Two East Bay members of Congress have had changes in their press staff this week.

Brian Cook took over as Rep. Pete Stark’s spokesman; Cook earlier was speechwriter to Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia, and also has worked as speechwriter and press aide to former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner and as press secretary to U.S. Senate candidate Harris Miller, who lost Virginia’s 2006 primary to Jim Webb.

Stark said he’s “delighted” to have Cook come aboard: “We are eager to put his acumen and work ethic to good use.” And Cook said he looks forward to helping Stark “continue the passionate advocacy and sound legislative achievement that has marked his very distinguished career in Congress.”

Cook replaces Yoni Cohen, who left to become the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s western regional press secretary. Surely Cook knows that keeping the oft-salty, always outspoken Stark — whether he’s cursing at Capitol Police, reaming President Bush or just talking smack about legislation he doesn’t like — in line can be a challenge; let’s hope he’s up to it.

Then, on Thursday, communications director Cleve Mesidor announced she’ll be leaving Rep. Barbara Lee’s office and taking a job with a different House member; her replacement has not yet been named. Mesidor had just started working for the Oakland Democrat late last year after former Lee spokesman Nathan Britton jumped chambers to become U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer’s press secretary. No replacement has been named yet.

An employment, consumer fraud and civil rights lawyer from Piedmont is the latest addition to a bipartisan commission that recommends nominations for federal judgeships.

U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., has announced her appointment of Jack Wing Lee, 56, to the Parsky Commission’s Northern District Panel. The Parsky Commission was created in 2001 as senators Boxer and Dianne Feinstein struck a deal with the Bush Administration for input in recommending nominations. It’s comprised of four six-member subcommittees -– one for each of the state’s judicial districts — and each subcommittee has one member selected by Boxer, one by Feinstein and one jointly by both Senators, while the other three members are named by Gerald Parsky, a Los Angeles investor and major GOP mover and shaker who has held appointments in every Republican administration since Nixon’s.

“I am very pleased that Jack has agreed to take on this important responsibility of helping select highly-qualified, moderate judicial candidates for the federal bench,” Boxer said in her news release. “I am confident that Jack will bring the experience of his long and diverse career to the process. I also want to thank Michael Ohleyer for his fine service on the Parsky Commission these past several years.”

Lee replaces Ohleyer, a San Francisco attorney.

Lee is a partner at San Francisco’s Minami Tamaki LLP; earlier, he worked on complex class-action civil rights cases with Saperstein & Seligman in Oakland. Earlier yet, he was an attorney for the nonprofit Asian Law Caucus; the San Francisco Public Defenders Office; and regional attorney for the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, where he worked on discrimination and desegregation issues in the school system. He has been active with various legal and Asian community organizations, and chaired the City of Oakland Civil Service Commission from 1992 to 1996; he graduated Phi Betta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973 and earned his law degree from the UC Hastings Law School in 1976.

Federal judges are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate to lifetime terms on the bench.

So state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, pulled the plug late Wednesday on his effort to have state Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Merced, recalled from office. From our story:

The abrupt move came, he said, after deciding that a recall of the Merced Republican would directly affect his ability to negotiate a budget with Republicans, who have assailed him for pursuing the recall.

He said he told Sen. Dave Cogdill, R-Fresno, that “I did not believe this kind of politics cast against the huge problems we’re having in the state made a lot of sense.

“You get to the point where you just have to say you gotta see what matters most,” Perata said.

“And I don’t want to go through what we went through last year. The state can’t afford it. You know how things are at the end of a campaign. They get uglier and uglier, tenser and tenser, and it made no sense.”

To recap: Perata couldn’t see what mattered most until Wednesday, when he realized pursuing the recall made no sense.

So what took him so long?

In trying to recall Denham — a move Perata essentially acknowledged was as much (if not more) about pushing Senate Democrats closer to the two-thirds majority needed to pass budget bills as it was about Denham’s voting record — Perata embraced the very tactics of which he and many other Democrats complained so stridently during the 2003 gubernatorial recall.

Also, even as he abandoned any pretense to owning the moral high ground (as if there’s any in politics, anyway), Perata also has made a martyr of Denham — a martyr who gets to stick around and make the most of his martyrdom. Denham’s supporters say he’s a moderate, Perata and his supporters say Denham campaigned as a moderate but legislated as an arch-conservative. Whatever Denham is, he’s also now the guy who can truthfully say he faced down a recall threat from someone supposed to be California’s most powerful Democrat; that’s a line you’ll surely hear in campaign ads if Denham ever seeks statewide office.

If you don’t buy that, fine. For another view — a staunchly liberal Democratic view — of how Perata made a train-wreck out of this, check Calitics, where a recall supporter reams Perata for wussing out on a noble cause:

“A real Senate leader would have broadened the race into a referendum on state Republicans and would have done very well. You either do something like this full-speed or you never start it in the first place. This half-step just furthers the narrative of Democratic weakness.

[snip]

“(Y)ou now let everyone off the hook because you’ve proven you can be bullied by a Republican hissy fit and tut-tuts from the conventional wisdom crowd in the media. No Republican will EVER take a Democratic threat seriously in the near future, crippling the leadership of Darrell Steinberg. And all the leverage on getting legislation passed in the Senate just ended.

“Great friggin’ job, Don. If you want to just go ahead and quit now and let any stray cat from Berkeley finish out your term, that’d be just fine with me.”

Wow, there’s just no love for Perata on this one. Methinks the Pro Tem isn’t covering himself in glory in his final months at the Legislature’s helm; read Perata’s statement as e-mailed to reporters, after the jump, and judge for yourself… Read the rest of this entry »

The FBI has withdrawn a National Security Letter issued to the Internet Archive after a legal challenge from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, those groups said on a conference call moments ago.

Under a settlement agreement, the FBI has lifted the NSL’s gag and agreed to the case’s unsealing, making all the filings public and letting Archive founder Brewster Kahle speak out for the first time about his battle against the records demand.

“The FBI served the Internet Archive with a letter last November demanding information about a patron of the Internet Archive,” Kahle said. “I couldn’t discuss it with anybody, I couldn’t bring it to the board, I couldn’t discuss it with the rest of the staff. Even our lawyers couldn’t share information with their peers about what was going on.”

“Gagging librarians is horrendous,” Kahle said. “We don’t think this is necessary and were very happy to be able to speak up now to all librarians and the public.”

The Internet Archive — a nonprofit founded in 1996 and based in San Francisco’s Presidio — is building an Internet library of online books, music, videos and “snapshots” of Web pages, offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.

The government uses these secret NSLs to access personal customer records from Internet service providers, financial institutions, and credit reporting agencies among other companies. In most cases, recipients are forbidden from disclosing even that they received the letters. The Internet Archive fought this NSL because it believed the letter exceeded the FBI’s limited authority to issue NSLs to libraries; this was the first case to assert protections for libraries that Congress set in 2006’s reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act.

EFF senior staff attorney Kurt Opsahl said the FBI’s letter demanded an Archive user’s name, address, length of service, electronic communication transaction history and other data. But the Archive doesn’t collect IP addresses of users who upload and download files, he said, only their unverified e-mail addresses; he said he wouldn’t disclose what information the Archive did give the FBI on this person, other than to say it was publicly available information. Meanwhile, the EFF – joined by the ACLU – sued to challenge the gag order’s constitutionality, and after four months of legal negotiations, the FBI backed down.

ACLU National Security Project attorney Melissa Goodman said about 200,000 NSLs were issued from 2003 to 2006, yet only three including this one have been challenged in court. In each of these three cases, the FBI agreed to withdraw its request; Goodman said this calls into question how important the information was in the first place, and how wide a net the FBI is casting without judicial review, shielded from public eyes.

“The gag orders that are part and parcel of almost every NSL that gets issued are unhealthy in a democracy,” said ACLU of Northern California staff attorney Ann Brick, who noted the Justice Department Inspector General’s audits have found the FBI regularly abuses its NSL power.

Brick also said this secrecy “distorts the public debate over national security letters, including the debate in Congress” – when an ACLU attorney testified before Congress last month about NSLs, he couldn’t even talk about the Internet Archive’s case.

Brick said she hopes this case will inspire more libraries and other organizations to file lawsuits challenging NSL’s constitutionality.

Independent vice presidential candidate and former San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez — Ralph Nader’s running mate — will have his art shown in the back gallery at Johansson Projects, a contemporary art gallery at 2300 Telegraph Ave. in Oakland.

Entitled “Crossing the Delaware,” the show includes “collages from found objects creating faux personal narratives that evoke nostalgia and trigger subconscious embedded memories and associations. His art focuses primarily with found paper fragments, creating objects that adhere to his personal sense of equilibrium.” Kicked off with an opening reception from 6 to 9 p.m. next Thursday, May 15, the exhibit will run through June 13.

It’s not Gonzalez’s first exhibit. Left in SF posted some info in April 2007 about an exhibit at San Francisco’s Lincart:

Gonzalez used materials that he had found throughout San Francisco to create collages. Most of the pieces are small and used two or three items. There were two that he took cream color cardboard and broke the cardboard into pieces and placed it on a cream color backing. The examples are “With the Throat of a Silver Vale” and “Its Starry Paleness.”

Part of the fun was identifying the original source of the material that he was using for his collage. It took several of us to figure out that he was using a parking lot ticket for one of his collages.

His best creation was identified as “Winged Angel”. Using a paint sample from Kelly Moore Paints (the colors on the sample are identified Winged Angel and Beth’s Kiss), he creates the impression of an angel with pieces of foil paper and a torn piece of white cardboard, “Winged Angel”.

In some of the collages, Gonzalez took a great deal of effort to place the pieces. An example is the piece, “Now.”

What was not evident in the photos posted at Lincart’s website is that each collage is signed or initialed by the artist in large letters. In some cases, Gonzalez also noted the date of when he created the painting. Gonzalez is selling his collages for an average of $600. (That would buy a lot of chess sets for an elementary school.)

Several pieces have already been sold.

I’m not an art critic — some might call me a Philistine, and perhaps they’d be right — but… $600? I don’t think so.

UPDATE @ 4:58 P.M. TUESDAY: The gallery just sent me images of two of the pieces which will be part of Gonzalez’ exhibit:

This week, a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger circa 1978. CBC describes it thus: “He’s young, brash and just starting to act but the world’s most successful bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger, already has charisma to spare. He’s charming in this TV interview with Peter Gzowski.”

Women, body image, ego and lots of other subjects in here…

Previous SVOTWs: April 29, April 22, April 15, April 8, April 1, March 25, March 18, March 11, March 4, February 26, February 19, February 12, February 5, January 29, January 22, January 15, January 8, January 1, December 25, December 18, December 11, December 4, November 27, November 20, November 13, November 6, October 30, October 23, October 16, October 9, October 2, September 25, September 18, September 11, September 4, August 28, August 21, August 7, July 31, July 24, July 17, July 10, July 3, June 26, June 19, June 12, June 5, May 29, May 22, May 15, May 8, May 1, April 24, April 17, April 10, April 3, March 27, March 20, March 13, March 6, February 27, February 20, February 13, February 6, January 30.

Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez — chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and the Democratic Policy Committee, as well as former chairman of the Natural Resources Committee — says this about the idea of suspending the federal gas tax for three months this summer a solution to high gas prices:

“The call by Sens. Clinton and McCain to temporarily suspend the federal tax on gasoline is a short-sighted stunt that will hurt consumers and do nothing to reduce the price of gas.

“American consumers and our economy need a real solution to the energy crisis, not an empty trick. You can run cars on a lot of different fuels, but snake oil isn’t one of them.

“In the hopes of winning votes, the Senators are preying on consumers’ justified anxiety about the economy without offering a solution to their real problems. There’s nothing in our history to indicate that oil companies will pass on any savings to the consumer. So despite the McCain and Clinton gas tax holiday, the price at the pump will continue to rise and oil companies will take even more of the profit.

“My constituents are reeling from the highest gas prices in the country. But they understand that we can only break the oil chokehold and bring prices down by investing in highways and mass transit, new technology, renewable energy, and energy efficiency.

“Siphoning off the political energy from these necessary steps to focus instead on a plan that some political consultants favor is cynical politics. Taking a break from the federal gas tax and the hundreds of thousands of jobs it produces is harmful to the long-term economic well-being of our country.

“Sen. Clinton knows it is not easy to pass a windfall profits tax on oil companies. We have been trying to rein in record oil profits for years, and the House has repeatedly passed legislation to roll unjustified federal oil subsidies and invest instead in renewable energy – but President Bush and Senate Republicans have blocked us. Some of the subsidies we are trying to eliminate started under President Bill Clinton’s administration.

“Sen. Clinton is trying to intimidate members of Congress into validating her bad policy prescriptions. Congress should reject her and Sen. McCain’s idea. Relief from soaring gas prices will only come from smart investments and real change in our energy policy.”

Also, as I’d noted last week, it could cost the country hundreds of thousands of jobs. Today, I see the American Road and Transportation Builders Association estimates that number at 310,750 — including 23,107 jobs right here in California.

And for what? Check out this calculator to see how much you would save. It ain’t much… and that’s assuming most prominent economists are dead wrong when they say demand and prices would simply rise to about the same levels they’re at now.

But, hey, what do those economists know, anyway?

Will Jerry McNerney throw his superdelegate support to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama while the race is still on, or will he stay mum?

Sure, I’m picking on him a bit. He’s not the only East Bay Congressman who has not yet made the choice – Pete Stark hasn’t, either – but McNerney’s the one with the most to lose.

Stark, D-Fremont, was elected to the House in 1972 and has been there ever since; he now chairs the powerful Ways and Means Health Subcommittee. His 13th Congressional District is registered 53.6 percent Democrat, 18.5 percent Republican. In his past four re-elections, he won with 70.5 percent in 2000, 71.1 percent in 2002, 71.7 percent in 2004 and 74.9 percent in 2006 – stronger each time.

In February’s presidential primary, Democrats in Stark’s district went 57.3 percent for Clinton, 38.3 percent for Obama. But although Stark’s temper and (ahem) plain speech sometimes get him into hot water, he clearly has little to lose in endorsing either candidate.

On the other hand, McNerney, D-Pleasanton, is a freshman who’s among the National Republican Congressional Committee’s top targets for unseating this year.

In 2006 he toppled House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, in a 53.3 percent to 46.7 percent race. Pombo was beset with accusations of ethics problems, and McNerney was buoyed by a flood of grassroots activists who came in from outside the district to knock doors, work the phones, etc.

Today, McNerney’s 11th Congressional District – mostly in San Joaquin County, but with swaths of Alameda, Contra Costa and San Joaquin counties – is registered 41.3 percent Republican; 38.5 percent Democrat; and 16.6 percent decline-to-state. As of March 31, he had more campaign money in the bank – $1,153,586 – than his Republican challenger, Dean Andal – $531,817 – but the race is young and nobody expects a Stark-style cakewalk in McNerney’s district.

Democrats in McNerney’s district in February voted 54.1 percent for Clinton, 39.9 percent for Obama. McNerney in early March told the San Francisco Chronicle he would “make a decision when I have to… I’m going to let the voters decide for themselves.

Surely he has formed his own opinion by now, right? It’s hard to believe that any member of Congress hasn’t by now, after all that’s been said and done. It’s easy to believe, however, that McNerney doesn’t want to make a choice now which could put him at odds either with a majority of his district’s voters, or with the activists who helped him win that seat, or with the eventual nominee; it’s easy to believe he doesn’t want his words now to show up in Andal’s ads this fall.

But the time may be drawing nigh.

The latest Associated Press figures show Clinton still leads Obama in superdelegate endorsements (268 to 248) but Obama leads in overall delegates (pledged and the officially unpledged superdelegates), 1,736 to 1,602; a candidate needs 2,025 delegates to clinch the nomination. The superdelegate contest has gotten hot in recent days; much is being made of former Democratic National Committee Chairman Joe Andrew’s superdelegate defection from Clinton to Obama, yet poll numbers show Clinton resurgent.

So, Congressman McNerney – will you play it safe and wait until the nomination is a fait accompli, or will you speak out about who you believe should be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States?

It was five years ago today that President George W. Bush landed on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and, against the backdrop of an enormous “Mission Accomplished” banner, declared major combat operations in Iraq at an end. Lest there be any confusion about what was and wasn’t said and seen that day, here it is in two parts:

Some critics are particularly irked by what White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said during her briefing yesterday: “President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said ‘mission accomplished for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission.’ And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year.”

Cue House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller’s head exploding:

“This latest White House comment is reprehensible and should be repudiated. Yet again, the Bush Administration, faced with its own failures in Iraq, is trying to rewrite history rather than write a new policy to end the war and bring our troops home in a timely and responsible manner.

“The assertion yesterday by the White House that the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner was meant simply to describe the mission of the USS Abraham Lincoln and its sailors in 2003 is clearly not believable and should be publicly repudiated by the President. The unjustified and misleading declaration of ‘Mission Accomplished’ by the President was the entire basis for his speech five years ago today, and it is a deep insult to all Americans and our servicemen and servicewomen that the White House is once again deliberately distorting the truth.

“The White House knowingly hung the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner in a public relations effort to convince the world that military operations in Iraq had been completed quickly just as White House and Pentagon officials had repeatedly said would happen before the war began. Well, we all know what happened after that, because so far over 4,000 military personnel have lost their lives in Iraq and nearly 30,000 have been wounded.

“The President’s reckless and shortsighted decision to send America into an unjustified war in Iraq is one of the most costly and devastating foreign policy decision ever made by an American president. What the White House owes Americans is a new policy in Iraq that will bring our troops home, not a new version of history that only deceives Americans further, just as the Administration knowingly deceived Americans and the Congress in the buildup to this tragic war.”

However, the White House has been backing off on this for quite a long time — this is from more than a year ago:

And, lest we forget, the media had a lot to do with how this was spun in the first place.

More from Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey, after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

Various news outlets are reporting Deborah Jeane Palfrey — the “DC Madam” from the North Bay who ran a high-priced escort service for Beltway bigwigs — has taken her own life while at her mother’s home in Florida. She had been convicted a few weeks ago of money laundering, using the mail for illegal purposes and racketeering, but she had not yet been sentenced.

Keep up with reports from our very own Vallejo Times-Herald or from the Washington Post. Palfrey’s own Web site says it’s “off line until further notice.”

Let the conspiracy theories begin.