San Francisco Values - Alleged Wife Battering County Sheriff Edition

This mug shot is our new Sheriff, Ross Mirkarimi. He was elected Sheriff in the last election and sworn in on Monday. Friday he was arrested for "domestic violence battery, child endangerment and dissuading a witness" over a recent incident involving his wife, the Venezuelan telenovella actress Eliana Lopez:

After only 10 months in office Mayor Jean Quan unifies Oakland

Ten months in office, and Oakland Mayor Jean Quan has done what most people would consider impossible. She has united the citizens of Oakland. A recent CBS 5 poll reports that 85% of the Oakland do not think she is doing a good job as mayor. Occupiers, Anarchists, Business Owners, Protesters, The Chamber of Commerce, Conservatives, Liberals, Centrists and Anarchists all standing shoulder to shoulder with this this single shared conviction and unity of purpose. Amazingly, an even higher percentage are united in the belief that she is doing a terrible job handling the protests.

STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!

With the call from Occupy Oakland for a General Strike, the epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street/D.C. /San Francisco/Oakland/Sesame Street movement moved to the left coast today:

"OAKLAND, Calif. — A week after police in riot gear rousted and then tear-gassed Occupy Oakland protesters, supporters of the movement have rebuilt their encampment in front of City Hall and are calling for a general strike on Wednesday that will include an attempt to shut down the nation’s fifth-busiest shipping port. “We call for a general strike around the country, and around the world, because we know that the wealth of the 1 percent is produced by the work of the 99 percent,” said Louise Michel, one of the protest organizers, at a news conference."

What better day to end my 60 day strike against my own blog and re-occupy this space in solidarity with the "movement". In no particular order, some thoughts on the unfolding events that are currently occupying my mind:

Strike Status
Upon awakening this morning, the first thing I did was check out the traffic cam for the Bay Bridge connecting Oakland and San Francisco. I expected to seen this primary commuter route to be deserted as the oppressed 99% flexed their collective muscle and answered the call for a general strike against the oppressing 1%. As you can see in the screen shot at the top of the page, the bridge superficially appears to be jammed with commuter traffic at 6:45 AM, pretty much as it is every day at this time. I can only assume that this is attributable to the 99% streaming across the bridge to Occupy San Francisco. Or something. I may have to walk down the hill and see how my Occupy San Francisco brethren are doing in Justin Hermann square. Or not

And now for something completely local - 16 Candidates

As a direct consequence of our new public financing rules for the mayoral race in San Francisco, we now have a cavalry charge of 16 candidates running for mayor. C.W. Nevius explains:

"It would be safe to say that many San Franciscans don't understand public financing...

Raise $25,000 and you get $50,000. Scare up $100,000 and you get a 4 to 1 match for $400,000. No wonder there are 16 candidates for mayor. It's political happy hour... this is a poor use of public funds. This is the first mayoral race with public financing and voters are learning that it allows candidates to get easy money and, in some cases, to waste it.

The weird catch-22 of San Francisco's system is that once the money is spent, a candidate can't drop out of the race unless he or she pays it back. The problem is that a 2007 change in the law made it possible to start pulling in the money nine months before the election. By the time August rolls around, candidates may be hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole and can't afford to quit."

So we have candidates who are only in the race because we the citizens of SF are paying them to run for mayor with our money. And the peculiarities of our public finance rules mandate they stay in the race in order to continue to suckle at The City's bountiful teat. But this is all fine because - you know - we in SF have a lot of extra money lying around to finance any candidate who wants to run for mayor. Why would we not want to spend $9 million of our tax dollars for the privilege of sorting through sixteen mayoral candidates? I sure can't think of anything better to do with that money.

As Ron Popeil might say - "But that's not all!" At no extra charge we will now throw all sixteen candidates into the mix-master of our first ranked voting / instant runoff election for mayor. On November 8th, all San Francisco voters will cast three votes for mayor in rank order of preference. "Rank" being the operative word in that sentence. Rich Deleon ruminates about the election and The City's progressive future in Sunday's SF Chronicle Insight: