City Hall Bakeoff

San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, above, has been demonized so thoroughly for so many years by journalistic hacks like C.W. Nevius at the San Francisco Chronicle and Ken Garcia at the San Francisco Examiner that seeing the young politico with a huge knife on Thursday afternoon in City Hall was rather startling.



The occasion was a "Bake-off" between Supervisors Daly and his ex-aide who is the current District 11 Supervisor John Avalos, below.



Avalos was the chair of the Budget Committee this year, which is always a nightmarish job, but in this particular year even more difficult. Part of his job was to negotiate with the Mayor's Office on proposed cuts and increases, with the final deal restoring $45 million in cuts to health and human services departments basically done on a handshake. During the full board debate on the final budget, Daly did everything but call Avalos a credulous idiot for believing a word coming out of Mayor Newsom's office, particularly in light of Newsom's history of never keeping his word on anything.



Avalos understandably took offense, and this "bake-off" was an Avalos staffer's inspired idea to let two macho guys have a contest that couldn't have been more feminine, and to publicly declare peace among friends.



Angela Cavalli, the Clerk of the Board, and Chuck Dugo, who's the executive pastry chef for Slanted Door, were the blind taste testers, and they took their jobs quite seriously.



The winner, after all, would win the priceless championship robe.



Best of all, everyone present got to stuff themselves with a couple of dozen different kinds of desserts after they had been officially judged.



The crowd was mostly staffers and a lot of media, including the fine online writers Paul Hogarth and Melissa Griffin above, who write for poverty pimp Randy Shaw and right-of-Fox Christian billionaire Philip Anschutz respectively.



Nicest for me was seeing old friends like Joe Lynn, above, the legendary Ethics Commission dude.



The winner, with two perfect 10s for a cake, was Chris Daly, and the rest of his team came out the winner too. Though it wasn't as starry as Obama's diplomatic beer quartet, the event was lovely, a place and time for government wonks to gossip, share information, and indulge in the pleasures of butter and sugar.