By Nima Maghame

As supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage await closing arguments and a verdict in the federal lawsuit challenging Prop. 8’s legality, California State Senator Mark Leno has introduced a new bill that protects clergy who don’t want to perform marriage ceremonies that conflict with their beliefs.

“We so often heard from members of clergy that if Prop. 8 doesn't pass, they had concern that they would be forced to marry against their beliefs and scared they would lose their tax-exemption,” Leno told the Guardian. So he’s decided to promote a bill that would remove that argument from the anti-gay marriage arsenal.

Continue reading "Leno seeks to affirm religious freedom" »

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Posted by Steven T. Jones at 03:24 PM • Comments (4)

By Steven T. Jones

Critical Mass photo by Tim Daw.

San Francisco Police Chief George Gascón said Friday that he has ordered a review of policies related to Critical Mass, offering veiled threats of an impending crackdown to the unpermitted monthly mass bike ride. As SFPD learned from a 1997 crackdown, that won’t work, and will more likely make the event even more popular and provocative.

But if he’s serious about improving police procedures surrounding Critical Mass, that would be a welcome change. Ever since the March 2007 ride, in which the local media fed hysteria over the ride after an altercation between a driver and cyclist, there’s been a big but confused and confusing police presence on the rides, the result of wanting to “do something” but having no discernible policy or strategy for what to do.

Meanwhile, within the community of longtime Critical Mass riders, there was already a discussion brewing about how to self-regulate and prevent conflicts with drivers. Some of that discussion has been occurring on a new website devoted to the event, and much of it centers on communicating to riders that the event is about celebrating bikes, not purposely pissing off drivers.

There are no official leaders, procedures, or route to the 18-year-old event, making overt negotiations and policies difficult. But if Gascón is serious about the value he said he places on community outreach, there have got to be ways to lower police costs, lessen community conflicts, and preserve what thousands of San Franciscans still see as an important San Francisco tradition.

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Posted by Steven T. Jones at 12:35 PM • Comments (11)

Text by Sarah Phelan

Will journalists be forced to include a "tip jar" logo next to their online work? Or is there some other way to save an industry in crisis?

Alan Mutter has a cool post on his 'Reflections of a Newsosaur' blog today: he advocates that we stop the exploitation of journalists. And he includes a handy way to calculate your own worth as a reporter, including the notion of establishing a basic hourly rate (which he calculates as four times the minimum wage in your state, so that would be $32 an hour in California, and then factor in everything else.)

Mutter's is a desperately needed message and tool-- in this age where freelancers are apparently expected to feel honored just to get their byline in an online publication, or a pittance instead of a professional salary.

Since the Chronicle drastically cut its newsroom last year and the California Media Workers alliance set up a Freelancers Unit (which, abbreviated, fittingly says "FU") I've read countless rants about the piss poor wages, or lack of them, that employers seem to think are OK to offer reporters, in the post-print, mobile-phone dominated age.

And so far, no one has figured out a way to turn around this depressing trend. Will reporters be forced to include a "tip jar" logo, alongside the "share" and "email" and "print" buttons that typically frame their online work? I don't know, but if you are prepared to give a dollar to a barista for making you a cup of joe, why not do the same for someone who just spent months of their life digging up the dirt on the rich and powerful, so that members of the public could have a clue as to what is really going on? And why don't the aggregators, like Google and Yahoo and Dogg, who profit handsomely from displaying reporters' work, pay writers a small fee (even a percentage of a cent) everytime someone clicks on this so-called 'free' content?

There may be very good reasons why none of the above approaches will work (it's easy to slip a dollar in a real jar, but less appealing when you have to log in and give someone your credit card number). But if human kind can figure out a way to get to the moon and cure cancer, then we can figure out a way to fairly compensate reporters.
Especially since these are the very folks who alert you when earthquakes hit and wars break out and seemingly wholesome politicians turn out to be cheating, daughter-denying, self-promoting sleaze bags. Yes, we can imagine a world without newsprint, but a world without news? That's called a dictatorship.

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Posted by SFBG at 11:20 AM • Comments (3)

By Ryan Thomas Riddle

What city officials called the “second largest transfer tax event in our city’s history” is set to go back before the Transfer Tax Review Board. The Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco has filed an appeal, contesting the delinquent tax value of the board’s Dec 4. ruling that states an estimated $14.4 million in transfer taxes are owed to the city.

Last month, the board ruled 3-0 in favor of Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting’s assertion that the church has to pay transfer taxes for its extensive 2008 property shuffle. Ting told the Guardian that particular decision isn’t what’s being challenged here. While the church has threatened to challenge the basic ruling in court, it is also contesting the exact value of the delinquent transfer taxes owed, he said.

In fact, Ting went before the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Jan. 26, to begin lien proceedings against the Archdiocese for the money owed. However, the church’s recent appeal has tabled that for now.

Continue reading "Back to the mat for Ting and the Catholics" »

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Posted by Steven T. Jones at 12:54 PM • Comments (0)

By Jobert Poblete

If you've noticed that your water has been looking a little off recently, you aren't the only one. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) is warning Bay Area residents that tap water may look cloudy for the next few weeks while maintenance and construction work is completed on the pipeline that delivers pristine water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park.

Work on the pipeline shut off the flow from Hetch Hetchy, which normally supplies around 85 percent of San Francisco's water. In the meantime, residents will be drinking water sourced closer to home from reservoirs in the Peninsula and East Bay.

SFPUC officials assure consumers that the water is safe. The cloudiness is caused by the presence of air bubbles introduced in the pipelines by the construction work and by an increased rate of flow at an East Bay
treatment plant. The department recommends letting drinking water stand for a few minutes to give the air bubbles a chance to break apart.

SFPUC is taking advantage of low seasonal water demand to perform regular maintenance and to complete work as part of the Water System Improvement Program, a multi-year, $4.6 billion upgrade of the region's water infrastructure. The Hetch Hetchy pipeline is expected to be back on-line by February 19.

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Posted by Steven T. Jones at 11:22 AM • Comments (1)

By Tim Redmond

Before Gavin Newsom is willing to consider extending parking meter hours to make drivers pay their fair share?

The budget picture is increasingly bleak, and Muni's talking about some very unpleasant cuts that may wind up to be ineffective; if buses are slower, dirtier and cost more, then fewer people will ride, and Muni will collect less fare money.

So how bad does it have to get? Does the system have to reach total collapse before Newsom is willing to take a little political risk and raise some money from people who drive downtown and park their cars?

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Posted by Tim Redmond at 02:43 PM • Comments (17)

By Steven T. Jones

Tosca in North Beach was packed last night for the State of the Union watch party that was thrown by Organizing for America, President Barack Obama’s grassroots organizing operation, and the crowd was predictably supportive of the president despite his political difficulties and declining popularity.

Karen Buchanan -- who volunteered on Obama’s presidential campaign and has continued to do so since then, including phone banking to support his health care reform effort – responded positively to the speech’s call for renewed activism, even though she was less than thrilled with some of Obama’s policy prescriptions.

“I don’t agree with him 100 percent, but I’m not going to join the circular firing squad. I continue to support him,” Buchanan said. “He had a nice tone of optimism and we needed that.”

That may be true. Obama’s poignant call for the country’s political, corporate, and media institutions to make strong, good faith efforts to regain the public’s trust was the emotional high point of this speech. But unfortunately, Obama’s muddled and often contradictory policy priorities are frustrating to progressives who have been turning away from this president.

Continue reading "Obama to base: "Continue to fight"" »

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Posted by Steven T. Jones at 12:53 PM • Comments (0)

By Steven T. Jones

Historian and social justice advocate Howard Zinn – whose work inspired me and countless others to look at history and the world from the people’s perspective, rather than that of the conquerors and power-brokers – has died.

Zinn’s People History of the United States was performed at Mission High School last year, and my preview of that prompted criticism on his scholarship. But he is truly one of the great progressive thinkers of the 20th Century, someone who took courageous actions on behalf of his ideals, and he’ll truly be missed.

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Posted by Steven T. Jones at 05:12 PM • Comments (5)

By Steven T. Jones

Michela Alioto-Pier has withdrawn from the race for insurance commissioner. “Michela suffered an injury to her leg which required surgery and will entail additional time in the hospital time to heal,” her husband Tom Pier said in a public statement. “The necessary recuperation, as well as the demands of her duties as a San Francisco Supervisor and as a mother of three young children, make a statewide run for Insurance Commissioner impractical at this time.”

We’re sorry to hear about her poor health. But like most of her progressive colleagues on the board, who already endorsed Assembly member Dave Jones for insurance commissioner, we’re not disappointed that her candidacy has come to an end.

At a time when insurance companies like the truly malevolent Mercury Insurance are brazenly pushing deceptive profit-making schemes and actively corrupting politicians of both major parties, we need a strong and independent defender of the public interest in this job.

And based on her well-established record of coziness with corporations and hostility to progressive causes, Alioto-Pier just isn’t that person.

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Posted by Steven T. Jones at 04:27 PM • Comments (1)

Text by Sarah Phelan

We don't know why O'Keefe targeted Louisiana's Landrieu, but we do know he led the attack on ACORN in 2009

Last year, we wrote about how Karl Rove targeted ACORN in 2006 as part of a concerted Republican campaign to attack progressive organizations that were registering low-income voters and helping them fight corporate power.

Those attacks came to a seemingly salacious climax in 2009, when James O’Keefe, a conservative videographer, secretly taped some ACORN employees saying stupid things—an incident that somehow became one of the biggest political stories of the year.

And now O’Keefe is back in the political headlines, only this time as one of four men charged Jan. 26 with trying to illegally access and manipulate the phone system in a district office of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.

We don't yet know why O'Keefe targeted the Democratic senator from Louisiana. But his arrest has a fortunate side effect: it's keeping the focus on the results of an official investigation into ACORN—a story that otherwise probably wouldn’t have got much coverage but is now being widely reported.

Take CNN’s coverage of O’Keefe’s arrest. It notes that, “a review by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, who was hired by ACORN to examine the issue, found no wrongdoing by ACORN employees.”

It also notes that O'Keefe and a female associate were named in a lawsuit that an ACORN worker in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, filed Jan. 21, accusing the pair of illegally videotaping an interview with her last July and distributing it on the Internet.

“That video and others by O'Keefe and his associate led to the dismissal of four ACORN employees who appeared to offer advice to the couple and to federal legislation barring the group from receiving federal funds," CNN notes.

Now, I don’t expect the right-wing attack machine to stop its assault on progressive organizations and individuals, any time soon, but there’s hope the truth will eventually out.

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Posted by SFBG at 12:40 PM • Comments (8)