By Benjamin Wachs

If you ever wondered who was going to be the Ed Wood of YouTube, San Francisco has an answer.

Gavin Newsom added a new video to his YouTube channel yesterday - a one-and-a-half minute introduction to 311's new online service. The video itself is not worth commenting on...the production values are significantly better, but it's still just Gavin talking about 311. But the fact that he did it means that we haven't seen the last of Gavin Newsom: internet personality.

Well, maybe you haven't. I'm done. If I had to keep writing about his videos through another weekend, I'd kill myself. And dammit, I'm not going to give him the satisfaction.

Instead, since the last three Newsom-isodes in his epic "State of the City" series - on emergency planning, public art, and the census - are a combined half-hour, I'm just going to run through them all right here and be done with it.

All the Newsom-isodes are covered in unholy detail here. Don't say I never suffered for this city.

Emergency Planning:

00:35 - "One of the big areas we have invested in is reorganizing all our of our emergency operation plans." This includes creating the first regional emergency operation plan in California history. The plan involves 10 counties, none of which like each other.

02:24 - "We've also invested in upgrading our facility, our emergency operations center."

02:41 - New city emergency planning is also underway, involving cooperation across many city departments, none of which like each other.

04:19 - There have been 73 emergency training exercises since 2004. "28 have been action based, a number of them have been discussion based. Discussion based just means we'd be in an office like setting and we'd be talking about scenarios."

So, to be clear, two-thirds of the city's "emergency training exercises" have been a group of people talking in "an office like setting."

Are those really "exercises?"

By Benjamin Wachs

What's that, you say? Didn't Gavin already give a Newsom-isode on the economy? Well, yes, but that was the "Economic Climate." This is the Newsom-isode on "Economic Development."

What's the difference? Well, one kind of tells you what Gavin plans to do, and the other kind of explains why he can't.

Personally, I can't believe anyone is actually still reading my notes about these things - isn't there enough misery in the world?

But if you are, at least make it a drinking game. If he says he's "proud" of something, or "I get it," take a shot. It's what I do.

Anyone who thinks I can keep watching Gavin Newsom-isodes without drinking heavily understands neither politics nor journalism.

00:00 - "One of the areas that I'm very proud of" (take a shot) "in our city is that we have not neglected the infrastructure in the last number of years."

He's talking roads, bridges, parks and playgrounds.

Our capital program to keep them up, a $19.8 billion program, "now will be a godsend in terms of addressing the macro-economic climate and challenges that we're facing."

So, to be clear, Gavin's plan to address the new economic climate is doing exactly what we were going to do anyway.

Huh.

00:56 - What's wrong with this statement?

"That is the first time, and I think this is important, it's the first time that we've had a capital plan in our city's history. And this was initiated just a couple of years ago by the Board of Supervisors in partnership with our office: with Supervisor Sean Elsbernd, Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier, Supervisor Carmen Chu, and others, that really wanted to push the bar in terms of organizing our capital needs in a thoughtful and a deliberative manner as opposed to a scatter shot way as we were doing it in the past."

Time's up!

If you said "The city only first developed a capital plan a few years ago? That's MADNESS!" then you're right, but you're over thinking it.

If you said "Wait a minute, Carmen Chu just got appointed to office last year - she couldn't possibly have been involved with a capital plan developed several years ago," you're RIGHT!

Gavin Newsom has given up even trying to thank the appropriate people, and is instead just crediting his friends and allies with whatever he has at hand.

By Benjamin Wachs

Yesterday, Gavin finally proposed something vaguely plan-like to try and deal with the city's looming deficit - but in last week's State of the Citysode on the Economy, Gavin couldn't even bring himself to use the word "deficit," let alone say how big it was.

In fact, according to this half-hour speech, the economy is doing great -- he's amazingly upbeat. So upbeat that he spends more time talking about 311 than he does the "current fiscal shortfall" in the budget that he only mentions twice.

It got so frustrating that I actually called 311 to see if they could tell me what the city's projected budget deficit is. (It's not a secret - the media's been all over it).

To find out what happened, keep reading.

By Benjamin Wachs

This is part of our continuing effort to see if we can watch Gavin Newsom's entire State of the City address before it kills us.

Click here for all the Newsom-isodes.

Today Gavin is talking about the issue of homelessness, except when he's talking about panhandling. Homelessness is actually one of his strong suits as mayor, so perhaps it's no surprise that he's just a little extra self-righteous.

To watch it in drinking game form, take a shot every time Gavin says he's "proud" of something. If you can't drink that much, takes shots when he says "I get it."

I have run out of liquor. The prospect of watching the next one of these sober is terrifying.

00:00 - Gavin particularly wants to talk about the issue of poverty as it relates to the issue of homelessness.

The issue (a single issue?) of homelessness and panhandling "arguably, at times," "define the worst" of San Francisco.

Arguably, at time? Think you're letting us off a little easy there, Gavin?

00:34 - Ah hah, homelessness and panhandling are not the same thing! "Panhandling is not homelessness, homelessness is not panhandling," Gavin tells us. Everybody clear on that?

00:52 - San Francisco has "moved in a different direction" from the rest of the country.

"We believe, fundamentally, that food solves hunger, that shelters solve sleep, and that housing solves homelessness."

Sleep is a problem?

1:13 - We have a 10-year plan, with a "robust nature," to solve the problem of homelessness. "Now a lot of people across this country have adopted similar plans, but we're very proud of our plan."

Angela Alioto's leadership has made a big difference, and he's proud of that, too.

1:41 - Just over 8,500 people have been taken off the street over the last few years. And 2,434 of them are through Care Not Cash.

03:00 - The most difficult part is getting new units for those who are still homeless. It's like there's some kind of housing shortage in this city, or something.

04:30 - He's talking about the number of homeless people housed through various programs: it sounds vaguely like he's giving the daily stock report.

05:00 - He's now going through all the different sites in San Francisco where we house otherwise homeless people.

05:45 - "Here's some other units that are coming on line."

I assure you, sleep is not a problem.

By Benjamin Wachs

00:00 - "Well 2008 was a big year in terms of investing in programs and solutions to reduce violence in San Francisco."

Gavin, Gavin, Gavin - however big 2008 was for investing in solutions to stop violence, it was an even bigger year for violence. Why not play to our strengths?

00:10 - "Some paid great dividends, and some have still yet to produce the results that we were hopeful for."

00:15 - "One of the big initiatives in 2008 was the development of a new violence prevention plan." It's a five-year "blueprint for how we as a community can do more and do better to transform San Francisco streets and neighborhoods into safe communities and environments."

Gavin - what have I told you about not announcing five year plans when you already look suspiciously like Hugo Chavez's kid brother?

00:34 - "It's about aligning resources, coordinating city departments, community based organizations, and individuals and organizations together."

Oh - so the plan is to do all that stuff we're not good at!

00:43 - "Basically streamlining the entire process of delivery for community crime prevention." Just the way he did in 2007 for small businesses! And he sure turned that around!

01:18 - Gavin notes that, despite deficits, we've put an increasing amount of money into public safety. And despite more money, we have seen increasing violence.

02:35 - Gavin says the "Summer Street Violence" initiative was a big success. There was no summer school-related violence, the way there has been in previous years. I know the schools and the police worked very hard on that. The Mayor's office, if I recall correctly, contributed by releasing a giant report about how hard the schools and the police were working.

04:14 - We've been hiring more police than ever. For the first time since the voters mandated it in the 1970s, we'll now have "baseline staffing."

04:38 - Those police will be "including police walking the beats." He goes into some detail about how many more beat police we'll have, and how many more we need.

Wait, didn't he veto beat patrols when the Supervisors first required them?

05:30 - Gavin has now gone over five minutes in a discussion about crime and violence in 2008 without mentioning "rising homicides." This is fundamentally dishonest.

By Benjamin Wachs

I have to admit something before I begin: Gavin's ability to be boring is stronger than my ability to be funny.

I'm slipping.

I think I can hold the line for seven-and-a-half hours, but if he posts a sequel (perhaps "State of the City: Revolutions," or "State of the City: Attack of the Moderates") I'll be overwhelmed.

In the meantime, here's the State-of-the-Citysode on Transit. For the Citysode on Healthcare, Education, and the Environment, click the respective links.

00:07 - 2008 was an exciting year for transit. "We just initiated the most comprehensive program of its kind in over 30 years."

To be accurate, by "we," Gavin must be referring to Aaron Peskin.

01:30 - People want more reliability and predictability in transit. Who knew? Thank God we had a study.

Not a single result of what people want is a surprise. And I say this as a supporter of the Transit Effectiveness Project.

02:54 - "2009 will mark the controversy...may I dare say...around the implementation."

Dare! Dare!

03:30 - The system has been starved for employees. "You wonder why that bus driver sometimes doesn't show up? Why the bus then is backfilled or put out of service if the driver doesn't show up? It's because we don't have enough operators. But you can see here..." (and you can't really see here) "...that we've made a lot of progress in the last year in hiring up."

By "we," Gavin once again means "Aaron Peskin."

04:14 - 2008 was the first time in six years that we've had a net gain of new transit operators.

04:35 - We still need more maintenance officers and parking control officers to issue tickets and move cars. He seems to think this will be popular.

04:54 - Gavin momentarily confuses "parallel" and "perpendicular," but catches himself at the last minute. Phew. What a high wire act.

05:03 - Gavin also promises more MUNI fare inspectors, and fare inspections. "All those folks out there, you've seen them: you paying your fare, but someone in the back is not paying theirs, you're upset about that, and you're wondering what the heck the city's doing ... well we're going to be doing a lot more with these transit fare inspectors."

Quick hint: people in the front aren't paying either.

Also, they put graffiti all over the bus.

And they pee in it.

Does Gavin Newsom turn into Stalin when the moon is full?

By Benjamin Wachs

(This is State of the Citysode III: The Environment. Click here for Part II: Education, and Part 1: Health Care)

00:00 - Gavin begins philosophically. "I like to say that the world's consumption is the sum of all local consumption."

Well, he's blown my mind already.

00:35 - "SF Forward" is a five year plan to curb our carbon and consumption.

You know, given how inevitable comparisons were between Gavin and communist leaders once he announced a 7.5 hour speech, I'm not sure if he REALLY wants to be in the business of "5 year plans." I'm just saying. The symbolism is terrible.

00:50 - San Francisco's secret weapon in cutting its emissions is its ability to measure its emissions. Does this really follow? Is it really a secret?

01:02 - San Francisco has not only measured it's Co2 emissions (say it with me now: "Knowing is half the battle!") but we've "submitted them to a third party."

Gavin doesn't say who. I'm guessing the Rotary Club?

01:05 - Our Co2 emissions, according to this unnamed third party (Disneyland?), are presently 6% below 1990 levels - despite our growing population and economy. "We're proud of that."

Raising teachers' self esteem through massage - and other "education" moments from Gavin's enormous State of the City Address.

By Benjamin Wachs

Every now and again, Gavin Newsom finds his moment.

In the last State-of-the-Citysode, it was a brief minute when he was talking about why the Laguna Hospital bond failed so badly, and why he thinks San Francisco General won't. I don't buy his explanation, but for that one minute he was clear, reasonably concise, passionate and convincing; you got the sense that he had seen the problem and knew what he was talking about.

For one minute. Out of 46. And it's in the middle.

Today's State-of-the-Citysode, on Education, is of generally higher quality than the last. It's about 10 minutes shorter, nobody accidentally walks into the shot, there are fewer attempts at changing camera angle (though the one is REALLY bad), Gavin's bizarre southern accent doesn't emerge, and subjectively it feels like a much less brutal assault on your senses by a man who's determined to show you how much he knows about those laws he passed.

But even so, it still drags through about 30 of its 35 minutes, and there's only one really good spot where he steps up to the plate: at 23:33 on the clock, talking about the need to get truant kids back into school, he makes a passionate case for going all out to support the families of truant kids, instead of either ignoring the problem or threatening the parents.

Then he tells a compelling story about an Iraqi family living in public housing: the mother is scheduled to go back to Iraq, and the daughter won't go to school because she's terrified of leaving her mother. This isn't a situation where threatening calls can help, Newsom says.

It's good stuff. But it also highlights how enormously self-centered this whole enterprise is. Gavin rarely mentions other people - almost never by name - and when he does it's usually in the context of thanking his supporters. Much in the same way that it apparently never occurred to him that in seven-and-a-half hours of time, we might want to see someone else on camera: maybe bring in an expert, or a friend, or somebody a program helped. Or a juggler.

Other human beings rarely come into the world view Gavin implies here, except as obligations and after thoughts.

He also never tells jokes. He almost does, once, and then thinks better of it. I've watched 76 minutes of Gavin winging it so far, and the only humor is unintentional.

How unintentional? Well, for starters, he spends even more time talking about freakin' salad bars. Apparently they're FAR more important than he let on last time. And he promises an expanded discussion about them in the future.

I couldn't make this up.

Some highlights are below.

00:00 - Apparently 2008 was a crucial year for education in San Francisco. The "Partnership for Achievement" between the city and school district is a model, Gavin thinks, for other cities around the country. So far the only reason he's given is that, unlike some other cities, the city isn't trying to take over the schools.

By Benjamin Wachs

Part 1: Health Care

My favorite story about Fidel Castro comes from 1997, when there was considerable speculation that the Old Man was dying. In response, Castro gave a nine-hour address to the Cuban Communist Party, in which he implicitly dared other world leaders to prove that they were healthy enough to stand up for nine hours under hot lights, and shout.

I thought of this when I first learned that Gavin Newsom had given a 7-and-a-half hour State of the City Address, in one take, to staff who were ordered to edit it and put it on YouTube.

This has been a tough year for Gavin: his candidates lost big in local elections, his image was drafted by the enemies of Gay Marriage (turning his one big success story into a low-rent Greek tragedy), and his prospects for state office have gone so dim that he needs to carry a fluorescent light bulb just to meet other California Democrats.

Could he, like Castro, have given this enormous speech just to prove to us that he's alive? Is the message of 7.5 hours "I am relevant?"

Newsom, of course, claims that this is an advance in Democracy; and it is, if, by Democracy, you mean "A system wherein elected leaders give the public what they never wanted."

There is no way -no way in Hell- that the people of the city that invented web 2.0 wanted 7.5 hours of old-school municipal policy discussion. Newsom refers to his YouTube state-of-the-citysodes as "discussion and debate," but the fact that he appears to have disabled the "rate this video" and the "comment about this video" options means that the communication is entirely one way: which is oligarchic, even dictatorial; not democratic.

This is a distinction that will likely be lost on the chattering classes, and if Newsom's real reason for putting a massive policy discussion (if that's what it really is - I start watching it in just moments) on YouTube is so that he can say he "used technology to reach out to San Franciscans" in a campaign commercial, this will probably be good enough.

But it still places Newsom firmly in the company of the other leaders infamous for making unnecessarily long speeches like Castro, Mao, and Khrushchev. Except that those guys had whole countries to run: Gavin's got a 49 square-mile peninsula, and he doesn't even control the schools.

So it's scary egomaniacal propaganda....unless, well, here's the interesting thing: unless he really is that excited about talking policy.

Okay, not "talking" policy, but "lecturing" it: Newsom's people have always claimed he's a policy wonk, and I've never believed it. He's always struck me as someone pretending to care about policy because politically it beats admitting that you care about whiskey and women. History has borne me out.

But at some point, pretending to care about something and actually caring about it become one and the same. If Gavin pretends to care about policy so hard that he memorizes its minutest details, becomes fluent in its nuances, and thinks up exciting new ideas, then...he's not pretending anymore.

Can Gavin have actually hacked his way to wonkdom? Is that what this is about? I can't imagine, and yet it's possible - and in this scenario, he's using a two-way technology to speak one-way for the same reason that he never shows up to Board of Supervisors meetings: he's conflict-averse. (To put it nicely).

I have no idea what's going on - but as we delve in to the gorgeous set-piece that is Gavin's Newsom's episodic State of the City address, I will keep an open mind to find out.

We begin with Episode 1: Health Care

00:00 - Newsom is dressed in a sharp blue suit and tie, standing against a luminescent blue background. A large screen behind him has the words "Health care" and a picture of a patient receiving a shot (I think) set against yet another color of blue. The whole thing looks like the Magnavox commercial of tomorrow.