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. "#634" -- to the end of the URL above.

The Pigeon as Metaphor

"I'm not calling for killing pigeons,'' Mayor Gavin Newsom emphasized, well aware of the city's active animal-rights community. "We just want to get people to stop feeding them.''

7/30/04 3:03 p.m. (Link here.)

Hell on horses and women, cont'd. (previous item here), or maybe I should call this item, "From My Cold Dead Hands":

The county attorney for Johnson County, Texas has declined to prosecute that vibrator saleslady. Per the SF Chron, "She was facing a year in jail for selling the vibrator in October to a pair of undercover officers posing as a dysfunctional married couple." And where on earth are the marital privacy rights of Griswold v. State of Connecticut when we need them? Evidently not in Johnson County, Texas.

Little surprise, then, to learn from a zinger of a Texas Observer feature (That's Texas Observer as in Molly Ivins) that Johnson County is bedeviled by a group of sanctimonious Christian conservatives known to their neighbors as "the Talibaptists" who seem especially offended by the obvious public happiness, attractiveness and mutual affection of Joanne and Chris Webb, who are respectively the alleged perpetrator of marital aid saleswomanship and the spouse therof. No surprise either that the county attorney who had been prepared to bring the charges is one of the ex-Democrats who changed parties to save his job when Johnson County went Republican.

This is, incidentally, further proof that the current ayatollahs of the Republican Party don't believe in fun. Nor do they believe in the great American Right To Be Let Alone. Heaven only knows why folks who once belonged to the party of Minding Your Own Business have been persuaded to vote for these Carry Nation zealots. If we let them take away our vibrators, what will they decide to take next? Remember, a contentedly purring nation is a safer nation. And if vibrators are outlawed, only outlaws will have vibrators.

7/29/04 7:59 p.m. (Link here.)

Well, the nomination speech, finally:

"I'm not going to claim that we're on God's side...as Abraham Lincoln said, I humbly pray that we are on God's side."

"We were literally all in the same boat... An America where we are all in the same boat..."

I've waited at least a dozen years to hear words like these. This is not 2000. It's something better.

7/29/04 5:33 p.m. (Link here.)

Goddammit, protest disorder is headlining the Boston Globe website right now. Still, I keep thinking, or wanting to think, that it could be worse. Aggregating the Globe, Indymedia, and some blogs, it sounds like several kinds of protest and policing excess happened today, including some of the provocation kind of stuff that seemed mercifully absent earlier. But it could be worse. It's not "saturation policing," not really, and the pictures of Boston officers, even when they're in full riot gear, show the officers holding themselves with reasonable ease. In LA, protests were flanked by double and triple skirmish lines of very nervous, very young, very stiff recruits clutching their batons for dear life and staring at demonstrators in goggle-eyed disgust as though they had been told the exercise of constitutional assembly rights was proof of criminal insanity. In today's pictures I don't see officers looking angry or scared. That's something. That's good. I'm looking too hard for hope maybe, but that's something.

7/29/04 3:08 p.m. (Link here.)

Meanwhile, inside the fence, it sounds like they're going Stepford on us. Come on, folks. To show you're the party of humanism you've got to be a little bit human. Just a little. Let a few people hold up homemade signs for cryin' out loud.

7/29/04 2:51 p.m. (Link here.)

Oh dear, convention protest picture looking worse today. They're saying one woman hospitalized after baton blow to head under disputed circumstances. Come on, folks, all of you, in and out of uniform, keep the peace. Please. [UPDATE: Sorry, forgot to give the source. It's Boston Indymedia. Indymedia sites aren't fully reliable but they offer a good indication of the mood among protesters and the distance between their side of the story and mainstream accounts.]

7/29/04 2:33 p.m. (Link here.)

The SF Chron's Joan Ryan today writes up a report from the Russell Sage Foundation about "Social Inequality," documenting among other things the loss of middle-class jobs for people without college diplomas. I tried to find the report itself online, expecting it would be available in PDF as many things are from the Urban Institute, Brookings, etc., but the thing turns out to cost $125. Which tells us that something is wrong with the publishing industry, with the foundations that fund studies on social inequality, or both.

Meanwhile, nothing but bad scary news from local nonprofits. Everybody's had funding cuts, everybody's hurting. As far as I know the indispensable San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness still can't pay their rent, and the General Assistance Advocacy Project, the benefits advocacy clinic I've been associated with since 1991, is coming up short again. It's always hand-to-mouth but this week GAAP's stuation is positively scary.

7/28/04 10:05 p.m. (Link here.)

I see one more reason to love San Francisco in the sign on the wall of the civil court clerks' office about the free packets of forms for name and gender changes. You get to become whoever you want to become here, and practical civil servants will process the forms without any smart remarks.

7/28/04 6:07 p.m. (Link here.)

Well, the DNC protest situation -- in fact, the dissent situation in general -- is not all sweetness and light, but it's still not as bad as it might be. Which has the nice side-effect of causing the protest coverage to focus on the actual protest messages being conveyed & not on conflict about the means of conveying them. Still hopeful, still not sounding so bad as LA 2000. Though of course I was quite a bit closer to LA 2000, and these things always do seem worse when you're actually photographing people's bruises. But really it doesn't sound like there are even all that many bruises this year. Good good good.

7/27/04 10:03 p.m. (Link here.)

Up is down, black is white, and perennial California Republican candidate-for-something Bill Jones is using the epithet "elite" against expanding the franchise. That's right, he's weirdly claiming that allowing more parents to vote in school board elections would benefit some unnamed tiny minority at the top. Look behind you, Bill. Your rhetoric is eating itself again.

7/27/04 9:50 p.m. (Link here.)

Intriguing Craigslist job ad today seeking news reporters "for conservative-oriented community newspapers" in, yes, conservative-stereotyped sections of the San Francisco Bay Area outer-ring suburbs. The papers themselves -- e.g. this one -- look like poky local-doings freebie sheets that you wouldn't expect to have acknowledged political attitudes at all. So what's going on here? Some kind of astroturf campaign to make these papers look like the products of cranky small-town editors? Is someone trying to supersede the "neutral" AP style with overt conservatism? How in hell do you write a "conservative" story about high school sports anyway? Write the story about a pre-game prayer instead of the game itself? Compare a local hero's touchdown to the Shrub's aviation exploits? Argue for replacing girls' basketball with classes on veil-wearing or floor-scrubbing? The mind boggles. All around, this is a weird ad. Hope it doesn't represent anything bigger than itself.

7/27/04 9:09 p.m. (Link here.)

So three bored kids in Oakland who had no previous criminal records murdered a homeless man for fun. This kind of thing doesn't happen in a vacuum. Office-holders who got elected by scapegoating the poor should wonder what part they played in forming these kids' views of who matters, who's fair game, whose suffering won't be redressed. Those kids thought they were safe murdering a member of a despised minority.

Gavin Newsom, you owe it to the memory of Dalrus Joseph Brown to admit to the public that homeless people are real human beings entitled to the equal protection of the laws. Yeah, Jerry Brown, you too.

7/27/04 7:40 p.m. (Link here.)

Sorry not much blog today. I've been wrapped up in one of these paper-intensive emergency court proceedings, adapting recognized formal incantations to make and unmake procedural structures. The work is a cross between computer programming and necromancy. At times you feel like the Sorcerer's Apprentice or the demonically possessed geek from "Ghostbusters." This impersonal clockwork you've started takes on a life of its own.and it starts running you, imposing an hour-by-hour schedule lasting whole days and nights. Interview, draft, consult, draft, discover unexpected flaw late at night, resolve it in the small hours, finalize, format, proof, print, copy, chase declarant signatures, discuss, revise at last minute, file, serve, appear, file, serve, argue, floss, repeat, 'til your brain shrivels down to a little crusty lump like a Mexican salted plum, tumbles out through your left nostril and falls plunk into your coffee....

...OK, I'll feel better with a little sleep.

In blogworld, I've mainly just been watching the convention protest reports and hoping all parties continue more or less keeping the peace. Thus far it sounds like the Boston police are being sporadically picky but not getting overwhelmingly, rigidly arbitrary the way crowd-control squads sometimes do. And protesters seem mainly not to be trying to bump chests with anyone. So all sounds good, or almost good, from this distance. But it's very hard to gauge the mood of a protest from news reports, even comparing alternative and mass-market sources.

7/26/04 12:11 p.m. (Link here.)

I've just used up the last of the blogging time I can afford to spend today getting exercised over on Horizon at political criticism of John Kerry's taste in poetry. So go read over there, OK?

BTW finally someone besides me has linked to the Horizon site. Pls welcome the new linker, Moosifer Jones' Grouch, who flatteringly thinks we're Canadian. Actually only Graeme is. Otherwise we're two Californians (but I'm originally from the U.S. Northeast), a Texan, and a transplanted Brit in Pennsylvania.

7/26/04 11:17 a.m. (Link here.)

Anyone who still thinks poor people's votes aren't worth asking for should have walked by the San Francisco public library this morning. One of the homeless guys waiting for the doors to open was listening to news coverage of the convention on a hand-cranked radio. There were plenty of other people nearby, maybe not listening closely, but at least not trying to change the channel either. Now, someone please tell John Kerry to give these folks a reason to vote for him. Y'know, poor people who are stuck sitting in public libraries all day sometimes read books there. And newspapers. And they have time to talk to their neighbors. And, well, they're part of the people of this country too.

7/25/04 8:22 p.m. (Link here.)

"Are we criminals for voicing our opinion?"

An excellent question from a Boston Indymedia contributor who has just taken a tearful look at the barbed-wire, no-escape "free speech zone."

7/25/04 7:15 p.m. (Link here.)

Martha Stewart still sounds like kind of a jerk and it's strange to see her turned into a folk hero just because worse white-collar criminals are still at large. I did, however, mean to thank her for rescuing a personal name that also happens to be mine from its previous mono-stereotype of dim, dutiful sitcom wife. Several years ago a shop in the Castro was selling T-shirts that said, "I wanna be Martha -- the bitch can do anything!" I never did get around to buying one. Couldn't decide if it was praise or insult. Now I wish I had.

7/25/04 1:13 p.m. (Link here.)

A biting irony via the conventionbloggers feed: there's serious fear this week among the immigrant cleaners and other scut-workers who commute into Boston's office districts as the office workers are going home each night. They're afraid of security checks for the Democratic Convention because of their own mainly questionable immigration status. One lady, afraid to be quoted by name in the paper, says, "We don't want to hurt the country... we just want to get to work."

And, um, what are the Democrats, the party of the poor, actually doing about this? Advice to the Democratic Party: do something in favor of poor immigrants. Something symbolic and directly helpful, not just your usual indirect good gray prudent measures like urban redevelopment and progressive income taxation. Yes, immigrants don't vote right away, but they eventually naturalize, they have citizen kids, they talk to their neighbors. These folks are your constituents whether you feel like noticing them or not.

7/25/04 11:41 a.m. (Link here.)

I've been contributing in the TalkLeft comments about the Democratic Convention run-up & have made some previous urgent suggestions about convention demonstrations, their policing, and the worry that images of street protests this summer will only help the right wing. In fretting like this, however, I don't mean to let off the Democratic Party for ignoring its egalitarian, humanitarian wing. I don't mean to excuse "pragmatic" Democrats' non-pragmatic refusal to admit they need the left. But for pity's sake there are plenty of ways to send a message that do not involve members of the left putting themselves in the humiliating, frightening, and likely pointless position of shouting for attention outside the heavily secured walls of a party to which they're not invited. All it does is dramatize exclusion and powerlessness and thereby ask for pity. It took me a long time to realize this, but pity is not an emotion that wins many hearts or votes in our world. Why don't people who feel uninvited throw their own parties on their own terms and let the Democratic conservatives beg for invitations for a change?

BTW some of these thoughts come from the more cheerful moments in a half-unfavorable SF Chron review of Rebecca Solnit's new book Hope in the Dark. The book sounds like a good starting place for a discussion, even if it doesn't show where the discussion should end up.

7/24/04 8:43 p.m. (Link here.)

I'm going to be watching TalkLeft through the Boston convention. And hoping fervently that all parties will have the good sense to avoid disorder outside the convention. Everyone has got to remember that images of disorder are great big gifts to "law-and-order" Republican rhetoric. [Update: here's TalkLeft's convenient list of convention weblog compilations.]

7/24/04 7:04 p.m. (Link here.)

(OK, here's a try at Professor Lakoff's "framing":)

Citizens who have the intestinal fortitude to study the facts of the California budget dispute instead of wimping out at the level of juvenile insult may appreciate the California Budget Project site. Now, this here is for serious persistent grownups only. Pro wrestling fans and Arnie groupies will find the colors aren't bright enough and the words aren't in big enough type. They'll lose interest and change channels in two minutes. Grownups, read on.

(There, how'd I do, Professor?)

(And, to the person in the mirror: OK, I'm getting the hang of this re-framing stuff, but do I really help anything or anyone by saying this? Or if I do, is writing propaganda any more honorable than going into advertising? Hmmm. In which case, advertising sure as hell pays better...)

7/23/04 11:01 p.m. (Link here.)

Lakoff on Moyers tonight -- he's just delivered a better how-to lecture on propaganda than the Checkers Speech itself. On the word "liberal," for example: he says actual liberals could take the word back over time, but not by November -- so for now he's saying "progressive." About Democratic rhetoric: he says don't just negate the Republican line. Don't say "America is not safer..." Instead, use different words to explain the dangers created by Republican policies. Take the rhetoric back, don't just mirror-image it.... and so on. He says Democrats, liberals, progressives (...whatever) should take every bit of language that the Republican propagandists use to label an issue, and replace it with language of their own.

Y'know, the more original and more political bloggers have been doing this for some time.

I don't know how I feel about lessons in persuasion like this. George Orwell, midway through the BBC work that helped him invent the Ministry of Truth, wrote in his 1942 diary, "All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don't think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why." Three clauses in a row, each of them tugging in a different direction. It's the old means-ends dilemma, isn't it.

7/23/04 5:10 p.m. (Link here.)

Look: Echidne spots Continental Features censoring Doonesbury. (Here's more from Romenesko.) Look for more of these attempts to shove the mainstream sideways between now and the election.

7/23/04 10:59 a.m. (Link here.)

Interesting commentary on the Moyers site about uses of the word "liberal." Of special note: that it's relatively new for mainstream political discussion to use the terms "left" and "right" instead of "liberal" and "conservative."

The occasion for my posting this is a promo from George Lakoff's Rockridge Institute, which seems at least an interesting and possibly a good beginning of an answer to the commentary hothouses maintained by hard-right foundations. Per the promo, Lakoff is supposed to be on the Moyers "Now" show tonight. It will be at 10 p.m. on our local station here, but this page at PBS has more on scheduling throughout the U.S., plus more on Lakoff and Rockridge.

7/22/04 12:33 p.m. (Link here.)

Oh, and that California budget fight? The one that has Schwarzenegger insulting Democrats in the Legislature for preferring their constituents to his own muscular self? From the Trenches finds it's at least partly about the corporate-impunity crowd trying to reverse a new law that lets people sue their employers over wage and hour violations -- a right most people had probably thought was unquestioned to begin with.

7/22/04 11:39 a.m. (Link here.)

...and that's "Mr. Liberal" to you, too, buddy.

I've just read George Packer's 2000 book Blood of the Liberals. Some of my thoughts while reading, and Gene Zitver's earlier comments about the book, are here, and my notes are here from a symposium where Mr. Packer showed himself a surprisingly intense fan's fan of George Orwell. With a grim title like that, you can imagine the book was almost unfairly pessimistic about the state of liberalism in the '80s and '90s. Still, Packer did seem to be saying that the U.S. was ready again for the ringing egalitarian version of liberalism that represented the very best side of his populist congressman grandfather, George Huddleston. Here's Huddleston, for example, on World War I business profiteers:

"no man should be allowed to come out of this war richer than he went into it."

and

"These selfish interests have viewed with growing dissatisfaction the trend of affairs during the past dozen years. The people have been getting harder to control. There has been too much evidence of democratic spirit, too much idealism and brotherhood. They are displeased by the swing toward amelioration and the recognition of the rights of common men; they long for the former era of unrestrained combination, monopoly and exploitation; they are determined to seize out of the present world crisis some means of ending such foolishness once and for all."

And Packer managed to bring out some of the genuinely evil origins of liberal-baiting as a right-wing political tactic. This is a comment he found in a 1926 essay by Hiram Evans, who was then "Imperial Wizard and Emperor" of the Klan. It could appear intact today on any of several hard-right weblogs that snuck into the mainstream while we were out buying air filters and duct tape these last few years:

"The average Liberal idea is apparently that those who can produce should carry the unfit, and let the unfit rule them. This aberration would have been impossible, of course, if American Liberalism had kept its feet on tthe ground. Instead it became wholly academic, lost all touch with the plain people, disowned its instincts, and common sense, and lived in a world of pure, high, groundless logic."

Packer was over-optimistic to say in 2000 that the word "liberal" had worn out as a term of abuse, but now, four very long years later, he may be right. Lynda Barry has her beatnik poodle announcing "Wear the scarlet L! Ring it like a bell!" And this new Harper's issue has a discussion about the U.S. being ready for a return to pride in basic liberal notions like, well, fairness.( OK, you want specifics? How about the weekend. It's a liberal notion -- well, actually, it was once a dangerous radical notion -- that it should be normal for everyone to get evenings and weekends off from work. It's a notion that's slipping. Badly. That's what you get when you revert to 19th-century plutocracy, as we have in fact been doing. ) I haven't finished the issue, but there's a real stemwinder in the "Readings" section, from Marilynne Robinson's essay "The Tyranny of Petty Coercion," originally published in Social Research. A few excerpts:

...Physical courage is remarkably widespread in the population. There seem always to be firefighters to deal with the most appalling conflagrations and doctors to deal with the most novel and alarming illnesses. It is by no means to undervalue courage of this kind to say it is perhaps expedited by being universally recognized as courage. Those who act on it can recognize the impulse and act confidently, even at the greatest risk to themselves.

Moral and intellectual courage are not in nearly so flourishing a state, even though the risks they entail -- financial or professional disadvantage, ridicule, ostracism -- are comparatively minor. I propose that these forms of courage suffer from the disadvantage of requiring new definitions continually, which must be generated out of individual perception and judgment. They threaten or violate loyalty, group identity, the sense of comme il faut. They are, intrinsically, outside the range of consensus....

It is true that in most times and places physical courage and moral and intellectual courage have tended to merge, since dungeons, galleys, and stakes have been extensively employed in discouraging divergent viewpoints. For this reason our own society, which employs only mild disincentives against them and in theory positively admires them, offers a valuable opportunity for the study of what I will call the conservation of consensus...

...It is consensus that conceals from us what is objectively true. And it is consensus that creates and supports 'truths' that are in fact culturally relative. And, interestingly, it is consensus that is preserved when the objective truth is disallowed on the grounds that "truth" is merely the shared understanding of a specific group or culture.

Here is an instance: for some time the word 'bashing' has been used to derail criticism of many kinds, by treating as partisan or tendentious statements that are straightforwardly true or false...

...So the exchanges that political life entirely depends on, in which people attempt in good conscience to establish practical truth and then candidly assign value to it, simply do not take place. This is a failure of courage on both sides. I assume many apologists for the administration would find it painful to say that radical economic polarization is a good thing. So they are relieved to learn that they are only being 'bashed,' and therefore need not consider the issue on its merits....

...Why critics are so flummoxed I can only speculate. Perhaps it is because most of the people in this country who take on public issues are educated and middle class. As is true of their kind anywhere, they are acculturated to distrust strong emotion, so they are effectively rebuked when they are accused of harboring it. Oddly, they seem often to be shamed out of defending the poor and vulnerable on the grounds that they themselves are neither poor nor vulnerable, as if there were properly no abstract issues of justice, only the strategies of interest groups or, more precisely, of self-interest groups. That their education and experience prepare them to think in terms larger than their own immedaite advantage makes them an 'elite,' and ipso facto they are regarded as a self-interested subgroup of a particularly irksome kind. Even when they benefit, materially, from the policies they deplore and wish to change, their position is dismissed as nothing more than elitist, though the pols and pollsters who use the term have identical credentials and much greater power. To be intimidated in this way is a failure of courage, and to abandon democracy from an excess of self-doubt and good manners is no different, in its effect, than to abandon it out of arrogance or greed.

I am myself a liberal. By that I mean I believe society exists to nurture and liberate the human spirit, and that large-mindedness and openhandedness are the means by which these things are to be accomplished...

7/21/04 11:07 p.m. (Link here.)

If you agree with Brecht, as I do, that Hell is probably a city much like Los Angeles, then by all means this po-mo Inferno is for you. Some of the drawings also appear in the new issue of Harper's, but it seems you have to go to a gallery in LA or pay $3,000 for a limited-edition copy to see the rest of them. Bummer. BTW the new Harper's is good, especially in defense of liberalism.

7/21/04 6:06 p.m. (Link here.)

This is a kind of awful U.S. asylum-seeker's story, but with a happy ending thanks to the asylum project of San Francisco's Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. The question however being, how many similar stories don't reach U.S. public attention?

7/21/04 10:09 a.m. (Link here.)

Tom Ammiano, who is a guy from New Jersey as well as a gay comedian and a San Francisco Supervisor, speaks up: "Hey, it's Mr. Girlie-Man to you, pal."

7/20/04 1:16 p.m. (Link here.)

More on Schwarzenegger turning the California budget fight into a cartoon (and, well, ya gotta admit he's livening it up, tho possibly at his own expense): Senate president John Burton shuts down his espresso machine. No more coffee mit schlag for der Gubernator. And, one suspects, no more apple strudel or poppy-seed cake (scroll down) either. Not for a good long while.

[UPDATE: Echidne has an essential feminist counterpoint on Mr. S. To which I'll only add that there are parts of Polk Street where I wouldn't advise him to say "girly-men" like that's a bad thing.]

7/19/04 8:52 p.m. (Link here.)

On the subject of "girly-men," a clarification.

7/19/04 1:44 p.m. (Link here.)

The SF Business Times has picked up the "California Urban Issues Project" story. It's reporting the group has ads on the San Francisco Chronicle site too. I'd only known of them appearing on the New York Times and San Francisco Examiner sites. [UPDATE: Meanwhile a different search found an Indymedia mention of someone seeing the ad on an SF-registered Yahoo account. This "CUIP" group is spending real money to make so many different ad buys in favor of Gavin Newsom's budget ideas. I do realize Mr. Newsom doesn't control the "CUIP," but does he possibly know where all this money is coming from? If he knows, why won't he tell us? If he doesn't know, doesn't he want to find out who he's becoming beholden to?]

7/19/04 12:46 p.m. (Link here.)

Been doing my yakking over at Horizon s'morning, so go read over there, OK?

Oh -- except that s'morning's paper has Schwarzenegger calling on voters to "terminate" the Democrats in the California Legislature and maybe wanting to propose making the Legislature part-time. In a state of over 30 million people that does not mean there is nothing for the legislators to do. It means Mr. Schwarzenegger is not especially in favor of the separation of powers. Funny because he did presumably swear the same oath I did to uphold the state constitution etc.

7/18/04 7:42 p.m. (Link here.)

Found via an Atrios commenter: Kerry is setting up a legal network to monitor and protect voters' rights on Election Day. This could be important.

7/18/04 1:27 p.m. (Link here.)

Am wondering how long the American public will allow the eminently satirizable Arnold Schwarzenegger to get away with confounding satire by adopting it. His latest: calling members of the Legislature "girlie-men," as apparently adopted from the old Saturday Night Live "Hans and Franz" skit. The point of the original skit having been to find amusement in the excesses of testosterone popularized by Mr. S in the pseudo-sport of bodybuilding. The point of Schwarzenegger's recent adoption thereof being to accuse the legislature -- illogically -- of lacking manhood because of members' refusal to relax and accept whatever this cartoon of a man has in mind for themselves and their constituents.

This is a weird thing to say, but I learned a lot about American politics the night I dragged my baffled and protesting husband to a pro wrestling match at the Cow Palace -- which is San Francisco's venue of choice for unfortunate spectacles, from monster truck rallies to the 1964 Republican Convention. I wanted to see who would be in the audience. J. wanted to humor me. I expected -- I dunno -- bikers, drunks, rowdies, leather jackets, push-up bras, maniacal speed freaks howling for blood. It was nothing of the kind, of course. We were surrounded by families with children. More fathers with sons than mothers with daughters, but basically a cross between amusement-park patrons and baseball fans. It turned out these families understood the night's wrestling matches as a kind of clown show and were prepared to respond with the same wholesome amusement they'd express at Saturday morning cartoons. This was, in other words, a sophisticated audience. They understood wrestling wasn't a real sport. They understood the appearance of violence in the matches was actually pratfall theater. They understood the supposed deathly rivalries between the wrestlers were entertaining hooey.

So now maybe politics is going the way of pro wrestling. It's full of bigger-than-life arguments on TV and radio among professional arguers who you can imagine chatting collegially in the greenroom before and after. An actual pro wrestler has had a career in politics. Maybe in fact some Americans who follow politics are like pro wrestling fans, feeling that politics isn't a real sport and the appearance of intense opinion is just an act put on to please the crowd. But if politics isn't a real sport how come it hurts real people?

I guess I'm saying something not terribly original: that the problem with our politics is its blurred line between spectacle and reality. Yes, but I think it's still worth saying. What I don't know is what to do about it, because our politics is turning into The Blob. Answer it in kind and you feed it. It swallows up satirical phrases like "we will pump you up!" (Hans and Franz again) or "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" (some jerk on The Simpsons). It turns these knowing mockeries into non-ironic mainstream rhetoric for people with short or soft memories. Evidence of the real harm caused by policies adopted for theatrical reasons gets ignored as boring, except that the horror stories become a pornographic part of The Blob itself. The challenge, then, being how to talk politics in a non-Blob way that remains interesting to people who have short attention-spans and jaded capacities for viewing the pain or passion of others. More shockingness -- like, sorry, Lila Lipscomb's grief in the Michael Moore movie -- doesn't work. It only feeds the Blob. I don't know how you get heard in a quiet conversational tone of voice -- how you invite people to bring politics out of the realm of entertainment and into the normal register in which they live with their families and coworkers. But that's what we need, isn't it?

7/17/04 11:02 p.m. (Link here.)

Finally seen "Fahrenheit 9/11." Well, it's an unnecessary kick in the guts to someone like me who already reads far too much political propaganda in a day. I'm not the intended audience of course -- it's intended for people who don't recognize most of the allegations made and who haven't already seen the famous video clip of John Ashcroft's awful singing, etc. The main pleasant surprise is incidental: that so many individual soldiers still feel able to speak critically in their capacity as voting citizens. Hard to say very much more without a day's digestion.

7/16/04 11:22 p.m. (Link here.)

Here's a more relaxed kind of recommendation: an impressionistic SF Chronicle cartoon called "All Over Coffee". The guy has a perfect eye for the rooflines of older San Francisco frame houses, with their false fronts and the pipes and wires and wall-heater chimneys running up the outsides of the buildings. It's that rare kind of drawing that helps you really see what's in front of you already.

7/16/04 11:20 a.m. (Link here.)

Crooked Timber recommends a lovely essay by Slacktivist about selective readings of the Book of Leviticus "...to try to explain why it is that so many contemporary Christians reject gays while embracing shellfish."

...which reminds me of the Monty Python episode (Vol. 2, #32) in which a lecturer spices up a dull nature documentary on molluscs with a little old-fashioned sex and hate:

Mr. Zorba (presenting documentary): ...Whereas in others, viz, cephalopods the head-foot is greatly modified and forms tentacles, viz, the squid. (looking out) Whare are you doing?

Mrs. Jalin: Switching you off.

Z: Why, don't you like it?

Mrs. J: Oh, it's dreadful.

Mr. J: Embarrassing....

...

Mr. J: Give him another twenty seconds.

...

Z: However, what is more interesting, er... is the mollusc's er... sex life.

Mrs J (stopping dead): Oh!

Z: Yes, the mollusc is a randy little fellow whose primitive brain scarcely strays from the subject of the you know what.

Mrs. J (going back to sofa) Disgusting!...

Mr. J: Ought not to be allowed.

Z: The randiest of the grastropods is the limpet. This hot-blooded little beast with its tent-like shell is always on the job...

...

... [similar on depravities of the periwinkle and great scallop]...

...

Z: ...and finally among the lamellibranch bivalves, that most depraved of the whole sub-species -- the whelk. The whelk is nothing but a homosexual of the worst kind. This gay boy of the gastropods, this queer crustacean, this mincing mollusc, this screaming, prancing, limp-wristed queen of the deep makes me sick.

Mrs J: Have you got one?

Z: Here! (holds one up)

Mrs J: Let's kill it. Disgusting.

Zorba throws it on the floor and Mr and Mrs Jalin stamp on it

Mr J: That'll teach it. Well thank you for a very interesting programme...

I can only hope my earlier (July 13) post was right & that real ordinary genuinely conservative Americans -- not the talk show screamers, but the decent cookie-baking grandmas -- will find hate talk, not social difference, to be the alien and disturbing quantity here.

[Update per Alan's comment -- So, OK, maybe the larger point is that talking loudly about hate, even deploring it, can actually encourage the stuff. To be remembered in future.]

7/15/04 11:48 p.m. (Link here.)

I see I'm not the first to complain about the poor condition of the "walk of fame" that's going unprotected during our neighborhood's school construction project. The Mister S.F. page offers a photo, a little more explanation, and further indignation at this careless damage to local history.

7/15/04 11:05 p.m. (Link here.)

Well, I was sorry not to get a mention in today's feature on the California Urban Issues Project by Matt Smith of the SF Weekly. I know this website had a visit a few days ago from someone with the Weekly's parent New Times corporation, and I'm guessing my post of July 3 may have saved him some research time. But anyway it looks like he made the right phone calls for yesterday's feature on the strangely, as he puts it, "furtive" behavior of this organization. As he notes, the CUIP is backing a currently popular mayor who doesn't really seem to need a bunch of guys to go around buying ad time on his behalf without describing their own agenda in public or even naming their top funders to a news reporter who asks.

Incidentally, Matt, I wasn't able to tell if you requested their IRS 990 report, but the IRS advice on doing so is available here. As you may know, that once source they recommend, Guidestar, is usually about two years behind, but you could always file a 4506-A request with the IRS for a copy. Or, as the text of the 4506-A notes, you can just ask the organization itself to show you the form and it must legally comply with your request.

7/15/04 10:10 p.m. (Link here.)

The New Yorker explores the military counseling establishment's reluctance to discuss "Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress." Perspectives include that of Dan Knox, a Vietnam vet and a relative of the author:

In order to properly treat combat veterans, Knox said, the V.A. would have to change its mission. “They’d have to change from the ‘me’ to the ‘I.’ Not just ‘What happened to me?’ but ‘What did I do?’ But they can’t go there.”

7/15/04 11:04 a.m. (Link here.)

Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?

Food stamp caseloads increased by 26 percent over the three-year period ending October 2003. Over 9 million families received food stamp benefits in October 2003 compared with 7.3 million in October 2000. The recent increase in the number of families receiving food stamps represents a stunning reversal of the 40 percent caseload decline that occurred between 1994 and 2000....

BTW, there's a sad fact that this study repeats: many of the people who most need Food Stamps don't know they're eligible or don't think to apply.

7/14/04 5:42 p.m. (Link here.)

Robbie's done a nice photo essay on Orwell's old street in Paris. Aw, go read it.

7/13/04 11:47 p.m. (Link here.)

Herve Villechaise has been cut down to six inches and I'm worried.

In San Francisco, South of Market, on Seventh Street between Folsom and Harrison, they're building a new elementary school on a property where many years ago some people tried to start an independent film studio. Way back godknowswhen -- well, at least 11 years ago, because Villechaise died in '93 -- the film studio people got some genuine TV and movie celebrities to do a miniature Walk of Fame on the sidewalk outside, with handprints in the cement and brass stars with their names embedded in the sidewalk, one celebrity per cement square, about a dozen in all. The names we can remember without going back to look are Bob Goldthwait, Whoopi Goldberg, and Herve Villechaise. Actually, it's misspelled "Villeschaise" on his star. His star is all that's left of his square -- the handprints are gone -- because the people building the school hacked an 18-inch channel right through the walk-of-fame sidewalk sections, probably to lay a pipe or something, and replaced what they'd hacked with a stripe of plain asphalt. The whole "walk of fame" looks eroded and uncared-for. There's graffiti, there's this big hacked asphalt stripe, and the inner edges of the cement squares that now border the school's foundation pit are looking fragile. The bottom-weighted chainlink fence sections they're using to protect the construction site may be messing up the surface of the cement too. This is depressing. If I was building a school for kids, and the handprints of famous people were already in the sidewalk outside, I'd for darn sure take good care of that sidewalk. Wouldn't you?

I phoned the Chroniclewatch line tonight. Hope they do something about it.

7/13/04 10:58 p.m. (Link here.)

Here's more on Milton Glaser's "Light Up The Sky" proposal from the Village Voice. Turns out that like me, like many people -- like anyone with sense I think -- Glaser believes the Republicans are hoping for disorder outside their convention. He knows any form of disorderly protest will be a gift to hard-right "law and order" rhetoric. And what he's proposing is a completely quiet, completely peaceful, completely legal, completely permit-free way of registering an objection.

7/13/04 3:45 p.m. (Link here.)

I try to find items in less obvious places than the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle but this account of the gay marriage amendment debacle is too delicious:

...But instead of a landmark debate, Republicans found themselves filibustering their own amendment to stop it from coming to the floor on Wednesday for a straight up-or-down vote -- out of fear that it might fail to get even 51 votes, much less the 67, or two-thirds majority, required to amend the Constitution.

Republicans apparently were taken by surprise when Democrats, sensing a huge victory, offered to lift their own objections and proceed to direct consideration of the measure.

As many as a dozen Republicans, various aides and lobbyists said, might bolt from their party on the issue. Many Republicans have long been wary of federal intrusion on what has always been a state domain, believing an amendment would violate their basic principle of keeping the federal government out of state matters.

Many also have expressed concern that the current wording of the Federal Marriage Amendment also would ban civil unions and domestic partnerships that are considered legal alternatives to marriage.

So amendment proponents, led by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., floated the idea of offering an alternative version that might allay some worries about civil unions and improve the vote count.

But Democrats refused to go along, noting that Republicans had already bypassed the regular committee process to get the amendment directly to the floor and now found themselves trying to rewrite the measure at the last minute....

And the Republican leadership forgot something else: the actual conservatism of your basic religious, clean-living, old-fashioned small-town conservatives -- I'm thinking here of my own late paternal grandparents, and Huey's granddad on "The Boondocks." They don't care much for gayness, but I think they'd also be made uncomfortable by a public speech against gayness. It would still be bringing up a subject that to their minds is indecent and therefore best not mentioned or contemplated. After all, the standard anti-gay complaint is, "I don't care what those people do in private, but why do they have to flaunt it by doing [X]? (Let X equal holding hands in public, getting married, having jobs, visiting their partners in the hospital, filing civil rights lawsuits, etc...) In actual fact, of course, a gay couple is no more indecent than a heterosexual couple -- but, well, if you limit your thoughts about any couple's relationship to wondering what they do in bed, you'll either overheat or risk losing your lunch. Conservative "don't pollute my mind with that subject" voters are hardly going to find it dignified or pleasant for their Senators to spend lots of time on television explaining in loud and specific detail just precisely what's wrong with gay marriage. Guess what, guys: they just don't want to hear about it, one way or the other.

7/13/04 11:29 a.m. (Link here.)

Mr. Orwell, Mr. Huxley, your differences are finally settled. Gents, meet Fox News.

7/12/04 11:18 a.m. (Link here.)

Francis Bret Harte died in 1902, but he has some timely advice for the District Attorney of Stanislaus County:

...first I would remark, that it is not a proper plan
For any scientific gent to whale his fellowman...

7/11/04 2:51 p.m. (Link here.)

Here in San Francisco we're late picking up the stolen-yellow-ribbons story. The earliest version I can find is a June 28 AP brief on an Iowa TV station's website.

It seems Bob and Alexis Saskowski, an Iowa couple with a son in Iraq, repeatedly put yellow ribbons on the trees in their yard and had them stolen. For months they kept replacing the ribbons, wondering meanwhile if they were victims of thoughtless teenagers or someone with a grudge. But when they finally put a video camera on the case, they found the culprit was a squirrel.

J. spotted the item s'morning in an outdoor-sports column but it turns out already to have made the rounds. As of today Google News has about 90 mentions -- many of them on local TV stations' websites -- while the regular Google total is somewhere between 140 using a relatively narrow search (Saskowski, squirrel, "yellow ribbon") and 1,790 using an over-inclusive one (squirrel, "yellow ribbon").

Many of the reprints use this later AP version of the story, which closes with homeowner Bob Saskowski saying this:

"We can laugh now," Saskowski said. "Before, it was not funny."

He said the squirrel was actually a good thing.

"And I named him Patriot because he brought our neighborhood together," Saskowski said.

-"but would a true patriot know he is the patriot?"

--Very good point. And would it not be in that patriot's nature to give credit to another; human or otherwise?

---I believe you are correct, like my great uncle who received 3 purple hearts and the silver cross in the s pacific doesnt think he is a hero only a fortunate survivor

In an interesting sub-theme, commenters of varying political attitudes treat this as an example of people being too quick to blame things on teenagers.

And one commenter on Democrats.org, saying she has had her Kerry sign stolen, suggests:

The funniest thing is that this family went to the great lengths of setting up a video camera. Obviously they felt threatened by some anti-war liberal types in the neighborhood! I hope they learned a valuable lesson.

7/10/04 4:26 p.m. (Link here.)

Outside there's a small black car with a hind window broken and the driver's window simply rolled down. A note taped to the steering wheel says, "You broke into my car for nothing! Fuck off!" I don't know why people -- including me -- feel especially angry at a thief who breaks in and finds nothing worth taking. Is it that when nobody, not even the thief, gains anything from the crime, it's worse than a theft of valuables because it's pointless? Or is it maybe because you can blame yourself if you foolishly left something valuable in the car, but if you took all proper anti-theft precautions and still got broken into, you have to blame the thief both for the broken window and for the disturbance in your assumptions about how to be safe from crime? If the latter, I wonder if the psychological mechanism has anything in common with a study I mentioned on Horizon a few days ago. It found that if people believe life is fair, and they're told about someone who has tried hard and still not succeeded, they defend their assumptions by taking a hostile attitude toward the victim of circumstance. People are, face it, very, very weird.

7/10/04 12:27 p.m. (Link here.)

More corrupt rationalizations from Nader, who says he wants to keep the Republicans' money. His talk is getting to have that special Buchanan up-is-down style -- the statements so emphatically illogical that they briefly paralyze logic. He says big money is taking over the political process. Then he says big pro-Republican, pro-corporate contributors "are human beings too," so it's OK for him to take their money to magnify his role as a spoiler.

Mr. Camejo, your own political future is calling you: separate yourself from this man.

7/9/04 2:32 p.m. (Link here.)

Having wondered online in the past whether there'd be a good market for strictly non-sweatshop clothing, I suppose I owe SweatX an apology. They're going under, and I didn't buy any clothes from them either.

7/9/04 1:54 p.m. (Link here.)

Look at this: Big Republican donors sending money to Ralph Nader. Even his running mate sounds tactfully disgusted.

[UPDATE: A few weeks ago a Salon report said Nader was just plain wrong to think he could draw actual Republican voters away from Bush. And the Chron story quotes Bill Whalen, a Republican-strategist guy now at the Hoover Institution, as heavily implying that these big Nader donors just want a spoiler. Here's the kicker quote:

Whalen says that Nader is playing games when he suggests that his donors are merely acting in friendship and that his message will resonate with GOP faithful.

"What's at the heart and soul of the Nader campaign? That corporations are evil and that we need to get out of Iraq,'' Whalen said.

[UPDATE #2 ...and more of the same in Michigan, where Michigan Republicans are openly gathering signatures for Nader.

Y'know, Peter Camejo seems like a decent guy -- too good a man, with too much of a future in the Green Party, to yoke himself to this unholiness. Has anyone called on Camejo to withdraw from the Nader ticket yet?]

[AND YET MORE: Republicans in four more states are openly trying to get Nader on the ballot. (Via archy tho I'm not so sure about his inferences therefrom.) So, in the name of all that is decent about the Green Party, won't Peter Camejo kindly please get off of that Nader ticket??? Doesn't Camejo realize he's getting to be Nader's only source of left/liberal credibility? Does he really want to be in that position? Isn't he smarter and better than that?]

7/8/04 1:08 p.m. (Link here.)

The SF Chron has a pretty good analysis today of the bait and switch HUD is pulling on poverty housing. These HUD guys are spotlighting a genuinely useful-sounding effort to end "chronic" homelessness by housing the most deeply fucked-up currently homeless individuals -- but at the same time they're threatening to cut the much bigger Section 8 housing program, which is the only really large-scale way the government provides housing to genuinely poor people -- people living on 30% of their area median incomes and less. (To find what that means in real money try this handy-dandy converter.) The effect is not just to obscure the bigger cut -- it's to treat poverty as an individual disease, pretending the torture of having no money can be cured by counseling and treating a few aberrant, degraded individuals without regard to large-scale inequality.

That, and HUD is saying local housing authorities should make up for these Section 8 cuts by reducing bureaucracy, waste and fraud. The fact that fraud does exist in many housing authorities is beside the point. For that we have Inspectors General, or I sure hope so. What these officials are really saying is, "because we're taking money away from you, you have a moral duty to shake down yourselves and your clients to make up the difference." Reminds me of an older kid in our church choir named Russell who used to pick up your hand, hit you with it, and say with mock pity, "Why are you hitting yourself?" There are lots of grownups like Russell: it's not enough for them to hurt you, they want to make you hurt yourself.

The Chron story is by Kevin Fagan, the paper's tin-eared homelessness specialist. As usual he isn't bad on writing down what policy wonks tell him -- which is what makes the article OK -- but as usual he says dumb and wrong stuff about poor people. In this case, it's that while supportive housing may get some of the hard cases off the street, cutting Section 8 "could then backfill the ranks of panhandlers, some worry..." Actually, "backfill" is a good word for the problem. But in all the many years Kevin Fagan has spent interviewing street people for exploitive profile pieces, has he ever noticed that most actual homeless people do not in fact stoop to panhandling? Listen, Kevin, never mind the shameless professional beggars you prefer to interview: ask yourself when the last time was that anyone pushing a recycling cart asked you for anything? In San Francisco, some estimates say there are 10,000 or more homeless, counting couch surfers, people living in cars, and for example a guy I know who got hurt in two consecutive accidents and as of last week was bouncing among SF General, the VA, and a city shelter's medical "respite" floor. If all homeless people did panhandle, what makes you think there'd be any space on the sidewalks at all?

--

Another thing gets on my nerves, this time at the wonk level, and I haven't seen this covered elsewhere: It's the procedural sneakiness of the way HUD set out to make this Section 8 cut, which would take effect through a dull-sounding change in calculation methods. The HUD officials didn't go through a formal rulemaking process with publication in the Federal Register, which would have formally notified more people and offered an opportunity for public comment. Instead they had the high-handed gall to issue this life-shattering announcement in the form of a "notice" on "implementation." I guess we should almost be grateful they issued an excessively reassuring press release to announce the change to the non-nerds of the housing press who read the HUD press releases instead of the Federal Register and Hudclips. Now, I'm not a big expert on the Administrative Procedure Act but I think a federal agency pretty much has to do a formal rulemaking with publication in the Federal Register when it makes any big rule change. This one actually purports to override stuff previously published in the Federal Register. Yet they tried to send it through as a low-level notice without opening up any comment period or other forum for consulting the persons affected -- as though evicting thousands of people were no more important than revising an application form.

--

The SF Chron is generally good today: it links to a Mark Fiore animated zinger on electronic voting, and covers an unsettling  Greens-versus-Democrats development in our local supervisorial election. (Here's the nitty-gritty for locals: Matt Gonzalez, the ex-mayoral candidate who's now leaving politics, is to endorse Renee Saucedo, day laborers' lawyer and activist, to challenge Tom Ammiano, political inheritor of Harry Britt and Harvey Milk. All three are good progressives & should be on the same side. This conflict is a pity.) There's also a great interview with Geoffrey Nunberg, the NPR "standup linguist," on political language and why George Bush says "nucular" on purpose.

7/7/0410:51 p.m. (Link here.)

It's Grandma Millie's turn:

Ken Lay indicted. Lovely news.

7/7/04 5:02 p.m. (Link here.)

It seems San Francisco police on patrol are now waking up sidewalk sleepers to run warrant checks on their IDs, and they're also asking homeless people, insistently and repeatedly, "Where do you sleep?" At least that's what's been happening to the guy who called me just now, and he has the impression it's happening to others similarly situated. [No, I haven't heard this latest story anywhere else -- just that recent "quality of life" enforcement has been especially hard on the quality of homeless persons' lives in the Tenderloin and Mission Districts lately.] He said the officers took notes and told him it was for his own protection so they'd know about him in the future, or words to that effect. I don't know if Gavin Newsom's campaign promises to "Compstat" the city are kicking in or what, but it does sound like there's some kind of systematic effort to build up a grid showing every homeless person's "home" areas of town.

If so, this is troubling. Yes, I, too, can be found if wanted, as can most of us who live in conventional housing, and I don't resent the fact that I have to give my home address for many administrative purposes. But, well, so long as we stay out of trouble with the law, housed people like me aren't actually required to register our presence with the local police. That's a kind of requirement that other governments impose in other countries where I am glad not to live. If only for sentimental reasons, I do see a difference between the Police Department and for example the Department of Motor Vehicles. So why should registration with the police become a de facto requirment for homeless people? Sorry, but I'm allergic to putting people in pigeonholes. It leads to fold, spindle, and mutilate.

7/7/04 1:04 p.m. (Link here.)

A relative on the phone this past weekend: he said his old high school had written for donations, saying it was out of money for books. The public high school of course. The one he went to before the scholarship. He was shocked. No new books? Were they spending their money on sports, then? We talked it through. Yes, public schools had been losing funds since the '80s. For everything, not just for books. No, it was no surprise after all. Yes, maybe he'd send them something.

At home here we had Springsteen's Greatest Hits on the stereo, songs like "Born to Run" and "The River," nearly always about naive hope disappointed and a punch-drunk, morally compromised, or plain old pointless hope taking its place. It's the old Camus existentialist message: you can't win, but that's what makes it so romantic to keep trying.

Springsteen was the perfect artist for the 1980s in America. Yes, some of those hits were written earlier, but the time they fit best is the '80s. Ten or twenty years we'd had when there was reason to hope for a freer, more equal existence -- hope in more than an existentialist sense. Then hope went out of fashion, becoming as foolish as bell-bottoms. The conception of life as being hard and hopeless clamped down on America like it clamps down on Springsteen's Rust Belt heroes. Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" is another '80s lyric: "...I know things will get better/ You'll find work and I'll get promoted/ We'll move out of the shelter..." There are always cars in those songs, for getaways and fresh starts.

Well, if this note were a Springsteen song we'd be at the bridge by now and the lyrics would tell about the public schools resegregated and their libraries having no money for books and cars people live in that get towed away as "eyesores" by cops who can't afford a house in the city either, and fresh starts ruled out by credit check companies. You know how the rest of this verse goes. Take it as read -- it's purple enough already.

(Opening melody reprise....)

Or maybe we'll live to see everything turn again.

Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
or is it something worse
That sends me down to the river
Though I know the river is dry
That sends me down to the river tonight...?

7/7/04 9:20 a.m. (Link here.)

Re: Republican bashing of Edwards for being (gasp) a lawyer who defended little guys. (And got well paid for it, too. Though the other side would have paid him much more...) --

How many normal Americans even know what a "trial lawyer" is? I mean, this term "trial lawyer"was probably dreamed up by guys who didn't like being called "personal injury lawyers," and it's been used against them recently by the folks who also use "lawsuit reform" to mean "corporate impunity." I'm sure Dick Cheney knows what "trial lawyers" are, because he has personal reason to fear them. But does the average heartland Republican even know? I don't think I knew what was meant by "trial lawyer" until after becoming a lawyer myself. So has the word come into more general use over the past ten years or is this another case of Republican strategists losing touch with the public by talking mainly to each other?

7/6/04 7:12 p.m. (Link here.)

The Atrios people put this quote from Scott McClellan on their page for some other reason today, but I have a dumber, more basic question than theirs:

This guy McClellan, he's a public employee, right? He speaks for the White House, which is a public entity -- not for the Bush campaign, which is a private entity. Right? OK, then, why did he criticize "the ticket that we are running against"? What "we" does that imply? Who is running for office, the current federal government as a whole, or the man currently at the top of it?

There's probably an obvious response to this question that makes McClellan's phrasing all right after all, but at the moment I'm sorry, I just can't think of it.

7/6/04 5:35 p.m. (Link here.)

Sorry, I've been wrapped up in work today -- been chatting mainly on Horizon when at all. Not much to say at the moment except thank goodness for a veep candidate with eyebrows. Sorry but Gephardt was a Mondale dinosaur.

7/5/04 1:15 p.m. (Link here.)

Electablog picks up an increasingly noticeable strangeness: Kerry is campaigning like an incumbent; Bush is campaigning like a challenger. Look at the Bush re-election site: Kerry's name is all over it. Look at the Kerry site: Kerry's name is all over it. Candidates used to say "my opponent" rather than even name the other guy. So what's with the Bush campaign strategists? Are they so high on attack politics they're abandoning the normal rules of thumb? Have they developed a whole new theory of political persuasion? Whatever the Bush folks think they've got, it isn't working, but it'd be fun to know why they're giving up the high ground so energetically.

7/4/04 10:09 p.m. (Link here.)

I just want to note that the ambient celebration level here in downtown San Francisco is loud enough to freak out the neighbor cats who are staying with us over the weekend. They are definitely as nervous as they would be in any other major U.S. city on the Fourth of July. People sometimes talk like the Left Coast doesn't live in America any more. The crackles and booms outside our windows say otherwise.

7/4/04 8:52 p.m. (Link here.)

Shameless plug for a friend:

Joel's old neighbor and friend Kiyoshi Nakazawa (pictured here, in a photo grepped from the Web so don't even ask about the context because I have no idea), has become a hip punk zine artist in LA. He's the advertising guy for Giant Robot magazine and produces his own Drunken Master comic/fan-interview zine. His cartoon art is kind of Hokusai meets Bukowski with some Mexican wrestler ninja angst on the side but you really have to see it for yourself -- which you often can in Giant Robot because most issues carry ads for his zine and he sometimes illustrates articles there. He needs to get his own website. Until he does just keep Googling that name.

7/4/04 5:14 p.m. (Link here.)

Housekeeping note: a couple of posts down from this one is a long disquisition on San Francisco local politics. Some friends and family stopped reading this blog last winter when it started concentrating intensely on the regional stuff, so I just want to offer assurances that most future posts here will be comprehensible to non-San Franciscans.

7/4/04 12:18 p.m. (Link here.)

Like many of us whose civics education predates the Gitmo era, I'm posting the Declaration of Independence today. Go reread it.

7/3/04 6:58 p.m. (Link here.)

The California Urban Issues Project rides again

A fascinating -- and intriguingly familiar -- bit of sneaky political spending just turned up in an ad alongside a New York Times article (via TAPPED) about Ralph Nader's disgusting willingness to make common cause with Pat Buchanan.

The ad was a promo piece for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (screen shot here), obviously targeted to the San Francisco address on my NYT registration. It had one of these smiling Plastic Gavin photos and with it, dimly activist-sounding slogans: "San Francisco: The Choices are Clear"; "Save Services, Not Special Interests"; and "Support Mayor Newsom's Reform Budget." (Some folks on SF Indymedia -- their surrounding comments not necessarily endorsed by this space -- found similar ads in the SF Examiner.)

A consumer/lefty-sounding pitch like this, for our economically non-lefty mayor, was weird enough to deserve a second glance. I clicked on the ad and got a website with the address "www.sftaxandbudgetwatch.com." Across the header bar (screen shot here) was a name that's an old friend to me now: "The California Urban Issues Project" (hereinafter "CUIP").

Ah. So that explains why recent Sitemeter reports have shown visitors looking up my December coverage of the shadowy CUIP. It's back.

The CUIP is the previously unknown 501(c)(4) pseudo-grassroots "lobbying" group that suddenly appeared as sponsor of a questionable direct-mail and telephone campaign during the Newsom-Gonzalez mayoral runoff in San Francisco last winter. The CUIP sent glossy flyers, and placed annoying recorded calls (variously from a "Sally Smith" and a "Susan Smith" [UPDATE: credit for these goes to "Testpattern"]) to convey "lobbying" messages on legislative issues then before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Which would have been fine, except that the CUIP is a 501(c)(4) group that at least has to be careful about campaigning on behalf of candidates, and its "lobbying" messages all happened to make Supervisor Newsom look good and Supervisor Gonzalez look bad, on days that just happened to fall immediately before the election to decide which of those very same two Supervisors would become mayor. The CUIP's "lobbyist" status allowed it to keep from naming its donors, which was especially interesting since several names and addresses connected it to San Francisco's solidly pro-Newsom downtown business establishment. To be clear I am not saying any laws were necessarily broken, but I am saying that the CUIP's pretense of grassroots status, its blurring of the line between lobbying and campaigning, and its use of a formal status that avoids naming its funders have all been, well, sneaky.

CUIP's vagueness about its funders seems to be continuing, judging by the tell-nothing introductory material on the "Tax and Budget Watch" site:

The California Urban Issues Project

Who We Are

The California Urban Issues Project are your friends, neighbors, and local businesses [sic] owners who each share a common concern about the direction our city is headed in.

A Network Solutions WhoIs search under "sftaxandbudgetwatch.com" produces the name of a Washington PR firm:

Malchow Schlackman Hoppey and Cooper
  Hoppey and Cooper, Malchow Schlackman  [MH-373]
  1101 14th Street, NW
Suite 300
  Washington, DC 20005, US
  Phone: 202-478-7900
  Email: info@mshcdirect.com....

...and shows the domain name was only created recently:

Record Information:
  Domain Record Created: May       26, 2004 00:00
  Domain Record Updated: June      25, 2004 12:48
  Domain Record Expires: May       26, 2005 00:00

In other words, it seems an independent expenditure effort has been running steadily for something like a year now, trying to create an impression of public support for Gavin Newsom and his pet issues -- and it has continued even when he isn't running for office. So are the CUIP folks positioning Gavin for his next mayoral run, or for governor when Ahnold uses up the public's patience, or are they spending all this money just because they want his local budget proposals passed? Hard to tell until we know who exactly is funding the CUIP and what exactly they're trying to do. A little transparency, anybody?

[UPDATE 7/4/04: I had a look at the TV ad linked from the "sftaxandbudgetwatch" site: it's directed primarily against the city Board of Supervisors -- as a whole! -- as though the whole board were somehow obstructing city management. This ad campaign makes a little more sense now: San Francisco business-conservative Democrats and Republicans have been trying to create resentment against the whole notion of the city having a legislative branch ever since the district-based elections of 2000 brought in a liberal majority to the City and County Board of Supervisors. It's kind of strange that the conservative campaign message demonizes "the Board of Supervisors" as a whole, considering that the Board itself includes conservatives. But the campaign strategists on the Newsom side of local politics seem to have decided to pound on the message that too much democracy is inefficient.

Hmmm.... a thought: last December, not too long after the mayoral election, I got a weird poll call exploring different proposals for abolishing San Francisco district elections. I have no idea whether the poll call was related to the CUIP directly, but loosely speaking I think they both came out of the same conservative Newsom/"Committee on JOBS" end of San Francisco politics. Maybe these CUIP people are trying to soften up the San Francisco public for some kind of ballot measure that would reduce the power of the Board of Supervisors? Or are they preparing us for a pro-Newsom slate in the Board of Supervisors elections to be held this November?]

Since political memories shift quickly, a little reminder may be in order: Gavin Newsom is not an unequivocal "civil rights hero". Before that whole gay marriage business, in which he did do a good thing, Gavin Newsom was best known for making proposals and campaign promises that implied he would do whatever it took to get rid, not of homelessness, but of homeless people, in San Francisco. On the subject of homelessness, he didn't entirely seem to mind if his rhetoric encouraged housed voters to see their homeless neighbors as a menace rather than see homelessness as evidence of injustice. Matt Gonzalez, a former public defender, was challenging Newsom from the left, and a key difference between the candidates was Gonzalez' warmer view of the human rights of poor people.

The bee in my bonnet on this subject has to do with Newsom's persistent anti-homeless policies. He may be doing good things on gay marriage. He may be bravely visiting crime scenes in the Bayview. He may even be backing supportive housing for the city's most visible homeless residents. But at the same time the police sweeps and tows of inhabited vehicles are as cruel as ever; the city welfare programs are still denying people what they need to live; the homeless services are gearing up to fingerprint and serial-number the people they serve, and comfortably housed San Franciscans are still degrading the city's liberal reputation by treating their homeless neighbors as representatives of an abstract problem, not as neighbors.

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Incidentally the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness could use some help in moderating the non-warm, non-fuzzy aspects of the Newsom Administration. They're in bad financial trouble right now: even the core staff have had to lay themselves off, and these are mainly not folks with savings they can live on. Poor people's human rights in San Francisco need support more than ever. Help them out if you can.

7/3/04 12:02 p.m. (Link here.)

I may never live down having called the Washington Post's star reviewer "this Yardley person," but anyway The Yardley Person has written a lovely revival-review -- via A&L Daily -- of No Left Turns, which sounds like a nice bit of inside debunkery on J. Edgar.

And, well, Happy Independence Day. This country is bigger than the soft-faced fear-governed security men who try to lock us up and down in the name of freedom.

7/2/04 10:47 p.m. (Link here.)

Some jerk stole the Kerry sticker off our car. In San Francisco, yet.

7/2/04 11:49 a.m. (Link here.)

Atrios and TalkLeft have this item already so I'm probably not doing much additional good here, but just in case: People for the American Way has published the Florida "felon" list. People whose names appear on this list might not be allowed to vote in Florida unless they successfully challenge the state's assumption that their voting rights were suspended by a felony conviction. So send it on to anyone who might know someone in Florida, OK?

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In other, newsier news, a friend forwarded an article yesterday from the San Francisco Daily Journal legal newspaper saying that the San Francisco public defender's office, subject to pending approval by the Board of Supervisors, is going to start looking much more carefully at clients' ability to pay at least some fees, and court procedures are to be rearranged to provide for a hearing on the client's ability to pay at the end of each case. This is bad stuff -- looks to me like an erosion of the Gideon v. Wainwright right of the accused to have an attorney, especially as the office appears likely to charge its clients according to what services they receive. Practically speaking, people who are destitute won't have to worry, but it seems like people with low-paid jobs or other modest incomes might choose to take an unfair plea bargain rather than go to trial purely in order to hold down the attorney's fee, and that's bad. Of course what I'm really arguing for by saying this is publicly funded criminal defense for all defendants, up to and including O.J. Simpson. That sounds dreadful in the abstract, but when you consider that most people who get arrested actually are poor, it really wouldn't make that much more difference -- and if middle-class and rich people started using the public defender maybe public defender budgets would get more money and public defenders themselves would get more respect. Kind of the way Social Security retirement pay doesn't count as "welfare" because middle-class and rich people qualify for it too.

Oh well, back to work...

7/1/04 9:04 p.m. (Link here.)

Also via The Nation, a literal "light a candle" suggestion for completely peaceful, hopeful protest in New York City and perhaps elsewhere during the Republican Convention: gather with lights, and leave lights shining in windows overnight, on August 30. "Light Up The Sky." Seems a little foolish maybe, but so did jingling keys in Wenceslas Square.

7/1/04 6:33 p.m. (Link here.)

Goodgoodgoodgoodgoodgood... The Nation reports organizers who want to criticize the Democratic Party from the left during the Boston convention are planning to decentralize their events to other neighborhoods away from the physical convention site. Except, unfortunately, for the ANSWER folks, who are predictably and boneheadedly organizing a '90s kind of demonstration with rally on Boston Common and march to convention locale. I'm strongly for decentralization. It makes more sense in the present highly mediated political world because it shows the strength of a point of view without provoking face-to-face conflict, and it doesn't risk causing additional splits between the left and the institutional Democratic Party over the treatment of protesters.

I still do not feel able to excuse Al Gore for saying nothing about the LAPD's excesses outside the Dem convention in 2000. Given the current political picture I do think I would hold my nose and vote for Kerry despite any amount of tear gas in the 2004 election, but it would be much nicer of course to vote for him half-or-more-heartedly.

On a more cheerful note, it shows more self-confidence for dissenters to hold demonstrations at locations of their own choosing, rather than piggybacking on the locations of more mainstream events. In the '60s, after all, people held big antiwar gatherings in places like the Polo Fields in the middle of Golden Gate Park. They didn't feel they had to get close to someone else's event to be noticed. They were their own event. Something to be said for that approach. It's psychologically healthier, and it makes for less unpleasant getting-in-faces overall.

7/1/04 1:27 p.m. (Link here.)

Moment of pointless joy in the midst of a writeup for a trade journal on subsidized housing: the discovery that when you type "Community" with your right hand misplaced it spells "Cinnybutt." I have no idea what a Cinnybutt is but it's less sonorously pious than a Community. OK, maybe you had to be here to laugh. I dunno, maybe my brain is melting...

[UPDATE: a few guesses anyway --

-Rude name for Marge Schott?

-What you get from too many Cinnabons?]

7/1/04 10:45 a.m. (Link here.)

The Cuevas family -- law-abiding, productive, homeowning immigrant Americans -- are being deported to the Philippines for no good reason.

And their little doggie, too.

Credit where credit is due, it's largely the fault of the Clinton Administration's anti-immigrant laws. But the current anti-immigrant attitude doesn't help either.

[UPDATE 7/1: Alan Allport writes with a different perspective on the question:

Speaking as someone who considers himself a law-abiding and productive, if not as yet homeowning, immigrant *to* America, your suggestion that the Cuevas family are completely innocent of all wrongdoing makes my own, often gruelling determination to stay within the law more than a little contemptible ... legal immigrants often have a very different take on these kinds of cases, and I can't help but think that you would understand that if you'd been in the same situation yourself.

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