Disinfo Rehab

It seems like every year we, the People, are confronted with some malfeasance by male elected officials committed while in office that involve them "doing it" with people or in places they're not supposed to. We are subjected to hearing about their (gross) sex lives, everyone gets in a huff, and nothing good comes out of it once the scandal is over.

This is a multi-partisan issue - think just in the last few years about politicians local (Newsom & Mirkarimi) state (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mike Duvall and Gary Condit to name a few ) and national (Bill Clinton, David Vittner, Bob Packwood, and many more) who've had problems all because they can't control themselves.

Clearly, this is an issue of both health and morals. Since many male politicians have seen fit to play the game of "Who Can Create the Handmaid's Tale in Real Life" with bills to regulate birth control, abortions, de funding rape crisis centers and the like, all in the name of health and morals, maybe it's simply time to take this to its logical conclusion: demand all male politicians use condoms during their affairs so as to limit the potential extra-marital births and for public health.

This way, we could be assured that even if we have electeds who have affairs, the worst they'll do is make themselves look bad, and not bring in children to this world who will be put in the spotlight during a messy court case or custody battle, and we'd be assured no one is spreading diseases whilst in office. I can imagine several scenarios where this law might have diminished certain scandals to where they might not have been such a boil on the body politics.

Flame away, Internet! See how loud and crazy you can get in the comments!

PS: None of the lists I made are to be considered comprehensive at all - I didn't have time to super Google a comprehensive list. We all know, though, that no one party has a monopoly on this kind of crap, and as far as I'm concerned, most politicians are either super corrupt, super immoral, or super neutral and just do whatever the lobbyists say. Both parties are full of people like this.

Posted by Greg Dewar at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Watching the twists and turns of the San Francisco Redisricting Commission as they create new district maps for the Board of Supervisors has been like watching several well-meaning people play ping pong all at once, on meth in the dark. Things happen so fast, and change so dynamically, usually with no MSM coverage, by the time you think you know what's going on, things have changed. Again. And again. AND...well you get the idea.

It was just about a week ago when I looked at what was the latest map, and it partially corrected the injustice committed on residents of the Inner Sunset by partisan progressive interests 10+ years ago-forcing part of the neighborhood into District 5, while cutting out many of the blocks of the Inner Sunset and put them into District 7. This injustice had the following effects:

- Many of us were forced into a district that elected Matt Gonzalez and Ross Mirkarimi, both "progressives,' who paid more attention to more politically correct parts of the district. It also ensured that anyone from the Inner Sunset would have a harder time getting elected, since people in say, the Western Addition probably regard the Inner Sunset as they do the Farallon Islands - far, far away.

- The residents of the Inner Sunset were divided into two districts, making contact with the appropriate Board member confusing. Also, as I've stated before, this meant trying to get two busy Supervisors to attend a neighborhood meeting to express concerns. In Allegedly Sophisticated and Smart San Francisco, this is stupid.

Just recently there seemed to be a fix in teh works that would have at least contained more of the Inner Sunset in District 5, thus solving at least part of the problem. Unfortunately just a few days ago, the Commission decided to roll back the borders, citing the 'traditional' borders from 2002.

NEWS FLASH, Commissioners: that "historical" border was a partisan gerrymander hack designed by partisan progressives to jam a few precincts in to try and "help" narrow progressive itnerests, the residents be damned. Relying on this precedent is, for all intents and purposes, bullshit.

There are two remaining meetings of the Commission - one is tonight at 6pm at City Hall, Room 406. The other is this Saturday, April 14th, at 10:00am in Room 400. Both should be televised at SFGovTV online and on cable, but you never can tell if it's going to be live or just taped it seems. UPDATE: Our Friend Paul Hogarth says the live link should be this one at SFGOVTV online.

I am going to try and attend tonight but it is a close call since I have to go spend most of the day out of town and given the commuting foibles of going from county to county, might not make it.

However, there's nothing stopping you from going. The one good thing about the Commission is that they will listen if people show up, and will try to do their best to accommodate people, without worrying about what a few political bosses think. So that's a good thing.

Posted by Greg Dewar at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a whole cottage industry revolving around "campaign reform," and for the most part it's produced a lot of nonsense, locally and nationally. However, I am daring to get in the game and make a few modest proposals of my own, not for the sake of helping one partisan side over the other, but instead to give voters a clear choice and to be able to understand for whom or what they are voting for.

Earlier this year, I proposed that anyone running for office in San Francisco in 2012 be asked to sign a pledge saying simply that if they won election (or re-election) to the office they campaigned for, they'd actually serve the full four year term they asked voters for.

This may sound a bit nitpicky, but look at what happened in 2008 - we had several people run for Supervisor who asked the voters to send them to serve as Supervisor. Halfway through their terms, these newcomers then decided they'd had enough, and ran for Mayor. So did a lot of other elected officials.

Not only did they spend a lot of their time away from their six-figure salaried jobs, they asked for taxpayer money to finance piles of junk mail. In fact, we had so many people last year running for Another Office, things pretty much shut down at City Hall, all at a time when we needed people on the job. Add to the fact that taxpayers subsidized most of the Mayoral races (and yet the guy with the Super PACs funded by the 1% won anyway) and it's clear something is wrong here.

Today I amend my suggestion that candidates running in 2012 sign a pledge to serve out their full terms in office and not run for another during said term with this:

Any candidate that takes taxpayer money in 2012 to run for office in San Francisco should serve out their full term. If they do not, they should be forced to return the tax money they used in 2012 to run for office if they decide to run for another job (Assembly, State Senate, Dogcatcher, Sheriff, etc.)

I don't think this is an unreasonable request. I'm sure the politicians will ignore it, as they do anything that demands accountability or gets in the way of taxpayer dollars to finance their career advancement. It'd be interesting to see who, if anyone makes such a pledge. San Francisco voters would certainly be the beneficiaries though, since now they at least can figure out who's telling the truth when they say "vote for me in 2012" and who is not.

Posted by Greg Dewar at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

God bless The Awl. Without this in my RSS reader I might have missed out on the news that scientists in Japan have invented what is informally called a "shut up gun" - a device to silence people who talk.

Using the same effect when you talk into a cell phone that relays back your own voice on a delay, only on a larger scale, it's fairly effective at, well, shutting people up.

I can think of about a million uses for this in San Francisco, and when these become available, I'm buying one. Muni, Supervisors, Mayor, annoying people on the street (to start) : consider yourself warned.

Posted by Greg Dewar at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)