In today's news

Michelle Goldberg on the stupid commentary after Trump's speech to Congress last year:

But some observers were deeply moved. “He did something tonight that you cannot take away from him — he became president of the United States,” gushed the liberal pundit Van Jones after Trump’s speech. You’d “have to be dead not to appreciate the moment,” said David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former chief strategist. Chris Cillizza, then at The Washington Post, wrote that the speech was proof that Trump “can be, dare I say it, presidential when the moment demands it.”

Look for more this drivel after the speech tonight. This is what happens when you spend too much time in Washington D.C. and on cable news: your brain turns to mush.

In today's SF Chronicle:

San Francisco’s “Question Time” — a long-standing monthly appearance by the mayor before the Board of Supervisors — was meant to trigger serious debate between the two branches of government.

But in the 12 years since voters approved the practice, it’s become a stock ritual in which no questions are asked. Instead, the supervisors sit patiently while the mayor delivers a five-minute prepared speech. The last time a supervisor submitted a question was in September 2016, according to board clerk Angela Calvillo.

“It’s made a farce of what the voters voted for,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who is sponsoring an ordinance to revamp the rules for these question-and-answer sessions. Under his proposal, supervisors would no longer have to present questions ahead of time — rather, they would submit the “general topic” of each question a week before the mayor’s scheduled appearance.

The idea: to create a lively discourse on city policies, modeled after a British government proceeding in which the prime minister answers questions from Parliament. That was what former Supervisor Chris Daly envisioned when he and three other progressives devised the original Question Time ballot measure in 2006, hoping it would force debate with then-Mayor Gavin Newsom...

Wrong! The question time idea was always about the boorish Daly's hope of cornering Gavin Newsom in a regular pubic confrontation during which, of course, he assumed he would outshine Newsom. As I pointed out last month, question time will always be disappointing political theater in San Francisco, since there's very little disagreement on important policy issues to make it interesting. The city is in effect a one-party city-state.