The chimp wore an electric blue tie for his press conference this morning. I know this because I’ve been waking up earlier than usual and reflexively switching on CNN. It’s a bad habit, sure, but for the first time in maybe thirty years the race for President includes a candidate who isn’t simultaneously boring and thick as a brick.

I don’t switch on the sound for Bush. I’m not that far gone. His facial expressions are scary enough, the half-smile, the twitching, the smarmy, oleagenous fake sincerity. No wonder people are crazy if they’ve been watching this for seven years. How in the world this cretin was re-elected (I know Ohio – and several other states – were electronically stolen in 2004, but still... millions DID vote for him) is a mystery.

By the way, the Bush presidency has helped me answer a question I’ve been puzzling over for my entire life, at least since puberty, which is: what is the actual percentage of utterly stupid people in the country’s voting population? Thanks to the chimp, I believe that question has now been definitively answered.

Nineteen per cent of Americans polled now express a “favorable” view of George Bush. Thus we have what I believe to be a reliable Bonehead Baseline. Roughly one-fifth of the American electorate – people who for the most part have bank accounts and drive automobiles and wear suitable clothing – do not have the brains God gave geese. Many of them own guns.

The discovery of the Bonehead Baseline, which I expect to patent or trademark or copyright, or whatever so that when the mass media latch onto it I can finally retire from the legal racket, is of signal importance, for reasons of social science and also for campaign purposes. Candidates need to know just what percentage of the electorate can be expected to believe any horseshit whatever so long as its uttered by an authority figure.

Say, for instance, you are Barack Obama. You know going in that there are voters who will oppose you for the reason that with a name like that you probably had something to do with 9-11. When they discover that your middle name is Hussein, they will think you are one of Saddam Hussein’s un-executed relatives. (Note: in some places, in a world which is not mainly white, the name ‘Hussein’ is as familiar as ‘Jones’ is in the U.S.).

That crackpot in Cincinnati who kept emphasizing Obama’s middle name also made a big thing out of the Senator’s being from Chicago, the same place machine politics operated under the first Mayor Daley. Of course, the Cubs come from Chicago, too, and I’d find that a more troublesome association.

Barack Hussein Obama, the dingbat repeated, trying to make it sound like ‘Lee Harvey Oswald,’ and an appreciative audience of drugged-looking white people thought that was quite a telling revelation.

Twenty percent, that’s what’s got to be figured-in. I don’t want to be harsh, but my guess is that the vast majority of the Bonehead Baseline is comprised of Republicans. Yes, some are certainly Democrats and even independents; one or two may even have found themselves at the top of the Clinton campaign, which would help explain her nearly-complete inability to describe a coherent philosophy. But mostly the Bonehead Baseline is a number which would reliably support a fellow bonehead, which means that no Democratic nominee would’ve had much chance at these votes anyhow.

The boneheads will support McCain, regardless of the Democratic ticket. So Barack Obama’s name, and even his ethnicity, will not pose the kind of problem for his candidacy some ‘experts’ think they envision.

Obama ought to realize this. That is why the response of his campaign was an error. He had to know this was coming, and he’s had time to consider it, and yet, in rather stark contrast to the brilliance he’s shown in firing back at every other attack, he is not handling this one well.

After all, it’s his middle name. He doesn’t have to explain or defend it. Most of the rest of us have middle names, too, sometimes selected by parents for reasons which surpasseth understanding. So, as they say, fucking what?

I never use my middle name. I’ve never liked it much. Granted, it’s not a name one would associate with racial overtones, but it is what it is. Big deal. The only time anyone would use all three of my names on me, it would be my Mom, and she would be pissed off.

Obama has to remember about the Bonehead Baseline. Any votes he might lose due to his middle name were lost long ago when it was discovered that he was not entirely of the Anglo persuasion. People who believe what they see on F*x News (sic).

The world’s grown. America’s grown. The notion that a non-white would ever be elected president in the U.S. was far-fetched only forty years ago. Even at the time they murdered Martin Luther King, Jr., a black political leader – if he stepped outside of the ‘acceptable’ arena of civil rights and into a wider world – had no chance. King was savaged by Time Magazine in the spring of 1967 because he had broken with the government over Viet Nam. They called him a demagogue. Now, King’s a hero, although I notice that the media manages to avoid mention of his anti-war crusade and the radicalization of his domestic views.

Young people especially are unconcerned with a candidate’s race or sex. They have sometimes seemed to old cranks like me to be a generation interested in strange tribal rituals and weird music, but of course that was us forty years ago. We don’t see them occupying campus buildings and trying to block munitions carriers, and what’s with all the bald heads?

But maybe it’s more like this: they are a generation quite smart enough to get what’s going on and recognize the peril their country’s leaders have exposed them to. When they looked for political leadership, all they saw was a bunch of self-serving, power-mad thugs arguing about who was the lesser of evils. Until now.

For forty years, I’ve been wounded. Forty years ago, America was in Viet Nam, a brutal, stupid war which cost millions of lives, most of them Asian, obviously, before it was over, and America’s cities were sometimes armed camps, such was the state of things. Two great and humane political leaders, King and Robert Kennedy, were trying to stop the madness, and millions of ordinary people had rallied to the cause. For a very brief time it appeared that they, that we, would make it.

There is no question that the murders of King and Kennedy forty years ago devastated the movements they led. For many, many people, it was hard after that to really believe in America. The war for the country, for the soul of the nation, had been lost in the spring of 1968. I’ve done politics since then, occasionally, for as long as I could stand it, but I haven’t recovered the feeling I had once, which was, of course, hope.

I resisted Obama for a long time. Friends would say, you’ve got to hear this guy and I’d say, yeah, okay, he can give a good speech. Even to a couple of weeks before California’s primary I’d figured to vote for Edwards. But there was Iowa.

I think he’s the best thing to happen in my country in forty years. He was asked fairly recently what he’d do on his first day in the White House. Hillary, to the same question, well, you know what she would say. Obama just smiled. “I’ll go into the Oval Office and sit in that chair, and I’ll say ‘This is really cool.’”

I haven’t trusted a politician since George McGovern, but I trust this guy. He reminds us that “we are the change we’ve been waiting for.” God keep him safe.

When I was in law school, a couple of centuries ago, there was a rebirth of feminism, a movement grounded in unarguable fundamental human principles and driven in equal measure by smarts and determination. At the time, less than ten percent of the student body were women, a ludicrous state of affairs brought home to me in stark fashion on a regular basis in a course entitled “Women and the Law.”

It wasn’t the legal part which interested me, and you can interpret that any way you want to. I don’t think I opened my mouth once in all of those classes, which was wise considering that I didn’t know shit about either the law or women, and it was pretty much impossible to listen to the personal stories of my classmates, all of whom were female, without sharing their outrage and their tears.

I read anthologies, including the terrific “Sisterhood Is Powerful.” I harangued my male friends, ruining more than a few social occasions by trying to snap people’s heads off. I looked forward to the day when women would have the same shot at political power then routinely afforded to mostly rich, white, men. Partly this was ideological: it was difficult to imagine women fucking things up as badly as men.

That was before I ever heard of Condoleezza Rice.

It turns out that unless the culture is prepared to evolve in a more feminine direction, the price of political success for women will continue to be the adoption of some of the worst characteristics commonly assigned to men, including an eagerness to brawl and a willingness to inflict enormous damage. There have been a few notable exceptions, such as Pat Schroeder of Colorado, and Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey in Northern California, but too often we’ve had to settle for Diane Feinstein, who will vote for war and weaponry until it engulfs the planet entirely.

I have sympathy for Hillary Clinton. I don’t like her and hope to God I don’t have to vote for her, but I’m feeling sad right now because she’s turned herself into Hubert Humphrey and sold herself down the river for a chance at the presidency.

Because she is the first woman to have a realistic shot at the presidency, she evidently decided that on matters of international dispute she’d better waive her dick around just like Bush and his boys or be thought “too weak.”

Please don’t tell me, Hillary, that after all those years of experience you like to talk about, at the highest circles of power, you really believed George Bush when he lied the nation into war. Don’t tell me you voted to authorize America to launch a first-strike attack against a nation which was neither harming nor threatening us because George Bush promised to only do it if he had to. Don’t tell me that.

There was a brilliant editorial in Buzzflash.com today, which asked:

“How many of the Clinton “cannot be criticized” readers (or ex-readers) who have written us would vote in favor of allowing the military to use cluster bombs in civilian areas? Very few, but Hillary Clinton did; Barack Obama voted against it.

“How many of our readers would support a welfare bill that would cut women and their needy children off of government support money if they didn’t find work in an economy that is increasingly bereft of decent paying jobs? Few of our readers would, but Hillary did.

“How many of our readers would have voted for the Iraq War authorization, when we all knew it was the enabling legislation Bush needed to go to War with Iraq? We would have voted against it; but Hillary Clinton voted for it, and then claims that she was, essentially, “duped.” Okay, we weren’t duped; you weren’t duped. But the person who touts her “experience” claims she was.

“There’s a point when support of a political candidate because the candidate is a symbol – in this case of a woman triumphing to become president – compromises so much to reach that goal that the victory would be hollow. Is it advancing feminist principles of peace, care for women and children, and decent jobs for women when the candidate one supports has severely compromised herself on all these issues? We’ll let you answer that.”

I want to believe that Hillary Clinton is better than that. But I don’t believe we’ll ever know. She’s not going to win the presidency. Maybe the Democratic Party’s semi-hack leadership can still engineer her nomination if she can squeak by in Ohio and Texas a week from Tuesday, but she can’t beat McCain, and that’s really, just unutterably sad.

She can’t beat McCain for three reasons, two of them fairly obvious: she is so corrupted by her own record that she has no issues to use against him, and she is so rabidly hated by a large number of really twisted ‘conservatives’ that she will be ‘swift-boated’ into infinity. The web is already awash in scurrilous garbage about her; it will only get worse. There is another reason, though, and it’s the strongest: she’s not real, and people can tell.

I’ve watched her now in a couple of ‘debates’ and while I don’t hold against her the little prevarications and evasions – that’s normal for pols – I think it’s clear that her entire persona is in a kind of living hell. She is brittle. Her speech is strident. Her smile appears to be forced and false, and it is there even when there is no earthly reason for it. Her eyes dart, as though an inner program is trying to sort out the audience from the camera. She has lost all gentleness. Even when she speaks well of Obama, as she did at the end of the appearance in Austin last week, it’s pure calculation and without sincerity.

I know it reads as though I have no sympathy for Hillary Clinton, but I don’t think that’s so. She’s been carrying a heavy load for a long time. Any woman aspiring to high public office has to deal with not only public attitudes toward women but also with mostly male, often macho schmucks who already run the place. In politics, it’s supposed to be dangerous to be too genuine, and the danger is multiplied if your gender is in the minority.

So I get it that she figured, whatever her real beliefs, she’d better not look weak on things like war and munitions. I get it because pols think that way, the rationalization that you can’t do all the wondrous things you want to do for the people unless you screw the people a few times along the way for the sake of your campaign contributors.

The look of panic in Hillary’s eyes may be the recognition that she has completely trapped herself. She has nothing to use against Barack Obama and so has taken to misrepresenting his health care proposal and launching pathetic claims that he’s “plagiarized” a couple of lines formerly used by his own campaign co-chairman, when the plain fact is that while Obama’s two books were actually written by him, Clinton’s were ghostwritten, and, anyway, authenticity may not be her best issue.

I do not want a President who is afraid. Presidents who are afraid do really terrible things. Maybe you think all presidents do terrible things, but I’d argue that it’s not so and if it is there are degrees of terrible. John McCain, for instance, is so overtly insane that Hillary looks like Joan Baez. But anyhow I don’t want to spend the campaign debating whose candidate is a bigger whore.

I don’t know what it’s going to take for the egalitarian society I once thought was just over the horizon to finally arrive, but we’re not close to it. And the success of Hillary Clinton in the political arena is not a feminist victory. Most women in America are still treated as inferior to men. You don’t think so? Why, because Meg Whitman got to be C.E.O. at eBay? Because Boxer’s in the Senate?

Women in the United States get paid about 60 cents for every dollar men get paid, which is almost exactly what it was forty years ago. The feminist movement, when it is mentioned at all, is trivialized with references to “bra-burning.” The Equal Rights Amendment was never passed.

I’m from the sixties. I’m aware of the existence and ‘celebrity’ of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, and it makes me want to rend my own flesh at this final, utter debasement of the human spirit and its possibilities, at what we’ve become. Except for this:

Maybe it’s not over. See, there’s this guy from Illinois. I know, I know, don’t yell at me. He could be a fake. He could catch a few bullets in a hotel kitchen. Anything. It might be that a lot of people are desperate not only for a change in administrations but for a change in the world. Okay, in that case Barack Obama’s just handy for the millions who were looking for someone. As he says, we are the people we’ve been waiting for.

A lot of truth in that.

Look, I don’t care if John McCain had sex with Vicki Iseman. I don’t care if he’s had sex with two twenty-year-old hookers from Des Moines, seven members of the Coast Guard on leave in San Diego, or the starting outfield of the Baltimore Orioles. I don’t even care that Iseman bears an eery resemblance to Cindy McCain, the Senator’s scary-looking wife.

The New York Times story is not one of extra-marital hi-jinx but of political corruption, and it’s likely to have a shelf-life all the way to November. The man is toast. You read it here first.

There are really only two viable explanations for McCain’s situation. One is that his brain was fried during his prisoner-of-war years in North Viet Nam. The other is that he’s a crook. I write this with all due respect.

This morning, the co-chairman of McCain’s campaign in his home state of Arizona, Congressman Rick Renzi, was indicted for extortion, money-laundering, and mail fraud in connection with the strong-arm purchases of land and the concealment of kickbacks. Cornered by a pack of rabid journalists in Indianapolis, McCain looked like 200 pounds of condemned veal.

The Renzi story is exactly like the Iseman story, excepting the sex if you are prepared to believe that McCain did not engage in sexual congress with the congressman, which is a given until further notice. This is not a webLog which is interested in sensational charges until they’re printed elsewhere first.

The Renzi story is like the Iseman story because each involves a deep and close connection between McCain and persons who expect to profit greatly thereby. It’s a feature of McCain himself, the man he is, not merely an odd coincidence, that he’s in bed, mostly figuratively, with a whole bunch of people looking for favors.

Check out the guy’s entire campaign staff. Every one of them is a lobbyist. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington's lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JP Morgan and U.S. Airways. His senior advisors, including Steve Schmidt – whose fingerprints can be found all over Arnold Schwartzenegger’s gross, steroidal body – have whored for a nice roster of corporations.

McCain, who has long posed as a symbol of clean government, is not paying them salaries, which means that their work on his behalf is being subsidized by their real employers: big players in the game of who runs the world.

So, as I said earlier, there are really only two possibilities here. Either the man’s a garden-variety crooked pol, which makes him less interesting, and he knows he’s lying, or else there is some genuinely bad wiring in his brain, maybe the long-term result of having it fucked with by some angry guys who didn’t speak English unless it suited them.

After all, McCain recently supported Bush’s veto of a measure banning the near-drowning (well, sometimes they get the timing wrong and the guy dies, but nobody’s perfect) of human beings in secret prisons by our secret police, on the grounds that he didn’t think it was torture and didn’t want to restrict our secret police anyway.

How could anyone who’d been tortured for years in a prisoner-of-war camp take that position unless his mind had snapped?

It’s the latter proposition that worries me. I can handle when a guy’s just a liar and a fraud. I have a familiarity with politics and have made numerous political acquaintances. But when the guy’s actually cracked? Look what cocaine and booze did for the mind of Bush – granted, he hadn’t mad much of one to begin with; do we have any doubt that torture will loosen more screws than alcohol?

It doesn’t matter whether McCain was actually schtupping Iseman, and vice-versa, since he sleeps with everyone. It matters if he’s crazy. We’ve had more than enough of that already.

There’s a woman named Toni Dukes who works as a dispatcher for San Francisco’s emergency reponse center. She’s thirty-nine, divorced, with three children, the youngest of whom is 4. The center is understaffed, 120 dispatchers covering four thousand calls a day.

When she began her work there, Dukes was on the graveyard shift, midnight to seven a.m. On her drive home each day she would pass homeless people in the cold. She decided to do something about it.

Using her own limited funds, Dukes began buying hats and gloves from the Dollar Store or Wal-Mart, packing them in ziplock bags, and taking them to the people in the streets. She’s given hundreds of these packages to the homeless. She says it’s not only the hats and gloves.

“It’s amazing just for people to smile,” she says, “to acknowledge them and show you know that they’re there. They’re not animals. They’re just people without the same opportunities a lot of us have.”

A presidential candidate said recently, “We are the people we’ve been waiting for.” He may be right.

Ah, the life of a federal judge. A few interesting cases, a lot of golf, and a roster of law students and recent graduates willing to crawl through all of that nasty paperwork of which legal research is comprised. You get a very hefty salary and a pension that wouldn’t have embarrassed Henry Luce.

Under normal circumstances, I might pause here in my story for an extraordinary rendition of an old Moby Grape song, “Murder In My Heart For The Judge,” but it’s a risk these days, citing a song title which someone of loose marbles can take as a literal threat because unless you’re Ann Coulter they won’t let you off when you say you’re only kidding.

And speaking of kidding, and of extraordinary rendition, we’ve just had the third federal judge in as many cases dismiss a lawsuit brought by victims of the CIA’s “program” by which people are kidnapped by the government and flown out of the country to a ‘secret’ location where they are tortured.

Conservative estimates are that upwards of seventy people have had this happen to them. At least two have since been released when it was determined that it has all been a mistake. Three others still held were flown in private planes to dungeons in Morocco and Egypt.

This time the claim was filed against a subsidiary of Boeing named “Jepperson International Trip Planning.” I am not making this up. According to the suit, the only international trip planning Jeppeson has been doing is for the CIA, providing the planes and the logistics for ‘extraordinary rendition.’

The federal district judge, James Ware, in dismissing the claims, employed the same kind of twisted wording found in the term itself. The case could not be heard, he said, because, according to the article by Bob Egelko in today’s Chronicle:

“crucial elements of the case – Jeppeson’s alleged relationship with the CIA and the agency’s cooperation with foreign governments – have not been publicly confirmed or denied by the government and can’t be litigated without an unacceptable risk of harm to national security.”

Think about that for a minute.

First, the CIA and the Bush regime could release every bit of information it’s got on the program and national security would not be compromised because our enemies already know about it. They know who and what and where and how. The only people who don’t know, actually, are the American people.

Second, the relationship of the CIA with foreign governments is also not a secret, at least not to anyone whose paying attention. It’s not as though Egypt doesn’t know. But maybe the details wouldn’t play very well on F*x News (sic).

Third, what’s with this “not publicly confirmed or denied”? What if the feds were building concentration camps along AMTRAK lines and special train cars to carry prisoners to them? Oh, wait a second, they are. The contracts are in writing. Guess who’s building the camps? (You guessed it). I suppose Judge Ware could say that these things were not confirmed or denied because nobody’s talking about them, maybe that’s it, same as with “extraordinary rendition.”

The press isn’t talking about it in a way which treats it as important. The Chron piece played it on the inside of the Metro section (it’s a San Jose judge). There is no scandal, no indictments, no congressional investigation. Kidnapping? Torture? Well, we’re at war, after all, and nobody wants to be accused to aiding the enemy, especially after the congress passed the legislation which gives the government power to seize American citizens without warrants and cage them without trial.

If the commission of violent felonies by a federal agency, as a matter of policy and under the direction of a ‘secret’ program, is acceptable in America under any conditions, then we have permitted our enemies to turn us into savages.

It seems to me that we were once better than that. I'd like to believe that we still are.

The time thing is in the syllabus, I’m sure of it. We may think we’re signing up for units of biology or political science, and of course we are, but these things are only the bones of the organism... the basic structure within which we play life. And when we play life, things come up.

Lately, time’s been on my mind.

One reason, there’s its passage, or my passage through it. There’s mortality to consider, naturally, and that fact tends to come more clearly into focus as months become years become decades, and so on.

Another reason, a lot of books I read doing research for a novel, theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, and the technical possibilities, given what some guys a lot smarter than I am are writing, of time travel.

Then there’s politics and the emotion the Obama candidacy seems to have conjured in me, memories of another time and a couple of brothers who believed enough in the possibilities of the human spirit that they offered up their lives for it.

And I’ve been thinking about time and friendship. There are plenty of reasons these days for what the shrinks call clinical depression. There’re the newspapers, for one thing, if you read them, with daily items out of Washington and elsewhere which chill the blood. There’s the project of economic survival for many of us, too, with health care through the roof and a rickety “Social Security” system which may or may not stiff us.

In order to avert depression, one must find a strategy for staying sane. But in order to stay sane, one must be as close to authentic as possible. This is where old friends come in, because old friends already know every weird little thing about you. They know your looniest behavior, your dopey blunders. They have seen you behave in a less than perfect way. Hell, they’ve seen you behave like an asshole. This is a great thing because with old friends there is absolutely no point in pretending anything. You can breathe. You can be who you are.

Time changes shape. It implies things when we’re young, and after a while it begins to do more than imply. This is not always easy. But when you have someone you can talk to, you’ve got a decent chance at the sanity thing because all you have to do is be yourself.

Life sure is interesting.

I suspect that a degree of cynicism has infected my socio-political outlook.

People who have known me for, say, forty-five years, will say this is not a recent development, yet I’ve spent a good portion of those years in various political contests and you’ve got to admit that anyone claiming to be relatively sane has some ‘splaining to do with that kind of record.

I blame my high school teachers for this, subversives all. I can say that now. A dozen of them challenging us to think for ourselves. They fed us James Joyce, Albert Camus, Plato, Mel Brooks. When that sort of thing takes root, look out Cleveland.

In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus’ protagonist keeps pushing that rock up the hill only to have it come crashing back down. Still, he pushes it because, succeed or not, it’s the only thing he can do.

I also blame beautiful women because I wanted to show off, and I couldn’t lift all those weights or run over a linebacker.

And I blame the Kennedys. JFK’s thousand days, as chronicled by revisionist ‘historians’ with the analytic abilities of hamsters, didn’t amount to much. After all, where was the landmark legislation? But some of us know how it was, not just by the rosy glow of reconfigured memory but from what we’ve learned over time.

JFK was the man Oliver Stone’s great film shows him to be, a man who tried, in his own words, to “smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds,” who had begun to move the forces of government against the Cold War, and who had appealed to the nation on behalf of civil rights. His work had barely begun when he was murdered for it.

Barack Obama is not JFK, regardless of the Kennedy survivors flocking to his campaign, and he is most clearly not Bobby, who nearly swept what was then a handful of popular primary elections in a stunning insurgent campaign. He’s not Jesse Jackson, either, despite Bill “depends what is, is” Clinton’s backhanded swipe at him after South Carolina. Obama is not JFK but the sucker’s got me praying for him anyhow.

Barack Obama’s got a long road ahead and there are great difficulties and incalculable peril awaiting him. The danger he poses to the owners of the corporate state is not necessarily programmatic – let’s face it, we don’t know much yet about who he is and what his political beliefs are – but cultural. It is a rare thing, not seen in thirty-six years, that a leader emerges who stirs the next generation. The corporate state may in fact be unstoppable, since it owns the guns, the media, and the money. Unstoppable unless a popular movement rises against it.

The real reason Obama is mentioned in the same breath as Jack and Bobby Kennedy is that those of us who were alive in those days were inspired enough by their example, and the example of others, to believe that we could change the world. Because he has touched that place in the young especially, that place where the heart lives.

I’ve seen several of his public speeches now, seen the near-frenzy of the people who believe in him. The loudest roar I’ve heard yet was when he said this:

“We have been criticized for offering people false hope. But in the long, unlikely story of America, there has never been anything false about hope.”

I tell you right now, I don’t want to believe. I’ve been through a lot of elections and spent all the energy I could manage over the years trying to make things better. I’ve earned my cynicism the hard way.

And it’s not just Obama and who he turns out to be. There’re all those other ghosts, as well. Hotel kitchens and public plazas, and private planes. And there are the unavailable ‘proprietary’ codes to the electronic voting machines, in which the actual vote totals can be easily cooked and the evidence of that made to disappear.

I wonder if Obama or his people know that Diebold, the manufacturer and programmer of most of the machines (can you say Ohio, 2004?) has recently gotten a huge contract from the Department of Fatherland Security.

I’m hoping anyhow. It’s completely crazy, I understand that. I know all of these things, you see, and wish I didn’t, and it’s these things which club down dreams. But I’m hoping because I see the faces of all of those kids – faces I saw a long time ago – and that means we’ve got a chance.

The story ran on page two of the Metro section of the Chronicle today. A mid-forties “former car salesman” – which may suggest he was out of work – was sentenced to one year in jail for perjury and presenting false evidence. His name is Andrew Bamberg.

Here’s what happened:

Mr. Bamberg got a traffic ticket, failing to stop at a sign, and the bite on that one, at least in Redwood City, runs $215.00. Mr. Bamberg’s financial circumstances are such that the payment of this fine posed a serious problem. What he was convicted of doing was going to traffic court with photographs, introducing them into evidence, and then testifying as to what they depicted, having himself physically moved the location of the stop sign for photographic purposes.

Presumably, if Mr. Bamberg is gratified to discover leniency in the court system in the person of the Hon. Quentin Kopp, who might have sentenced him to as long as four years in state prison, his good fortune was probably not on his mind as he was led from the courtroom in handcuffs.

Of course, perjury is a serious thing. But every lawyer in practice more than, say, a day and a half, knows that it’s committed in every courtroom in America on a daily basis. Many times it would be too hard to prove; many other times it’s considered not worth the bother. That’s a simple fact. I suppose it would be nice of human beings always told the truth, but that day is not just around the corner.

I have no verifiable evidence that Mr. Bamberg is stone broke, but when you consider the “former car salesman” description rather than a “present-day” something-or-other, it doesn’t look good. In this country right now, it is increasingly dangerous to be poor or in some other way vulnerable. There are hammers everywhere.

No, Mr. Bamberg, if he did it, should not have moved the sign and then lied about everything. On the other hand, you should probably not have sex with an intern and then lie about it in a legal proceeding, but I don’t recall Bill Clinton spending any time in jail. It’s still safe to be rich and powerful,

A great many crimes in America are unmistakably crimes of circumstances and poverty. Yes, some people steal because they’re sociopaths or off the rails, but many steal to support drug addictions and many steal to eat.

Homelessness is a crime. Begging on the streets is a crime. Across America there’s been a wave of coldness, a “zero tolerance” approach to people and situations which reflects the worst in us. In San Francisco, the ‘liberal bastion’ which reactionaries and nouveaux-Nazis enjoy lampooning, one prominent newspaper columnist regularly demonizes the homeless while the ‘liberal’ Mayor who once said his hero was Robert Kennedy has pushed policies designed to run them out of town.

Last Sunday, the 27th of January, a man stood panhandling at the corner of Greenwich Street and Van Ness Avenue. According to the first news stories on Monday and Tuesday, “someone complained to police” about him, and an officer was dispatched to cite him. The man “was uncooperative” according to later police claims, and began to run east on Greenwich. The cop then called for backup. A squad car with two other cops joined him, and the three armed men cornered the pan-handler at Polk Street. The cops say he pulled a knife. He was shot twice, dying three hours later.

On Wednesday, it leaked that the “someone” who complained to police was Heather Fong, who is in fact the Chief of Police in San Francisco. One may imagine the text of that call. This panhandler had not merely broken the law, a bullshit law to begin with for reasons I hope I don’t have to explain at length, he had pissed-off the CHIEF!

Chronicle columnists Matier & Ross reported it this way:

“Panhandling...has long been a pet peeve of Fong’s boss, Mayor Gavin Newsom, who led a voter-backed initiative in 2003 to ban ‘aggressive’ soliciting on median strips, parking lots and the like” (i.e. anywhere there are people who may be asked for money). A police ‘spokesman’ said, “She spied the violation and called it in to field operations, and field operations called Northern Station.” Fong’s message: Do something about it.

The Chron columnists, agreeably passed on the cops’ description of the dead man as having been “long known... for his drug and mental problems...” His name was Leonard Michael Cole. He was 55.

This is who we are now. It’s who we’ve become. Hammers everywhere.