the whole City Council.

So here's my question: where's the White House Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives when it comes to local coldness toward the poor and needy, in violation of every major religion's teachings, expressed through anger and political pressure against a religious group that feels there is faith-based justification for being nice to people?

Too busy, I suppose, promoting Healthy Marriages at the expense of the larger general public. Today the San Francisco Chronicle's Mark Morford let himself get so angry about the notion of $1.5 billion to push right-wing social conduct demands that he lost focus, but in the process he did express a few of the less ominous thoughts that do come to mind. 

1/16/04 1:00 a.m.  (Link here.)

A Fair And Balanced Diet

(Joel's joke. I'm not gonna steal the credit.)

U.S. HHS official protesting to World Health Organization about anti-obesity report unpopular with food lobbying groups such as the Sugar Association. 

 There is, says the letter signed by William R Steiger, special assistant to the secretary for international affairs, "an unsubstantiated focus on 'good' and 'bad' foods, and a conclusion that specific foods are linked to non-communicable diseases and obesity (eg energy-dense foods, high/added sugar foods and drinks, meats, certain types of fats and oils and higher fat dairy products).

"The US government favours dietary guidance that focuses on the total diet, promotes the view that all foods can be a part of a healthy and balanced diet, and supports personal responsibility to choose a diet conducive to individual energy balance, weight control and health."

1/15/04 8:37 p.m.  (Link here.)

I'm willing to believe Gavin Newsom would rather be Mr. Clean if it were up to him personally. It even looked yesterday like he was preparing to question the previous administration's no-bid contracts.

But some dirty machine stuff happened on his behalf in the election, and he's not stupid. I'm not saying he knew for a fact that anything wrong happened, but I am wondering if there were questions he avoided asking.

S'morning's SF Chronicle quotes nine street cleaners with the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG) as saying they were pressured by city officials to campaign and vote for Gavin Newsom with the heavy implication that they could lose their jobs if not. The story said some had in fact lost their jobs after complaining. Naturally for unrelated budget reasons.

I'm interested that the people who pressed these SLUG workers to vote for Newsom were hot to collect their ballot stubs. On election day outside a polling place on Oakdale in Hunter's Point, two men from the A. Philip Randolph Institute were also collecting voters' ballot stubs. I suppose they could have been involved in an unrelated GOTV effort. But whether related or not, it seemed odd. When two of us working as Gonzalez poll watchers pulled up to the Oakdale polling place that day, we parked just outside the "no electioneering" sign in a car that had a Gonzalez poster in the back window. They shouted at us in disturbingly authoritarian tones to take down the sign -- which we did -- and then continued to insist loudly that we were "electioneering" although we had no campaign insignia on our persons and we assured them we were present only as monitors. Inside, the inspector in charge of the polling place said Gonzalez monitors had also visited earlier in the day and she had not seen anything improper but that time, too, the men outside had complained of "electioneering."

Oh, yeah, and I dropped by the Ethics commission mid-afternoon today. The California Urban Issues Project -- the "lobbyist" group whose anti-Gonzalez phone and direct-mail campaign peaked in early December -- hadn't yet turned in its report on "lobbyist" activity for the fourth quarter of 2003, i.e. the period covering both the general and runoff elections. At the time I checked they still had a couple of hours left to meet the city's deadline. I'll go over again tomorrow.

1/13/04 5:21 p.m.  (Link here.)

Sue Chira, once the first female president of the Harvard Crimson student newspaper, has been appointed foreign editor of the New York Times. People forget how hard it was for women to get newspaper assignments on any kind of politics, let alone foreign politics, in the early working years of news writers who are now reaching the peak of their profession. This is another small victory.

1/13/04 1:54 p.m.  (Link here.)

The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service does good work for the rights of asylum seekers, especially children. Its new "storybook," America: a Freedom Country,  presents case histories of asylum seekers and their experiences seeking help in the United States. I haven't been over it in detail but it seems worth a look.

1/11/04 10:23 p.m.  (Link here.)

Why is the SF Chron website running an online poll about "Democrat presidential candidates"? Who has persuaded the Chronicle to use "Democrat" as the adjective for members of the Democratic Party? Don't they know "Democrat Party" is a Republican pejorative? Those are Democratic candidates -- that, or their opponents should now be "Republic" candidates.

1/11/04 4:12 p.m.  (Link here.) [Later 1/11/04 update: some cosmetic proofing.]

In a multifariously interesting SF Chron Insight section, Everett Ehrlich analyzes the Dean campaign via Coase's theories on transaction costs. He says the easier it gets to share information among separate entities, the less need there is for big institutional structures. Because Dean can use the Internet to build a support structure, he doesn't need the Democratic Party's existing apparatus -- its mailing lists, local volunteer structures, etc. -- though he still does need its endorsement for his ideas. 

As with many exponents of offbeat yet valuable ideas, Ehrlich overstates his argument. No, Dean isn't really "a third-party candidate," nor is he trying to "take over" the Democratic Party, nor would the two-party system be "defeated" if Dean won. 

But this article does explain a bit not only what Dean is doing, but why it was foolish for old-school San Francisco Democratic Party loyalists to treat Matt Gonzalez as a challenger representing the Green Party "against" the Democrats in our mayoral election. Nonsense. Gonzalez was the candidate of the moment for the same progressive coalition that backed Tom Ammiano (a Democrat) in 1999, and his party affiliation didn't matter much except to the minority of (comparatively) old-school Greens who gave him a little more of their energy because he promoted what I think Ehrlich would call their "brand name."

1/10/04 11:36 p.m.  (Link here.)

The following complaint is a result of a legal effort in which I have been volunteering some time as an attorney. Hence I won't comment on it.

TO:SAN FRANCISCO DEPARTMENT OF ELECTIONS
1 DR. CARLTON GOODLETT PLACE,ROOM 48
SAN FRANCISCO,CA 94102-4634

FROM:HERSCHEL P. DOSIER
[address and phone number omitted]

I am a permanent absentee voter in San Francisco,CA.

During the most recent election cycle here in San Francisco, I received by mail an absentee ballot from the San Francisco Department of Elections, which ballot required by separate “Voting Instructions” that I use only a #2 pencil to mark my selection (see attached “Voting Instructions”). The absentee ballot itself (copy of a ballot is attached) had no instructions on marking the ballot other than to “complete the arrow”. In a letter dated December1, 2003 I objected to the fact that pursuant to the “Voting Instructions” I did not have the option to fill out the ballot with an indelible marker (see attached letter) as required in Cal. Elections Code 13216(b)(3); I received a reply (also attached) dated December 3, 2003 (mailed 12/05/2003) from the Dept. of Elections. As a permanent absentee voter, I object to the denial of my right to mark my ballot in a more secure form than a #2 pencil; requiring absentee ballots to be filled out in pencil increases the possiblity of erasure and fraud; it is not as secure as indelible marker; it potentially deprives me of the right to have my vote securely, accurately and fairly counted. The fact that vote tabulating technology has rapidly advanced in San Francisco cannot deprive an absentee voter of the right to vote with an indelible (pen and ink) marker as provided in California Elections Code 13216(b)(3), nor can Cal. Elections Code 13246 on legibility (which does not state, "notwithstanding any other provisions of this code”) be utilized to try and deprive me of my fundamental rights accorded under Cal. Elections Code 13216(b)(3).

I respectfully demand that all absentee ballots marked and cast in the December 9, 2003 election and the absentee ballots similarly cast on November 6, 2001 for Proposition F (assuming the same insert instruction,with no appropriate language on the ballot itself), not be counted as provided in California Elections Code 13200....

1/08/04 4:54 p.m.  (Link here.)

Levi's today closed down its last two U.S. plants -- and, with perhaps symbolic timing, it has just gotten itself off the hook in the Saipan sweatshop case. Alas for an old San Francisco institution.

1/08/04 1:19 p.m.  (Link here.)

So here I was writing last night about Gavin Newsom's appeal to people who hate the poor, and this morning's San Francisco Chronicle has a big article about Newsom calling for a big supportive housing bond issue to get the most damaged part of the homeless population indoors.

I should be ashamed of myself and cheering my head off in delirious surprise, right?

Well, not precisely. I'm still sure that lots of people who voted for Newsom did so because of the implication that he would get "those people" out of the way -- put them somewhere -- do something with them -- never mind the details but assure us it's humane and we won't ask for proof...

And supportive housing -- well, it's a wonderful thing if it's done properly, but the flip side of having "supportive" staff in a building is that they can easily take on the role of jailers. All the stuff you've heard and disliked about "the nanny state" does come into play in a supportive housing building, especially if the staff are poorly trained or burned out or both. Lots of people in such buildings fail to get the "supportive services" they need but at the same time are subject to all kinds of silly rules. For example, in one such building tenants may never receive more than two visitors at a time.

Most worrying: if the Giuliani model is on its way here, as I fear, the construction of a limited number of supportive housing units will be used as an excuse for vicious treatment of everyone who has failed to fit into them.

Building supportive housing is, however, a better use of city money than the current master-lease program, which has been spending city money on hotel rents rather than equity and incidentally co-opting the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which was founded as an advocacy organization and to a certain extent remains one. Matt Smith's unreasonably vicious swipeat Randy Shaw is half right, to the extent Tenderloin Housing has let itself get too friendly with hotel owners. But it leaves out the fact that the organization's Modified Payments money-management program was actually founded to reduce rents and enforce habitability standards through bulk-payment buying power, and to some extent (not enough) still does so. It also leaves out the most persuasive argument in Randy's criticism of John Elberling's TODCO: that TODCO cherry-picks people on Social Security disability and retirement benefits who get $800 and more per month, and likes to deal with nice well-behaved old people, while Randy is willing to deal with younger, tougher tenants and people on county benefits who get more like $400 per month. 

One more thing: Matt Smith just seems to get a special little thrill out of slanging Antoinetta Stadlman whenever possible. It's not fair. Toni and I disagree about some things but she has done a lot of good for the Baldwin House Hotel.

1/08/04 12:52 a.m.  (Link here.)

Marcel Proust knew about people. His comments on an episode of family tension -- a son unkind to his mother -- help explain the appeal of Gavin Newsom's message on homelessness.

In this year's successful campaign for San Francisco mayor, Newsom managed to blur together two sentiments that are really contradictory: resentment of beggars (or "the homeless") and kind concern for poor people's well-being. Newsom succeeded in implying that both resentment and kindness could be expressed through the same policies, so that there was conveniently no need to distinguish publicly between the two. People who hated the poor, but had received enough early moral training to know they shouldn't, voted for Newsom because he offered exactly the reassurances they wanted to hear. 

It was hard to put a label on the emotional engine driving Newsom's success, but I think Proust has it here: it's the resentment that selfish people feel against appeals to their better nature:

"...thus it is that egoists have always the last word; having laid down at the start that their determination is unshakeable, the more the sentiment in them to which one appeals to make them abandon it is touched, the more fault they find, not with themselves who resist the appeal but with those persons who put them under the necessity of resisting it, with the result that their own firmness may be carried to the utmost degree of cruelty, which only aggravates all the more in their eyes the culpability of the person who is so indelicate as to be hurt, to be in the right, and to cause them thus treacherously the pain of acting against their natural instinct of pity..."

It turns out to be a useful advantage for suitably hard-minded politicians that the more heart-wrenchingly effective an underdog's appeal, the more energetically people who have resolved to resist the appeal will resent the underdog and support the leader who promises to free them from the burden of being appealed to.

1/07/04 9:06 p.m.  (Link here.)

Chris Nolan has been worth reading on San Francisco city politics for the past couple days.

1/07/04 5:19 p.m.  (Link here.)

I was over at San Francisco City Hall yesterday when a Chronicle reporter came into the Board of Supervisors offices and asked if the Mayor (that would still have been Mr. Brown as of yesterday) had made some new appointments. It sounded like talk had been going around along those lines, but the staff at the Supes office hadn't seen the list if there was one. Hm.

--------

Lots of good material in today's SF Chron.

Of all the municipal corruption in San Francisco, what does Gavin Newsom go after? Why, yes, he picks the Department of Building Inspection and its rumored kindness to builders who hire "permit expediters." Could this be retaliation against Walter Wong, the "permit expediter" who endorsed Matt Gonzalez and rented him a campaign headquarters? Oh, apparently not promarily. Matier and Ross write:

...Newsom's decision is meant to serve notice that he's serious about his campaign promise to end "business as usual'' at City Hall. It also may be seen as a not-too-subtle slap at outgoing Mayor Willie Brown, who gave Newsom his political start but whose administration has been mired in allegations that friends and big political contributors got special treatment in contracts, appointments and other favors....

Oh, come on. "Also"? That's all of what it is. Since when does it show independence from Da Mayor to use Brown's own payback playbook on a political opponent? Gavin's going to have to do much more than this to show he's interested in clean government.

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Striking headline: "Iraq to free 506 detainees in conciliatory move: but U.S. will offer reward for most wanted insurgents" It's on this article, discussing an announcement from U.S. officials. I've got nothing against the decision itself, which in fact sounds sensible so far as one can tell from this distance, but the Chron's phrasing is odd. Who's "Iraq"? Apparently for the moment "they" is us.

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And here's Katha Pollitt in The Nation reviewing the year 2003 for women: some items deeply godawful, others encouraging. Among the latter:

19. Lieut. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, who thinks Allah is an idol and that God put Bush in the White House, quoted his ex-wife as follows: "I don't love you anymore, you're a religious fanatic, and I'm leaving you."

1/06/04 8:34 p.m.  (Link here.)

The SF Chron has the US-VISIT screening producing 21 people via FBI watch list who had past felony convictions. OK, at least we're talking felonies, not misdemeanors. That's something. But we still don't know if these people who got pulled out of the line were actually wanted for arrest, or in violation of immigration law, or just generally viewed as suspicious characters? Felonies are not all "aggravated felonies" for immigration exclusion purposes, right? I'm still confused.

1/05/04 11:12 p.m.  (Link here.)

General-audience coverage of the "U.S. Visit" program for fingerprinting and photographing immigrants may be missing this bit in Government Computer News: the Homeland Security people are not just checking the prints against national security watch lists: they're also running some kind of criminal warrant checks on people and pulling them in -- or kicking them back out of the U.S. -- if they've failed to appear in ordinary criminal courts. 

Unless there's another way to read this:

During the pilot phase at Hartsfield [Airport in Atlanta], border inspectors recorded about 20 hits when running the fingerprint and information from visitors against the government’s collection of data about known terrorists and people with criminal histories. Some of the hits indicated that travelers had warrants out for their arrest, and one match turned up a fugitive who had failed to appear in court.

In cases where local police declined to extradite the individuals, DHS officials returned the travelers to their country of origin.

It's hard to tell if the article means warrants in the U.S. or in other countries, and we don't know how serious warrants have to be to get onto the Homeland Security database. Maybe the Homeland Security people are only looking for serious bad predators who really are up to no good. Potentially, though, this could mean immigrants are being checked for any old kind of warrant whenever they travel, while citizens are able to keep their troubles with local criminal courts to themselves.

For background it may help to know that sometimes U.S. criminal warrants, even felony warrants, get issued for relatively minor reasons -- e.g. a missed appointment with a parole officer, or failure to attend a court-ordered driver safety class following a drunk driving conviction. Yes, someone who breaks a promise to a court or a parole officer ought to face consequences. But I'm not sure that, for example, failing to study driver safety when told to do so should be a reason to get thrown out of the country.

Now, to be perfectly clear, I'm making up this last example without sufficient information, and maybe smallish criminal issues like drunk-driving warrants aren't part of the Homeland Security fingerprint checking system. But I do worry about the apparent lack of interest in distinguishing between national security policing and the ordinary criminal justice system. 

1/03/04 11:07 p.m.  (Link here.) [Correction: this was posted 1/04/04.]

A couple autumns ago we were up at Pyramid Lake in Nevada, which is a Paiute holy site and looks it. Flat blue water, eerie pointy rocks, very little else. It looks like an artist's rendering of an uninhabited planet. The photos here do not do justice.

There is very little development at Pyramid Lake. There is, however, a shop on the approach road that sells sandwiches and strictly regulated fishing licenses. Within sight of the lake there are a few shelters in which to eat the sandwiches. 

It was in one of these shelters I saw a strange little sticker. If I remember right it said, "Happy the nation whose God is the Lord." 

It raised a lot of questions. Did the speaker mean to say some other God or gods existed that weren't "The Lord"? How could you tell? Did the Man Upstairs check passports at the Pearly Gates? Wouldn't all monotheistic fundamentalists make the same claim, and how could they ever settle which one was right? Had the sticker been placed on purpose to disparage Paiute spirituality? Out of innocent church-inflected patriotism? Here in the middle of nowhere, had someone wanted to signal defiance to any dangerous foreign enemies who might pass by? 

Why, two autumns ago, was I half afraid to ask these questions out loud? And would I ever understand my own country?

Of course, for everything there is a season. There is a time for gawping at Pyramid Lake and indulging in airy ponderings. There is a time for wondering why God told Pat Robertson about George Bush's election chances but let William Bennett lose eight million dollars without slipping him any card tips. And there is a time for laughing your head off at Jon Carroll's tribute to the Church of Giant Fork.

As usual, ya laugh or ya cry.

1/03/04 6:04 p.m.  (Link here.) [Correction: this was posted 1/04/04.]

I'm still catching up from the holidays & hence slow returning to daily commentary here. But anyway here's an item from GAO: they say the federal government isn't keeping proper track of its own spending. Well, what else is new.

Earlier I wrote but decided not to post a morose essay on the Reagan dime proposal and the totalitarian tendency in the practice of connecting even small homely transactions to big national political statements. Probably this sentence says as much as anyone will want to hear about same. 
 

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