Bulletins from the Twilight Zone

The city's left is off to a fast start this year, issuing bulletins from Progressive Land, an imaginary country where progressives are always fighting the good fight against the forces of Darkness, regardless of the facts.

Tim Redmond writes in the Dec. 28 SF Bay Guardian:

The federal government isn't going to help San Francisco house the homeless, or stop the homicides, or treat poor people who get sick. Washington has abandoned American cities. On the flip side, the feds aren't going to respect local and state laws. California voters legalized medical marijuana, and San Francisco has carefully regulated pot clubs. The Drug Enforcement Administration doesn't care.

SF "has carefully regulated pot clubs"? California's Proposition 215 was passed by voters way back in 1996, but SF only just passed its first ordinance regulating the city's 34 pot clubs. Like the homeless issue, this is another instance of political negligence by the city's left. Why were the city's clubs left so long without regulation? Because the city's left is irresponsible and lives in an ideological twilight zone where marijuana clubs are Good, and the homeless are just Poor People who can't pay the rent and whose right to live and die on city streets must be defended.

H. Brown, for his part, thinks Gavin Newsom is waging a war on pot clubs to satisfy the "fanatical right wing of his donor base." The evidence for this? Mayor Newsom is discontinuing the city's marijuana identification program now that the state has started its own card program, which, as you know, is "run by a Nazi." ("Watching City Hall, #415") Brown and Redmond seem to think that SF is a political/legal island, a law unto itself. The reality is that both state and federal law trump local laws.

Sorry to see too that Brown, like the SF Examiner, is capitalizing "city" in his copy, a bit of civic narcissism that should be discouraged by every independent writer in the city.