Anyone who's played one-on-one against Mayor Newsom's gotta have some game! Look at the fire in Fiona's eyes in this picture! Bring! It! On!

After a fairly moribund start (for our purposes, "moribund" means "not too terribly hilarious in that car-wreck kind of way that we like") to the SF West-siiiiiide State Assembly race between Fiona Ma and Tori Spelling Janet Reilly (wife of the famously-aggressive political strategist Clint Reilly), where the candidates have agreed on almost everything except school exit exams and the death penalty (Fiona is against the first and for the second, Reilly is the opposite), things heated up today with the first use of the word "Nixonian." Yes!

According to Ma, Reilly's people faked her name on IRS filings and have been falsely telling everyone that she was the treasurer in the 2002 campaign for Mike Rounds, the anti-abortion South Dakota governor. Ma is pro-choice. The Examiner did some research and found out that the Reilly campaign has been emailing Mark Leno and NARAL about it. Reilly's people (through Eric Jaye, Newsom's old campaign guy) now say they didn't fake anything, don't know if it's correct or not, and are now trying to find out from the IRS why Fiona's name is listed on those forms.

Why would Fiona Ma be working on a campaign in South Dakota, anyways? We can barely get her to work on campaigns in San Francisco!

We're launching a new sporadic political column, following Fiona Ma and Janet Reilly's battle for the 12th Assembly District. If anyone's got a better name for this column, post it in the comments!