San Francisco News Blog

But that's not what did it for us. Despite the sheer unpleasantness of this interview, the takeaway was how, after excoriating Plante for focusing on "the past," when finally asked questions about the city's budget deficit, all Newsom could think to say was "It's a big deficit" and "it's a challenge." Plante had to all but stage-mother Newsom to get anything more than that.

It appears Newsom has been taking his interview etiquette lessons from Crash Davis. It also prompts the question: Which is worse -- for Newsom to sanctimoniously avoid the press or to deign to speak with reporters yet blow off reasonable questions and come off as utterly contemptuous and condescending? Experts we tracked down say it's the latter.

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***MAYOR GAVIN NEWSOM'S SCHEDULE OF PUBLIC EVENTS FOR Friday, NOVEMBER 20, 2009***

The mayor has no public events scheduled. He will be conducting meetings -- privately -- in City Hall. He will be doing his job. Really. What, you don't believe me? Well, just because the jackals in the press aren't there to see something doesn't mean it's not happening. I may have come out and seen my shadow yesterday, but today I'm staying behind closed doors. You hear me, Matier?  If a tree falls in the forest, it doesn't make a sound unless I hold a press conference about it to promote my falling-tree restoration program, which is really doing great things. You write what I tell you to write about and nothing more, understand? Why does only Ken Garcia get that? God, what was I fucking talking about? Oh right -- I'll be busy not talking to you assholes!

                          
              Note: Mayor's schedule is subject to change. Oh, and Hank Plante can go fuck himself.

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***MAYOR GAVIN NEWSOM'S SCHEDULE OF PUBLIC EVENTS FOR Thursday, NOVEMBER 19, 2009***

The mayor has no public events scheduled. He will be hiking the Appalachian trail.  
                                  
              Note: Mayor's schedule and whereabouts are subject to change.

Newsom -- and his right-hand men -- won our praise for thinking of the best name in the league (The Barbary Coast Bombers) and coming up with cool, city-related imagery for the team's Web page. But style is easier to master than substance.

Career-wise, this has worked out to be the winter of Newsom's discontent. In addition to his setbacks on the local, state, and national political stage, the city teetering on a financial abyss, and Chris Daly leaving that flaming bag of shit on the Newsoms' front porch -- The Barbary Coast Bombers have dropped three straight games.

Having a mayor acting a little bit loopy is an interesting novelty for a while, just as it was to have a former action star or pro wrestler serving as a state governor. But, barring Ed McMahon heading to City Hall and handing stunned city controller Ben Rosenfeld an oversize check, this city is in dire financial straits right now. And this kind of political theater begins to lose its charm when people begin to throw around terms like "insolvency," and "deficit" while coupling them with figures exceeding $50 million.

That's why it's a mistake to think the media is giving Newsom a hard time over his self-imposed press blackout because we feel threatened. Rather, we feel a bit cheated. This is a mayor whose critics -- with some merit -- have accused him of governing by press release. When you take the press releases away, well, then what? Newsom's not saying. And as for the notion that the mayor is now going "directly to the people" -- this is an awesomely half-baked concept. As if globetrotting, gadabout Gavin Newsom needed more ways to resemble "Where's Waldo," now he's randomly popping up at receptions, open mic nights, and, for all we know, keggers at S.F. State.

"Even if he's licking his wounds after the gubernatorial race, Newsom can still give the appearance of running the show -- and he's not," one veteran political consultant told us. "This not talking to the press is just not good." Added another: "In bad times, sometimes the most valuable thing an elected official can provide is that ephemeral quality called leadership."

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***MAYOR GAVIN NEWSOM'S SCHEDULE OF PUBLIC EVENTS FOR Wednesday, NOVEMBER 18, 2009***

The mayor has no public events scheduled. He will be eating fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, watching reruns of The Price is Right, and contemplating resurrecting his dying career in Vegas. Thank you very much.

 
                                  
              Note: Mayor's schedule and game-show viewing are subject to change.

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The mayor will be weeping gently in Room 200 with the shades drawn.

Note: Mayor's schedule and crying jags are subject to change.

Ballard and Newsom praised one another in a release sent moments ago by the mayor's office. Newsom described his soon-to-be former employee as "unflappable, smart, and a fierce advocate," while Ballard returned the favor by calling the mayor "a gifted leader who fearlessly tackles significant issues such as health care, the environment, education and equal rights."

No news on, ahem, why these two mutual admirers have parted company. Our calls to the mayor's press office seeking Ballard were answered by an assistant who said Ballard is not around -- and he's not sure if he's stepping down soon or has already left for good.

And yet, Newsom's legitimately bizarre behavior since he withdrew from the governor's race made the severance of his 12-day Twitter silence into newsworthy fodder for both the Chronicle and local television stations. Yet the news for Newsom's attention-starved 1,239,249 Twitter followers was even better than reported on TV. Newsom authored not one but two Tweets in the past two days; soon he may yet begin speaking in complete sentences to reporters and his colleagues in city government.

Yet if we're going to cover the ephemera of Tweets, we're going to have to really cover the ephemera -- so we'll be nit-picky and point out that neither the Chron nor TV got the story quite right. As noted above, television reports didn't catch that Newsom sent two messages instead of one. The Chron reported that both messages were sent on the same day when they came on Nov. 10 and Nov. 11. And neither reported that Newsom is still listed as "Candidate for Governor of California" in his Twitter bio.

If only there were a method of rapidly conveying short messages that Newsom could utilize to instantly inform millions of people that he's dropped out of the gubernatorial race. What a pity. 

Meanwhile, one has to wonder: If Gavin finally leaves his office at Room 200, sees his shadow, and retreats within, will we have six more weeks of budget deficits?

Still, a handful of longtime City Hall employees seemed unfazed by The Gavin Newsom Reality TV Show currently not being filmed by the pod of increasingly cranky reporters hanging out in front of the mayor's office. "Gavin's MO is to get out of his hybrid Tahoe, walk briskly to and from his office -- and he has a suite of offices -- and not come out," said one City Hall insider. "Like most politicians who get a lot of press attention -- particularly this one, because he's so bad with people -- he walks briskly to his office. And he always has two police guards with him to keep everyone away he doesn't want to talk to."

Adds another longtime City Hall employee (and, by the way, these are all folks whose names you'd know if you follow politics closely in this city), "The mayor is never around City Hall. He does his presntation of the city budget, and pops up at press conferences or to announce initiatives at random locations around the city. That's his role."

The takeaway: "My mayor sightings are few and far-between," said a City Hall insider. Now "the only big deal is that the mayor is being weird."

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Has Newsom ever before gone cold turkey on the Twitter before? Surely you can't Tweet everything. Well, the answers to those questions are "not really" and "unfortunately, you can."

Newsom has been Tweeting ever since December of 2007 and has amassed 520 Tweets -- but he didn't start Tweeting compulsively until this year. Scrolling through his feed, a gap of even more than two days is rare in this the modern Tweeting era, though he has gone on hiatus for up to six days at a time (He Tweeted "Hitting the trail hard next couple weeks. Town halls in Long Beach, OC, SAC and Riverside. Hope to see you." on Aug. 4 and "Talked with company, @Kiva that is changing lives through micro-lending on my radio show. Podcast is up" on Aug. 10, for example).

Back in his primordial Twitter days -- that'd be December and January, he once went a full 14 days between Tweets (Dec. 31: "Help me launch my campaign for Governor, go to www.GavinNewsom.com/Contribute and give $5 before midnight tonight!". Jan. 14: "Great day for equality. Aide announces that President Obama will end "don't ask, don't tell" http://tinyurl.com/7d4yjs12:27 AM Jan 14th from web."). And, finally, back in the Pleistocene Newsom went between December of '07 and October of '08 between Tweets. 

But while all we get these days are Godot-like messages from Newsom's spokesman, Nathan Ballard, making empty promises that the mayor will not talk today -- maybe tomorrow -- an article that appeared in the New York Times dated Nov. 7 suggests he is indeed conducting interviews with "the media."

Following last week's embarrassing quasi-meltdown, many members of Mayor Gavin Newsom's staff were blissfully unaware he'd headed to the Aloha State -- and the haste with which he left the continent called into question who, exactly, was acting mayor.

Well, never again. SF Weekly has garnered a sneak peek at the handy-dandy new chart that will now hang outside City Hall's Room 200.

Accountability at last!

Image | Audrey Fukuman

 

​On the one hand, following Mayor Gavin Newsom's abrupt withdrawal from the governor's race, he spent quality time back in a beautiful city nestled in the bosom of the Pacific. On the other hand -- it was in Hilo, Hawaii.

When you take off for an impromptu jaunt several thousand miles away from City Hall and even your top aides don't know where you are -- well, gifts are in order. Here's a gift guide from the Aloha State:

Acting Mayor Carmen Chu: T-shirt reading "I was controversial acting mayor and all I got was this lousy T-shirt," size small. Also, macadamia nuts.

Board President David Chiu: T-shirt reading "I shoulda been acting mayor and all I got was this lousy T-shirt," also size small. And macadamia nuts.

Mayoral Spokesman Nathan Ballard: A new chair to replace the one that is now unusable after he realized the mayor took off to Hawaii without telling him.

Sing along with our erstwhile mayor, Gavin Newsom, as he belts out the SF Weekly original tune, "If I Were a Nice Man," (to the tune of "If I Were a Rich Man" of Fiddler on the Roof fame. At last, the great Topol/Zero Mostel debate is over: Gavin is the greatest Tevye of them all!). We hear this tune is very popular now in Hawaii, thanks in large part to Newsom (along with Hawaiians' traditional love of Broadway musicals).

Click above to listen. Lyrics below:

It wasn't this suit...

​Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson -- whose garment bag was snatched and, improbably, recovered recently in San Francisco -- received San Francisco's sincerest apologies from Mayor Gavin Newsom's office. Newsom's "friends" (that's what it said on the press release) hand-delivered the filched bag to Johnson's Sacramento office this morning. The garment bag -- which Johnson contained a special suit Johnson calls his "Rose Garden Suit" because he wore it when he met Bill Clinton at the White House a decade ago -- was swiped on Saturday when the former Cal and NBA basketball star was helping an elderly man get into a taxi near Union Square. On Tuesday, Johnson received a call from Newsom's office that a young man and his girlfriend had found the bag in the Tenderloin and turned it in.

As an added bonus, Newsom also sent along a goody basket containing San Francisco-themed items to woo the Sac-Town mayor right back into our thieving arms. Items in the basket donated by local businesses included: 49ers tickets, a six-pack of Anchor Steam beer, tickets to Beach Blanket Babylon, sourdough bread, a two-night stay at the Fairmont Hotel, Ghirardelli chocolate, a necktie from Wilkes Bashford, tickets to the wax museum, and a dinner cruise aboard the Hornblower Yacht. Wow -- when can we get our stuff stolen, too?

The results are in -- the inaugural "Comb Your Hair Like Gavin Newsom Day" is a big, greasy success.

While Newsom's ability to manage this city -- and, potentially the entire realm of California -- is up for debate, his control over his coiffure can no longer be questioned. We ran through combs like Richard III ran though horses, and were forced to use not Pinaud Clubman or Brilliantine, but both. As George W. Bush quipped about running the entire country, whipping your hair into Newsom's 'do "is hard work."

But we think we've succeeded. And a number of you sent in photos of your own efforts to recreate "The Newsom." To quote San Francisco's erstwhile mayor: "All I can think of, is 'What's Next?' ... That's what's so exciting -- how do we top this?"

How about a bunch of amazing photos? How 'bout that?

Here's Hizzoner:

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And here's your humble narrator:

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And it turns out that combing one's hair like Gavin Newsom has some unusual side effects:

Audrey Fukuman

​The other day, Gavin Newsom's gubernatorial campaign gave the little people a chance to select which logo San Francisco's erstwhile mayor ought to use. While we appreciate being pandered to as much as the next constituent, you'd have to be myopic to not observe that all of the choices Newsom has shoveled into our trough are lousy and indistinct.

So, we're being proactive. Instead of merely casting our lot for the least terrible of the pre-selected Newsom logos, we've commissioned a trained professional to create newer, better graphics that the candidate's handlers should feel free to pilfer. Well, not free. These logos cost us two beers. A man's got to eat (drink), so, we'll part with them for, say, four beers (no low-carb crap, please).

The first logo, above, is an amalgamation of past and present. The young people can be made to gravitate toward Newsom -- a man with a knack for saying nothing, but saying it charismatically -- via the reference to the Keanu Reeves character from The Matrix (who, astoundingly, said nothing and did it uncharismatically). Meanwhile, older voters will be swayed by warm memories brought about by this 21st-century version of the famous Richard Nixon campaign pin. Did you know Nixon ran for governor of California, too -- against a member of the Brown family, no less?

But, wait -- we've got more:

It's tougher than it looks to get your hair to lay like this

​The other day, we declared Friday to be Comb Your Hair Like Gavin Newsom Day, in honor of our erstwhile mayor's 42nd birthday the next day. As we put it before:

Your participation in this experiment will, once and for all, answer the critical question that has plagued local social scientists and armchair political psychiatrists: Does combing your hair like Gavin Newsom make you behave like Gavin Newsom, or does behaving like Gavin Newsom induce you to comb your hair like Gavin Newsom?

Yes, we totally want your pictures. Upload them to SF Weekly's Flickr Pool or send 'em to me.

It turns out, however, that getting your hair to lay like Newsom's requires more than, say, falling down an elevator shaft or poking one's head out the window of a Concorde. We've been training. It ain't easy.

By the time Gavin Newsom completed his mind-blowing, seven-and-a-half hour YouTube sermon, he could have started reading names from the phone book or offering family recipes and we'd have been too bleary to notice. This may have been the plan.

But in his Monday speech alongside President Bill Clinton at Los Angeles City College, Newsom said something a bit odd -- at around the 25:28 mark, for those scoring at home -- and we did notice. This was probably not the plan. 

"I've always believed we're nothing but a mirror of our consistent thoughts," Newsom says, only 24 years late for the senior quotes page of his high school yearbook. We're not sure what Newsom means by this and we know we don't much care -- but it is an interesting thing to say. And, surely enough, it's not Newsom's quote.

"Life is nothing but a mirror of your consistent thoughts" turns out to be a bit of wisdom first uttered by famed, 6-foot-8 motivational speaker and infomercial king Tony Robbins -- of whom Newsom is quite an aficionado. Newsom's cribbing of Robbins' quote is not attributed at any point in the speech.

Mayor Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, popped out a 20.5 inch long, 7 pound 12 ounce baby girl today at 12:39 p.m.

The baby, whose name was apparently being kept secret under threat of retribution, is Montana Tessa Newsom, named for the state in which the couple got married. (What if they had been married in Rhode Island?)

Montana is in good company. At any rate, she has company. Other famous Montanas include:

1. Hanah Montana (Miley Cyrus) who is part-rocker, part-regular high school student and sometimes subject of poorly thought-out photo shoots.

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Gavin Newsom says he's got everything covered

​This morning., Gavin Newsom's favorite group of notebook, tape-recorder, and camera-wielding inquisitors packed into his tepid chambers for a press conference regarding a proposed United Nations Global Warming Center at the Hunter's Point Shipyard. Great idea, it seemed, but when all the cheer-leading was over, and Newsom made himself available to the media, he received not a single question related to the day's appearance.

One TV news reporter immediately took charge, and asked Newsom about the recent turnover in his office. "It's normal," he insisted, that budget director Nani Coloretti and Climate Change Initiative Director Wade Crowfoot, both announced this week they'd be leaving their jobs. "It's just that people are paying more attention," Newsom said.

Then, apparently as counter-example of how some staff members appear to be deserting him, Newsom brought up Paige Barry Arata. "It's pretty ironic," Newsom said. "We're bringing back someone whose been with me for six years." No one asked about why she was leaving her position in Newsom's gubernatorial campaign as a top fundraiser.

They were too eager to know: "What happened with Eric Jaye?"

Mayor Gavin Newsom: bears striking resemblance to Will Arnett

Google Maps unveiled their latest project called "Favorite Places" this afternoon at a press conference/meet and greet/smorgasbord inside City Hall. Local business owners, members of the press, and Mayor Gavin Newsom mingled, networked, and ate cupcakes before and after a brief presentation outlining the philosophy and technology behind the new Google venture.

From what I could gather when I wasn't stuffing my face with Google cupcakes, "Favorite Places" is an attempt to make Google Maps more accessible to the everyday user, to the traveler, and a boon to the local business scene.

"Favorite Places" (according to the Google Web site -- which, heh, I totally Googled) enables users to "explore the favorite places of local experts from cities around the world. Find out where they like to go, and why, from their own perspectives." For example, here are the favorite places of Digg founder Kevin Rose:

Text Reads: Gavin for Governator Says Say Hasta la Vista to Your Wife, Baby!

After graffiti and body paint, the sticker is every San Franciscan's favorite vehicle for communicating with the public. It's usually a hit or miss affair. Conversations about this sticker, spotted on the waterfront near the SF Weekly offices, go like this:

"I don't get it. 'Hasta la vista to your wife?' Like, his wife is going to leave him after he becomes governor?"

"Is he supposed to be stealing Arnold's wife? He knows Maria Shriver doesn't come with the office, right?"

"I think it's about how he had an affair with his campaign manager's wife, so if he becomes governor, he'll steal all our wives"

Yeah, it's not only not funny it's kind of confusing. If you're going to take the effort to design, print, and distribute a sticker with a vaguely political message, surely it can be done better. Especially when Gavin has given us so much good material.

Ky Michaelson

Combine rockets and toilets and you get this ... and Gavin Newsom's big donors.

Credit where credit is due: If there's one thing Gavin Newsom can do with elan, it's accept a check. Perhaps sometimes there's a little too much elan -- he recently returned a hefty donation from Russell Weiner, the son of radio lunatic Michael Savage, and took big money from anti-rent control sugar daddy Thomas Coates.

You've got to admire Newsom's range now, however. Recent filings indicate he managed to land back-to-back large donations from the most earthbound of men and the CEO of a rocketship company.

Earlier this month, Newsom's campaign reported a $10,000 donation from Elon Musk -- CEO of Space X and a co-founder of PayPal. Space X has actually won a NASA contract to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station once the government opts to stop randomly killing folks in the '59 Cuban Chevy of space travel, the Space Shuttle. Then, around a week later, Newsom landed $5,000 from the U.A. Local 38 -- the plumbers' union.

Who should I snub? Ballard! My magic eight-ball!

If you were Gavin Newsom -- and, odds are, you weren't -- these were your choices: Head to last weekend's U.S. Conference of Mayor's in Providence, R.I. and talk about your treasurer's innovative economic plan and a former supervisor's innovative health care plan -- or skip the conference and keep your top adviser happy by giving the cold shoulder to America's only openly gay mayor of a state capital. Wow -- no one said being a politician is easy (and, it warrants mentioning, whichever decision Gavin made wouldn't do a thing to actually help anyone -- that's hard too!)

Anyhow, if you're reading a post in our "politics" section, odds are you know which decision Newsom made. Talking about Jose Cisneros' and Tom Ammiano's big plans at the conference would have been great political fodder. But crossing a picket line organized by Providence's firefighters, angered at Mayor David Cicilline's refusal to sign generous contracts in the face of a mounting human services crisis, would have been unthinkable -- especially when San Francisco's own firefighters are making similar demands and Newsom's longtime political svengali, Eric Jaye, is organizing the whole campaign (incidentally, some local observers are acting as if it's a revelation that Jaye manages Newsom's political fortunes and the firefighters' union -- when he's been putting fires out for the firefighters since 1996 and calling the shots for Newsom since Gavin was still known as "Anakin Skywalker").

Photographer Michael Rauner brought this photo (which he took) to our attention today, and we can't decide what's more amazing. The alignment of the photos or the eerie synergy of the text.

Note: The Guardian still sucks.  

Those of you who grew up here in the Bay Area may feel a nostalgic tear run down your cheek when you view the above video: A 1970s-era KTVU "Charley and Humphrey" Bits & Pieces short culminating with the message "1,002 stupid things to do: borrowing without asking!" Perhaps Gavin Newsom didn't watch KTVU as a kid.

Now, if Newsom or any other politician can find policies or practices not necessarily of his own devising and employ them to help the people -- who could object? Franklin Roosevelt didn't invent Keynesian economics -- that would be Keynes -- but you could argue it sure helped a lot of people during the Great Depression.

That being said, FDR didn't pass off Keynes' ideas as his own -- or tout them as a key campaign tool. And that is what the mayor's critics have accused him of doing, repeatedly. The most obvious example is Healthy San Francisco. Much has been written here and elsewhere how the city's universal health plan, which Newsom has made a cornerstone of his gubernatorial campaign, was actually created largely through the effort of then-Supervisor Tom Ammiano. In fact, Ammiano, peeved by Newsom's "boasting and overselling" of the plan recently told SF Weekly that the mayor has "tainted" Healthy San Francisco.  

Glancing at the agenda for next week's U.S. Conference of Mayors in Providence, R.I., it seems Newsom may have found a new intriguing program conceived and implemented by someone else.

Hut, hut, hike

These days are just packed for Mayor Gavin Newsom. He just introduced a city financial plan that's a dead cert to induce enough fevered statements about "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor" to make outsiders think the city's indigent population is working on a circus novelty act. Within a matter of days, he'll have the names of San Francisco's potential next police chief placed on his desk. And, tonight, Santa Clara's city council votes on greenlighting a $937 million stadium plan to appropriate the 49ers.

In the long run, the fate of our football team is likely the least important of these three challenges facing the mayor and the city. But while Newsom was composed and even upbeat in handing down a budget that slashes jobs and services, it was in his cajoling of South Bay politicos and voters with hopes to build a stadium -- and with his rationales as to why the 49ers should remain here -- that the mayor appears to have come slightly unhinged. Reading his statements in both local dailies induced a cringe-worthy feeling reminiscent of those moments when a punter or field goal kicker is desperately forced to run or throw the ball -- it looks bad and often accomplishes the opposite of what they intended.

Newsom's logical zig-zagging recalled a Hugh McElhenny run -- but not for positive yardage. How else can you explain his telling the Chronicle that a new 49ers stadium would be the centerpiece of his elysian dream of a rebuilt Hunters Point -- yet telling the Examiner that a ballpark would be a bad deal for Santa Clara voters, who'd be "subsidizing a giant stadium for 10 games a year." How is it possible to make both of these arguments on the same day? The Niners wouldn't be playing more games in a San Francisco stadium: You can't argue a ballpark would be a revitalization tool in your community but a behemoth money pit sitting empty for 355 days a year 20 minutes down the road. (By the way, we're inclined to go with the latter; employing a little-used football stadium as the anchor for residential or retail development is an abysmal idea). 

Will it burn a hole in his pocket?

Last month we reported on how gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom took a hefty donation from Rockstar Energy Drinks' CEO Russell Weiner. When the media began reporting extremist positions Weiner touted on immigration and same-sex marriage in the past (and that he's Michael Savage's son) Newsom's campaign soon saw fit to return the money, citing differences between the "values" of the donor and recipient.

Well, it'll be interesting to see if that happens again any time soon.

As first reported Friday by the Bay Area News Group's Josh Richman, Newsom last week accepted a $25,000 donation from real estate investor Thomas J. Coates -- who pumped nearly $1 million into last year's Proposition 98, which would have abolished rent control statewide. Newsom denounced that measure -- and Prop. 98 was similarly decried by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a wide consortium of Republican- and Democrat-friendly organizations and unions -- and, ultimately, 62 percent of the state's voters (and 74 percent of San Franciscans).