Bronstein at Large

• When's a crash like a train wreck? When we can't look away...

  Free the White House 2! And Tiger, too. In the film, "The Paper," Michael Keaton's editor character explains to a reporter that you can always get past a police barricade or most other obstacles "with a clipboard and a confident manner." Tareq and Michaele Salahi were just [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 5:00pm EST
  

• Has Gavin slipped from Ringmaster to Sideshow?

  Here's the burning San Francisco mayoral political question of the day: Where are Larry and Moe? The Gavin Newsom drama has gone downright absurdist on us. This poor guy is tripping over his laces and running into so many walls it's stopped being funny. You might have a guilty [...]
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  Posted: November 24, 2009, 10:52am EST
  

• Obama & Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- if one branch is good, two must be better?

  Not every president in the last 35 years has considered Richard Nixon a role model. But our current POTUS seems to . When the darkly fascinating Mr. Nixon declared Charles Manson guilty of murder before that 1970 trial was over, there was only a small intake of national breath. [...]
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  Posted: November 19, 2009, 2:05pm EST
  

• The original power couple emerges again with Hillary on top...

  Barack and Michele Obama, the couple, continue to captivate the public and the press, most recently in the cover story of the NYTimes Sunday magazine: "The first marriage. It's modern, it's a formidable international brand and it's an ongoing negotiation." Sounds like a reality show promo to me....
  
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  Posted: November 02, 2009, 12:55pm EST
  

• New York Times responds to "liberal" borrowing policy question...

  I like the tussle of digital world commmenting, as nasty and angry and messy as it can get. There are also endless tips, suggestions, ideas and other useful things in comments sections that may be bad for the ego but good for journalism. I've tried to have a fairly' [...]
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  Posted: October 20, 2009, 11:55am EDT
  

• New York Times' SF debut gets "liberal," but applies to borrowing policy?

  The grand, grey New York Times made its Bay Area "local content pages" debut last Friday, even as execs there prepared to cut 100 newsroom staffers in Manhattan. After causing competitive shivers among some Bay Area journalism institutions , how interesting it is that the Times chose to...
  
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  Posted: October 19, 2009, 2:14pm EDT
  

• All work, no play makes us all dull: Who will replace Jack as THE bad boy?

  I'm thrilled to see they cut some slack for that criminal kid who brought the camping utensil to school. He got off with time served. Maybe next year, when he's seven, he'll understand the rules better. The whole episode seems to reflect one of those cultural shifts: a [...]
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  Posted: October 15, 2009, 10:45am EDT
  

• In conversation with Helen Thomas at the Commonwealth Club

  It's one thing when the Financial Times says Barack Obama "seems to float like a butterfly -- and sting like one..." Even if the gently biting British criticism does come from one of the few publications that successfully charges for some of its content -- journalism is all about [...]
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  Posted: October 13, 2009, 1:27pm EDT
  

• Is the New York Times too rich for your blood?

  The death of Gourmet magazine is a big, sucking wound for all those consultants advising the panicked print industry to go niche, baby, go niche. As though we haven't been hearing that since the 1980s. But even as we bury another paper publication, this one high end and historically' [...]
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  Posted: October 05, 2009, 5:20pm EDT
  

• Val Diamond bows out at Beach Blanket Babylon

  Val Diamond, the tireless, talented oak tree-like icon of San Francisco's Beach Blanket Babylon, has left the show . She'd been there over 30 years channeling Ethel Merman to the delight of princes, queens and generations of tourists. Circumstances surrounding her exit are unclear. No reason...
  
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  Posted: October 01, 2009, 2:10pm EDT
  

• Does Obama's "Bailout" mean a future for print but not profits?

  A campaign executive for Gavin Newsom's governor's race said I was "scraping the bottom of the barrel" when I posted a photo of the mayor's green recycling bin in connection with a column about the city's new mandatory composting regulation. Point and shaky pun taken. But, despite my own [...]
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  Posted: September 21, 2009, 2:15pm EDT
  

• One bin, two bin, green bin, blue bin: Inside your responses & Gavin's compost

  Lots of response -- slams and support -- for my Monday column here on SFGate and in The Chronicle about San Francisco's new mandatory composting regulation. Sorry to report that Gavin Newsom did not offer to come personally weed out anyone's leftovers to kick the thing off on a note [...]
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  Posted: September 18, 2009, 11:53am EDT
  

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  Posted: September 18, 2009, 11:53am EDT
  

• Where does social media start, and a mainstream media news cycle die?

  By the time Jimmy Carter weighs in, with all due respect to the former President, home builder and Nobel Laureate, you can bet that's pretty much the end of the news cycle for that story. When I watched Mr. Carter offer an opinion about South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson [...]
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  Posted: September 17, 2009, 2:05pm EDT
  

• Why are Kanye and all these celebs mad? It's in the stars...

  South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, it turns out, was just the red-faced canary in the coal mine of anger toxicity poisoning our national psyche. Fury is being unleashed across the land and don't say you weren't warned: it's all been astrologically predicted . While you've been burying...
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  Posted: September 14, 2009, 2:38pm EDT
  

• Obama, not all dropouts grow up to be rap stars...

  It's not fun to criticize Barack Obama anymore now that everyone's doing it . Even cautionary blog posts used to feel like a wonderfully lonely place, particularly if you live around San Francisco or on HuffPo. I warned early on about the dangers of over-stimulating the public expectation ...
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  Posted: September 08, 2009, 1:45pm EDT
  

• McCain's care restores health to sickly town halls...

  Civility in public discussion these days is as rare as a bald-headed Kennedy -- the last of that mane now lionized by Ted's passing . But damn if John McCain didn't have a bunch of citizens at his Arizona health care reform town hall meeting yesterday behaving like the' [...]
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  Posted: August 26, 2009, 9:55am EDT
  

• Bob Novak, the Prince of Darkness for better or worse...

  Criticizing the recently deceased is as rude as punking the Queen of England at an official event: it's bad form both in terms of timing and reasonable respect. As a journalist, I know I should revere Bob Novak, whose death from brain cancer was announced this morning, almost as' [...]
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  Posted: August 18, 2009, 12:00pm EDT
  

• Is it porn -- or just an odd couple's spat?

  Good Vibrations has always been the place where the x-rated rubber meets the merchandising road in uniquely San Francisco fashion. No whiff of disinfectant in there, nothing scarier than a 9-volt battery or more threatening than sage how-to manuals for after hours. No trench coats necessary. ...
  
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  Posted: August 17, 2009, 10:59am EDT
  

• Hillary comes out of the Bill closet: But how does she really feel?

  I am NOT HIM! Hear me roar! The loose lips parade of outbursts has replaced swine flu as the national epidemic of the moment. And there's no vaccine in sight for this 223-year-old unruly American problem . But even Arlen Specter's gamely stiff spine in the face of [...]
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  Posted: August 11, 2009, 3:45pm EDT
  

• Obama and Palin against the media -- plenty of muck to rake?

  In a secret meeting last week at a Denny's outside Squamish, British Columbia, Barack Obama's chief strategists David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett shared coffee and a plate of donuts with Palin steering committee chairman, Levi Johnston . The purpose of the improbable session: to come up with a...
  
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  Posted: July 27, 2009, 5:03pm EDT
  

• Gavin, your "green" credentials around town are all wet...

  Gavin, there's someone I'd like to introduce you to. Meet Gavin. I know climate change can be a bitch, but is the barometric political pressure so different from here to San Diego that the mayor just turns into two different people? In Southern California last March, stumping Green [...]
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  Posted: July 23, 2009, 2:30pm EDT
  

• Tangled web: The case of the disappearing Newsom Op-Ed

  I'm not faking this blog post! Just don't tell anyone. It's been a pig-in-poop week for nut jobs, conspiracy theorists and just plain, square-minded skeptics . The faked-moon-landing fans came out of a nearly 40-year eclipse to light up the digital call board, incentivized, as they say, by...
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  Posted: July 21, 2009, 4:16pm EDT
  

• Wise Latina, meet Ricky Ricardo...

  Who's the better decider now, sucka? When I heard Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn tell Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, " You'll have a lot of splainin' to do ," if she went home, got a gun and shot him, my first sensation was the warm wash of memory watching' [...]
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  Posted: July 15, 2009, 12:38pm EDT
  

• A modest proposal: the ultimate death tax

  New England Zoo officials have the right idea : if you want to solve the relentless, intractable, choking monster of balancing public budgets, you have to do a little killing. That bothersome SF Public Defender, Jeff Adachi, who keeps hounding the city for money to defend indigent clients,...
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  Posted: July 14, 2009, 1:57pm EDT
  

• We're all the new N-word: It's not about me, it's about me

  There's a new N-word permeating our culture and it has nothing to do with racial epithets. The warm bath of public narcissism is getting as crowded as the rooftop hot tub at SF's kink.com on a Friday night. Instead of luxuriating in it, or watching a few privileged [...]
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  Posted: July 08, 2009, 12:45pm EDT
  

• Hey Sanford! Did Obama put you up to this?

  Let me just say it before a commentator on Fox does: This whole Mark Sanford mess is a Barack Obama conspiracy. The sad spectacle of Mr. Sanford's teary confessional is designed, at least in some part, to make the President look even better by comparison than he already [...]
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  Posted: June 24, 2009, 2:31pm EDT
  

• Twitter can't cure cancer! But the right pro-am mix is the future of journalism

  All Twitter needed this last week was for Ashton Kutcher to be named the compromise president of Iran. Then the perfect circle of social networking, information gathering, and real-world events would have been balled up tighter than a Microsoft intellectual property-rights case. But in actual...
  
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  Posted: June 22, 2009, 1:59pm EDT
  

• Gavin tells San Jose that San Francisco is the model for CA: Is he living on his own Fantasy Island?

  How many flashy, technicolor buzzwords does it take to blind a voter? We'll be finding out the answer in the 2010 California governor's race. Bullet-riddled bodies, eviscerated budgets, and the physical accessibility of a public official are such pre-Web concepts that only wonky Tom...
  
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  Posted: June 18, 2009, 10:30am EDT
  

• A real Missed Connection: Craigslist saves print and stands to profit even more?

  Craigslist is saving newspapers! I respectfully disagree with Arianna Huffington's claim this week that Craig helped her kill print journalism . Just as Prohibition handed over the lucrative liquor trade to the Bronfmans and the Kennedys , rabid law enforcement agents are chasing the ...
  
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  Posted: June 12, 2009, 10:10am EDT
  

• Love or lust, Obama and the fawning press need to get a room

  When Barack Obama decided that questions from the German press about his trip agenda in that country were too pesky, he told the reporters , "So, stop it all of you!" He just wanted them to ask things he wanted to talk about. Well, what politico wouldn't want that? ' [...]
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  Posted: June 08, 2009, 4:35pm EDT
  

• I feel your pain, see your "empathy," and raise you a little EST

  Empathy is our newest cultural celebrity, now that Susan Boyle has collapsed in the face of the unrelenting beast of huge and instant fame. (But we really feel for her and understand her let-down and nervous exhaustion as if it were our own. Honest.) Like "networking" years ago or [...]
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  Posted: June 02, 2009, 4:38pm EDT
  

• GOP pols believe in outsourcing -- the dirty work

  Republicans may be struggling in the dunk tank since the last national elections, holding onto each other for warmth and flotation in the Senate and House and fractiously searching for a new overarching identity to avoid being the outlying party for the next several decades. But, don't be...[...]
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  Posted: June 01, 2009, 1:48pm EDT
  

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  Posted: June 01, 2009, 1:48pm EDT
  

• Obama and Cheney face off in a Battle Royale for safety's sake...

  I thought cockfighting was illegal in this country. But there, right on TV and web stream, was the President of the US and his now archrival, the former Veep, in an unrestrained rooster pecking match over the most serious of topics, including enhanced interrogation (speaking of euphemisms, Mr....
  
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  Posted: May 21, 2009, 12:54pm EDT
  

• Gotten any Facebook friend requests from the KKK?

  Social networking isn't just for the warm and fuzzy any more. (Never was.) The web is a sharing and neutral place -- maybe that's what all those perspiring newspaper publishers mean by the cliche "platform agnostic" -- where new-agers and neo-Nazis share the same bandwidth. A Reuters story [...]
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  Posted: May 15, 2009, 1:15pm EDT
  

• Miss CA keeps crown -- and a more honest "gay" record than Obama and Crist?

  Carrie Prejean didn't lie to beauty pageant officials even though she'd appeared semi-nude in photos a few years back, so let's just get off that high Godiva horse right now. Here's the thing: Since the old pictures were of her real breasts, she never actually exposed the new breasts [...]
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  Posted: May 12, 2009, 1:40pm EDT
  

• No tricks here: Dick Cheney has become Nixon 2.0

  There's something about former Vice President Dick Cheney that's been struggling to get out like a rare bald eagle chick ready to hatch. After listening to his remarks this weekend about Rush Limbaugh (loves him) and Colin Powell (doesn't), and his jut-jawed "I don't regret anything" moment on...
  
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  Posted: May 11, 2009, 3:01pm EDT
  

• Every time a bell doesn't ring... MUNI's treatment of retiring operator sparks protest?

  Nothing is sacred or safe in SF these days, apparently. Unless you're a carbon credit or another green wonky wonderland plan waiting to ease someone's guilt. Even the annual, feel good, tourism-friendly, home-town-hero cable car bell-ringing championship in Union Square is being threatened...
  
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  Posted: May 08, 2009, 11:32am EDT
  

• Kerry: newspapers are "endangered." Journalism, however, is adapting...

  John Kerry wants to save newspapers. Or something like that. Anyway he's holding DC hearings on the subject today, presumably goosed by the fact that his hometown Boston Globe has been teetering on the brink of oblivion . Getting as testifiers Arianna Huffington , never dull, and David...
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  Posted: May 06, 2009, 4:50pm EDT
  

• Shouldn't that be His Royal Highness, the "Addled Lord of Print?"

  When great satire can't make it anymore in the printed newspaper world, that's not so funny here in the belly of The Chronicle and at other publications. The Onion, which blew into San Francisco a few years ago with its hilarious headlines and endless news parodies -- there [...]
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  Posted: May 05, 2009, 2:03pm EDT
  

• Interviewing Robert Redford at the SF International Film Festival

  In a very tight, tented-off square upstairs at the Castro Theater, a photographer had handed Robert Redford the small pyramid crystal award he'd be getting the next night from the SF International Film Festival . "Just do something with it," the shooter said a little gruffly to the' [...]
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  Posted: May 04, 2009, 2:01pm EDT
  

• The Swine Flu is from Mexico... wait, where are you from again?

  If everyone is wearing surgical masks, what's Michael Jackson going to do? It's an important question for Neverland fans, but about as useless and untimely in the swine flu panic of '09 as the debates about closing the border door with Mexico after the virus has already galloped through.' [...]
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  Posted: April 29, 2009, 12:43pm EDT
  

• The Bratts' "La Mission" shows there are two tales to this city...

  What's the difference between these two couples: Mr. And Mrs. Gavin Newsom and Benjamin Bratt and his wife, Talisa Soto Bratt? They're all unquestionably very attractive people, as the Chronicle noted about the "beautiful (mayoral) couple" Sunday. But after seeing the Bratts in their movie,...
  
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  Posted: April 27, 2009, 2:46pm EDT
  

• Iowa is the new San Francisco -- Thanks, Gavin?

  Note to Bill O'Reilly: Iowa is the new San Francisco. I can barely write that sentence without my hands shaking at the thought of the city I grew up in losing its punch line status on right-leaning talk shows and slightly more sympathetic late night comedy hours. ' [...]
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  Posted: April 22, 2009, 3:42pm EDT
  

• The top sign the economic crisis has bottomed out...

  Every news anchor, hyperactive money reporter, and sputtering financial pundit is trying to read the economic bird droppings to tell us when this national nightmare will begin to think about trying to be over. What's the sign we've bottomed out? Is it the stock market? Home sales ? Unemployment ?...[...]
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  Posted: April 21, 2009, 4:08pm EDT
  

• Blagojevich kept off reality TV? Talk about punishing everyone...

  I say let Rod Blagojevich go to Costa Rica for the reality show, "I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!" which probably aptly describes the former governor's (and other celebrities') view of life at the moment. He's already gone from political appointment sales and services to perpetual...
  
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  Posted: April 21, 2009, 2:01pm EDT
  

• I'll see your 183 waterboardings and raise you an Iron Maiden...

  Waterboarding is for amateurs. This weekend, I visited the reconstruction of a medieval castle in Calistoga, imported by vintner Daryl Sattui brick-by-brick from Europe. It included a dungeon with an anatomically correct rack -- did you know they not only stretched people, there was also a ...
  
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  Posted: April 20, 2009, 3:33pm EDT
  

• It's not Back to the Future -- It's the news.

  I saw the lame remake of "The Day The Earth Stood Still" on a plane last week but it didn't strike me until today that our globe is actually spinning backwards. As of now, we're somewhere back in the 17- or 1800s. The comeback of pirates should have [...]
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  Posted: April 16, 2009, 2:15pm EDT
  

• Obama's measured pirate reaction -- just like a Democrat?

  So, where's the parade ? The carrier landing? The Presidential dress-up in sniper camo, binocs, and scoped rifle? If these were the martial days of the Bush or Reagan White Houses, Sunday's pinpoint sharp shooting and victory over a bunch of pirates would be followed by triumphant spectacle....
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  Posted: April 15, 2009, 10:00am EDT