WALKING from the Ferry Building to the ballpark Saturday morning, a naked guy on roller skates zipped in and out of the Embarcadero's heavy pedestrian flow. He made two passes through us peds in the mile between the two points, so we got him coming and going, the frontal and the buttal, you might say. He was a tall, lean, truculent-looking fellow of about 50, I guessed. I also guessed that he looked truculent because he was catching a few insults as he flew by, especially from the black ticket scalpers. I doubt this would hold up scientifically, but the ethnic reactions to Naked Guy seemed predictable. A Mexican family, right down to a kid who looked like he was about five, laughed, and were still chortling a block on. A couple more groups of Hispanic baseball fans were equally amused. Asians of both genders, including East Asians, and without exception, did not approve. They either frowned or looked straight ahead, deliberately not seeing this mobile violation of the social contract. The black scalpers shouted, “Cover up, muthafucka!” and “Come back here and I'll beat your naked ass!” while most white people, middle age women especially, laughed, one of whom, walking in a quartet near me, commenting, “I haven't seen one of those in a while,” cracking up her friends. After the game, I walked to my daughter's house in Diamond Heights, a distance of three or four miles, most of it along Market Street with its Last Days vibes in the middle blocks that don't let up until Valencia. It was a good walking day, sunny with wisps of cooling fog whistling down from Twin Peaks. The Naked Guys, as they're now known, were out in force at the mini-park at Castro and Market. A fat dude in nothing but a cowboy hat was posing for pictures with several middle age women who I assumed were tourists. (Sorry to repeat the stereotype, but middle age women in San Francisco last Saturday were totally into the Naked Guys.) The consensus Frisco opinion, though, seems to be that the Naked Guys at Castro and Market have simply become one more visual bummer, their ubiquitous presence suggesting that the entire Castro District and, by extension, the rest of The City, is a kind of freak show. The occasional exhibitionist is one thing, but a dozen of them every day at one of the busiest intersections in The City? I paused at the liquor store at the foot of 17th for a tall can of Bud to get me up the hill. I asked the Chinese clerk what he thought about the Naked Guys across the street. “Good for business. Bring people here,” he said.
THE UNEVENTFUL “RACE” for Second District Supervisor continues to plod along with SEIU belatedly mounting a semblance of a campaign on behalf of Andrea Longoria, their Chief Steward and Labor Negotiator. Longoria is challenging first term incumbent John McCowen out of SEIU's pique at the recently concluded negotiations between the County and most of its SEIU-represented work force. Both sides made major tactical errors, but SEIU's were not only more egregious, they cost the people they allegedly represent an unnecessary loss of wages.
ANYHOO, MS. LONGORIA has gotten out a generic mailer and is also blanketing the inland airwaves with radio ads. As reported earlier at our up-to-the-minute on-line site, an SEIU staffer also sent an email to County employees at their jobs asking them to show up for precinct walking and phone banking on behalf of the SEIU candidate. And, again, you've got to wonder at union reps for public workers who don't know that it's a violation of state law to (1) campaign at work and (2) campaign using County stuff such as computers, stationary and so on.
COUNTY COUNSEL immediately got out an announcement to County employees telling them to disregard the offending email, not that it's likely to harm McCowen's re-election; SEIU is unpopular generally with County workers who have come to resent their dues funding SEIU's serial blunders. The illegal call for precinct walkers and phone bankers seems to have gone unheeded.
SPECULATION IS THAT SEIU, which rakes in several hundred thousand dollars in dues every year from County workers for representation ranging from half-assed to incompetent, is now demonstrating what? That they don't know the rules but they’re willing to spend dues on a futile, purely retaliatory run at McCowen, as if he was the only supervisor opposed to them. All five were, including the putative libs, Hamburg and Smith.
SEIU PARLAYED THEIR ANGER towards the County into a 12.5% pay cut for workers when it was clear the County was willing to settle for a 10% from the outset. The SEIU leadership wanted to stay at 12.5% and keep the fight going. But when given a chance, the membership voted overwhelmingly in favor of the 10% cut. SEIU immediately sounded the call for “regime change,” an updated version of “throw the bums out,” which could just as easily be interpreted as a call for SEIU to hit the road. (Teamsters anyone?)
JOE LOUIS WILDMAN is a Mendo-based SEIU and Democratic Party hack, the union and the most reactionary sectors of the Party being one in the same. He led the search to find challengers to take on McCowen and 1st District Supe Carre Brown. Wildman also brought us the twin disasters as supervisor, Colfax and Smith. But most people understand that McCowen and Brown have generally done a good job under difficult circumstances. Anne Molgaard and her husband Michael Kisslinger were also on the Get McCowen search team, with Molgaard herself being Wildman's first choice to take on McCowen. But she was apparently unwilling to step down from her secure $80-90k-plus position as head of First Five, a travesty non-profit funded out of cig tax money. Why run for a hard job that pays $60k when you've got an easy one that pays $90k?, especially an easy one that also sends you to Scotland for an international blah-blah?
THE SEARCH TEAM has struck out so far in the 1st District. But they came up with Longoria to run against McCowen in the 2nd. Longoria is long on passion, mostly over the pay cut that all County employees had to take, but is short on specifics about how else to balance the budget. Longoria is also apparently unaware that the Board of Supes has no budget authority for public education. She sent out a mailer saying that protecting public education from further cuts was her top priority. Not even the local school board, which reacts to the cuts imposed by the state, has the power to stop cuts to education.
THE MERE MENTION of First Five, Wildman, local Democrats, and flab glab lib labs generally makes me go a little crazy. I don't dislike these people on a personal level. They kind of remind me of the less intelligent dog breeds. Simple souls, all smiley and waggy but intellectually, politically? Well, we're talking Mendolib; we're not talking Border Collies, are we? So, if you'll sequester the kids I'll just go off on you here.
LOCAL DO-GOOD non-profits are real good at conferencing, not so good at providing the practical succor the doomed might feel less doomed with if they ever got it. Succor, I mean, of the type not patronizingly doled out to them by the Lady and Lord Bountifuls of the Democratic Party apparat. If you divvied up First Five's annual budget of a mil-plus and at the Food Bank to hand to the First Five-hundred people who came through the door, just handed them the cash in thousand dollar packets, some real good of the fleeting, morale-boosting type, will have been accomplished. The whole Mendolib apparatus exists simply to keep Wes Chesbro in office, to pretend that Paul Tichinin and Bruce Richard know what they're doing, to drink a glass of wine every afternoon at Patrona with the right utterly wrong people, to get each other public sector jobs, and give each other attaboys and attagirls at every opportunity. Some of these enemies of the people even go so far as to call themselves “progressives,” a degraded term that hasn't meant anything at all since 1950 when it was code for “communist,” those “ultimate liberals,” as my friend Fred Gardner once defined the old CP for me. But this oppressive crew we seem stuck with in Mendocino County, well, without further insult I'll just say they aren't the way forward.
ANOTHER CANDIDATE UNCLEAR on the fundies has surfaced in the 4th Supervisorial District as a write-in. Rex Gressett found 20 people willing to sign his nominating papers and has been duly certified as an official write-in candidate. Gressett, who lives in Fort Bragg, says he plans to knock on every door in the City and contact all 7,000 people prior to election day. He is concerned about the Fort Bragg mill site and the roundabout south of town, but has no opinion on issues like the budget or the recent fee waiver for projects tied to job creation. Mr. Gressett doesn't seem to know that the 4th District stretches from just north of Mendocino to Whale Gulch and inland halfway to Highway 101 and contains 18,000+ residents, not just the 7,000 who live in Fort Bragg.
GRESSETT FACES THE QUADRUPLE CHALLENGE of getting people to know who he is, giving them a reason to vote for him, teaching them how to cast a write-in vote, and getting them to spell his name correctly. Gressett says he has been told by “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people” that they are voting for him, but we doubt that Dan Gjerde is losing sleep over this last minute challenge.
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