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My new video is for the 2 million Californians who signed the recall of #GavinNewsom​. I’m sure Gavin, the Democrats and the media have now changed their minds on signature verification since the November elections. #recall​ #GavinNewsom​ #MiniAOC​ #AOC​ #MALA​ #Wednesday​

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom two weeks ago criticized Gov. Jerry Brown's tax initiative approach, suggesting to KGO Radio in San Francisco that the governor was slow to hit the campaign trail and that he was telling college students "something that's not true." Newsom spoke to KGO on Oct. 17, a day after Brown appeared at UCLA in the first of several appearances at state colleges and universities. But the interview got little statewide notice until Bee columnist Dan Morain referenced Newsom's caustic words for Brown in today's Bee. Though both Democrats who support Proposition 30, Newsom and Brown have endured...

President Obama's position on same-sex marriages has indeed been "evolving" - back in 2004, he wouldn't even have his photo taken with Gavin Newsom, for fear that being pictured with the man who opened the City Hall wedding chapel to gays and lesbians would cost him votes back home in Illinois. At the time, Obama was a mere state senator from Chicago looking to win a seat in the U.S. Senate. Like a lot of up-and-coming African American pols, he tapped Willie Brown to host a fundraiser here to score some badly needed cash.Brown tossed a party at the Waterfront...

On the heels of a headline-making split with talk show host Keith Olbermann, San Francisco-based Current TV has hired on a new talk show host — one well-known to progressives — California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. Newsom, the Democratic former mayor of San Francisco, will star in a weekly show for San Francisco-based Current TV called “The Gavin Newsom Show” beginning in May, the network announced Wednesday. According to the release from Current: “The hour-long talk show will have a decidedly California touch as Newsom interviews notables from Silicon Valley, Hollywood and beyond.” “The Gavin Newsom Show” will be executive...

I see Gov. Jerry Brown took some backhanded swipes at our lieutenant governor in a visit to The Chronicle the other day. No surprise there. Even in his "do-nothing" job, Gavin Newsom is still a challenging figure for politicians throughout the state. He's articulate. He has movie-star looks. He has a great eye for issues, and he's young enough to be Jerry's son. That's also why Newsom strikes fear in other politicians. He has the potential for being a favorite of the Google generation. Brown has a special grudge against Newsom, of course, because Gavin tried to run against him...

Gov. Jerry Brown was at the Chronicle Tuesday for an editorial board meeting (mostly to sell his tax plan), and we asked him about how Gavin Newsom is doing in the number two, largely ceremonial, spot of lieutenant governor. The two former Bay Area mayors, you may remember, have a rocky past (in part because of personality, and in part because Newsom also had his sights set on the governor’s office two years ago before dropping out of the race) .“I think he’s well within the tradition,” Brown said when asked whether he’s satisfied with the job Newsom has done.Ouch....

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who pops up from time to time to snipe at Gov. Jerry Brown, suggested today that his fellow Democrat lacks a "vision for greatness" and is "not necessarily the most collaborative executive," and he criticized social service cuts Brown has proposed. "We've got a governor who is doing a very good job focusing on solvency," the former San Francisco mayor, who dropped out of the gubernatorial race in 2010, said on KQED Radio's Forum. "But what we need is a vision for greatness again." Brown and Newsom have a distant relationship, . . .

Gov. Jerry Brown couldn't leave the state when he was governor before without looking over his shoulder at Lt. Gov. Mike Curb, who feuded with Brown and made mischief when he was gone. But as Brown prepares to leave California for the first time since retaking office this year, he can rest easy: Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who will become acting governor while Brown is in Las Vegas on Tuesday for a clean energy conference, is unlikely to misbehave. . . .

Gov. Jerry Brown has a new "senior jobs adviser." Michael Rossi, a retired Bank of America executive from Pebble Beach, will be "the point of contact between California's business and workforce leaders and the administration," Brown's office announced Wednesday. Operating out of the governor's office, Rossi will be asked to "streamline the state's economic development infrastructure" and advise Brown on regulatory, legislative and executive actions needed to improve the job market, according to the announcement. OK, but wait. Wasn't that what Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom's "growth and competitiveness agenda," introduced three weeks ago, was supposed to do? "Blindsided," said a...

Former San Francisco Mayor-turned-Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom is once again on the move - this time out of the city. Movers from Delancey Street Foundation, where Newsom did his rehab counseling after admitting to a drinking problem a few years back, pulled up to his Ashbury Heights home Monday. Workers packed the family's beds and other belongings and drove them off to storage. It seems that the four-bedroom, 3 1/2-bath home that Newsom and wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom purchased two years ago for $2.7 million is just not big enough anymore now that a second little Newsom is on the...

AUSTIN, Texas -- Molly Ivins once described the Texas Legislature as the best form of free entertainment in a city that bills itself as the live music capital of the world. From quips about shrinking government to the point where you can fit it in a uterus, to an amendment to a budget bill that would have require 10 percent courses offered by universities to focus on Western Civilization, the Texas Legislature has managed to live up to that billing once again this session. Adding to the theater over the past couple of days: A visit from a delegation of...

Less than three months on the job, and already Gavin Newsom is prepping to run for governor again. A city insider who asked not to be named tells us the new lieutenant governor approached him at a charity fundraiser the other day with a request for help to start raising money for a renewed gubernatorial bid. Newsom's inability to compete with the much-better-financed Jerry Brown was one of the reasons he withdrew from last year's Democratic race and ran instead for lieutenant governor. Newsom has opened a re-election campaign committee for 2014 - but there's nothing to stop him from...

Newsom lends a hand in Brown's budget battle - Since Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom took the oath of office last month, the onetime gubernatorial hopeful has been feeling his way in a limited role that gives him virtually no power over the budget process.Newsom has expressed in no uncertain terms that he would relish a chance to participate in the brewing budget battles. He gets his shot in a Web video pitching Gov. Jerry Brown's message that was recorded for the California Democratic Party and released last week."I agree with the governor," Newsom says . . .

In his first remarks at a University of California Board of Regents meeting this morning, Lt. Gov. and Regent Gavin Newsom proposed challenging half a billion dollars in cuts to the UC system proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown. Newsom said the regents shouldn't automatically accept the cuts and said, "I'm not convinced we're going to lose that half a billion dollars." The remark suggested Newsom won't hew tightly to the Brown administration line as lieutenant governor, despite coming from the same party and sharing longtime family ties. Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco, . . .

After delaying his swearing-in by a week, former gubernatorial candidate and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom became California's 49th lieutenant governor Monday in a low-key ceremony in line with his new position's limited duties. Newsom told a few hundred people gathered in the state Senate chamber that he would focus on economic development and job creation while admitting that his contributions would more likely involve ideas rather than policy decisions. "I know my role as lieutenant governor is limited," Newsom said. "I understand the constitutional restrictions. I do. But I hope I can add some value in the debate and...

All eyes will be on Gov.-elect Jerry Brown Monday as the 72-year-old Democrat is sworn in for a third term as California's chief executive. . . . LATER: Lt. Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom will be in Sacramento to attend the swearing-in ceremonies for Gov.-elect Jerry Brown and other constitutional officers, but the San Franciscan won't take the oath of office himself. Newsom has scheduled an inaugural celebration for 1 p.m. on Jan. 10 in the Capitol Rotunda, though a spokesman said he could be sworn in sooner. Constitutional officers are eligible to be sworn in as soon as the first Monday...

Even political consultants, who give out compliments as if they were drops of their blood, agree. Facing a crowd, without notes and holding a microphone, Mayor Gavin Newsom is as good as it gets. The downside is he undermines his charisma with petulance. For someone who is proud of taking on the big fights, he is painfully thin-skinned. We've seen both in his seven years as mayor. In the last few years, he has championed same-sex marriages, a groundbreaking universal health care program, Healthy San Francisco, and suffered an inelegant meltdown. When his gubernatorial campaign floundered, he disappeared to Hawaii...

Gavin Newsom's strength and weakness as mayor of San Francisco has been his willingness, as he put it, to take the risk of making "glorious mistakes" or proposing ideas that critics would find "fun to mock." This is the mayor who banned city purchases of bottled water, signed the nation's first mandatory composting law and talked of harnessing the energy of ocean waves. Newsom's most daring move of all - allowing same-sex marriages in February 2004, in open defiance of state law - only seemed to encourage further dashes of audacity by a politician with a penchant for policy analyses...

The solid left majority on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has an opportunity to do what city voters haven't done for more than two decades: put a progressive in the mayor's office.Not since the election of Art Agnos in 1987 has a progressive served as mayor, and his tenure ended four years later when he lost his re-election bid to Frank Jordan, the more conservative former police chief. The only progressive mayor before Agnos, George Moscone, was assassinated in 1978, three years into his first term.Now, with Mayor Gavin Newsom, a San Francisco-style moderate, set to leave office in...

Nature abhors a vacuum and that tenet applies to politics as well as physics, which explains a phenomenon in communities dominated by one political party, such as Democrats in San Francisco or Republicans in Placer County. Since there are no interparty battles waged in such communities, those in the dominant party fracture along minute shadings of ideological difference, thus filling the vacuum. What's happening in San Francisco, where all politicians are liberals of one stripe or another, illustrates the syndrome. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom will soon become California's lieutenant governor, but how soon is the issue of an intensifying...