Watching City Hall #192, JUNE 27, 2003 “So this is what it looks like on top?” (Kim Spicer – deflating my ego) “’Too late to pay’? … ‘too old to work’? … sounds like you got it going on.” (Jens Nielsen – from different angle) “1028a Howard – 10am Saturday – 6-28-03” (See photos of Mayor & supes naked) (submitted by Eileen Left) OK, I don’t have any nudes of ‘Willie and the Wankers’ fully involved. But, if you’re a lefty and want to see my goy boy, Matt Gonzalez move up on the political evolution ladder, get your ass over there and pick up a few petitions (at least, stop and sign!) … our signature initiative for the November election is favoring an increase in the local minimum wage to hike it up a buck and change to $8.50. … A modest move? … Hell, it’s pitiful. Take out taxes and it’s under a grand a month. Still, it is the right thing to do. Instead of attacking the poor a’ la Gavin Newsom, Board President, Gonzalez makes a move to funnel a few more bucks a month to the working poor. Not so oddly, millionaire pimp Newsom opposes a hike in the minimum wage. Gavin? … He’s opposed to sharing the wealth with the poor on any level. He’s like some kind of perverted Robin Hood who robs the friggin’ poor to give to the rich! Move your buns to 1028a Howard tomorrow and sign the petition. The Left cannot afford to pay an army of poor people to collect signatures. We need you. Am I famous yet? Nothing like an honest friend or two to puncture your bloated bulbous balloon of hubris. I was sitting with my buddy (and campaign mgr against Daly in 2000 – we got 186 votes) … anyway, I was sitting with Kim Spicer and Jens Nielsen (my mgr in the 2002 campaign against Newsom – we got 208 votes) Kim was clearly high on something. … It could be related to the fact that he’s just lost his job and become homeless. You know … you know … just a quick aside to my good friend, Gavin Newsom … if you were suddenly homeless and living on these mean streets, you might need a drink too. … So, as I was saying … we were sitting in one of my secret spaces (I move more often than Osama bin Laden and Sadam Hussein combined) … yeah, uh huh … we were sitting in the dark cubby-hole amidst stacked furniture listening to Lou Reed on the portable radio. I was alternately trying to cheer Kim up by telling him how good unemployment had been to me. … You know? … I bragged about how I’d used my idle time to create a news publication feared and respected by the City’s major players. … I went on about how I went to great parties all the time and stuff like that. … Kim? … He kind of looked up at me from his malt liquor, observed my unshaven, unwashed, bloodshot-eyed countenance … he gazed around and looked at what truly looked like Hannibal Lector’s garage and said: “So, this is what it looks like at the top, huh?” … I went on talking Somewhat deflated, I switched to my woes. I couldn’t get a job. Everyone said I was too old to work. … I’d just gotten a letter from the Arnold, Mo. Police Department threatening me. They said that when I went back home to bury my mom, I’d driven out of a gas station without paying (utter bullshit) … and, now it was too late to pay and I had to make some kind of arrangement with them or they were going to send Alex Fagan Jr. after me. … Something like that. … I shook my head about all the negative crap and gazed at the floor. … But Jens? … Jens, he took another pull off his 40 oz bottle of King Cobra and interpreted my woes from the ‘bottle-half-full’ perspective: “Too late to pay? … Too old to work? … sounds to me like you got it goin’ on.” … It’s all how you look at this stuff. … Ya know? 1028a Howard – 10am Saturday (free condoms) The Board has been meeting, pretty much around the clock the past couple of weeks and often double-booking committees during the same time slots. … Now, I’m arguably the biggest political junkie in town, but, even I cannot keep up with the pace. I mean, figure … if you have 13 hours in one Budget Committee hearing, another 6 in Rules and a few more in Bevan Dufty’s City Services … try repeating those … what it comes down to is that you need around 50 hours programming in a day and you can’t get that much crap in a 24 hour bag. As my computer likes to say to me in the morning: “Your box is full!” … So, anyway … you need a break now and then and I sometimes turn down the sound when people visit while we argue and shout and scare the cats. … It was during one of these ‘breaks’ that I happened to notice Rec & Park’s Elizabeth Goldstein silently showing the supes a chart of what looked to be an assortment of dildos. … Now, that caught my interest. I immediately figured they were going to be displaying that collection of rock star phallus plaster molds some groupie so lovingly collected in the 60’s. … I turned up the sound. I turned up the sound Did I mention I turned up the sound? Soooo, I was wrong. It was actually a chart of various styles of parking meters Goldstein wants to install in Golden Gate Park. … Now, you gotta admit … say what you will, but Goldstein and her rich masters, … they take the word ‘park’ pretty literally. I mean, hell, they’ve already gotten approval to charge for parking under the park. … Now, they want to charge for parking above ground too. It’s all part of the plan to deny public parks and marinas and courses and stables … a plan to make them too expensive for the poor. … Well, Elizabeth, you can take your phallic collection of meters and stick them way up in one of your ‘Natural Areas’. … Enuff of that. Speaking of shafts Director of Elections John Aren’tz was just before the Budget Committee again and he’s starting to act more and more like one of those characters out of Monty Python. He pretty much danced around singing: “na-na-na-na-naaaa!” when asked how IRV (‘ranked-choice’ voting) was going. … Yep, uh huh. Told you so. It seems that everything is out of his hands. There are hired consultants and vendors and governmental agencies on every level preventing him from implementing IRV. As Eileen Left said while watching: “Look at this clown. He never made more than 50 grand in his life and Willie squeezes the Civil Service Commission to give him 180 thousand bucks a year.” That ain’t bad when all you’re supposed to do is go stand in front of the Board and shrug every now and then. I didn’t think it was possible to go downhill from Tammy Haygood, but … we did. … Our only prayer here is if Secretary of State Kevin Shelly certifies our hand count system. It will work. It will cost half as much and take half of the time Aren’tz estimated and it will give us the best chance possible to have an honest election come November. As long as Willie Brown has an office in City Hall, you can’t trust any vendor, consultant or builder with a City contract … particularly, those related to elections. Now, don’t forget … Now, don’t forget: 1028a Howard Street – 10am (6-28-03) (meet other desperate people) show me the waaay to go home: