San Francisco News Blog

John Grubb, a spokesman for the Bay Area Council, confirmed what SF Weekly had heard through the grapevine: Reilly will direct his first campaign in 14 years in leading the charge for a state constitutional convention.

"I can't discuss details of his contract," said Grubb. "But let's just say we're getting a really good deal for the advice we're getting."

The Bay Area Council is a consortium of the region's 75 largest employers, including folks you've heard of such as Google, Yahoo, Wells Fargo, BART, The Chronicle -- and Clint Reilly.

Messages for Reilly have not yet been returned. But Grubb had an interesting rationale of why the BAC would, in essence, opt to play its coming political match with a wooden tennis racquet. 

​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.

The promised land

​The city's Public Utilities Commission and Local Agency Formation Commission -- commonly known as LAFCo, the commission helps formulate energy policy -- yesterday issued a Request for Proposals from potential bidders who would run the program. Called CleanPowerSF, the initiative is a "community choice aggregation" plan that would allow the city to pool all its power customers together and offer them to a private supplier.

CleanPowerSF's purpose is to break up PG&E's monopoly on the city's power supply, ushering in more renewable and local sources of energy. (As such, it has the support of many "public power" advocates, who have supported past unsuccessful efforts to gain voter approval for a city takeover of PG&E's local power grid.) But the softened bid requirements -- in particular the loosening of the city's commitment to CleanPowerSF providing rates for customers at or below those of PG&E -- raise questions about where the effort is headed. In theory, the less stringent bid request could lead to a program that is less green, and more expensive for the city's ratepayers, than what CleanPowerSF proponents have promised.

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:

So, what does this mean for California? Oddly enough, yesterday's Maine election seems to appear as all things to all people. Those dead-set on attempting to repeal Proposition 8 on the 2010 ballot see this as all the more impetus to get cracking. And those hoping to wait until 2012 point out how this startling failure indicates the benefits of waiting for the right time to unhorse Prop. 8, not merely the soonest.

Today, Restore Equality 2010 unveiled its "Million for a Million" fund-raising campaign, hoping to amass the cash necessary to garner the million signatures necessary to get a same-sex marriage initiative onto the 2010 ballot. Spokesman Jeffrey Taylor told SF Weekly that there's no time to lose in getting back on the ballot -- "I think waiting for [elderly anti-gay marriage voters] to die is not a very nice strategy." Added Robert Polzoni from Yes! On Equality, "We believe 2010 is still viable. We can't allow those bigots and National Organization for Marriage who beat us in Maine to beat us again in California. If we wait three years, we hand them another victory."

And yet, an anonymous source within Restore Equality 2010 told us even within the ranks of organizations pushing for a 2010 initiative, trouble is brewing. There are those who favor delaying a ballot measure if polling and fund-raising doesn't materialize, and others who favor a 2010 initiative come hell or high water. Our source does not believe the latter possess the ability to gather the necessary million signatures on their own.  

Daly is entitled to write whatever he pleases -- and, on Fog City Journal, it seems he can truly write whatever he pleases; the Web site serves as the Kato Kaelin to Daly's O.J. Simpson.

But we are also entitled -- and some would say obligated -- to point out that the central premise of Daly's diatribe, that articles in SF Weekly and San Francisco Magazine are part of "The Big Rollout," that shadowy, high-placed apparatchiks of downtown sidled up to us and said "Hey kiddo, I'm rich and powerful and I've got a pitch for you" -- is bunk. Not only is it bunk, it reveals a lot more about Daly than about Sparks (or us). Along with a large portion of the city's hard left, Daly seems disturbingly eager to engage in paranoid conspiracy theories.

According to the city's Department of Elections, just 56.6 percent of San Francisco's 451,861 voters are registered Democrats (it's not as if the party is sweating bullets; only 42,089 are Republicans, 8,776 are Greens, while 133,577 are "decline to state/non-partisan").

According to an interesting list of "the most partisan districts in California" in Capitol Weekly, the most Democrat-friendly realm in all the state is Assembly District 52 -- Compton -- with 70.9 percent of all registered voters aligned with the Dems. The second-most Dem-heavy district is AD 48 (Los Angeles). Three through five are: AD 46 (Huntington Park) 65.7; AD 16 (Oakland) 65.5; and AD 47 (Culver City) 64.9. 

When we spoke with Department of Elections head John Arntz Monday, he reported that around 49,000 of the 183,849 absentee ballots mailed to San Franciscans had been returned. San Francisco's Department of Elections doesn't project voter turnouts -- but they do acknowledge the obvious. This is a crap turnout; "It's tracking more like a special election," admits Arntz. It also figures that more people will vote via mail than in person. So the above numbers point to two things: Folks don't care about this election (probable) or folks notice their absentee ballots sitting beneath a pile of unopened letters and figure "eh, too late."

Well, if you had the ballot mailed to your domicile a month prior to election day and consciously chosen to blow it off -- hey, that's on you. But if you're figuring the deadline has passed to return those absentee envelopes -- you're wrong. Here's how.

​Brown's office has released a resignation letter from Gerber, dated today, in which the former head of the AG's press office admits to "serious errors in judgment." He continues, "I suspect that the few reporters involved in the calls I taped would have readily said yes, but nonetheless it was wrong not to ask them first." Gerber states that, "as a result of my actions, I realize that I can no longer effectively serve the Office of the Attorney General."

Last week, the Chronicle reported that Gerber had taped an on-the-record conversation with Chron political reporter Carla Marinucci and two senior staff attorneys from the attorney general's office. While his actions were probably not illegal under state law, they ran counter to the typical protocols followed by both reporters and government spokespeople, and caused an unwelcome scandal for Brown, the current front-runner in the 2010 governor's race.

​
One of the "wild rumors" Newsom has spent much time angrily dismissing -- along with the rumors he'd quit the governor's race shortly after the birth of his child, which turned out to be way off base -- was that he'd turn his flailing campaign for the top job into a more realistic shot at the lieutenant governor's seat. It's hard to rush off into a new political race moments after claiming your exit from your last race was undertaken so you could be a better father and mayor. But -- that's what politicians do.

Still, can you name our current Lt. Gov.? With the exception of Gray Davis, the position hasn't exactly served as the threshold to greatness -- and that may be the first sentence in which the terms "Gray Davis" and "greatness" were ever juxtaposed. For every Davis, there are many Garamendis, Bustamantes, and Leo McCarthys.

"I think it would be a mistake [to run for Lt. Gov.] ... if he's looking at his future," said political consultant Jim Ross, who ran Newsom's 2003 mayoral campaign. Yet Ross' opinion was far from unanimous. "I wouldn't be surprised if there's a deal in place for him to be lieutenant governor," said another Ross, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi. For Newsom to drop out was "an astute decision -- but not one that was made in a vacuum."

In a statement sent to SF Weekly in response to questions about the incident, Brown staffer Christine Gasparac said the spokesman, Scott Gerber, "has been put on administrative leave and appropriate disciplinary action will be taken." The San Francisco Chronicle reported today that Gerber had recorded a conference call with Chronicle political reporter Carla Marinucci without informing her beforehand.

​"Mr. Gerber's recording of certain telephone conversations was done without Attorney General Brown's knowledge and in direct violation of explicit directions regarding office policy," Gasparac wrote. "These conversations were on the record and in no sense confidential. Nevertheless, the explicit agreement of all parties should have been obtained."

Audrey Fukuman, based on original illustration by @yiyinglu

Gavin Newsom and the Bay Bridge came up short this week

​If you see a tall, handsome man with slicked-back hair wandering forlornly through the city on Halloween, it may not be a denizen dressed as Gavin Newsom. It may be the real thing.

The mayor's traveling political roadshow came to an end today when he fired off a press release acknowledging he is dropping out of the governor's race:

"It is with great regret I announce today that I am withdrawing from
the race for governor of California. With a young family and
responsibilities at city hall, I have found it impossible to commit the
time required to complete this effort the way it needs to -- and should
be -- done...This is not an easy decision. But it is one made with the best
intentions for my wife, my daughter, the residents of the city and
county of San Francisco, and California Democrats."

Newsom was far behind Attorney General Jerry Brown in both the polls and fund-raising. It is unclear if Newsom will, as many have speculated, set his sights on the lieutenant governor's chair.

As Johnny Carson used to say, "More to come..."

What were the odds of this happening?

​

In examining Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's letter to the California State Assembly in which the letters I F-U-C-K Y-O-U appear vertically down the left-hand side, it is hard to imagine that it could have happened randomly.

The letter purportedly explains Schwarzenegger's refusal to sign AB 1176 -- an ordinary piece of legislation regarding the Port of San Francisco's finances -- which happened to be sponsored by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who recently told the governator to "kiss my gay ass." Motive? Check. 

In all seriousness, we wondered what the chances were that the letters "I FUCK YOU" ended up on the page via sheer coincidence. So we called a few math professors.

Stephen Devlin, the chair of the math department at the University of San Francisco, got excited about the challenge. The first thing he had to do was estimate how frequently the letters in question generally appear at the beginning of words.

Joe Eskenazi

Green Party state co-chair Barry Hermanson brought his own beer -- literally

​Members of San Francisco's Green Party refused to exude the blues last night in the farewell bash for the party headquarters they can no longer afford to keep, dousing the place in one last coating of spilled soda, beer, and plenty of top-notch hard stuff. State Party co-chair Barry Hermanson even wandered the room with large bottles of his home-brewed ale and a pocketful of sample cups he foisted upon one and all. Here, at last, was a politician who truly served the people.

As anticipated, the mood was bittersweet. It's certainly not a thrilling realization that a matter of a $1,200 monthly office is an untenable drain on party coffers: "It'd be nice if we needed a bigger space because so many people were active in politics," admitted Paul Platt, a member of the party's county council. But, on the other hand, nobody was crying into their absinthe one room over as a DJ gyrated to the beats.

As the music temporarily faded, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi -- the party's most prominent local member -- urged his contemporaries to keep on keepin' on.  

Joe Eskenazi

Lots of nice folks with dreadlocks for a political event, yes

​

General William Shafter, namesake of Shafter Street. In 1899 he postulated "it may be necessary to kill half the Filipinos" for the other half to ascend from barbarism.

​
Aradanas has repeatedly written to Mayor Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel-Newsom -- who has spoken on behalf of next year's "Summer of Peace" events in the city. Aradanas, a U.S. government anthropologist, thought the juxtaposition of a "Summer of Peace" and streets named for men who saw little wrong in wiping out hundreds of thousands of Filipinos as if they were human cockroaches was jarring, and noted so in his letters. After penning his fourth letter to the mayor, he went so far as to hand a paper copy to Hydra Mendoza, Newsom's education adviser, to personally deliver. His months of entreaties haven't resulted in so much as a form letter in return.

Frankie: Boy. You wanna talk about some pain? I bought one o' them linoleum knives the other day, you know?

Willie: With the double edge?

Frankie: Right.

Willie: Yeah?

Frankie: So, I go home, you know, and I spread my toes apart and I just start sawing, back and forth and back and forth, you know?

Willie: Mm hmm.

Frankie: And I take a little thing o' Tabasco sauce, you know?

Willie: Yeah.

Frankie: And just dump it on there. Talk about a hotfoot, mister! Boy, that was rough.