As a candidate for U.S. Senate from Virginia, former secretary of the Navy, best-selling novelist and Hollywood filmmaker James Webb initially garnered national attention because of who he is. Now his views and temperament are grabbing the spotlight. In an unusual move, Democratic senators John Kerry, Harry Reid, and and Charles Schumer, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, endorsed Webb over Harris Miller in the state’s primary election.
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So who’s formulating inter-national policy these days? Is it Gov. Schwarzenegger? Mayor Newsom? How about London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who, as part of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s California entourage this week, signed a pact with several other municipal potentates to do something about global warming?
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Fantasizing about their imminent takeover of Congress, the Democrats these last months have taken to throwing out all manner of ideas to see which ones stick. If you go to Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s Web site you’ll find that the House minority leader has posted, like pasta on the fridge door, much of the party strategists’ starchy guesswork.
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Dick Lamm, a former governor of Colorado, recently said that blacks and Hispanics are more victims of their own culture than of a discrimination that undeniably exists. You would have thought he called for a second Holocaust, considering the reaction his remarks elicited. The head of a Latino group called him "a hard core racist." Gary Hart, a former senator and presidential candidate, is quoted as going nearly as far, saying the fellow Democrat’s statements appeared to "condone sophisticated kinds of ... racial characterization." A state legislator accused Lamm of "demonizing."
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If the five-month-old lawsuit to block the California high school exit exam achieves the indirect result of forcing the state’s educational establishment to improve English and mathematics teaching for foreign-born and/or low-income students, then something productive would have come from it.
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On the whole, most of the people who live or work in the areas where this newspaper is circulated came out reasonably well during the triple-digit heat wave that sweltered California during the past two weeks. Unlike some 823,000 of our neighbors in the East Bay and South Bay, we did not suffer extended large-scale blackouts.
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Depending on who does the talking, the six days of free Spare the Air rides on Bay Area Rapid Transit were either a triumph for public transit and smog reduction or a horror show on wheels. Most likely an accurate evaluation would include some of both arguments. However, the program should continue, although fine-tuning is required.
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So now we’re wasting time talking about wasting time. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so disdainful of the voters.In 2004, a long time ago considering the decision-making needs of San Francisco’s business community, city voters enacted Proposition I, creating an Office of Economic Analysis. Working with the controller, the OEA is required to study the economic impact of the supervisors’ legislative fancies.Those fancies, often diseconomic, have come so fast and furious —
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With Congress’ overwhelming passage to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act and President Bush’s likely approval, the federal government has affirmed that a democracy is only as strong as its commitment to its voting rights. Locally, the implementation of ranked-choice voting and public financing ensures that each person’s vote counts despite the influence of monied interests. In the same spirit of democracy, I have proposed a charter amendment to increase voter participation.
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Bus riders in The City, it’s not your imagination. Timespent on Muni really is longer than ever, your rides reduced to crawls. And it probably doesn’t help if there’s an empty seat for your shopping bag or backpack.Your numbers are down 12 percent over 20 years — this trend among the findings of the "San Francisco Transit Effectiveness Project," part of which was released this week. The full report, sure to create angst throughout local government, will be made public in December 2007.
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