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

Go have a look at Horizon, OK? Alan over there is trying to talk politics (and space opera, and other things) and I haven't had time to join him lately.

9/27/04 5:20 p.m. (Link here)

On the lighter side, my dad took this picture today.

9/27/04 12:01 a.m. (Link here)

According to this table it costs up to $177 a day to live in San Francisco. If you're a visiting HUD official, that is. If you're a public housing tenant living on benefits in San Francisco, however, life is presumed to cost somewhat less. Funny, that.

9/24/04 10:15 a.m. (Link here)

Here's a good kind of story about flip-flops.

Less good, in today's SF Chron: the Kevin Shelley scandal just won't quit, in fact it keeps getting worse. Again, I've got no pity for a man who was either dumb or venal enough to let strangers give him huge contributions with suspicious links to a public grant that he himself helped to arrange. But I do have to wonder how much the intense pursuit of Mr. Shelley may have to do with his status as the Democratic California Secretary of State, under a Republican governor, or with Shelley's history as a strong opponent of paperless electronic voting.

Heartfelt advice from here to Mr. Shelley: your career is irreparably damaged by this scandal no mater how the investigations and/or trials come out. Do the honorable or at least the far, far better thing: use your remaining political capital to give California a clean election no matter what else happens next. And, no, I don't mean skewed your way instead of Arnold's. I mean clean. Period.

9/23/04 10:48 a.m. (Link here)

Echidne has some timely thoughts on election news analyses and The Woman Question.

9/22/04 1:04 p.m. (Link here)

"...If you make the wrong choice this November, Santa may skip your house..."

Ladies and gents, the SF Chron's one and only Don Asmussen: further proof that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

9/20/04 3:00 p.m. (Link here)

If your faith in human possibility happens to have slipped, take a look at the inspiring Distributed Proofreaders page.

9/20/04 11:55 a.m. (Link here)

Echidne has run across the worst Republican advertisement yet. It starts with "There is a line drawn in America..." and goes downhill from there.

Because laughing is more fun than crying, I'm gonna modestly propose a parlor game. It starts with this godawful ad text. By changing ten words or fewer, each player converts the ad to a speech by the twentieth-century dictator of his/her choice. No two players may choose the same dictator. The altered speeches are read while costumed with moustaches, high-crowned hats, sunglasses, prosthetic double chins, etc. Points are scored for verisimilitude and dreadfulness. Now, crumple up the costumes, clear the air with poetry, and, whatever you do next, remember this: polarization itself is as much a danger as any specific political position.

9/18/04 1:54 p.m. (Link here)

I stumbled into a scarily weird corner of the Internet today. It appears someone is using unrelated-sounding domain names to redirect innocent Web surfers to an anti-Kerry website, and it may or may not be related to a previous effort that redirected people to anti-abortion sites.

I just don't have the time or fortitude right now to get to the bottom of this, but I'll lay out what I found today in case anyone else wants to build on it.

So:

This started with me looking for a website about the philosopher Walter Benjamin. I should have just Googled his name, which would have given me a diverse choice. Instead, I mistakenly went to the address "www.walterbenjamin.com".

That's when the weirdness started. I was instantly diverted to an entirely different site titled "The Kerry Files: The Young Opportunist's Handbook," which has pseudo-scholarly anti-Kerry text attributed to someone named Selwyn Duke. Links at the bottom of the page go to Mr. Duke's website, which appears to be right-wing. This is on the whole strange, since Walter Benjamin himself was a Marxist -- a sort of romantic, theoretical, theological Marxist, but nevertheless if you'd asked him about his politics he would have called himself a Marxist.

So I did a little looking. The Network Solutions WhoIs for the domain name "walterbenjamin.com" gives an owner's name and address:

"Domains For Life
 235 W. 102 st.
 New York, NY 10025
 US
 1-917-251-1853"

Googling "Domains for Life," I found several results, including this administrative decision regarding a domain name. Specifically it was a decision in favor of the proprietors of a small-town newspaper who discovered that a domain name very similar to their own was linking to anti-abortion propaganda. I don't actually know whether the respondent in this case -- something called "baby safe" -- has anything to do with the Walter Benjamin caper.

However,

Googling "235 W. 102 st.," I found some other results, including this other domain name decision. It was an inconclusive finding regarding a case in which an entertainer with a website, owner of an entirely different domain name, complained that visitors to his website were being diverted to an anti-abortion website.

I also found yet another domain name decision involving a complaint by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., against someone named "Mike Flynn," which is interesting because the first decision I found also mentions that name. The decision said Mr. Flynn's address was "235 W. 102 St, Apt. 14ff, New York City, NY 10025, United States of America." In the Wal-Mart case, however, there's nothing about any political or social issue.

Of further interest and weirdness: When I Googled the telephone number in that WhoIs result, I got another WhoIs result for a domain name called briandeneke.com, and when I went to that website I was redirected again to the anti-Kerry page.

And of yet further interest and weirdness: When I enter the address of the anti-Kerry page itself into a Google search field, it offers "similar to..." and "link to..." results that are completely not related to either Senator Kerry or this Duke person or abortion issues: instead, weirdly, they seem to have to do with travel companies and the state of Florida.

I don't know what's going on here but, like I said, if anyone else has the time to find out it might be a public service.

BTW cybersquatting turns out to be a practice of at least one other anti-abortion zealot as well.

9/16/04 1:27 p.m. (Link here)

This week's San Francisco Bay Guardian cover story is a thing to be read in full only by San Francisco politics mavens, except they won't read it either because they already know the score. But a good comment appears therein that's worth some wider attention.

It's from Calvin Welch, a local low-income housing guru, on Joe O'Donoghue, a local condo development impresario who has been weirdly backing lefties at City Hall, but never mind those two names for the moment. Never mind Jack Davis either. Jack Davis is a kingmaking political consultant possibly best known for his gala 50th birthday party, which featured the "Satanic Apache" sexual abuse of a bottle of Jack Daniels. But never mind about that -- it's just more boring local politics....

...Where was I? Oh, yes. The Calvin Welch quote. It was this:

O'Donoghue's shtick, Welch says, is playing the image game. "He's always had the ability of projecting this image of being a populist grassrootsy fellow," he says. "[But] he specialized in applying a political approach that Jack Davis pioneered: act right, talk left. Attack the left from the left, for the benefit of the right.

Schwarzenegger and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (and, in effect, Ralph Nader too) fit a pattern: on symbolic issues they're lefty/libertarian but the practical effect of what they do is righty/authoritarian. Newsom talks civil rights on the national level while superintending the meanest economic cleansing of the Tenderloin since the days when ex-police chief Frank Jordan was mayor. I mean, they're "cleansing" literally: throwing water and disinfectant on the sidewalks at all hours, with the ostensibly incidental result of making it impossible to sleep. But that's below the radar or, anyway, below the rhetoric. The rhetoric is all the kind of sweetness and light and freethinking that pisses off right-wing talk show hosts, which veils the fact that folks who get and hold political power in California are mainly not really liberals. With a few exceptions like outgoing Senate President John Burton, they've got no more fellow-feeling for the poor than Rush Limbaugh does.

Calvin Welch is a smart guy. Listen to him. When folks from Northern California, or anywhere else, start talking outside the normal run of politics, reserve judgment.

And this is basic advice but maybe it bears repeating: don't watch their mouths. Watch their hands.

9/15/04 2:05 p.m. (Link here)

I heard a report last night that since San Francisco started cutting homeless people's county benefits to $59, tempers are worse in social service offices and food lines, and violent crime in the Tenderloin is supposedly up. Still checking details. More on this later.

9/14/04 11:56 a.m. (Link here)

Actually it's a heartwarming story, but with due respect and best wishes to the actual happy couple, we couldn't not laugh at this in our morning SF Chron:

....Marriages by proxy were illegal in California until Friday, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law allowing military personnel stationed overseas in a war or conflict to marry through a legal stand-in. Texas, Montana and Colorado allow marriage-by-proxy.

Arnold, who is pregnant with a baby girl and due any day, wore a pink flowered dress and had her shoulder-length brown hair in curls. A family friend stood in for Cogan, whose parents and two sisters traveled from Philadelphia to attend....

Looks like the editors caught on: a later online version of the story separates the bride from the Governor more clearly.

9/13/04 2:43 p.m. (Link here)

Went to a training session in San Francisco this past weekend for the nonpartisan Election Protection effort. It was encouraging, mostly. From appearances, at least, several hundred volunteers from San Francisco alone were willing to consider traveling to other states to serve as voting rights monitors. A few surprises, however: for one thing, Mayor Gavin Newsom made a brief, quiet appearance, just a day after an official report saying his own supporters committed voting rights violations last December. Another surprise was that I only saw a handful of people I knew, and I've been around San Francisco activism a long time. But maybe the people I know can't afford the time and money for out-of-state efforts? A further disappointment: the crowd was ethnically almost all white. Where was everyone else? But again, maybe it had to do with who could afford the time and money to travel. On the other hand, there was much cause for optimism. Trainers were seasoned volunteers who had stories to tell about, for example, Florida voters being turned away for lack of identity cards without being told of their right to submit affidavits instead. And clearly there is money behind the Election Protection campaign itself. Volunteers appearing at the training were given free bottled water and snacks, the stage was well-appointed, and lots of people were wearing new Election Protection T-shirts. For at least one state we were told the project would lend cell phones to all polling place monitors. That may not be much by the standards of national advocacy groups, but by the standards of local homeless-rights activism it's princely. The project comes across as well-organized, legally scrupulous, and able to use volunteers' skills intelligently. If there is another Florida 2000-style disenfranchisement problem, this group can be expected to stand up for voters' rights regardless of what any candidate does or doesn't choose to contest. That's reassuring.

9/12/04 5:36 p.m. (Link here)

I can't beat this Chronicle headline: Colorado Rocky Mountain high holy days: 'Adventure Rabbi' leads services on hiking, biking trips.

9/12/04 10:11 a.m. (Link here.)

Mainstream Journalist Bites Candidates --

Journalism, it turns out, is still an active profession. S'morning's SF Chron gives front-page space to a news analysis by Carolyn Lochhead of its Washington bureau: "Speeches ignore impending U.S. debt disaster: No mention of fiscal gap estimated as high as $72 trillion." Yes, it's an old-fashioned display of independent civic thinking -- not transcribing the presidential candidates' statements, but pointing out an issue they haven't addressed. Gotta give credit when something like this sees print. Goodness knows it's rare enough.

9/12/04 10:08 a.m. (Link here.)

No, I couldn't think of anything to say about yesterday's anniversary that wouldn't be fatuous or tendentious. Enough other folks said enough things about it.

9/11/04 8:32 p.m. (Link here.)

TalkLeft has a very odd report, attributed to an arrestee's mother, that the substandard Pier 57 property in New York City, which was used to detain demonstrators and others during the Republican Convention, was leased at the time by the Republican National Committee. If true, it's yet another reason to work at maintaining a seemly distinction between the Republican Party and the government.

9/11/04 11:02 a.m. (Link here.)

Don't tell me I never say anything nice about the Bayview Station cops.

These are the folks who police southeastern San Francisco, which is a tough beat but one I often feel they could cover with a little more kindness or at least a livelier sense of proportion, especially when it comes to inhabited RVs. Actually, this year they're not towing or harassing campers with the outright relish we were seeing one and two years ago, thank heavens (the worst officer has reportedly been transferred), but then again Bayview Station has a serious gang violence problem on its doorstep, and every morning those officers spend calling the tow trucks to dispossess poor people is a morning they don't spend preventing actual physical harm.

...but I was going to say something nice. It's this: there are, it seems, half a dozen feral cats in the Bayview Station parking lot. The officers are feeding and housing them, but can't get near them to apply flea dope. So rather than call Animal Control on the cats, the staff and officers of the station are living with fleas. That truly is kindness beyond the call of duty.

9/10/04 9:58 a.m. (Link here.)

I misquoted my correspondent Henry a few days ago regarding the New York arrests, for which apologies. He writes:

...I did not intend to suggest that your believing the claims/protests of innocence from those arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time was foolish, nor that such claims were necessarily false and/or self-serving. On the contrary, I am convinced that such arrests happen all the time. What I found _naive_ was your concluding wish or hope or whatever it was:

> I know that arrests do sometimes have to be made, but I think
> they should always be made individually, based on individual
> conduct and not ascribed collective responsibility

Well, OF COURSE they _should_. My point was that in this day and age it is completely unrealistic (pollyanna-ish) to expect that they _will be_.

A couple of years ago I read somewhere--it might have been on abg-o, and it might even have been you who wrote it--that there are two kinds of citizen: those who think it is preposterous to suggest that the police would ever abuse their power (use unnecessary force, plant evidence on suspects, etc.) and those who believe it's absurd to think that such doesn't happen regularly. You can call me cynical, but I am squarely in the second camp.

9/9/04 5:03 p.m. (Link here.)

My dad became a librarian in the 1950s. The first university library where he worked had a copy of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. He says the update materials used to arrive with instructions to cut out and send back the pages they replaced. Of course as free-thinking librarians in a free country, he and his colleagues found the request laughable and did nothing of the sort.

Now, thanks to Molly Ivins, we learn that this past summer, the Ashcroft Justice Department first issued, then  withdrew, an order telling depository libraries to destroy five publications, two of which were texts of federal laws. For some reason Ivins wrote her item as though the order were still in effect -- which it apparently isn't -- but this comment of hers is worth considering anyway: 

I don't know how you feel about living in a country where the citizens are not allowed to read the law, but I find it ... surprising....

Is too nice a word.

Latest from ALA on the issue here.

9/8/04 1:51 p.m. (Link here.)

Finally we're getting a little more attention paid in the U.S. to the problem of suburban poverty. It's a natural consequence of overall economic immiseration plus the return of monied homeowners to city centers. As The Nation points out this week, living poor in the suburbs is worse than SRO existence downtown because of the automotive-scale distances involved and the lack of old, reliable support institutions like, for example, the San Francisco Tenderloin's two big free dining rooms run by liberal downtown churches. Heaven knows if suburban churches believe in feeding the poor or, if so, how much.

A further, concomitant worry: the Bush Administration, whenever it gets the chance, is redesigning grant and service programs to privilege rural areas over either urban or suburban regions. For example, HUD money gets specially set aside for the wretched Colonias on the Mexican border, which sure as hell need money, but so, for example, does South Central L.A. For another example, the FDIC is currently proposing allowing banks to meet their Community Reinvestment Act compliance requirements by lending money to anybody at all, rich or poor, in a rural area, which if I have this right means a big bank would be legally allowed to accept a bunch of small savings deposits from urban grocery clerks and security guards in South Central, and loan the South Central people's savings to some agribusiness concern in the Central Valley without regard to the company's treatment of field laborers, and then this bank could claim it had met its community reinvestment requirement just like that. Which would completely reverse the original idea of the CRA, which was to make banks invest money in the same places where they accepted deposits. It further occurs to me that South Central has robust political institutions that elect people like Maxine Waters to national office. So conservative politicoes are likely to want to direct services to the rural poor, who they can hope will be humble and grateful, while starving out the urban poor, who besides being Maxine Waters voters are more likely to claim public services as a right of citizenship, and are anyway taking up valuable real estate that could be more profitably occupied by condos for stockbrokers.

I keep saying this but I'll say it again: we're gonna end up like Paris, with alabaster cities gleaming at the center, with all the poverty and problems shoved awkwardly into inner-ring suburbs. Which will be lovely if you're a tourist but not so lovely if your trailer park, your day care, your food bank, and your job are at different ends of hourlong bus rides.

9/7/04 11:09 a.m. (Link here.)

Guess what: you can challenge a Section 215 demand for your personal information [Clarification: that's Sec. 215 of the Patriot Act] -- most notoriously including your library borrowing and bookstore purchase habits -- but you have to challenge it, apparently, by telepathy, as you're not allowed to attend the hearing. Unless of course you happen to be a G-man investigating yourself. As the sender of the foregoing item commented, "Disingenuous is too nice a word for this."

9/7/04 10:07 a.m. (Link here.)

Usenet friend Henry in Finland writes that having reached "the age of reason," I am simply being foolish to accept "wrong place at wrong time" stories told by detainees during the New York demonstrations. [CORRECTION: 9/10/04 -- Turns out I completely misunderstood him. See explanation above.] I dunno, maybe so in individual cases. Yes, arrested people do sometimes lie, it's true. But I can at least say that the 1992 "Mr. Payless" story I've told below seemed genuine -- or, at least, the man's shame and confusion seemed genuine in the statement he submitted to the class action attorneys. And he's certainly not the only case of a person caught in a sudden official "crackdown" despite law-abiding conduct. Yes, most people arrested in demonstration roundups do tend to be present with some idea of participating in (or watching) a demonstration -- but does that make them criminals? Does that make it fair to say, "Well, then, they must have done something wrong? I certainly hope not. The First Amendment was still more or less in effect last time I checked. (The Fourth being of course another question entirely.)

There's a pattern when people talk about police stops and arrests, by the way, that reminds me of the way some folks discuss illness: when they hear about someone becoming seriously ill, their response is to explain how the sick person did something to cause the illness -- i.e. how it couldn't happen to themselves. "He ate those greasy burgers all the time," "she didn't wash her hands enough," "probably bought food from a street stall," "doesn't exercise," "what do you expect, he grew up with poor nutrition," etc. It's the same with news of arrests: people take comfort in the notion that an arrested person "must have done something," because it's a help in thinking that they themselves couldn't ever be falsely accused. At bottom we're all Erewhonians.

9/6/04 9:46 p.m. (Link here.)

We're just back from a road trip -- some previous entries here were written away from home -- so the freshest news I've got is about America as seen from Highway Five. I-5 is the main long-haul artery of the West Coast. I can vouch for about 600 miles of it, from Northern California up through central Washington State.

The rundown:

- More Kerry than Bush stickers.

- Lots of fat people. Including a party of four who of necessity occupied a booth "Reserved For Five Or More Persons."

- A recently irrigated orchard in Northern California, with water standing in pools around trees, and a sign facing the highway: "No Water Export To [I forget which] County." As J. grumped, "They're exporting water into the sky."

- A mid-sized town in southern Oregon where nearly everything closed on Sundays.

- Since we last did the trip two years ago, RV owners seem to have upgraded. Even last year it seemed like the fanciest RVs (UK readers: that's "caravans" to you) were mainly the integral-cab type, made of glorified aluminum-plated cardboard on top of a light truck chassis.

[Update 9/7: Alan Allport writes, "US readers: that's 'motor home', or sometimes 'camper van', to you. Caravans are unpowered and have to be towed." Oops.]

- Lots of very new-looking cars on Highway Five, but cars looking older as soon as we took I-80 into the San Francisco suburbs. Very possibly the reason is that people with old cars won't necessarily trust them for long-haul driving trips, nor will they necessarily have time to take driving vacations.

No, you're not gonna convince me that everyone outside San Francisco has a new-looking car. Really, I think it's just that most people who can get the time off to take long driving vacations also have new-looking cars.

A few conclusions among many: the rich are getting richer, but per those Kerry stickers, even folks on the lucky side of the present "jobless recovery" are getting fed up with the present administration.

9/2/04 10:28 p.m. (Link here.)

"...They cordoned off the whole street and just arrested all of us...."

Yep, what'd I tellya. The first "Mr. Payless" tales (see previous post) are emerging from New York. The above link per TalkLeft, which also, fortunately, reports that a judge ordered the city to release 470 protesters this afternoon on pain of a $1,000 fine per person. Not clear how many are still detained. I keep thinking, "coulda been worse," but then I wasn't locked up in a stinking warehouse for two days.

9/2/04 12:17 p.m. (Link here.)

Sorry, not much blogginess out of me today, but here's an interesting angle from Mother Jones on a couple of Log Cabin Republicans who are in many ways old-fashioned Republican conservatives trying to take their party back from the radicals. It makes sense: treating the personal as political is an irreducibly activist stance, and that includes the bad kind of activism -- the hard-right kind that actually calls for hating people because of who they are. Real conservatives think the personal is nobody else's business.

....Quick protest comment, however, based on reading public sites: it sounds like the protest detention situation is worse than it had looked; NLG folks are quoted on Indymedia saying some demonstrators have been detained 40-48 hours in violation of a supposed 24-hour detention requirement. Those tales of dehydration and other bad conditions at the Pier 57 detention area sound worse now given the length of time some of the arrestees have now been held.

In thinking about this, btw, it's always a mistake to presume that everyone who gets arrested in a mass roundup was somehow "asking for it." The universal experience with mass arrests is that folks who had genuine criminality on their minds will also have been crafty enough to avoid the dragnet. Yes, some of those arrested will have been courting arrest, but others will have been simply in the wrong place. People who are inexperienced with protest situations, and whose own consciences are clear, tend to be too innocent to notice when it is time to get the hell out of a place.

In this I'm thinking especially of a story from the Collins v. Jordan case in the early '90s, in which I played a minor part that mainly involved summarizing and evaluating evidence. The case was a civil rights lawsuit over one of the gratuitous roundups that followed San Francisco's echo of the 1992 Rodney King riots. On May 1, 1992, the manager of the Payless shoe store on Mission Street in San Francisco was locking up his store when the police threw skirmish lines across both ends of his block and decided not to let anyone out. This encirclement was a panic tactic applied in response to some genuine rioting and looting that really had been perpetrated the night before -- but in other parts of the city, by people who mainly moved too fast and too cleverly to get caught. The public safety during those few days genuinely did have to be safeguarded, but unfortunately, the officers in charge of protecting us all didn't work to track down the looters. Instead they decided it would somehow help to preempt a protest march before it even started, and in the process they arrested poor Mr. Payless.

Now I'm wondering, when the dust settles in New York, how many fresh "Mr. Payless" injustices will we be hearing about? Thing is, I know that arrests do sometimes have to be made, but I think they should always be made individually, based on individual conduct and not ascribed collective responsibility, as a matter of both prudence and principle. My personal guess is that it's impossible to arrest more than about two dozen people at a time without being unfair to someone.

9/1/04 1:22 p.m. (Link here.)

Good article here from a computer industry trade mag on privacy rights vs. HUD's attempts to impose a registration system on homeless Americans.

9/1/04 12:01 p.m. (Link here.)

Well, I'm triangulating alternative and mainstream published news reports from New York and it sounds like things could be worse. Sounds like there's plenty of arbitrary and arrest-happy behavior by city police, but while it's fairly dreadful to see many hundreds of people tarred with arrest records for life for the "crime" of being concerned citizens -- well, it could be worse. In Philadelphia at the last Republican Convention there were reports of violent retaliatory mistreatment by the jailers inside the jail. I haven't seen reports of anything like that yet. That's a very good sign, as mistreatment in detention can sometimes be worse, and less justifiable, than anything that happens in public during actual demonstrations. The United for Peace and Justice website yesterday had a report up on "appalling conditions" of detention at a warehouse on a pier (for some reason I can't find the report again today) but the appallingness appeared to consist of denials of food, water, rest, and adequate sanitation for a matter of hours rather than days. As things go, that's not so bad, though it isn't what you'd call good either.

Stay cool, everybody, it's almost over.

Return to main page