I guess I have nothing against Michela Alioto-Pier personally, except the name Alioto. Her grandfather had me (and hundreds of others) arrested for, as the California Supreme Court later ruled, exercising my first amendment rights. He teamed up with S.I. Hayakawa on that one.
Mayor Joe Alioto (black people showed their contempt by aspirating the “t”) (
wikilink) was a lawyer and democratic hack who’s main claim to fame was that he nominated Hubert Humphrey for president at the disgraceful 1968 Chicago convention.
I saw old Joe at SF’s “Hall of Justice” sometime in the 1990s. I was in a hallway during a break in jury-duty and I thought I saw him entering an elevator. As he turned to face the door he saw me craning my neck with a kind of questioning look on my face.
He was glad to be recognized and nodded acknowledgement to me. I lowered my eyes and shook my head in disapproval and he quickly looked elsewhere.
Michela Alioto, his granddaughter turned up running for office and losing, repeatedly. Then, Gavin Newsom, newly elected SF mayor, did something rash and impetuous that he probably regrets.
I guess he didn’t like his fellow members on the Board of Supervisors, and he wanted to send them a big FUCK YOU.
So he appointed Michela Alioto-Pier (
wikilink) to the supervisor’s seat he vacated when he became mayor. Ms Alioto-Pier’s politics are normal, boring, downtown-interest oriented. Bad enough.
Worse, she has a terribly unpleasant personality. You know how on holy cards saints have halos and they radiate lightbeams… Michela manages to radiate darkness. She looks out at us from the bottom of a pool of darkness.
She makes it difficult to watch the proceedings on TV. Some of the supervisors make me sort of want to puke, but when the camera turns to her, my arms raise reflexively in a defensive position.
She comes in somewhere between a doped up Patsy Ramsay and a pissed-off valley girl.
She used her incumbency to be elected “in her own right” in the following election cycle. Just like Gavin Newsom, who’d been appointed by Willie Brown ‘nuff said. Remember Annemarie Conroy?
So here’s a practical, easy charter amendment to keep these unelectables from sneaking through the back door of appointed-incumbency.
“All persons who serve by appointment any portion of an unfilled term on the Board of Supervisors are disqualified from running for that seat, or any supervisor seat until the term subsequent to the unfilled term of the seat to which they were appointed is completed.”
Or something like that. That should get rid of a bunch of losers.
As our sophomore Latin teacher, Mister Shut-up-or-I’ll-teach Foree, used to say, “Simplex, nonne?”
And, Gavin, we support you, but we have to tell you that saying FUCK YOU to the SF Board of Supervisors, while it might make you feel good momentarily, will only cause you grief down the road.
Don’t you have, like, advisors?
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