No Public Funds for Politicians!

I am beginning to really get fed up with politicians. When Gavin Newsom left for the Lt. Governor’s position he ended up leaving us in a state of chaos. I read an article today that really horrified me. It said that San Francisco would be paying out $6-8 million dollars in campaign funds to anyone who runs for mayor and raises at least $25,000.

Here’s how it works. If you get $25k in contributions, the city will give you double that amount. If you bring in $125k you’ll get $450k from the San Francisco and if you get  $500k in private funds you’ll get an additional $800k from the city.

Let’s make it a little bit worse. The new rules call for a $1.3 million spending limit per candidate, but if just one campaign – or even an independent expenditure committee, which isn’t subject to the same limits – breaks the cap, all candidates may all be able to get even more money from the city.

Many candidates are already well on their way. City Attorney Dennis Herrera has collected $250,000 in private donations, state Sen. Leland Yee has raised $165,000, and businesswoman Joanna Rees has brought in $150,000. Other candidates who have already qualified for public cash are former Supervisor Bevan Dufty, $100,000, and Controller Phil Ting, $50,000.

The city’s deficit is expected to reach $750 million dollars this year so I suppose adding another $6-8 million won’t help. I’ve done a little math here. Gavin Newsom tried to put into effect his own version of the old JobsNow program which reimbursed employers for the payroll of unemployed parents, but that didn’t work too well. If you took that money and put it into $40k/year jobs it would get 200 people off of unemployment. Not a very big deal in a city of 850,000 people. OK how about this, take that money and divide it equally to all the San Francisco public schools and how much would they get? Almost $51,000 per school.

Our schools are short on cash. My daughter’s teacher has to ask parents if they can donate supplies because she doesn’t have the funding to purchase them. I bet she wouldn’t have to ask for donations from the parents if the money was distributed. Hell, she even had to go out and buy paint to repaint her classroom by herself.

This is wrong and I’m putting a call out to our new Mayor Ed Lee to do the right thing and stop this. Anyone who can fill out the paperwork and raise $25k in funds will get $50k free of charge from the city and that is wrong. This is one of the biggest problems we have to fix and we have to fix it NOW!

San Francisco: Not so gay anymore.

Apparently, according to the Advocate, the news source for the LGBT community, San Francisco isn’t so gay anymore. As a matter of fact we’re down at #11. How could that be?

“For each city, The Advocate added up numbers for Gay.com profiles, listed officiants for gay weddings within a 50-mile radius, openly gay elected officials, performances by lesbian sisters musical duo Tegan and Sara over the past five years, lesbian bars, gay and gay-friendly religious congregations and entries in YellowPages.com with “gay” in the business name or description.”

So it was just a little number crunching that took us off the list.. Well, that’s fine by me because people who are in LGBT community have been cited as the leading cause of all the problems we have in San Francisco. Now we can just say, “Nope” and point to…wait for it…Minneapolis, Minnesota is the gayest town in the US. Here’s the article at advocate.com says explains it all. Apparently last year we didn’t even make the list and Atlanta was on top.

[mappress mapid=”3″]This should come as good news to Rev. Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas better known as “GodHatesFags.com” because he and his buddies will have less of drive for the protesting and picketing. There’ll be less reason for him to come to California and save a dime or two. Good for him and good for us. So what is the overall ranking on “gayness”?

Here’s the list:

1. Minneapolis, Minnesota
2. Santa Fe, New Mexico
3. Las Vegas, Nevada
4. Orlando, Florida
5. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
6. Vancouver, Washington
7. Atlanta, Georgia
8. Washington, D.C.
9. Seattle, Washington
10. St. Louis, Missouri
11. San Francisco, California
12. Cleveland, Ohio
13. Denver, Colorado
14. Oakland, California
15. Miami, Florida

Miami is last on the list? ¡Ay Papi! What about South Beach? No Los Angeles or New York? How can this be? Are the members of the LGBT community going to the suburbs?