He was crying in court and appeared disheveled in a T-shirt and khakis. The magistrate ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office to interview Giusti to see if he is mentally competent enough to be released to a halfway house, or if he should continue to be detained.

It could be said that a more sympathetic portrait of the man is emerging. If he’s just some poor crazy fuck, can he really be held responsible for his actions? Legally, that’ll be up to the courts, and I’m glad we live in a country where mentally ill people are not held fully responsible. And yet people who live with him, or have dealt with him in recent years — see the previous entry here — have found him scary and intimidating. At what point do you stop being a harmless if abrasive nut and start being a dangerous creep? It’s not up to the victims of a bully to evaluate his mental state or even confront him if they believe they are in physical danger.

Meanwhile, KGO’s Dan Noyes reported (via Politico.com) that his mother said her son was the victim of bad influences like “Fox News, or all of those that are really radical.”

Gregory Lee Giusti

After the FBI hauled him away from his Tenderloin (of course!) subsidized housing building (of course!), his neighbors told TV reporters things like, “He was not one of my favorite people. He had a real attitude problem… I personally was afraid of him.”

He was even kicked out of a local church a few years ago for being “menacing while angry” and a general asshole. Apparently a tech geek (of course!), he rigged a system to make continuous harassing calls to church members.

But that photo gets me. It’s like a picture staged by The Onion to show a generic Tea Party protester all hot under the collar about Obama’s birth certificate, the New World Order, and the secret internment camps at Fort Irwin* for a story headlined “Local man can’t stand it when people won’t engage him in heated political discussion.”

*If this seems unnecessarily detailed, it’s because I’ve been reading up on right-wing paranoid drivel lately.

Potential citizens though, (i.e non-voters), will find out this weekend who their Congressional rep is, as House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi invites them to UC Hastings in the Civic Center area for a workshop designed to prepare them to make successful citizenship applications. The event is geared for permanent residents who are eligible to apply for citizenship but do not know where to begin the process, or cannot afford to hire someone to assist them with the complicated forms and applications. This is particularly relevant, since starting October 1st, the USCIS will begin administering a new redesigned naturalization test to new applicants (meaning an old cheat sheets might not help ya).

Apparently the 8 year process of redesigning the exam was meant to underpin American values and thematic concepts inherent in the Constitution. This new test, which has been criticized by some as being harder, is designed to end the rote memorization of facts & dates, and moves toward a more meaningful drill. Said the program’s director last year when plans were announced

“when you raise your hand and you swear allegiance to the U.S. you really ought to know what you’re swearing allegiance to.”

(To see a comparison PDF of the new test vs the old test, clickee here

New requirements include the English reading test, where applicants will be given up to three sentences and must be able to read one sentence correctly in order to pass. They also must answer 6 out of 10 civics/US History type questions correctly. Applicants also must form a conclusive sentence correctly after a topical question is dictated to them such as, “Who was the first President?” and then be expected to write an answer like, “Washington was the first President.”

A study list of vocabulary words that will be used in the dictation sentences is available at: http://www.uscis.gov/files/nativedocuments/writing_vocab.pdf.

A mp3 podcast summary of the test info here courtesy US Citizenship Podcast

Wanna see if you could handle the questions?

100 Naturalization Questions”
Naturalization Test MP3 Download

Speaker Pelosi’s Citizenship Workshop will take place on Saturday, September 20 from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at UC Hastings, 198 McAllister Street, in San Francisco.

For additional info, call the Speaker of the House’s office at
415-556-4862 ( after all it’s your phone too, you pay for it.)

As a longtime citizen, taxpayer and voter, years may go by without ever noticing exactly what your Congress-person does for you in their district. There are few, if any, neighborhood events, or seminars focused on small business (the supposed backbone of the city), with any sort of Congressional support, presence or representation that I’m aware of. In fact most of the time I rarely receive any word from elected officials unless they send something out when they want a vote in an upcoming election.

I suppose it’s nice to see the government reaching out to such a vulnerable community, but the cynic in me wonders why they do so little for those who are already here, like small business people who are supporting the system for decades and trying so hard.