The Bay Citizen: Big Deal. I Just Said It. I Didn’t Say It Was True.

In an expansive, nuanced and thoughtful conversation, Ross Mirkarimi, a San Francisco supervisor and candidate for sheriff, told us recently that the city’s tenants might now have too much power. A constituent’s demand for $70,000 to vacate a rent-controlled apartment, he said, amounted to “extortion.”

But those comments, Mr. Mirkarimi said in The San Francisco Bay Guardian the following week in response to tenant blowback, “do not reflect my views or my record.”

In short, Mr. Mirkarimi reassured voters that his actions and policies will in no way be affected by his actual beliefs, even after he has observed with alarm the real-world effect of laws he has personally championed.

As it enters the election season, San Francisco finds itself with a clutch of political figures who, like Mr. Mirkarimi, seem determined to turn prevarication into a comical art form.

Perhaps they should take some tips from Stephen Colbert and footnote their remarks with “Not intended to be a factual statement.” Mr. Colbert minted that disclaimer last month and has had a lot of fun with it on Twitter, after Jon Kyl of Arizona declared on the Senate floor that more than 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget was spent on abortions — and then had an aide explain, when confronted with the real number (3 percent), that his boss had never intended his statement to be understood as being actually true.

Mr. Mirkarimi and other candidates here are hard at work perfecting their own routines. Consider these developments from just the past week or so:

? Dennis Herrera, the city attorney and a leading mayoral candidate, hired a registered lobbyist, Alex Tourk, as his campaign manager. A 2004 law — passed when Mr. Tourk was Mayor Gavin Newsom’s deputy chief of staff and Mr. Herrera was already city attorney — made it illegal for campaign consultants to lobby their clients.

Nonetheless, Mr. Tourk reports lobbying Mr. Herrera on behalf of a hospital seeking city approval to expand.

(The same day that the lobbying reportedly took place, the hospital’s chairman made a donation to Mr. Herrera’s campaign.)

“Dennis does not believe those meetings” with his registered lobbyist/campaign manager “were lobbying,” said Mr. Herrera’s campaign spokeswoman, Jill Nelson. Are there any records of what was said, considering that Mr. Tourk certainly regarded those meetings as lobbying when he submitted his report to the city ethics commission?

There are “no records,” Ms. Nelson said, “because they are not meetings. If Dennis doesn’t have those meetings on his calendar, they didn’t happen.”

Last week Mr. Tourk left Mr. Herrera’s campaign.

? In February, Edwin Lee, the interim mayor, affirmed to a roomful of Bay Citizen reporters and editors that $300 million to $400 million had to be cut from what the city spends annually on pensions and benefits. If not, he said, the city could be bankrupt in five to 10 years. Recording devices rolling, he also vowed that under no circumstances would he run for mayor. Is that unequivocal, he was asked? Yes, he responded.

Three months later, Mr. Lee is about to declare victory with a plan to trim roughly $100 million in pension costs. He steadfastly refuses to entertain questions about how a $300 million bankruptcy-inducing emergency has been transformed into a $100 million victory. Oh, and that mayoral run? Stay tuned.

? State Senator Leland Yee, also a mayoral candidate, is a lover of shark-fin soup, and he loudly opposed a proposed ban on the dish as an insult to Chinese-Americans.

But this week at least, Mr. Yee is a lover of sharks.

“We totally share concerns about what is happening to the sharks,” Jim Stearns, Mr. Yee’s campaign strategist, said Monday. What changed? A coterie of Chinese and Chinese-American shark-loving celebrities appeared together in San Francisco last week, and a poll found that 70 percent of the state’s Chinese-Americans are perfectly content to renounce shark-fin soup to protect the world’s shark population.

So Mr. Yee is “95 percent” in favor of the ban, said Mr. Stearns. And he is floating this compromise: shark-fin soup is fine, as long as it comes from a legally caught shark whose entire corpse is eaten. “If you are selling shark-fin soup, you’d better have a receipt showing” that the rest of the animal was consumed, Mr. Stearns said.

Mr. Yee’s proposal is comically unenforceable, akin to passing a law decreeing that filet mignon cannot be served unless the pulverized hooves of the cow in question are eaten for dessert.

Really. In all truthiness.

The Bay Citizen: San Mateo’s Asian and Hispanic Voters Speak Up

“The border is Eighth Avenue,” said Ms. Ortega, 67, who immigrated from Guatemala to Redwood City in 1970. “You come down Middlefield and the view is completely different all of a sudden. It’s like two societies.”

In many ways, the juxtaposition of the heavily Latino, working-class North Fair Oaks neighborhood and the largely white city of Atherton — home to the likes of the Apple C.E.O., Steven P. Jobs, and the executive chairman of Google, Eric E. Schmidt — captures the disparities in class and race found all over the Bay Area. ?

But some say that gulf also underscores a gap in political representation for ethnic and racial minorities in San Mateo County that is unique in California.

San Mateo is the only county in California that still elects its Board of Supervisors through at-large elections in which all candidates run countywide. In the past three decades, all 57 other counties in the state have moved to a district system, whereby the county is split into districts and each elects its own representative.

Last month, Ms. Ortega and eight other plaintiffs sued San Mateo County in an effort to change the way voters elect the powerful Board of Supervisors. Latinos and Asians make up half of the county’s population, yet they rarely hold high-ranking elected offices.

Ms. Ortega and her fellow plaintiffs in the lawsuit argue that the county is in violation of the California Voting Rights Act of 2001, which outlawed at-large voting in places with histories of racially polarized voting or where minority groups are “too geographically dispersed to elect their candidate of choice from a single member district.”

Since 1995, only one Latino — and not a single Asian — has won countywide office in San Mateo, said Robert Rubin, a lawyer at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represents the plaintiffs. Although the 2010 census showed that for the first time in San Mateo County history, non-Hispanic whites — who are now 42.9 percent of the population — fell out of the majority, four out of five current supervisors are white. The fifth, who is African-American, was appointed to a vacant seat by the board in 1999.

A district voting system would yield at least one Asian and one Latino supervisor, Mr. Rubin predicted. “The white community votes as a bloc that defeats the electoral choices of the minority,” he said.

The lawsuit — and its implied suggestion of racism — has struck a nerve in a county that considers itself solidly liberal. County officials say going to a district system would promote provincialism, while others point to San Francisco’s polarized Board of Supervisors.

Residents say that despite the income disparity, signs of racial tension are almost nonexistent and that local governments spend heavily on social services for immigrants. As long ago as 1974, for instance, San Mateo County built a community center to provide health services and English and citizenship classes for North Fair Oaks.

“San Mateo County has always been reaching out to the underserved and welcoming its immigrants,” said Sister Christina Heltsley, the executive director of the St. Francis Center, a nonprofit in Redwood City.

County Counsel John C. Beiers said it had been the dearth of Asian and Latino candidates, rather than racially tinged voting patterns, that had led to a mostly white Board of Supervisors. “We looked at our races and haven’t found any conclusion of racially polarized voting,” said Mr. Beiers. “Our supervisors are very proud of the fact that they represent all of the constituents countywide.”

The Bay Citizen: At Google, the Book Tour Becomes Big Business

At an Authors@Google “fireside chat,” Ms. Fey, the “30 Rock” creator and star, had a friendly conversation with Eric Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman, in front of an audience of hundreds of employees who greeted her with a standing ovation.

As Google’s reach into many aspects of media production and distribution grows ever greater, A-list authors, actors, musicians and others are taking part in the company’s six-year-old on-campus speaker series.

Lady Gaga recently shared the stage with Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president for location and local services, as did Christy Turlington, the supermodel turned documentary director. The YouTube video of “Google Goes Gaga” has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.

The unlikely spectacle of technology executives chatting up celebrities talk-show-style originated as part of Google’s effort to create a quasi-collegiate atmosphere on its campus. The events increasingly dovetail with Google’s interests in publishing, broadcasting, music distribution and other media businesses. The company is selling “Bossypants” as a Google e-book for $12.99 in its online bookstore, which it opened in December.

For authors and other creative professionals, an appearance at the Googleplex, the company’s sprawling complex of office buildings, is good business — but nonetheless conjures some mixed emotions in light of Google’s complicated relationship with content creators. The company is involved in a bitter lawsuit over its efforts to scan all of the world’s books and make them available online, and has long stood accused of unfairly profiting from work that is excerpted and indexed by the company’s search services.

“I think it’s a great thing that they’re doing this,” Chris Clarke, a natural history and environmental writer, said of the talks. “I don’t think that it clears their karma as far as trying to become the sole-source provider of all intellectual property everywhere.”

The speaker series began in 2005 with the New Yorker writers Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki as its first two guests and has since featured hundreds of authors, musicians, chefs, economists and politicians.

Google employees involved in the program say that it evolved out of employees’ interests and at their initiative.

“The program was a grass-roots effort that started when a few Googlers realized that some remarkable people were passing through the halls of the Googleplex,” said Ann Farmer, an information engineer. She is one of more than two dozen employee volunteers who organize the events, which are now held three to five times a week.

Since 2005, more than 1,000 guests have appeared. Garry Kasparov, the chess master, and Jesse Ventura, the former governor of Minnesota, are among some 600 authors, mostly of nonfiction, who have participated. The list includes a number of authors who have written books about Google.

Talks now take place at Google offices around the world, with employees from 18 offices participating via videoconferencing. At larger events, employees use Google Moderator software, which fields questions from the audience, ranking the most popular ones.

In the early days of the series, the employees had to cajole speakers to attend, working personal connections, since the company did not pay an honorarium. But the program gained traction, with some talks drawing more than a million viewers on YouTube. “Let’s put it this way,” said Ms. Farmer. “The tables have turned.”

As of April 1, Cliff Redeker, 27, is the company’s official “speakers specialist.” He used to organize author visits in his spare time as a support specialist, but now his full-time job is dedicated to the speaker series.

The series has made the Googleplex an increasingly important stop for authors promoting their work in the Bay Area, as many major bookstores that featured readings have closed.

“It’s not going to replace bookstore events,” said Larry Weissman, a literary agent in Brooklyn, “but if I have an author going to San Francisco, I always want my author to stop in at Google and do an event there as well.”

The Google books lawsuit, though, combined with a broader concern that the Internet is undermining the ability of authors to get paid for their work, remains a big issue for some.

As of last October, Google Books had already scanned more than 15 million titles from more than 100 countries in 400 languages. On March 22, a federal judge threw out a settlement agreement between Google and groups representing authors and publishers. The Authors Guild had filed a class-action lawsuit against the company over copyright infringement.