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

Sorry to let this space slide. Been caught up in the annual miracle of Festivus and also down with a cold. Re-emerging slightly to find a bit of good national news -- there's a special prosecutor in the Plame case and Halliburton has lost that fuel contract -- but also much worldwide disaster and what seems like an extra-high weird news quotient. E.g. the folks we trust to protect my mama and everyone else's from extremist maniacs are wasting their valuable time looking for people with almanacs. What is it with the FBI and almanacs? Woody Guthrie is dead, and so is Poor Richard. Haven't they heard?

Angela Alioto, meanwhile, had the unbelievable chutzpah to claim in Sunday's SF Chron that she won the election for Gavin Newsom when she more likely nearly lost it for him.

And someone has broken into our car again for the eighth time in seven years -- taking, apparently, nothing.

I don't understand this planet. If I was the groundhog I'd crawl back in my hole and hope to emerge in another six weeks to a world making a little more sense. Not that it's bleeding likely of course. 

12/25/03 11:09 p.m.  (Link here.)

Just Plain Strange just about describes most of Strange de Jim's website, but he does have a lot of the great one-liners that appeared as Herb Caen items back in the day. We've just been looking at his new photo history of the Castro District today. There's a picture of Tom Hayden in the '80s that highlights Hayden's resemblance (when younger) to Matt Gonzalez. I've been trying to convince Joel of this resemblance all year. He finally saw my point. (Ha.)

12/23/03 10:36 p.m.  (Link here.)

So if HUD has a Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse, why no There Oughta Be a Law Clearinghouse?

12/21/03 8:08 p.m.  (Link here.)

The Office of National Drug Control Policy is claiming an 11% decline in teenage drug use over the past two years and naturally it's taking credit for same. From director John Walters: 

 "This survey shows that when we push back against the drug problem, it gets smaller. Fewer teens are using drugs because of the deliberate and serious messages they have received about the dangers of drugs from their parents, leaders, and prevention efforts like our National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign...."

However, the Washington Post (c/o SF Chron) points out:

"...Other analysts cautioned that drug use is cyclic and that the survey may understate the problem because it relies on young people to report their own illegal behavior...."

12/20/03 10:02 p.m.  (Link here.)

OK, the reworked archive arrangement linked from the top of the left column here should be a little more practical for ongoing use but it means many links from one item to another will now come up empty. Still working on that part of the problem. 

Also, been reading Alan Bennett's "Talking Heads" monologues. They're a good tonic against too much use of the first person singular. For which apologies.

12/19/03 6:57 p.m.  (Link here.)

Sorry, in the previous post I was thinking of a different union building on Market that had the Newsom sign, but the Building and Construction Trades Council did endorse Newsom. And this Carpenters dispute with O'Donoghue looks like it has so much ugly subtext that I'm back to feeling more fretful than relieved about the whole Gonzalez endorsement thing. This was Matt Smith's take on the Carpenters ruckus last February. I don't know enough to say if Smith's article is fair, but at any rate the dispute sounds plenty nasty. 

BTW I'm guessing there is something to my early theory that Joe O'Donoghue endorsing Matt Gonzalez likely had something to do with Chris Daly. Chris has for some time been one of the few progressives able to get along with O'Donoghue, but I hadn't realized he had actually "brokered a deal" with O'Donoghue and the Tenderloin Housing Clinic on some apartments South of Market. (Then again, this is the Examiner talking. Another Examiner reporter, J.K. Dineen, wrote two articles about a client of mine a few months ago and nearly every paragraph contained a mistake.)

Hm. Or maybe Randy Shaw had something to do with this. Just below some of Mr. O'Donoghue's poetry on the rhetorically extravagant Residential Builders Association website, here's a text attributed to Randy Shaw of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, dated last summer, that denigrates accusations of corruption against both O'Donoghue and Walter Wong. Especially interesting because Walter Wong was the other incongruous Gonzalez endorser and concomitantly the landlord of the main Gonzalez campaign headquarters. 

I generally get along well with Randy Shaw. I've had many close associations with the Tenderloin Housing Clinic as a poverty lawyer. In fact one of my clients still receives services from that office. But, good grief, now I'm curious to know just who is supporting whom on what, and why.

And I'm connecting a few other dots here too: That poll call I got a few days ago had questions slanted against Chris Daly and against Supervisorial district elections, and then there were two questions, puzzling at the time, about support for unions and household membership in unions. Hmmmm, now...  maybe in the next election they'll try to to link Chris Daly with Joe O'Donoghue and, by implication, with "anti-labor" attitudes?

Or maybe I'm reading too much into that poll?

12/19/03 4:18 p.m.  (Link here.)

I'm belatedly catching up, via vanity googling, to a post by Blogger for Matt Memory and Desire that cited my own item on the Joe O'Donoghue endorsement of Matt Gonzalez but also provided a possible motive for O'Donoghue's move. Maybe I'm the last to know about this, but according to a column M&D found here, Mr. O'Donoghue has been in a prolonged tiff with the Building and Construction Trades Council and the Carpenters Union, and wasn't that their building on Market Street with the big Newsom sign on the front?

In a weird way this is a relief. When Joe O'Donoghue, the notorious proponent of our '90s loft boom, decided to endorse Matt Gonzalez, the anti-downtown, anti-developer candidate, the natural question to ask was which one had sold out his ostensible ideals. 

Now it seems O'Donoghue was just playing the old enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend game, which makes it more likely Gonzalez was telling the truth when he said he hadn't made O'Donoghue any promises. Situation normal. Thank goodness.

12/19/03 3:58 p.m.  (Linkhere.)

To their credit, I hear the Chronicle guys who wrote the "Shame of the City" homelessness series responded in an open-minded and conciliatory way to some activists who staged a protest at an exhibit of their photos yesterday. They were also good enough to write about the episode in which a maker of pre-fabricated emergency housing tried to give the Silvers a house but found nowhere he would be permitted to set it down.

Nevertheless, I can't avoid hooting at the following in today's news story about Christmas gifts to the Silver family, whose life in a van formed the They're Not All Bad part of the series:

Even the police, who often have to order the car-camping homeless of the city to move along, pitched in. Three officers recently brought two gift certificates -- $50 for each child -- to Toys R Us. A paramedic also dropped by with a ball for Tommy and a set of bubbles and a comb for Ashley. 

I wonder if these are the same Bayview Station officers who have made people terrified and sick and miserable by waking them in late-night raids with shouting and bright lights and warrant checks and baton blows that dent trailer doors, and by taking away their RVs in pretextual towing binges, sometimes forcing them to camp in lean-tos in the rain.

I wonder if one of these kind Police Department donors was the same kind police officer who made an example of a homeless-rights activist last summer (disclosure: the activist is also my client) by ordering her out of her van at four in the morning, refusing to let her dress or put on eyeglasses or shoes, taking her to Bayview Station on Williams Street, and citing her out of that place before daylight -- accused of the heinous crime of using a vehicle for human habitation -- and saying it wasn't his problem what happened to her on the walk home through those dangerous streets in pyjamas and sock feet in the dark. 

(NB: In areas that are not zoned residential, San Francisco Municipal Police Code Sec. 97 bars habitation only of certain kinds of vehicles only between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. -- a fact not made clear on the many "no vehicle habitation" signs posted throughout the Dogpatch and Bayview neighborhoods. It is my interpretation that vans like the one the Silvers occupy, and the one my client occupied last summer, are not among the kinds of vehicles in which habitation is banned. Besides which, I think any resident of a vehicle in San Francisco is probably eligible for a necessity defense under In re Eichorn, 69 Cal.App.4th 382 (1998).)

I have an idea for the Kevin Fagan - Brant Ward team: they can loan cell phones and maybe video cameras to homeless people for the next few cold rainy weeks and make themselves available by telephone overnight -- as I have been for more than a year now -- so that, when one of these raids happens, they can be called in quickly to help document the harm to people's living conditions and nerves. Actually, by doing this they could really help make the holidays more pleasant, or at least less frightening, for a lot of poor people, because when officers know that their behavior will have multiple witnesses, they tend to show much more respect for the law and the Constitution.

12/18/03 2:29 p.m.  (Link here.)

This Craigslist ad distills the way our publishing industry disserves both writers and the public.

"A marketing company purchases reprint rights for articles from magazines and newspapers on a wide range of subjects, for use in branded publications. Subjects include food, wine, health and fitness, lifestyle tips, and travel. No entertainment profiles, technology, politics, poetry or fiction...."

12/18/03 10:57 a.m.  (Link here.)

The Gonzalez campaign's Marc Salomon is complaining that the Department of Elections mailed out the absentee ballots for the mayoral runoff a week before they said they would. The Newsom people knew; the Gonzalez people didn't. That gave the Newsom people a head start rounding up the early vote.

And I believe this is not the last complaint you will see about absentee ballots. 

12/17/03 6:20 p.m.  (Link here.)

Demisemiblog has a mention in this Bay Guardian editorial, which naturally I think is brilliantly written.

But seriously, Redmond is raising the current biggest SF question: how to hold the Gonzalez coalition together now the election's over. Already I feel funny keeping a "Bloggers for Matt" link on this site as though the next mayoral campaign had already started four years early.

As Redmond also notes, the group backing Gonzalez wasn't exclusively Green. Actually it seemed like the usual progressive/activist coalition of Democratic-wing Democrats and Greens augmented by moderates fed up with corruption and newcomers to electoral politics who liked the candidate himself.

Now to define a new purpose the Gonzalez coalition can agree on that isn't either Green-only or Gonzalez-only. 

Maybe it needs a new name. Progressive Coalition? Clean Government Coalition? (Does "clean government" sound too wonky?) Take Back SF? (Too angry?) I'd suggest "Sunshine Coalition," in honor of Justice Brandeis' "sunshine is the best disinfectant," but that's probably too hippy-dippy.

C'mon, help me out. I'm not a sloganeer or a party leader, but someone who is could pick this up and run with it.

12/17/03 2:27 p.m.  (Link here.)

My husband must be on a list of people who give good quote. He gets a lot of poll calls. Several weeks ago there was a call that had something to do with a Showplace Square development proposal. Best he remembers it, they told him some nice things about what the project would do and asked if he would approve, so he said something like yeah, well, sure, I suppose so.

He got an envelope postmarked December 9 from Bill Poland of the Bay West Group, beginning this way:

I want to thank you for supporting our plan to construct mixed-use housing in the Showplace Square neighborhood at the bottom of Potrero Hill.

Bay West recently contacted you by phone to ask your opinion of our two proposed residential projects at 801 Brannan (the current site of the Concourse Exhibit Hall) and at One Henry Adams Street (on the block bounded by Division, Rhode Island, Alameda and Henry Adams streets) and you responded favorably.

The benefits to the neighborhood and local residents will be overwhelming. If approved, these projects will provide approximately 700 units of for-sale and rental dwelling units for working San Franciscans and their families. These buildings will enliven local streets with residential, retail and commercial entrances. This in turn will make the area a safer and cleaner place to live and work. The projects will be in keeping with existing building heights and will protect existing views. Design showrooms will be incorporated into the projects and they will help provide new open space and pedestrian/bicycle passageways, as well as many new jobs.

Support from neighborhood residents like you will be critical to winning city approval for our plans. As such, I ask that you fill out the enclosed support card and drop it in the mail. I've taken care of the postage..."

My aforementioned spouse says he has no idea if he supports the proposal or not, since he was given a very narrow picture of it. And it's a little weird that we're described as "neighborhood residents." We must live half a mile north of there.

My own view is, wait and see, but I'm not inclined to do any favors for developers in Showplace Square without knowing more, for a rather specific reason: While we do need traditional housing desperately, we also need tolerance for people living in non-traditional housing in the mean time, and over the past year, especially late last winter, I talked with some people living in vehicles who had been pretty nastily cop-harried out of that same flatland area north of Potrero Hill. Their strong impression was that the police were "cleaning up" the area in preparation for some kind of development.

Maybe these developers want to get vehicle campers out of their damp chilly RVs and into good decent housing. But knowing how this stuff works, I bet they'd rather fill that housing with tech workers who can afford $2000 rents or $3000 mortgages. 

No, I don't know what Showplace Square did or didn't have to do with this past year's campaign against inhabited vehicles. But they'll get my support only when they promise to house some people who are actually poor, and/or when they oppose these police clearances of vehicle campers. 

This past year, police officers have used tow trucks, threats, and midnight raids to drive nearly all inhabited vehicles out of the area between Seventh and Tenth north of Potrero Hill. The campers are hanging by their fingernails in Dogpatch, and pressure has increased even on households camping in the lonely warehouse streets south of Cesar Chavez St. Just last week a client said she guessed they were trying to force inhabited vehicles all the way south to the San Mateo County line.

For other descriptions of the Showplace Square project, scroll down to "S" in the alphabetical list here. Another description is in this Potrero Boosters newsletter.

12/16/03 8:22 p.m.  (Link here.)

Get a Salon pass and read this article on what happened in Miami. 

As an experienced legal observer at protests, I find it both insulting and cause for concern that Miami officers were reportedly taught to regard legal observers as having the purpose of provoking officers. That is not the purpose of observing. The purpose is primarily to observe police conduct, and secondarily to make clear to officers that any misconduct will be documented. A good observer takes care not to behave provocatively. True, I have seen people with video cameras at protests asking rude questions, but they are not the serious lawyers and law students who do this work properly. Obviously, officers who obey the law have no reason to find notebooks or cameras provoking. In fact, they should welcome independent documentation as a protection against false accusations, and for good measure they should videotape the same events themselves to guard against the possibility of selective reporting by others. 

Ironically, when I first started wearing the green protest-observer armband ten years ago, I understood it to convey a kind of semi-neutral status -- not quite a press pass, but still a signal that the wearer would be only watching, not causing trouble. Strange how they've turned that on its head.

It is beginning to look like there will be a special need for socially respectable, politically moderate observers at the 2004 convention protests. The presence of lawyers, professors, legislators, journalists, and middle-class concerned citizens doesn't prevent police misconduct, but it does mean their testimony will be believed afterwards.

12/16/03 11:51 a.m.  (Link here.)

Saleswoman of sex aids singled out for arrest, possibly because she dared to join the Chamber of Commerce in Cleburne, Texas. They do say that place is hell on horses and women.

12/14/03 10:10 a.m.  (Link here.)

Lookit: A group of liberal A-list webloggers who accept advertising are putting pressure on an advertiser -- in this case, Senator Kerry -- and not vice versa. I don't know enough to comment on this particular issue, but the new political pressure tactic is interesting.  It seems politicians now need the Internet, and the gatekeepers of Internet political buzz are figuring out how to use their positions.

12/13/03 11:11 p.m.  (Link here.)

Whaddaya know: the California Urban Issues Project finds its way into a Bay Guardian article listing possible concerns about campaign finance ethics in the recent election.

12/13/03 10:45 p.m.  (Link here.)

In the last days before San Francisco's mayoral runoff election, someone who could afford focus groups was already preparing a next move.

On December 5, I got a polling call from one Colleen Sullivan of Corey Research. Some of her questions had to do with rent control, and whether it was a good idea to support labor unions. Also, after confirming I lived in District Six, she asked several about Chris Daly -- including one with a long pejorative description of his PUC shenanigan that led me to suggest she was pulling a push poll.

But the sharpest, most detailed questioning had to do with -- get this -- abolishing district elections.

Following is the best I can reconstruct of the poll from quick notes. All parenthetical comments below are my own.

The poll asked for ratings of two ballot measures that "may appear on next year's ballot." One was a murkily phrased measure on "preserving" rent control. The other was to change the method by which the San Francisco Supervisors were elected, to make each Supervisor elected citywide.

Then some individual questions:

- Was the Board of Supervisors (as a whole!) doing an "excellent, fair, or poor job"? (Silly question. It's like asking, "Do you see any point in having a legislative branch?")

- In the Sixth District, how well was Chris Daly doing?

- "In the era of high technology," did we need a computer network to run something or other better (sorry, I don't remember the question well, but I do remember it wasn't clear).

- Since the Supervisors had recently "taken" a "300% pay raise," should their pay be reduced by 30%?

- True or false, "Politicians will be more representative" if required to run citywide --? (False!)

- Was it a good thing to "support union businesses and workers"?

- "The way we elect supervisors in San Francisco has been a political hot button for years," and something about was it time for a change? (Misleading question. District elections mean more democracy, and democracy is always an uncomfortable hot button for people who prefer centralized boss politics. So, no, it's not time for a change. It's time to defend the district election system we've got.)

- True or false, "I'd like to be able to vote for all eleven supervisors instead of just one."

Next the poll asked for opinions on the persuasiveness of arguments made by "people opposed to" changing the law to elect supervisors citywide:

- "Candidates tend to live in the same neighborhoods" when elections are citywide.

- "District elections give you a stronger voice at City Hall."

- District elections force supervisors to run in neighborhood elections.

- The district election system "empowers neighborhoods."

- The district election system helps people who couldn't win otherwise.

- District elections lessen the power of downtown interests. (It probably wasn't put that clearly.)

- A better quality of candidates.

- A limited number of candidates (not sure if I remember this one correctly).

- The requirement of more votes necessitating broader support for each candidate.

- (Sorry, I missed one here. "Cuts down the possibility" of something.)

- "Eliminates petty conflicts."

- "Forces Supervisors to think about city interests first."

- Gives voters a say in electing all 11 Supervisors.

Then, a request for comments on several versions of a measure to change the Supervisors' electoral system, all of them tending more toward at-large voting, and hence toward weakening the power of individual neighborhoods. The suggestions:

- Have all 11 Supervisors elected at large.

- Keep the districts and require one Supervisor to live in each district, but still have each Supervisor run at large. (Silly idea: when Willie Brown sent a puppet of his to live in District Six and run against Chris Daly, that didn't make the man likely to represent a bunch of new neighbors he didn't even bother to meet.)

- Keep the district elections, but reduce the number to five.

Finally, the caller asked about willingness to participate in a focus group. 

Actually a few years ago my husband joined two paid focus groups at Corey Research, one on the appeal of beer labels to thirtysomething male professionals, and one on the image of Mayor Willie L. Brown, Jr.

No, I don't know who commissioned this most recent poll.

--

So, well, it's no surprise that the Brown machine is trying to retake the Board, but it's audacious -- and, among other things, an insult to Harvey Milk's memory --  to try and undo district elections so soon after we got them back.

Listen, if you're asked to sign any ballot measure petitions in the next three months or so, read them damn carefully.

12/13/03 12:43 a.m.  (Link here.)

Interesting new kinds of strikes: 

In California, Latino shopkeepers and shoppers and hotel and restaurant workers and even schoolchildren staying home to protest Schwarzenegger's veto of driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants. (No word whether Mr. Newsom's PlumpJack operations were affected.)

In Italy, TV viewers switching off the idiot box, going out in the evening to other entertainments, and taking their remote controls with them.

12/12/03 3:14 p.m.  (Link here.)

Out poll-watching this past Tuesday, documenting the big guys in the late-model vans with the Newsom or A. Philip Randolph Institute signs, I kept thinking about the sadder moments of the 1959 Bock/Harnick musical Fiorello! which I learned to love as a pit orchestra player in high school (thank you again, Mr. Gerstein!).

The great thing about that show is, it puts the emphasis and time into LaGuardia's first, unsuccessful, 1929 run against Gentleman Jimmy Walker, when LaGuardia was a scrappy activist lawyer and junior Congressman from Greenwich Village challenging the elegant incumbent machine mayor of New York City.

We all know Walker was eventually disgraced, and Fiorello LaGuardia went on to become New York City's greatest mayor to date, so it's instructive to see in the musical how tough things looked for him in the early days.

I can't find any of the lyrics in full online. This review gives a little sense of their spirit. Otherwise I'll have to recite from memory, forgetting a lot and probably getting stuff wrong. 

This is from "On The Side Of The Angels," the group number about LaGuardia's law office:
 

[Client 1:] "I don't wanna go to jail!"
[Client 2:] "Tell me what I gotta do!"
[Client 3:]  "I'm in such a lotta trouble!"
[All:] "I need relief: That's why I come to you!"

[LaG's sidekick:] 
"Your life is an island of grief
surrounded by woe
when you choose to work on the side of the angels....

...[I forget part of it]....
...Here's one more client!
It's a regular wailing wall --
penniless and helpess
ignorant and scared.
He collects them all..."
....

"Live and let live
Love and let love
That's what Jimmy tells the world 
wherever he goes:

[up-tempo here]

Who's that dapper gentleman with the 
silk hat,
gray spats
[da, da,
da da]
Gentleman Jimmy
[da da da -- da da -- da!]..."

[Solo:] "I can see Your Honor doesn't pull his punches
and it looks a trifle fishy, I'll admit
but for one whole week I didn't eat my lunches
and it mounted up, your honor, bit by bit."

[Chorus:] "Up your honor bit by bit

In -- 

a -- 

little tin box
a little tin box
a little tin [da da da da (sorry)]
There is something delectable
almost respectable
about a little tin box!"

Sooner or later, the side of the angels does have all the good songs. 

There's hope.

12/12/03 11:26 a.m.  (Link here.)

The most upsetting part of this SF Chron story on the denial of tenure to biotech industry critic Ignacio Chapela is the UC-Berkeley spokesman casually calling it a "personnel decision."

Calling a tenure denial a "personnel decision" is demeaning both to the professors involved and to the university community. In a healthy, free university, the professors are in charge as the co-managers of their departments. If the professors are mere "personnel," then they're not partners running their departments. In which case, who is running their departments?

After reading this article, one wonders even more.

12/11/03 1:03 p.m.  (Link here.)

OK, I'm cheering up a little about progressive politics and southeastern San Francisco. I had to go see a client about a dog this morning (no, really, I did), misunderstood her directions, and ended up driving around the Bayview & up on the Hunter's Point hill, in a much more relaxed frame of mind than on Tuesday. Lots of Gonzalez signs still up, pretty well distributed really, though I think more on the flatlands and waterfront than on the hill or inland. And while I don't agree with everything in the San Francisco Bay View, it was further encouraging to pick up the editor's post-election editorial:

...Young people who never voted before have joined the movement. I had the honor of driving three young folks, age 18 and 19, to the polls today. The Democratic Party should see this as a wake-up call....

At the risk of stating what's bleeding obvious to everyone else, I learned this week that District 10 needs higher voter turnouts and lower rates of election irregularity, and that when the same happens, it's likely to help with the needs we all knew about, like high-paying jobs and law-abiding teenagers and policemen.

12/11/03 9:53 a.m.  (Link here.)

But of course the DLC is crazy about Gavin Newsom. That's exactly what's wrong with the DLC. Note, however, that I said "the DLC," not, as the Chronicle did, "the Democrats." To steal Paul Wellstone's line yet again, there's a Democratic wing to the Democratic Party.

12/10/03 11:58 p.m.  (Link here.)

All right, one of the Gonzalez GOTV people has written to dispute what I've said about Bayview/Hunter's Point. And I suppose I don't know the full picture. I only know I was out yesterday in southeastern precincts where the Newsom presence was much stronger than the Gonzalez presence although the people in those precincts were not, in general, rich. 

12/10/03 11:04 a.m.  (Link here.)

Matt Gonzalez lost the San Francisco mayoral election because he didn't show enough attention or respect to black people in the southeastern neighborhoods that are still deeply segregated. This is not just my own opinion, and anyway it's obvious from the turnout figures. So most people there either didn't vote or let Willie Brown's machine bring them in for the greater glory of the boy from Pacific Heights. 

So now we'll get more of the same corruption, and quite likely also an escalation of human rights violations in the name of public order by public employees of a city that outsiders will continue to describe as "liberal." 

12/08/03 7:22 p.m.  (Link here.)

A borderline case of astroturf (as in fake grassroots): 

A Kamala Harris flyer got here in today's mail with a red strip across the bottom reading: "Renters Alert: The Affordable Housing Alliance endorses Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris is the renters' choice." I don't know who "the renters" are, then.

I gather the Affordable Housing Alliance is a real organization, but three years ago the Bay Guardian said:

Once a legitimate tenant advocacy group, the AHA does little these days except endorse candidates and send out mailers during election season. Numerous well-known tenant activists say the AHA reflexively promotes the candidates of the Willie Brown machine ? no matter where they stand on tenant issues.

Just FYI, if there is any single group that can claim to speak for "the renters" (which I doubt), it's probably the San Francisco Tenants' Union, which has endorsed Hallinan.

12/08/03 11:27 a.m.  (Link here.)

Dan Strickland, AKA Testpattern , would be glad to hear from anyone who has saved answering machine messages from the CUIP or otherwise received interesting material supporting the Newsom campaign. His posted email address is <info@testpattern.org>.

12/07/03 4:16 p.m.  (Link here.)

Testpattern has spotted an article in the Chronicle Friday discussing the "California Urban Issues Project" as putting out what look like campaign ads except that, while the messages criticize Gonzalez, they carefully don't urge any particular vote in the mayoral race. 

12/07/03 2:43 p.m.  (Link here.)

From Brian Murphy of the San Francisco Urban Institute:

The San Francisco Urban Institute is a nonpartisan public policy research and action project of San Francisco State, with administrative responsibility for the university's community service learning programs, the administrative coordination of San Francisco Head Start, and the coordination of the university's many partnerships in the city. The Institute does not take partisan positions on local elections, and does not lobby on behalf of candidates. 

The Urban Institute is not affiliated in any way with the "California Urban Issues Project," which appears to be an independent expenditures committee engaged in both print mailings and phone spam on behalf of local candidates.

12/06/03 11:02 p.m.  (Linkhere.)

Hotel Infinity Is Not In San Francisco

The basic Gavin Newsom message about homelessness -- that he's got something new, and Gonzalez represents existing "failed policies" -- is hooey.

It's Newsom who represents what Mayors Jordan and Brown tried without success: punishing people for living outdoors, and trying to cram them all into the latest too-small Hotel Infinity. Gonzalez has called for actually building housing, spending money on coordinated services rather than punishment, and cooperating with other local governments. Those aren't new suggestions, but they haven't been properly tried because the last two mayors decided it was easier to believe in Hotel Infinity.

Lemme explain:

"Hotel Infinity" is a mathematical thought-experiment for teaching children about the mathematical significance of the infinite. The basic idea is that, if the Hotel Infinity already has an infinite number of guests, the desk clerk can always make space for one more by asking each of the existing guests to move one door down. I read about it as a kid in a book by Martin Gardner. A writer named Nancy Casey has elaborated a nice version of the story here. (In which it is suggested that maybe there'd be a problem with an infinite number of infinitely large buses full of guests. Well, nothing's perfect.)

"Hotel Infinity" has also been my private nickname for the Same Old Basic Homelessness Plan ever since Frank Jordan called it the Matrix Plan. Back then, the Hotel Infiinity was the Mission Hotel. The Matrix project sent out teams of social workers backed by cops, with the idea that the social workers would talk to street sleepers about coming to the Mission Hotel for a nice warm bed, and if the people didn't want to come along the carefully unstated implication was that the cops might check them out for warrants or arrest them for obstructing the sidewalk or something. There were about 50 rooms available in the Mission Hotel, and there were several thousand people living homeless in San Francisco even as of the early '90s. Each lucky guest brought in by the social workers got a week in the Mission Hotel, and then it was time to move elsewhere to make room for more lucky guests. Elsewhere was sometimes, with the social workers' help, a little nicer than a sidewalk, but the slight improvement didn't necessarily last. The finite size of the Mission Hotel -- and not the recalcitrance of poor people -- is why the Matrix Plan didn't work.

Under Brown, Hotel Infinity has come to be the Seneca Hotel on Sixth Street and a handful of other SRO hotels that are master-leased by Tenderloin Housing Clinic to provide aid in kind to County Adult Assistance Program recipients who otherwise would not be able to afford monthly rent on a residential hotel room for a whole month. (It was in the early Brown years that rents for non-subsidized, non-rent-controlled hotel rooms, even in the crappiest flophouses you can imagine, exceeded the neighborhood of $300-400 per month, which is where the city welfare benefit for a single adult peters out. There are now people paying $800 and more for roach-infested hall bedrooms.) The Seneca and the other master-leased buildings are reputed to be real success stories, really not bad places. As far as they go. The thing is, they are finite. They serve a limited number of people pretty nicely, and everyone else is up a creek.

Now this Care Not Cash thing is set up once again to offer homeless people a distressingly finite number of rooms (or cots, or floor spaces in shelters, I gather), and then punish anyone who has the temerity not to fit into this finite number of spaces.

Hotel Infinity does not exist. It is fictional. And odd as it may seem, no administration for the past dozen years has come to terms with that fact. No administration has put its energy primarily into creating more housing and coordinating services intelligently rather than trying to harass poor people out of town or into nonexistent hotel rooms.

Newsom has a plan, yes. He's got another Hotel Infinity plan. We know about those. They don't work.

What the city needs is a finite but larger number of cheap rooms and apartments, and a mayor who doesn't believe in convenient fictions.

12/06/03 6:51 p.m.  (Link here.)

Well, this afternoon I got around to checking the return address on the "California Urban Issues Project" mailers, which is 41 Sutter St., Suite 1483 (see Testpattern's facsimiles). Two people had written to me saying "Suite 1483" was a mailbox, not an office. Correspondent #15, for example, wrote:

I have received at least two mailers and I honestly do not how many calls, but certainly more than 3. 

I was so irritated I finally walked out of my flat in North Beach to find the Urban Issues Project. I went to 41 Sutter St. Suite 1483. There is no physiacl [sic] office space. The "suite" is a mailbox the size you find at a Postal Annex. The security guard in the lobby said he did not know who they were. 

Of course it's just barely possible that my correspondents have somehow misunderstood the situation and Suite 1483 is on one of those six upper floors, but it's also quite possible that "Suite 1483" is best measured in inches, and either the "Sally Smith" who left this message for Testpattern and the "Susan Smith" who left this message for him are very tiny people indeed, or they are probably employed at some other address.

Certainly that building looked awfully quiet for the office of a political organization on the weekend before an election.
 

* Ironic: I would have enjoyed visiting 41 Sutter St. much more under other circumstances. It looks like someone made an attempt there -- probably seventy years ago or more -- to re-create in San Francisco the kinds of "arcades" that Walter Benjamin loved in Paris because they represented the full jostling diversity of culture, economics and status that makes a great city -- exactly the kind of tolerated difference that suffers when big business and government get together to prettify urban downtowns by making poor people unwelcome.

12/06/03 2:38 p.m.  (Link here.)

Testpattern has put up a sponsored link to his pro-Gonzalez page that appears on Google when you search for "California Urban Issues Project."

12/06/03 1:26 p.m.  (Link here.)

Interesting: here's a website for one Frank Fudem, of BT Commercial Real Estate, who describes himself as a commercial real estate broker in San Francisco who "has represented local and national tenants in millions of square feet of successful negotiations with an aggregate value exceeding $500 million." He notes board of directors memberships in several political/civic organizations representing downtown San Francisco businesses, and among these he states, "Board of Political Action Committee of BOMA (Building Owners and Managers Association) and California Urban Issues P.A.C." 

I do not, repeat, do not know if the "California Urban Issues P.A.C." is the same as the "California Urban Issues Project," but it seems like something worth checking.

12/06/03 1:26 p.m.  (Link here.)

The Bay Guardian's Tim Redmond got a "California Urban Issues Project" call too. Here's what he found out.

12/05/03 7:37 p.m.  (Link here.)

I just heard from correspondent #15 about more aggravating phone calls and messages from the "California Urban Issues Project." Meanwhile, it looks like the Bay Guardian also found the CUIP's filing at the Secretary of State's office.

[UPDATE: Oops, sorry, I meant to thank #15 for pointing me to the Guardian article]

To recap, what I know is that the lawyers involved are at two heavy-hitting political firms: Remcho, Johansen and Purcell, and Sutton & Partners. The group is registered as a lobbyist, not a campaign consultant, candidate, or independent expenditure committee. At the Ethics Commission, one filing by the organization is signed by Nathan Nayman, the executive director of the Committee on Jobs (at least, that was his title as of last year), and the organization reports its officers include John Hutar, who is president of the SF Hotel Council. I've discussed this material over the last few days in a couple of series of posts, findable here and here. 

All in all, it's not surprising that the standard downtown and anti-homeless players are involved. What's surprising is that they're being so sneaky about it. Three of my correspondents have now confirmed receiving phone calls from the "California Urban Issues Project" that show up on Caller ID as coming from "1-333-444-5555."

12/05/03 4:47 p.m.  (Link here.)

Well, the chat with the Silvers, which will probably be posted here soon, took a tawdry Jerry Springer turn. I participated, trying to send the conversation in a better direction, but I don't feel like I helped really. It's amazing how some people feel like anyone who's poor owes them an explanation of every decision in their whole life.

12/05/03 1:42 p.m.  (Link here.)

Some people who really do know a thing or two about homelessness staged a protest at the Chronicle yesterday over its "Shame of the City" series. This paragraph about sums up my own reaction to the series as a whole:

They said that while some of the series was positive -- including parts that talked about the need for more supportive housing -- the overall image of homeless people in the stories and photographs was derogatory. 

First I heard of this was a phone call from another activist saying the Chron reporters and a television truck were down at the end of 24th street with a truck trying to deliver some kind of "tool shed" to the Silver family. He was asking me to come down right away because, based on long experience, he expected that the combination of homeless people and publicity would get somebody arrested imminently. I was out until late and didn't get the message in time, but fortunately nobody did get arrested as far as I know.

Anyway, this shed-delivery business sounded weird enough that yesterday I went over and introduced myself to Kim Silver. (Disclosure: I was in the neighborhood on the way back from assisting a client with a court appearance. The client happens to be a friend of the Silvers, and the activist who phoned me the day before had been ready to appear as a witness in the same case.) 

Mrs. Silver said what actually happened was that an experimental builder who makes modular "Chuckhouses" learned of her family's situation from the Chronicle and decided to offer them one of his creations. She showed me the brochure and let me copy down the address for the company's website. She said that -- as anyone familiar with the troubles of Potrero vehicular residents could predict -- the Port Commission and Sheedy Drayage wouldn't allow the Chuckhouse guy to set down the building. She said the Chuckhouse people were checking around to try and get some kind of permit.

Well, of course. What the bleeding hell else did they expect? This had me literally jumping up and down in front of Mrs. Silver's van window, which must have looked strange to anyone passing. 

The problem in San Francisco is always getting land and permission to build, not finding structures. For the last five or six years, there have been a succession of efforts to arrange a piece of land where people could camp in vehicles free from constant police harassment. The Coalition on Homelessness worked closely for a while with a group called the Vehicularly Housed Residents Association, and many of the same people -- including a lot of the folks I've already mentioned here -- got involved more recently with Mobile Residents for Civil Rights. I helped found this newer group but have since decided to back off from organizing and stick to legal work on the issue.

I'm especially amused that anyone even remotely thought Sheedy Drayage would voluntarily let homeless people live in anything like a pleasant situation on its property. Sheedy is notorious among trailer residents for calling the cops to tow inhabited vehicles from the streets around its property, while parking its own heavy equipment along the public streets for months on end without consequences.

The people who have worked constructively to find a place for vehicular residents to live in peace on specially reserved property are the same people who have been demonized by the Chronicle and the Newsom crowd as blindly endorsing disorder.

If the folks who worked on this Chron series really want to do some good for homeless people, they could start by pressing for some places to put these Chuckhouses, or for that matter the small houses developed by minor mayoral candidate Jim Reid. As Reid has pointed out repeatedly, San Francisco is still dotted with "earthquake cottages" that were built side by side in public parks to house people made homeless by the 1906 Earthquake and Fire.

But I wonder if the "Chuckhouse" episode will get any coverage at all.

By the way, Mrs. Silver said that a few days after she visited the Housing Authority with the Chronicle in tow, a possibility did come through for the family to move into some decent rebuilt public housing. Glad there's a happy ending in this for someone. That's one household. Only 6,000 or more left to go.
 

12/04/03 3:41 p.m.  (Link here.)

Jim Sutton, the political attorney who filed two lobbyist disclosure forms for the "California Urban Issues Project" on October 15 (see previous item below), is described at the end of the Chronicle's "Campaign Notebook" today as "Jim Sutton, an attorney for the Newsom campaign." He's in the article because he's quoted as criticizing the Gonzalez campaign over allegedly inadequate donor disclosures.

12/04/03 10:45 a.m.  (Link here.)

Here's a better link to testpattern's recordings of the "Sally Smith" and "Susan Smith" calls.

I went to the Ethics Commission and looked at the papers filed in July and August by the "California Urban Issues Project" and the "Urban Issues Project," which was apparently the same thing before a name change. 

The people and entities I can identify that are connected with the "California Urban Issues Project" are political lawyers, lobbyists, and downtown business and anti-homeless political players

The filings describe the entity as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. 

The earliest filing, on July 16 for the second quarter of 2003 in the name of the "Urban Issues Project," is signed by "Nathan Nayman, Director." As of the publication of this Examiner editorial last fall, Nathan Nayman was executive director of the Committee on Jobs, a San Francisco political organization representing some of the city's largest employers. This July filing gives two phone numbers for the "Urban Issues Project." One goes to the San Leandro offices of Remcho, Johansen & Purcell. The other goes to the San Francisco offices of Barnes Mosher Whitehurst Lauter & Partners, a "political consulting, public affairs and lobbying firm" informally known as "BMW." This filing says that in April, May and June 2003, the "Urban Issues Project" paid $35,000 to BMW for "Production of Care Not Cash implementation television ad," and $30,000 to Comcast Cable TV for "Airing of Care Not Cash implementation television ad."

On October 15 the Urban Issues Project amended its earlier filing by stating a name change to "California Urban Issues Project." This time the signer is James R. Sutton, and the phone number and address given for the organization are his. It names the officers of the organization as Donna Crowder, David Heller, John Hutar, Chris Wright, and Ken Zenkal. I can't identify most of these, but John Hutar was as of August '03 the president of the Hotel Council, and as such was quoted in the Chronicle in an article on complaints from Matt Gonzalez about the Hotel Council's anti-homeless advertising campaign. This supplemental filing states the "total amount of payments to influence local legislative or administrative action" as $51,500. The issue sought to be influenced by the $51,500 is described as "Care Not Cash implementation," but there is no further explanation of how the money was spent. Unclear if the supplemental filing means the organization spent less than the $65,000 it originally reported, or whether the $51,500 was an additional amount. 

Also on October 15, the California Urban Issues Project filed its third-quarter report, for July through September 2003. This one is likewise signed by Mr. Sutton, with contact information given as his own address and phone number. It says in the third quarter the organization paid $14,490.50 to BMW for "Production of Care Not Cash implementation television ad" and $13,269.25 to Comcast Cable TV for "Airing of Care Not Cash implementation ad."

Nothing in any of this about where the organization's money comes from.

Also nothing in any of this about the phone calls or mailings -- but that's not entirely surprising, since all the phone calls and mailings I know of took place in the fourth quarter of 2003, and fourth-quarter reports for "expenditure lobbyists" like CUIP are not due until January 15, which of course is after the election.

12/03/03 12:54 a.m.  (Linkhere.)

"Testpattern" now has three political messages from his answering machine online, including a "Susan Smith" and a "Sally Smith" message, both of which sound familiar from descriptions people have sent me, like this one.

12/03/03 11:24 a.m.  (Link here.)

More on the "California Urban Issues Project":  Gonzalez campaign volunteer Douglas Beach wrote last night linking the organization to political attorney Jim Sutton. I now have separate confirmation of same from the San Francisco Ethics Commission. 

According to Commission staff, the California Urban Issues Project has not filed any campaign expenditure reports or independent expenditure reports in the campaign finace category. 

However, the Commission's website shows the CUIP is a registered lobbyist with the city. As such it must file a lobbyist registration form. 

I couldn't get full information about the form over the phone, but they did tell me the name of the person signing the form, which is James R. Sutton, "attorney/agent for filer." There is no address given for him, but the address given for the CUIP (by the way, this is the third address we've gotten for this entity) is 731 Sansome St., 5th Floor, San Francisco, CA  94111. This is a familiar address to me because it turned up in some research I did in October on the committee that was backing Newsom's anti-homeless Proposition M. (See the indented part of my October 27 post.) The California Political Attorneys' Association membership list gives 731 Sansome as the address for Sutton & Partners, PC., and that is also the address on Mr. Sutton's State Bar membership record. The telephone number on the form is that of Sutton & Partners.

Under the "lobbyist" heading is something called an "expenditure lobbyist." Per the Commission's Lobbyist Manual, 

An individual or entity qualifies as an expenditure lobbyist if the individual or entity spends, directly or indirectly, more than $3,200 within any three consecutive months to influence local legislative or administrative action. Payments made to contract lobbyists and other paid advocates do not count toward the $3200 threshold. Similarly, dues payments, donations, and other payments to any business and organization lobbyist or expenditure lobbyist, regardless of whether the payments are used in whole or in part to influence local legislative or administrative action, do not count toward the $3,200 threshold.

I'm not an expert on this, but here are the disclosure forms that candidates, campaign committees, and lobbyists have to fill out. Is anyone up to doing a comparison among the forms and seeing if there are important differences in the disclosures required?

Mr. Beach draws to my attention an article mentioning Mr. Sutton in the 2001 San Francisco Bay Guardian. I haven't checked the Guardian's research, but the article does suggest Mr. Sutton has tried innovative approaches to funding political expenditures before.

12/03/03 10:23 a.m.  (Link here.)

Full-scale though probably unconscious Victorian atavism in a sidebar to the Chron's homelessness series today: a catalog of "territories" in real old "rogues' gallery" style. (Did I say "Victorian"? No, it's out of Tudor England.)

Why is it that the impulse to classify people always goes with the intention to dehumanize and mistreat and incarcerate? Is it part of the process of reducing an individual human being to a scientific specimen analyzed as an example of a type? 

And, dammit, these Chron guys aren't even getting their classifications right. The area where people live in vehicles is referred to in the series as "Car Nation," a term I've never heard in five years of legal aid and organizing work there, and there's no mention that the residents there literally live in constant fear of police intimidation and vehicle impoundments. Also, I don't know who the hell these social workers are who talked to the Chronicle reporters. I know who the social workers are who do the best work for vehicular residents in the Potrero/Bayview flats, and none of them are quoted.

12/03/03 12:41 a.m.  (Link here.)

Today's (Wednesday's) installment in the SF Chron homelessness series is already up, and as might have been expected it's godawful. Here's the gravamen:

...San Francisco has become a city of political and social enablers, as psychologists would put it....

Again, constantly, the Chron feature speaks in terms of what shall "we" do with "them"? Doesn't the Chronicle think homeless people vote, pay taxes, or read newspapers? (Yes, they pay taxes. Payroll taxes, sales taxes and car taxes.)  I've already heard from one homeless client who is upset by the series. She says she knows the family who were profiled in Monday's paper and thinks the article treated them unfairly. She's offended also by the constant references to drugs. I would add that there are constant references to bodily wastes -- a theme that becomes stronger whenever anti-homeless rhetoric grows angrier, with the chilling implication that homeless people themselves are waste to be gotten rid of.

At least the reporter, in addition to contacting usual-suspect homeless advocates, did talk to Dr. Barry Zevin of Tom Waddell Clinic, who is a good and decent man.

But who the hell supplied this statistic?

"...the homeless, the vast majority of whom are drug addicts or mentally ill...."

Another bit of poor reporting on the role of the police:

...Their main tools for managing the homeless are issuing vagrancy tickets to people "encamping" on the street (occupying a space without permission), or asking them to move -- unless the person is threatening or commits a crime.  Then he or she can be arrested. Homeless people also can be arrested if they don't show up for their court date to answer the vagrancy charge, or if several such tickets stack up.

Last year, 2,324 "encamping" citations were handed out -- in many cases, multiple tickets to the same person. Some 237 people were sent to court -- representing 1,048 of the tickets -- but there they were either sent to counselors or were sentenced to no more than a couple of weeks in jail, according to the district attorney's office. The maximum sentence is six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Virtually all the city's 800 annual busts of the homeless for possessing drug paraphernalia -- the second most common ticket -- result in the offender being sent to a rehab program. The city's policy for years has been to emphasize treatment over incarceration, recognizing -- as have experts around the country -- that simply jailing the homeless doesn't cure them of addiction....

First of all, "vagrancy" in the old sense of a crime of status has not been a crime in the United States of America since 1972. Justice Douglas and the late lamented Warren Court decided our country was better than that.

Second, the reporter only seems to have reported on misdemeanor citations without mentioning the many additional thousands of "quality of life" citations that are handed out at the infraction (traffic court) level, to the generally pointless botheration of the recipients. A misdemeanor in California is a crime that, upon conviction, can result in a sentence of up to one year county jail. An infraction is an offense that carries penalties other than imprisonment, such as fines or community service -- though, as the reporter half-correctly notes, neglecting an infraction charge may result in a misdemeanor charge of failure to appear in court.

When the reporter says "encamping," he's borrowing an informal term used among police officers for a misdemeanor charge under Cal. Penal Code Sec. 647(j), "lodging in public." (Note that Sec. 647(e), "loitering or wandering," was declared unconstitutional in 1983.) I don't know what the drug paraphernalia charge is that he has in mind -- probably something in the 11000s of the state Health & Safety Code. The reason I'm so vague on it is, it's a misdemeanor charge, and misdemeanor defendants are entitled to public defenders; infraction defendants aren't. The criminal defense work I've done on and off for many years has mainly been volunteer assistance to homeless people charged with infractions. The main "quality of life" infraction citations are for "trespassing" (SF Municipal Police Code 25, often applied to sleeping in doorways), drinking or possessing an open container in public (SF Municipal Police Code 21 or California Business & Professions Code 25620), "blocking the sidewalk" (Municipal Police Code 22), and committing various offenses in parks such as sleeping, camping, remaining past 10 p.m. closing times, and failing to Keep Off The Grass (in Chapters 3 and 4 of the SF Municipal Park Code). The San Francisco municipal codes are available in Windows-compatible format only at this site. Texts of state laws are here.

Someone clearly wanted this reporter to believe that the police were ineffectual, and to think the police had issued barely more than 3,000 citations to homeless people in a whole year in San Francisco. And clearly he fell for it. To which I can only roll my eyes, think of the long hours I and others have spent in traffic court defending thousands upon thousands of infractions, and say, good grief, if only.

The best figures I can find online for the actual number of annual "quality of life" infraction citations are in a Coalition on Homelessness report posted here on Indybay. I'm not precisely sure what the Coalition on Homelessness means by citations for "life-sustaining activities" -- I haven't seen them use that term before. But having worked with the Coalition's citation defense program in past years, I expect they mean something pretty similar to the list of infraction charges I've described above. They report 7,004 "life-sustaining activity" citations given between January and July in 2003, which sounds about right, or even a little low. No, I don't know if they count public drinking charges in that category or not. 

Finally, the police in San Francisco are very far from powerless with respect to homeless people. In fact there are officers who make a regular practice of intimidating people who lack the Fourth Amendment protections that come with conventional housing. They dent trailer doors with nightstick blows in the small hours of the morning, and shout, and shine lights in sleepers' faces, and demand identification papers. They threaten to take away people's tents, trailers, carts, possessions and pets, and sometimes do take them, and sometimes even an unlawful impoundment can be administratively difficult to reverse.

I used to appear in traffic court as often as two or three times a week in the late '90s, and every once in a while the same guy would have fifty or sixty infraction tickets on the same calendar. Then we'd learn that the defendant was dead, and the matters had been calendared all together so they could be dismissed to tidy up the outstanding cases on the computer system. And I'd think, "Damn, that bunch of tough love sure did him a lot of good." Now, the strange thing is, the anti-homeless faction take sentiments like these and pretend they are arguments for the point of view that even harsher treatment would somehow improve the lives of people who are already living on the edge. I will never understand this. I don't think the public health workers who actually get to know homeless people as people, like Dr. Zevin at the Tom Waddell Clinic, or the staff at the Community Clinic Consortium, will ever understand it either.

12/02/03 10:05 p.m.  (Link here.)

"California Urban Issues Project" call recipient #10 writes, "...yes, they've been filling up my message machine on a daily basis..." with lots of anti-Gonzalez stuff.  She suggests the "home equity" issue may be a version of the murkily phrased real estate transfer tax allegations Newsom has been raising lately.

12/02/03 8:06 p.m.  (Link here.)

Late afternoon/early evening brought in messages #8 and #9 about "California Urban Issues Project" calls. One Democrat in the Mission, one Green homeowner in District 5. 

Number 9 wrote:

I received a message from them this afternoon. Like another writer, it was a message from "Sally Smith" asking me to tell Matt Gonzalez to leave our home equity alone...."

12/02/03 3:23 p.m.  (Link here.)

The list of people (besides me) who have heard from the "California Urban Issues Project" is now up to seven. One writes:

i am getting three or four calls a day from them with
the same messages about gonzalez and daly.  i am
furious as this is extremely bothersome.

The latest call at 1:40PM was a message from "Sally Smith" asking me to tell Matt Gonzalez to leave our home equity alone. The caller id # is 1-333-444-5555. I am campaigning against Gavin Newsom because I'm sure this is his call. It really pisses me off.

[NOTE 12/2: I'm actually guessing that, formally speaking, literally speaking, the calls are not coming from the Newsom campaign. This "project" is probably some kind of "independent expenditure" group. But -- to state the bleeding obvious -- whoever's running this thing must want Gavin Newsom to win the election if they're working this hard to run down his only runoff opponent.]

I forgot to note that Testpattern's Matt page says the mailings he received give the address, "California Urban Issues Project, 41 Sutter Street, Suite 1483." Per Google, a lot of different organizations have offices in that Sutter St. building, but there's no mention of any organization in Suite 1483. So we still don't know who's running this organization, but at least we now have an address other than the San Leandro address of the organization's law firm.

12/02/03 1:00 p.m.  (Link here.)

Three more people have corresponded with me today saying they have also received phone calls from the "California Urban Issues Project." 

So I'm putting out a request to San Franciscans reading this blog: 

Please write to me if you have received mail or calls from the "California Urban Issues Project" so we can figure out who's getting contacted, how big this entity is, and who's associated with it besides the law firm that incorporated it.

(By the way, please note that the law firm itself may not be directly responsible for the phone calls. It was probably acting for a client in incorporating the "California Urban Issues Project," and the client is more likely to be the one responsible for the phone calls. Obviously the really interesting question is who the client is.)

For calls, it would help to know if they are live or recorded, what message, what time of day, how often, and what identifying information is given, especially the caller's stated name, location, and/or organization.

For mailers, it would help to know the slogans used, the general political message, anyone quoted in the text, and any addresses or identifying "paid for by..." information. 

It would also help if you could state your own party registration and what general neighborhood you live in.

By the way, to be clear, I'm making this request simply as an individual trying to figure something out, not as a representative of the Gonzalez campaign or any other organization, though I may tell the Gonzalez campaign anything I learn that they ought to know.

12/02/03 1:17 a.m.  (Link here.)

It looks like the high-powered Remcho Johansen & Purcell law firm may have something to do with a nasty electioneering phone call I got in October, and with some more anti-Gonzalez campaign stuff that has been going on this week.

This evening I received a note from "Testpattern", a fellow Blogger for Matt who wrote that he, like me, has received anti-Gonzalez material from something calling itself the "California Urban Issues Project." Also like me, he reported having had trouble finding out anything at all about this entity on the Internet. The December 1, 2003 entry on Testpattern's pro-Gonzalez page here describes two campaign mailings he received from the "California Urban Issues Project" and

a recorded message from "Susan Smith of the California Urban Issues Project" telling me about the "backroom politics" going on in the City, in particular how Supervisor Chris Daly "took advantage" of Willie Brown's trip to Tibet by making a "backroom power grab move" to "appoint his friend to the City's PUC... This is not the San Francisco way."

Y'see, I got a recorded anti-Gonzalez message from a "Sally Smith from the Urban Issues Project," with a closing phrase attributing the mesasage to the "California Urban Issues Project," way back on October 30 -- that is, a few days before the general election. I have moved the blog entry I wrote that day to my archive page, but otherwise it appears there as originally written.

Of further interest: the "California Urban Issues Project" has a listing at the California Secretary of State's Office describing it as an active California corporation with incorporation filed August 18, 2003. Its mailing address is given as 201 Dolores Ave., San Leandro, and the agent for service of process is listed as Thomas A. Willis, of "Remcho, Hohansen & Purcell" at the same address.

The law firm of Remcho, Johansen & Purcell lists one of its two offices at that same address. (Looks like the "H" in "Hohansen" must be a misprint.) The firm's self-description states it has represented Governor Gray Davis, San Francisco Mayor Willie L. Brown, Jr., and the State Legislature, among other distinguished clients.

Thomas A. Willis, the agent for service of process of the "California Urban Issues Project," is listed as an attorney with the Remcho firm. Apparently he is a very high-powered attorney: an online copy of a writ petition lists Mr. Willis and other Remcho attorneys among the counsel for Gray Davis and other petitioners who were seeking a delay of the October recall election date. Mr. Willis is also listed among the members of the California Political Attorneys Association. The Remcho firm's website includes a links page on "election law resources."

Googling the words "Newsom" and "Remcho" does not produce any direct current connection between the candidate and the firm, but it does yield a Bay Guardian article that says: "...Records also show the firm did legal work for Newsom's supervisorial campaign in 1998."

The same article says the Remcho firm made a filing with the Secretary of State's office "challenging the city's ability to hand count ranked-choice ballots." And in this context it says something that now looks a little bit familiar:

Despite its impressive name, the California Voting Rights Foundation appears to be a front group for the Remcho firm itself. Firm attorney Tom Willis, who is handling the ranked-choice challenge with Getman, is listed in the secretary of state's records as the group's principal, and its address and phone number are that of the firm.

So the unanswered questions at this point include:

Who's this Susan or Sally Smith person?

Where does she work?

Who pays her to record messages about Matt Gonzalez?

And who hoped to accomplish what by waking me up with a nasty recorded phone call on the morning of October 30?
 

12/01/03 8:37 p.m.  (Linkhere.)

R.I.P. Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, at age 92.

The Chron is modest in his obituary and doesn't mention that only a week ago the University of Florida gave an award to Seth Rosenfeld, author of last year's much-honored series about FBI misconduct at the University of California at Berkeley. Among other surprising facts, Rosenfeld learned that the FBI had investigated Kerr as potentially disloyal. Kerr's offense: being a liberal during the McCarthy Era and the early end of the protest years, and disagreeing with hard-liners' insistence on academic loyalty oaths. The report said the FBI sent allegations of disloyalty to the White House although it had already investigated the charges and found them to be false -- an act that may have stopped President Johnson from considering Kerr for Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Kerr responded with surprise in June 2002:

"I always had a high opinion of the FBI, so it came to me as quite a shock that they would step outside their boundaries the way they did," Kerr said Sunday in an interview at his El Cerrito home. "I think they did me some damage."... 

....Kerr said he was disturbed by the FBI's apparently having taken sides against him because of his political views. 

"I think it's despicable," he said. "It's certainly undemocratic. It's the kind of thing you would expect more from the intelligence agencies of Russia than you would from the U.S." 

"As a citizen of this country, I abhor any investigative activity that targets or punishes individuals for the constitutional expression of their views," Mueller said in replying to Feinstein's inquiry about the June 9 report. "I will tolerate no such undertakings in today's FBI."

I'm still pissed off at the Chronicle over its homelessness feature, although today's installment does mention the housing shortage at least, and it's clearly intended to telegraph a "They're Not All Bad" message. Today's poster children are a family living in a van, scared of the TL and the projects, with dad seriously disabled, mom chronically ill, kids miraculously earning high grades. Lots of sympathy expressed, but there's also an implication that they really ought to be doing something more for themselves, they really ought to take any conventional housing that's offered -- and more basically, there's an assumption that it's the business of readers to dispense "oughts". Amazing, also, that the kids are pictured and named. When I was an intern with the Providence Journal-Bulletin 15 years ago the editors were very definite about limiting the exposure of a homeless family who consented to a group interview: let the mother be pictured, let the mother give her name, that's her choice -- but the kids are really too young to consent meaningfully to having their names and faces in the paper under a label that many people find shameful. It seemed like a good decision and still does. Right there in today's article, both children say they've been taunted at school about being homeless. Yes, I know openness is now considered more of a virtue than in past years, and no, there's no shame in being homeless to the mind of any decent person, but there are plenty of indecent persons in San Francisco who think that when a household becomes homeless the entire rest of the world is entitled to hand them advice and reproaches.

And of course it was a family they chose to play the Not All Bad household. That's an ancient, and I do mean ancient, idea about The Poor: women with children are good; fathers of families are good; heterosexual couples get the benefit of some doubts; but men alone (or together) are sturdy beggars, and women alone (or together) are witches or harlots. A single adult can be redeemed back into the ranks of the Deserving Poor by having a good kind of disability, like paralysis, but the charm doesn't work if it's a bad or suspect kind of disability, like depression or chronic fatigue.

This guy writing the series: he's got a heart. He really likes the people he's met. But he doesn't seem to wonder if it does justice to his sources to have the dominant theme of the series be "What Shall We Do With Them?"

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