Watching City Hall #344, (2-21-05)

“What’s left when memory’s gone and your identity forgotten?”

(Thornton Wilder)

Turns out I’ll never get fucked up with Hunter Thompson. Like Marilyn Monroe and Jesus Christ before him, he didn’t even leave a note for me. You know, regretting they hadn’t gotten to know me but had pressing business elsewhere and would see me soon.

The cave man who did the drawings of the various furry things his tribe killed upon the walls of the community caves would have forgotten all about them if he’d seen Marilyn Monroe. Adios Hunter, if, as the morning Chronicle states, you spent your last months hanging around with the likes of Phil Bronstein & the Hearst brat, we understand why you checked out.

Newsom running to daylight?

There’s an old adage about United States Supreme Court justices. It goes something like, you can’t be certain how they’ll vote because they are removed from political pressure with their lifetime appointments. It is not unusual for a justice appointed as a conservative vote by a conservative president, to completely flip to become a liberal vote as the years pass. … Can this have happened to Gavin Newsom inside of a year? While Gavin’s clarion call for legalized Gay marriage obviously leads the list, there are any number of signs that seem to indicate that Mayor Newsom may not be the rubber-stamp the Downtown interests who stole the election for him assumed he’d be.

Latest example

It’s a holiday Monday and I have been watching a rerun of the Mayor’s Disability Council on the tube. There are 2 assholes from Laguna Honda (newly appointed – 4 months – Chief Operating Officer & co-head of nursing) … these 2 contract-killers straight from the Willie Brown era are responding angrily (let’s say they were brimming with a wounded bitter superiority) to comments from the Council questioning the wisdom of putting gang bangers in with 80 year old Alzeimer’s patients. The same pair were before the Board or one of its committees a couple of days ago.

They’re pissed because the day before they came forward to front a hearing to justify dumping oldsters, … the day before, mind you … they get word from the Mayor’s office that Gavin doesn’t like the idea and wants things back as they were. It goes like this.

Those of us who blog seriously have been hearing stories for the past year about the move to change the fundamental mission of Laguna Honda from caring for the elderly poor, to a mixed use facility.

When you fill a building with tenants, you soon realize that you are not only ‘renting’ to the applicant, you also have agreed tacitly to accept their lovers and friends and family. No matter how many murdering pricks and drug dealers that may include. It’s a lesson all property managers learn the hard way. … You’d think Mitch Katz would know this shit.

Of course, he does. Mitch sat down with the likes of Willie Brown and Warren Hellman a few years ago and they addressed the question: “Now that gentrification is such a success, we won’t need so many beds at the charity hospitals. How do we deal with this phenomenon?”

Hellman’s Department of Health Director, Katz said that perhaps they could begin sending some of the patients from SF General to Laguna Honda since there was already a bond in place to pay for rebuilding it and they could begin shutting down wings at General right away (they shut down a brand new wing that housed mentally ill street people last year) … Brown, of course, bought it.

Apparently, Newsom didn’t! … Now, this kind of stuff just seldom happens. Here comes the mayor, responding to community pressure telling Katz that he has to reverse the pollution of Laguna Honda.

Katz is furious! He already has hired a couple of cheap pistoleros to gut and burn the old people on the hill in the Sunset and here comes Gavin telling them it ain’t right and to go back to the old way. Which is that, … Laguna Honda is indeed, an alms house for the elderly poor. It seems that everyone realized this except Katz who has always been for sale.

We’ll make your lover a spy for Planning

In a move just chucked with irony, Willie presented the new 2000 class of the Board of Supervisors with a brilliant idea. “Let’s make Mitch Katz’s lover a ‘liaison’ from the Planning Department to the Board of Supervisors.” It made sense to Willie: “That way, the 2 of them together will be bringing down around a half million a year in salaries and benefits and I can count on them to back all of Hellman’s projects!”

It all made such good sense. Unfortunately for Willies, the Board disagreed and refused to fund the position for Katz’s mate. … Of course, in a typical Willie Brown move, the Planning Department sent the guy over anyway and they pay him to this day for being ‘liaison’ to the Board of Supervisors.

I’m still watching this thing on the Disability Council and they just had another Willie person who’s a lawyer for a group called TCM. She’s a meat eater and the meat she eats is aged human. She talks about the “very exciting statewide support” for mentally ill patients to be housed outside of public facilities.

It’s the old Reagan argument. The institutions are so bad and we’ll give you money to keep the people elsewhere but we’ll only fund pilot projects and after that, we’ll just dump the people into the streets.

How many people are involved in selling this piece of Hellman’s crap? At least a half dozen I’ve seen so far testifying (remember, the column is centered around the fact that Mayor Newsom has refused to support them in Willie’s old plan) … there are at least a half dozen people recently put into place just to dump the old people from Laguna Honda and replace them with the insane and with wounded gang bangers.

Bottom line

This gang that Willie and Hellman put together to empty Laguna Honda is just one of dozens assembled during the Brown era. There are small groups holding top positions who aim to hand over the Veterans’ War Memorial Building, the municipal stables in Golden Gate Park (for God’s sake!), the Golf Courses, the Zoo, the Art Museums, … no, wait! … except for the Veterans building, they already have control of all these public institutions. The question is, what the hell is Newsom doing challenging them in ANY of their projects? And, what does he do with these little teams of institution killers that Willie assembled? Who pays the phonies they turn out to public meetings now? Gavin has definitely made some ‘supreme court’ kind of moves that seem to indicate that he’s not just a puppet on a string. Should we hope?

Free Gavin!