San Francisco Diary--Journal Of An Exile

Pictured is the riverboat California on San Francisco Bay during last year's New Year fireworks displays. The cruises are set up every year for both locals and tourists to get a truly dramatic view of The City and the fireworks which are coordinated at multiple locations on the Wharf, Crissie Field and the Embarcadero (I can see Crissie Field and the Wharf from my nothern windows, but the Embarcadero is hidden from me by Russian Hill). Across the Bay to the north, fireworks are also set off on the Marin side of the Golden Gate.

New Year's Eve in San Francisco is not as concentrated as it is in the Big Apple. We really don't have a place as large or easily-accessible as Times Square, so we spread our festivities out over prime locations in The City. The Union Square (downtown) celebrations have been severely cut back because of some unruly behavior over the years, but everything else seems to go well, happily, and unrestricted. Our waterfront is visible from nearly all locations on the Bay, from Berkeley to Richmond, to Sausalito and to points south as well, so the waterfront displays give the most fun to the largest number of people.

NOTE: Readers of the San Francisco Chronicle have been frustrated for years by the poor service, rude bus drivers, and general filthiness of the Muni buses which carry a large portion of The City's workforce every day. At last, the head of the transport workers union explains why, with that record, Muni bus drivers (and Muni employees in general) are the third highest paid transport workers in the United States. I should have known. It's because the transit employees have to pay a portion of their health care benefits, unlike the other City employees. Somehow, I'm not convinced, and apparently either is a large portion of the population which has to ride those buses regularly. To add insult to injury, they all got a $3,000 Christmas bonus to help them pay for their "cadillac" insurance policies as well as a federal exemption for the taxes we mere citizens will have to pay if Pelosi's socialized medicine plans succeed.

NOTE: In other developments, a Chronicle writer in the Mommy Files has her panties in a bunch over the deleterious results of people watching the movie A Christmas Story. Most of you know the story (it's a Christmas classic). But for those who don't, author Jean Shepherd creates a story built around a boy named Ralphie Parker whose sole wish for Christmas is to get a Red Ryder BB gun. There is considerable hilarity about his wish, including the immediate refrain "you'll put somebody's eye out" from every adult who hears his wish.

Oh my God!, the author of the Chronicle piece informs us that 21,000 children are wounded every year by BB guns (incomprehensibly, she includes charged pellet guns with BB guns). I think that's about half as many as are injured each year by bicycle accidents, but what the hell. We must agonize. We must worry. We must lose sleep. We must protect our children from every possible risk of harm. We must ask ourselves if "any child under the age of 16 should have a BB gun." Aw, nuts. Kids under 16 shouldn't have anything that thoughtful parents haven't considered carefully, after giving due contemplation to their children's propensities, their intelligence level and the availability of adult supervision. I don't want any child to be injured, but given that this is the real world, the only way to protect a child completely is to put the kid in a plastic bubble, monitored 24 hours a day by experts of every sort. Life itself involves risk, adult or child. Some risks cannot be avoided, others can be minimized, but the risks are always there. So as my younger friends say, "lighten up, dude."

NOTE: In a rare display of firmness, Senate Republicans have forced the Democrats to reconsider the 12 to 7 vote confirming in the Judiciary Committee the Obama nomination of former ACLU attorney and current temporary federal magistrate Edward Chen. Chen is a typical Obamist, with a bigger mouth and a highly-visible paper trail. As an attorney, he unsuccesfully argued in federal court against California Prop 209 (The Civil Rights Initiative) which ended affirmative action in California in public contracts and public education. He later voiced his views about Katrina and New Orleans by publicy asking if "the government's response to Katrina would have been quicker if the victims had been white and middle-class rather than poor and black." Aha! A wise Chinese male who sees the world in the same terms as new justice Sotomayor. The Committee has now reconsidered sending the nomination to the full Senate, but my guess is that this is just a matter of time. Yet maybe some Senators will be a little less timid about questioning the potential permanent judge on the San Francisco federal bench about his racist views than they were with Red Sonia. I have my own candidate for a bench presently devoid of anyone of Chinese ancestry: John Yoo. Remember him from my previous posts? He's the UC Berkeley law school professor who isn't afraid of Eric Holder and his political show trials. But Holder is plenty afraid of him, considering that Holder withdrew all charges against Yoo for advising President Bush on what were acceptable interrogation techniques that the Obamists didn't like. Yoo essentially said "bring it on." Holder chose not to.

NOTE: San Francisco has suddenly found itself with the biggest annual drop in homicides in history. The Chronicle says it's "inexplicable." Unfortunately for its mystification, the article goes on to tell us that the drop was particularly dramatic in the largely-black Bay View, Western Addition and Hunter's Point areas where the police have dramatically increased gang control units and targeted enforcement, and the largely-Latino Mission district where anti-gang units have been doubled and tripled over the past year in reaction to the gang murders, led by the notorious MS-13 thugs. Before anybody decides this is "racist," it in fact means that the largest drop in homicides were among blacks and Latinos killing other blacks and Latinos. It has never been a black-white or Latino-white dichotomy.

It seems to me that the drop in homicides is not, then, entirely "inexplicable." However, I'll grant the Chron some of its mystification, since the same pattern seems to be appearing in New York City, Oakland, Los Angeles, and many other major cities. Maybe they have their own versions of San Francisco's logical intense concentration on gang-dominated and high crime areas, or maybe the thugs are just too depressed to go out of the house during this economic meltdown.

Well, that's it for now. Time to get ready for New Year celebrations with family and friends. I see a bright future in the new year for America through the fog of Obamism. As they say, it always seems darkest before the dawn.

But before I close, I know some of you are wondering if I'm going to do anything on Chronicle columnist Mark Morford. Well, in my own little way, I may have pushed his name a bit farther than I had intended. Late last week, Big Hollywood picked up on one of his recent bizarre columns. So if you haven't already read it, here's Morford's review of Avatar: Please mount my hot blue alien.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OF YOU!