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More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! | Visit YouTube | Visit UShow.com Now that the long-awaited Lake Chalet is open, one would think everyone in Oakland's happy that it's done and the boathouse is restored. But no. I'm told some Oakland councilmembers are still upset over a vote that took place three years ago. So much so they won't even set foot in the Lake Chalet! Let's go back three years to 2006, when San Francisco restaurateurs Lara and Gar Trupelli, known for the Beach Chalet and Park Chalet restaurants, were selected over the always good and very popular Everett & Jones Barbeque, in Jack London Square. The Oakland City Council was deadlocked four in favor of the Beach Chalet proposal and four against it. Specifically, Nancy Nadel (Downtown-West Oakland), Oakland Councilmembers Larry Reid (Elmhurst-East Oakland), Desley Brooks (Eastmont-Seminary), and Jean Quan (Montclair-Laurel) against the Beach Chalet pro...

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! | Visit YouTube | Visit UShow.com The latest news in the Chevron / Richmond oil refinery issue is that California Attorney General Jerry Brown wants to step in and mediate the negotiations between the oil giant and the City of Richmond. In working to do this, Brown's scored a point on San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in the California Governor's race. According to the San Jose Mercury news and Contra Costa Times (yeah, I know they're merged), Brown appeared before the Richmond City Council and a "standing-room-only" crowd of 350 people, most reportedly laid off union workers from the Chevron facility, who's reconstruction effort was halted by court order in the wake of a lawsuit by environmentalists challenging the environmental impact report for the venue, costing them their jobs (I wonder if Dennis Roos was there ?). The Richmond electeds passed a resolution supporting the involvem...

  More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! On YouTube Tuesday, May 26, 2009 will go down as an eventful San Francisco day, sunny, and yet dark, and one that saw a lot of people marginalized who didn’t want to be. But then, who does. Before I turn to who said what, and who got arrested, I stick my head right into the belly of the beast, the California Supreme Court’s decision. Today, in first upholding Proposition 8, the voter-approved initiative to make same-sex marriage illegal that passed in November 2008, and yet protecting the 18,000 same-sex marriages that were done before the passage of the initiative, the California Supreme Court successfully stood logic on its head. I’ve just read the Court’s entire 167-page decision, and while I understand the reasons given by the majority of justices (six supporting the decision, one against it and even then the six judges that agreed were not perfect in their union) I’m concerned with the logic behi...

more at www.sfexaminer.com : “SAN FRANCISCO – In a thinly veiled shot at Mayor Gavin Newsom, former Oakland Mayor and California Attorney General Jerry Brown — who has said he is considering a run for governor in 2010 — said in a radio interview that there are “characters” traveling around the state campaigning for governor while their city is a mess. Speaking on KGO’s morning talk show Thursday, Brown’s comments appeared to refer to criticism that Newsom has been spending too much time traveling to town hall-style meetings across the state while missing budget talks at home." -- I'm wondering who's doing Gavin' PR, because he's not taking the offensive at all. Jerry's a master politician and is not a afraid to deliver a velvet glove punch.

The iReport at CNN team wants to know what my do-over-day would be. Well, the one I was thinking of, when I -- as Chairman -- wrote an email to the board of the Oakland Super Bowl Bidding Committee.

I was just informed today, Saturday evening January 10th, 2009, that BART is holding a "community meeting" on Sunday, January 11th, which is tommorrow, from 2 PM to 4 PM at 101 Eighth Street, the Joseph P. Bort MetroCenter in Oakland, off Lake Merritt BART. The timing of the meeting is questionable because I got the intel on it today (Saturday) in the afternoon. And it was clear that today was the date of the creation of whatever release went out on the meeting. I think BART's officials were trying to prevent the activation of New Media to annouce the meeting to any possible "undesirables" that may attend. In other words, they were trying to control the spread of the message. It's clear BART has learned NOTHING from this entire affair. The knoweldge of the shooting and the reaction to it was the child of New Media. Traditional media played a bit part because it was not able to do what New Media can do, constantly repeat an event in the pasttim...

More at SFBG Politics Blog : “As the year winds down, I’d like to note what I consider to be the most politically courageous act of 2008: Attorney General Jerry Brown’s decision to reverse his position and urge the California Supreme Court to overturn Prop. 8. This was a deeply principled decision that went against Brown’s political self-interest considering the fact that he’s planning to run governor in a state where a majority has approved Prop. 8. And that political danger was exacerbated by Brown’s post-election statement saying he would defend Prop. 8, as attorneys general are generally required to do, opening him up to the dreaded flip-flopper label. But his new position is consistent with important constitutional principles (as I outlined in the Guardian almost a month before Brown adopted his new stance) and well-worth taking a gamble to do what’s right, the kind of act that is all too rare in modern American politics. ” -- And I second that award. Jerry Brown did act in a way...

Jerry Brown orders scrapping of Prop. 8 - Inside Bay Area : “SAN FRANCISCO—California Attorney General Jerry Brown changed course on the state's new same-sex marriage ban Friday and urged the state Supreme Court to void Proposition 8. In a dramatic reversal, Brown filed a legal brief saying the measure that amended the California Constitution to limit marriage to a man and a woman is itself unconstitutional because it deprives a minority group of a fundamental right. Earlier, Brown had said he would defend the ballot measure against legal challenges from gay marriage supporters. But Brown said he reached a different conclusion "upon further reflection and a deeper probing into all the aspects of our Constitution." "It became evident that the Article 1 provision guaranteeing basic liberty, which includes the right to marry, took precedence over the initiative," he said in an interview Friday night. "Based on my duty to defend the law and the entire Constitut...

I remember when then-Oakland City Manager made curbs on the sale of guns in Oakland a major priority; then Mayor and now AG Jerry Brown fired him.  Since then, Oakland's taken its collective eye off the ball of controlling gun sales.  And the lack of attention has been so severe that it's led to this article in today's Oakland Tribune  : OAKLAND — Seventeen-year-old Dominique Nubie stood on a West Oakland street corner talking about what matters in his life. "Guns "... everybody here has guns," he said, motioning around. Instead of the usual high school concerns about finishing homework or making the basketball team, Dominique worries most about survival in a neighborhood where many of his peers own guns. Oakland is teeming with guns. They're easy to buy, easy to steal and seen by some young men as a necessary possession in certain Oakland neighborhoods where to be unarmed means to be vulnerable. "If I got a gun, I feel like I can't be touc...

  Paul Cobb is a long-time Oakland, California writer, activist, community organizer and now publisher of the Oakand Post. I met Paul at his office in Downtown Oakland to talk about a wide range of subjects, but the two I was most interested in talking about were who killed Chauncey Bailey and what Paul thought about the current Mayor of Oakland, Ron Dellums.   Bailey was an Oakland journalist who was supposedly murdered by people associated with Your Black Muslim Bakery (YBMB) on August 2, 2007.  But Cobb and others believe that the chain of events that led to someone, perhaps Devaughndre Broussard of YBMB,  murdering a journalist in the line of duty is more complicated and may lead to people and institutions one would not expect. Cobb's assertions regarding the relationship between Bailey and members of the Oakland Police Department would seem to match the concerns expressed in this website article by the Chauncey Bailey Project .  The person who sh...

Richmond City Council Approves Chevron Upgrade Plan 5 to 4 After a long and bruising Tuesday night-into-Wednesday morning Richmond City Council meeting, the City Council approved Chevron's Richmond Oil Refinery Upgrade Plan on an emotional 5-4 vote and approving the community development plan 6 to 1. I attended the packed meeting which seemed to draw every media person in the Bay Area to Cutting Boulevard and the council gathering. It was indeed a people-circus, with folks representing those who wanted to save their Chevron jobs (which probably weren't going any where anyway) and others who were in opposition to the idea that Chevron was breathing, let alone upgrading an existing facility. The main issue is the assumed production using crude oil: Chevron says they don't use it at the plant; opponents say they're lying. The project has been the source of much controvery, with California Attorney General Jerry Brown weighing in, saying that the Environmental Im...

Some other SF Bay Area columnists who are friends of mine and just enjoyed an evening out with -- without talking about Oakland politics -- are still way wrong regarding Deborah Edgerly and the Edgerly Family. Specifically, my friend Chip Johnson , who presents a picture of an Oakland that was transformed by Deborah Edgerly into a sea of people who are related to her. If you believe that, you're a totally big fool. You're also all the more foolish if you think favoritism started with her. Hell, one major reason I accused former Mayor Jerry Brown of racism in 2000 was that I believed he picked those he was most comfortable with -- young white professionals -- over equals like myself who are Black. In my view, what Jerry Brown would do is relegate all of the young Black employees who should be in his office to then-City Manager Robert Bobb's office and, pointing at a young African American woman in his office, say -- as he did to me during our dispute over my treatment...

For me, covering what turned out to be this three-part video documentary started with a call from a friend and fellow Cal Alum who said that I should get "down there" with my camera because there was no video on what was happening. So, fresh from a meeting, and with two hours to spare, I went over to the Grove in front of Cal Memorial Stadium, the site of the clash between the Cal Tree Sitters and the UC Administration and Police. The overall story is that we -- Cal -- needs an upgraded stadium facility and the plans for this have been in the works for almost ten years. With the success of Cal Coach Jeff Tedford, it became easier to raise money toward this objective. As part of the effort , the University of California was able to secure $500 million from British Petroleum, most of which would go to the creation of a new research institute, and the rest toward what will be an athletic facility upgrade -- a new training center where the Grove is. (CORRECTION - The BP D...

Ok, how does one explain an unprecedented KTVU video report on Mayor Ron Dellums spending and "high life" habits as leader of our City? Hey, Jerry Brown's not cheap either, but he never got that kind of coverage at all. Someone's out to get Dellums, and what's blocking his ability to recover his image is the fact that he does not believe in working with image-makers, the press, or PR people. That's a fact, folks. Dellums' staff has asked him to "get help" in this area, but he's resistant to the whole deal. Now, I think someone sees Dellums as vulnerable to bad press, so they piled it on. But the simple fact is that Jerry Brown also "lived it up" you just didn't read about it much, or cared. Mayor Elihu Harris didn't do that. It's not his style and he really cares about the office and what people would think. So it's not a case of someone picking on Dellums for reasons of race, just to get that out of the way, b...

Former Governor and Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown is all over the death of Anna Nicole Smith and released this statement, which I got from TMZ.com: "Brown's Statement Posted Oct 12th 2007 2:24PM by TMZ Staff "The California Department of Justice today served search warrants at various doctors' offices, billing locations, and residences in both Los Angeles and Orange Counties, related to the death of Anna Nicole Smith. The locations searched today are related to doctors who provided medical treatment or prescribed drugs for Anna Nicole Smith or her associates. On March 30, 2007, the California Department of Justice Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement commenced an investigation into circumstances surrounding the death of Anna Nicole Smith, including the prescribing and dispensing practices of several California licensed doctors and pharmacies. To date, agents have reviewed over 100,000 computer images and files, analyzed patient profiles and pharmacy logs and interviewed witness...

Well, this should prove just how much Jerry and Gil Duran had to hide (its not the first time they've been accused of a cover-up) -- and how damaging his term was to Oakland. It should be against the law for anyone to do this, but hey, Jerry's AG now, he's really protected. And what about all the talk of wanting "open meetings"? Right! Who voted him in to that office? Mayoral files for Jerry Brown are missing By Thomas Peele and Heather MacDonald MEDIANEWS STAFF - CCTIMES Some public records of new state Attorney General Jerry Brown's eight years as Oakland mayor are missing and others were apparently improperly destroyed, raising questions about whether the state's top law-enforcement official has violated California's public records law. Two former Brown aides said they removed records from the office late last year. One of them, Gil Duran, said he consulted Michelle Abney, the public records coordinator in the city attorney's office, befor...

Today as I was passing by City Hall, I saw a familar face pass by at a distance and rushing toward the 14th Street side entrance of Oakland's City Hall. Bill Claggett. For those of you who don't know the name, Claggett was hired by Elihu Harris when Harris was Mayor Of Oakland and as one of three economic consultants, including myself. I stayed on as Harris' Economic Advisor while Glaggett moved on, but then returned as Economic Development head after the departure of Kofi Bonner. Currently, Bill's listed as a "Management Consulting Consultant and Contractor" according to his Linkedin listing. Glaggett remained under Mayor Jerry Brown, and was considered as the one person who pushed through the Mayor's 10K program and his casino idea, as well. Eventually, he and his deputy Bob Lyons were let go by Jerry Brown. Glaggett was replaced by Dan VanderPriem, who departed last year. The news was unpopular with not a few community political operatives, some o...