The description of the suspected vandal: A male in a red bodysuit with portrait of a spider on his chest...
A little while ago we wrote about the Clear Channel "Visit Israel" billboards along Highway 101, with their breezy Israeli girls strutting above the motto "Different From the Israel You See on the News." The ad was rendered a tad ridiculous by the deterioration of conditions in the region during the recent 22-day assault on Gaza supposedly prompted by Hamas rocket fire.
Now, ostensibly pro-Palestinian taggers have co-opted the ad for their own political statement. At the billboard overlooking Harrison Street near the intersection with Fourth St. in SOMA, someone has gone to considerable trouble to spray paint "(NO ARABS THOUGH)" beneath the "Visit Israel" portion of the billboard.
BlueStar PR, the company who put up the ad, says they hadn't heard until we snitched on Tuesday.
"That's horrible," deputy director Peter Altman says. "It's obviously not true. Anyone can go visit
There's a lot of hatred out there right now. There's a lot of really
vicious anti-Semitic stuff. ... Who's writing this garbage? Don't they
get how stupid it is? It's stupid. It's about being hip. It's all about
being radical chic, about what's chic and what's not. It doesn't have
to do with who's really humanist; it's about being chic."
Clear
Channel spokesman Michael Colbruno said the company
generally replaces ads that have been tagged with graffiti, and that a new ad campaign would replace the marred sign on Wednesday. The "Visit
Israel" advertisement has been overlooking the 101 for free since
BlueStar's contract expired on December 7.
[image-1]To say San Francisco is enthralled with our new president is putting it a bit mildly. If, during his inaugural address yesterday, he'd have instructed us to shout "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" out the window -- well, skip to three minutes, 16 seconds here, and you'll see what the city would have looked like yesterday.
So, yesterday President Obama mentioned this:
For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately thefaith and determination of the American people upon which this nation
relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break,
the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a
friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours.
trickle down to real people and situations like we have in San
Francisco." Something to ponder: Will the notion of cutting back hours or giving back hard-fought concessions be a possibility with the city's unions?
You'd think this would be an automatic no. But, according to the president of San Francisco's International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the answer is yes.
really a large matter -- it's the difference between the lightning bug and
the lightning."
You know what? He was right.
