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. "#99," to the end of the URL above.

"...the world is more peaceful and more free under my leadership..."

Yes, GW Bush said that.

Where? Washington.

When? on Wednesday. 

Hm. Gee, that's too bad.

Meanwhile Joan Didion delves into the fundamentalist backing (and filling) of the current administration.

10/30/03 8:54 a.m.  (Link here.)

This morning circa 7:45 a.m. the telephone rang here with a recorded call. An anonymous female voice announcing itself as "Sally Smith from the Urban Issues Project" said Supervisor Matt Gonzalez had voted himself a 200% raise (at least, I'm nearly sure the voice said "voted") while asking other city workers to cut their pay. It gave what I presume was Gonazlez' City Hall phone number -- with a "554" prefix -- and suggested we call him and tell him to give it back. The signoff said the call had been paid for by the "California Urban Issues Project."

Like any decent citizen I called Matt's campaign and put a description of same on his answering machine. My candidate is Ammiano but I'll back anyone running to the left of Newsom, and anyway hit-piece automatic dialing is disgusting.

Anyone with sense will know this must come from the right (oh, excuse me, the "center"), because no real activist organization would use automatic dialing.

There is no "California Urban Issues Project" on Google.

As for substance, it's true that the whole Board of Supervisors had its pay increased this past summer from $37,585 to $112,320 -- but it was by a Civil Service Commission decision, not by direct vote. Yes, Matt Gonzalez supported the raise. Gavin Newsom, who as a millionaire could afford the gesture, announced he wouldn't accept more pay. (Why do I now have the feeling he was setting up and salting away an advantage so he could pull it out at the right moment?)

At the time, of course, Willie Brown agreed the Supervisors shouldn't approach his own $167,000 salary. (Fancy what secure, well-fed, well-upholstered county supervisors could do if they were allowed to have their own money! Why, they might fly to conferences! Attend fundraisers! Who knows what trouble they might cause!)

Listen: $112,320 may sound like a lot of money in normal towns, but in San Francisco the median family income is $91,500. See page 18 here. (Warning: large PDF file.)  Yes, a $112,320 salary also sounds like a lot of money to me, let alone how it must sound to people living in buses and subsidized housing and doorways around here. But it's only a little bit above the San Francisco median. 

Let's keep our eyes on the ball: at the issues level, the question is how that compares to Mr. Newsom's profits and dividends. At the political morality level, the question is who paid for this call and how they face themselves in the mirror.

10/29/03 9:00 a.m.  (Link here.)

From the final paragraph of an SF Chron column on mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom and housing:
 

When asked about his own housing experience, Newsom avoids
questions about what sort of neighborhoods and houses he has
lived in and instead paints a picture of himself that resembles
the average, struggling San Franciscan. "Most people don't
realize I was raised by my mom, who was a renter just about all
of her life," he writes. "She was the victim of an unscrupulous
eviction while she was undergoing chemotherapy. My father was
also a renter for much of his life. These experiences have had a
strong impact on me." Even his first home, he says, was bought
as "a joint purchase with both of my parents and my sister. We
pulled the money together." 

With just days until the election, [Angela] Alioto's campaign sent out a
 mass mailing this week aimed at portraying the "Care Not
Cash'' crusader as an insensitive landlord who evicts seniors. 

The bullet in the attack is a decade-old legal letter from
Newsom giving 30 days' notice to a 65-year-old tenant and her
daughter who had been living for 17 years in a duplex that
Newsom -- along with his sister, father and mother -- had
acquired through a tenants-in-common action. 

The letter -- which was drafted by the family attorney -- said
Newsom planned to move into his new apartment.

The letter also contained a P.S. telling the tenant that failure to
"surrender possession" of the flat would result in legal action
-- and that the woman would be on the hook for lawyers' costs. 

In other words, behind the smiling face, Newsom was being a
heartless landlord -- which is about the worst thing you can
say about a San Francisco politician. 

In an interview Tuesday, Newsom called the revelations "old
news.''...
 

10/27/03 9:25 p.m.  (Linkhere.)

In case anyone still thinks panhandling causes homelessness or social services cause poverty, the SF Bay Guardian did a special issue this past week (October 22-28) with some true-ringing stories about poverty and San Francisco, including a nice essay by Ben Bagdikian. 

10/27/03 6:38 p.m.  (Link here.)

I could wish Gavin Newsom hadn't broadened his Tudor enthusiasms. He was all right running wine shops and restaurants on the theme of Shakespeare's "Plump Jack," but now he's trying to bring back the Elizabethan Poor Laws. No, it's worse: Prop. M, on next Tuesday's San Francisco ballot, sounds more like Edward III's Statute of Laborers (see page 8 of this article) or the ghastly statutes of Henry VIII (page 12), which authorized begging only by "the aged poor and the impotent" and even then only by previous license, on pain of flogging and worse.

As I've previously discussed, he insists on insisting that his latest proposed anti-begging law is for the benefit of the poor themselves. Even Henry VIII, for all his odiousness, didn't tell a lie like that. I have here a flyer that arrived in today's mail. It thusly quotes an emergency room doctor:

"Every day we treat patients in our emergency room who are sick from drugs and alcohol abuse. Many of these people are homeless and maintain these dangerous habits by panhandling."

And because Prop. M makes addiction treatment one possible sentence for the "crime" of asking for money, the flyer claims, "Proposition M takes aggressive panhandlers off the street and places them in substance abuse treatment programs."

Sure. It takes people off the street long enough to get them into the courtroom. Then it kicks them out onto the street again, with a criminal record and possibly an appointment to report to counseling next Monday. With no suggestions for how they're going to eat or where they're going to sleep meanwhile.

It says, "Proposition M improves public safety near ATMs and in parking garages, where people feel most vulnerable." Love the implication: not only are people who ask for money "dangerous," they're not even "people." No, "people" are people with money. Those creatures walking around without money are some kind of miscellaneous primates.

This stuff would all be much more persuasive if Mr. Newsom's repetitive attacks against the poor weren't so obviously, patently paid for by big money. S'morning's Chron says Prop. M has raised SIXTY TIMES AS MUCH MONEY as the "No on M" committee. All of $520,000 "raised and spent" thus far to stop wretched people from asking for a dollar at a time. That, folks, took an awful lot of high-level lotsa-bux-a-plate aggressive panhandling. There oughta be a law.

Furthermore, the Prop. M campaign is being run by hired professionals. This godawful pamphlet describes itself as "Paid for by the Committee to Stop Aggressive Panhandling, Yes on M, a Coalition of Merchants, Doctors, Hospitals, Restaurants, Police and Firefighters, and the Committee on JOBS." (The "Committee on JOBS" is a local business organization that has never liked homeless people.) However, this "coalition" isn't exactly advertising who's running the campaign or where you can go to volunteer.

 - The flyer provides a website address but no phone number to call for information.

- Today local directory assistance had no telephone number for the "Committee to Stop Aggressive Panhandling."

- The website doesn't even invite people to volunteer, only to give money. (Panhandling again!)

- The street address on the flyer and website, "731 Sansome Street, 5th Floor," in San Francisco, seems to belong to some kind of political consultant: A membership list for the "California Political Attorneys' Association" connects this address with an undeveloped website, "www.Campaignlawyers.com," with the firm of Sutton & Partners PC, and with one Kevin Heneghan, Esq., a lawyer two years in California practice, officially listed by the State Bar as an attorney with the Sutton firm, office phone number (415) 732-7700. 

- The WHOIS lookup for the "www.YesonM.com" site goes to a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. The firm itself does list a local San Francisco number, (415) 647-6340, but my Internet searches don't find anything else about the number.

(Some things neither side mentions enough: many homeless people are not visibly homeless; most homeless people do not panhandle; many panhandlers are not homeless.)

For comparison, the WHOIS for the bare-bones No On M site goes to a local woman identified on another site as an ACLU intern. The site lists a local phone number, (415) 724-8704, and its materials include an invitation for people to join its speakers' bureau at a meeting earlier this fall at the offices of the local Coalition on Homelessness. Much more of a local effort.

About that Sansome Street fifth-floor office: it was also the address of "Garrett Greuner for Governor." In the recent gubernatorial election, Mr. Greuner placed 28th, receiving 2522 votes statewide. May this firm's other client have similar success.
 

10/26/03 11:33 p.m.  (Linkhere.)

Phenomenal: the undocumented cleaners working for as little as $2 a day at Wal-Mart (the link trail leads here) were from 18 different countries including Uzbekistan and Mongolia. The detail that bugs me most is that the cleaners were arrested at the end of their shifts. So Wal-Mart and its middleman contratistas got at least one free shift from each worker out of the deal, and guess which folks, on top of being in immigration detention, won't be paid even their pittance this week? Lucky them.

10/25/03 12:28 a.m.  (Link here.)

OMB Watch and colleagues are inviting submissions for a 2003 list of the 10 Most Wanted Government Documents. There must be some obscure report you've hankered after. Let 'em know what it is.

One modest nomination, not really "top 10" material: the March 2002 report by the Department of the Interior's Office of Inspector General on the "Lynxgate" scandal. Don't know if anyone remembers this little caper, but a couple of scientists who were looking for signs of rare wild lynx near the Canadian border secretly submitted some hairs from a captive lynx to the study's testing lab. The scientists reportedly say they did it to test the lab's accuracy. All kinds of nastier motives have been imputed to them, especially by the House Western Caucus. Here's a relatively neutral account of the story from GAO.

News reports came out in March 2002 (a Seattle Times version of AP's story is still available with free registration) saying DOI's Office of Inspector General had issued a report that castigated the scientists' "bad judgment" but found they had no criminal intent -- an important point given the angry fulminations the Western Caucus folks were handing out at the time. This OIG report might make interesting reading, especially for folks studying the politicization of environmental science. But it never appeared online, and it's not clear from the AP story if journalists were given the whole report or only a copy of an official letter describing it. The report is summarized in the DOI OIG's semiannual report that covers March '02 -- see page 17 -- but this summary is the only substantive result for a search on the word "lynx" at the OIG reports site, and the lynx report does not appear in either of the two indices to individual topical reports that are linked from that site. On the main DOI site, a search on the word "lynx" does find a more detailed summary of the report given as part of congressional testimony. But still no way of obtaining the full report.

Of course it's possible that there's nothing mysterious going on here. OIG may simply have decided not to distribute the document widely because it's a very big document that must cost a lot to print, copy or digitize: the AP story says it's three inches thick. But it's a little annoying that the public never got to see a major official report at the center of what was briefly a major controversy.

10/23/03 10:45 p.m.  (Link here.)

About this E-Government stuff:

The IRS makes looking up regulations really awkward for the general public and a good bit more convenient for journalists (including, as of recently, me), but not truly convenient for anyone who doesn't subscribe to a private data service. It turns out that if you work for a legitimate news organization (I freelance for one), you can ask the press office to put you on the list for a daily feed of regulatory information and press releases. I don't know what criteria they use for letting you on the list, but I guess it helps to show a serious, nerdy, and legitimately journalistic interest in tax regulations. The reporters' feed saves tax journalists from having to check for new developments on the "Advance Notice" site, which is available for public use in its full user-friendly glory here. Even the journalists' feed doesn't include the publicly disclosed but unciteable "Written Determinations." For those, you have to struggle with the awful downloading interface that you get by clicking "Written Determinations" here. (Warning: do *not* click on the "Written Determinations" link in this page unless you have really good browsing software or half an hour to waste.) 

(Further warning: persons not interested in tax law arcana should skip over the next paragraph.)

A handy tip: My own approach to reading the Written Determinations with a lousy old browser is to form the URL's myself. There's a weekly cumulative index every Friday whose pattern is given by last week's link: <http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-wd/0342_idx.pdf>. The number "42" in this URL denotes the 42nd week in the calendar year, so this coming Friday, in Week 43, the most recent index will appear at a now-nonexistent address, <http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-wd/0343_idx.pdf>. And so on. Every Friday there's a new crop of Private Letter Rulings, Technical Advice Memoranda and similar aggravata. These can be read by substituting the figures "001," "002," "003," (and so on ad glazium oculum) for the characters "_idx" in the above link. Hence, for example, Private Letter Ruling #200342001, issued last Friday, October 17, can be found at <http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-wd/0342001.pdf>. Mercifully, most people will not have to weary themselves by reading it.

My point in typing up this minutia here (and yep, yeah, I know my Latin is lousy) is to show what a hassle it is to obtain free public information on lower-level regulations from a federal agency that actually does better than average at presenting it. While I do realize the IRS is putting itself out considerably to provide as much free online material as it does, I gather it is far more convenient to subscribe to any of several fine private services that will, for a fee, provide you with the same public information but in clearly date-identified, rationally indexed and searchable form.

It occurs to me that if, in this whole move towards "E-Government," agencies really want to help ordinary people have as much access to the workings of government as "elite" journalists, lawyers, lobbyists, et al., one of the first things they may want to consider is bringing the online presentation of their own internal sub-regulations up to the standard of, for example, the Code of Federal Regulations at the comparatively lovely GPO site. Given the amount of time I've spent figuring out the IRS site, I'll happily forgive the CFR site its tendency to crash. 

I don't know whether to see progress in this new GAO study of "E-government" rulemaking efforts by federal agencies, which has already pissed off EPA by comparing its site unfavorably with the Fed-wide Regulations.gov notice-and-comment site. EPA apparently says GAO should have given its program a bigger chance to get started before giving it a bad review.

The above links, btw, are worth saving -- especially Regulations.gov, which allows you to check what proposed rules are open for comment at your favorite federal agency & to find out how & where to send comments on whether they should take effect. If you are reading this in the United States, you, too, are a member of the fine U.S. public and entitled to send comments to federal agencies telling them (politely) what you think of their proposed rules. You don't have to be a lobbyist. Really, truly, you don't. 

10/22/03 1:29 p.m.  (Link here.)

The public housing "community service" requirement is taking effect in Albany, New York, to mostly confused or incredulous responses.

Apparently it's reprehensible laziness to insist on being a full-time mother, but watching someone else's kids is "an opportunity to give back to your community." Which is a little like the old Soviet notion that cultivating one's own farm was antisocial but performing farm work as a state employee was useful and praiseworthy. 

Since motherhood is already unpaid community service, I hope they'll at least be able to give mothers credit for "day care" work when their kids have friends visit for the afternoon.

But why should they even have to do that? Should Mom have to punch a clock whenever Bobby from across the street comes over to play? Is this what the Republicans mean when they say they want the government out of citizens' private lives?

[UPDATE 10/24: Jerry Doolittle notes fairly that this kind of requirement follows the pattern of "the welfare 'reform' bill of that earlier compassionate conservative, Bill Clinton." You can read the HUD official document reinstating the requirement here. And, yes, indeed, it says the original "community service and self-sufficiency requirement" came from Sec. 512 of the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998. Note, though, that "welfare reform" isn't exclusively Bill Clinton's fault. I seem to remember the Gingrich crew having something to do with it.]

10/22/03 11:01 a.m.  (Link here.)

The anti-Prop. H campaign in San Francisco turns out to be actually run by Gavin Newsom's campaign manager. All three DA candidates and four of the mayoral candidates support Prop. H. Of the major mayoral candidates, only Newsom and former police chief Tony Ribera are against H. Strange politics when the frontrunner for mayor opposes a clean-government measure that all the DA candidates support. Not just liberal Terence Hallinan. Also Harris and Fazio.

Interesting synergy wrinkle between Newsom and the anti-H campaign: they're both basically campaigning against the Board of Supervisors in general -- a move that echoes our state and federal themes of contempt for legislatures and affection for central executives.

The anti-H campaign message claims the Board of Supervisors would be given too much direct control over the police. A strange claim given that the agency governing the police department would continue to be the Police Commission, and the Supervisors would only acquire the power to apppoint a minority of the Commission's members and to ratify all appointments or removals. Currently the mayor has those powers. Apparently the SFPOA is afraid of even very indirect control by members of the Board of Supervisors. Maybe it's that Supervisors are specifically accountable to their districts, so that, after a certain point, they can't afford to ignore complaints from constituents about police misconduct. (It's a question for another day whether Supervisor Maxwell will ever respond to the complaints of homeless people, some of whom are my clients, who have been personally abused and had their vehicles towed unfairly in the Bayview part of her district. But anyway....)

The anti-H campaign itself looks like a losing effort unless it wins through sheer weight of repetition. A police scandal was a major political event in San Francisco politics this year, and it was hardly the only publicized recent problem. Voters should understand it's time to clean house.

But the anti-H campaign does, meanwhile, reinforce Newsom's anti-Supervisors position, and it creates an additional way to criticize the measure's Board of Supervisors sponsor, Tom Ammiano. (Ammiano's position as the measure's proponent is underplayed in yesterday's SF Chron article, which gives nearly all the credit to the ACLU.)

Newsom, although a county supervisor himself, has a particular interest in campaigning against the whole idea of having a Board of Supervisors at all. He was unable to get a majority of Supervisors' votes for his Care Not Cash program, although it did get a majority popular vote as a ballot initiative last year. The reason for this difference is a fine example of why we need legislatures: a majority of voters liked the general idea of Care Not Cash, but the Supervisors opposed it because it was badly written and unfair. The more Newsom denigrates the Supervisors as an institution, the less it will seem to matter that he failed to get their support on the proposal to which he had most publicly linked his personal image.

California initiative-backed candidacies are a weird political subject. It can be hard to tell who's exploiting whom. My own guess here: Prop. H passes but Newsom gets the benefit of the "anti" campaign -- and consequently, if he wins, he enters office with a political debt to the cops' union.

10/20/03 8:20 p.m.  (Link here.)

Hey, all.

I may not have received some emails this past weekend due to a mailbox choked with spam. If anyone was unable to write to me on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, please try again.

Two reports from points north of San Francisco:

-- Our public employees need a grammar refresher, though it's more urgent to reopen the campgrounds  that have been closed due to state budget cuts. (OK, I only know of one that's definitely closed, but it seems likely there are others.) Seen on an interpretive sign at a state park:

Pacific Harbor Seal (Phoca vitulina)

Harbor seals are very curious creatures. While taking a picture of a fish in Gerstle Cove this seal pooped [sic] up into Chuck Honek (local photographer) lens..."

-- On a more serious note, the Anderson Valley Advertiser has finally gone all the way off the deep end. The October 15 issue features rants against environmentalists, "liberals," and  "Zionists," Alexander Cockburn taking sideswipes at Israel while cheering for Schwarzenegger -- "...who may or may not be soft on Adolf Hitler. What does that mean at this distance?..." (plus worse), and to top it all off, a column by none other than Rush Limbaugh trying of all things to fan resentment against the families of September 11 victims on the grounds that said victims might end up better compensated than the families of soldiers fallen in battle -- which sounds an awful lot like an invitation to country people to resent New Yorkers. I don't know why some people still see this Bruce Anderson fellow as either a quirky heart-o-gold crank or a lefty. If he's a lefty I'm a manual trolley hoist. He's a know-nothing bigoted populist in the Coughlin tradition. Another thing: it's long past time for The Nation to fire Cockburn.  Only some of the nasty column I've mentioned appears on Cockburn's "Counterpunch" site (I can't get into the article's direct link at the moment, so if it's no longer there, try the Google cache here) and a further-reduced version of the same text appears in the October 27 Nation -- but the Nation edition does have most of the "Hitler" stuff. Maybe Cockburn misses his old neighborly relations with Hitchens and he's angling for a job with the Daily Mirror. Or maybe that's unfair to the Daily Mirror. What I do know is, there's a big difference between literal criticism of actual current Israeli government policy and the full-spectrum atavistic howling in the AVA. I'll provide a link to the paper -- it's here -- but be warned that the selections for Internet publication favor the presentable side of the content.

10/16/03 12:35 a.m.  (Link here.)

I have to put my hiatus on hiatus for a jaw-dropper in s'morning's SF Chron: 

The San Francisco Police Department, responding to criticism that it has a dismal record of solving violent crime, is changing its practice of picking investigators for the homicide detail based solely on how long they have been on a waiting list, with no regard to merit....

No, the anti-Prop. H ad from the SF Police Officers' Association is not appearing at the top of sfgate.com pages today.

OK, back to my time off now.

10/14/03 10:55 a.m.  (Link here.)

"Inmates at Pleasant Valley State Prison faced lockdown conditions Monday after a riot that left one prisoner dead, authorities said...."

When they named that prison they must have known someone would write this news lead someday. Didn't they? 

There's a sign for Pleasant Valley State Prison on I-5, and it always makes me think about Dylan's "Hard Rain" line: "...Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison..."

Do people who name prisons have a sense of irony? Are we better served if they do or if they don't?

10/13/03 8:33 p.m.  (Link here.)

Found a draft version for some more of the material I deleted by mistake this weekend. (Please pardon some repetition):

A San Francisco psychologist in [Friday's] Chron tells why it's emotionally unhealthy and possibly dangerous to project one's own hopes onto a political figure with an "empty" celebrity image.

Meanwhile, Mr. S. sets about pursing his own goals -- whatever those are -- and warning the Legislature that he will "go directly to the people" over their heads if they get too independent. (Memo to Mr. S.: "the people" elected their legislators. The legislators all got majority votes. You didn't.)

Weirdest name on the transition team list: Willie Brown. Especially after this, where does the Chron get off calling him a "liberal"?

Scariest name: Viet Dinh, Georgetown law professor and former Justice Department attorney, and co-author of the Patriot Act.

---

Also on the Chron site (I got it [late Friday, I think this was] searching www.sfgate.com for the word "transition"): "Need help figuring out the San Francisco ballot? Come to SPUR for San Francisco's most respected impartial ballot analysis."  So, OK, "respected" is in the eye of the beholder, I realize, but "impartial"? Hoo, yeah, impartial, right, you might as well believe Fox is "fair and balanced," take your criminal defense advice from your arresting officer, and put a downpayment on the Brooklyn Bridge. SPUR is a downtown business-driven group that among other things hates homeless people because they're bad for tourism. Gotta love "impartial" comments like this one: "Prop. H continues the ongoing backlash against the current Mayor..." yep, real impartial. As impartial as this one (see page 7 of the PDF) is logical:
 

San Francisco's lack of enforcement and prosecution of 'quality of life laws breeds contempt for the law and frustration amongst its citizens, law enforcement agencies and even amongst homeless people. This lack of enforcement must be corrected immediately. Civil behavior can be required without making homelessness 'illegal.' Standards of behavior can be enforced equally for all citizens, without singling out poor people. And violators can be directed into support services rather than the prison system.

So should the Chron be publishing dishonest advertisements that offer political campaigning masked as an "impartial" public service?

UPDATE: Now the ad in the same place is an anti-Prop. H item sponsored by the San Francisco Police Officers' Association, who have unaccountably gotten Dianne Feinstein to back their claim that the sky would fall if we gave the Board of Supervisors some limited control over Police Commission appointments, and if the Office of Citizen Complaints got the kind of authority that most people likely think it has already. Hmmm. Why would the Police Officers' Association be against strengthening the investigation and disciplinary process for bad cops, when all three top DA candidates are in favor of these reforms? What do SFPOA members have to hide?

And how come so many Chron website banner ads are promoting right-leaning causes lately?

San Francisco a liberal "island"? Ha. Only by comparison.

10/13/03 7:03 p.m.  (Link here.)

Today I found myself explaining the meaning of the term "union label" to a full-grown and otherwise well-informed salesman at REI. I feel old. 

10/13/03 1:02 p.m.  (Link here.)

What I said about union labels on flag decals being the main difference between Republicans and Democrats: I wasn't wholly serious to begin with, but anyway I take it back. Holy Leviticus, Batman, these Texas Republicans are crazy. And arrogant -- "directing" public officials to do this and that as though the party leadership had more authority than the government. Who do these people think they are?

10/13/03 12:08 p.m.  (Link here.)

One of the Mr. S campaign staff on why they bypassed journalists who would ask tough questions and campaigned through the entertainment media: "We did it because we could."

Our governor-elect and his handlers may believe in "power and authority," but they don't believe in following established rules. They make up their own rules as they go. Most likely we're in for more of the same.

10/12/03 8:07 p.m.  (Link here.)

Troubling: the Dept. of Homeland Security is inviting private companies to help it form immigration policy, but without directly paying for their advice. This is a problem. When a company is paid to prepare a study for a public agency, it's being paid to give good advice, period. Here, the companies are being asked to propose policy changes as part of their bids. That makes it in their interest to recommend all kinds of expensive meddling in people's lives, so they themselves can get paid to do the meddling. One official comes right out and says, "We're trying to get [your ideas] for nothing." Sorry, can't be done. Funny: it used to be conservatives who habitually reminded us, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch."

10/12/03 8:07 p.m.  (Link here.)

The "Power and Authority" saga continues:

Blogger archy has a third version and source for the Schwarzenegger quote whose common theme is that "95 percent" of the population are followers who need to be told what to do. A while ago I found the phrase quoted without clear sourcing in a 1990 U.S. News profile. Then the SF Chron found a similar comment in the "Pumping Iron" outtakes; and now Frank Rich has Version Three in a New York Times comment, this time quoting from Mr. S's autobiography. 

The Frank Rich article is worth reading on the dangers of Disneyfying politics, from "The West Wing" to the Arnold campaign. I've often thought of adopting the slogan, "My President Is Jedediah Bartlett," but Mr. Rich offers good reasons not to place faith in any fictional character.

10/12/03 12:50 p.m.  (Link here.)

Nother attempt at blog restoration: In the lost stuff I had an item about the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sending me a touch for money wrapped in a push-poll "questionnaire," also including a Free Gift flag decal. The questions carefully danced around what should be the Democrats' big issues: an inadvisable and poorly managed war, and growing economic injustice. All of which led to the almost-but-not-quite-fair thought that the difference between our two major parties is getting to be that only one puts union labels on its flag decals. Thing is, a flag decal won't get the Democrats into Heaven, or the White House. They've got to stop letting themselves be baited and start showcasing the right-wing ideologues' willful ignorance about the practical details of governing. 

Yeah, and by the way, when I was digging up the above link to John Prine's eerily appropriate old song, Google threw me an advertising link for "Five stick-on flags for five bucks. Free Army Dog Tag with orders." Plus ca etcetera.

10/12/03 2:13 a.m.  (Link here.) 

In a further attempt to reconstruct my blog items from yesterday and the latter part of Friday, here's an alt.books.george-orwell post in a conversation with Gene Zitver, who contributes regularly over at HurryUpHarry. It's along lines similar to those of a post I lost, and preserves the link to an interesting article by a psychologist about voters in search of reassurance who projected their hopes onto Schwarzenegger and voted for what they thought they saw.

10/12/03 1:45 a.m.  (Link here.) 

Yesterday morning's item, which I'm now reconstructing due to my dumb posting mistake, suggested that, should Rush Limbaugh happen to be prosecuted and convicted on drug charges, it would be instructive for him to end up in federal prison alongside Tommy Chong. I further suggested that such things have happened before, considering that the screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr. found himself in federal prison for refusing to answer HUAC's questions alongside J. Parnell Thomas, former chairman of that same committee.

10/12/03 12:18 a.m.  (Link here.)

Sorry, folks, I made a dumb FTP'ing mistake that wiped out everything I posted from Friday afternoon through today.

Can't reconstruct it all now, but the most important item was the troubling news that the Schwarzenegger transition team includes Viet Dinh, Georgetown law professor, former Justice Department official, and co-author of the Patriot Act.
 

10/10/03 12:10 a.m. (Link here.)

Exceptionally fatuous, or at least I hope so: the SF Chronicle's suggestion in 10/9 morning editions that California Senate President John Burton would be friends with Mr. S. because both have connections in the film business:
 

Schwarzenegger may have an in with Burton, who is widely viewed as the most powerful person in the Legislature. 

The Senate leader's best friend is actor Warren Beatty, he's a huge movie buff, and he and Schwarzenegger can most likely bond over their love of all things Hollywood. In a press conference with reporters, Burton mentioned that both he and Schwarzenegger counted actress Jamie Lee Curtis as a friend. 

Memo to SF journalists: Hollywood has been a politically divergent place for a long time. 

A second Chronicle story gets it a little closer to right:

"I believe I will have a very good personal relationship with the governor-elect," Burton told reporters. "How we do politically is a very different thing. Tip O'Neill and Ronnie Reagan had wonderful personal relationships and they fought over policy, as we should. Hopefully, we will find enough common ground to get the state out of this mess." 

Mr. S. is about to discover that the governor of a state can't govern unilaterally. Funny little thing called democracy crops up in the darnedest places - even in California state government. 

10/9/03 2:31 p.m. (Link here.)

A half-serious proposal: the way the bar associations sponsor "Law Day," maybe our elected officials and local political party committees could hold an educational event explaining the need for legislatures. It's beginning to seem, at least in California, like people who get their news from television don't understand what legislative branches of government are for, or what would go wrong if we didn't have them, or why the inefficiency of representative democracy is often not a bad but a good thing, considering most of the alternatives. 

People -- I don't just mean kids -- need to relearn why a healthy country must have legislators with power and dignity. Not dictatorial power to the extent once held by Wilbur Mills or Joe McCarthy, but power enough to direct and restrain the executive in a system marked by healthy separation of powers. 

Dunno -- "Legislature Day" doesn't sound too lively. Maybe "Democracy Day." Truly, it doesn't seem like all that many people pay attention to what a democracy is or what it is for or what it eats or how it responds to the degradation of its habitat.

There must be public money for a project like this somewhere. The Blue Angels are blustering overhead today, at a cost of I don't know how many dollars per second, because it's Fleet Week in San Francisco, and they're not teaching anyone a thing about the separation of powers.

10/9/03 12:05 p.m. (Link here.)

Your tax dollars at work: a referendum among "first handlers and importers" on mango promotion.

10/8/03 3:16 p.m. (Link here.)

Timely: Jean Elshtain on the importance of civic institutions in civil society. There's an especially good page here, whence you can get to the rest of the essay & from there to related writings in the same collection c/o Brookings.

10/8/03 2:52 p.m. (Link here.)

[Because I've been referring to the apparent governor-elect as "Mr. S":]

A word of explanation: "Mr. S" is the name of a leather-and-chains boutique in our neighborhood. I think it's an appropriate label for a political figure who attracts support through a self-centered pageantry of superiority. Over here on Folsom Street, we know kink when we see it, and we know the importance of distinguishing between entertainment, which provides an escape valve for the outrageous, and politics, which has consequences for actual human beings. California in general has perennial bouts of trouble with this distinction.

10/8/03 11:08 a.m. (Link here.)

Laurel Wellman lets drop an odd, or maybe not-so-odd, factette here: lots of Schwarzenegger supporters at a rally were fat and unfashionably dressed. 

If one had to make another generalization about the crowd -- and it was tempting -- one would have to say these were people who wear their pants high. While the rest of the population is still flirting with pubic-bone-baring lowriders, most members of this crowd had their waistbands hiked somewhere around their floating ribs. Of course, this could have had something to do with the average build of the attendees; after a while the wonder became not so much that Wal-Mart apparently manufactures an impressive selection of garments printed with various Stars and Stripes patterns, but that it manufactures them in such enormous sizes. 

...Arnold once gave an extended interview in which he observed, 'We all have great inner power. The power is self-faith.' But he has also dismissed those whose self-faith founders, saying: 'I look down on people who are waiting, who are helpless.' In 1990, he still sometimes looks down on the weak, though his impatience is less obvious. When a plump photographer started snapping pictures at a recent photo session in the Missouri governor's mansion, Arnold startled onlookers by making fun of the man, announcing that he 'has at least 20 percent body fat' and chiding the governor for hiring a 'couch potato.'

10/7/03 10:07 p.m. (Link here.)

Well, at least we beat Prop. 54.

As Cruz Bustamante implied in his victory/concession speech, that saves some of Californians' honor. People here aren't bad or stupid -- just frustrated, star-struck, and politically naive enough to accept clever speechwriters' explanations of why it is they feel frustrated.

Didn't like the messianic tone of McClintock's concession/endorsement speech. That bit about Californians taking action "in response to a common danger."

Yeah, they responded all right. Faced with a common danger, what did they do? They elected it.

10/7/03 3:16 p.m. (Link here.)

Ugliness Sunday at the Pleasanton rally for Mr. S:
 

Security guards confiscated items that read "Vote No on Recall" and told some anti-Schwarzenegger supporters, including a large group from the National Organization for Women, that they couldn't come in at all. 

Pleasanton City Councilwoman Jennifer Hosterman and Karen Pico, wife of Pleasanton Mayor Tom Pico, were among a group guards said initially would not be allowed to enter the Fairgrounds because of anti-Schwarzenegger paraphernalia. 

"This is public property. I have as much right to hold up my sign that says 'Vote No on Recall.' This is a public place. If they had wanted a private affair, they should have rented private property," Hosterman fumed. 

Both Hostermann and Pico eventually were allowed to enter the fairgrounds.

"This is my city, this is my back yard ... I was given special treatment because I'm a councilwoman, but all those other people weren't," Hosterman added. 

 The Pleasanton police reported no arrests Saturday. That law enforcement agency worked alongside Alameda County Fairgrounds security personnel as well as guards from Schwarzenegger's team. 
 

10/7/03 1:16 p.m. (Link here.)

Am wondering whether to see oblique commentary on current events in the front page of the SF Chron's Datebook Section, which this morning features a play re-enacting Federico Garcia Lorca's last hour of life. 

10/7/03 12:33 p.m. (Link here.)

A neighbor couple who registered to vote at a new address a few months ago got no voter information and were not on the list in our precinct. Of the two, he may not have time to deal with the problem at all. She found herself at the Registrar's office yesterday being told she had forty minutes left to get a court order. Fortunately, she's educated and the courthouse is next door to City Hall. She got the court order. I wonder how many didn't?

The Election Protection line through People for the American Way is 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

10/6/03 6:02 p.m. (Link here.)

Thanks to the nice lady who lives downstairs, there is a translation from the Tao Te Ching on the shelf next to this computer. It's the best answer I have to tomorrow's recall election and the spammers who keep trying to sell me "1/2 off V1agra." It says:

The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.

10/6/03 5:49 p.m. (Link here.)

And, heaven help us, it's the first Monday in October again. Here are Greenhouse and Egelko at the start of the day, TalkLeft on the Supremes' opening announcements, today's 83-page order list, and, should you wish to track previous action on any of these cases, links to pages of and about the federal circuit and state supreme courts.

10/6/03 4:31 p.m. (Link here.)

Bad stuff: talk at the SF public library of tagging books with radio transmitters. 

10/5/03 2:09 p.m. (Link here.)

OK, apparently she does wear pants now. 

10/5/03 1:12 p.m. (Link here.)

Two years ago in the runup to the Afghan war it was a matter of frequently expressed democratic principle that women's human rights included the right to wear practical modern clothing without fear of patriarchial restrictions. It was an axiom of democracy that men who asserted authority through restrictions on women were cowards and tyrants. So where, oh where, is the outrage at this?
 

_In a 1988 interview with Playboy Magazine, Schwarzenegger said, "I hate pants. This is
something I have inherited from my father. He despised pants, and my mother was never
allowed to wear them at home. We're talking about a different time period now, when the
man was much more the ruler of the house. But I still feel that way, and neither my mother
nor Maria (Shriver, Schwarzenegger's wife) is allowed to go out with me in pants."

10/5/03 12:40 p.m. (Link here.)

Fifteen women now accusing Mr. S of harassment and worse. Gray Davis acts like a Democrat, signs health care bill. There's hope. If things keep on like this maybe he'll even stand up to the prison guards' unions.

But, good grief, Davis had to say, "The number of victims is mounting daily." I saw that in the SF Chron version of the AP story linked here, but clicked on it again a few minutes later and found some copy editor had snipped the double-entendre. It's still in versions of the AP story here and here, though.

Davis, in a statement, said, "the number of victims is mounting daily. These are very disturbing allegations and raise serious questions about whether he can govern California."

Schwarzenegger is responding with "evasive language and partial denials," Davis said, which he said should prompt voters to ask, "are all these women and their families lying or is Mr. Schwarzenegger not telling the truth?"

10/5/03 12:03 p.m. (Link here.)

Arts & Letters Daily this weekend is featuring a Washington Post story on the hard work and suffering that people -- especially older women -- endure to keep their health insurance when they're really too ill to be working at all. Meanwhile Treasury Department expert C. Eugene Steuerle writes that health care costs per person in the United States -- i.e., costs paid by somebody, if not necessarily the patient -- have now reached $15,000 per person. His statistics are more striking than his argument, which seems to be folding back on itself to avoid placing blame for the rising costs of treatment on anyone in particular. Seems like the logical candidates would be the makers of drugs and medical equipment who inflate prices, and legislators who fail to use the government's bulk-purchasing power to get tough with the manufacturers about pricing. His basic point is well taken: that arguing about who will pay the health care costs is less effective than working to bring down the costs. But I'm afraid he may think that it would bring down the costs to have the government reduce public benefits while leaving sick people to find their own ways of paying for expensive medicines. (Or maybe this is unfair to him: it's a damn confusing article. You read it.) Sorry, we need national health, and there's no point arguing that rationing care is wrong. We do, of course, ration care in the U.S. -- it's just that where countries like Canada ration care by committee and waiting list, we ration it by ability to pay. Claiming that we don't ration care here is essentially saying that people only count as human beings to the extent they have money.

10/4/03 8:43 p.m. (Linkhere.)

I don't know if people understand that what's at stake in this California recall is the whole idea that candidates are nominated through party politics. Party politics may be aggravating stuff, but as Churchill not quite said, it's the worst system except for all the others. This is the reason Californians should vote against the recall no matter what they think of the sitting governor.

10/4/03 11:36 a.m. (Link here.)

I wrote to U.S. News a few days ago asking if writer Lynn Rosellini -- now a contributing editor -- could provide a source for the "My reaction to power and authority is that I'm all for it..." quote that she attributed to Schwarzenegger in her November 26, 1990 profile of the actor. No answer thus far.

But it looks like we finally do have a prior source for the quote. It's slightly different in this version, but recognizable. Per this morning's San Francisco Chron (just above the "Alleged Admiration of Hitler" subhead):
 

"Inside Edition," a TV news magazine, televised outtakes Friday night from the 1975 documentary "Pumping Iron." In it, the young bodybuilder talks about America's problems. 

"I think we can't live without authority," Schwarzenegger said. "There's a certain amount of people meant to be leaders, and to control, and another large amount, 95 percent, are followers. 

"We have to tell (them) what to do and how to keep in order, you know?" 

"The people are the ones that give me the positive reinforcement," Schwarzenegger said. "I mean, look at the masses that show up." 

Meanwhile (via Atrios), here's Palast on a Schwarzenegger connection with Ken Lay, recent boondoggler of California's electricity grid. 

10/3/03 8:34 p.m.. (Link here.)

Where's Jessica Mitford when we need her? Here's a press release from the University of Arkansas about what makes people pay in advance to be buried. The part I love is the euphemism for what it is they're buying: "End-Of-Life Goods."

10/3/03 7:27 p.m.. (Link here.)

"A shrewd observer remarked, one day, that fascist Italy was being run like a large newspaper and, moreover, by a great journalist: one idea per day, with sidelights and sensations, and with an adroit and insistent orientation of the reader toward certain inordinately enlarged aspects of social life -- a systematic deformation of the understanding of the reader for certain practical ends. The long and the short of it is that fascist regimes are publicity regimes."

Jean de Lignières, "Le Centenaire de La Presse," Vendredi, June 1936. 
Quoted in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, trans. Eiland & McLaughlin, Harvard:Belknap, 1999.

And see this recent feature on Italian politics, which conveys a few warnings about the U.S. too.

10/3/03 2:52 p.m.. (Link here.)

Look at the figures for the top 1% on this chart of tax and income changes from 1979 to 2000. And the weird divergence in incomes between the top 20% and everyone else. Not so long ago, we weren't so far separated from each other.

10/2/03 9:40 p.m.. (Link here.)

Headline in s'morning's SF Chron:
 

Puzzling study on breast implants, suicide:
Rate triple that of general population, but reasons unclear.

Oh, but none of this is thinking medically or scientifically, is it. Ain't I just like a woman.

10/2/03 12:00 p.m.. (Link here.)

Red All Over!

A few weeks ago Joel and I wrote up a list of reasons why Big Red, a yard-wide deep-sea jellyfish, should be governor of California. Today we were proud to hear from Kevin Raskoff, Ph.D., of CSU/Monterey Bay as follows (quoted by permission):
 

Hi, I ran across your blog on the Big red jellyfish for governor (via
google).   Very funny stuff; I will be sharing it with my nerdy jellyfish
scientist friends. 

Kevin (one of the guys that discovered it)
 

10/2/03 11:11 a.m. (Link here.)

Ed Meese leading the War On Librarianism.

10/1/03 9:51 p.m. (Link here.)

St. Francis was a public nuisance.

10/1/03 5:14 p.m. (Link here.)

This item on the Rough Popcornflower is the closest thing I've read to poetry in the Federal Register. Yes, owners of land affected thereby may feel differently, and I don't personally know the politics of the decision. But just listen to these words:
 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (``we'') announce the 
availability of the final Recovery Plan for the Rough Popcornflower 
(Plagiobothrys hirtus) for distribution and use. Plagiobothrys hirtus 
is found only in the Umpqua River drainage in Douglas County, Oregon, 
at sites ranging from 100 to 230 meters (328 to 755 feet) in elevation. 
Extant, naturally occurring populations of this species occur along the 
Sutherlin Creek drainage from Sutherlin to Wilbur, adjacent to 
Calapooya Creek west of Sutherlin, and in roadside ditches near 
Yoncalla Creek just north of Rice Hill. The northernmost reported site 
is near Yoncalla, and the southernmost at Wilbur.... 

I have Ammiano links on this page, but I don't pretend to be objective. The San Francisco Chronicle does pretend to be objective, and it has paid Gavin Newsom advertisements all over its website.

Search for "Newsom" on sfgate.com and you get an advertisement for the man's campaign at the top of the page. I'm sure the Chron folks would answer that any candidate is free to take out advertising in its paper or electronic pages -- and in fact there was an ad for a minor gubernatorial candidate on the front of sfgate.com some weeks ago -- but it strikes me as a little different from print advertising to have an ad for one particular candidate be the *only* ad visible on a page of political coverage. Especially when that same ad turns up at the top of a recent feature on his opponent Tom Ammiano. 

Interesting also, considering the appearance in yesterday's paper of an embarrassingly kissy Newsom profile headlined: "Deep thinker who sweats the small stuff -- Mayoral candidate meets policy groups." 

"Deep thinker"? Ha. If hair gel were brains.

In said article,  among other things, he openly states his admiration for the Wilson/Kelling "broken windows" theory, which pretends that the way to improve public safety is to treat "disorderly" human beings -- even if they're not violating any law -- as blemishes to be removed from the public eye. Thing is, "broken windows" practice is already the reason why the SFPD puts lots of energy into the relatively easy and safe activity of bothering homeless people and taking away their possessions, while its record on solving serious crimes is pretty dismal. The original Wilson & Kelling article that coined the "broken windows" phrase is replete with barely veiled racism and contempt for the Bill of Rights. I wonder if Mr. Gavin has read it at all. 
 
 

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