I chatted up a paid signature gatherer yesterday (he didn’t know who I was). When I asked how things were going, he said great; people are eager to sign. I remarked that getting 100,000 signatures seems like an uphill battle and he replied, “Oh, no, not for professional signature gatherers. We’ll have that by the end of this month.” That sounds optimistic, but I liked his confidence.

Did you happen to catch video of Thao giving her State of the City speech the other day? She reminded me of Shirley Temple, the pudgy child actress of the 1930s, in a movie about a little girl who pretends to be a Queen.

It’s taken a while, but I finally got the blank petition forms from Carl Chan, and can now distribute them to everyone who signed up to gather signatures for the Recall of Pamela Price.

Naturally, the left is against “pretext stops.” A high-level OPD officer defines pretext stops as a term “mainly [used] by the anti-police groups suggesting that cops stop folks for a low level ‘minor’ reason as a ruse to stop someone who[m] police are investigating for something else.” In addition to no license plate, these reasons can include expired registration tags, a driver blowing through a stop sign, or a car with broken tail lights.

You can think of the current political struggle in Oakland, and across the country, as a Chess game with three pieces in contention: the radical progressive left, the moderate centrist-left, and a rightwing bloc. As the left and right struggle for power, pressure on the moderate-centrists increases; both left and right are anxious to poach off as many moderates as they can.