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

There is a strange notion of public service at work in this San Francisco Chronicle reporter, Kevin Fagan. He was willing to spend months getting to know a community of extravagantly wretched and addicted homeless campers, obviously with real perception and considerable empathy -- only to pimp their misery to the world in a feature series carefully timed for the last days of a mayoral campaign in which homelessness is an issue, and slanted to back a theory that only passes for logical in the upper social strata of San Francisco: that the cause of homeless people's misery is an excess of kindness from the housed public.

The kindness-harms theory ignores a really phenomenal pile of facts. It has to pretend the problem isn't the city's shocking shortages of housing, public medical care, and adequate drug treatment. It isn't the county-based nature of California welfare programs for single adults, which creates a "race to the bottom" among counties with each trying to be stingier than the next. It isn't the welter of prudish state and local laws that impede honorable informal-economy professions like selling trinkets or shining shoes. It isn't the terrible American shortage of decently paid unskilled employment. It isn't the War on Drugs, which wastes the time of cops and jailers on a problem that needs doctors and counselors.

Oh, no, the Chronicle says, borrowing the Gavin Newsom line: the problem is cash. The problem is that public benefit programs and passers-by provide addicts with money they can use to buy drugs.

We've only had the first installment of the Chronicle series so far, but the intention is clear. This, for example:

"Day clinics? Jail? You think anyone out here on the street, all over this city, can stick with that?" Tommy said weeks before he died. "Why the hell do you think we're out here? Because we can't get over what's going on with us by ourselves, that's why.

"We want to get off the street, but I got to tell you true," he said. "Unless they take people like us and put us somewhere where we can't keep f -- ing up, we're going to keep f -- ing up."-- -- --

Not, of course, that it's an original theory by any means. Jack London quoted the Chicago superintendent of police as saying something similar about a hundred years ago:

 "The humane and generous treatment which this city has accorded the great army of homeless unfortunates has made it the victim of wholesale imposition, and this well- intended policy of kindness has resulted in making Chicago the winter Mecca of a vast and undesirable floating population."

The actual descriptions of the actual people Kevin Fagan interviewed ring shudderingly true, and I say that as an attorney and frequent de facto social worker with experience representing homeless single adults. 

But the overall thrust of the article is dishonest for a number of reasons:

- While some homeless people are seriously ill and addicted junkies like those described in the article, it does not follow that all homeless people are in the same condition. In fact many people who are homeless manage to hold down full-time jobs and still either can't afford to get indoors, or can afford it but have damaged credit histories that landlords won't accept.

- The article implies that all homeless people panhandle. Again, this is not true.

- The shortage and high cost of San Francisco housing, which is the central reason why people end up living outdoors, is never mentioned.

- The shortage of adequate drug treatment is never mentioned, except briefly by the only person in the story who does anything constructive: a lady who shows up offering food and drink.

It happens there really are people who think they want to be taken in hand by a strong paternalistic authority. I have known people like this, too -- for example, a recently released prisoner who actually saw his parole officer as a protecting father whose firm hand was necessary to steer him away from a return to crime. Such senses of dependency and deficiencies of self-discipline are not healthy in adults. They result from extreme experiences either of institutional control, or of anomie, or, paradoxically, of both at once. People who feel this way are *not normal*, and their despairing masochism is not a valid source of public policy advice. You don't trust an anorexic who wants to be deprived of food. You don't trust a suicidal man who wants to jump off a bridge. You don't trust an abused wife who says she deserved to be hit. You don't trust a drug addict when he wants another dose of a drug. Why, then, take the same addict's word when he finds it easier to deliver himself up to others' control than to believe himself capable of change?

As for Tommy's particular case, it also happens that a serious case of necrotizing fasciitis is a qualifying condition for federal disability benefits, known as Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which come with MediCal coverage (that's the California edition of Medicaid). With SSI, Tommy might have managed to get indoors. Not necessarily -- like I said, there's a housing shortage here -- but it would have been more possible. When I see an outdoor death from necrotizing fasciitis, I don't blame public benefits, or people who give to panhandlers. I blame the housing shortage and the intentionally daunting difficulty of the application process for disability benefits.

People who live indoors do of course sometimes lose hope and feel imprisoned by addiction, but they don't suffer in such dramatically wretched ways, and a person living indoors can achieve that slightly larger distance between hand and mouth that makes it possible to contemplate rehab. This doesn't mean that people living indoors recover easily from drug abuse. But drug addicts do not die of necrotizing fasciitis so easily when they are living indoors. Don't believe me: read your damn Nelson Algren.

Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom keeps claiming Matt Gonzalez hasn't got a program for reducing homelessness. He has, too, got a program, and instead of pretending it's possible to help poor people by denying them money, Mr. Gonzalez is proposing that the way to reduce homelessness is to build more homes. Fancy that.
 

11/28/03 10:00 p.m.  (Link here.)

Global warming: whether it officially exists or not, the Army Corps of Engineers has to deal with it. As do the residents of Shishmaref, Alaska. Per the November 20 Federal Register:

...Shishmaref, population 562, is on a barrier island on the Chukchi Sea on the northwestern coast of Alaska. The shoreline at the community is being rapidly eroded by storm waves possibly because the ice pack has been forming later in the autumn than in the past, allowing more of the force of late season storm energy to reach the shore. The programmatic DEIS will determine whether Federal action is warranted, and if so, and community relocation is selected, site alternatives will be addressed in more detail in a second tier of the EIS process.

Here are photos of the damage, and here is more about the town, courtesy of Shishmaref School, home of the Northern Lights. I had not heard of Shishmaref until just now but there must be people who love it. 

11/28/03 6:09 p.m.  (Link here.)

So about the Newsoms and the San Francisco DA contest: are they backing Hallinan, Harris, or nobody? 

Two days ago the Matier and Ross column wrote:

Newsom isn't supporting anyone in the race for district attorney, but it's probably no accident that he's spending some time around Kamala Harris, who's looking to oust incumbent Terence Hallinan.

Newsom says he can't endorse in the contest, since his wife, Kimberley Guilfoyle Newsom, is a deputy district attorney currently on leave from the office. 

MEDIA ADVISORY

Nancy Pelosi, along with other San Francisco Women Leaders, speak out for 
District Attorney Terence Hallinan

What: Women's Leaders Press Conference
When: Monday, December 1, 2003 12 noon
Where: 3543 Eighteenth St. @ Guerrero--The Women's Building @ the Mural Outside
           Rain contigency: Inside the Women's Building, Room A
Who:   Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi & District Attorney Hallinan along with:

Angela Alioto
Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom....

Alioto and Guilfoyle Newsom are also listed on Hallinan's public endorsement list, among "Prominent Attorneys."

So, Angela endorses Mr. Newsom and Hallinan, Mrs. Newsom endorses Hallinan, Mr. Newsom endorses nobody, but Mr. Newsom makes favorable noises around Harris. Odd.

11/28/03 3:28 p.m.  (Link here.)

Damn, I forgot to post this yesterday. It's the complete lyrics to "Alice's Restaurant."

11/28/03 12:53 p.m.  (Link here.)

Sorry, "Blogger for Matt" or not, I think Mr. Gonzalez has a little explaining to do about these endorsements from Joe O'Donoghue and Walter Wong.

11/28/03 11:00 a.m.  (Link here.)

GW, speaking to Army troops in Iraq yesterday:

....Together, you and I have taken an oath to defend our country....

The oaths are as follows:

For the President:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

"I, ____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."

""I, _____ , having been appointed an officer in the Army of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of _____ do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United  States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God."

11/27/03 6:12 p.m.  (Linkhere.)

From the Miami New Times via Romenesko: a local alternative paper's reporter tells how she was arrested for "walking down the street" and her possessions discarded along with other people's. She does not deny that some protesters threw things; she is simply upset that nonviolent people, people who did not throw things, were attacked spontaneously by uniformed public servants. She's picking up the collective-punishment ethic that is the most troubling aspect to the worse kind of major-protest policing.

It seems to be human nature not to believe that law-abiding, nonviolent people can be presumed criminal by their own country's public servants. It's something you have to see and feel to believe, just as you have to experience an earthquake to know in your bones that such things happen. Afterwards the ground never quite seems as solid as it did.

11/27/03 5:38 p.m.  (Linkhere.)

Cause for nostalgia: 
 

On a cold winter morning in 1982, Boulder woke up to its obligation to provide emergency shelter. A homeless veteran was found frozen in the Central Park Bandshell. 

The city, which likes to view itself as compassionate, couldn't tolerate the idea that it
could blithely allow people to freeze to death....

11/27/03 12:34 p.m.  (Link here.)

Scenes from American public education:

Maggots rain on Fairfield classroom

Students in a high school literature class got an unexpected lesson in insect biology earlier this month when a half-dozen maggot larvae fell through ceiling tiles onto books and students. 

--

Amnesty International is calling for an investigation of what happened in Miami, and it sounds like the AFL-CIO is taking an interest. Kind of them, since union contingents usually get specially gentle treatment at these events, and they usually accept it without asking if all those other folks who got hurt really did all do something to deserve it.

-- 

The San Francisco police union endorses the opponent of our current DA, and union spokesman Chris Cunnie says, "When the district attorney indicts 10 officers in one year, that's a problem." No, Chris, when ten officers get themselves indicted in one year, that's a problem. You wouldn't be shopping for a new DA likely to be softer on certain kinds of crime, would you?

--

And Mayor Brown may have to find himself a new haberdasher. 

Mrs. Dewson is interesting. Clearly she knows what a charming effect she can have as political window-dressing. So every once in a while she does something very publicly independent to serve notice that she is not an inanimate prop.
 

11/26/03 1:04 p.m.  (Link here.)

Stuff like this Asmussen cartoon on Gonzalez can be cute, but it leaves Newsom looking like the grownup in the San Francisco mayoral contest. Gonzalez is two years older, writes his own lines (or, at least, doesn't talk like he's reciting lines), is better educated (Columbia and Stanford Law vs. a Santa Clara University BA), and as a felony public defender has essentially had to ask clients to trust him with their lives. 

11/26/03 1:04 p.m.  (Link here.)

This is an account of police violence in Miami from Scahill of Democracy Now via Cursor: it should be read with a grain or two of salt, but it should be read. If half of what he says is true, the level of systematic official hostility toward the right of free assembly may have been the worst seen in the United States in some time.

11/24/03 11:14 p.m.  (Linkhere.)

The police hit the demonstrators hard in Miami -- not just tear gas and rubber bullets, but pepper spray and even Tazers -- and the whole world did not watch closely enough. 

"If we don't lock 'em up tonight, we'll lock 'em up tomorrow, so let's lock 'em up," Timoney said.

Regardless of what the individual demonstrators' opinions might have been -- regardless, even, of whether individual demonstrators behaved badly, which some reportedly did -- backing decent treatment of demonstrators is the only way to preserve the right of us all to assemble and petition for redress of grievances. Demonstrators act as individuals and are individually liable for their actions. Police act as representatives and employees of the public and are protected by the law of qualified immunity from full responsibility for their actions. Because the officers are not acting as individuals, they truly are obligated to meet a higher standard of conduct than the people they are facing. Yes, this must be a frustrating standard in those moments when a decent officer happens to face a violent unreasonable protester, but it's essential both to democracy and to preserving the notion that what police officers do is to enforce the rule of law. Above all, we live in a country where individual responsibility is both enforced and celebrated with great intensity -- and so for the sake of consistency not to mention legality, officers need to respond to demonstrators as individuals and avoid indiscriminate collective punishment.

As for what happens otherwise, listen to badly injured protester Edward Owaki: 

``I'm worried that I will stifle my own speech because of this.''

Let me repeat again: in my substantial experience of observing protests both in person and on videotape, group roundups at protests nearly always pick up large numbers of nonviolent people. The parties who are genuinely up to no good in the first place also tend to be the smartest about stepping back when the encirclements start. 

11/23/03 11:14 p.m.  (Link here.)

Odd times when the President of the United States snubs the Queen of England and The Nation roots for the Queen.
[UPDATE: HRH's damaged gardens and traumatized flamingoes]

11/22/03 10:25 p.m.  (Link here.)

The good news: California's Secretary of State will be requiring paper receipts for all electronic voting machines.

The bad news: not until 2006.

11/22/03 2:07 p.m.  (Link here.)

About the energy bill that was just defeated: call me dense, but I still can't see why people have a problem with ethanol per se, though maybe it would be a good idea to limit how the ethanol gets produced. I mean, corn liquor is on the whole less harmful than either petroleum or high-fructose corn syrup, wouldn't you say?

HOWEVER, this bill would have done any number of other ghastly things that Bush supporters want. I'm not sure how many folks had caught on that it would have repealed the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935. This is the law blocking the very kind of corporate-subsidiary shell-games that Enron and PG&E played around California energy crisis time. It was passed in 1935 because that's the kind of thing unscrupulous corporate conglomerates also did in the Roaring Twenties (you know, before that 1929 thing). Enron only got around it because of some exemption that I don't understand but Public Citizen does. See especially this lovely "PUHCA for Dummies" primer (in PDF). The Enron stuff starts on Page 7.

11/21/03 5:15 p.m.  (Link here.)

False note in an otherwise charming BBC story about a spaniel who has had a calming effect in a classroom for disruptive kids:

"We've also got an animal trainer to come in and work with the children. He's got them teaching him to sit and stay. We combine this with a course to prepare children for working life." 

11/20/03 12:19 p.m.  (Link here.)

The late dirt from the Newsom campaign is starting. In today's Chron, a Newsom guy is accusing Matt Gonzalez's campaign manager, Ross Mirkarimi, of campaigning on company time. No evidence offered. Incidentally, the Chron's online version of this story appears as of this writing with a Newsom banner ad at the top of the page. 

Meanwhile posts dated November 17 and 19 from Chris Nolan respectively set out an allegation and a response from Mirkarimi on a fairly attenuated smear: someone in McAllen, Texas says Gonzalez's parents "run" a maquiladora in Mexico that makes fishing lures. The response says they in fact do some consulting-type work for the unnamed Mexican company to the tune of $18,000 a year. It's not clear from Nolan's account if the person making the statement in Texas, Ludvinia Garcia, is a reporter for the McAllen Monitor or a letter-writer or what. I've been looking at the "Last 7 Days" directory of the McAllen paper Nolan links to, and can't find the original statement. Maybe you can. Nolan quotes thusly:

'Given what I know about the Green party's stance on such matters, Mr. Gonzalez's dad would be regarded as one who exploits the working man. Is this what San Francisco wants in a mayor?' the McAllen woman, Ludivinia Garcia, wrote. In response to a message asking about her interest in the San Francisco election, she had this to say: 'I did not even know Mr. Gonzalez was a candidate for mayor let alone Mr. Newsom. I only obtained Mr. Newsom's name from the article itself and did a little searching on the web. As to my motivations, they are simple. I was simply thunderstruck by the apparent hypocrisy of Mr. Gonzalez's remarks in light of his parent's [sic] business. I say let the voters of San Francisco be well informed and decide who will be their mayor.'

While we're at it, someone ought to take a look at what wages get paid to laborers in the kitchens and vineyards that support Mr. Newsom's present businesses (Tuesday's Jon Carroll column may or may not be apposite). I am not actually saying that I know Mr. Newsom exploits anyone in particular, but as far as I can see, Mr. Nolan is not actually saying that he knows Mr. Gonzalez's parents exploit anyone in particular either. In both cases it's guesswork until someone does the legwork.

As for the matter of children bearing responsibility for their parents' exploitive behaviors, we could perhaps consider the history of Mr. Newsom's friends the Getty family, in which the second hyperrich generation worked hard through philanthropy to live down the skinflint reputation of the patriarch who built the fortune (and, admittedly, left a lot of it to his museum -- see the Guardian story). Among the utterances of the original J. Paul Getty (1892-1976): 

...Recounting his plight in a magazine article entitled "It's Tough to Be a Billionaire," Mr. Getty said that "I never give money to individuals" because "it's unrewarding and wrong." 

Returning to this theme in 1965 in a Saturday Evening Post article entitled "The World Is Mean to Millionaires" (why he had diminished his wealth status since 1958 was not explained), Mr. Getty said: 

"If I were convinced that by giving away my fortune I could make a real contribution toward solving the problems of world poverty, I'd give away 99.5 percent of all I have immediately. But a hard-eyed appraisal of the situation convinces me this is not the case." 

"However admirable the work of the best charitable foundation, it would accustom people to the passive acceptance of money," he added. This, he believed, was corrupting. 

"As long as I have money, I will give it away."

This is some of what Getty money now does for artists alone. Don't know whether to thank younger Gettys or the J. Paul Sr. bequest for this, but anyway money gotten through tough exploitation of Saudi oil contracts and such has ended up serving useful public purposes.

So, what, Newsom supporters don't think children should be allowed to rise above their parents' sins?

11/20/03 12:05 p.m.  (Link here.)

I actually searched the whole San Francisco Chronicle for Jon Carroll's suddenly thrice-weekly column this morning before realizing he had been on the back page of the Datebook section all along. Like, presumably, a few other sleepy readers, I had passed right over his column because it was unattractively wedged into the top left corner of that back page with a comparatively tiny byline -- the actual type being one-eighth of an inch high as measured on the printed page. 

Point size is measured from top of ascender to bottom of descender, so if there were any descending letters ("g," "y," etc.) in "Jon Carroll," they might bump the full height up to one-sixth or three-sixteenths of an inch, judging by the clumsy wooden ruler we've got in the house here  -- and I think fonts appear on the page slightly smaller than their formal point sizes indicate -- so, out of a 72-point inch, let's be charitable and call it 14-point type, and I admit that is 14 points of chunky boldface sans-serif. 

By contrast with which, local gossip columnist Leah Garchik and fawning syndicated national gossip columnist Liz Smith get their first names in fancy gray block capitals one-and-one-sixteenth inches high, i.e. 76.5 point or more. 

As for Garchik, fine, she's got a heart (statement of interest: she mentioned my name earlier this year), but is Jon Carroll really less than one-fifth as interesting as Liz Smith? If so, to whom? And could this by any chance have to do with Mr. Carroll's refusal to write fluff (except about cats) and the fact that his column today excoriates the aggressive marketing of consumer debt in what some would call alarmist terms? 

They should put him back to five days a week and give him a byline as big as Liz Smith's. They wouldn't've treated archy this way.

11/19/03 11:48 p.m.  (Link here.)

It almost seemed like the San Francisco Chronicle had noted the fortitude and entrepreneurial drive it takes to live off scrap metal and beverage container returns in one of the world's most expensive cities. The headline:

"Camping out for art's sake -- getting wet, sleeping on concrete are nothing for hard-core collectors"

It seems the SomArts Gallery -- itself a fine institution that in fact hosts the annual Coalition on Homelessness benefit -- holds this other annual benefit sale of good art at (relatively) cheap prices. Collectors -- of art, not of beer cans or cardboard -- sleep out next to the gallery on the night before to be first in line to spend $110 a shot on art that's worth bigger money than that. 

Hard to tell from the story and photo if the people described as pitching tents and sipping wine in the open air were on public or private property, but if on public property, they were possibly committing the crimes of Municipal Police Code Sec. 21, drinking in public; Municipal Police Code Sec. 22, blocking the sidewalk, and Cal. Penal Code Sec. 647(j), lodging in public. If on private property without express permission they may have been committing trespassing offenses under Muncipal Police Code Sec. 25 or Cal. Penal Code Sec. 602(l). 

I point this out not to be a spoilsport -- if anything, I think more people should try sleeping on concrete once in a while -- but I'd like to suggest that the Chronicle might pay a little sympathetic attention to the many, many people -- all of them apparently too ordinary to mention -- who live outdoors on concrete for months and years at a time, get hassled, arrested, and/or dispossessed of their property in "cleanups" every few days, and contribute massively to that high recycling rate that San Francisco city waste officials are so proud to report.

Incidentally (Newsom take note), professional recyclers very rarely panhandle. 

11/18/03 5:15 p.m.  (Link here.)

Odd: today's mail brought a bulk-mail fundraising letter attributed to Howard Dean's wife, with a message including modernized but still stereotypical woman-to-woman stuff: 

...After medical school Howard moved to Vermont for his residency. After a fellowship at McGill University I joined him as a partner in his medical practice. We were married in 1981. Our daughter Anne was born in 1984 and our son Paul is 17.

I enjoyed working side-by-side with my husband and missed him when Howard was forced to leave our practice to serve as Governor...

11/17/03 5:09 p.m.  (Link here.)

News from another planet: In the UK, as of next April, families will be able to sue local councils for placing them in bed & breakfasts as opposed to more substantial housing if the placement lasts more than six weeks.

Ha. Here, promoting a free bed for everyone -- hell, even free indoor floor space, and never mind breakfast -- gets you labeled as a silly Utopian.

Homeless families are lucky to get hall-bedroom residential hotel rooms where they have to look out for needles in the showers. More typical is shelter accommodation or illicitly living in a car or trailer -- accompanied by the risk of having the children taken away by authorities because it's considered bad parenting to become homeless while raising children, never mind whose fault said homelessness might be. As though the Youth Guidance Center or foster home semi-neglect were better for children than shared hardship in a loving family. 

Oh, yeah, and in San Francisco, people run for mayor on a platform that defines all homeless people as "panhandlers" and makes veiled promises to chase them out of town.

11/17/03 12:08 p.m.  (Link here.)

Good to see Gonzalez campaigning properly in Bayview/Hunter's Point, a place with its own political climate to the point where the ROSES police-community forums in the Bayview feel like they're happening in a different town from the one over here around City Hall. A lot of voters in BVHP have a huge personal loyalty to Willie Brown no matter what he does to them, but it's an open question whether they'll transfer that loyalty to Gavin Newsom. I saw Newsom speak at ROSES. He was pretty stiff, and he didn't have a proper answer for a question about how to get more African-American young people into school instead of jail. He went on about his own volunteer work in the schools, but that's not a program for systematically doing better: it's only a boast of having fulfilled noblesse oblige duties.

11/17/03 11:17 a.m.  (Link here.)

Friends I've corresponded with since writing an article on the Japanese-American Internment transit camp at Tanforan have just pointed out a nice bit of historical resonance: Fred Korematsu, of the famous wartime test cases on the Internment, filed an amicus brief drafted by Professor Harry Stone of the University of Chicago, in support of the effort by the Center For Constitutional Rights to get Supreme Court review of the Guantanamo Bay detentions.

By synchronicity, this morning's Chron carries an obituary for Rev. Marvin Stuart, a Methodist pastor described as having ministered to Japanese Americans during their detention at Tanforan. We can only now appreciate how much courage that took.

11/15/03 5:49 p.m.  (Link here.)

Reading this Mother Jones feature about Prison Fellowship Ministries, run by Watergate convict and evangelical convert Charles Colson, the phrase that comes to mind is "cheese screamer": old American slang for a prisoner who conveniently finds Jesus right around parole hearing time.

The MoJo story starts out cheerful, but goes on to say that inmates at a prison in Kansas get perks, family visits, and kindness (and lectures about the evils of homosexuality) if they join the Christian evangelical program, while those in the "general population" get harsh, impersonal treatment and decreasing access to programs as public services are cut back. Not only that, but the evangelical group is 40 percent funded out of the general Inmate Benefit Fund, which comes from profits on all prisoners' canteen purchases and telephone calls. One prisoner says, "If anyone but the Christians gets together for a prayer, security hits the panic button." Nobody seems to mind except, of course, for the prisoners who get the worse treatment.

Is there a slight Establishment Clause problem here? Just maybe?

11/15/03 4:38 p.m.  (Link here.)

Gonzalez ahead of Newsom 49-47 among respondents "certain" to vote, down 43-46 among "possibles," and in a 46-46 dead heat overall. The man could win. 

I dropped by his Mission campaign headquarters for the first time today. Busy buzz, and a shortage of literature -- they said something about the printer being late -- but even that's encouraging: the Ammiano campaign had a glut of flyers and not enough hands to distribute them.

11/14/03 7:45 p.m.  (Link here.)

The other day I was bloviating about how if that $1 billion judgment doesn't go to U.S. servicemembers tortured during the first Gulf War, then maybe it could go to small business microloans in Iraq or something suitably useful.

Well, good news: Donald Rumsfeld says 5,000 new businesses started up in Iraq between May 1 and late September this year.

Except that John H. Brown, writing for The Nation, tried to learn more about these businesses, as in where, how big, and what kind, and nobody official was willing to tell him.

11/14/03 12:02 p.m.  (Link here.)

GAO takes a look at the baroque National Guard pay system. See especially Page 25 of the PDF (numbered page 19) and the ensuing complicated diagrams. Some of the stories:

...DOD erroneously billed 34 soldiers in a Colorado National Guard Special Forces unit an average of $48,000 each. Though we first notified DOD of these issues in April and sent a follow-up letter in June 2003, the largely erroneous total debt for these soldiers of about $1.6 million remained unresolved at the end of our audit in September 2003.

As a result of confusion over responsibility for entering transactions associated with a Colorado soldier's promotion, the soldier's spouse had to obtain a grant from the Colorado National Guard to pay bills while her husband was in Afghanistan.

Some soldiers did not receive payments for up to 6 months after mobilization and others still had not received certain payments by the conclusion of our audit work...

11/14/03 10:30 a.m.  (Link here.)

It's definite this morning: Joe O'Donoghue's Residential Builders Association, proponent of the huge live-work loft construction campaign that gentrified so many working people out of their apartments in the dot-com days. is backing Matt Gonzalez, saying "Matt is for the working people, the disenfranchised, and that's what this race is about...It's about the haves and the have-nots.'' 

This is weird. Weird enough that columnists who back Newsom have already been making political hay out of even the rumor that the RBA might endorse Gonzalez. See, for example, the "Matt Smith Fan Mail" entry for November 12 on Nolan.

My guess is, it has something to do with Chris Daly. Back during Chris's first run for Board of Supervisors in 2000, it developed that he was oddly able to get along with O'Donoghue despite Chris's otherwise lefty politics. And Chris, of course, is a big Gonzalez supporter.  I don't know. It's just possible that O'Donoghue -- a complex personality -- believes those things he says about addressing the housing shortage through construction, even though the effect of projects his people have built, even projects on vacant lots, has been to raise surrounding property values so that evictions result, and he hasn't been especially known for ensuring that his loft condos get sold to struggling artists either.

Memo to Matt (Gonzalez): before pseudo-solicitous Newsom supporters use this O'Donoghue endorsement to disillusion your neighborhood-activist supporters, get Joe out there to say in public, on the record, what he means by standing up "for the working people." For example, might he commit to backing tougher inclusionary zoning, under which new housing must include some certain number of units where cops and teachers (never even mind bike messengers and retail clerks) can afford to live?

11/14/03 9:53 a.m.  (Linkhere.)

See, this is why we passed Proposition H to give our police conduct reviewers the power any sensible person would have thought they had already. It's also why that SF Weekly piece is wrong in suggesting Prop. H won't do any good.

11/13/03 9:49 p.m.  (Link here.)

I don't even normally read the SF Weekly, but this is a pretty good rundown of the police oversight situation. Except I don't quite share the Weekly's low opinion of the Board of Supervisors. This is the Human Rights Watch report they're talking about, and here's the PDF of the 83-page OCC report on police stonewalling of investigations.

11/13/03 4:16 p.m.  (Link here.)

Got an email yesterday from Bayview/Hunter's Point police conduct activists Sandra Juanita Cooper and Mesha Monge-Irizarry, of the Idriss Stelley Foundation, saying they've opened their "Green House" to the Matt Gonzalez campaign.

Good to know Matt is paying attention to the southeast corner of the city and specifically to its police conduct problems. Bayview Station, aka Charlie Company, has a cowboy institutional culture appreciably nastier than that of other San Francisco police stations -- a fact possibly related to Bayview/Hunter's Point being mostly African-American. As a former public defender Matt has the kind of knowledge and experience it will take to do something about that. 

Of course, he'll also have to reach out to people who want to see the good side of SFPD. Not that there isn't a good side. It's a big institution, with good and bad in it. There's just more bad in it than seems strictly necessary.

Meanwhile, this SF Chron story on black leaders' endorsements may be tilted pretty hard against Gonzalez, but there's a big chunk of hope buried in it: Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, who has often seemed oddly conservative since she was elected to represent Bayview/Hunter's Point, stepped back from the big Newsom endorsement ceremony and said she's undecided.

11/13/03 2:47 p.m.  (Linkhere.)

Mel Martinez, current secretary of HUD, may be running for Senate in Florida. 

[UPDATE: correcting post date for this item to 11/12/03]  (Link here.)

Out-of-synchronicity: today's San Francisco Bay Guardian has an op-ed rightly noting that Gavin Newsom's pseudo-compassionate conservatism is "a page from W's playbook" -- and yet today's Daily Kos has a promo for a conference of the "New Democrat Network" featuring Gavin Newsom as one of "NDN's New Leaders." San Francisco commenters have started an argument thread on the Kos site about the Gonzalez campaign (which I also support), and they've partly addressed what's strange here: Gavin Newsom is essentially the Republican in San Francisco's runoff for mayor -- he's the advocate for big business, employers, landlords, and "broken windows" policing -- and Matt Gonzalez would be the Democrat if only the Democratic Party were still the party of the underpaid. Never mind that Newsom calls himself a Democrat and Gonzalez calls himself a Green. Can't people see past labels?

While we're talking labels: why do these people say "Democrat Network"? Don't they know that "Democrat Party" is a right-wing slur for "Democratic Party"?

11/11/03 3:05 p.m.  (Link here.)

Lubbock on Everythang

Molly Ivins on what the rest of us should know about the great state of Texas. I mostly hooted, cried a little at the end, and meantime read half of it out loud to the nearest victim -- who, poor man, was on the other side of the kitchen table bravely trying to read something else.

11/10/03 12:05 p.m.  (Link here.)

Milo Minderbinder award of the day goes to the Bush Administration lawyers attempting to overturn a court award of frozen Iraqi assets to U.S. service members who were victims of torture under the Saddam Hussein regime during the first Gulf War.

If the administration succeeds, the former prisoners would be deprived of the money they won and, they say, of the validation of a judge's ruling that documented their accounts of torture by the Iraqis -- including beatings, burnings, starvation, mock executions and repeated threats of castration and dismemberment.....

...."No amount of money can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering that they went through at the hands of a truly brutal regime," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman. "It was determined earlier this year by Congress and the administration that those assets were no longer assets of Iraq, but they were resources required for the urgent national security needs of rebuilding Iraq."

Yes, that's a lot of money, and very possibly too much for 17 people -- and arguably Iraqis should get the benefit of it  -- but shouldn't these guys get something? That, and I'd like to see some showing that "Congress and the administration" intend to do something more useful with it. Think how far that could go, for example, in the form of microloans to Iraqi households to start small home businesses. Even in the expensive U.S., it could double the McKinney-Vento homeless housing appropriation. Heck, we could spend $1 billion on homeless veterans only and do a lot of good and it still wouldn't even get all the vets indoors. But odds are that billion will go to military contractors who will run through it in a hurry for godknowswhat.

The opinion and judgment in the case by Judge Roberts are available from the DC District Court. Can't find any mention of the case on the DC Circuit site from a quick search but if someone wants to sign up for a fee-based PACER account there I'm sure further developments are findable.
 

11/10/03 11:10 a.m.  (Link here.)

In Janine DeFao's otherwise nice profile of the veteran and ex-alcoholic who founded Oakland's Operation Dignity, an odd bit of sociology:

The homeless in San Francisco are hard to miss -- panhandling by day on downtown streets, crouched in doorways at night while opera and ballet patrons gingerly step past their sleeping bags.

But in Oakland, the homeless are hidden, camped out along creeks and railroad tracks, ensconced in abandoned buildings and tucked under freeway overpasses.... 

Funny how people who cover this city don't know it as well as they could.

11/09/03 11:25 p.m.  (Link here.)

Not much new under the sun.

Tonight we were flipping through a new acquisition from the public library book sale: a facsimile of the 1852 edition of Charles MacKay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The South Sea Bubble was already sounding familiar, and then J. discovered that in the List of Bubbles (scroll down -- it's numbered "2.21" in the margin), you can add "...on the Internet" at the end of each description and most of the time it'll sound like a dot-com IPO. Here, you try it:
 

...16. For buying and selling estates, and lending money on mortgage.
17. For carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is....
...36. For a wheel for perpetual motion. Capital, one million.
37. For improving of gardens.
38. For insuring and increasing children's fortunes.....
....57. For improving malt liquors. Capital, four millions....

Besides these bubbles, many others sprang up daily, in spite of the condemnation of the government and the ridicule of the still sane portion of the public. The print-shops teemed with caricatures, and the newspapers with epigrams and satires, upon the prevalent folly. An ingenious card-maker published a pack of South-Sea playing-cards, which are now extremely rare, each card containing, besides the usual figures, of a very small size, in one corner, a caricature of a bubble company, with appropriate verses underneath. One of the most famous bubbles was "Puckle's Machine Company," for discharging round and square cannon-balls and bullets, and making a total revolution in the art of war. Its pretensions to public favour were thus summed up, on the eight of spades:

In 1720, mind you.

Too bad the makers of the present-day "Stacked Deck" aren't so good at verse.

11/09/03 10:50 a.m.  (Link here.)

California Uber Alles

Grim article from Edwin Black in this morning's SF Chron on the U.S. origins -- notably in California -- of key Nazi eugenics ideas. Methods, too. 

11/08/03 3:23 p.m.  (Link here.)

Emma at Late Night Thoughts figures out that what's wrong with the welfare system is its arbitrary injustice. 

11/08/03 2:30 p.m.  (Link here.)

The Wingnut Debate Dictionary assembled by the Atrios crew is a real public service. It's so much easier to spot and skewer a cheap debating trick when you have a name for it. E.g.:

Argument by Attribution - In which any argument you make is immediately conflated with whatever they think Noam Chomsky/Robert Scheer/Susan Sontag/Michael Moore said about something. Mark Safranaski does this incredibly well - essentially, any argument you make, you must first answer for any argument that anyone else sharing a vague political connection to you has made. You also see this in the presidential debates, where the entire field wants to withdraw from Iraq because Kucinich is the only one saying that. (jesse) 

My own entry for today:

DysLochnerexia: Invoking constitutional rights to further oppress the people they were designed to protect, as in the bitterly remembered 1905 Supreme Court case of Lochner v. People of the State of New York, which found that limiting bakery employees to a 60-hour work week or a ten-hour day violated the employees' own right to freedom of contract. 

A Sixth Circuit decision yesterday against the second of two federal laws that have attempted to protect religious observance in prison. The New York Times relates:

Yesterday's decision was not based on states' rights but on the First Amendment's prohibition on the establishment of religion by the government. In the 1997 Supreme Court decision striking down the earlier law on federalism grounds, only Justice John Paul Stevens suggested that it was vulnerable to attack on establishment-clause grounds.

The judges in yesterday's decision agreed, ruling unanimously that the law "has the effect of encouraging prisoners to become more religious in order to enjoy greater rights."...

Though I do have to question the wisdom of whoever chose the plaintiffs for this case: an overt racist, a worshipper of Thor, a Wiccan, and a Satanist. Not a mix to inspire widespread sympathy, though it sounds like the religious freedom principle itself was worth defending.

11/08/03 12:43 p.m.  (Linkhere.)

And it's one, two three....

In Berkeley on November 11, Country Joe McDonald will be helping to lead a Veterans' Day ceremony at the traditional eleventh minute of the eleventh hour. Armistice Day did once celebrate a time when people who were tired of hitting each other simply decided to stop.

11/08/03 12:42 p.m.  (Link here.)

So three San Francisco union locals have endorsed Gavin Newsom for mayor, although Matt Gonzalez backed the Prop. L minimum wage increase, and the major opponents thereof were Mr. Newsom's friends the Golden Gate Restaurant Association. What kind of labor solidarity is that? For the Restaurant Association's anti-labor ballot arguments, see p. 162 ff. as numbered, which is page 178 ff. of the PDF, in the November 4 ballot pamphlet. If that doesn't work try the public library's archive site.

11/07/03 11:11 p.m.  (Link here.)

Jello Biafra sez: Vote For Matt!

11/07/03 10:30 p.m.  (Link here.)

"Well, I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it..."

Sydney Schanberg on Robert McNamara and guilt.

11/07/03 2:54 p.m.  (Link here.)

GAO bravely, or mostly bravely, made public a responseto a congressional inquiry today showing the United States at the top of the list for overall greenhouse gas emissions, with 1,578 metric tons of emissions as of 2000, following an increase of a little over 1% per year over the previous 20 years. This total emissions level is more than double the figure posted for all of China.

Several countries, mostly poorer, do, however, have us beat on "Emissions intensity (metric tons of carbon equivalent per million dollars of economic output)." The tables start on page 4.

I said "mostly bravely" because of an odd footnote on page 7: "These emissions data do not include carbon dioxide emitted from natural gas flaring." Hard to tell, but it looks like they're saying the "flaring" data doesn't appear in overall emissions data but some "flaring" data does appear in the intensity data. What's that all about? 

11/06/03 10:20 p.m.  (Link here.)

So J & I here decided to send a contribution to Matt Gonzalez and sign up as volunteers for his campaign for mayor of San Francisco. 

And then I sat here and read this scalp-tingling article in the New Republic, via Atrios and BadAttitudes, about the power of Dean-style Internet fundraising. I don't mean the unethical anti-Cranston trick described at the beginning. I mean the meat of the story, mostly on Page 2, about how the Internet can enable supporters to use their own initiative to broaden a campaign's network, and how much more useful that is than just asking volunteers to send money or slog along as footsoldiers in a hierarchical voter ID operation.

And I get to thinking, wotzis I saw earlier today on the Chris Nolan San Francisco politics blog quoting Peter Camejo saying the statewide Greens will be pulling for Matt? Could there just maybe be a substantial network forming in Matt's favor even outside of San Francisco?

Well, Nolan's source is a pretty vicious post by someone named fjgallagher who says he at some point worked for Solem & Associates, and that's a notoriously pro-business, anti-homeless public relations firm. Apparently Gallagher has since worked for the (also pro-business, anti-homeless) San Francisco Examiner since then -- or, at least, there's a 2002 Ex story online bearing his byline. This kind of makes sense, since Gallagher says on his blog that he once worked for the Independent in the late '90s. The Fang family started out with the Independent as its flagship paper and then acquired the Examiner in that ownership switcheroo a couple years back that left the Hearst Corporation holding all the good writers from the old Chron and the old Ex. Unclear who Gallagher works for now.  But if Gallagher is saying the Greens are on "a crusade" in Matt's favor, he's probably saying it just to make Matt look like a Pawn Of Outside Agitators or some such thing.

[UPDATE 10/6: apparently Gallagher has a company called Maverick Media, and the October 27 entry on his blog confirms this is the same "Frank Gallagher" described in an Ex story yesterdayas having worked against the Prop. J initiative on special housing for the most vulnerable homeless.]

Nevertheless -- for all I know, Camejo did say that stuff attributed to him about bringing in Greens to work for Matt, and if so it wouldn't be all bad. What if Matt really did become a statewide (or wider) progressive cause? What if lonely lefties in his home state of Texas sent him money? What if Mother Jones or The Nation or somebody decided it was national news that a 38-year-old registered Green, poet-lover, sometime punk guitarist, former public defender, and endorsee of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has a real chance to become mayor of San Francisco? 

Seriously, it's worth thinking about. 

Nother thing worth thinking about: Matt will stall his good happy momentum if he goes all stodgy and professional now in the crunch weeks. I know. I've seen it happen:

In 1999, we were part of Tom Ammiano's write-in campaign for mayor when Tom was the candidate who had the sudden impossibly hopeful progressive momentum. The campaign moved along beautifully from the moment Tom agreed to run until the general election. We set up a table at the Potrero Safeway with a sign saying, "Finally, there's a reason to register to vote!" and people in fact did register to vote, in large numbers and with enthusiasm. The campaign posted sticker forms on its site and people printed stickers at home to put on their bicycles and in all kinds of other places. (Ammiano tried the sticker thing again this year, though with less emphasis and success, mainly using the designs from '99.) The campaign handed out chalk, and people chalked pavements just like in past generations. The campaign invited people to take handfuls of flyers and talk up the candidate at their own evening hangouts, and they did. It worked.

Then Tom made it into the runoff against Willie Brown. Suddenly when you called up about volunteering, the campaign staff gave you two choices: walk precincts with a checklist or come to campaign headquarters to make voter ID phone calls. The thing is, Joel and I don't like bothering people at home: we like talking to people about local campaigns when they're out shopping or strolling in public. Speaking to a person on a public sidewalk is nowhere near as violative as phoning or visiting a total stranger at home. It's not only easier for us, we find it makes a nicer impression on voters. But the '99 general-election campaign was using the old-fashioned GOTV playbook that the New Republic article describes so well, and Voter ID was all they wanted to do. The momentum went flat, the chalk and stickers lost popularity, and Willie got four more years.

If Matt knows what he's doing, he'll use progressive activists' existing collegial networks, and he'll invite volunteers to make use of their own connections and abilities instead of turning people who offer their time into footsoldiers mechanically processing precinct lists. Yes, sure, the precinct stuff has to be done, but that's not all he has to do. He has to keep lively support going at events like Diamond Dave's Wednesday poetry nights at Brainwash. He has to use the Internet. He has to keep encouraging people to use their own contacts for his benefit. This is, frankly, where Tom fucked up. Diamond Dave is *still* mad because in '99 he put together a "Poets for Ammiano" event that was well attended and raised $600, and the Ammiano campaign, confusing his event with a "house party," at first wouldn't send any representative and then sent a campaign staffer but not the candidate himself. And, so, yes, Dave has been working for Matt this time around. 

Matt is off to a good start with artists' fundraisers and such, but judging by the '99 Ammiano campaign experience, it'll be a powerful temptation to go robot for the last few weeks. He has to resist that. If he's going to promote himself as a different kind of politician, he has to use, and trust, different kinds of political tactics.

11/06/03 5:01 p.m.  (Link here.)

Arnold hires P.I. to investigate groping allegations.

He will find the real groper. Eeyup.

So is he getting his image tips from O.J. or what?

11/06/03 1:21 p.m.  (Link here.)

Outrageous SF Chron cartoonist Don Asmussen has our mayoral election just about figured out. So did this pre-Tuesday item, linked at the Ammiano for Mayor site, on Voight-Kampff testing to discover which of the mayoral candidates is a replicant. 

Meanwhile there's a comparative-styles story in s'morning's Chron that goes after Gonzalez with sneers and 50-year-old jokes:

In terms of parties, it was a different scene, man, at the Gonzalez bash.

Just ask the self-described anarchist who uses Elmer's glue to
keep his "classic Mohawk'' in place. As the DJ spun progressive
house music, Marc Powell bounced like a pogo stick, energized
by joy and faith that San Francisco under Greenie Gonzalez
would become one big anti-capitalistic co-op.

But also evidence of robot politics -- and keeping down costs for feeding the help -- at Newsom headquarters:
 

... Newsom -- founder of PlumpJack wines and one of San Francisco's
leading restaurateurs -- offered nothing stronger than Sprite,
sandwiches handmade by volunteers and store-bought cookies. 

Getting a volunteer to talk on the record about Newsom proved
more challenging than finding a Cabernet at the Avalon, even on
the most mundane of topics. One group of four volunteers was
chatting amiably with a Chronicle reporter until a fifth
stopped by to admonish them for answering questions from the
media. The group disbanded, all declining to give their names. 

The offending question: What's in the sandwiches? 
 

Also in today's Chron: a map showing the city's lowest voter turnout was in Bayview/Hunter's Point, and reports that the second-lowest turnout, by supervisorial district, was in our own District 6, which is SoMa and the Tenderloin. The District 6 Supervisor is Matt's friend and early endorser Chris Daly, so he and the downtown housing activists need to get it together downtown, and Matt needs to get his hip posterior out to community meetings in the Bayview, where he  ought to have more cred than Newsom on education, civil rights, and public services.

11/05/03 10:28 a.m.  (Link here.)

Oops, my mistake last night: Hallinan and Harris are in a runoff for DA. That one ain't over either, but at least the campaigns can shift a bit to the left: Fazio, eliminated in this round, was the conservative. What's a pity is, Fazio may very well have been the most competent of the three, but he would have been harder on what are basically crimes of status, like camping and intoxication. I wish we could have a DA who was both a solid competent prosecutor and primarily interested in going after crimes that have clear victims.

11/04/03 11:34 p.m.  (Linkhere.)

Well, tonight's news in San Francisco could be worse. Newsom takes first place but not the 50% that would avoid a runoff; Gonzalez wins the progressive primary for second place. Hallinan stays on as DA.

Newsom's anti-homeless Prop. M passes, probably because it was peddled with a simulacrum of compassion, though its practical effect will be to give more poor people two more things they can't eat or sleep under: criminal records, and referrals to overstuffed recovery programs.

Prop. H wins. Now, *that* is good. Finally bad cops are going to get some attention, and the mayor's direct control over the Police Commission is broken.

Dunno how Gonzalez will do against Newsom. In the last few weeks it was clear enough Gonzalez had the progressive momentum -- everyone at the Wednesday night Brainwash poetry open mike was for Gonzalez, in large part because he supported and valued artists, and had real cred as an artist himself -- but will Angela's old-line union supporters find the guy charming because he's in the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry with a memoir about Jack Micheline? I mean, anyone with a romantic streak or any sympathy for underdogs has to love the guy -- he's a walking illustration of Clarence Darrow's line about "inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet" -- but unfortunately, we need a majority.

11/04/03 2:24 p.m.  (Link here.)

Possibly encouraging: out at the Van Ness/Market and 10th/Market intersections during this morning's commute, there were Gonzalez people, Hallinan people, and our contingent with signs for Tom Ammiano, but no Newsom people.

Possibly not encouraging: at about 10:30 a.m., Joel and I were the 52nd and 53d voters in our South of Market precinct. That's low.

Meanwhile, one of the Ammiano people suggests persuasively that the bizarre recorded anti-Gonzalez phone call I got Thursday morning could have come from Alioto, not Newsom. Pure guesswork, but it's a good point that Alioto has more to lose from Gonzalez today, since they're competitors for the second-place slot to face Newsom in the runoff. It does make sense that Newsom would probably rather run against Gonzalez, who he can mock as a radical, than against Alioto, who has centrist old-labor kinds of backers.

11/03/03 4:10 p.m.  (Link here.)

So now Clear Channel DJ's are scapegoating the bicycle riders. That's an idea so absurd that its absurdity is part of a famous old joke against scapegoating. What a world.

11/02/03 10:00 p.m.  (Link here.)

Apparently the war was never over. KTVU, the San Francisco-area Fox affiliate, just ran an advance trailer for the evening news about the recent Iraq helicopter deaths, in "...one of the bloodiest days since the war began." 

11/02/03 7:47 p.m.  (Link here.)

Rachel Brahinsky of the SF Bay Guardian rightly catches the Prop. M campaign in a whopper: the second of two Prop. M flyers it has sent out (I discussed the first a few days ago) quotes the same spokesman, Dr. Rokeach, as saying: "Last year, 169 panhandlers died on our streets. It's time to stop defending the status quo." As Brahinsky notes correctly, this is ridiculous for uncountable reasons, the first being that we have no idea if the 169 people who died homeless last year had been begging or not.

I might add that this is a clever sneaky further attempt to elide "poor city resident" with "homeless person" with "annoying beggar". The elision even got by *me* on first reading -- and I know hundreds of homeless people who don't beg and at least one housed man who does. (Think about this: has a recycler pushing a cart ever asked you for anything?) 

Yes, "it's time to stop defending the status quo." It's time for a city affordable housing fund. It's time to require that developers include substantial numbers of affordable units in their projects. It's time to redefine "affordable": a lot of "affordable housing" in an expensive area like San Francisco is specifically targeted to incomes many times those of public benefit recipients. For example, in California, SSI is $836 for a single person without cooking facilities. This figure includes a relatively high state supplement that makes SSI benefits more "generous" than family welfare, and certainly higher than General Assistance, which in San Francisco is a "generous" benefit of up to $395 per month.

By contrast, as Brahinsky's story recounts, the "workforce housing" Newsom has in mind would serve a one-person household earning $76,850; two-person household at  $87,750, or three-person at $98,800.

Most ironic, this proposal calls for putting said housing in Dogpatch, which is the gentrifying district on the east side of Potrero Hill. I know a number of hard-working homeless people -- two of them union marine workers -- who have been kicked out of the Dogpatch neighborhood by relentless police harassment this past year. Who's going to house these real members of the workforce?
 
 

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