Watching City Hall #460 (6-2-06)

Watching City Hall #460

“What do the voters want anyway?”

(Freud reads Bulldog endorsements)

“Look mom, no ads!” … Yeah, that’s how you can tell that every endorsement da Dawg makes was not influenced by money. … Drugs? Well, yeah, maybe a little by drugs. Booze? Uhhh, OK, I gotta give you that perhaps alcohol does play a role in my thinking process. Sex? Absolutely, but only when some is offered and no one’s been giving it up this election cycle (although one serious consultant told me last week that any reputable candidate sends their best workers to Nevada to get laid at least once during the campaign).

Then, there’s food and flattery and transportation. Those will get you some favorable press with most of the ‘third world’. Or, are we the ‘3rd estate’? Or, is it the ‘4th estate’? Or are we the ‘Fifth Column’? I have trouble remembering what title to respond to. I do know that you can get shot lots of places just for having a press pass or a camera dangling around your neck. I’ll take California where you have to worry more about ‘interventions’ than roadside bombs.

The Devil’s Ballot

What else can you call an election that comes on 6-6-6? Hopefully, fundamentalists will refuse to vote. Thataway, maybe some of my candidates can win for a change. Or, maybe the machines are fixed. Certainly the absentee ballot boxes will all be stuffed. Mohammed Nuru’s ‘persuaders’ will no doubt be teaming with the A. Philip Randolph goons, roaring around the east side of town like those, what are the guys on camels? … ‘jingewee’ or something. The ones in Darfur.

There’ll be all that and, of course, peer pressure to just get drunk and not vote … democracy generally takes over the ball on election day deep in its own territory. The old problem of the lonnng field and the clock running out. And, no timeouts left.

All right. Enough evasion. I want to give you my serious thoughts on next Tuesday’s election and who and what I really like. I’ve made a few predictions on the SF Junto (through Sfusualsuspects.com) but what I think will happen and what I want to happen, as usual, vary greatly. Let’s start with our local ballot measures.

Vote YES on everything!

A, B, C, D … YES on everything. The Downtown forces who favor gentrification, a police state and criminalizing hunger have placed all these measures on Chris Daly’s back. It’s not true, but it is certainly a compliment. Right now, Peskin’s Budget Committee chair is the hottest Progressive politician in town. You could do worse than follow his lead (and, probably will). Here’s my thinking on the offerings:

Prop A

Like Business Improvement Districts, Prop A is an admission that the cops do not do their job. That’s tragic and dangerous, but certainly true. You can give them a trillion dollars and they won’t walk a one man/woman beat in Hunters Point. They’re liars and they’re cowards, full of brass like Marty Halloran, who’d rather bust a dying AIDS patient for smoking pot than confront a gang banger at 16th & Mission.

The cops spend hundreds of million dollars a year hiding in their patrol cars eating donuts, shooting up on steroids and drinking coffee. Giving them money for ‘violence prevention’ is like giving a junkie more smack. It’s just gonna disappear up their arm.

Prop A channels 10 million a year around the assholes with guns and badges and through a: “Homicide Prevention Planning Council to develop and annually revise a Homicide Prevention Plan, and create a Survivors’ Advocate and a Survivors’ Fund in the Office of the District Attorney”.

That’s chicken feed, folks. The biggest difference in how this money will be spent and how the cops spend their ‘outreach’ funds is that the cops pay off Uncle Toms, while this idea of a ‘Homicide Prevention’ effort is genuinely grassroots. It’s supported by people like Ace Washington, a longtime and widely respected black journalist who has been beaten by Delugnuts punks and had his press pass renewal refused. The man has neighborhood roots. Unlike the cops.

Folks, if you want to cut the homicide rate, you need to reach the people who are shooting each other and talk to them. That’s first. And, when you talk to them, you need to be able to offer them things like jobs and workforce training. That’s what A is about.

Prop B

The opponents of this proposition are in bed with all of the evil forces in the Universe. People like Charles Schwab and Nate Nayman and Howard Epstein and Mike DeNunzio. These people are human garbage who want to throw dying AIDS patients our of their apartments and make certain no one knows about it. For MONEY. Let me repeat that … they are doing this for MONEY. With the billions these assholes make off new construction and legitimate Ellis actions, they’ve chosen to attack the poor and colored and crippled and old and dying. Because they want more MONEY. How much is enough for these cocksuckers?

For many years, the more vulnerable of our citizens could go to bed at night knowing that their homes were safe from the greedy. Really. Hard to believe? It’s true. I’ve talked to realtors about this for years and even the most greedy of them refused to buy buildings that had old or disabled long-term tenants. It was too much of a risk of public embarrassment for them to toss out this population.

Then, the most avaricious of the hyenas were overcome by their greed and went for the poor and crippled in their homes. Mostly in District 3, where Aaron Peskin put up a defense for the vulnerable … and, in the Castro, where Supe 8 Downtown flunky, Bevan Dufty backed the greedy realtors. Now, the stampede is on. Everyone wants to buy a building full of the frail and physically fucked-up because if everyone else is doing it, no one will notice you?

Then, along comes Daly and says, ‘OK, you can do it, but I think that the people you want to sell these ill-gotten properties to should know … they should know that they might be buying the ghosts of Christmas past. Vibes count, folks. Especially in San Francisco. No one in their right mind wants to settle into a place where terrible things happened.

That’s the whole point of Prop B … Disclosure. It’s not going to prevent these pricks from throwing your grandma out. It only says that you have to tell the people you try to sell grandma’s rent-controlled apartment to, … what you did … EARLY in the process of showing and selling the apartments that (when it happened) … telling them that the apartment is available because you evicted a senior. Or a disabled person. Or a terminally ill AIDS patient (they die 5x faster when evicted).

This measure is PRICK SPECIFIC. Reveal the assholes.

YES ON B!

Prop C

Vote YES on this one if you want a new high-speed rail Transbay terminal. Because, that’s not what the Mayor’s friends in the real estate industry want.

Nope, now, only those of you who really know their shit will even begin to understand what I’m saying and it’s complicated, so I’m gonna say it fast.

The Myers project at 80 Natoma was an arranged rip-off of 50 million in General Fund dollars. It was orchestrated by a political operative who had access to public pension funds which he leveraged to purchase the property upon which he never intended to build shit (tip of hat to Matt Smith of the SF Weekly who brought this out months ago to a deafening ‘ho-hum’). Myers, in fact had been told of the real scheme, which is to NEVER put high-speed rail into that location. The real scheme is to rip-off the state of California for the land they own at Transbay. Dick Blum is in the middle of it, of course. I mean, c’mon, does that surprise you?

Think I’m kidding? Did you watch Emilio Cruz (can you say, ‘father to Burton progeny’) push the 1000 foot tower on behalf of URS (can you say ‘Dick Blum – hubby of U.S. Senator, Doris Feinstein’?) … did you see him push this thousand foot tower along with a couple of 800 to 850 feet? He talked about pouring a huge concrete boulder underneath the site. A boulder so large, mind you … so large, that you can place almost 3,000 floors of luxury apartments atop it … build them on top of this boulder. Then, come back years later and drill holes in the boulder, underneath the gigantic skyscrapers … in which to place tunnels … in which to run high-speed trains?

And, the towers won’t be affected by these high speed trains and all the drilling. That’s what they’re telling you. I mean, I how friggin’ stupid do they think you are?

Like I said, complicated and wonkish on the detail side. But, bear with me. Those in the know will realize that the Burton/Cruz/Blum/URS/Feinstein proposal sounded very familiar. That’s because it was exactly the plan for the proposed Myers tower which, I believe was supposed to run only around 500 feet straight up.

Yeah, pouring huge boulders with skyscrapers atop them, then undermining them like a mother fucker. Damn. Seriously, I mean, shit! These guys got balls.

One of the most important projects on the face of the earth today is to get a tidal power system working along the coast of California. It’s second major customer (SF Public Power being first) should be the California High Speed Rail System. Gavin Newsom and his friends don’t give a shit about this. Hell, Getty made Newsom and Getty is all about oil and pollution.

This is all about building skyscrapers on the cheap with Dick Blum directing money from Calpers into URS (the billion Pelosi and Dionna gave him in Iraq wasn’t enough?) … Blum wants free land and free financing and no high speed rail. None of them want high speed rail. It will hurt the oil companies.

Only Chris Daly wants high speed rail. And, you. You want it, right? This proposition will guarantee nothing. All it will do is to shake things up in the middle of this multi-billion dollar rip-off. And, things need shaken up here.

YES ON C!!

Prod D

This proposition is the product of career doctors and nurses and attendants watching Mitch Katz turn the old folks home called Laguna Honda Hospital into a way-station for young and insane perverts and crippled gang-bangers who then prey upon the oldsters.

I’ve heard the stories the past few years. I know staff there on the front line and Adriel Hampton wrote stories on the unbelievable situations taking place when young, strong and without conscience, were placed with vulnerable seniors. I watched the BOS hold hearings where Mitch Katz stood and lied (as usual) that he’d ceased his ‘Flow’ program that funneled the thugs into LHH.

Katz lied. Willie lied. Now, Newsom is lying. They have no intention of rebuilding LHH as the best municipal old folks home in the country. They intend to ship SF oldsters out of town (have already done it to a couple of hundred) and use the facility as a combination jail/drunk tank for the final sweep of SF streets to remove those who refuse to leave the streets.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I want the streets cleared of the drunks and junkies and crackheads and ‘narco-nomads’ (tks doc). But, … not by screwing with grandma and grandpa.

D is designed to stop the Katz/Newsom abuse of the LHH population.

YES ON D!!

Candidates

Vote Green on everything. Except, Camejo for governor. I gotta go with the Bay Guardian on that one. And, for once, I won’t get into insulting the guy. Suffice to say, he’s no good for the Green Party and any votes he gets will only encourage him.

I think the Greens only have 2 San Franciscans running but they’re both fantastic. Barry Hermanson and Krissy Keefer. I’ll get back to you on them. Barry deserves an entire column and Keefer is a living novel.

State Propositions

Prop 81

I’m voting ‘No’. This is only on the ballot to enrich Republican construction companies. They’ve installed former SF Head Librarian, Susan Hildreth as State Librarian and, while I just love Sue, she’s a rubberstamp of anything the machine wants to waste money on. This is not about libraries. This is about rip-offs. If they could, these butts would tear down every Carnegies library in the State and replace them with URS tents.

Prop 82

Oh yeah. ‘Yes on 82’ for sure. This is pre-school for the poor … paid for by the rich who already have pre-schools for their kids. Can’t get much cleaner cut than this one.

That’s good for now. Number on this one’s probably out of sequence. AX, don’t fret on it but let me know when you post it. 5 days til election and all that.

Salon 1-3pm today?