The Wall: Commentary on Public and Private Life in San Francisco

DISTRICT 6: THE WHOLE SHOCKING STORY

2009-09-07T23:51:00.000-07:00

Message Board Down

2009-07-31T09:26:00.000-07:00

Looks like yuku has been struggling with some of their servers all week. If you have anything burning to get off your chest, you can post it at http://sfwall.yuku.com until the original board comes back up again.

(EDIT: Board back up. Profile servers fixed. Nothing to see here...)

Meet The New Mayor, But First, A Cautionary Tale

2009-06-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

HONGISTO: Long-serving Sheriff, Short-serving Chief, force of nature.

As our Absentee Landlord runs for Governor, one of the burning questions on the minds of those interested is who will succeed him. There are a number of people who are actively posturing like they want the job right now, but the most likely successor is someone who hasn't made himself noticed much recently - and that is something that people should be talking about.

But first, we have a cautionary tale for George Gascon, who as of late July, will be our new police chief. As big city police manager with experience in the quantitative performance school of police management pioneered in New York, Gascon represents one of the few substantial campaign promises that the Absentee Landlord has followed thorough on. It certainly took long enough, too.

While Gascon's main selling point is his experience being part of the Bill Bratton management regime in Los Angeles, many are also capitalizing on his recent exposure to - and survival in - the often surreal world of Arizona politics, which occasionally comes up with some real pieces of work - like Evan Meacham, and more to the point, the ever-entertaining Joe Arpaio. But dealing with Arizona's right-wing buffoons may pale in comparison to the demagogues on both the extreme left and right that a police chief must deal with in San Francisco. And this is where our history lesson begins.

Not with Charles Gain, the hyperpoliticized troll who was appointed by George Moscone and mostly did himself in by listening to Joe Freitas a little too much. For some reason Gain keeps getting trotted out as the object lesson in SFPD political mismanagement. Unfortunately, there is a much more germane - and recent - example. The best object lesson in how the city's political establishment can eat a police chief alive - even when that chief comes from that very same establishment - is Richard Hongisto.

Dick Hongisto eventually became a sort of rennaissance man of San Francisco government, serving as police officer, elected Sheriff, member of the Board of Supervisors, and as Assessor, before becoming police Chief under Mayor Frank Jordan as part of political appointment shuffle. Appointing Hongisto as Chief allowed Jordan to move Doris Ward to the Assessor's office, and Annemarie Conroy to the Board of Supervisors. It also allowed Hongisto, who made his name as a progressive activist street cop and founder of Officers for Justice, and as an equally progressive and popular Sheriff, to realize his own vision for SFPD as a progressively-run force which still emphasized respect for the law.

But Hongisto soon found himself under attack by both the hidebound police union and his former Progressive allies. Earlier as Sheriff, Hongisto burned bridges with some Progressives by being compelled to enforce the law: after spending time in jail for refusing to carry out the court-ordered mass eviction of the International Hotel, which was home mainly to indigent Filipino retirees, he finally carried out the order. In 1978, Hongisto was appointed as police chief in Cleveland by progressive mayor Dennis Kucinich. He was soon sent packing once he proved to be more popular than his boss. Now at the helm of SFPD, he would soon find himself in a similar position again, along with the burden of conservative opposition within his own rank and file.

Soon after his appointment, Chief Hongisto faced a major challenge: in the wake of the Rodney King Trial, riots in Los Angeles were soon mirrored by civil unrest in San Francisco. Fears that the deaths and massive property damage in Los Angeles would also manifest in the City prompted Jordan and Hongisto to react strictly to demonstrations - any that resulted in property damage or injury, or which deviated from agreed routes would be shut down. Local progressives didn't care much for that - they went ahead and crossed the established line of conduct, and the result was mass arrests. Additionally, Hongisto took measures, such as declaring the local jails full and processing and releasing rioters at the Santa Rita Jail across the Bay, which effectively took the wind out of the sails of any further organized unrest. Progressives were incensed, and looked for any opportunity to get Hongisto fired. They, with help of the right-wing leadership of the Police Officer's Association, would soon find that opportunity.

In response to police action against the demonstrations, a local LGBT publication, The San Francisco Bay Times, ran a cover which featured a satiric, demeaning caricature of Hongisto. Faced with continuing dissension in police ranks due to public reaction to the mass arrests, Hongisto asked a narcotics detective based out of Mission Station, Gary Delagnes, who was also vice president of the police union, to get some copies of the Bay Times and distribute them to his membership "to show them what kind of heat he was taking." Delagnes apparently misinterpreted the request - perhaps deliberately - as an order to seize over 2,000 copies of the paper out of public newsracks. Soon afterwards a "little bird" complained about missing newspapers and investigators found the papers being stored in a basement at Mission station.

The resulting hearings before the Police Commission were nothing if not a Soviet-style show trial par excellence. Hongisto was fired, and Delangnes and some other cops got off with suspensions and warnings. Indeed, after a public face-saving interregnum under moderate President Chris Cunnie, Delagnes now heads the police union.

As the new SFPD chief, George Gascon will likely have less emotional involvement and political baggage then Hongisto had. But unfortunately, the hazards faced are still the same.

Meanwhile, back to our next Mayor. An inordinate number of local politicos are acting as if Newsom is going to be the next Governor – despite the fact that his chances in that race are slim to none. Anyone with half a brain knows that either Jerry Brown or Tom Campbell will end up winning that one.

But let’s say he does win. Or, alternatively, he ends up having to leave office because one of his Caligulesque personality tics finally does him in with the public. Has anyone considered the fact that in such a scenario, our next Mayor will most likely be Aaron Peskin?

PESKIN: "So, how long do I have to wait for my closeup?"

Yep. You see, although the former Supervisor and Board President will have been out of the public eye for the better part of two years by the time he would be appointed, he is the most favored candidate for Mayor should Newsom leave office early.

Under the City Charter, the succession plan works like this: if the Mayor leaves before the due expiry of his office, then the President of the Board becomes Acting Mayor. But the Acting Mayor doesn’t get to keep the job for any specified time; unless the vacancy occurs within 120 days of a regularly scheduled election, the Board of Supervisors gets to nominate and then appoint, by majority vote, a new mayor. And they can appoint anyone.

Looking at who is on the Board now, and who will likely be elected to the Board by 2010 (Janet Reilly in District 2; Debra Walker in District 6; Carole Migden in District 10), a majority of them owe significant political favors to Peskin – including David Chiu, the current Board President and Peskin’s anointed successor on the Board.

Now before we start imagining horror scenarios of Aaron Peskin, emerging from the shadows like Pol Pot to forcibly migrate Downtown San Francisco to rural reeducation camps on Treasure Island, you may want to consider that of the last three mayors, the most effective and ultimately most true to a centrist agenda was Willie Brown – who initially ran from the Left with significant Progressive support. As Board President, Peskin ran the agenda like a Swiss watch, and has often shown a pragmatic side. But then again, that pragmatism may be put in abeyance when he is able to gain the power of incumbency as Mayor without a truly public vote.

It’s something to think about.

Discuss on the Message Board (1) (2)

Penalty Unfair

2009-05-18T11:43:00.000-07:00

The current pressure on MUNI to “get tough” on fare evaders creates an even bigger sinkhole for public funds - and more tension on trains.

This week Supervisor Bevan Dufty became the latest in the long line of public officials around the country to address the issue of MUNI fare evasion, an offense whose level of outrage seems to correlate to a city’s economic health. Dufty “is pushing to increase evasion citations by 50 percent, which would bring the fine for first-time offenders up to $75 from the current $50. Dufty is also suggesting fines of up to $250 and $500 for second-time and third-time violators, respectively.”

MUNI fares are in the news this month as the City’s economic woes bring pressure to bear on any municipal revenue stream, and the MUNI fare box has always been the subject of political tug-of-war between transit advocates who endorse cheap, plentiful transit as an incentive for citizens to stop using their polluting and sprawl-inducing cars so much, and fiscal conservatives who tend to indict transit as an exemplar of everything that is wrong about social democracy – an overpaid driver and an underpaid fare box leading the way inside a mobile aquarium of the working poor and ungovernable urban youth covered in magic marker ink, crack pipes, spilled coffee and lickspittle. The end result is that nobody seems to want to look at the issue in terms of how to effectively ameliorate the problem.

Concerns about fare evasion are rising in all major cities. That’s because we’re in a recession, and cities need money. The fact that fare evasion rises when everyone is under economic pressure makes it an even more convenient bugaboo that allows transit agencies to vent popular pressure while increasing fares. Enforcement schemes against fare evasion are indeed more often than not more expensive than the lost fare income itself, and in a culture where the public expectation of transit fares are still based upon the outdated notion that transit is primarily for the poor to lower middle class, you’ll never get away politically with bringing fares up to the level where they actually pay for service.

The stupidity of fare evasion enforcement becomes even clearer when you combine the subsidy-vectored pressures of cities like San Francisco (where the rule against back-door boarding is broken literally hundreds of thousands of times per day out of common sense) with the individualistic cultures of Left Coast cities generally. Such schemes become characterized by the public as the urban equivalent of the old Southern “Speed Trap” as any hope to legitimize the policy goes out the window. End result: more fare evasion.

So whatever happened to Penalty Fares? Is it really more expensive to just make scofflaws pay their fare on the spot rather than process all those citations?

Now there’s an idea.

Discuss on The Wall: San Francisco Politics, Policy, and Government

SFWeekly Looks at the JROTC Issue

2009-04-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-04-08/news/jrotc-under-fire-in-s-f-schools/

Interesting article. Some Observations:

1) As I've posted before, I was a JROTC cadet in two different school districts. JROTC kids get teased/bullied everywhere. Yet it's only here that the program has tried to conform to self-styled "community standards". Despite this, it's still used as an ideological hate idol. I wonder whether the decision of the local JROTC program to water down their curricula helped them at all.

2) Any attempts to create a "homegrown" leadership program within SFUSD is doomed to failure. Any realistic attempt at a syllabus for such a program would have to include instruction on the use of discipline and motivation, and any such work outside the aegis of a neutral subject venue such as national defense or public safety will inevitably be labeled as ideological. We've already seen the interim "Leadership Pathway" project exposed as a sham.

3) Some people are just nuts about this. Apparently, a certain anti-JROTC School Board Commissioner "unfriended" one of her facebook freinds because that person had the temerity to post supportive comments about Fiona Ma's pro-JROTC legislation, on Ma's facebook wall. If I unfriended people based on policy decisions I'd have shit can FB Friends left.

4) I wonder if Army TRADOC (the national command which oversees JROTC) wouldn't rather see JROTC die at SFUSD in favor of a charter school or private military academy, either here or in Daly City. Lots of military secondary schools use the JROTC program as their curricula base. This may suit the facile political goals of the anti-JROTC School Board Commissioners, and the Army, but leave both the majority of SFUSD JROTC students as well as the peace activists with a great deal of resentment.

Discuss on the message board

The Homeless, Again

2009-03-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

Funny, I still see an overwhelming number of chronic homeless on Downtown's streets. I doubt any progress has been made at all.

It goes without saying that any social service case management regime requires a way to track the process of clients. We have similar programs with GA clients and other programs. There are safeguards in those programs. SFPD can't just demand the GA or SSI address records of a given client who may have warrants, for instance.

The Board will never contribute to solving the homelessness problem because they receive endorsements and campaign assistance from homeless-oriented NGOs who want to be able to keep their service contracts. Downtown wants to see the homeless "moved along" someplace else, which is impossible. The Mayor has turned the issue into a cruel Potemkin Village sideshow with a program that allows corporations and constituents to feel better about themselves on the issue by letting them donate free massages.

The only answer to chronic homelessness is intervention. Implementation of Laura's Law, increased cooperation between MAP and SFPD, and the opening of transitional shelters for cumpulsory committment cases. And the program needs to be run directly by DSS/DPH, not contracted out.

Of course, that would violate the sensibilities of our City's political class, who use the ethical fiction "people have a right to live without money" to defend the presence of the homeless, which they in turn use to propagandize their constituents about the continuing need for their brand of social change - which never seems to arrive despite the fact that they were supposedly elected to enact it.

Richard Ramirez once said "In the absence of government strategies of how to help the lunatic or the destitute, or the addicted, we pass out quarters. In return, the homeless give us the assurance that we live in San Francisco."

http://sfappeal.com/news/2009/03/homeless-policy-progress-made-more-accountability-needed-grand-jurors-say.php

A Board of Supervisors panel this afternoon took up a Civil Grand Jury report that found San Francisco is on the right track with its push to create more permanent housing for homeless people but that new tools are needed to make sure service dollars aren't being wasted.

In particular, it was interesting to watch members of the board's Government Audit & Oversight Committee and Newsom administration officials tip-toe around the Grand Jury's call for a computerized tracking system that confidentially assigns a number to each client of city-funded homeless services agencies to determine which programs are working best.

"The Jury believes that such a tracking system, properly designed and maintained, will be an invaluable tool for establishing the effectiveness and cost effectiveness" of city-funded service providers, according to a report, titled "The Homeless Have Homes, But They Are Still on the Street."

The tip-toeing was on display because supervisors and administration officials either don't want to take on or share the view of advocates for homeless people who see such a tracking system as a violation of privacy and potential obstacle to getting care to people who are distrustful of how the information would be used by authorities.

Dariush Kayhan, the mayor's chief homeless policy director, never addressed the call for the tracking system directly but contended the city is keeping a close enough eye on the dozens of nonprofit agencies under contract to deliver homeless services.

"We know what they are doing," Kayhan said, adding, "I am very comfortable with the nonprofit agencies and how they are performing."

Supervisor Eric Mar suggested more attention on monitoring how homeless services dollars are spent might detract from the services themselves.

"I want to see strong services to people on the street," Mar said.

Discuss on the Message Board

Chronicle: 1st & Folsom Project Needs More Scrutiny

2009-03-29T12:49:00.000-07:00

Perhaps, but maybe this way we won't get stuck with another giant condom-sheathed penis in the midst of our downtown...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/29/BAHC16NIED.DTL

Two years ago, the competition to win the rights to build San Francisco's tallest tower drew powerful developers, celebrity architects and fervent public interest in the proposed designs.

Images
View Larger Image

Now there's another competition just two blocks away, the grand prize a site with room for a 60-story tower at a major entrance to the Financial District. But only three teams bothered to respond - and the way the rules are currently written, the public won't be allowed to glimpse any of the proposals until the city selects a winner.

Discuss on the Message Board

The New Plan To Bring Jobs Back Downtown

2009-03-16T10:42:00.000-07:00

http://www.spur.org/documents/030109_article_01.shtm

The smart growth movement has long called attention to the problems with sprawl, but has often been focused on residential sprawl. Yet the dispersion of jobs into suburban and exurban office parks that can never be served by transit is just as much of a threat to the environment as residential sprawl, if not greater. To achieve a low-carbon future, Bay Area residents need to be able to commute to work without relying on a car.

SPUR argues that our best strategy to reduce job sprawl is to channel more employment growth toward existing centers, particularly the transit-rich downtown of San Francisco.

Other transit-served employment centers in the Bay Area, such as downtown Oakland and San Jose, as well as Concord and Walnut Creek, also should capture a growing share of regional employment. The success of the other transit-served job centers is key to a future Bay Area that uses less carbon. But most workers in these other locations, including downtown San Jose and Oakland, drive to work. Future SPUR reports will look at what can be done to improve the land use, urban design and transportation networks for the other employment hubs in the Bay Area.

But downtown San Francisco is the only employment node in the region where most people travel to work without bringing their own car. This paper focuses on downtown San Francisco as the node with by far the greatest near-term potential to accommodate regional employment growth with a low carbon footprint. In fact, if reducing emissions and the amount of driving was our only criterion, we would advocate a region that adds as much of its incremental growth as possible into San Francisco. Even if San Francisco retains its share of regional jobs (16 percent), the increase in driving and emissions in the suburbs will prevent the region from attaining climate change goals.

While done from an environmental perspective, this is an excellent plan all around. One question, though: with regard to the Market-Mission and Civic Center, is public safety the Chicken or the Egg?

Comment on the Forum

A Modest Proposal: Chris Magnus for SFPD Chief

2009-03-13T21:42:00.000-07:00

Why not?

This is a person who has worked as a police manager in three very different but challenging jurisdictions: Lansing, Michigan; Fargo, ND; and now Richmond.

He's a "stereotypical white guy" who nevertheless understands and honors diversity - and at the same time won't back down in the face of racial cronyism.

He's got experience in successfully implementing community based patrol schemes, handling community concerns from entertainment issues, tackling hate crimes, and reaching out to classified constituencies.

Most importantly, in Richmond he's learned how to survive vicious political infighting.

He even looks a little like Hennessey. Plus he's single and collects art, so certain gatekeepers in the LGBT community could just assume he's... well, no, that probably wouldn't fly.

Oh well, just a thought. Still, who in the SFPD has this kind of experience, is still young enough to care about using it right, and isn't inured to the department's archaic culture?

Just A Thought.

Discuss on the forum

Is San Francisco Calcutta, or East St. Louis? And is it The Chronicle's Fault?

2007-11-02T15:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, in their endorsement of Mayor Newsom for re-election, the Chronicle chided him for failing to have the fortitude to combat institutional resistance to implementing reform of homelessness policy, such as enforcing Laura's Law. However, after reading today's incomprehensible opinion piece by Callie Millner, I have come to the following conclusion: that all of the hand-wringing about homelessness in the Chronicle, whether it be the meretricious sensationalism by Sports Guy, the presumably reasoned unsigned editorials, or today's hysterical hallucination, is essentially crocodile tears.

In her editorial, Millner deliberately confabulates homelessness with gun violence, conjuring terrible images of armed homeless people just itching to shoot at overentitled white-acculturated yuppies such as herself. She compounds the injury further by contrasting these images with her tourist trip to Calcutta, stating essentially that while the homeless of Calcutta may be worse off, they at least make her feel safer because they are less likely to blow her away.

Quite frankly, if Ms. Millner was less likely to be blown away by a homeless person in Calcutta than by one in San Francisco, it would have more to do with the acceptance of homelessness in India's culture than anything else; gun ownership is legal in India, albeit tightly controlled, and let us not forget that Calcutta is a mere hop, skip and a jump down the Grand Trunk Road from Peshawar, Pakistan, where you can buy almost any sort of small arm which can be made or resold.

It's also hardly likely that the average homeless person in San Francisco, or any other US city, carries a gun. After all, they're too busy spending what money they get on drugs and booze in order to afford to buy a gun, whether at retail price or street. Most homeless people in San Francisco, however, do carry knives. They tend to use them on each other, however. Any streetwise San Franciscan knows that while they are very likely to be accosted and annoyed by a homeless person, the likelihood of being actually physically attacked by one is about the same as being eaten by a bear at Yosemite.

The bizarre hysteria exemplified by Millner and her article insults the intelligence of the public. So much so, that it becomes easier for ordinary citizens to accept the equally disengenous rhetoric of NGOs like the Coalition on Homelessness and the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, whose primary business is using shrill elitists like Millner as straw men in support of public policy designed to keep people on the streets and in slums - and keep thus these very entities in business.

Homelessness does indeed present a threat to public safety. However the threat is an environmental one, not a direct one. Where homeless people are allowed to congregate, the streets become dirty, property values fall, businesses leave, and real criminals come in to take the easy pickings. The same homeless people are just as likely to be victimised by those criminals as they are to commit any crimes themselves. We've seen it again and again, just as we've seen the Chronicle fail to adequately cover the corruption of homeless-oriented NGOs.

Maybe the Chronicle editorial board thinks that coverage of that process, and why it should be stopped, is simply too complicated for its readership to comprehend, and so they've come up with this bogeyman of the machinegun-toting homeless person ready to incite an Urban Armageddon. If that's the case, they are underestimating their readers. This imagery is far more likely to drive the average person into the arms of the opposition, and as such we will be stuck with the same problems.

Which leads us tio thinking the unthinkable: maybe the Chronicle actually has no interest in helping the public frame the homelessness issue with the goal of solving or ameliorating it; instead, they simply wish to provoke a more organized backlash against homeless policy reform by San Francisco's Progressives and corrupt, self serving NGOs. This, in turn will destroy reform politically forever and keep San Francisco's urban blight and street crime intact as a source for further sensationalist coverage which the Chronicle can continue selling to its newer, disinterested suburban readership.

Of course, that does nothing for San Franciscans who continue to put up with homelessness and dirty streets, and the resultant increase in street crime.

Then again, most San Franciscans don't read the Chronicle anymore, either.

Panic in Needle Park

2007-08-23T13:42:00.000-07:00

The Chronicle promotes harm reduction in response to heroin use in Golden Gate Park - but Washington’s Republican intolerance and local Progressives’ negligence will likely combine to make it into a disaster

The big issue in San Francisco, especially if you’re a Chronicle reader, is the squatting in Golden Gate Park by homeless drug addicts. Never mind that this issue is trotted out every few years with no solution anyway - With no serious competition for Mayor Gavin Newsdriven in his re-election campaign, the Chronicle has been running a series of stories on the ongoing junkie problem, featuring their new conscience, the flabby, mealymouthed former sports columnist, Chuck Nevius. In today’s issue, Nevius proposes a solution to the problem: setting up “injection centers” run by the City for addicts to shoot up in so that they won’t litter the park with their needles.

The idea is not without merit. Cities like Vancouver and Zurich have such facilities, which are more properly referred to by governments and NGOs as “supervised injection facilities”. Studies tend to confirm that while they by themselves do not reduce the total rate of HIV or Hepatitis infection among addicts, nor addiction rates, they do have an impact on the overall incidence of high-risk drug behaviors, and upon the public order and quality-of-life aspects of these offenses. When combined with more comprehensive measures such as needle exchange, methadone distribution and changes in administrative doctrine to “medicalize” drug use, addiction rates, to hard drugs at least, fall dramatically.

However, any attempts to rationally implement such solutions in San Francisco run into the usual codependent behaviors which mar other aspects of public policy. We already have Methadone programs, but they are impacted by accessibility problems (most are based in the Bayview and SOMA areas and have limited dispensing hours, yet the Tenderloin and Haight are our major centers of Heroin use). Newsom’s attempts to make Methadone accessible by prescription have been fought by the city’s leftist NGO establishment. As El Greco has brilliantly documented, needle “exchange” in San Francisco more often than not means mere distribution with no effort to collect used needles.

Moreover, in countries where supervised injection facilities have been successfully implemeted, it’s been done with the cooperation of their national governments. Vancouver may be about to lose that cooperation. Do you think we can get it here? California’s Prop 215, which sought to medicalize marijuana use, is ignored by the Feds, and is being used as a legal fiction by drug dealers to sell pot for recreational use with relative impunity, because there is no way to protect legimate, monitored medical uses from opportunistic Federal enforcement. Do you think San Francisco can get federal support for municipally supervised shooting galleries? Take a look at the comments to Nevius’ article and guess again. Do you think they will be properly supervised, given the negligence-oriented, corruptive influence of local NGO’s?

What the Chronicle fails to report, as it always does, is that none of these measures can be properly implemented until San Francisco’s voting public wakes up and recognizes the necessity of framing public policy according to real public needs rather than as a reflection of conceited self image, until we can remove the regime of self-serving NGO’s from the public service trough, and until we can elect politicians we can truly respect and trust - rather than simply like the idea of.

Throw The Jew Down The Well

2007-06-19T10:10:00.000-07:00

(Left) Victim of a Rush To Judgment? Or Poster Child for the Municipal Equivalent of a Failed State? You Decide.

If you live in Northern California, you know that San Francisco's District 4 Supervisor Ed Jew is in big trouble. Headlines in the city's newspapers and blogs have been dominated by the ongoing criminal and civil charges against the 47-year-old entrepreneur, activist, and since last year, elected official.

To the uninitiated, Jew came upon the political scene as an activist for the interests of New Chinatown, the community of conservative, homeowning, second and third generation middle-class Chinese-Americans who moved to the City's West Side to buy homes and start businesses. Together with more affluent recent Chinese immigrants, this community started to find its own political focus during the mid-90's over issues like the fate of the Central Freeway, the shorting of their children in public schools as exemplified by the district's busing policy, rising taxes and utility use fees, and community opposition to their tendency to remodel their new homes to accommodate larger families, which they viewed as racist.

The truth is a bit deeper than that. Just as mainstream city leaders in the 1980's saw an exodus of light industry in favor of a new upper middle class changing the face of downtown and nearby development through infill housing, some leaders in the city's Chinese American community, then still centered politically around Old Chinatown on the East Side, saw the evolving needs of the community and worked to foster a new political voice for Chinese Americans which was independent of the Progressive, benefit-oriented ethnic politics of the time.

Chief among these were Harold Yee, the founder of Asian, Inc. and his protégé Roland Quan, a major leader in the Chinese American Democratic Democratic Club (CADC) in the 1990's. These people were contemporaries of other more assimilationist and Progressive identified Chinese American leaders like Supervisor Gordon Lau, Judge Lillian Sing, Professor Ling-Chi Wang, publisher John Fang, Democratic activist Alicia Wang, and others. However, they decided to go in a different direction politically.

It was in the late 1990's and early 2000's that this political faction started making visible gains. In 1994, CADC sponsored a class action against the San Francisco Unified School District, alleging that the district busing policy negatively impacted Chinese-American students by effectively holding them to far higher standards than those for other students. In 1999, they won a court order that forced the district to stop using race or ethnicity in admissions decisions. In 1997, newly elected Supervisor Leland Yee, a former School Board member who campaigned for his job based a moderate, reality-based political platform, championed a successful ballot measure to retrofit and preserve the Central Freeway, an artery considered important to car-loving Westside Chinese but as a blight generating impediment to the density-friendly redevelopment of Hayes Valley and nearby neighborhoods.

By 2000, however, things started to slump. District Elections forced Leland Yee to reinvent himself as a NIMBY politics candidate who put forward a conservative image but who was more than willing to be pimped by Progressives on citywide issues, essentially becoming a Chinese ghola of Quentin Kopp. Further ballot battles over the Central Freeway led to victories for the Progressives. But the icing on the cake was the demise of Julie Lee, the Taraval street realtor and rising political ward boss who acquired her first fat pipe during the first Central Freeway war.

Lee started a new organization called the San Francisco Neighbors' Association, which was ostensibly dedicated to championing issues dear to new (and thus implicitly including immigrant) homeowners, such as tax and fee relief, quality of life issues, and increasing housing supply. Unfortunately, Lee's personal ambitions, for herself as well as for her son, took over. And when they came crashing down, they took the political career of Kevin Shelley with them.

It is in the wake of all this that we now see the meteoric rise and fall of Ed Jew's political career.

Jew won his Supervisor's seat with an aggressive campaign which would seem, despite the recent revelations that he didn't even live in the district, to be a model for victory under the current electoral regime of district elections by ranked choice voting. He stayed clear of the backbiting and perceived factional string-pulling between other Chinese-American candidates, and turned out a base, which he carefully cultivated as a citywide leader.

Jew may not have earned the notice of the white-dominated city political clique until recently, but within the Chinese American community he was very well known as an activist on political issues, whether based in policy (water and sewer rates, neighborhood schools) or culture (urging Japanese acknowledgement of war crimes). His family ties - his father is a former President of the Chinese Six Companies - are also well known.

And while the political community may see his agenda as fungible (Jew entered politics as a Republican, but won office as a Democrat), his base, up until now, has seen him as True Blue (when Leland Yee turned his back on his constituency for the sake of first District Elections, and then State office, Jew in turn abandoned him).

But none of that matters anymore. There are a lot of indications that Jew, despite being respected in the community and having considerable personal wealth, simply "wanted it too badly." Insiders in the community readily acknowledged that during his recent and previous runs for office, his meeting of residency requirements was facile at best. Like a lot of rich people who run multiple businesses, Ed Jew likely sees a publicly known home address as an encumbrance if not an outright invasion of privacy. Despite running as a supposed outsider, he was well connected, and benefited from a number of the many entitlements which burden the City (for instance, his family holds tight-fistedly onto a taxi medallion).

So if Ed Jew was More Of The Same, and it certainly seems he has turned out that way, what's with the spectacularly sordid explosion of his political career? Jew's residency peccadilloes, although long suspected, were not focused upon until it was revealed that the FBI were already investigating him for shaking down businesses over permits. Oh Yeah - Jew had the brass balls to ask for $40,000, as an elected official, to expedite businesses supposedly arrears permits. The business in question didn't seem to feel compromised in the situation: after all, they went to the FBI, and helped sting Jew with FBI buy money. Which begs the question: ISN'T THIS WORSE? Any why has everyone stopped talking about it and instead focused on the residency issue, despite its own fungibility?

It certainly makes one wonder.

Who, or What, is "John Nelson?"

2007-03-01T13:40:00.000-08:00

Many of you will remember the pathetic antics of Newsom Administration Professional Embarrassment Peter Ragone on the SFist blog and how it got exposed. Well, lately it appears that someone is continuing to appropriate the name in order to post some rather surreal contributions on the Wall Forum:

I Like Press Secretaries (A rather unfortunate ripoff of a widespread Net meme)

Bathroom "Humor"

And the most disturbing yet, "I Am Homer Simpson"

Maybe there's more than meets the eye here - a second look at the bathroom post indicates that the "Spock, in a chef's hat" reference may actually be Benjamin Spock, not the TV character. And the Homer Simpson reference in the newest missive is most certainly not the cartoon charcter, but from the Nathanael West classic "The Day of the Locust" (Donald Sutherland plays him in the movie.)

Notable Posts

2007-03-01T13:22:00.000-08:00

Castro's Character Threatened?

What WERE They Thinking?: "There were plenty of other hate columns Asian Week could have published. Just a simple Google search and I was able to dig these up:

9. Why I Hate People Who Work Hard, Pay Their Taxes, and Think City Government Should Be Accountable by Chris Daly

8. Why I Hate Chris Daly by the F line Muni driver who was nearly suspended for making a comment to Daly during the last election

7. Why I Hate Not Being Able to Date Nineteen Year Olds Anymore by Gavin Newsom

6. Why I Hate the US Military by Gerardo Sandoval with special guest star Sean Hannity

5. Why I Hate Hillary Even Though She Let Me Sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom by David Geffen

4. Why I Hate Chat Boards by Peter Ragone

3. Why I Hate that Son of a Bitch Even Though He's Paying Me Off by Alex Tourk

2. Why I Hate Ellen Degeneres Hosting the Oscars by Billy Crystal

1. Why We Hate Kink.com More Than Having the Armory Vacant for Thirty Years by activists in the Mission..."

This Week's Controversies

2006-10-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

San Francisco's Sex Trafficking Problem

Sabotaging the Local Democrats

Kamala Harris Criticized, Yet Again

Prurient Preservation

2006-10-02T09:37:00.000-07:00

Left: A Quonset hut at Pier 66. Some morons wish to suck more blood from the body politic to have this disposable structure preserved (Word Document).

Today's Chronicle has a story about preservationists out of control again. Fortunately, the object of the fetishists is an earthquake shack, so it could be moved to the Zoo. But not before the owner had to pay thousands of dollars to determine exactly what kind of earthquake shack it was.

This is sadly reminiscent of the recent attempt by some to preserve Quonset Huts in the Mission and Bayview. Next they'll be filing suit to save Conex Boxes at former mini-storage sites.

Discuss it here.

What to Ask of School Board Hopefuls

2006-09-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

User "mom knows best" reposts a model questionnaire for school board candidates, put together by the mod at the SFSchools Yahoo Group. And we chime in on it.

"The Decline To State State" - A Growing Empire of Indifference?

2006-09-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

Dan Weintraub's California Insider sends us over to Bill Cavalla's prognostications on the growth of Decline-to-State voters and the effect it has on political parties and campaigns:

"'The Secretary of State recently released new registration numbers for California showing a continuation of a serious trend: both major parties lost in the contest for new voters. The winner was "declined to state".'

All surveys show that "declined to state" voters are the least interested and least informed members of the electorate. They decline to state a party because they don't care about politics or government enough to learn the differences between the parties. They vote because they know good people do – sort of like brushing your teeth or combing your hair. Voting is more dutiful etiquette than thoughtful pursuit of good for the nation.'

But they do vote (albeit in lower percentages than partisans), and their vote is often the difference between winning and losing. Because they are so indifferent, they must be given the same simple message many times before it sticks enough to affect their behavior.'

That's why campaigns (and mainstream television) seem so mindless at times: they are pointed at a disinterested audience."

We discuss it here.

On Heavy Shoulders

2006-09-25T11:21:00.000-07:00

Left: Somehow, Faking It Was Easier Back Then

With people finally waking up to Mayor Newsdriven's giving away of the store and Unease of the Week - driven policies, it's no suprise that both Sofia Milos and Jack Davis have dumped him.

Can the Ungovernable Mayor save himself?

Newsom vs. Newsom on Crime

Hennessy wants a raise, but was last in line at the trough

Daly's Reign of Terror

2006-09-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

Daly: "I support Colonic Irrigation!"

KCBS reports that Supervisor Chris Daly is now actively pursuing elimination of the police chief post, something he first spoke of doing a few years ago. Instead, the elected sheriff would oversee all law enforcement in the city and county.

"If they're keep the attacks on me, I'll keep moving forward what I think is good public policy," Daly said. "What they fear is the end of their reign of terror in San Francisco."

But whose reign is he talking about? We talk about it here.

The Bay Garbagecan Still Stinks

2006-09-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

Several of us, but especially Slickwillie, are fed up with the "advocacy journalism" of the Bay Guardian.

Free Speech Should be Banned

The Oakland Horde

Technicalities Aren't Fair

Bayview Redevelopment Blocked

2006-09-20T10:01:00.000-07:00

People are pondering the upcoming plebescite on Bayview development. RandySF writes:

'So, Bayview residents, who live in some of the most squalid conditions in the city, will have to wait another year before they are allowed to improve their lives. Never mind that there will be no "emminent domain" of houses. Never mind that no less a progressive than Sophie Maxwell supports redevelopment. Never mind that the new jobs created would have to be filled by bayview residents.

'There can only be four types of people who are blocking this: Developers who do not want to employ Bayview residents; "Activists" who want to keep playing the poverty game; "Progressives" who don't want to take any chances of having more black neighbors and Chris Daley who would lose support if people realized that he doesn't have any answers.

Way to go progressives. '

We discuss it here.

West Nile Weirdness

2006-09-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

The SF Daily reports (story not online) that West Nile Virus has been found in dead birds in the Presidio. Anyone else report this?

Leave a comment or discuss it here.

Trying to Abate Daly's Mountain of Shit

2006-09-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

SPUR, and, surprisingly, the SF Chamber (which seems to have gained a backbone since Jim Lazarus came on as political director), are launching a campaign to limit the last-minute politically-driven ballot measures put on by the Board of Supervisors. These are generally measures made from bills which failed to be passed at Board voting or meaningless litmus-test measures put on to drive turnout for certain incumbents, which can be put on the ballot with only four votes.

The incumbent in question, the careerist psychopath Chris Daly, defends himself in today's Examiner:

'Daly said he has a legal right to put measures on the ballot, if he gets the support of at least three other supervisors. He added that the process was a more equitable way of "pushing issues" than well-funded initiative campaigns where petition workers are paid per signature to gather support.'

'"I'll never be ashamed of pushing turnout for elections," said Daly. "Where there is actual conflict is when there's significant money involved."'

But, isn't there already significant money involved? All that money Daly has corraled from developers who are currying his favor? Or the public money he's used to payback his political minions?

We discuss the issue here.

And Now, The Asshole Patrol

2006-09-15T09:03:00.000-07:00

Mayor Gavin Newsdriven and his minions finally put together resources to quell the obnoxious bridge-and-tunnel crowd in North Beach. We discuss it here.