Chris Smith’s blog

This month’s San Francisco magazine runs my piece on a legal challenge that could bring California’s death penalty law crashing down. The decision is expected this fall, but no matter which way the judge goes we can expect appeals stretching to the horizon. Ultimately, though, it’s hard not to see this challenge as yet another step on the road to abolition.

One way or the other, members of the defense community are cautiously optimistic that the death penalty’s days are numbered. “It’s like pushing a boulder uphill,” Zimring says. “But things are changing.”

Yesterday, the Huffington Post ran my initial take on the Occupy SF movement–and Occupy Wall Street in general.

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The encampment, huddled on the sidewalk in front of the Federal Reserve on Market Street, was a veritable Noah’s Ark of lefty protest. There were dreads in camo pants, Boomers in recycled-rubber sandals, crust punks with Guy Fawkes masks — red meat for Fox news, in other words.

But then a DPW street cleaning truck trundled by on Market Street. The guy in the passenger seat was leaning halfway out the window, high-fiving sign-waving protesters on the sidewalk. And every time the F-line passed the driver leaned on his horn, prompting a cheer from the protesters.

Clearly, this wasn’t just another San Francisco protest.

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This is a fast-moving story, though. After my piece went up yesterday, word got out that the police were planning another raid on the camp Wednesday night. The call went out, and maybe a thousand came out to protect the encampment, and stayed deep into the night. A few impressions from last night’s gathering:

SF’s Brass Liberation Orchestra played its highly danceable version of protest music. The guy with the tuba was my favorite.

A woman danced while wearing a gas mask.

A new chant (at least to my ears) was born: “Hella, Hella Occupy!”

Rumors flew that some 2,000 Oakland occupiers were marching across the Bay Bridge to reinforce the SF encampment. Alas, they were just rumors.

Word was that hundreds of riot cops were massing in Potrero and headed to Justin Herman. Somewhat puzzlingly, they had piled into Muni buses for the ride up to the encampment. The jokes, of course, told themselves: “Riot police are on their way, but they may be a little late–they’re taking Muni.”

Bart shut down Oakland’s 12th Street station to prevent the Oakland occupiers from coming to San Francisco. Then they closed Embaradero station–due to a “civil disturbance,” as the agency put it. If only Bart could monetize the commuter anger it’s been generating lately, there’d be enough money to fund 24-7 service across the bay.

There was a lot of cigarette smoke. Activism requires lots of standing around and waiting. Hence the cigarettes.

Organizers taught the crowds to link arms and form defensive lines encircling the camp. People scrawled the number for the National Lawyers Guild (415.285.1011) on their arms, and donned vinegar-soaked bandanas in case of tear gas.

And then nothing happened. The cops never showed. Possibly because there were so many people there and the City Family didn’t want to risk an Oakland-style melee. It couldn’t have hurt that a good chunk of the city’s elected officials–including mayoral candidates Avalos, Yee, Adachi, and Chiu–turned up in the plaza last night. (Yes, Occupy SF has become an issue in the mayor’s race.) Today, the police said their maneuvers were just late-night training exercises. Advisory letters sent to businesses near the encampment suggest otherwise.

In any case, the camp’s still there. At least until tonight.

That’s the subject of my new piece for San Francisco magazine. If you believe the polling, it doesn’t look good for Lee’s opponents. But ranked choice voting is a cruel mistress, and the scandals surrounding Lee’s campaign backers are beginning to pile up. If Lee stumbles down the stretch, here’s a (half-serious) look at how his opponents might prevail.

Historical note: I might be the first journalist in San Francisco to name-check Jello Biafra, Barry Zito, and that terrible ’90s band, Train, all in one piece.

This month’s San Francisco magazine (see p.38) runs my piece on broken political promises, from the “no new taxes” pledge that helped make George H.W. Bush a one-term president to Barack Obama’s liberal bait and switch to SF mayors Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, and, most recently, Ed Lee. How pissed should voters be? Sometimes, mendacity is in the eye of the beholder.

When interim Mayor Ed Lee announced his intention to run for a full term this fall, erstwhile allies like Board of Supervisors president and mayoral candidate David Chiu let him have it, and rightfully so. After all, the supes had given Lee the interim post precisely because he said he wouldn’t run. Voters, though, greeted the charges with a shrug: Politics as usual, no? Still, a look at some broken promises by prominent pols, past and present, reveals some interesting middle ground between “unforgivable” and “no big deal” that may help you decide just how charitable to be toward this latest bait and switch.

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My exploration of the struggle between supporters of Israel and Palestine on the UC Berkeley campus, in which I trace a decade of passion, protest, and bad behavior, runs in this month’s California magazine.

Every spring since 2001, a group of earnest, impassioned students has gathered near Sather Gate, cordoning part of it off with emergency tape. Some of them don faux uniforms and brandish mock M-16s; others wear keffiyehs and traditional Arab robes. Then the actors set up a military checkpoint, a simulacrum of the hundreds of real checkpoints that pepper the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The “soldiers” allow “Israeli settlers” to pass unmolested while they yell at the “Palestinians.” They bind the wrists of a young man, forcing him to lie face down on the concrete; another they “shoot.” There is fake blood, a makeshift stretcher, the wailing of the wounded and bereaved.

Created by the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the mock checkpoints first appeared at Berkeley, and have spread to schools from Arizona State to Yale. It’s easy to see why.

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The checkpoints are just one of the most visible elements in a decade-long, tit-for-tat struggle between supporters of Israel and Palestine on campus. It is waged through Palestinian movie nights and Zionist picnics; tables in Sproul stacked with literature quoting Edward Said and Theodor Herzl; and Palestinian “die-ins” and pro-Israel hip-hop shows. Ron Hendel, a professor of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies sums it up: “It’s a PR war.”

And wars are never pretty. Partisans have engaged in online flame wars in the comments sections of local newspapers, disrupted speeches by visiting scholars with shouted obscenities, and scrawled swastikas (aimed at both sides) on campus walls. Students even got into a fight at a 2008 campus concert.

In its dynamics, this local fight often echoes the flesh-and-blood conflict in the Holy Land—minus, thankfully, the body count.

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Check it out.

From a randomly found postcard; number two in an occasional series. Photograph by Mary Anne Fackelman, 1984.

A couple of months ago, I acquired an odd new follower on Twitter. The handle was FakeLelandYee, the State Senator and SF mayoral candidate’s tweeting doppelganger. I think that was the name, anyway–Twitter soon took it down.

Not to worry, though, because an account named NotLelandYee quickly replaced the old one. The accounts–run by somebody who really, really hates Yee–have lots of fun with Yee’s weird brushes with the law and alleged ethical lapses, as well as his uncanny ability to play both sides of virtually any issue. As a political writer I’m a connoisseur of “ratfucking,” so I wrote up a squib for San Francisco magazine (see p. 34):

State Senator Leland Yee is one of the frontrunners in this fall’s mayoral race, but not everyone’s a fan. The social-media equivalent of an old-school attack ad, this fake Yee Twitter account quoted here–run by person(s) unknown–hammers on Yee’s penchant for playing both sides of an issue, such as his opposition to both sharkfinning and the ban against it. When Twitter shut down the account, another impostor popped up. It may not be as effective as a TV ad or mailer, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.

San Francisco magazine’s “Best of” issue this month runs my short piece on Keith Olbermann, the angry newsman unbound, and his new gig at Current TV. The new Countdown debuted last week, and it appears to be a lot like the old Countdown–not a bad thing, to my mind. I’ve always been a fan of Olbermann’s but haven’t caught the show yet, beyond a few clips. Why? Well, like so many others out there, I don’t get Current.

This month’s San Francisco magazine runs a number of my pieces, most of them as part of its annual “Best of the Bay” package. Here’s one on this fall’s mayoral race, focusing on Ranked Choice Voting, the city’s new-ish voting system. RCV isn’t like your typical, “first past the post, winner-take-all” system. Instead, it has a tendency to kneecap frontrunners (just ask Oakland’s Don Perata), and encourages second-tier candidates to be nice to each other.

You might think that this fall’s mayoral race–the most wide-open in ages, with nine credible candidates and no true front-runner–promises even more of the ritual bloodletting than usual. Instead, look for a race more anodyne than aggro, as hopefuls kiss up to their opponents’ supporters and try not to alienate anyone, ever.