Tag Archives: progressives

Disinfo Rehab With the Chronicle, City Hall, And Hollywood

Posted on April 30, 2008 by | Leave a comment

Here we go again.
On the heels of some parliamentary wizardry that killed the latest tax credit package for “film production,” the Chronicle, right on cue, had had a front page article bemoaning the “loss” of film productions in town. Predictably, it talked solely about “tax credits” being offered by various local and national governments, and how SF is “missing the boat” because we’re just not offering up enough gimmies to Hollywood.
The problem with the article is that it narrowly defines the “whys” of the lack of film production in San Francisco without considering some very important facts that are important to any film producer, large or small, who wishes to film anywhere on location ( like the fact that previous San Francisco tax credits haven’t worked out at all like promised.) Yet nowhere in the Chronicle story is this noted, despite the fact this isn’t a state secret.
I’ve written about this issue before because like many of us, enjoy seeing Our Fair City in TV and movies. Bullitt and the first Dirty Harry movies remain some of my all time favorites, along with Vertigo, to name a few.
Having worked on a documentary about the Screen Actor’s Guild, I’ve had a lot of time to study the issue of film production here and abroad, and have had a chance to talk to a lot of people in the industry and in the unions who have studied this issue for literally decades.
So let’s do a little disinfo rehab on the subject and see what we get:
First, it’s important to remember that a tremendous amount of film credits in Canada cited in the Chronicle are given to film productions that are primarily created by Canadians to defend and enhance Canadian culture and “Canadiana” (yes that’s a word). Thus, to compare any incentive program offered up by a budget-challenged small city to that of the Mighty Canadian Govenrment Protecting Canada’s Culture is comparing apple and oranges.
It’s also important, up until the dollar’s recent decline, the weak Canadian Dollar made filming very cheap, which was the initial appeal for filming in the Great White North. (Ever wonder why so many Sci-Fi channel movies and TV shows look the same? Vancouver!) Don’t discount the additional appeal of doing your work in a nation whose cities look like America, but aren’t beset by violent crime and filth, either.
Also, as I’ve tried to tell the chess club brains at City Hall, filming in San Francisco is expensive for reasons you can’t give a tax break for. Crews are going to cost more, because rent and taxes here are extremely high. Neighborhood folks, well established in the siren whine of Today’s City, will complain about the inconvenience of a long film production, “jobs” be damned. Crime is out of control in San Francisco – we don’t even prosecute murderers here, much less property theft. Anyone wanna risk having their brand new movie camera stolen in SF? I doubt it.
And most importantly, we simply do not have the sound stages and related facilities that Los Angeles and its environs enjoy. That alone is going to make it much more feasible to come in to town for a week of exterior shots, then shuffle off to Vancouver or LA to finish the job.
All important topics worthy of coverage by policy folk and media folk. There’s plenty of more creative solutions to enhance our economy with jobs and investment from the film industry others have proposed.
The problem is, no one at City Hall or at the Chronicle gives a damn about any of that.

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Posted in Debunking Politicos Pundits + Spin, San Francisco Politics

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You Have To be Freakin’ Kidding Me: Gonzalez for VP? WTF?

Posted on February 28, 2008 by | 1 comment

mn_green_party_gonzalez.jpg
So I’m at lunch and reading email when I notice someone sends me the news that in fact, Matt Gonzalez is running as Ralph Nader’s veep candidate.
Wait, WHAT? This is a joke, right?
See this is what happens when you skip your morning paper and blogs. Beth Spotswood, of course had the funniest and most concise take on the news, and I’m sure others did too (I’ll post links as I find ’em).
To me, however, this news encapsulates just how f*cking stupid Magical Matt really is, and how the local conservatives and whatnots need to give him a medal for helping bring down progressive politickers in 2008.
When people to the left of Attilla the Hun needed someone to run against a damaged Mayor Newsom, Gonzalez pissed away whatever political capital he had left, and made sure that other people’s efforts were stalled. Then, at the last possible moment, he announces he’s not running, but not before wasting a lot of important people’s time, money and hard work.
Let’s not forget the years of gaming the system for Magical Matt. When it was time for someone to make a stand and perhaps have an impact locally, Magical Matt decided to walk away, and stick it to everyone else in the process since he wasn’t the progressive prom queen last year.
The result was an epic FAIL for progressives in 2007, and now, in 2008, when seats on the Board of Supervisors and the School Board are up for grabs, the Mayor and his crew are administering political beat-downs, old school style against anyone who stands in their way.
Unlike, say, in 2004, when, after a close race, Gavin was giving out marriage licenses to our gay and lesbian neighbors, and talking about health care for all. Funny how that worked out.
Whatever. Local progressives and Greens are with Obama this time around and to me that says it all. If the people who know Matt Gonzalez the best aren’t supporting his candyland bullsh*t, why should anyone else?
UPDATE: It’s so funny to see all the status updates on Facebook concerning Magical Matt…Chris Nolan at Spot-On.com dusts off some interesting info about Matt’s past that apparently Ralphie Boy didn’t know about. Calitics also has their take on Gonzalez, too. And a diary at Daily Kos that would appear to be from Our Mayor rings the alarm bells (really Mr. Mayor you should give Gonzalez a foil star for helping ruin local progressives’ chances in 2008). Oh and KPIX’s blog (which I had just discovered a week ago and really dig) was kind enough to link to the blog I write that no one reads
It should be noted that the day before he announced, Gonzalez posted a long, boring piece on why he hates Obama. Funny, he doesn’t ask any questions about his new buddy. I guess leftist hypocrisy is just a natural reflex for Magical Matt.

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There’s No “Safe Word” In San Francisco Politics And Mayor Newsom’s Team Knows It…

Posted on February 11, 2008 by | Leave a comment

You really have to hand it to Mayor Newsom and his team. They can pretty much get away with anything, short of murder for hire, and no one seems to really mind. Even more amazing, even when “progressives” are right on the issues, they can’t seem to get their message out.
This latest brouhaha, between Supervisor Peskin, the Mayor, the infamous MTA, et al gets the usual “political gossip” treatment, as always. But also, as always, we tend to forget a few salient points as to how we got here.
We’re in a situation where the city has a big budget deficit and Mayor Newsom has ordered awesome-sounding “across the board cuts,” sounding all fiscally responsible. Which is funny, because as Supervisor Daly tried to point out, this is the same Mayor who blew out the budget with big expensive pay raises and increases in the City payroll.
What’s even funnier is that as Daly was trying to point this out, his infamous “cocaine” line blew up into this Big Problem, and Supervisor Peskin was gamed into removing Daly from the Budget Committee. So even though in this case Daly was right, it was he who paid the price – and the Chronicle waited 6 months to note Newsom’s key role in blowing out the budget.
Now, to be fair, it was not that hard to push Daly aside – his acrimonious style, and his spending of political capital on symbolic measures made it easy for the Mayor’s people, and their friends in the press, to make it all about something Daly really didn’t say. Chalk one up for repeating the “mean Chris” meme, and one down for any serious budget reporting.
Likewise, as the Mayor is demanding we cut funds from things we need, he’s spending a lot of money on plasma TVs and fancy new offices. And to pay all these people watching ProRun on those plasma tvs, he’s swiping money from MUNI and other agencies so he can fill the chairs.
But once again, it really doesn’t matter if the Mayor’s people are doing anything wrong – they’re recasting this as a “personal attack” and upping the ante with all kinds of personal and legal attacks, so no one stops and thinks about the actual issues at hand. And once again, as in the case with Daly, Peskin’s temperament and style are being used against him. Suddenly we’re talking about he-said-he-said, instead of talking about whether the Mayor is breaking the law, or mismanaging the taxpayers’ money.
Brilliant. One thing progressives and their allies don’t seem to understand is that in these fights being “right” with the facts isn’t enough – you have to have the political capital to be able to fight back.
Blowing it all on symbolic measures and feel-good stuff means you don’t have it when you really need it. Now, the Mayor’s holding all the cards, and although his opponents may have caught his hand in the till, they’re losing the battle.
As this latest political battle escalates, it’s clear the Mayor’s people don’t mind playing rough with their opponents. There’s no “safe word” in San Francisco politics, and those who would oppose the Mayor would be wise to remember that.
Note: I wish I was clever enough to come up with that last bit, but it’s actually a paraphrasing of a comment I heard from a friend, so I wanted to be sure I mentioned that.

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Record Voter Turnout in Presidential Primaries Has Some Lessons for Local Politickers

Posted on February 10, 2008 by | Leave a comment

The LA Times has an interesting report on the record voter turnout we’re seeing in primaries, and in particular the lopsided increase in turnout on the Democratic side.
The article has some interesting facts and figures, but it pretty much bears out what I said last week – that if you have good candidates who aggressively campaign on issues and ideals that people actually care about, people vote. Who told?
(Oh, and I find it equally amazing that Sen. Obama has been able to run an incredibly close race fueled mostly by small to mid-sized donations…while lefty champions are once again left in the dust.)
It’s a stark contrast to the mind numbingly stupid elections we had in Supposedly Liberal Brainiac San Francisco, where “progressives” had a FAIL so complete and total, turnout was in the toilet. And now, of course, the progressives are crying about the Mayor’s shenanigans, not realizing that if they’d just bothered to run a real candidate, the election might have had a different outcome. Boo hoo for them.
Most importantly, these record turnouts of voters are coming out without any of the lefty electoral gimmicks out-of-state reformers are trying to peddle across the country as ways to “increase turnout.”
It’s really simple, people. If you run a good campaign, you win the election. If you inspire people to action, they act. If you listen to people and talk about the issues they actually care about, they get excited and feel like politics is an opportunity for change – not just a tired exercise that people don’t feel matters to them.
There’s a chance that local “progressives” might take a lesson from all of this in the upcoming elections in November, and perhaps try strategies that don’t involved running around in circles, gossiping like junior high girls in gym class, and whining.
News flash, progressives: THIS DOESN’T F*CKING WORK. Stop trying to game the electorate with phony reform bullsh*t. Run on a vision and an agenda that works for the citizens who actually vote in elections, and you might win. If nothing else, it would be an improvement over last year’s “act like gossiping dorks” strategy.
The real winner will be the voters of San Francisco, if they’re given an honest race between various factions who all strive to offer a cohesive vision of policy and politics for the next four years. We’ll see what happens.

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When “Progressive” Political Analysis Becomes “Junkie Logic” AKA Disinfo Rehab Time!

Posted on November 28, 2007 by | Leave a comment

The election is barely past us, and already everyone’s trying to spin the results to suit Their Side. It’s been particularly amusing to watch the “progressives” try and spin this latest election as anything but a disaster. It’s a form of “junkie logic,” the same kind a drug addict uses to try and con you into loaning money, only this time the con is on the voter and anyone with common sense.

The usual people are spinning their best (instead of reporting, oddly enough) and predictably, some elected officials are upset too and are trying to contort what happened in November into some sort of a victory.

Heck you can hear it straight from the professional blog-commenters and Greens (yes, sigh, a few of them are still around..) at some event, but frankly, why bother? Junkie Logic is never much fun to listen to, neither is parroting or rubber-stamping the latest from the Politburo.

Ok, enough picking on the “progressive” kids. Let’s just look at some facts, and since I’m not in the business of defending one side or another, try and see if we can cut the nonsense one by one :

“Ranked Choice Voting will increase turnout, and be more inclusive than runoffs. It will save money and more people will participate.”

Oh really. Now let’s take a look at the numbers from our last big runoff, in 2003, supposedly evil because “less people” vote in runoffs (and yet in a twist of Junkie Logic, are the numbers now used by those who promoted RCV/IRV/WTF to say that Mayor Newsom “didn’t win”):

PRECINCTS COUNTED (OF 562). . . . . 562 (100%)
REGISTERED VOTERS – TOTAL . . . . . 466,127
BALLOTS CAST – TOTAL. . . . . . . 253,872
VOTER TURNOUT – TOTAL . . . . . . 54.46

Wow, 54%! Now lets look at how we did under the Magical Perfect RCV/IRV/WTF system the “progressives” prommised us would increase voter turnout (and cut costs!)

PRECINCTS COUNTED (OF 580). . . . . 580 (100%)
REGISTERED VOTERS – TOTAL . . . . . 419,598
BALLOTS CAST – TOTAL. . . . . . . . . 149,424
BALLOTS CAST – TOTAL CARD 1 . . . . 149,424
BALLOTS CAST – TOTAL CARD 2 . . . . 150,098
VOTER TURNOUT – TOTAL . . . . . . 35.61
VOTER TURNOUT – TOTAL CARD 1 . . . . 35.61
VOTER TURNOUT – TOTAL CARD 2 . . . . 35.77

That sound you here is the Junkie Intervention phone ringing, but no one is answering because they don’t want to hear the news – under the Magical RCV/IRV/WTF system, turnout was dismal, a mere 35% of voters turning out (100,000 fewer than in evil 2003!). But we were promised by radical advocates for the system that if we adopted it, more people would vote and the final vote would be a “true reflection of the people’s will.” (And whatever you do, do not note that there are actually about 40-50,000 fewer registered voters in San Francisco than there were in 2003! That’ll throw the junkie logic off even more!)

Suddnely, now that the vote result is not what some people wanted, that’s not the case, at least according to the Bay Guardian and assorted so-called “progressives.” Junkie Logic to the extreme.

Oh and that claim that this system would “save money” has been pretty much put to rest since we had to hand count, hand rewrite and handle ballots by hand because the voting machines weren’t, um, legal. The spectacle of radical so-called “elections reform” folks like Steven Hill actaully advocating for illegal machines just beacuse it made their phony RCV/IRV/WTF “reform” look bad was, well, crazy, to say the least.

Now, if that Junkie Logic were not enough, let’s take a look at the second big “Progressive” talking point, that of Mayor Newsom’s vote total:

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Posted in Instant Runoff Voting FAIL, Politics of Political Reform, San Francisco Politics

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