In the spirit of the season the staff at East Bay Express has come up with its own
March Madness for public officials behaving badly. (That’s shoplifting Castro Valley Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi’s mug shot. She’s a finalist.) Says editor Robert Gammon: “It’s hard to remember a time when so many public officials in the Bay Area were caught in embarrassing situations or accused of misdeeds at the same time.” The staff’s Elite Eight looks like this:
Nadia Lockyer (Alameda County Supervisor) vs Michael Meehan (Berkeley police chief); Mary Hayashi (Assemblywoman) vs. Chris Magnus (Richmond police chief); David Muhammad (Alameda County’s probation chief) vs. Desley Brooks (Oakland councilwoman); Ross Mirkarimi (San Francisco sheriff) vs. Jean Quan (Oakland mayor).
Add: (That Mirkarimi-Quan matchup is regarded as a blowout, by the way.) As for their “pick” for the finals, they give the edge to Mirkarimi over Hayashi because, as Gammon writes, “from our perspective, domestic abuse outweighs shoplifting on the scales of justice—and ethics.”
Politics
In the spirit of the season the staff at East Bay Express has come up with its own March Madness for public officials behaving badly. (That’s shoplifting Castro Valley Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi’s mug shot. She’s a finalist.) Says editor Robert Gammon: “It’s hard to remember a time when so many public officials in the Bay Area were caught in embarrassing situations or accused of misdeeds at the same time.” The staff’s Elite Eight looks like this:
