Gavin Newsom to face Matt Gonzalez in San Francisco mayoral runoff election next month

A member of the Board of Supervisors best known for his focus on homelessness and a more liberal colleague were chosen by voters Tuesday to face off next month in what could be an electrifying contest for mayor between two thirty-somethings.

Though Brown and Newsom would be considered liberals most anywhere else in the country, they are usually categorized as moderates here.

This is a joke. In San Francisco's ever delightful Mission District, Newsom is consistently portrayed as a corporate blood-sucker cynically using the "homeless" as stepping stones to his place at the trough. I don't recall him yet being adorned with swastikas (as Pres. Bush constantly is) but it won't surprise me if/when it happens. People who don't spend time on the streets of S.F. simply can't imagine how far skewed the politics are here.

here's a little tidbit from a recent article:

"It is not too hard to figure out why San Francisco has so many vagrants. Indigent adults receive cash payments of $320 to $395 a month, with only a nominal work requirement for the able-bodied. Supplemented by a little panhandling, this is a tidy sum in the agreeable North California climate. When I wrote about the situation on this magazine’s website, I got e-mails from people in neighboring towns and counties saying: “Please don’t write about this. We’re happy with things just as they are. San Francisco takes in all our homeless people, so we’re spared the problem...”

"Naturally this logic is lost on the city’s irredeemably liberal Board of Supervisors and their soul-mates in the local press. One of the latter, Ilene Lelchuk of the San Francisco Chronicle, recently began a sentence thus: "With San Francisco's homeless population growing despite the millions of dollars the city spends annually to help its most desperate residents..." Note that word “despite.” We spend more and more on the homeless, and still their numbers increase. How can this be? What a strange and wonderful thing is the liberal mind! (Recall the similarly clueless New York Times headline: “Prison Population Swells Despite Falling Crime Levels.”)

"By last year the situation had already got so bad that city voters were presented with a November ballot initiative, Proposition N, under whose terms that $395 monthly cash handout would be reduced to $59, the balance being replaced by city-provided food and shelter. This “Care not Cash” initiative was passed, with 60 percent of voters in favor. That of course outraged the city’s left-wing activists, who immediately challenged the vote in court. On May 8 Superior Court Judge Ronald Quidachay ruled that only the Board of Supervisors can set city welfare policy, and that the ballot initiative was therefore invalid. The hundred-dollars-a-week handouts to anyone that shows up will continue — in a city that is looking at a $350m deficit this year

So, the city of San Francsico spends MILLIONS of dollars per year on these worthless bums; How stupid is it to understand that when you hand out free money, the problem is going to get worse because it only attracts more of the same??

I was born in Bagdad by the Bay. Although I have long since moved away from The City, I have kept up with what is happening there by subscribing to the Chronicle. It is just painful to read about the corruption; the bloated city government; the lack of understanding what their liberal policies have done; the miserable state of the public schools; etc. It seems ludicrous that those who live there are oblivious to the fact that their failed idealism is what is ruining them.

It breaks my heart to see what has happened to San Francisco, however, it is an incubator of failed liberalism, thankfully, seperated by water on three sides from the rest of California.

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