Out here the SF Examiner has been resurrected as a decent news source again. However there are writers with which I have a disagreement. One of whom is named Al Saracevic. In his most recent article, he pushes the meme of "left vs. lefter", which is a vast over-simplification in my opinion.

It's not a bad article, although I don't really get the need to do a Freud reference, because politics is more about power than human psychology, but I wrote him an email. Here it is:

Thank your for your soap box Mr. Saracevic, but I have to disagree with your framing here. It’s not left vs. lefter. It’s left vs. contrived. It’s not Chesa vs. Brooke. It’s Chesa vs. a political opportunist who got paid 100,000+ by the billionaire(s) who largely funded the recall for “consulting services”.

And now the SF Chronicle is going with the Walton “nigga” story full blast that Breed’s folks pulled out of a hat to get ahead of that $100,000 fiasco. Mind you we are talking about LondonBreed whose childhood friend Nuri was milking bribes throughout an extensive network of insiders and consultants. Breed who meets secretly with developers and then immediately destroys emails, who makes a big show on Union Square but cannot do anything about the persistence burglaries in Chinatown at Asian business establishments, and then leaves for Europe to escape criticism to promote tourism. Oh but let’s just get all upset about an N-word Walton used because he had to take off his belt and shoes more often then white folk.

I remember when the city press went ga-ga-go-go all over Matt Gonzalez when Tom Ammiano suddenly had a real chance to become city mayor. They slavered all over Matt as if he was the real deal. Then when he performed his stalking horse duty and knocked out Ammiano’s chances by splitting the votes — just like the services David Lee performs out here in District one — Gonzalez faded into the background. Interesting how Gonzalez recently resurfaced to support the recall too.

This town is owned by the rich and the rich want to keep it that way. This was a Republican town all throughout the 20th century after the Ruef corruption trials around 1908 and that only started to change during the latter 1970’s because of the changing demographics. This is the town that initially refused Willie Mays a house in Miramar because white people worried about property values. This is the town where Justin Herman completely destroyed Harlem West because his wealthy developer backers wanted to make more money at the expense of the black people who lived in those regions.

The city has changed in the past 20 or 30 years and most current denizens are ignorant of this past, and that’s what the rich are counting on. They will make sure their hired chroniclers write narratives that make them seem practical and civic minded, when they are just power hungry. The recent recalls are a reflection of that.

The politics of San Francisco has always been about downtown vs. everyone else, it just got more complicated in the post 1970’s. Lincoln Marshall recently did a great couple of pieces in the examiner on this topic. You should read your own newspaper.

This is a great article in Slate.

Click here for a Brookings Institution research study on the algorithms used to manage enrollment.

I'm responding to Mr. Quentin Kopp's latest screed in the August issue of the Richmond Review out here on the west side of the city of San Francisco. I would link to Mr. Kopp's monthly rant, but it has not yet been published on the website. The printed newspaper arrived this weekend on various corners of the Richmond district where I live, so us citizens who actually read it got a head start on the digital version.

I'll link the eventual digital version here: Click here. It will probably be active sometime Sunday on 31 July 2022.

RE: District Elections are the norm for large California cities

In his latest penned annunciation, Mr. Quentin Kopp makes some allegation that district elections for San Francisco city supervisor are equivalent to “dirty” ward politics that is beneath the grandeur of the city of San Francisco. I’m paraphrasing.

Keep in mind however that San Francisco is unique because it is the only city in the United States that is both a County government as well as a City government. Kind of like Washington DC. Electing officials for city government elsewhere is separate from electing county officials for government. So you have to view San Francisco in the same context as you do County elections in other places of the United States.

Generally across the United States, electing city officials occurs on a district basis because city denizens want to feel that the officials they elect represent their interests and live in the districts they represent. Mr. Kopp makes the allegation that this fact is somehow a bad thing. Yet he gives no example anywhere in the United States or even California where not having district elections for city supervisors has been a benefit. Honestly that is an open question, but making a blanket unsupported statement without providing sufficient examples of benefit is just word salad.

Out of curiosity, I did a google in California for county and city supervisors, and I could not find other large cities in California that do not do district elections for county supervisors. In addition to San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego, San Jose, and Los Angeles all have district elections.

The last time we had city-wide elections, the citizens of San Francisco had to fight against all kinds of developers fever dreams like building freeways all over the place and bulldozing viable neighborhoods for … reasons.

One obvious fact : it’s easier for large swaths of special interest money to have influence on city-wide elections. Which is why it is very sad that Mr. Kopp apparently has completely forgotten his parochial roots and understanding about the importance of keeping San Francisco’s neighborhoods vibrant.

I wrote a letter to the editor that got published in the Richmond district monthly of San Francisco.

Click here

The "letter" regards a response to a reaction to gun laws and open borders being the cause of gun violence and gangs, despite the immense amount of evidence and data indicating otherwise. I won't paraphrase my argument here. Click the link and comment on the post if necessary.

Misleading opinions are invading the public opinion space recently, so I respond.

Here is Mr. John Trasvina writing a letter to the editor in the Richmond Review and even getting some space on the platform Medium. To be fair I enabled the Medium post (link below) because everyone has the right to be assessed fairly on their own merits. That's how I roll.

Or, as Jamie Raskin (Democratic Representative from Maryland) recently said (paraphrasing): free speech is good because that means everyone gets to hear what you yourself exactly said not what all of your handlers and hired sycophants say or explain what you intended -- whether genuine or not.

Editor:

While so much attention is being devoted to Proposition H, the Boudin recall, another important proposition with long-lasting impact is tucked away as Proposition C. It’s a city charter amendment that would do two harmful things — restrict our right to recall and make it impossible to vote on the person the mayor appoints to replace a recalled official.

Recalls are an extraordinary but essential part of our democracy. They are rare. San Franciscans know the difference between a good recall and a bad one. Until the School Board recall, we hadn’t had a successful one in SF in over a century. Back in the 1980s, the San Francisco Democratic Club and Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council wrote in the voter handbook, “The Recall Process is a vital part of our electoral system. It ensures that public officials are held accountable.” In 2018, the San Jose judge who gave out a six-month sentence in the Stanford swimmer sexual assault case was recalled — with the active leadership of Democratic party, feminist, labor and other progressive groups. And in the 1950s, fed up voters in Little Rock, Arkansas recalled School Board members who were blocking integration.

On the same day that 80% of Richmond and Sunset voters supported the School Board recall, Supervisors Mar and Chan put Proposition C on the ballot. Proposition C would have prohibited the School Board recall despite all that support. If voters approve Proposition C and DA Boudin is recalled, it will force Mayor Breed to appoint a caretaker to the office who will not be allowed to run in November. Just like the School Board, a Boudin recall would be a clear message for real change, not a caretaker.

I’ve written more against Proposition C at [ https://medium.com/p/38b7e1e15f02 ] I urge a No vote on Proposition C.

Sincerely,

John Trasvina

To which I responded. Note: I am only responding to the opinion in the Richmond Review.

What you say here Mr. John Trasvina is misleading. Let me explain the math.

Namely that 80% of 25% of Richmond and Sunset district registered voters voted in the last recall election. Around 75% did not vote so you shouldn’t include them. 0.80 times 25 is actually only 20% of the registered voters. I got a letter from GrowSF mentioning the same thing.

Off-elections rarely get more than 30% of the registered voters to vote, something that is known by the millionaires who fund recalls for political reasons. That is the whole entire strategy. It's not for removing corrupt officials, which is what motivated the recall process in California back when the state legislature was owned by the railroad magnates.

Instead the recall process is now paid for by special interests in order to circumnavigate democratic elections. Hiram Johnson would have never supported this recall. Boudin is not corrupt. Crime was worse or at least equivalent 10 years ago but there wasn't all this hollering about recalling the district attorney.

You folks are hijacking some moral equivalence and acting like you are the saviors of democracy, when in reality you are being hood-winked by special interests with money producing a constant stream of dishonesty. If the truth was on your side, why put out political ads that are not speaking the truth.

Personally I am offended that you think recalling Arkansas school board members (in 1950) who resisted integration equivalent to the two recent recalls in San Francisco that are politically motivated. You might disagree with the policies or the personalities, but nothing Boudin has done (or not done) and nothing the recent recalled school board members have done is ANY WAY REMOTELY CLOSE TO DENYING BLACK SCHOOL CHILDREN THE RIGHT TO GO TO SCHOOL.

Your swarthy moral crusading is nothing but a disguise or some kind of self-inflated justification for what is a paid for political action. Some folks simply refuse to wait until a regular election because they can buy political ads and get signatures on papers in order to hijack democracy by taking advantage of a 25% voter turn out.

Wake up man.

2000 mules is a fraud. Dinesh D’Souza is a fraud. This movie is a fraud. True the Vote is a fraud.

FACT: Making a movie with videos of people doing something and showing dots on a radar screen you say represent “mules” is not evidence. Were that to be the case, all of the 60-something cases put before the courts would not have been thrown out, including by judges appointed from both George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

You have no idea whether said persons were turning in ballots from legitimate voters or not, or how said voters even voted. Those videos you see in the preview of the movie might be (and probably are) nothing illegal. Videos can easily been framed to portray something sinister. That lady you see dropping off a bunch of ballots at 1 a.m. might have done so from the ballots collected at a local church, all of whom are registered voters that got checked out — and some were double or triple checked out.

The ballots themselves represent real voters and the ballots of those real voters are on a registration list.

Let me repeat that again just in case you missed it. The ballots themselves represent real voters and the ballots of those real voters are on a registration list.

So again this movie is a fraud. Dinesh D’Souza is a fraud. True the Vote is a fraud. Unable to win a single court case, these monsters decide to make a film to manipulate the weak minded.

We do however know of Republicans who “harvested” votes and ballots in Florida and Texas that got prosecuted. Also of Republicans who voted more than once in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. And we even have Republicans paying someone to pretend to run for an legislative office in Florida with a similar hispanic name in order to split the hispanic vote against the real candidate.

It would be foolish to think there is any substance to this monstrosity.

Furthermore, this is the ilk inspired by Quentin Kopp. I didn’t realize fallacious purposeful subtle dog-whistiling ever deserved a voice at the community table.

Since y’all like quotes so much, here’s one from Lyndon B Johnson: “If you can convince a poor white man that he is better than a [black man], you can pick his pocket all day long.” (I inserted brackets because the actual word Johnson used might offend some folks.)

Have a nice day.

Yea, I'm just a bit overwhelmed right now with the dysfunctional politics of the system right now. Rethuglicans playing culture war games and salivating over how they can frame law and order issues hoping it can conceal their authoritarian-let-the-wealthy-own-everything agenda. The plutocracy owns them but they have to pretend to have ideas, so they just hijack words and use them like paint on the same decrepit artifice. GOP means Got Only Partisan-politics.

And then there's Joe Manchin who is well paid to pretend he has principles while he stops any meaningful legislation from happening. As if negotiating with devils is bi-partisanship. He knows the plutocracy is behind the scenes stuffing money into politicians pockets, providing lucrative speaking tours or sinecures to foundations funded with their money.

Meanwhile our nation sinks into third world status and we are unable to update our public infrastructure with investment while we wait for billionaire investors to propose false solutions.

I'm looking at you Elon Musk, meat puppet front-man for the oligarchy that owns him (too). Twitter. RIP.

This is not the flu. Every time I hear that I want to punch the wall. A virus is a package of genetic material encased in a lipid shell that hijacks your bodies transport mechanism to your cells. Why do you think our body evolved an immune system to recognize virus's and attack them in multiple ways ? Because genetic mutations create new strains all the time. We get bird flu, swine flu, bat flu, horse flu, cow flu, goat flul, sheep flu, ... all animals that use the same transport mechanism to the cells.

Larger denser populations integrating with domesticated animals increases immensely the chance that the virus's mutate to jump to another species. Covid is no different. This is not the flu. Herpes is not the flu. Polio is not the flu. Smallpox was not the flu. Measles are not the flu. Whooping Cough is not the flu. Etc.

I disagree with Mr. Wolff on his assessment of Biden, but otherwise this is a very informative video -- because as Mr. Wolff himself admits in the video, it's not just a Biden issue, it's the fact that all President's are still shackled to the economic mythology of the elite.

They create this false ideology of economics to explain why the short-term decisions of the wealthy is always in the nation's best interest, when sometimes that is not the case.

The USA almost fell to the last fascist decade in 1934.