Just Say No

Mike Aguirre is, once again, probably right. Under the strong Mayor system of Government the Council will have to, today, vote yes, no, or defer on the Mayor’s strong-armed proposal to end the City’s defined benefit retirement plan for new City employees. The plan will save a paltry (and, in the Pension deficit scheme of things, $49 million over eleven years is small fiscal potatoes, indeed) at the expense of souring whatever sweetness is left in the municipal waters sipped by management and labor. It will drive any ambitious and qualified person seeking municipal employment to other municipalities within the county and state. And the two-tier pension system will bring even more discord to City Hall as animosity grows between old hands still covered by the defined-benefit plan (like Jerry Sanders) and the newbies. It’s bad policy, through and through.

Jerry Sanders has cast his lot against the much maligned municipal employees and their unions. He’s also cast his lot against good governance. The Council shouldn’t throw him a life preserver and try and modify (probably illegally) his labor plan. Jerry’s a strong mayor now. It’s time for him to swim or sink on his own.

Let’m sink, City Council.

Just Say No.

Where Oh Where Has Our Task Force Gone?

Last Sunday, May 4, the Marine Amphibious assault ship Peleliu and its Task Force departed San Diego for points unknown (or, at least, undisclosed) in support of the war on terror. Might someone have an idea where such points unknown in the war on terror might be? Perhaps a Place that is spelled like “Iraq” but for one critical ending consonant change? The Peleliu is the point at the end of the Marine spear. Where might it be inserted next?

On the Radio, Wha-ah-ah-oh…

Ok, apology to Donna Summer fans for the title. Looks like there might be a little life left in progressive talk on the AM dial, after all. AM 540 has switched formats to “balanced talk,” mixing conservative and progressive programming. Check out the report on TalkingRadio blogspot. The top progressive draw is supposed to be former liberal top talk dog Mike Jackson. And if you’re saying “Who’s he?,” join my club. He was supposedly big on L.A. talk in the 1990s. Which was, of course, in media terms, a thousand years ago. What next, the return of Fibber McGee or Charlie McCarthy?

I listened to the station briefly today around 11:45 — the topic was whether or not your teen will really tell you the truth. OK, I’ll give them another shot on the way home today. But if the station turns out to be the Dr. Laura/Rush/Al Franken wannabe hours, I’m not too optimistic.

Sunroad, Sunset

“The voters want[ed] someone to show strong leadership. They want a mayor that’s going to go in immediately and restructure City Hall.”

—Jerry Sanders, Sept. 24, 2005

“This report makes it painfully obvious that various processes failed us. This is not a happy day for me or my administration.”

—Jerry Sanders, July 19, 2007

During the mayoral campaign of 2005, non-politician Jerry Sanders promised to make America’s formerly “finest” city “finest” once more. Two years later, amidst the flap over a development project gone terribly wrong, now-Mayor Sanders has had to admit that his goals of massive city reform have fallen well short of the mark.

With Sunroad Enterprises agreeing to reduce the size of its Kearny Mesa building to comply with federal aviation standards and the release of a report exonerating the mayor and other city officials from willful wrongdoing, the whole sleazy Sunroad saga may be starting its slow fade. But, just a week shy of the second anniversary of the special election that led to his ascendance to the mayoral throne, the political future of Jerry Sanders may be fading as well.

What a difference a couple of years can make in the political life of a city. Not the real, day-to-day life of a city, mind you. San Diego still has not gotten its financial house back in sufficient order to reenter the bond markets. City services continue their slow degradation, brought on by years of under- and deferred funding caused by said financial maelstrom. The employee-pension program and the retiree-health-benefits programs are still woefully underfunded. National media continues to label San Diego a den of mismanaged inequity. And the same city government that brought San Diego to the brink of financial ruin and national humiliation (the former of which we still teeter on, the latter of which we have long since plummeted over)—both elected and appointed, politician and career civil servant—is largely still running the place.

It was supposed to be a the dawning of a new day in town when Sheriff Jerry took over, wearing the whitest of non-political, untainted white hats over his new mayoral duds. Unsullied by the pollution of previous political participation, there being no campaign contributions and grasping special interests in his background, Sanders could rise above the foul fray of politics and, with his trusted sidekick, likewise nonpolitical and universally applauded former Navy Admiral Ronne Froman at his side, provide exactly the kind of stern, strong, successful leadership that his predecessors had failed to do. The sun was rising on San Diego again.

Back in the good ol’ days of ‘05, Sanders was going to demand the resignation of 300 city officials to bring the bureaucracy to heel, use the threat of massive layoffs to bring the municipal unions to heel, wave his bully-pulpit and appointment power to force the resignation of a half-dozen pension board members to bring that group to heel and use Mad Dog Mike Aguirre as the mayor’s own personal pit bull to bring the council and everyone else to heel. He was going to speak with gentlemanly softness while swinging a big, city-cleaning stick. Now these promises lie like bleached bones on the political trail Sanders has trodden to this, the near halfway point of his administration. And maybe it’s all finally catching up with him and—at last—the public.

Now, you can blame a lot, if not most, of Jerry’s jinxes on the usual host of San Diego suspects always on hand when ideas of political reform and change need assassinating. The municipal unions, doing what they are supposed to—which is look out for the security of their members first and foremost—have not been compliantly willing to simply roll over on Sanders’ command and give back the benefits and pay they won in collective bargaining.

The pension board members essentially did to the mayor’s request for en masse resignations what they’ve done to everyone else for the last decade: gave them a big political raspberry. The city bureaucracy simply locked its bureaucratic shields and avoided any substantive change (creating enough frustration to drive Ronne Froman right out of city government). And the City Council and the city attorney have proven themselves far more dedicated to each others’ mutual annihilation than to working out meaningful compromises and solutions under Sanders’ smiling auspices.

Throw in Sanders’ hanging on to his no-new-taxes pledge, but only at the cost of substantially boosting water and sewer fees, and the straight-shooting mayor has seemed to miss his targets more often than not.

But, at least, through all this, Jerry had one unassailable thing going for him. He was seen by the public, the press and even most political players to be a straight-shooting genuinely nice guy. As CityBeat itself pointed out in March 2006, during Jerry’s honeymoon, even as Sanders was admitting he was having trouble gaining traction in his first 90 days in office, “Sanders, a likeable figure with a slow, deliberate speaking style and grandfatherly charm, has proved a calming influence at City Hall.”

But along came Sunroad. And Jerry is just not the same anymore.

Yes, the report compiled by Sanders’ ethics chief, Jo Anne SawyerKnoll, commissioned by the mayor in the face of rising public scrutiny over the Sunroad project, says that, while mistakes (read: incredible incompetence) occurred in the city’s handling of the issue, no criminal or otherwise corrupt wrongdoing was found to have occurred. Of course, when the mayor’s office issues a report largely exonerating itself from charges of wrongdoing, one should keep a big shaker of Morton’s on hand to accompany the swallowing thereof. But Aguirre’s previous protestations now falling silent and there being no rumbling of interest at the county, state or federal levels, it is highly likely that this report will be the final official word on the matter.

But the Sunroad story leaves a whole host of questions and queries that, while they may lie unaddressed over the coming dog days of summer, are sure to rise up again during Gentleman Jerry’s bid for reelection.

Of course, none of this is exactly new news. Back during the 2005 campaign, there were allegations by his opponent and echoed in the press that Sanders wasn’t really all that different from the same old City Hall establishment he was lambasting. Calling for open and ethical government, he then acted positively Murphian in keeping the press from interviewing Froman, his anointed chief of operations. Then it came out he’d received campaign contributions from the previous president of the ill-fated pension board, a central figure in that scandal. Under pressure, Sanders returned the money, but the incident lent credibility to then-candidate Donna Frye’s claim that he was just part of the same old downtown political guard committed to business as usual.

Which included business with people like the mysterious president of Sunroad, Aaron Feldman, a man who likes to operate out of the public eye and apparently on the edge of ethical business practices just as much as making friends in high places to help him keep things that way. Feldman helped raise thousands more dollars for the Sanders campaign. When the oversized Sunroad project in the Montgomery Field flight path was initially derailed by Aguirre last fall, Feldman had two private meetings with Sanders. After each meeting, the city took steps to help Sunroad—and Feldman. Not until May, more than a half year after Aguirre first raised the roof on Sunroad, did Sanders finally stand tall and tell Sunroad to back down.

Coincidence? Collusion? Corruption? Who really knows. But what San Diegans now know is that Sanders is a politician like the rest of them, taking money in large chunks from powerful interests for whom favorable things just seem to happen. Maybe that’s why his poll numbers are starting to slide.

Sanders may, of course, weather this latest sun-storm. The SawyerKnoll report went out of its way to throw dirt at Aguirre for contributing to the problem. Given how the Union-Tribune likes to see everything through “It’s all Mikey’s fault” glasses anyway, it’s only a matter of time until this is spun as Aguirre’s failure. For his part, Mauling Mike seemed more than happy to play nice-nice with the mayor at last Thursday’s news conference unveiling the report. Aguirre is already off on his next crusade—questionable land deals involving San Diego City College—and the press will move on as well, and the Sunroad saga will quietly set.

Come 2008, Sanders also has one major advantage that might well outshine the nasty glare any resurrection of the Sunroad story might produce: He has no real opposition. City Council President Scott Peters wisely says he doesn’t want the job. Wealthy businessman Steve Francis doesn’t have the political base. Frye says she’s not running. There just ain’t no other white-hat-wearing strangers coming into town to take a shot at being the new political sheriff.

Thus, tarnished badge and all, halfway through a far-from-stellar first term, Sanders—Sunroad or no—still has a political future. But as the public increasingly realizes that Gentleman Jerry is no gentleman at all, but just another politician, that future is anything but certain. One more Sunroad just may do Sanders in.

Busy Bees

I just drove by the Sunroad complex by the 163 and was in awe of the American work ethic on display there. Stop-work orders or no, those busy little worker bees are swarming over that building like ants over a mound of honey. (Okay, enough bug methaphors.)

I’m off for a ten day jaunt. I’ll be interested to see, when I return, if anyone in City government has developed the huevos, in the interim, to give a public order and actually enforce it.

Have fun in my absence, sports fans. And Sunroad people — try and get the building done before I get back, shall we. City orders are like Dad’s orders to the kids in mom’s absence: you listen to ‘em just long enough to ignore them.

Hunting Duncan

Be sure to tune in to KGTV 10News and ABC World News tonight. Besides the incomparable pleasure of seeing yours truly do yet another soundbite (that would be for the local guys) there’s going to be an interesting piece on our only local presidential candidate, Duncan “Bomb ‘em back to the stone age” Hunter. (Hence yours truly’s soundbite.)

Seems Duncan “Give the troops everything they need” Hunter has been earmarking millions of dollars in government contracts (that’s millions of dollars that didn’t go to body armor and armored humvees) to a major campaign contributor who is trying to push an expensive new helicopter on the military that the military doesn’t want and none of the major defense contractors want to touch.

Why to shine, Dunco.

The first and time I met Duncan Hunter was back in 1980 when he was running against Lionel Van Deerlin for Congress and I was the president of USD’s political science club. Okay, I know. Geeky. But we did have a great election night party at a suite we rented at the Holiday Inn on the Bay. That night was the second time I met Hunter. I was in the stairwell going down a floor to get ice. Hunter was on the stairwell leading a Dixieland band and a ton of hangers-on celebrating his victory up the steps to who knows where. Everyone but Duncan, including the band, was thoroughly snoggered. Hunter, however, was stone cold with eyes the size of the cat that ate the canary. He knew he’d just been handed the keys to his own political kingdom. First time I saw him was as our guest to speak to the ol’ poli-sci club as part of our election activities. He informed us that we had to be careful how we dealt with the emerging crisis in Poland—you know, the one that led to the rise of Solidarity, Lech Walesa and the downfall of communism—because the Russians might send their troops into Poland. And some of them, he told us youngins, were Mongolians!

That’s how I first met Duncan “Yellow Horde” Hunter. So last week’s remarks about nuking Iran were just par for the course.

But Duncan has been on Capitol Hill for almost 30 years. His best pal Randy the Dukeman just got sent up the river. And they were close. Just how close? Best case scenario for Hunter: this whole thing gets explained away as business as usual in the fetid swamp of D.C. And then people vote against him because they’re sick of business as usual. (Which is why members of Congress haven’t made it into the White house for almost 50 years.)

Worst case: this turns out to be the tip of the proverbial iceberg. A kind of yellow-snow iceberg, to be sure.

Anyway, it should be great sport. Pop some popcorn. Duncan Hunting season seems to be on.

A Picture is worth a thousand words. Or is it thousands of dollars in campaign contributions?

Loyal reader Sunburned linked the following site showing pictures of
“Pre-His Mayorness Jerry Sanders hobnobbing with the rich and famous.” Kinda explains which side of the trough Jerry is on, and it’s not the side of the little piglets who make up most of this berg. He’s in it with the hogs.

Sunburned’s entire post to my April 24 entry, “Jerry Sanders Shows” reads:

sunburned Says:
June 8th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Just catching up on older posts, so I wanted to chime in here: something Gerry Braun wrote recently inspired a comment concerning Frye’s campaign, i.e., that during the campaign Frye didn’t develop the assertions she made about Sanders being the same old boys’ club candidate.

It was true what she said, but she never showed how it would work to our disadvantage. That’s important, because on the surface, there is nothing wrong with being connected. We’d all like it, if it didn’t co-opt us or CORRUPT us. We want to believe that there is an advantage to being connected, and that it will be to our advantage to have leaders who are connected.

So Carl, since you already have a website and have clearly stated what is all too true about Sanders’ pathetic inability to lead, why not post this picture at the top of every colomn you write from now on:

http://www.directorsforum.com/events/event_10_30_03_photos.htm

And, below the picture, Senor Luna, why not use your expertise on these things and show how the background from which Sanders came, with his made-up CEO-ness and the grooming he got from the boys who put him up as mayoral candidate, would inevitably NOT lead to his being capable of really leading or being a creative thinker or self-starter? There’s a good bit of data available on Sanders’ phony roles at VCC and Willow Creek Partners (he’s still listed on the Board on WC’s website), and Sanders can make absolutely no claim of accomplishments (that I know of) at those companies. But the men involved with those businesses do actually educational/business backgrounds and expertise: Tom Stickel, Les Barkley, David Porreca, and Mark Wolfenberger, among others. Some of these guys put up Sanders as their candidate, but he doesn’t have their savvy. When they can get him to act dangerously and corruptly to further their interests, he just isn’t sharp enough to pull it off, or better yet, best them, and eventually they’ll throw him aside for the next flunky if he can’t cut it.

That’s the real story. But it needs telling.

Sunroad = Sunburned

In response to the latest comments posted to yesterday’s blog, “Follow the Money”:

Dude! Please don’t get me wrong here. I completely agree with everything you’re saying. I’m just giving a cold analysis to how this works. Why the players thought they could get (and so far have gotten) away with Sunroad.

Now if you’re asking me what should be done, that’s a different pot of mackerel.

The City Attorney has tried on this and has been shot down in the courts and undercut by his own chief of police and mayor. Meanwhile the nattering nabobs of the ethereal establishment UT keep up their constant smear campaign against him. (Not a little bit of which seems to be seeping into “The Voice of San Diego” these days.)

Donna Frye, meanwhile, is the only voice on the council even talking about this. But her complaints so far seem to be dismissed by the rest of the council and that voice of reason (meaning it’s unreasonable to rock the San Diego money boat) the UT as mere district parochialism and nimbyism.

And the Mayor? He basically says the City is to blame for allowing Centrum to be built, thereby taking the legal liability off Sunroad, then starts trying to figure out how to make Centrum work by trying to move flight paths around Montgomery. If the cave in was any more complete you would have to call in a mine rescue team from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

And why? Because the people who are benefiting from Centrum and all the projects like it are making a lot more noise and getting a lot more in the face of Sanders, the Council, e. al than are the people outraged over what’s happening. They –Sunroad et al. – simply care more—a hundred million dollars worth of care—then the protesters.

Want that to change? You’ve got to make a whole lot more noise. You have to show the City that you care too.

You want to get the council to pay attention to this? Here’s what you do: start writing letters. Start sending emails. Start making fall calls. And get everyone you know to do the same. Send copies of each letter and email to the letters to the editor for the UT, Voice of San Diego, The Reader and City Beat.

Then you and you’re like-minded crusaders have to organize. Have everybody over for coffee and cake, make up some signs and go down to Centrum and protest. Get a few hundred people outside of the project, contact the news stations and let the rest of the public see how much you do care. You get the AM talkshow guys to have you on to spread your message. Get Roger Hedgecock (yeah, yeah, I know – but the guy is effective, darn it!) to do a live broadcast from one of your protests.

Start a website – StopSunroad.org or some such—get people to sign your on—line petition. Publish how much money Sunroad, B of A, Burnham and the like give to our politicians.

And network with the other groups who are already against Sunroad:

Donna Frye
Mike Aguirre
Community Airfields Association off San Diego (CCCSD, which has joined the City in its lawsuit against Sunroad because of the safety risks to pilots and the community.)

In short, you’ve got to make as miserable for the politicians as Sunroad’s support makes them happy. You make Sunroad the road to political perdition for any politician who supports it—or doesn’t actively oppose it.

You make Sunroad the high watermark – the Waterloo—of forty years of San Diego development gone wild. You make it the symbol of all the corruption and arrogance that has marked this city. A giant pension deficit is an abstraction. You can’t hide a 12 story building. You want it so that everyone driving on the 163 sees that building and gets so angry they get on the phone and flame City government.

Then see what happens.

Meanwhile, we can get as righteous and angry in the blogosphere as we want. But virtual protest never beats the real thing.

Follow the Money

Follow the Money

The whole sorry Sunroad saga, like most things, is ultimately about money. So if you want to figure out how this fiasco flared into being, like the saying goes, follow the money.

Begin with Sunroad Enterprises. Sunroad’s real estate empire started in the 1980s when founder and CEO Aaron Feldman began to buy up car dealerships around Kearny Mesa.

Sunroad than began moving into commercial real estate, developing over 2 million square feet of such property over the last quarter century. Sunroad’s largest project to date has been its 420,000-square-foot Sunroad Corporate Centre in University City. But Sunroad is on the high road these days, with construction projects in the works that total as much square footage as everything they’ve done to date.

That includes the 1 million-square-foot Centrum project, of which 300,000 square feet has already been built. (That would be that little slightly-too-tall, 12-story building that’s causing such a hullabaloo.) Sunroad’s proposed Harbor Island hotel high-rise project comes in almost as large.

So Sunroad has a lot of capital dangling out there right now. Kiss off the Centrum project and the Harbor Hotels likely go kablooey, too. Indeed, given the scope of Sunroad’s current commitments, one can only speculate on how leveraged the firm must already be. The prospect of seeing the Centrum project stalled for months—or even years—can not be a prospect promising many nights of peaceful sleep for Aaron Feldman. Or for the people he borrowed all the money from to build the project. Perhaps that is why Sunroad has seemed so hell bent on completing Centrum I, come FAA or city lawsuit.

And Centrum I is not the height of the matter. A quick trip to the Centrum website (maintained by Burnham Realty, which is handling the leasing) shows a site promising three towers to be built on the site. Two of these will be taller (14 and 16 stories versus 12 stories) than the current building at the center of the controversy.

If Sunroad loses on Centrum I, then phases II and III go up in legal smoke. And that could send the sun setting on Sunroad Enterprises. But if Sunroad goes down, it doesn’t go down alone. Like good businessfolk everywhere, the Sunroad people are getting ahead using other people’s money—in this case, the good people at Bank of America. But, according to The San Diego Daily Transcript, B of A has taken on a might more risk than usual in providing construction funding for Centrum. As the article reports:

“This building differs from most office projects in that it has gotten under way without having a sizable amount of pre-leasing. For example, lenders required the Broadway 655 project in downtown San Diego be about 50 percent pre-leased before construction could start. The Diamond View Terrace project in the Ballpark District was more than 30 percent pre-leased before it got under way last year.”

Sunroad, however, was greenlighted by B of A with very little pre-leasing. One might wonder why?

According to Rick Vann, Sunroad executive vice president, B of A was convinced to give the greenlight because of the success Sunroad has had with other projects in Mission Valley and University City. This, even though those projects were significantly smaller than Centrum. Vann even put a good spin on the fact that Sunroad is stalled constructing a building for which there are no major tenants, stating in the Transcript article that “Doing it our way, the tenants don’t have to wait for other tenants to come on board before they see the building.” One has to wonder how many potential tenants are beating a path to Burnham’s door for the chance to hang their shingle on a building certified a hazard by the FAA. Or how much good it does a corporate image associated with a notorious piece of real estate.

Maybe Bank of America also saw a chance, with Centrum, to establish a good partnership with an up-and-coming real-estate mogul who seemed to have the insider track in moving projects forward with the city? The future Harbor project and, even better, potential Kearny Mesa developments—especially should Centrum help to shoehorn Montgomery Field out—hold out the promises of gigantic development profits for years to come.

If only Sunroad can complete Centrum. And if it can’t? Then B of A is on the hook for a big hunk of dough and kisses off all the additional gold that might have flowed down the Sunroad express from future projects.

And that is a prospect that can’t delight Sunroad’s other big-league partner in Centrum, the aforementioned Burnham Real Estate. One of biggest real-estate concerns in California, Burnham stands to profit handsomely from the leasing of Centrum, but only if the project is ever completed.

So, let’s connect a few dots here. Sunroad Enterprises is trying to build a controversial project in Kearny Mesa, one that, with just a little foresight and imagination, Sunroad executives must have known would be controversial. Prior to this, Sunroad hires a former city insider with no real private-sector experience to help spearhead development. And Sunroad gives the obligatory big donations to the campaign of the man who would become mayor.

Sunroad’s banking partner in this happens to be Bank of America, which, coincidentally, is the financial sugar daddy the city of San Diego has been dependent on ever since Dick Murphy helped drive the city out of the bond markets (and whose former chief of staff now works for Sunroad.) Bank of America holds San Diego’s credit lifeline in its hands at least until the city completes its final audits and San Diego can return to the bond markets. Say, in about a year.

And Sunroad’s realty partner is Burnham, whose founder and CEO, Malin Burnham, is one of the elitist of San Diego’s power elite with connections to City Hall going back decades.

So, how does the city of San Diego allow a hazardous building to be almost completed? Could it be because the companies involved have a history of substantial influence and leverage over city politicians and bureaucrats?

And what do you think the odds are that the city will be willing stand up to its chief creditor, a leading mogul and a company that’s got the city in its sights for tens of millions in potential legal liability?

Follow the money. It leads to the pot of gold at the end of the Sunroad.

Short Shots

Here are a few, brief takes on things from local to global.

Chutzpah

That’s what you’ve got to call Pamela Naughton claim that Mike Aguirre’s abusing his power by bringing charges against Sunroad Enterprises’ saddest Story, Tom. Naughton is Story’s attorney so of course she has to deny, deny, deny. (When’s the last time you heard a lawyer say, “Just between you and me, judge, my client is outrageously, fabulously, unbelievably guilty—but we can go through the sham motions if you want.” Ain’t gonna happen. And the entire Sunroad saga is soaked in chutzpah: “Let’s build this building as fast as we can cutting every regulatory corner we can and then, when it’s a fait accompli, we build a couple more. Or sue the City for every last dime we’re on the hook for.” Or, at least, that’s how it seems to appear to us plebes. So Naughton bashing Aguirre for being the one city official to point out that former downtown development emperor Tom Story has no clothes (or, more to the point, his building has too many stories) is just par for this chutzpahic course. (And yes, I just made up chutzpahic. Dibs on the future dictionary entry.)

They’s A Coming

Fresh from the South Carolina “Everybody stand there uncomfortably for ninet miutes and give short soundbite answers and we’ll call it a” Debate, the Democrat’s Magnificent Seven ride into San Diego for this weekend’s State Democratic Convention. Look forward to more play it safe and down the middle stump speeches by the front running duo of Hilary and Barac. It will be interesting to see if they keep using kid gloves on each other like they did at last night’s debate. Apparently both have decided that keeping a détente between themselves while the knock out the wannabes over the next few months is mutually beneficial. I’ll be part of City Beat’s round the clock coverage team down at the Convention Center and look forward to sharing amusing anecdotes and insightful observations (and, hopefully, the answer to the salient question: “What’s up with Dennis Kucinich’s hair?) over the weekend.

If

Okay, we can all concede Harry Reid is in a race with Joe Biden for the 2007 foot-in-mouth award. (Last year’s winner: John Kerry and his “let me blow another election with one sentence” remarks about the quality of US troops in the run up to last November). Since the November election he has worked overtime nipping away at his party’s credibility with one gaffe after another.

But if you’re going to hang the man, hang him for what he did say, not what he didn’t.

And he didn’t say “The war is lost.” The complete sentence was: “As long as we follow the president’s path in Iraq, the war is lost. But there is still a chance to change course — and we must change course.”

What Reid says what that IF the Bush administration keeps doing what its been doing in Iraq for the last five years – screwing unbelievably up – THEN we lose. And a clear majority of Americans agree with him.

I expect Pravda (aka Fox News) to distort facts whenever it suits their (and the Republican conservative) ideological bias. If Hilary Clinton says “I feel we must deal with those who hate America” (note, I don’t know if she’s ever said this perse) Fox will edit it to have her say “I hate America.” Fox News is like the lecherous old man at the family party who paws up all the younger women. You’re disgusted by it, but not surprised.

What irked me was how the so-called mainstream liberal media fell into the same lockstep, with soundbite after soundbite truncating Reid’s remarks to fit the story frame, truth be damned. No wonder the Pew Research poll found that, despite this being the media age, Americans are no better informed today (and, in many cases, less informed) than a generation ago.

Battle Royale

And, on a final note, nothing like watching a first place candidate fall on his face. Such is the case with Gaulist presidential candidate Nicholas Sarkoz apparently going out of his way to deep six a debate between run-off rival Socialist Segolene Royale and “out of the money but still king of the mushy middle” Francois Bayrou. The likely result of this is to push Bayrou (and the 19% of the vote he received in last Sunday’s first round) into Royale’s arms(not, in the scheme of things, the worst place to be….) giving her a potential 43% of support (compared to Sarkoz’s 30%) going into the final round. Oh, that right wing politicians learn the limits of their ability to rule the media by decree. But it looks like Sarkoz has got a bad case of Berlusconitis, which could become his undoing.