I watched the other games from the stands so this was the first one I saw on TV, and as a committed secularist I noticed to my horror that Mike Singletary was wearing a cross draped on his muscular bosom.  As much as God made little daisy petals, that goddamn cross hexed the 49ers.

Isn’t an NFL head coach wearing a cross on TV on federally licensed channels a violation of the First Amendment or something? A violation of NFL rules about fair play – if one coach brazenly invokes God’s favor is that fair to other coaches who go buck-naked secular?

The 49ers were supposed to be a speedboat but Sunday there were a rowboat with a leak. Only Singletary’s flashing the cross can explain this disaster; God righteously evened the playing field.

At least the last losing coach, Mike Nolan, only wore ill-fitting suits at home. Singletary pushing the cross in the face of non-Christian fans might be appropriate for the coach of Southern Methodist University, but not a San Francisco team that is named after the 49ers of the fabulously irreligious Barbary Coast.

— a 49er fan.

(The Eastern Establishment editorial comment on President’s Obama’s surprise Nobel was unsurprising. The Wall Street Journal cattily noted that the wily Norwegians had really praised the end to “American exceptionalism” that they incorrectly pretend Obama represents and correctly believe Europe wishes. The New York Times was dutifully little engine that could liberal check-listing a lotta things to be done so the president would fulfill his praise from the far North. The increasingly braindead Congressional Republicans had white spittle in the cracks at the sides of their mouths in outrage so vehemently undefined that could they have they certainly would have voted for a war resolution to invade Norway just the way the Nazis did after the Nobel went to the imprisoned anti-Hitler journalist Carl von Ossietzky.

Such all for a peace prize funded by the coupon clippings of the inventor of dynamite and once awarded to the likes of the US war criminal Henry Kissinger which provoked the crown prince of satire Tom Lehrer to state: “It was at that moment that satire died. There was not more to say after that.” Obama was impressionably modest in declaring his freshman unworthiness for this senior honor but as usual he couldn’t close the deal. The only settled editorial comment on the piquancy of the Norwegians came from the Financial Times of London, reprinted immediately below, which concluded that the only appropriate thing for Obama to do about the hot potato prize would be to gracefully send it back, a suggestion in which the Argonaut heartily concurs. – Ed.)

“The Norwegian Nobel Committee has made odd decisions before. Awarding this year’s peace prize to Barack Obama, however, is not merely bizarre but bad: for Mr. Obama, the prize itself, and for the cause of world peace.

The prize has been adrift for a while. Some recent laureates, such as Muhammad Yunus and Wangari Maathai, received it for work (microfinance and tree planting) that only overgenerous interpretation can relate to peacemaking. But even these far-fetched decisions referred to work actually done. This is the first time that the prize is given for what remains, for now, mere aspirations.

Certainly, Mr. Obama has delivered some fine speeches, which have “created a new climate in international politics” as the Committee puts it. But the results on the ground are yet non-existent.

The citation lauds Mr. Obama’s vision of a nuclear-free world – but his work on nuclear disarmament is barely beginning. On Iran, more progress was made in eight hours last October 1^st than in eight years under George W. Bush – but that places the bar awfully low. On Palestine, Mr. Obama has achieved only a snub by Israel’s prime minister. And he receives a prize created in part to reward reductions of standing armies as he is deciding how many more US soldiers to send to fight in Afghanistan.

Despite Mr. Obama’s undeniable diplomatic ambitions for a more peaceful world, there has simply been no time for him to realize or betray them. So – to borrow from his own rhetoric – why the fierce urgency of now?

The answer is a Nobel Committee tapped in an adolescent adulation of Mr. Obama that, if once shared by many, most have put behind them. Its continuing desire is to flatter a particular tendency in US politics – Al Gore and Jimmy Carter are recent laureates – risks painting it as an annex to the left wing of the US Democratic party. Hoping the prize will strengthen Mr. Obama domestically is deeply misguided: it will embarrass his allies and egg on his detractors.

Elsewhere, it will come to be seen as awarded for wishful thinking, not hard work. Peace is not served by devaluing the moral force of the prize, whose greatest impact has always been the moral support it can give to those who fight oppression with their lives – a von Ossietzky, a King or a Walesa – or leaders who make heavy concessions needed for peace. Mr. Obama has done neither. It is, however, in his hands to rescue the prize from itself – by declining it in deference to those more worthy than he.”

– Editorial, The Financial Times, October 10-11.

A fight between two female passengers on Muni, captured by an amateur photographer on his cell phone video camera, has lit up YouTube — and is now under investigation by the transit agency.

The shouting, punching and hair-pulling episode took place aboard a 20-Columbus bus in Chinatown and was posted sometime Wednesday. It’s unclear what set off the argument between the two women, but it lasted several minutes and ended only when another female passenger intervened.Muni spokesman Judson True said the bus driver did not report the fight as required, and now an internal investigation is under way.

A warning for viewers: The video is laced with both violence and obscenities.

Last week the give-away tabloid Examiner printed a letter to the editor of interest for its lucidity. The title the sub-editor put on the letter was “Plastic Bags Litter Streets”. Before further comment, here is the letter:
“”The Examiner’s daily front page announcement, “This paper is printed on soy ink on recycled paper” is hard to reconcile with the irony of plastic bags that our scouring our landscape because of you.

Why must you enclose every newspaper in plastic bag, rain or shine? Detriment  from your plastic bags could far exceed the benefits from your ink and paper.

Adding insult to injury, home newspaper of your newspaper is unsolicited. I understand this “circulation” helps you sell advertising but let’s be honest about the environmental impact of so many unwanted ( and in many cases unwelcome) newspapers in addition to the ramifications of all that nonrecycable plastic.
Richard Leeds
San Francisco
Ahem. The point of the letter wasn’t that plastic bags liter streets. It was about the Examiner’s uninvited albeit littering presence.

If you get your news from right-wing talk radio and Fox News, you probably think America is being overrun by a hyper-corrupt organized prostitution ring headquartered in the White House.In case you missed this story: Two conservative activists, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe, visited a host of ACORN offices around the country posing as a pimp and prostitute. They asked for help establishing a brothel, and even stated that underage girls would be working for them. They had a surveillance camera and recorded at least four interactions with ACORN employees and claimed these employees provided them with assistance. All of the employees implicated have now been fired, and federal aid to ACORN has been cut off.

Still, the story at this point really has a lot more to do with Fox News and conservative media activism than with ACORN. The undercover videos first appeared on BigGovernment.com, founded by Andrew Breitbart, a protégé of Matt Drudge and a conservative with a long record of highly partisan and inflammatory statements. Giles, daughter of conservative blogger Doug Giles, attended the National Journalism Center in Washington, one of the many right-wing institutions conservatives have established to flood the field with young, motivated, and rabidly partisan “reporters.” For his part, O’Keefe has been a far-right activist since college.

Breitbart has developed a direct line to Glenn Beck, and so it wasn’t long before the videos were being presented breathlessly on his TV and radio programs. This week, following his 9/12 rally, Beck escalated the attacks over ACORN. “But good God almighty, what is wrong with us,” he said on Tuesday, “that we don’t right now get into the cars and drive back to Washington, and surround the Capitol and say, ‘What the hell is wrong with you people? Are you soulless? Are you dead inside?’ ”

It was just the beginning. “Obama is Van Jones, Obama is ACORN,” right-wing pundit Monica Crowley said on Wednesday. “Just as he is ACORN, just as he is Van Jones, he is racism,” Rush Limbaugh parroted the sentiment on Thursday. Radio host Jim Quinn said that we were all living in the “United States of ACORN,” and Fox News’ Megyn Kelly had Karl Rove on to talk about the tapes exposing what was now a “remarkable criminal enterprise.” The stakes couldn’t be higher. ACORN, after all, was on tap to receive “eight and a half trillion dollars of stimulus money,” according to Sean Hannity — a number that was a thousand times greater than the equally fictitious billions that Beck had accorded to the organization on behalf of the government. ACORN had suddenly ballooned from an organization which had received $53 million in federal funds over 15 years to representing 67 percent of America’s gross domestic product.

Fox was running so wild with the story that they were willing to lower their already dubious standards. The first problem was one of logic. Four videos were being promoted as unimpeachable proof that all of ACORN is equally corrupt — all 1,200 chapters and hundreds of ACORN employees. It was the opposite of how a credible investigation is supposed to function, in which conclusions are withheld until after all the facts are in. By comparison, here, the conservative media had a few isolated facts but were willing to extrapolate an entire thesis from them.

More important, Fox News failed to vet the tapes. This was made painfully clear with the case of the San Bernardino ACORN office, which was featured in the fourth video to be released. In the footage, ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke claimed that she had murdered her former husband following a period of domestic abuse. On September 15, Beck and Sean Hannity both broadcast Kaelke’s assertion. Beck, who had reported on the supposed confession during his radio program, added on Fox, “She never spanked her kids, but she did shoot her husband dead.” Later that night, Hannity played the same clip, and in a rare moment of intellectual curiosity, asked about the veracity of the murder claim. “We’re working on it,” Giles said, which was enough for Hannity. The following morning, on September 16, Fox News’ Gretchen Carlson repeated the allegation, saying, “She killed somebody? Despite this, some lawmakers want to keep funding the group.”

But Kaelke’s ex-husbands are alive. The San Bernardino Police Department confirmed this simple fact on September 15, releasing a statement that read: “Investigators have been in contact with the involved party’s known former husbands, who are alive and well.” (Kaelke was soon quoted in an ACORN press release saying that she had made the claim because she was seeking to mislead the undercover videographers, whom she was suspicious of.) In spite of these developments, the next day, Hannity was still treating the San Bernardino tape as fully credible. He even hosted Giles again but failed to ask her about her own investigation into the truth of the claim. (Here’s a full timeline of the attention the San Bernardino video received.)

In the meantime, another pivotal hole in the story began to present itself. During interviews, Breitbart, Giles, and O’Keefe had all asserted that the undercover team had never been kicked out of an ACORN office. Bertha Lewis, ACORN’s CEO and chief organizer, had already said this was a falsehood by the time a Philadelphia ACORN employee, Katherine Conway Russell, publicly claimed to have done just that, adding that she had filed a police report after a visit from the conservative pair. The police report was soon produced, raising further serious questions about the credibility of the entire ACORN exposé. It was another major side of the story that Fox News simply hadn’t cared to look into.

On the offense, Breitbart has lashed out at the mainstream media for supposedly burying the story. “The behavior of Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN,” he said on Friday, “has been despicable during this.” Many mainstream reporters were indeed worthy of criticism, but for the opposite reason that Breitbart cited. Their real failure was discussing the ACORN issue on Fox News’ terms and ignoring the network’s role in pushing the smears.

The New York Times covered up conservatives’ well-documented ACORN obsession in its reporting. In their reports, all three network evening news broadcasts — ABC’s World News, NBC’s Nightly News, and the CBS Evening News — left out substantive facts about the incidents that mitigate the accusations, exonerate ACORN employees, or undermine the credibility of the filmmakers. Moreover, none reported that Fox News, in its aggressive promotion of this story, had made false accusations.

On MSNBC, Chris Matthews was content to report that the right had simply “claimed another victim,” as if the campaign had been entirely legitimate. “They know what they are doing because they are getting an audience from this,” he added, uncritically. And MSNBC’s Dylan Rattigan allowed conservative activist Carter Clews of Americans for Limited Government to ask Bertha Lewis, “How much money did Barack Obama funnel to you … with his buddy-boy Bill Ayers?” David Shuster and Juan Williams provided some of the week’s few media bright spots by focusing on Fox News itself and providing the story with some perspective.

Fox News is already teasing its next round of ACORN attacks. If credible journalists don’t stand up for their craft, then Fox News will keep enjoying its position in the driver’s seat.

From an East Bay reader:

I was surprised and upset to read that person Jon Carroll in the Chronicle call Rachael Maddow of MSNBC as “an out lesbian” and “the Hottest Butch of 2009.”

I went to high school with Rachael – Castro Valley High, Class of 1990 – and she was as sweet and normal and blonde as can be and not the person described by

Mr. Carroll.

In proof, I forward a copy of our class yearbook:

 

By Joe O’Neill
(San Francisco politicians, including  John Burton,Willie Brown,  and Nancy Pelosi were instrumental in making California the first state in the country to pass the McBride Principals which made it state policy not to do business with companies in Northern Ireland who discriminate against  Catholics in employment practices. Passage of this law was vigorously fought by English lobbyists and business interests. San Francisco Irish activists, including builder Joe O’Donoghue, were the catalysts for the political coalition that forced the McBride legislation into law.

As veteran Irish correspondent Joe O’Neill reports, San Francisco Irish are now leading new effort towards the reunification of Ireland where the Northern six counties still remain under British rule.)

California, once described by Patrick Doherty as, the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ of the Mac Bride Principles campaign for fair employment practices by American companies doing business in Northern Ireland, has again shown that Irish-Americans continue to be pro-active in the quest for Irish reunification.

Doherty was, and is at this time, Director of Corporate Responsibility for the City of New York pension funds, and a leading proponent of the Mac Bride campaign.

… in Sacramento in 1985.

The Mac Bride Principles were first adopted in California by the City and County of San Francisco, and the legislation was then carried to the State Capitol, first by Assemblyman Tom Hayden, and then by Assemblyman John Burton of San Francisco, the current head of the California State Democratic Party. Passed in several sessions of the California legislature, the Mac Bride Principles were continually vetoed by Republican governors and eventually enacted into law with the election of Democrat Gray Davies.

The latest campaign by Irish-Americans in California is being spearheaded by the Irish-American Democratic Club of San Francisco. At the July 14, meeting of the club, they unanimously passed a resolution calling on the California Democratic Party’s Executive Board to support the reunification of Ireland. At the Sunday July 19, meeting of the Executive Board, the following resolution from the San Francisco club was passed unanimously;

Support for Irish Unification:

WHEREAS, the logic of history, international law, human rights and peace dictate the reunification of the island of Ireland, and the reality of the moment — in the Good Friday Agreement and the development of the All-Ireland institutions of governance — attest to this momentum; and
WHEREAS, in the past the California Democratic Party and the State Legislature adopted the Mac Bride Principles for Northern Ireland and strongly endorsed passage of the Good Friday Agreement among the previously warring parties, in part because of the dedication of President William Jefferson Clinton, his administration, and Senator George Mitchell in seeing it to fruition; and

WHEREAS, the contribution of the Irish-born, and Irish Americans to this state, nation, and the Democratic Party are legion;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the California Democratic Party strongly supports Irish Reunification and urges both the State Legislature and the California Democratic Congressional delegation to support all peaceful actions that support the final reunification of the island of Ireland [Eire] by all electoral and diplomatic means necessary; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution be forwarded to the Democratic members of the California Congressional Delegation, the Democratic members of the State Legislature, the President and Vice President of the United States and the U.S. Secretary of State.

Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, who recently held a conference in San Francisco; A United Ireland and How Do We Get There? has been supportive of the efforts and sent the following message to Jeannie Marie Maher of the Club, ‘I want to thank you for all of your work in support of Ireland and the initiative you and the Irish American Democratic Club is taking to propose a resolution on the Reunification of Ireland to the California Democratic Party.’

It is early days yet, in this campaign by a small group of individuals in San Francisco, to put Irish reunification on the political agenda of American foreign policy. Regardless of the current state of the economy, California remains the seventh largest economy in the world. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and one of the two California senators, Barbara Boxer, cut their political teeth in the old Burton political machine out of San Francisco. Hordes of would-be political office seekers from less well-off states make the pilgrimage to California in search of campaign funds. The Mac Bride Campaign in the United States, powered only by volunteer labour and miniscule funding, proved what could be done by a small-dedicated band of political activists. They took on the British Foreign Office based in British Consulate offices across the United States who spent millions of pounds to defeat the Mac Bride Campaign and defeated them from one end of the country to the other.

During the war years in Ireland, British embassy staff was able to exploit the concerns of many Americans on the issue of violence and ‘terrorism’. With the current relative peaceful state of political discourse in Northern Ireland, if the British choose to campaign against this effort as they did with Mac Bride, it will be much more difficult to divide Irish-America on moral grounds.

This campaign could develop very large legs.

(California now has a budget, and faces the consequences: There will be Draconian cuts in state services and irreparable holes in the social safety net – many will fall through, and be unable to get back up – and of course the counties are keen to sue the Capital for taking monies from them. The worst cut of all is the unkindest one of being condemned to repeat history, with recurring budget crises and fiscal shortfalls built into the band-aid solutions of the new budget.

For those of you among the many who could not bear reading the convoluted and frequently incoherent accounts of the evolution of the budget buffoonery in the Sacramento, the Financial Times whipped off a smart summation of the horrors.

The text below is from the pink paper’s Lex Column, a smart and often witty analysis of all matters financial, which appeared on July 22 when the budget first congealed. Nothing bad has changed. Read it and sob into your Obamabeer. – Ed.)

Dr Schwarzenegger recommended a strict regimen for the patient but, this being California; cosmetic surgery in the end was more expedient.

A little liposuction here, a nip and a tuck there and, from the proper angle, the budget looks marvelous again. Zoom in, though, and it is clear that the state’s cash flow problems could resurface… Even worse, a golden opportunity to solve structural problems was wasted.

Some real cuts are being made by reduced welfare spending, continued furloughs of state employees and prisoner releases. But cuts to education, the biggest budget item, must largely be repaid in the future years, forming a $10bn liability. The $2bn it is borrowing from cash-strapped local governments must also be repaid. Perhaps the most egregious fudge moves the last payday of the fiscal  year into the next for state employees, creating “savings” of $1.2bn that will have to be cut from the 2010-11 budget.

Meanwhile, borrowing needs are unclear and IOU issuance may continue for weeks. One positive is the lack of new taxes. Californians are already among the most heavily taxed Americans and depend too much on wealthy residents with volatile fortunes. The richest 1 per cent of Californians paid nearly half of state income taxes in 2007.

Even if robust economic recovery bolsters state revenues the way the housing boom did after the technology bust, ingredients for problems remain. Voters could have been mobilized to reverse binding referendums that limit property taxes, set aside minimum funding for education and require a legislative supermajority to pass a budget, but the moment has now passed. Until the next crisis, that is.

by Warren Hinckle, Matt Gonzalez, Jello Biafra

If we can learn from history, attention should be paid to Black Bart. The legendary gentleman stagecoach bandit robbed only the strong boxes, not the passengers. He was always polite, apologized for any inconvenience, and even left a poem on his departure. Many call eminent domain robbery, which may be true; but what is inarguable is that government taking of private property should be polite and, above all, financially fair to the victims of “progress.”

This regrettably hasn’t been the case with the actions of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority. In 2005, San Francisco Supervisors approved the Transbay Redevelopment Plan creating “the Grand Central Station of the West” – a central terminal for Bay Area trains and buses. In its wake the project is slated to devour private property through the use of eminent domain (the law by which government can take private property). The legal taking has unfortunately shown little regard for compensating the small businesses located within the project’s boundaries. [Read more →]