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| monkey_man |
quote:
glencar wrote:
That was my most disappointing moment as a 30 year Stones fan.
Truely disappointing. . .the only good thing about it was being able to hang out with you folks.
[Edited by monkey_man] |
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| pdog |
No one cares about McCain running or his creepy hugs?
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| glencar |
quote:
monkey_man wrote:
Truely disappointing. . .the only good thing about it was being able to hang out with you folks.
[Edited by monkey_man]
Yes, that was fun. I finally met a bunch of people I'd been wanting to meet. Now all that's left is Some Guy, Voodoo & Paris Hilton. |
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| glencar |
quote:
pdog wrote:
No one cares about McCain running or his creepy hugs?
I hear he made reference to our wasted Iraqi war dead. Chump! |
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| pdog |
quote:
glencar wrote:
Yes, that was fun. I finally met a bunch of people I'd been wanting to meet. Now all that's left is Some Guy, Voodoo & Paris Hilton.
Dude, Stoned and VD |
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| Jumping Jack |
McCain is as big a hawk on Iraq as there is, yet Save has huds for him. What a ratings whore.
He is an idiot for going on that show to announce in the first place. He is self destructing!
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| mojoman |
between iraq and a hard place |
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| Joey |
" Johnny-on-the-spot! "
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| gimmekeef |
Well I'm a 50 yr old white guy...click on this link and then select the "people" column......guess I'm not welcome
http://www.democrats.org/ |
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| Jumping Jack |
LGBT? Don't you share the SF values? |
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| Joey |
quote:
Jumping Jack wrote:
LGBT? Don't you share the SF values?
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| monkey_man |
quote:
gimmekeef wrote:
Well I'm a 50 yr old white guy...click on this link and then select the "people" column......guess I'm not welcome
http://www.democrats.org/
Show me the 50 year old white guy section on the RNC's web site! www.rnc.org |
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| mojoman |
whats so wrong about a tower of power? |
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| monkey_man |
quote:
Jumping Jack wrote:
LGBT? Don't you share the SF values?
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| gimmekeef |
quote:
monkey_man wrote:
Show me the 50 year old white guy section on the RNC's web site! www.rnc.org
lol....its right here:
https://www.gop.com/Contribute/ |
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| Jumping Jack |
I've been disenfranchised! |
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| pdog |
I'm a breeder, with two kids, living in SF... Seems that some SF values are left out of this forced definition upon this great American city...
"As soon as you slap a label on me, you're admitting you're wrong and don't know anything about me, and are grabbing at anything to try to define me, instead of respecting me as I am... I am an American"
Paul W.
3-2-2007
SF,CA
Here's an article, from 2005... It's also from SFGate...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic...INGO0AS4D41.DTL
San Francisco's emerging right
Once considered an endangered species in America's most liberal city, conservatives show new signs of life
Tim Cavanaugh
Sunday, January 23, 2005
On Nov. 2, 54,079 San Franciscans voted for President Bush, and it may be only a slight exaggeration to say that Mike DeNunzio knows most of them by name.
The chairman of the San Francisco Republican Central Committee has a job so lonely the Maytag repairman would blanch at it: leading political conservatives in a city where politics is dominated by the left wing, where the same-sex-marriage supporting, picket-line-walking, tax-increase-happy Mayor Gavin Newsom may be the most conservative elected official in town, where most politicians' only complaint with the city's enormous, intrusive bureaucracy is that it seems to be modeled on Castro's Cuba.
San Francisco Republicans put on a brave face by calling themselves "The few, the proud," but in politics, "few" is one adjective nobody wants to hear. For conservatives, San Francisco is hostile ground -- and getting worse.
That's the official story. But visits with conservatives around the city -- from Republican Party stalwarts to think-tank intellectuals to techno- libertarians to old-fashioned values-based social conservatives -- tells a more complicated tale. Conservative San Franciscans can't be called triumphant (many hesitate to admit how they vote), but they have been energized by state and national election results, and even point to developments in the city itself as evidence that San Francisco may be more Right than it thinks.
"Prior to the elections of George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger," says DeNunzio, "being chairman of the Republican Party here was like being chairman of a bridge club. The difference now is in the way people look at us and we look at ourselves. The numbers haven't changed, but there is a perception of a Republican ascendancy."
Of the city's 480,000 registered voters, about 12 percent are Republicans, while an additional 28 percent decline to give a party preference. "I'm inclined to think about 25 percent of those decline-to-states are willing to consider voting Republican, to read our slate cards, and to consider what we have to say," DeNunzio says.
It wasn't always thus.
Between 1912 and 1964, Republicans held the mayor's office for all but eight years. As recently as the early '90s, the occasional Republican could be found on the Board of Supervisors. But through the city's long leftward shift (the 1977 board election, which brought in not only the late Harvey Milk but his assassin, Dan White), the GOP lost virtually all its electoral clout in San Francisco.
But although Republicans remain in the wilderness, the voting on last year's ballot measures supports DeNunzio's thesis that the city still has a conservative side. The tax measures Propositions J and K, both supported by Newsom, failed handily, as did Proposition D, which would have given more leeway and staffing to the Board of Supervisors, and several other traditionally liberal/progressive measures.
"The last election was instructive," says Michael Antonini, a Marina- based dentist who serves as a Republican member of the Planning Commission. "The voters went with the Republican Central Committee more than the Democratic Central Committee by 60 to 40. People voted against noncitizen voting, against Proposition A, against J and K ... we could go right down the list. There were some we didn't win on. But even in the presidential race we brought in close to 60,000 votes for George Bush. More instructive was that the voters favored our positions more than the Democrats."
San Francisco conservatism comes in a variety of colors, but the dominant hue is fiscal. Although a small bloc of socially conservative voters remains in the city, taxes, regulation, bureaucratic bloat and other constraints on entrepreneurship are the issues that unite young dot-commers with old money conservatives, Stanford economists with the Republican Party.
"We think a lot of the social problems will solve themselves as the economic problems get sorted out," says Sally Pipes, president of Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank on Sansome Street. Although she acknowledges that her organization focuses mainly on state and federal issues and has had a hard time getting Silicon Valley types interested in social policy, Pipes has reason to be bullish on the city. At a recent Pacific Research dinner in a 600-seat room at the Four Seasons Hotel, columnist George Will opened his keynote address by saying, "Until tonight, I'd have thought you could fit all the conservatives in the Bay Area into Lefty O'Doul's."
Among the more techno-libertarian element of conservative San Francisco, you might even run into some questions about what "conservative" really means.
"San Francisco is the most conservative city in America, by far," says Auren Hoffman, chairman of the 527 (nonparty political fund raising) group Lead21. "It is the most closed to change, the most closed to innovation, the most closed to new ideas. Not only is the city not a good innovator, it's not even a good copier. Ideas that have worked well in New York, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, and in many other cities get rejected out of hand in San Francisco. "
Hoffman, founder of a consultancy called Stonebrick and a technology consultant for Newsom's 2003 campaign, barely fits into a traditional pattern of conservatism. "The city of San Francisco does very little to help street people get on their feet," he says. "The city will spend millions of dollars doing job training to get somebody an entry-level job at PG&E, which is the closest thing to jail you can find in the job market. Why not issue get-out-of- regulation-free cards to encourage people to start their own businesses, even if it's something as simple as selling their artwork on the sidewalk or selling sodas in the financial district?"
This is the essence of younger conservatism in San Francisco -- dynamic, technocratic, and notably dismissive of the family-values material that got such attention in November's national elections. Hoffman notes, for example, that even Bush is amenable to the idea of civil unions for gays and lesbians. "Gay marriage has moved further and faster than any political issue of the past 10 years," he says. "It's at the point where the conservative position is to be in favor of civil unions. Ten years ago, nobody could have predicted that."
And some are not too happy about it.
The Rev. John Malloy, pastor of the legendary Sts. Peter & Paul church in North Beach, represents a strain of San Francisco conservatism you rarely hear about. In his weekly letters in the parish bulletin, he condemns same-sex marriage and stem cell research, and during the campaign excoriated John Kerry as a "a champion for abortion, calling himself a Catholic."
If San Francisco's Catholic right wing has a capital, it is probably the Ignatius Institute, which has famously feuded with the University of San Francisco over what it sees as the college's leftward drift. But Malloy's parish is enough of a tourist magnet to give him an important forum.
"I was a registered Democrat all my life," says Malloy. "But I've changed to an independent, and after this gay marriage business, I sent the mayor a letter saying I regretted voting for him. As for Kerry, he was a Catholic, which made me so sick. If he hadn't been a Catholic, I probably wouldn't have been so hard on him. But I just hated the hypocrisy."
Although he harbors few illusions about the political climate in San Francisco, Malloy sees himself as emblematic of broader changes in Catholic voting. "The Catholic vote now mirrors the national vote," he says, "but it used to be overwhelmingly, lopsidedly Democratic. I believe moral issues have driven Catholics nationally out of the Democratic Party."
Even at the local level, fiscal conservatives don't dismiss the importance of the socially conservative vote. "George Bush got the highest number of votes in San Francisco of any presidential candidate in a long time, " says Jim Fuller, vice-chairman of the Republican Central Committee. "I have a hunch a lot of those votes came from old-school values voters."
With so many strains of ideology, conservative San Francisco is often as dysfunctional as, well, the rest of San Francisco. DeNunzio split with the Log Cabin Republicans (which represents gay GOP members) over that group's refusal to endorse Bush. Republicans bemoan their inability to put forward an effective team of candidates for local office, and split every election on the question of how much aid and comfort to give the Democratic machine. "We had people in the last election who argued that we should let (Green Party mayoral candidate) Matt Gonzalez win," says DeNunzio, "and let him turn the city into such a disaster that people here would be as disgusted as people in New York were when they replaced (David) Dinkins with (Rudolph) Giuliani. But our position is that we always support the moderate."
That support, which DeNunzio credits with having made the difference for Newsom in 2003, has so far survived the mayor's leftward turn on taxes and his support for union members during the hotel lockout. "We're living in the most liberal city in the country, and the mayor played to that in the beginning of his administration, to neutralize the left," says Arthur Bruzzone, who coordinated Bay Area media for the Bush/Cheney campaign. "But the left is eventually going to abandon the mayor despite their fondness for him on the issue of same sex marriages. He can't continue to ignore his moderate base, because in time the left will come around to attack him the way they always do. "
A thornier question for local conservatives is how public their profile should be. Among GOP leaders, it's a frequent lament: In San Francisco, the only people in the closet are Republicans.
One Republican who is out and proud is Harry Aleo, owner of Twin Peaks Properties in Noe Valley. Aleo's storefront is festooned with pro-Bush memorabilia, posters objecting to the renaming of Army Street to Cesar Chavez Street, and doggerel addressed to "liberal loonies" and taunting the left over its mounting electoral losses. His signs have made the store a sort of controversy magnet on 24th Street.
"I get both kinds of reactions," Aleo says. "Every few days I get one or two people walking in -- I call them closet conservatives -- to say 'Keep it up. We're with you.' "
On the other hand, he says, passers-by frequently spit on or tape angry notes to his windows -- an improvement from the 1980s, when he says his windows were repeatedly smashed and his store was once shot at. "I think they're quieter these days because they're demoralized," Aleo says. "I see them walking around with their long faces since the election."
Still, if the left is demoralized, why can't the right get elected in this town? For years, local conservatives have touted the coming rightward turn in the Asian and Latino votes, but so far this has not happened.
Many Republicans look to increasing home ownership as the key to the conservative future. "When people buy their homes, they tend to vote more conservatively than renters," says Antonini.
Whether demographic changes translate into a more Republican future, remember that San Francisco is famous around the world not only as the birthplace of gay marriage and Dan White's (mostly apocryphal) "Twinkie defense," but as the home of America's greatest right-wing reactionary, Dirty Harry Callahan.
Of the Bay Area figures who have gained national prominence in the past decade, most have not been people of the left: Wired magazine founder Louis Rossetto, Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers (an important voice against regulation and in favor of liberal immigration policy), many technology executives, even the fire-breathing radio host Michael Savage.
You might say Savage, whose clannish, blood-and-soil rightism is outside even the mainstream of American conservatism, is a counterforce who could only flourish where the political climate is as hermetic as it is here. San Francisco's liberal loonies think they can banish the conservative specter from their feast, but they may only be making it mightier.
Tim Cavanaugh is Web editor for Reason magazine. |
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| gimmekeef |
Hey...pdog has made 6,245 posts this week!........ |
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| pdog |
quote:
gimmekeef wrote:
Hey...pdog has made 6,245 posts this week!........
I did...holy shit! |
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| Joey |
quote:
pdog wrote:
...holy shit!
OK ! : My Son .............
******** END TRANSMISSION *********** |
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