Okay, John McCain has yet another problem with his connections to crazy bigoted preachers. Check this out.

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Posted by Tim Redmond at 06:02 PM • Comments (0)

Judge Marla Miller appeared poised May 9th to finalize a $15.6 million award to the Bay Guardian and to issue an injunction barring SF Weekly from continuing to sell ads below cost.

In a post-trial hearing on the Guardian’s lawsuit against the Weekly and its chain parent, Miller said she was inclined to rule that some, but not all of the damages a jury awarded to the Guardian in March should be trebled. And she said in a tentative ruling that she was prepared to issue an order forbidding the Weekly from engaging in further predatory behavior.

The ruling hit the front page of Sfgate this afternoon with the headline "SF Weekly loses big, again."

Continue reading "Guardian poised for legal victory" »

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Posted by Tim Redmond at 05:44 PM • Comments (1)

Image from sfgreenparty.org

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi kicks off his campaign for reelection this evening at Yoshi's Jazz Club in the heart of the Fillmore. The Board of Supervisors' only Green Party member is popular in his District 5 -- made up of the super lefty Haight and crime-plagued Western Addition, where Mirkarimi has shown real leadership in pushing police foot patrols and other reforms -- and is expected to cruise to a relatively easy victory.

But today's event carries a far larger symbolic significance: it is the beginning of a long campaign to create a progressive narrative for San Francisco that counters the centrist and fairly superficial approach of Mayor Gavin Newsom. And that's a struggle that will carry through this fall's high-stakes supervisorial elections, into the vote for a new board president in January, and on into the next mayor's race -- all of which could feature Mirkarimi in a starring role.

Continue reading "More than just Mirkarimi's kickoff" »

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Posted by Steven T. Jones at 11:51 AM • Comments (1)

By Marc Salomon
Sweet turnabout at the Planning Commission last evening. Who of us on the east side can forget the heady days of the dot.com boom, when Willie Brown was running the City like a personal piggy bank for his developer cronies (instead of Newsom who gives it all away and gets nothing in return) which resulted in live work lofts sprouting like bulky tall mushrooms throughout the Mission, SOMA and the 3d street corridor?

The language used to justify these yuppie monstrosities was truly twisted, most of it mouthed by Willie Brown's short leashed then-Planning Commission president Anita Theoharis. The logic went as follows: we need more housing, so let's build live work lofts. We can build live work lofts in the districts zoned industrial, where housing is banned, because live work lofts are not housing. This reasoning enriched the builders while impoverishing the community as lofts were not charged for their impacts like housing because, silly, lofts are not housing.

But things have changed now.

Continue reading "The new San Francisco Planning Commission" »

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Posted by Steven T. Jones at 11:25 AM • Comments (0)

Editor & Publisher is reporting that the San Francisco Examiner will be creating a Sunday edition of the paper and also expanding its Thursday edition. Right now it's published six days a week. It will also be scaling back home delivery of the free paper -- residents have been enraged over them piling up on their porches -- to Thursday and Sunday.

It seems odd that a newspaper company would be growing its deadwood edition when so many dailies are laying people off and trimming back operating expenses. But one theory says that the Examiner papers, which are also available in Washington and Baltimore, are popular even among younger readers because they're free, easy to pick up on the way to public transit and contain mostly boiled down local coverage. The company that owns the Examiner, Clarity Media Group, took over the Examiner in 2004 after the Fang family nearly ran it into the ground.

Continue reading "Examiner expanding to Sundays" »

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Posted by G.W. Schulz at 06:02 PM • Comments (0)

We're getting word of a big standoff going on right now at San Francisco's Jewish Community Center on California Street, where 30 Jewish activists protesting Israel's policy toward Palestinians have blockaded the doors during an event celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel. Police have reportedly shown up on the scene of the "No Time to Celebrate" protest, which also includes another 40 or so Jewish and Palestinian supporters, and arrests are expected.

Mayor Gavin Newsom just returned from a trip to Israel, where he told The Jerusalem Post that much of the criticism by Bay Area residents of Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians and its longstanding military occupation of parts of Syria, Lebanon and Egypt was simply anti-Semitism, something these Semitic anti-war activists just might take issue with.

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Posted by Steven T. Jones at 03:31 PM • Comments (3)

Officials at the Golden Gate Bridge are pondering a $7 toll. In early April, we brought you a story outlining why the bridge district was facing a $91 million long-term deficit. Part of the reason is that it operates a transit system that's incredibly expensive. We all love public transit, of course, but the Golden Gate Bridge's bus and ferry system, we discovered, isn't all that efficient. (By the way, it took us a damn long time to understand how the feds crunch transit efficiency figures, but once we figured it out, it made a lot of sense.)

We also showed that the district's overloaded board of directors contained members who received health insurance coverage through the district, but they also obtained it in the towns where they lived and worked as local public officials. One guy even got three layers of health coverage. Inducements to get out of the car, like high gas prices and bridge tolls, in the long run seem like a good idea. But it doesn't look like higher tolls are going to save the bridge district from its long-term debt and organizational problems.

Continue reading "Tolls going up at Golden Gate" »

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Posted by G.W. Schulz at 03:29 PM • Comments (0)

I've accomplished a difficult feat that may become impossible in coming years: I rented a room in a decent neighborhood in San Francisco for $550. It wasn't easy. Searching Craigslist, spamming my friends, and looking at about 20 apartments over the last couple weeks has been like having another part-time job. And my success story was only the result of finding a tiny room in a rent-controlled four-bedroom apartment where some good friends live.
Rents and the number of apartment-seekers are both on the rise and the number of rental units is falling, a perfect storm hitting low-income San Franciscans who hope to stay in The City.

"The rents are definitely going up on the vacant units, and for various reasons, the supply is declining," says Ted Gullicksen, executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union. Some of those reasons include condo conversions (which number 2500 since 2003, according to the latest Planning Department figures), demolitions, temporarily rented SoMa condos taken off the rental market, and would-be home owners driven to rent by foreclosures, still-high prices, and fear that they bottom still hasn't been reached (check here for some interesting rental data compiled from Craigslist listings).

Continue reading "Rising rents in San Francisco" »

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Posted by Steven T. Jones at 04:53 PM • Comments (19)

Steven Moss, of SF Community Power, an organization that does energy efficiency work with small businesses, sent us an analysis showing we don’t need the peaker power plants.

Check it out. (It’s an Excel file.)

“This is all publicly available data,” Moss told us. “And all the data is right there. People can mess with it any way they want,” he added, encouraging number crunchers to dig into the spreadsheet.

For example, the tab titled “DC Line 72 Trans” was generated “based on Cal-ISO’s claim that 28 percent of transmission is not available,” said Moss. According to their analysis, with the Transbay Cable online, we’d still have a 100-megawatt cushion of extra power.

Moss said the data was collated and crunched by James Fine, an economist for the Environmental Defense Fund, and Richard McCann, of M.Cubed, who doesn’t seem like a slouch either.

Fine told me they did the analysis about a year ago and it came from questioning whether or not the city needed the 400 megawatt Transbay Cable. They assumed we’d have the peakers and factored them in. Now we’re getting the cable but questioning if we need the peakers, so the data’s the same but the question is different. Moss presented this data to the Mayor's office last week. Mayor Newsom's support for the peakers seems to have waned a bit recently.

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Posted by Amanda Witherell at 04:50 PM • Comments (1)

Just heard from Mark Leno that Lynn Woolsey, the popular Democratic Congressional Rep. from the North Bay, has endorsed him for state Senate. I suspect Woolsey, like many of us, has come to believe that, for better or for worse, this is a two-person race at this point between Leno and Joe Nation.

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Posted by Tim Redmond at 04:35 PM • Comments (7)

Among the most fascinating items in a day when the pundits declared the race over, no less than George McGovern told Clinton to drop out and Drudge reported that superdelegates don't want to meet with her: CNN says Dianne Feinstein, a superdelegate and Clinton loyalist, has been trying to reach the candidate for two days and can't get her calls returned.

I saw Hillary on TV last night vowing to fight on, and talking about seating the Michigan and Florida delegations, which would tear the Democratic convention apart and almost hand the election to McCain. But the Clinton campaigning is clearly circling the drain. She's canceled all public appearances today; maybe she's getting ready to do the right thing for the party and call it quits.

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Posted by Tim Redmond at 01:23 PM • Comments (1)

Just got a call from the folks over at Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles in Oakland. They're involved with a press conference that will take place today at noon calling on the city of Oakland to deal with a spate of recent aggressive robberies on Grand Avenue. Uhuru endured a takeover robbery on Sunday that left eight customers and two employees short of $1,000 in cash. Silver Screen Video at 3850 Grand Ave. has been robbed twice recently, as has Grand-Piedmont Liquors.

The press conference will be held at Uhuru, 3742 Grand Avenue, in Oakland.

“We recognize that the robbery at Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles and the increased robberies of Oakland businesses go hand in hand with the sharp escalation of desperate poverty of Oakland’s black community,” store coordinator Joel Hamburger said in a presser. “Although we denounce this attack on our nonprofit work, we are calling on the city to respond in a way that will not exacerbate the terrible conditions in the African community but address the root causes of crime and poverty.”

Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles is a nonprofit project of the African People’s Education and Defense Fund (APEDF) that relies on support from community donations. Residents are mad about the robberies, but organizers of today's press conference want the city to respond by improving economic development in the neighborhood.

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Posted by G.W. Schulz at 10:43 AM • Comments (0)

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates there were about 765,000 people living in San Francisco last year, down from about 777,000 in 2000. But a pro business non-profit group called Social Compact came out with a study a few months ago that claims our population is closer to 865,000 -- and that we're wealthier than official estimates because of our underground economy and other factors -- so Mayor Gavin Newsom has announced that he's challenging the Census figures to try to get us some more money.

“Every San Franciscan counts, and I am serious about ensuring San Francisco receives our fair share of federal
and state funding and attention,” Newsom said in a press release that went out less than an hour ago. “We can use this new data to attract high quality retailers to our under-served markets and make sure we develop the neighborhoods that have been unfairly under-counted.”

Continue reading "How many San Franciscans are there?" »

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Posted by Steven T. Jones at 07:14 PM • Comments (2)

Seems that Erin Brockovich is testing levels of methane and hazardous chemicals at a Lennar housing complex in South Carolina. The EPA previously tested the site and claimed all was well, but Brockovich is challenging those results. Hardly the kind of sound bite that Lennar's well-financed Prop. G supporters in San Francisco were hoping for.

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Posted by Sarah Phelan at 06:04 PM • Comments (0)

Early Monday morning about a hundred citizens gathered in front of City Hall to protest the construction of two natural gas-burning "peaker" power plants in the city -- one at the airport and one in the Bayview/Portero district. Representatives opposed to the plan, from a coalition of 20 different environmental and social justice organizations, articulated in so many ways that San Francisco should be moving toward green energy and away from fossil fuels.

Then the crowd, about 100 strong, filed inside to speak their minds about it at a Government Audit and Oversight Committee hearing -- last stop for the plan before it heads to the full Board of Supervisors. But 10 hours later, only a handful of people were still in the room when the chance to speak was finally given.

The insanely long hearing had a loaded agenda, with topics ranging from funding the airport to defunding Edgewood foster care center, not to mention six separate bits of legislation related to the peaker power plants. The public comment requests were piled high and proceedings slammed to a halt during Item #5 when Stephanie Gates, a rep for Edgewood, fainted to the floor in the middle of her testimony about foster care in San Francisco.

It was well into the evening and most of the audience had left for home or work by the time talk finally turned to the peakers.

Continue reading "Peaker Plan moving forward" »

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Posted by Amanda Witherell at 11:29 AM • Comments (2)