Oh Gavin, you're such a bitch!
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| Photo: Craig Lee |
Chris Daly’s April 12 blog post gives us a progressive spin on what’s happened politically in San Francisco over the past four years. Entitled “Right Turn to Dead End,” the piece discusses Daly’s sense of betrayal by Gavin Newsom.
According to Daly, in 2001 he and then-Supervisor Newsom were working well together on the Audit, Labor, and Governmental Efficiency Committee to solve the homeless problem, when Newsom abruptly veered off with his Care Not Cash proposal just so he could be elected Mayor: “So much for cooperation between the District 2 and District 6 Supervisors.”
Oh, Gavin, you’re such a bitch! We were working on it! We could have solved the homeless problem together!
What Care Not Cash has that Continuum of Care didn't: a real sense of urgency about homelessness in the city. Gavin Newsom realized that allowing people to live and die on city streets is an outrage, a social emergency that should have priority over everything else.
Not blinkered by a delusional ideology, Newsom saw too that city voters were getting restless about homelessness, while progressives fiddled and defended the "right" of the homeless to live on our streets and in our parks.
Progressives like Daly, Matt Gonzalez, and Tom Ammiano viewed homelessness with equanimity as something we just have to live with, like the weather and Critical Mass. Daly still sees homelessness as “one of San Francisco’s most important and difficult issues.”[emphasis added]
As long as homeless people are dying on our streets, what other issues are even close in importance?
Daly:
Daly:
“Long on community input and process, the Continuum of Care Plan was the outcome of over a year’s worth of meetings and represented a consensus of government and community stakeholders.”Well, yes: years of past meetings and no doubt years of future meetings, while everything was run by the Coalition on Homelessness and other "stakeholders" for approval.
This is no doubt what Newsom saw---an endless “process” that was failing to come to grips with the sheer, shocking emergency of homelessness.
Interesting too to ponder Daly’s sense of betrayal and his new-found deference to “process” in light of his betrayal of Mayor Brown when, as acting mayor, he appointed Adam Werbach to the PUC when Brown was out of the country.
Daly sees Care Not Cash as a turn to the right. Doing something about homelessness is right-wing, while not doing much of anything is left-wing? How true.
Interesting too to ponder Daly’s sense of betrayal and his new-found deference to “process” in light of his betrayal of Mayor Brown when, as acting mayor, he appointed Adam Werbach to the PUC when Brown was out of the country.
Daly sees Care Not Cash as a turn to the right. Doing something about homelessness is right-wing, while not doing much of anything is left-wing? How true.
Labels: BeyondChron, Children and Bikes, Chris Daly, Gavin Newsom, Homeless Deaths, Homelessness, Language, Matt Gonzalez, Right and Left, Willie Brown
posted by Rob Anderson @ 1:59 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
"Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation."
- Edward R. Murrow
Hey ... I just perused an entry or two in this blog thing you got...and I have so little attention span, and time that I am gonna just cut to the chase, and at the risk of candidness, I'll just tell ya my comments...
We all know that picking on Chris Daly is easy, just look at the guy.
But, when ya try to say that Care Not Cash has a "sense of urgency" about it is meaningless drivel. If you believe that policy & all the hub bub about it, has even remotely eased the homeless problem, that is a real misguided conception.
Gavin Newsom has not solved any homeless issues and neither has any mayor or elected official in SF that I know of in over 20 years.
I walk the city daily, ride the busses full of urine encrusted nutcases, and know that the streets resemble an open ward my friend...
With or without "care not cash" we'll have that going on.
My personal belief is that it is worse than ever out there, with drug addicts & babbling cretins lining nearly every street I have to cross on somedays.
Not Gavin or Chris Daly or the police or real estate pros or non profit "stakeholders" or your blogging are doing much of anything about it.
I would love to make this city a safe place for residents & tourists & businesses alike, but your petty griping about Chris Daly & Chris Duderstadt and The Bike Coalition and all the little nobodies in town is just more meaningless hot air a vague attempt to make you one of the nobodies too.
It's great that you still have hot air to vent... but I gotta wonder other than for venting your spleen, and trying to piss people off..what is the point of your "blog"?
Are you claiming to represent district 5 ?
You seem like a lone ranger, solo act from way back to me.
Why don't you just represnt as a washed up ol' hippie era dude who's probably more fun & entertaining at parties than he is online.
Leave the internet to the hacker nerds & porn freaks.
I mean no offense, but hot air is the first problem we have to get over in dealing with the real issues facing the city.
Everyone in this town is nuts about something, playgrounds, parking garages, farmer's markets, pot clubs, gay marriages...
you probably have opinions on all of em... so what?
Bitching about shit like Critical Mass is beyond an excercise in futility, it is an excercise in absurdity & a war without end...
I just see a sad angry man sharing these oft interesting opinions, but moot opinions...
A misanthropic fella entering the fray, accomplishing nothing more than virtual dust kicking...
you will occasionally find allies, (hey maybe you are lonely..seeking like minded enemies, hot sex or whatever),
but you will find more detractors and likely worse...I just wonder, why bother pissing of the petulant?
I can assure you, you will never find victory or solace or peace because this is S.F.. Hummmm baby !
here's a quote for the road...
"It is not advisable ... to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener." - Ayn Rand
I'm "picking on Chris Daly"? He's a progressive leader in the city, and, when he advances an unconvincing account of what happened on the homeless issue, it surely requires comment. Even progressives admit that Care Not Cash has housed around 800 homeless people in the last year. Do you have different information? And the mayor hasn't claimed that he has "solved" the homeless problem in the city. But he thinks we're heading in the right direction, and I think he's right. I walk the city and ride Muni every day, too, and I think things are somewhat better than they were a year ago, though there's still a long way to go. And those Bicycle Coalition nobodies just got the Board of Supervisors to vote to make the Bicycle Plan part of the General Plan. I'm not bitter or angry at all. Actually, I'm rather jolly in person, though perhaps a little irritable politically. In the end, politics is not just about power but also about issues,which means a lot of "hot air" about what's true and what's false---not to mention what's right and what's wrong. You seem resigned to living with squalor on city streets. A majority of city voters evidently disagree with you, since they voted for both Care Not Cash and Gavin Newsom for mayor. From the looks of your picture, M, you are a youngish person. I first lived in SF in 1961, and there were few homeless people in the city then. There are no doubt a number of reasons for the rise in homelessness---the closing of the state hospitals, the drug scourge, the steady rise in the cost of housing---but you need to understand that what's happening on city streets now is a relatively recent phenomenon in San Francisco. We don't have to live like this. And you need to do some work on your writing. Your comments lack specifics about the items you disagree with. You need to re-read them and get back to me. The two quotes from other people are also unhelpful to your argument, such as it is. What you should focus on is having something to say yourself without relying on what others said about something else. And lose the affected, regular-person phoniness in your prose, like "ya" for you,and "ol" for old. It just makes you sound like a bush-league Bukowski. "Candor" would have been a better choice than the clunky "candidness," which barely qualifies as a word. And why "perused" and not "read"? I understand your annoyance, since my blog is trying to tell you that everything you think about the city is wrong, but don't take it personally.
> As long as homeless people are dying on our streets, what other issues are even close in importance?
I feel pretty confident that environmental sustainability and a healthy economy are much more important homeless people dying on our streets.
Your logic is flawed. What in the end, if not human life, is the point of a "healthy economy" and "environmental sustainability"? People living and dying on our streets constitutes a social emergency. Fortunately for SF---and the homeless themselves---Gavin Newsom disagrees with you.
Appreciate this post. Will try it out.
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