She went with a Girl Power mix, starting with Sara Bareilles' "Brave," which is certainly more upbeat than Donald's "You Can't Always Get What You Want." LOOK OUT MILLENNIALS, WE'RE COMING FOR YOU!!!
(It was extremely hard to find embeddable video of this moment, so I had to steal it from LA Times reporter Mike Memoli. Thank you Mike Memoli.)
If you're old, you couldn't help but remember the First Clinton Balloon Drop.
Man, everybody looks a lot younger. But come on, even if you're not old, that is some pretty good shit. Those Clintons know how to get nominated for president, that's for sure. By the time it's Chelsea's turn, her song will probably be "What If The Mirror Is Real And We Are The Reflection" by Jaden Smith.
Speaking of political music, here's "DonaldTrumpMakesMeWannaSmokeCrack." (Donald Trump also apparently took my space bar.)
This song, which actually isn't nearly as bad as it should be, is currently #2 on Spotify's "Viral 50" chart. Here's a boring article about how Spotify determines what goes on the Viral 50 chart. Here's a more interesting article about the actual human people who compose playlists for Apple and Spotify and Google Play.
Hey, guess what? My friends in the Morning Line are making music again. Woods is playing at the Chapel tonight. And next weekend, of course, is Outside Lands. This year I'm finally doing what I threaten to do every year and leave town so I don't have to listen to Outside Lands in my living room when I'm just trying to watch Dateline. We're going to Guerneville for the weekend, so will there even be a Music Friday next week? I don't know. I don't know.
There's a hedge fund guy named Anthony Scaramucci who was against Trump but is now for Trump and is now raising money for him. For reasons known only to Anthony Scaramucci, he sat down and agreed to be interviewed by Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate group, which I would not say is particularly friendly towards Donald. The interview is about 20 minutes long and fascinatingly revealing.
At first there's a lot of boring stuff about how Scaramucci - "The Mooch" to friends, apparently - used to support Scott Walker but now supports Trump because Trump is now the Republican nominee. Whatever, raccoons dig for trash in packs, I get it. What I wasn't expecting was The Mooch's explanation about why Donald Trump isn't racist to be breathtakingly racist in and of itself.
The relevant portion starts at around 17:30.
OK. So, so, here’s the thing, here’s what happens. There’s a gigantic arbitrage spread between what people think of him based on what they’ve read about him and snippets of him in the media world and then when people actually meet him – and my wife said this to me, we did a fundraiser for him in East Hampton two Saturdays ago, at Wilbur Ross’s home. And we were coming out of the fundraiser and my wife turned to me and she said, “You know, I wish people could see him in this environment, answering the questions, getting a full sentence in about the questions, maybe even a paragraph so it’s not sliced on him and not taken out of context, what he said.”
I'm not saying that anyone who uses the term "arbitrage spread" in normal conversation is a dickhead, but it's like wearing a visor backwards - maybe you're a cool guy who just likes turnin' that visor around, but I doubt it. Anyway, yes, the problem is that DONALD TRUMP IS NOT GETTING THE CHANCE TO GET HIS MESSAGE OUT. That is seriously what The Mooch (or The Mooch's wife, I guess) wants us to believe. Stupid press! Why won't they let him speak?
Wait, it gets so much worse.
But some things are said in jest, and here’s the thing I don’t like about the society right now, if you don’t mind me being a little bit editorialization. We say some things in jest in the society. We do have ethnic jokes. I have been the butt of ethnic jokes in my life. And I find them humorful. OK? There’s also a show called “The Sopranos” that was on for 10 years that took every Italian-American stereotype that you could imagine and manifested itself for one full hour on national TV. And I met with the Reverend Al Sharpton one day and I said “Hey, why don’t we do The Jacksons? And we take every racial African-American stereotype, we talk in ebonics to each other, have spinners on the Escalades, and we shoot at each other with Glocks, and we have a whole prostitution ring going, I mean, and so on and so forth, are you guys gonna be sore about that?” He admitted that he would be sore about it. But as an Italian-American, you know, I believe in the First Amendment, and I can deal with the fact that we are typecast in shows like The Sopranos, OK? I get the joke. And so, he’s not a bigot, and he’s not a racist.
Hey, idiots! The Mooch is Italian, and The Sopranos used Italian stereotypes, and it didn't bother The Mooch, so quit crying racism! The Mooch has overcome how Italians were brought to America as slaves and then enslaved here for 300 years and then after they were freed Italians were subject to Jim Crow and the vilest discrimination and state-sponsored killing and redlining and still have a fraction of the family wealth that other Americans have. Italians have suffered so much!
This is called a "false equivalency," and people honestly believe shit like this.
I don't even know what to say about The Mooch's show "The Jacksons." I have a hard time believing he related this concept to Al Sharpton because Al Sharpton probably would have punched him in the fucking face if he said this kind of shit, and with good reason.
Finally, NONE OF THIS PROVES THAT DONALD TRUMP ISN'T A RACIST. The fact that "The Sopranos" trafficked in Italian-American stereotypes and it didn't bother The Mooch one bit and The Mooch had the gall to spout every African-American stereotype that popped into his head at an undoubtedly horrified Al Sharpton does not in any way mean Donald Trump is not a racist. Saying that a judge was unfit to hear Donald Trump's case in court because of his ethnic background makes Donald Trump a racist, OK?
Not to dwell too much on the apocalyptic, flaming-rats-are-falling-from-the-skies-to-devour-your-children's-limbs speech by that dimestore Manuel Noriega last night, but since this is Music Friday I'm allowed to say that choosing "You Can't Always Get What You Want" as the song for the celebratory balloon drop is either the Biggest Fucking Troll of All Time or shows a frankly breathtaking lack of awareness or, fuck it, who knows, maybe both, given this shambling shitshow of an election.
I didn't see it, actually. I was at the Fillmore watching They Might Be Giants, which is the exact opposite of Donal Trump.
TMBG is sui generis in American music: a band that writes clever, quirky, catchy songs, doesn't take itself seriously at all, and has a wry sense of humor. It's music for science geeks and (former) record store clerks and mathletes. In fact, at one point during last night's show, the audience began chanting "SCIENCE! SCIENCE! SCIENCE!" like we were at a crazy Republican rally is bizarro world where they just nominated Neil deGrasse Tyson and were dropping carbon offsets instead of balloons. I am not kidding, they actually chanted this, in response to some stage patter about science. I am also not kidding about the stage patter about science.
I haven't listened to a lot of TMBG lately (and by lately, I mean since the mid-90's), but I quite liked "Apollo 18," their 1992 release. Among other eccentricities, it has a song about mammals that contains the words "nuclei," "monotreme," and "allotheria;" a whole set of seconds-long song sketches smashed together at the end, and perfectly fine pop songs like "I Palindrome I," a catchy ditty about matricide. TMBG is basically kid's music for adults. It's charming and happy, which made it the perfect antidote to what was going on in Cleveland. Couldn't they just leave Cleveland alone? They have enough problems already.
Speaking of "Apollo 18," the show was billed as "They Might Be Giants plays Apollo 18," but, being They Might Be Giants, they played a bunch of other songs first and then played the album, in order, but backwards. I mean in backwards order, not playing all the songs backwards.
It occurred to me while watching them that it's kind of perfect music for people on the spectrum because, other than mirth, I can't see TMBG generating any kind of emotional response, like some music does. The last time I saw the Weakerthans I was moved almost to tears by the song "Left and Leaving" (go ahead, listen, you might burst into tears). I can't imagine any TMBG provoking that kind of reaction. And there's nothing wrong with that! God knows we could use a little levity. It was a fun, if tiring, show (they didn't go on until after 9 pm, and I had to leave around 11:30; they still weren't done).
We were also talking about pre-show music last night because TMBG had a nice mix going on the house PA before the show, with everything from Kendrick to Lily Allen to the Offspring and I happened to mention my Theory of Pre-Show Music, which is: The harder the pre-show music, the more twee the band. EXAMPLE: I saw Belle & Sebastian years back and they played Geto Boys as their pre-show music. Twee band, hard rap. Conversely, I've seen some pretty aggro rock and they played classical or something before. Try it and see.
THE OTHER MAJOR MUSIC STORY OF THE WEEK had something to do with Kanye, Taylor Swift, and Snapchat. The Wife explained it to me but I wasn't really paying attention but I think it has something to do with some behind-the-scenes dealing and skullduggery and now everyone hates Taylor Swift? I guess go to Buzzfeed or something to learn more.
DID I GET TICKETS TO FYF FEST YET: No. Saturday tickets are currently $194 on StubHub. Humorously, 2-day tickets are $190, which means more people want to go Saturday than go Saturday and then discard a Sunday ticket. Throwing something in the trash is not worth $4 apparently.
I don't think anyone really appreciates yet the level of fuckery that's going to accompany the arrival of Super Bowl L in February which is not being played in San Francisco at all but rather in Santa Clausa or whatever but will effectively shut down downtown because no Regional VP of Sales who's getting sent to the Super Bowl as a reward for beating revenue targets for three straight years wants to go to the Cheesecake Factory in Santa Clara when he could go to the Cheesecake Factory in Union Square. So the NFL and Business Fingerpuppet Ed Lee have joined forces to shut down the foot of Market for 2 weeks so business douches and Patriots fans can wallow around in money and celebrate a sport that's not even played professionally here any more.
Despite the obvious annoyance that this shitacular is going to be, I was more or less agnostic on hating it until this came out:
The committee planning Super Bowl City are asking that Muni’s overhead wires be taken down near Justin Herman Plaza, the San Francisco Examiner has learned, potentially disrupting service of Muni’s historic streetcars and wire-dependent buses.
Supervisor Jane Kim, whose district includes the plaza, said she thought the potential plan was well-known.
“Yeah, that’s real,” she said. “The [Super Bow] committee has been very open about it. They’ve said that’s what they want.”
She added, “They’ve definitely been asking to take down the overhead wires on Market Street.”
You get this? These dickbrains want to take down the wires that the fucking buses and streetcars use, because I guess they'll interfere with the views or something or, more likely, because they think that might keep the ugly vermin that ride Muni from making it into their Morbidly Obese Capitalism Zone. FUCK YOU, SAN FRANCISCO! If you need to get somewhere on lower Market in February, you should have either started a Fortune 500 company or been better at football.
Sources with close knowledge of the project also confirmed the potential plan. Those sources, who would not use their names for fear of reprisal from the Mayor’s Office, also said removing numerous wires on Market Street may cost a “seven-figure number” requiring “lots of overtime” to remove correctly.
So much here. The only people who can talk about this must remain hidden in the shadows lest whoever the fuck it is who really runs this yard visits a terrible revenge on them. But hey, we've got plenty of seven-figure numbers to throw around, now that all that money from Airbnb registrations is rollng in, right?
Elsewhere, the lovely Palace of Fine Arts, long a civic institution, is being boring and not doing what you're supposed to do in Our Garbage City, which is generate TONS O' CASH. So hey, let's fucking MONETIZE THAT BITCH!!!
The Palace of Fine Arts is one of San Francisco’s most iconic public buildings, and some folks are none too happy about potential plans to turn the cultural landmark into a luxury boutique hotel.
Back in December 2014, Rec and Park issued a press release announcing a request for proposals for what general manager Phil Ginsburg called "a unique business opportunity" for private businesses to pitch creative takeovers of the 140,000 square-foot structure. As of last week, the city has accepted three proposals for the fomer Exploratorium space: two would transform the building into a hotel, and one suggests opening a museum and restaurant.
Whatever. Fine. That's where we live now. If you're not generating ROI, you're fucking dead to us. LEARN TO CODE, PALACE OF FINE ARTS, OR GET LEFT BEHIND.
(Also, bless your heart, makers of the Change.org petition to stop this, but it's "San Francisco," not "San Fransisco," sweetie.)
We were also considering TK's Take & Eggs or Tartine Takery, so you got lucky with the title we went with.
WHOA HOW ABOUT THAT ELECTION. I actually can't say I'm surprised about anything, including Prop F going down. Imagine that, the side with 10x more money winning! It's only been that way since ANCIENT FUCKING ROME. I mean, if Gaius Nobodius raised 8 million denarii, he could knock off Cicero. "CICERO: BAD FOR ROME, BAD FOR YOU. My name is Gaius Nobodius and I approved this message."
The first thing everybody talks about is the LOW VOTER TURNOUT like ohhhhh nooooo only 132,262 people voted oh dude that sucks. What the fuck makes you think the extra 300,000 people who could have voted would have done any better? It's not like the 300k people who didn't vote are super well-informed about the issues or would have voted for Amy whoever for mayor instead of the techbro figurehead we're stuck with. If you couldn't be bothered to vote, there's very little chance you wouldn't be swayed by the Prop F ads telling you that Prop F will basically turn SF into Cold War-era East Berlin and the CIA will be watching you through your TV.
So yeah, Ed Lee won, no big surprise there since it wasn't really clear whether the people running against him were joking or not, but I guess it's kind of surprising that he only got 56% of the votes in an election where he was basically running unopposed. San Francisco is famously fractious, but you can still get more than 56% of people to agree on things that are basically unopposed, like beer is good or the Golden Gate Bridge is pretty. Doesn't make any damn difference, though, Ed's 56% counts the same as Kim Jong Whatever's 100%, and both of them don't give a shit what you think.
The interesting thing is that Aaron Peskin got sent back to the Board of Supervisors which is good for people like me who like assholes who call people drunk in the middle of the night or who are themselves assholes who call people drunk in the middle of the night. I just want shit to be more interesting and it seems like he's good at that.
Then we have Prop J, the legacy business fund thing that will help keep shops that people don't spend enough money in to support any more open after they should have gone out of business and I'm just bummed they didn't have this like 150 years ago because you know blacksmith shops and tanneries would be so fucking hip right now. Can you just see the beardos in suspenders all hanging out all around the smithy. God I love the Mission.
Anyway, good job, Garbage City. I'm sure the Airbnb thing isn't over. Hey, I have an idea for a ballot proposition - you can run your Airbnb like a hotel, but you have to provide a hotel bar in every building and also pay-per-view porn and a minibar in the room.
Proposition F - the anti-Airbnb ballot measure, for lack of a better pithy descriptor - has become the shitstorm of this election. It's turned comments sections from trash into Superfund-site-level toxic sludge, made Nextdoor even more hilariously unhinged, and filled everyone's mailboxes with the papertrash equivalent of 3 Examiners a day. It hasn't helped that Airbnb is financing an anti-F campaign that makes the Willie Horton ad look like a Harvard debate club salon.
Forced to do what? To report to the government when you're sleeping in your own bed, according to this not-at-all fearmongering and hilarious No on F ad.
The actual proposition tinkers with existing regulations in more or less minor ways - reducing the total number of nights you can rent out your place from 90 to 75, and allowing neighbors to sue you if they think you're violating the terms, along with some other stuff - but to hear the anti-Prop F people, you'd think it was the Apocalypse combined with the Cuban Revolution and now everyone will have to leave their houses and let a poor move in. They also say the current system is working, which is patently bullshit, since we have a newly-operating full-time Airbnb hotel 2 doors down from our house and no one's doing shit about that.
As you can probably tell, I'm lowkey pro-Prop-F, but it doesn't make any difference because Airbnb's Gigantic Fun House of Money combined with a total voter turnout of about 48 people, most of whom work for Airbnb, pretty much ensures that they've got this one in the bag.
Still, it's become obvious to me this isn't actually about the proposition itself. It's about two views of a changing San Francisco. A lot of people (me, to some extent, included) see San Francisco changing quickly and, to their minds, unpleasantly, and Airbnb is a very visible, very loud manifestation of that. Remember that nice family that lived down the street? They had to move to Fairfield, and now their place has a kegerator instead of a playpen and it's like Phi Delt is recreating the Fall of the Roman Empire there every weekend. To this group, Airbnb is a huge shining symbol of the New New San Francisco - Our Garbage City - where the tech companies shit all over it and do anything they want because there's a perfectly good city government that they paid good money for. To them, Airbnb and Uber and all the rest are the New Boss, swaggering around town and telling them exactly how it's going to be now and why your way sucked and the new way is better and just shut up and look at your phone. There's a velvet rope in front of Bi-Rite now, and it snakes through the Mission to the front doors of Vida.
The others side is a strange agglomeration of super-libertarians who are all IT'S MY PROPERTY I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT and Tech Kids who think anything with a .com at the end shits out cotton candy and genuinely well-intentioned people who really do use Airbnb to rent out an extra room once in a while and don't understand why everyone is so pissed off about that.
So this isn't really a vote about whether or not you should be able to rent out your place for an extra 15 days or whether the busybody neighbor is actually going to get their shit together and calm the voices raging in their head enough to sue you, it's about fear of what this city's becoming or may have already become. This observation probably isn't unique or even interesting, but maybe helps explain why everyone is so fucking worked up. Maybe.
For the past couple of hours, Airbnb has been getting slammed on social media for a San Francisco bus stop ad that was shared on Facebook. How bad was it? People (including Martha Kenney, who first shared the ad) started speculating that it may have been hoax, perhaps posted by someone who wanted to make Airbnb look bad.
via Techcrunch, and ultimately Martha Kenney, I guess. Thanks, Martha Kenney!
One of the grandest green spaces in glorious Golden Gate Park is Lindley Meadow. Its grassy area stretches along the south edge of JFK Drive in the center of the park, spilling down a steep bank into a wide flat space with picnic tables and grills tucked into the eucalyptus border. Lindley Meadow is a splendid place for a party!
Right off the bat, LIES. Lindley Meadow isn't one of the "grandest green spaces" in Golden Gate Park, despite what this alliteration-addled author might have you believe. It's an average green space at best. In fact, it's really brown in places, as you can see in the photo above. Good luck with your garbage picnic in the middle of that dirt hole.
It's a "splendid place for a party" if you like choking dust and grass stains, all right.
Let's get to the "Picnic and Party Features," which is just the GG Park jackboots' way of saying "Life Restrictions/Buzzkills":
1. Restrooms are located at the Equestrian Center just west of Lindley Meadow.
2. Cheers! Beer and wine are welcome at Lindley Meadow, but kegs and liquor are not. Remember: carrying open alcoholic beverages outside the picnic area is never permitted.
Oh, I guess we all should wear matching uniforms and sing "How Great Thou Art" too. Have you ever been to anything fun that didn't have kegs and liquor? ANSWER: NO. Beer and wine is fine for the kids, but a function without kegs and liquor is like a day without a dumb startup. You probably can't have any snacks with high fructose corn syrup either, but I haven't checked with Eric Mar to be sure.
Also, I carry alcoholic beverages around my house all the time, which is "outside the picnic area," so come and get me, Happy Police, I guess I broke the rules.
3. Jump! Inflatable play structures are welcome (additional permit required). No electricity is provided.
See how they snuck that "additional permit required" hoping you wouldn't notice? That's them telling you that your 10,000 square foot inflatable Larry Ellison Japanese Junior Jump Palace will be hung up in Planning for 18 months before you finally get a permit. Happy Birthday! NOW THAT YOU'RE MUCH OLDER.
5. Food-Trucks require an extra permit.
Here's a perfect example of the Regulatory State smothering our economy. Today it's "Food-Trucks" that require a permit, tomorrow it's "Your-Disgusting-Fucking-Kale-Salad." BACK OFF GOLDEN GATE PARK JUST LET ME LIVE!!!!
Regular readers of SFist and SFGate may have noticed that the comments on SFist stories have . . . . changed lately. Let's just say that the comment section at SFist, once a fairly SF-representative - and by that, I mean "progressive" or maybe just "stoned," I guess - place, has begun to resemble the comment section at crosstown non-rival SFGate, whose commenters run the gamut from slightly more conservative to batshit crazy.
Let's take a recent local story, as reported in both organs. The story involves a man who was smoking at the West Oakland station and when cops confronted him they say he freaked out and "resisted violently" and then when he was trying to pull a gun out he accidentally shot himself. I mean, that's what the cops say happened. I have no idea what actually happened because I wasn't there. None of the commenters you will read were there either, as far as I know.
Below are a selection of comments. HERE'S WHERE YOU COME IN. Try to guess which site the comment came from, SFist or SFGate. Ready?
It usually isn't ordinary tobacco I smell at Bart stations. Now we got a mix of gun smoke mixed in as well. Glad he accidently shot himself before he could shoot anyone else.
Great. Here come the white guilt protests tonight, please don't fuck up my commute home, kthx.
Considering they shut down part of the freeway the other night in protest of a car jacker with a gun getting shot by OPD, I think there will definitely be a protest about this.
Where are the protesters? I guess black lives don't matter in Oakland.
BART should close West Oakland, Fruitvale and MacArthur stations. Trips would get faster and crime would drop. I'd say close 16th St. in SF also but that area is gentrifying quite a bit (except the area right around the BART station, ironically).
Dozens of parking spaces surrounding Bill Graham Civic Auditorium are closed for nearly a month. Lanes of traffic on Grove Street and Hayes Street are shut down in the already congested area. Sidewalks around the building are blocked off.
Police officers and private security guards on Tuesday formed a perimeter around the building, huge air conditioning machines were in place outside, and the city’s Planning Department is considering allowing the temporary removal of the huge glass windows on the facade for signage.
Something big is being planned. But what?
The online tech rumor mill is speculating that the auditorium could be the site of Apple’s annual autumn media reveal, the date for which is likely to be Sept. 9.
A monthlong hassle for Civic Center users for a one-day presentation of the next iPhone? It’s certainly possible, but everybody involved claimed not to know or wouldn’t say.
“I’m even the landlord of the building, and they won’t tell me,” said Rob Reiter, project director for the Civic Center. “I’ve never seen anything like it before, but I’m just a guy in the basement,” he said of his office in the bowels of City Hall.
Hahahaha. Did you get that? The fucking self-described LANDLORD OF THE BUILDING doesn't know because the Actual People in Charge of Our Garbage City have patted him on the head and told him he doesn't need to know.
(Also, I assume Rob Reiter is a nice guy and whatever but he really sounds beaten down by life to the point where he describes himself as "just a guy in the basement.")
Furthermore,
The Planning Department is reviewing a permit request from Another Planet to remove four huge windows from the Grove Street facade of the building, secure them with bubble wrap (yes, bubble wrap) and install temporary signage. Drawings on the permit request show big stars would be placed in the window-shaped signs.
The tech industry so thoroughly owns and operates this town now that it can command total secrecy as it reconfigures a PUBLICLY OWNED THEATER and maybe even swaps out the fucking GLASSWORK to its own specs. We are all truly players on Apple's stage. I guess that makes us iMovie elements. San Francisco is their set, and we just live here now. Someone has to populate the background of EXT. STREET SCENE - NIGHT.
(Also, "big stars" in the windows sounds tacky as fuck, but what do I know, I'm not a technology conglomerate with a mayor on retainer, I'm just a doofus with a blog that operates thanks to a different technology conglomerate with the same mayor on retainer.)
Supervisor Jane Kim, whose district includes the auditorium, said she’d heard the Apple rumor but didn’t know for sure. Police officers and guards standing out front said they didn’t know, either.
Even the fucking cops don't know. "Hey man, what are you guarding inside there that's so valuable?" "Fuck if I know!" HOW WOULD YOU KNOW WHO TO SHOOT THEN OR IF SOMETHING IS GOING WRONG.
Maybe you'll find out. Maybe you won't. Maybe Apple will have its next product launch in your fucking kitchen. Shut the fuck up and don't eat all the English muffins, there's important people coming through.
To understand this Journalism Thing, you need to know a few background facts:
1. The San Francisco Chronicle is San Francisco's only big-time, still-printed-on-paper-every-day newspaper. I get it delivered to my door! I'm old school like that. Also, just old. Anyway, being the single most important newspaper in SF comes with a Civic Responsibility, I think. It is my belief that a city's newspaper should serve as the citizenry's watchdog, unafraid to keep a careful eye on what government is doing for and to its people.
2. There have been some questions about whether the Chron is living up to this solemn responsibility.
3. Former mayor Willie Brown writes a weekly column for the Chronicle, which appears on Sundays. It is a strange, although not-unpleasant melange of lightweight political observations, very, very lightweight movie reviews, and almost certainly fabricated anecdotes in which normal folks encounter Willie and inevitably share quoteworthy bon mots. (Example: A guy came up to me at Town Hall on Thursday night and asked me, “You know what is both the shortest and the longest sentence in the English language?” “I do.” Complete strangers apparently approach Willie Brown at dinner with sub-Borscht-Belt level jokes.)
4. The defense in the Raymond Chow case has suggested, in court filings, that Mayor Ed Lee accepted bribes, a parctice he inherited from former Mayor Willie Brown.
Now, that sounds like a juicy story for a newspaper to investigate! Not one but TWO former mayors taking bribes! But wait! Is the San Francisco Chronicle going to investigate San Francisco Chronicle columnist Willie Brown?
They don't need to! Willie Brown has told us, on the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, that he didn't take any bribes at all!
I could feign surprise or even indignation at seeing my name dropped in FBI wiretap transcripts as having taught the folks at City Hall the art of “pay to play” politics. But in all honesty, after 40 years of innuendo and countless investigations, I’m used to it.
So when federal court filings quoted former Human Rights Commission compliance officer Zula Jones as telling an FBI undercover agent in the Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow case that I taught her everything there is to know about laundering campaign contributions, I could only chuckle.
I have never talked about campaign contributions with Jones in my life. And I would not know her cohort who shows up in the Chow case, former Human Rights Commissioner Nazly Mohajer, if she bumped into me on the street.
I do know, however, that for years the FBI has targeted sting operations at black officials and other minority politicians all across the nation. That is why, in all my years in office, I treated every phone call as if it were being taped and everyone I spoke to as if they were wearing a wire.
So stand down, citizens. All is well!
I tweeted about this apparent - well, you could say apparent or you could say GLOWING LIKE THE SURFACE OF THE SUN OBVIOUS - conflict of interest yesterday:
Maybe I'm cynical, but can you trust the Chronicle to conduct a thorough investigation of their own columnist? pic.twitter.com/KTLMA0HYhM
Through the good replies of my fellow citizens, I found that questions about the relationship between Brown and the Chronicle have been raised before, like in this article by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez in the sadly defunct Bay Guardian. Somebody should pay Joe to look into this more. Surely with the billions of dollars sloshing around this town we can fund some investigative reporting. One less laundry app! Uber for muckraking!
(It feels weird to write about questionable journalism without Debra J. Saunders being involved, but don't worry, Debra, I'm sure you'll be featured again soon. The odds are in my favor.)
Towards the end of another Debra J. Saunders fiasco, this one about renaming stuff that's named for Confederates (like, who knew there were three elementary schools in California named for Robert E. Lee?), there's this little anecdote:
"The bill," BTW, is SB 539, which bans naming state or local property after "an elected leader or senior military officer of the Confederate States of America," but exempts the "renaming of a city, county, or other political jurisdiction" with a Confederate name, so Fort Bragg gets to stay Fort Bragg if it so wishes.
(Fort Bragg, as you may not realize, was named after Braxton Bragg, a guy who was a Confederate general, but was apparently named after him before he became a Confederate so it's OK? I guess?)
Before we move on, let's just pause and admire Deb's phrase "Confederate name jihad," because only Debra J. Saunders would call a move to stop honoring traitors a "jihad." Christ.
Anyway, we've been getting this a lot. "But where do you draw the line? George Washington owned slaves! Maybe we should remove his name from everything too!" GOP Assemblyman James Gallagher makes the same argument above, vis-a-vis Earl Warren. Andrew Jackson was a total shitbird, but Jackson Street in SF is still Jackson Street.
So let me suggest a simple test we could use to determine whether or not to remove someone's name: DID THEY ENGAGE IN WAR AGAINST THE UNITED STATES?
Voila! The scales have fallen from my eyes. Now this shit is easy. Robert E. Lee is out and FDR gets to stay. We don't have Emperor Hirohito High School, so why one named after Nathan Bedford Forrest? (That was thankfully changed in 2014.) So that's the rule. Sorry, Taliban Technical High School. That has a ring to it, but it's a non-starter.
Towns are harder because they're not a discrete entity like a school. Thousands of people don't put their elementary school as their return address every time they mail a letter and the rest of the country doesn't commonly refer to a middle school when trying to find a place to stay that's close to Mendocino but cheaper. So I get the exception for that. (Although changing the name of a town has been done before. Even as we speak, I'm in beautiful downtown Yerba Buena. More recently, Hot Springs, New Mexico changed itself to Truth or Consequences, NM, to win a fucking radio contest. America!)
ONE FINAL NOTE. This is not to say that you have to change the name ONLY if someone waged war against the US. After all, the Richard M. Nixon Freeway quietly became the slightly less interesting "Marina Freeway." There's always going to be exceptions.
I was having lunch with someone the other day who mentioned that I don't seem to blog much anymore, which is true. I told him that maybe I just don't get as worked up about stuff as I used to. I mean, even Debra J. Saunders' incoherent sub-preschool-level columns barely raise my ire any more. I thought maybe I'm just not that angry anymore.
Thankfully, these gigantic assholes arrived to shake me from my slumber.
RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIF. — Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.
People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”
Human-shaped garbage barge Steve Yuhas isn't even the worst of this crew who think that they're above the law because they have money. I mean, it's hard to fault them for thinking that, since the whole fucking country seems bent on constantly reinforcingthat idea. Still, it's sort of breathtaking to hear them spout their entitlement-speak out loud and to a major newspaper. At least the filthy rich used to have the common courtesy not to openly rub our faces in the yawning disparity between how they live and how we scrabble around the floor waiting for them to accidentally drop a crumb.
Let together lament the travails of Gay Butler:
“I think we’re being overly penalized, and we’re certainly being overly scrutinized by the world,” said Gay Butler, an interior designer out for a trail ride on her show horse, Bear. She said her water bill averages about $800 a month.
“It angers me because people aren’t looking at the overall picture,” Butler said. “What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?”
Well, Gay, actually, yes. It will come as no surprise to anyone that Steve Yuhas "hosts a conservative talk-radio show," because he is a shining example of the I-got-mine-so-fuck-you mentality typical amongst his ilk. If there was unlimited water, Yuhas and Gay Butler and Bear could all hot tub together and hose each other down 24/7 for all I care but we don't. There is a fixed amount of water available and these scabrous jackoffs think their lush green lawns are more important than your drinking water or your kale or whatever else you want to eat. God I am sick of kale. That's not the point. The point is these people are awful.
One other factoid of note:
In a place where the median income is $189,000, where PGA legend Phil Mickelson once requested a separate water meter for his chipping greens, where financier Ralph Whitworth last month paid the Rolling Stones $2 million to play at a local bar, the fine, at $100, was less than intimidating.
Hold the fucking phone. The Rolling Stones will play a private gig for only $2 million? Mick Jagger is worth $300 million. What is he doing playing "Brown Sugar" for a bunch of rich dicks in Rancho Santa Fe?
Yesterday the Board of Supes voted on the #MissionMoratorium, Supervisor David Campos's idea to halt all market-rate residential construction in the Mission so rents will go down or something. I'm actually not clear on what effect he thinks this moratorium would have, and I'm not sure he is either. There was some vague talk about giving the City a chance to buy some undeveloped parcels for affordable housing but no one had that idea when land was cheap and no one had put forth any hard numbers or a plan to actually make that happen anyway, as far as I know. The Board rejected it, but I doubt that's the end of it.
It's a loaded topic, and no one can dispute that rents have exploded in the Mission and a lot of longtime residents have been forced out and replaced with boring white people. The question is what to do about it. I wasn't convinced that stopping all construction would slow in any way the eviction of current residents. In fact, my belief is that it would probably increase it, since people with money still want to live in the Mission and if there's no new construction then existing landlords will just Ellis Act out their current tenants and sell off the resulting TICs to Facebillionaires.
ANYWAY I live in the Richmond district and my supposed supervisor, Eric Mar, somehow found the time to tear himself away from his tireless efforts to control what beverages people drink and weigh in on this issue.
Supervisor @ericmar415 just compared displacement in the Mission to "ethnic cleansing" #moratorium
Oh my. As @thetens pointed out after I objected to this kind of rhetoric, "Genocide isn't the only thing that ethnic cleansing means though," which is true, I suppose, but I would guess that when people hear "ethnic cleansing," they usually think of ethnic cleansing like Bosnia or Rwanda and not people of various races being peaceably (albeit unwillingly) evicted from their homes. Don't get me wrong; it's terrible, but I don't think incendiary statements like this add to meaningful dialogue on this issue.
I sorta wish Eric Mar would turn his supervisorial gaze to his own district, where we could use some help. Here's the corner of 6th Ave and Balboa, in the heart of the Inner Richmond, not far from where I live:
Empty one-story restaurant, one-story storefront, empty one-story storefront, empty one-story coffee shop. Talk about a prime development opportunity! No tenants to evict, and a shitload of space! You could put up a 4 or 5-story building here, ground floor retail, looks like you could get easily 20 apartments in here. LOOK OVER HERE AT YOUR DISTRICT SUPERVISOR MAR!!! HEY!!! OVER HERE!!!!
Believe it or not, the Mission is not the only place in the city where people could live. If you put up 20 apartments here, do you think they'd sit vacant? Do you think those people might patronize a coffee shop on the ground floor? How about saying "Sure, cool, I'll vote for a moratorium in the Mission if we all agree to speed through development in my district"? What if every other supervisor did that?
Remember a couple of days ago when we talked about how California needs a new State Song and then Burrito Justice went on his radio show and talked about it some more? That was fun. I said in that last post that we would look at other state's State Songs. This is me delivering on that admittedly boring promise.
Here's the list. Of note is the fact that only New Jersey has not seen fit to name a state song, which is cool because everyone knows the Sopranos theme is the New Jersey State Song.
Let's get the winners out of the way first. #1 is Georgia, whose state song is "Georgia on My Mind," predictably enough, as sung by Ray Charles.
Give you chills. OK, that's it. The others are all pretty much crap, except maybe "Tennessee Waltz," which is a pretty great song, and "Do You Realize??" by the Flaming Lips, the Official Rock Song of Oklahoma. What the fuck Oklahoma. Oklahoma is so conservative they think Copernicus was a dangerous radical and running away is the only acceptable form of birth control and they let a bunch of acid gobbling freaks write the State Rock Song. Yes I know the Flaming Lips are from Oklahoma thank you.
Tennessee, not content with just one Official Song, had to go and get fucking 10 Official Songs, including "A Tennessee Bicentennial Rap: 1796-1996," which is performed by an elderly white woman and is not something you would want to listen to willingly.
Most of them are just "State Name" or "My State Name" or "Oh State Name," but once in a while you get an outlier like "Here We Have Idaho," which sounds like someone is going over a map with a customer in a cartography store, trying to convince them to make a purchase by pointing out the completeness of the store's Official USA Map.
During our State Songs discussions yesterday, I learned about the doomed attempt to make "Roadrunner" by the Modern Lovers the Official State Rock Song of Massachusetts. Massacusetts has taken the, to my mind, fun and inclusive approach of having a variety of State Songs in different genres, such as a State Folk Song ("Massachusetts," by Arlo Guthrie) and, charmingly, a State Polka ("Say Hello to Someone From Massachusetts," Lenny Gomulka virtually commands).
New York has "I Love New York" which has not aged well and sounds like a shampoo commercial from 1978. Obviously they need to replace it with "Empire State of Mind" like yesterday.
And a final shoutout to Washington state, which has seen fit to have an "Unofficial Rock Song," namely "Louie Louie." We gotta go.
Letting 16-year-olds vote is a dumb idea. Reading a Debra J. Saunders column isn't only a dumb idea, it can actually be physically painful.
With the exquisite rarity of a solar eclipse, Debra and I occasionally agree. We both agree, for example, that 16-year-olds should probably not be voting. The only thing dumber than a 16-year-old is a 17-year-old. You don't magically become smart at 18 but you can legally have sex and smoke and anyone who can smoke and have sex at the same time is cool enough to vote in my book.
Failes-Carpenter added: “San Francisco has been losing young people, has been losing families,” She wants teens to be “involved in crafting solutions.” The resolution notes that there were 8,000 fewer school-age children in San Francisco in 2013 than in 2000. She sent me a link to a Politico piece, “Why the voting age should be 17,” by Peter Levine of Tufts University’s College of Citizenship and Public Service. (Note: He didn’t say 16.) One sentence jumped out at me: “If the government affects you, you get to vote.”
Hmmmm, methinks, I work in Francisco. I pay taxes in San Francisco — as well as the pesky 10-cent bag fee. I drive in San Francisco. I use city services — and would like to see more public sanitation. If I am charged with a crime, I will be charged as an adult. But just because I live in the East Bay, I cannot vote in San Francisco. If it is fair for teens to vote because city government affects them, why isn’t it fair for me to vote too?
Right on, Debra! I went to Redding once, so why don't I get to vote there? In fact, under Debra's chuckleheaded logic, you should get to vote in literally every city you've ever visited. Holy shit, New York just got 700 million new voters. And I am going to have to clear my calendar to study the ballots for every one of the 300 or however many cities I've been to.
Or maybe Deb just means she should be able to vote in places she goes every day? Or what about once a week? What if I don't drive or pay that 10-cent bag fee? No voting? This is going to get confusing.
(Also, that bag fee is Debra's personal bête noire. She mentions it ALL. THE FUCKING. TIME. I have got a HOT TIP for you, Deb: YOU CAN USE YOUR OWN BAG ANY TIME YOU WANT. Magic! No bag fee. Maybe Debra believes you aren't allowed to use your own bag? In fact, nobody tell her and we'll put a measure on the ballot to fix it AND SHE WON'T BE ABLE TO VOTE FOR IT HAHAHAHAHAH)
You get my point. You get to vote where you live. That's just the system. Age is a completely separate issue.
In closing, neither 16-year-olds nor Debra J. Saunders should be allowed to vote.
Along comes Maximus Real Estate Partners. "Hey you guys hey you guys we've got an idea," they say. "How about instead of a rundown Walgreens and a BK we put up a 10-story apartment building with 345 units of housing? You guys are always talking about how housing is so expensive, so how about we make more of it? And plus instead of the usual requirement of 40 below market rate units, we put in 90? Win-win, right?"
NOPE. You're in San Francisco.
First of all, I might suggest that it might have been a good idea to create a subsidiary for this project alone with a name other than "MAXIMUS REAL ESTATE." Maximus Real Estate sounds like an evil monolith that wants to evict your Mom. How about something a little more PR-friendly, like "Daisy Homes" or "Smiling Face Emoji Group"? Just really anything other than MAXIMUS.
“If Maximus builds these condos on 16th and Mission, there will be massive gentrification in this neighborhood,” housing activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca told a gathering crowd. “New people who move in will call the police to get rid of the poor people”
Dude, have you been to the Mission in like the last 3 years? The Massive Gentrification ship sailed like in 2011. Now the billionaires are gentrifying out the millionaires. We're on like 5th-wave gentrification. Maximus is offering to build 90 BELOW MARKET RATE UNITS. Right now, the only market rate unit at 16th & Mission is the bench by the BART entrance.
Not good enough for Mr. Mecca:
As Tommi Avicolli Mecca, of the Housing Rights Committee and Plaza 16, said at Monday’s protest: “There’s no community benefits that will make us support this project, all we want is 100 percent affordable housing.”
This is lunacy. This is like getting surgery to replace a heart valve and telling the surgeon, "As long as you're in there, please also do some plastic surgery and make me look like George Clooney." Then the doctor says "I can't do Clooney, but I can give you Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park," and you say "NO! CLOONEY OR NOTHING" and rip off the gown and storm out of the hospital. I've got news for you, son. Goldblum gets mad tail. You just fucked yourself.
So here's my counter. Right now, the building is scheduled to be 345 units. You want 100% affordable. OK, new plan. You get 345 affordable units, and they get to build a 100-story building with a total of 1380 units. Everybody wins!
Why do I do this to myself. Why do I click on a Debra J. Saunders column knowing - KNOWING - that the stupid will come tumbling out like a ruptured dog shit bag. Why. Why.
Let's start, as we must, with a Debra J. Saunders patented NO RELATION TO THE TRUTH OR ANYTHING ACCURATE HEADLINE:
Obamacare czar: don’t get annual physical
The problem with this inanity, of course, is that there is no "Obamacare czar" and even if there was, it would not be Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, who doesn't even work for the federal government. At one point in time, he was a health care adviser to the president, but that doesn't make him an "Obamacare czar" any more than once flying coach on United makes Debra J. Saunders a fighter pilot.
Here's how this vapid piece of semi-literate garbage begins:
This opinion piece kills me. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, brother of Rahm, is a former senior health care adviser to President Obama. Now he writes a piece in The New York Times telling people to skip their annual physical. It says, “Most think of it as the human equivalent of a 15,000-mile checkup and fluid change, which can uncover hidden problems and ensure longer engine life.”
“There is only one problem: From a health perspective, the annual physical exam is basically worthless.”
Debra's belief that an op-ed can kill her is roughly consistent with her level of intellect and understanding of Emanuel's column. Anyway, if you read the actual column, it's based on a study of 182,000 people over 9 years that found that annual checkups "are unlikely to be beneficial."
Big fucking deal. So don't get an annual physical if you feel fine, right? NOPE. In the fevered imagination of Debra J. Saunders, this the #Benghazi of health care.
Remember the 2008 sales pitch about how universal health care would mean regular doctor visits that would keep people healthier and hence out of the pricey emergency room? That’s how Obamacare would cover more people without driving up costs — that was the con-job argument anyway. In that spirit, the Affordable Care Act considers the annual physical to be an “essential benefit” for which there is no co-payment.
Oh God, Debra J. Saunders. I hope this is an act because if you're actually this stupid I fear for your safety when handling scissors or alighting upon a curb. If there is something wrong with you, it is demonstrably true that a doctor's office visit is cheaper than going to the emergency room. And perhaps some people - like those with chronic health problems - need annual physicals. What the Emanuel op-ed says that if you're otherwise healthy, studies show that an annual physical is unlikely to confer health benefits. Why is that so hard to understand?
And finally, Debra J. Saunders, Dr. Emanuel is not empowered to control how often anyone sees the doctor, so if you want to have 14 physicals a year, and you can find a doctor as equally stupid as you, go for it.
Voters in Arkansas seem ... confused? For lack of a better word? They just voted to raise the minimum wage in their state, which, fantastic! Good for them. The minimum wage is way too low. They're only raising it to $8.50 an hour but that's probably like $50 an hour here.
Guess how much this 2 bedroom, 1.5 bath with fenced yard and carport in Bella Vista is?
$675. Let that sink in for a minute.
Anyway, Arkansans seem confused because in addition to the highly progeressive and populist move of voting to raise their minimum wage, they also voted to the Senate a guy named Tom Cotton who is against raising the federal minimum wage but because he is so breathtakingly devoid of principle announced he would vote for the Arkansas minimum wage hike because he knows how to read polls and wanted to win an election. It worked. He won.
Arkansas is a good state to use to think about income and wealth disparity in this country because the per capita personal income there is $34,723 which ranks 45th out of 50 states and is also home to the mind-bogglingly wealthy Walton family of Wal-Mart fame who probably drag up the per capita median income a few grand just by being there. The Waltons are particularly venal and loathsome because they are the richest family in America with a combined net worth of $152 billion and pay their workers so poorly that many of them have to go on food stamps to live.
So here's a Thought Experiment. In some state with a low per capita income that also has ballot measures - a state like, say, Arkansas - get the following ballot measure before the voters: a 5% surtax on all incomes above $1 million, with the proceeds going to everyone with an income under $34,723. Now, ideally, I'd like to just distribute it in the form of crisp $20 bills or I guess a personal check but that might even be too Communist or Socialist or Fascist or whatever combination of those that radio hosts would use, so you could cut the state income taxes of everyone who makes $34,723 to a rate that matches the money collected from Richie Rich. (Looks like the current rates are between 1 and 7% for that bracket - should be a nice savings!)
Isn't this just a naked redistribution of wealth? FUCK YEAH. About time we start redistributing it down instead of up, like they're doing in Kansas, where the latest tax cuts benefit the wealthiest people.
What would this accomplish? Well, for one thing, it would help out the people who need it the most. For another, it would tell you whether people are so beguiled by Tom Cotton types that they're willing to vote NOT TO ACCEPT FREE MONEY if it means taking a little bit away from people who make more per year than they will in their working lifetimes. If they won't pass the Free Money For You From Some Caviar Chomping Dbag Act of 2016, then fuck 'em, we tried.
(P.S. Even in dark red states like Georgia a majority of people want to raise the minimum wage. SOUNDS LIKE A ISSUE THAT MIGHT BE GOOD FOR DEMOCRATS. If they weren't so good at losing they might want to pick that up.)
I just voted down at City Hall! No one asked me for my ID because I'm white. I'm pretty good at voting because I've done it for a long time with varying levels of success (still mad at u, stupid AL GORE). But in SF the ballot is like 10 PAGES LONG and I'm busy and don't study as much as I need to and some things still surprise me.
1. Nancy Pelosi is running for Congress! She hasn't run that many ads that I've seen. I voted for her because I like Nancy Pelosi Drive in Golden Gate Park. Little heads-up would have been good, though.
2. There's like a whole page of just judges. Mostly it's just YES or NO. I voted yes for everyone EXCEPT ONE because I like to keep them on their toes.
3. Oh shit, this year you have to vote for your favorite attraction.
I wrote in "Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theater" but I hope Coit Tower wins. If you voted for Fisherman's Wharf I don't even want to talk to you. The campaign those people ran was DESPICABLE.
4. I studied the David Campos vs. David Chiu race pretty hard but I DIDN'T GET TO VOTE IN THAT ONE. What a fucking ripoff.
5. I voted no on the soda tax because get back to me when you start taxing LITERAL BAGS OF FUCKING SUGAR. Do you know how much sugar is in a 1-lb bag of sugar? ONE POUND. That's so much more than is in a Coke. If we are gonna tax sugar, go all the fucking way or go home.
6. Nobody's running against Carmen Chu for Assessor! She must be good at assessing.
7. After I was done I didn't even make it back to the counter before some lady approached me and said "All done?" and then took my ballot. WAIT DO YOU EVEN WORK HERE? I think I just got voter frauded. Where are you, my Republican legislator friends? HELP.
8. THIS IS NOT A JOKE, NON-SAN FRANCISCANS, but this year we had to fucking VOTE on whether to have artificial turf soccer fields and what kind of height restrictions to have at Pier 70. This is ridiculous. Next year we will have ballot propositions like "What should the first movie be at Dolores Park Movie Night" and "Should I pay for a garage or park in the street" and "What's your favorite flavor of Ben & Jerry's" and "Who's Sharon? I have her name and number but don't remember anything about her."
Anyway, you deserve to be heard, so get out there and vote if you have political sensibilities similar to mine. If not, it's a fucking hassle and waste of time and you might as well just stay home.
TK lives and works in San Francisco. He occasionally travels to places east of the Caldecott Tunnel, but not very often. His interests include bars, reality TV, and irony. Things seem to be going fine.
