I received an email invite to "To Discuss The Newsom for Mayor Campaign" meeting tomorrow at the Irish Cultural Center on 45th Ave in the Sunset. I'm on the Newsom for Mayor campaign mailing list, since I volunteered for the Care not Cash initiative. I even received a Christmas card from Gavin and his lovely wife Kimberly, a gesture which I thought was smart and classy.

It's almost worth going just to see who shows up. This meeting is very early in the campaign, but it's a smart way to judge public support. Plus, it's got that folksy Jimmy Carter grass roots style campaign style feeling to the event, and it did work for Jerry Brown in Oakland.

On the Pete Wilson's KGO radio program, Susan Leal, the city's current treasurer, announced her candidacy for mayor. Leal calls herself a "social progressive", which is such a bogus label. I listened to her answers about what she would do about San Francisco's budget deficit, social problems like Homelessness, and dot-bomb woes, and I got more of the same ultra left wing progressive BS that is so not grounded in reality, it makes the the mentally ill homeless people who live on upper Market Street sound sane. It was like Leal took a page right of out the Bay Guardian and was reading it verbatim. And I'm like, NO THANKS! San Francisco has the major problems it has because of this impractical, financially dysfunctional and bankrupt, social welfare and engineering left wing drivel that vomits and froths out of the progressives' mouths.

I think the voters in San Francisco are tired of the "progressives". The great social welfare experiment in San Francisco has failed. The Statue of Liberty in San Francisco sob song, "give us your homeless and your poor so they can crap all over the city, bleed the city government's coffers dry, and scare the businesses and tourists dollars away which we're so dependent on". People came here, not to have a better life, but live off our generous city welfare system, where we ask no questions but just hand out cash. I've seen these people interviewed on TV, and I've read pages and pages of how the city's quasi social welfare program works.

Hello! The 60's are over. The flower children have all left, gotten married, had their kids and moved out of the City, and then enacted laws in their safe little burbs to keep the people who they used to be out, because god forbid they don't want their little darling children to be just like formerly hippie mom and dad living a life of free love, sex, drugs and rock-n-roll.

And no, I don't think it's someone's inalienable right to come and crap on on my street or sleep on the steps of my bank. Take it somewhere else.

We need the money for other things here like the burgeoning elderly population, Laguna Honda Hospital where really sick poor elderly people end up, MUNI, fixing the public parks, fixing a crumbling city infrastructure which includes water and the streets, the deterioration of beach at the Great Highway, etc. And guess what? The glory financial days of the 90's are over, and it will probably be another 10 years before they come back. The City is strapped for cash, and will be that way for probably the next 10 years as well.

I'm all for a social safety net for people who really can't take of themselves, but not at the expense of services for city dwellers and the city budget. People came to America to work for a better future, not for a free no questions asked handout.

I'm a tired voter and I live here, and I walk around the City freaking out over how bad it's all gotten. I say, let the Centrists come in and see what they can do, because whatever the Progressives have been doing in San Francisco is so not working; so not working at all. And if the Centrists can't do it, then and it breaks my heart to say this, let the conservatives and republicans have a crack at it. People keep saying we're all in this together, then fine. Let them all try. It can't hurt an already very bad situation.