It’s not particularly a surprise, but Gavin Newsom endorsed Rob “who?” Black for District 6 Supervisor yesterday. You can read Pat Murphy’s account of the event at the Sentinel, and Randy Shaw’s take on Beyond Chron.

As I said yesterday, it’s becoming clear that the Big Business types are not going to stand aside and let Chris Daly get re-elected without a fight. Between their dodgy push polling and Newsom’s endorsement of Black, it seems that significant downtown money is being mobilized to take Chris on.

There’s kind of a puff piece in the LA Times today comparing Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. There’s not really that much to the article–Gavin’s taller! Villaraigosa grew up working class!–other than an attempt to foreshadow a battle for governor between them.

The one line that caught my eye, though, was a description of San Francisco as “a city that eats its politicians alive.”

Ideally with a nice tomatillo salsa.

Push polling is one of the more unpleasant aspects of political campaigns. It’s the practice of trying to spread (usually untrue) information about a candidate by phrasing it in the form of a question. So a pollster will ask, “If you heard that this candidate has been known to torture and eat kittens, would it make you more or less likely to vote for her?” Now obviously, that’ll make most everyone say “less likely”, but the main point is to associate the candidate with kitten torturing, even (or especially) when it’s not true.

When you are a candidate, you want to know what happens in endorsement meetings. The answer-it all depends.

Two years ago, I was the chair of Campaigns and Working Issues (aka Endorsement) Committee for the San Francisco Greens. By acclamation, we endorsed Mark Sanchez, the first Green to be elected into office and who was running for re-election. (I recused myself when the motion came up since I was his acting campaign manager throughout his campaign.)

Yesterday, I went to visit a biology class at summer school at Mission High School. My purpose was to find out what students liked about Mission High School.

The class had started out with 50 students. In its fifth and last week, it had 15 students left in the classroom. The students were from Balboa, Mission and Thurgood Marshall. They stated that they liked the variety of their school’s after-school clubs and activities. Mission and Thurgood Marshall students also commented that they liked being in a small school where they knew all of the students and teachers. One of Thurgood Marshall students commented on the number of assemblies that various extracurriular clubs put on for the entire school during the school year.

An organization called “San Francisco Parents for a Safe School Environment” lead by Gail Baugh and Anitra Baker has sued SFUSD under the California Environmental Quality Act.

The suit is stating that SFUSD did not conduct a comprehensive environmental study on the impacts of closing schools as required under CEQA. So they are asking the court to stop the school closures, relocations and mergers since the San Francisco School Board and District failed to consider environmental concerns in keeping our school children safe.

The battle for a fair contract for San Francisco’s hotel workers is heating up again. Ironically, since hotel workers here have been without a contract for a couple years, one of their demands has been met in a back door kind of way. Since hotels are, by and large, all owned by giant multinational chains, hotel workers around the country have been demanding a contract that expires at the same time for workers across the country. Well, contracts are expiring all over, so the unions are working to leverage the power of numbers.

The Hotel Workers Rising Campaign is well under way!

I’ve been pretty delinquent at updating any news about San Francisco’s TechConnect initiative.

The current situation is this: The city is negotiating with Earthlink for the actual network. Due largely to Kimo Crossman’s birddogging of the city on secrecy, the city is posting weekly updates on the progress of the negotiations, here.

Meanwhile, I’ve been told that Supervisor Jake McGoldrick introduced a motion to get the city to look into a city-owned network:

“Motion directing the Budget Analyst to conduct, on a priority basis, a fiscal feasibility analysis of a City-owned Wireless Network to promote digital inclusion by ensuring affordable internet access, affordable hardware, community-sensitive training and support, and relevant content to all San Franciscans, especially low-income and disadvantage residents.”

The idea of tearing down the O’Shaughnessy dam and “restoring” Hetch Hetchy valley is bubbling through the media again. A report released yesterday estimated that it would cost from $3 to $10 billion dollars to tear down the dam and restore the valley.

Twelve years ago, while I was in law school, I came out as transgender. But I was terrified, even after living life as an open lesbian for twelve years. I was terrified because I knew it would be impossible for me to get a job. I was in law school and I didn’t know any transgender attorneys, except Shannon Minter who transitioned on the job at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, not exactly a place that would kick him to the curb for being trans.