Vaughn R. Walker

It seems that Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling in Perry v. Schwartzenegger striking down the State of California’s Proposition 8 ballot initiative which prohibited state recognition of Same Sex Marriage is highly vulnerable to being overturned on the grounds that the judge ought to have recused himself. John C. Eastman explains in the same San Francisco Chronicle which last February was assuring readers that Judge Walker’s personal sexual orientation was a “non-issue.”

Judge Vaughn Walker’s Proposition 8 decision last week has thrust his personal life into the limelight. The San Francisco Chronicle has reported that the fact that Judge Walker “is himself gay” is the “biggest open secret” in town. The BuzzTab blog calls him “the apple of gay advocators eyes.” The Los Angeles Times reported just last month, after the conclusion of closing arguments in the case, that he is “openly gay” and “attends bar functions with a companion, a physician.”

Is any of this relevant to Judge Walker’s ruling striking down Proposition 8?

Well, as University of Notre Dame law Professor Gerard Bradley recently noted, the mere fact that Judge Walker may be homosexual would not necessarily have required recusal. But the fact that he “attends bar functions with a companion, a physician,” and may therefore be in a stable homosexual relationship of the kind that could lead to marriage, is an entirely different matter.

The political philosopher John Locke noted in his Second Treatise on Civil Government that “it is unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases (because) self-love will make men partial to themselves and their friends.” That sentiment, undoubtedly true, is actually codified in federal law. A judge is required to disqualify himself in any proceeding “in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, including but not limited to instances in which: (a) the judge has … personal knowledge of disputed evidentiary facts concerning the proceeding; [or] … (c) the judge knows that the judge … has a financial … or any other interest that could be affected substantially by the outcome of the proceeding.”

If Judge Walker is indeed in a long-term, same-sex relationship, he certainly has an “interest that could be affected substantially by the outcome of the proceeding” – he and his partner are now permitted to marry! – and that, according to Judge Walker’s own finding, has financial benefits as well. Such conflicts would have required recusal, and cannot be waived by the parties.

Antonio, with a Bay area native’s perspective, lists all the reasons why New York City will never be a tech center in a very amusing rant.

Thinking the New York tech scene will ever equal Silicon Valley is as foolish as thinking San Francisco’s puny theater district will one day take on Broadway. Both Silicon Valley and Broadway are unique products of the cities that spawned them, and every attempt to create a Silicon Alley/Silicon Sentier/Skolkovo/whatever in various parts of the world have failed. So far, no one’s managed to do it, and New York sure as hell won’t either. …

$2495 for a 500 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment.

There, that’s how much my first apartment in New York cost (in 2005).

Living in New York, you hemorrhage money, and don’t see much in return. My career salary high-water mark is still working as a quant on Goldman’s credit desk, and I lived worse, from a quality-of-life perspective, than I did as a Berkeley graduate student. ‘Ramen’ money in New York is enough to support three families, and then some, elsewhere. If YCombinator existed in New York, they’d have to dish 5x more than their already slim initial funding to keep new startups in Cheetos for three months.

Basically, startups flourish in the Bay Area the same reason the homeless do: decent weather, relatively cheap living, and no stigma attached to your lifestyle.

Read the whole thing.

James Carville’s own poll finds that 55% of Americans believe Barack Obama is accurately described as a socialist.

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Red China’s People’s Daily says that the Taliban are training monkeys (macaques and baboons imported from the jungle) in Waziristan to use AK-47s, Bren guns, and trench mortars against US forces whose uniforms the monkeys are being taught to recognize.

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Democrat Financial Reform Bill includes racial and gender quotas for US financial industry.

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With the Social Security system soon to go broke, even democrats are talking seriously about raising the retirement age to 70. (Talking Points Memo)

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San Francisco (America’s longest and most impressive exercise in misgovernment) regulated pot brownies and grudgingly tabled a proposal to ban the sale of pets other than fish.

California’s San Francisco Bay area is notorious for both its inhabitants’ lack of enthusiasm for conventional religion and their hair-trigger political sensitivities.

Zomblog was consequently therefore more than a little surprised at the lack of protests, condemnations, or even public discussion of a new Islamic advertising campaign, funded by the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the North American branch of Jamaat-e-Islami, the fundamentalist Pakistani political party.

“No enemies to the left” seems to apply even to Islamic fundamentalism, and even in the Castro, despite the obvious problems with regarding organizations dedicated to the imposition of sharia law as being on the left.

The latest anti-crime crusade in liberal San Francisco is focused on people lighting fireplaces on the wrong day. It’s important to have the right priorities about these things, after all.

SF Chronicle reports.

For the first time ever, residential fires are illegal under a new law, passed in July, that bans home burning on winter season Spare the Air days.

The first such ban took effect at noon. Seventy inspectors from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District planned to spend the day and evening patrolling residential neighborhoods, looking for telltale chimney wisps.

Violators will get warnings by mail. Repeat offenders face fines of as much as $2,000.

The fireplace police say they are determined to keep law and order in the living room.

“We’re serious,” said district spokeswoman Kristine Roselius. “This is a major health threat. The weather conditions are such that smoke is trapped closer to the ground and anyone with respiratory problems will have a hard time breathing.”

With 1.4 million fireplaces in the Bay Area, Roselius said the district is hoping for voluntary compliance. It notes that wood burning produces about one-third of the particulate pollution on a typical winter night.

The district predicts as many as 20 Spare the Air days during the winter season, which air quality officials define as Nov. 1 through Feb. 28. That means it could be illegal to fire up the fireplace as often as one day in every six.

Similar bans have been in place in the San Joaquin Valley and in the Pacific Northwest for several years.

After the initial warning, repeat violators will face fines, some as high as four figures. In other no-burn districts, offenders have been permitted to do penance by attending “smoke school,” similar to traffic school. But the Bay Area is a no-school zone.

Pursued by screaming homosexuals, San Francisco Police last Friday had to escort a Christian group, which regularly prays and sings hymns at the corner of Castro and 18th for the conversion of homosexuals, out of the district.

KTVU disingenuously portrays the police as “keeping the peace” between two groups of demonstrators. One group numbering about ten or twelve confronted by a hostile and threatening crowd large enough to fill the street for more than a block isn’t my idea of equivalence.

4:45 video

Stephen Moore, in the Wall Street Journal, describes how the environmental movement has come to claim the right to regulate, tax, and control every aspect of every American’s life.

Earlier this month, while visiting a friend in San Francisco, I almost spilled my latte in my lap when I read this on the front page of the Chronicle: “S.F. Mayor Proposes Fines for Unsorted Trash.”

The story began: “Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents’ trash to make sure pizza crusts aren’t mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom.” Isn’t that what homeless people do — rooting around in other people’s garbage? If Bay Area residents are caught failing to separate the plastic bottles from the newspapers, according to the newspaper story, they could face fines of up to $1,000.

“We don’t want to fine people,” the mayor is quoted saying reassuringly. “We want to change behavior.” Translation: Do exactly as we say and no one gets hurt. And San Francisco considers itself one of the most progressive cities in America!

When I was a kid, the environmentalists promoted their clean skies and antilittering agenda mostly through moral suasion — with pictures of an Indian under a smoggy sky with a tear rolling down his cheek or the owl who chanted on TV: “Give a hoot, don’t pollute.” Such messages made you feel guilty about callously throwing a candy bar wrapper on the ground or feeling indifferent toward car fumes. Back then I was a devoted recycler, but not for sentimental reasons. It was the financial incentive: You got up to a nickel for every bottle you brought back to the grocery store. So I would scavenge the landscape to find unredeemed bottles to buy baseball cards and candy.

But now the the environmental movement has morphed into the most authoritarian philosophy in America.

Read the whole thing.

Let’s all go out and pollute something.

The SF Chronicle describes how Obama’s famous “bitter” condescending remarks were captured by an enterprising (Vassar ’68) Huffington Post blogger.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign has been in full damage control mode since the senator’s blunt remarks about the nature of small town Pennsylvania voters were secretly recorded by a Huffington Post blogger at a recent San Francisco fundraiser that was supposed to be off limits to the press.

Obama, asked last Sunday why it was so hard for him to reach blue-collar voters, said that many had been overlooked economically and that “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton pounced on the comment over the weekend, calling it “elitist and divisive.”

An Obama campaign insider tells us the blogger, Mayhill Fowler, had tried to get into one of two Obama fundraising events in the Bay Area a couple of months back where former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley stood in as a proxy.

She was turned away, even though she had offered to pay, says our source.

“There’s a very basic (fundraiser) rule – you don’t let press in, and anyone with an interest in reporting shouldn’t get in,” said the source.

Just how the MP3 – wielding Fowler managed to secure an invite to the $1,000 a head fundraiser at the San Francisco home of developer Alex Mehran wasn’t immediately clear – but Obama campaign higher-ups were said to be livid, with fingers pointing at a local fundraising consultant for the slip-up.

There should be a special award for bloggers like Charles Johnson (who debunked the Dan Rather forged National Guard letter in 2004), and Mayhill Fowler, who this year exposed the views about the common people that Barack Obama shared with a wealthy audience at a private fund-raiser held atop San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, whose reporting of the truth makes a significant impact on the course of Presidential Election contest.

The city of San Francisco has a long relationship with the United States Naval Service. It was frequently the embarcation port for Marines departing for combat in the South Pacific. Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of Pacific Forces during WWII, resided in San Francisco, and is buried in one of the cemeteries just beyond the city limits.

Marines Memorial Association, San Francisco

In 1946, the US Marine Corps chose to locate the Marines Memorial Association in downtown San Francisco, a short distance from Union Square.

But, more recently, San Francisco’s film czarina Stephanie Pleet Coyote, a former location manager and wife of actor Peter Coyote appointed in 2004 by Gavin Newsome as head of the city’s Film Commission, refused the US Marine Corps Silent Drill Team a permit to film a recruiting commercial.

The Marines wanted to shut down one lane of California Street for a few minutes at the start of morning rush hour on the anniversary of 9/11 so that the Drill Platoon could be filmed performing against the background of morning traffic. Ms. Coyote said that traffic control was the issue, but the production crew was offered permission to film on California Street as long as no Marines were in the picture.

Marine requests to use one lane of the Golden Gate Bridge were also denied by Ms. Coyote. So the Marines wound up filming in the Golden Gate Recreation Area, in Marin County, overlooking the Bridge.

San Francisco routinely permits traffic to be blocked by demonstrations, most notoriously by Critical Mass bicyclist demonstrators who on the last Friday of every month deliberately block commuter traffic.

This latest insult to the military follows a number of previous gestures by the city administration, including renaming Army Street for the late leftwing labor agitator César Chávez, refusing to berth the retired Battleship Iowa, abolishing Junior ROTC programs in city high schools, and unsuccessfullly trying to cancel the annual Blue Angels air show.

Stephanie Pleet Coyote

abc7news

4:17 video

Same recruiting commercial being filmed in Times Square 8:49 video

A feud between East Bay and West Bay gangs is believed to have been behind some shootings in San Francisco on Monday.

And the city Solons promptly responded.

San Francisco’s already tough laws on firearms will get even stronger — becoming some of the most restrictive in the country — after a vote at City Hall Tuesday. But even new restrictions won’t do much to stop the gun violence escalating on city streets, one sponsor of the new laws said after the vote. …

The laws — which gained final approval from the Board of Supervisors — would restrict both the sale and possession of firearms.

Specifically, they would prohibit the possession or sale of firearms on city property, require firearms in residences to be in a locked container or have trigger locks and require firearm dealers to submit an inventory to the chief of police every six months.

The last provision is intended to allow city officials to know how many guns are sold, though there is only one gun shop in the city.

“We’re pleased that, as soon as the mayor signs this, San Francisco has the strongest anti-gun laws in the nation,” said Nathan Ballard, spokesman for Mayor Gavin Newsom. The mayor sponsored the legislation, along with Supervisors Sophie Maxwell and Ross Mirkarimi.

Despite the laws, however, Mirkarimi said he doubts they will quell the kind of violence that erupted on Monday afternoon, which police suspect may be tied to a feud between a San Francisco gang and an East Bay gang.

Gun Control regulations will have zero impact on actual gun crimes even the politicians who propose and pass them admit, but isn’t it wonderful that San Francisco has the strongest anti-gun laws in the country?

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The comedian Jackie Mason has some very sensible things to say about Gun Control (in his characteristic ethnic accent, of course).

6:43 video

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

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And this horrifying news item from Connecticut demonstrates exactly why you need to have a loaded gun somewhere conveniently within reach in your home.

The tides have again exposed portions of an 1878 shipwreck of the three-masted freighter King Philip at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach (near the west end of Noriega Street). The wreck was last seen in 1980.

The SF Chronicle reports:

The sea, a thing of infinite mystery, was up to its mysterious ways Monday on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach.

At high noon, in the middle of low tide, two large pieces of a wrecked 19th century clipper ship decided to poke out above the sand and reveal their long-hidden selves to the world.

It was a little piece of maritime history and a great big puzzle. Just the thing for a beachcomber to ponder on a warm and sunny spring day, instead of going to work.

“I don’t know what happened here, but it’s interesting,” said lifeguard Sean Scallan, who got out of his dune buggy to check the wreckage, all the while keeping an eye on the nearby swimmers, that being what lifeguards do.

The visible parts of the shipwreck were nothing more than two 10-foot-long arrangements of lumber in the shape of a V, poking about a foot or so above the shoreline near the end of Noriega Street, and separated by about 200 feet of sand. One V was the bow of the ship and the other V was the stern.

That was it. Everything else was up to the imaginations of passers-by.

Complete story

The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal reports that, like San Francisco and Carmel, California, Manhattan is experiencing a steep rise of absentee property ownership by the super rich, whose pieds-Ã -terre may actually wind up being inhabited for only a few days in the course of the year.

Five-Fifteen Park Avenue has everything one could want in a Manhattan home: sprawling floor-through apartments, unobstructed views, and concierge and maid services. But on most days, the limestone and beige-brick tower at the elegant Upper East Side address lacks one thing: many of its residents.

More than half of the building’s 35 units belong to absentee owners, whose main residences stretch from Tokyo to Wichita, Kan., city deeds and mortgage documents show. Some spend little more than a few weeks a year at their apartments, say other owners and building staff.

It can feel a little empty,” says Las Vegas developer and billionaire Phillip Ruffin, who stays “a day or two” a month at his $2.8 million home at 515 Park.

Wealthy jet-setters have long maintained cozy Manhattan pieds-Ã -terre, but the city’s choicest properties are increasingly being scooped up by out-of-towners. More than 10% of Manhattan apartment sales are second-home purchases, up from about 5% eight years ago, estimates Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel, one of Manhattan’s largest real-estate appraisal firms.

Donald Trump says that more than half the condo owners at his buildings on Central Park West and Park Avenue are part-timers. These people “may not even know the address” of their New York holdings, says Mr. Trump, but “they’d still rather own a place in New York than schlep to a hotel.”

The lavish part-time spreads underscore a shift among the wealthy, who increasingly split their time among three or four homes. The investment potential of the city’s blue-chip real estate also appeals to rich people looking to diversify their portfolios.

Developers are targeting these absentee owners by packing buildings with amenities such as housekeeping, limousine services and even dog walkers, making it simple to ease in and out of town. Maids at Ian Schrager’s 50 Gramercy Park North even will stock the fridge with groceries before the owners arrive.

But the occasional occupants are troubling to some full-time residents, who say their buildings are left depressingly hollow. And the popularity of the costly apartments helps boost Manhattan prices for everyone, draining away developers’ interest in erecting middle-class buildings on the city’s few available parcels and making one of the world’s most expensive real-estate markets even more forbidding to average buyers.

To have so many apartments sitting empty when there is an affordable-housing crisis in New York City raises a “political question,” says Mitchell Duneier, a professor of urban sociology at Princeton University.

The same trend has caused some of the most splendiferous neighborhoods in California to seem like ghost towns most days, and has been predicted to promise a new urbanism entirely lacking a middle-class. The theory is that, before very long, these once great cities will feature no conventional industries or businesses at all, having evolved purely into playgrounds and service centers for the stratespherically rich.