In a 7-2 vote just before midnight, the City Council decided that the city attorney should not draft language for Mayor Kevin Johnson's new strong mayor proposal.

No votes: Council members Steve Cohn, Sandy Sheedy, Ray Tretheway, Rob Fong, Bonnie Pannell, Lauren Hammond, Kevin McCarty.

Yes votes: Robbie Waters and Mayor Kevin Johnson.

Thank you Council members!

Johnson STILL couldn't inform us why the need for executive powers instead he tried to make himself look good by making others look bad--- THAT IS WHAT WAS SO SAD ABOUT HIS CLOSING STATEMENTS. He made it personal; never showed us the business side of it......

Very well done council members. I love this language being voted down.

the council has spoken and that is fine. i just don't understand why a vote to the people of sacramento is such a bad thing? if you don't approve of the SMI then you can publicly vote "no". but not even allowing it to get to the public is wrong in my opinion. but, it is said and done and i hope the mayor and council move forward for the rest of this year and get some things done.

At last night’s Sacramento City Council hearing with regard to Kevin Johnson’s newer kinder gentler SMI-lite thingy, and after a blistering 7 to 2 vote against requesting City Attorney Eileen Teichert to draft language to ballot the measure, Kevin Johnson launched into one of the most mangled twisted lies of his career, attempting to justify any benefit to be gained from the initiative.

He lapsed into an historical diatribe that conflated his initial SMI, crafted and drafted in the dark of night by Republican lawyers as inside the GOP as one can get, hired by the ranks of the measure’s largely GOP (and DINO) backers, with the parallel efforts of the Council appointed Charter Review Committee, which he sought at every turn to derail while fronting for the campaign of his backers to gather signatures based on whatever convenient explanation was given to obtain as many signatures as possible, even if those explanations were outright lies.

Now, his ‘team’ drafted a couple of pages of bullet points for Council consideration, having had his initial measure defeated in the courts for constitutional ineptitude and error, and drafting for ballot. After the damning vote, he read each member of Council their respective beads, in his own brand of argot that is as clumsy and pathological as any paranoid schizophrenic I’ve witnessed on the streets of downtown, punctuated by “but I accept your position”, or words to that effect.

He was at once a petulant brat issuing epithets and drivel and anger at the discovery by Council that he had profoundly misrepresented his initiatives, seemingly in utter denial of press exposure and healthfully skeptical minds, and a defeated King Lear, reviled by his perceived ‘children’ on the dais, as he descended into madness…

I must say, it was delicious to watch ��“ high theater, and all that. But he also appeared like the delusional Kelly Bensimone of the REAL HOUSEWIVES OF NEW YORK, flailing about in utter nonsense while attempting to rationalize what could be done if he was only declared king, and not making a whole lot of coherent points along the way.

In ways, last night’s endgame was tragic, in other ways, it was just the silliness of a very naïve, very sad, and utterly inarticulate moron as mayor of this city.

He is simply unfit for public office.

BBBBmer has called it. Just wait. I do have a strong feeling that he'll go away. He has a history of packing up his toys and leaving. Going into politics has made public a side of him that many insiders and stalwarts have had much experience of. He chews people out in public to shame them. I don't envy Rhee or her children when they enter the Patriarch's household! Privately, he's completely nuts on the question of a woman's place as subordinate to her husband!

He hasn't the slightest idea about how democracy works, not because he's stupid. We disagree there, BBBBmer. You're right, he's naive, delusional, and sad. But he's very smart. It's just that he's a bigger narcissist than he is smart. He "shuns" people. He didn't use that word lightly when he first proposed the boycott of AZ. His problem is that he has a messianic view of his mission in life. Too many of the people immediately around him buy into it.

I wish we could section out all the racist and right-wing stuff, because it's distracting from the main issue. Simply on his own merits or demerits, he is unfit for public office.

Hmm. I didn't mean to imply anything about the AZ law. I refer only to the way he frames issues in his head. Let's see if he gets that Dept of Ed. The issue about Rhee's speaking to federal agents on his behalf got a little bit of coverage in the D.C. press, so they both may be damaged goods in the long run. Will Duncan want to risk taking on someone whom federal agents are rumored to still be investigating? The funding issue, I hear, has been dropped. But then there's the other stuff...