Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report

The S.F. Giants are now one win away from a World Series championship after beating the Texas Rangers 4-0.

•Twenty-something Madison Bumgarner won tonight’s game, making him the fourth youngest pitcher to win a World Series game.

•”Rosey Posey” — a shoe-in for Rookie of the Year — hit a home run.

•And “I’ll Huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down” — Aubrey Huff —hit a home run too.

I don’t know about you, but as a native Californian, I’m getting tired of people trashing our Golden State. In our area, for example, we live in historic gold-rush towns, our schools are good, and Lake Tahoe — a national treasure — is an hour or so up the hill. In west Texas, they play golf on packed sand for putting “greens.”

I’m starting to think that the whiners here are the ones who couldn’t make “ends meet” here as professionals, who can’t afford senior home care or whose politics are not “in sync” with the Golden State. May I suggest Nevada, Idaho, Indiana or Kentucky? “California, love it or leave it.”

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“California is poised once again to compete for the crown as the nation’s leading graveyard for business superstars trying to make the jump into politics,” writes Michael Hiltzik of the L.A. Times.

The commentary is here.

Why do big-time CEOs — Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, for example — make such terrible politicians? Much of it has to do with their failure in the “very special business of democracy,” as he puts it.

•”Engagement in democracy starts with participation in the ballot box. That’s the real significance of Whitman’s and Fiorina’s well-documented failures to vote over the years,” Michael writes.

•Neither has served a public apprenticeship as well.

•Government isn’t a business. “These include caring for the penniless; maintaining common amenities such as parks, schools, and universities; and creating infrastructure with broad value but unspecific beneficiaries, such as freeways and the Internet,” Michael writes.

I would add another key point: If you don’t get your way, you can more easily be “fired” by the voters than the other way around. After all, it’s a democracy.

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A Tea Party Patriot tries to explain how our freedoms are in jeopardy. Though a little longer than the normal clip here, this is an interesting discourse.

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In Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Rich does a good and humorous job of pointing to the cabal (such as Rupert Murdoch at Fox News and The Journal, as well as Pollster Scott Rasmussan) that has “been arduous in promoting and inflating Tea Party events and celebrities to this propagandistic end.”

We’ve discussed it on this blog too. Rich’s article is here.

The real mettle of the Tea Party will be tested when it locks horns with the GOP as 2012 approaches.

Our small rural county will be tangentially involved, too, whether we like it or not: We elected Tom McClintock, one of the Tea Party’s biggest cheerleaders, to be our Congressman. Tea Party co-founder Mark Meckler lives in our county as well. (Don’t expect any tangible benefits, however. We just provided the geographic “cover” for them in our left-leaning state; a lot of right-leaning retirees in one of the state’s most lily white districts).

“The tempest, however, will not be contained within the tiny Tea Party but will instead overrun the Republican Party itself, where Palin, with Murdoch and Beck at her back, waits in the wings to ‘take back America’ not just from Obama but from the G.O.P. country club elites now mocking her,” Rich writes.

“By then — after another two years of political gridlock and economic sclerosis — the equally disillusioned right and left may have a showdown that makes this election year look as benign as Woodstock.”

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“What’s wrong with being an advocate?” asks Bruce Brugman, the longtime editor and publisher of the Bay Guardian. “Advocating for the First Amendment, sunshine laws, for public power – what’s wrong with that?”

Bruce is profiled in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. The profile is here.

“The mainstream press looks down from the top of the Transamerica Pyramid. We look up from the street. And guess what? That’s where the action is. So that’s why we’re there,” he states in the interview.

I knew Bruce well for the 11 years I worked at The Chronicle, his nemesis at the time. Now his nemisis is the S.F. Weekly, another alternative newspaper.

We sat on the board of the Society of Professional Journalists’ chapter in S.F. Sometimes we agreed to disagree but one thing was certain: The Bay Guardian was more profitable than The Chronicle, at least in recent years.

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