Needlenose

A dispatch from the Department of Unintended Benefits, via TPM:

California Tea Party groups are calling San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s boycott and raising him a … boycott.

The mayor raised the ire of California Tea Partiers this week when, in response to Arizona’s passage of a controversial immigration law, he announced a boycott of the state, barring San Francisco city employees from entering Arizona and threatening to cut off economic ties. Local Tea Partiers who support the Arizona legislation answered his actions with a boycott of their own — on the city of San Francisco.

“We are just tired of our representatives not representing our wishes,” said Bridget Melson, president of the group Pleasanton/NorCal TEA Party, which called for the boycott on Wednesday. . . .

The group has encouraged its members not to patronize local businesses. . . . “Spend your money anywhere else…vacation elsewhere, dine elsewhere — if you protest here, bring your own food, coffee and water,” Melson writes in the boycott’s official call to arms.

As it happens, I live in the Bay Area.  I know San Francisco quite well, and have been to Pleasanton more than a few times.  Suffice it to say that Pleasanton is, um, not San Francisco — it’s more than 45 minutes’ driving time away across a bridge and through hills and valleys (not counting traffic), and in cultural terms the distance is probably measured in light years.

So I think I can say with some confidence that a threat by a Pleasanton-based group to stop spending their money in San Francisco most likely isn’t causing The City’s businesses to tremble with fear.  Especially given the propensity by members of this particular movement to be less than flush with cash and not exactly swift to embrace the diversity for which S.F. is famous.

In fact, for folks like me, the news that a bunch of intolerant, obstreperous suburbanites are doing their best to steer clear of San Francisco makes it seem that much more appealing as a place to spend my liberal, big-government-loving money.  Heck, if you ask me, whoever’s in charge of tourism for San Francisco should make an ad to make sure everybody knows about the boycott.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Tags: racism, tea baggers

This entry was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 11:39 pm and is filed under Reactionary Ideology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.