A coalition from across San Francisco is hoping to make tomorrow – Friday, Jan. 20 – a monumental day in the history of Bay Area activism, the Occupy movement, and the fight against home foreclosures and other manifestations of corporate greed.Organizers call the day of protests, marches, street theater, pickets, and more “Occupy Wall Street West.”

Those that urged Occupy protesters to focus in on a list of demands should be pleased, as the day includes a list of demands on banks, including a moratorium on foreclosures and an end to predatory and speculative loans.

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Mayor Ed Lee talked to the Examiner about his plans for the next year, and it's a lot of the usual political crap: I'm going to create jobs, I'm going to bring people together and promote civility, ho hum. But he did mention, briefly, the need to change the city's business tax, and here's how he put it:Read more »

Chris Daly, a pivotal organizer of progressive politics during his decade on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, has returned to a high-profile role in the movement. Last month, he went to work for Service Employees International Union Local 1021, the city's largest public employee year. And today, he was named its interim political director.Read more »

Some days, you wake up, check the news, and wonder just what the hell happened to this country. And I'm not talking about that nutty right-wing view that we've strayed from the original vision laid out for us by the authors of the Constitution or the Bible. I have just the opposite view: I'm wondering why those people seem so intent on dragging us back into the bad old days of bygone centuries, when white male property owners ran things as they saw fit.Read more »

You never know what you're going to get on Slate, which tends toward the neo-liberal and sometimes libertarian, but I just read a particularly awful piece by technology writer Farhad Manjoo, who thinks that local bookstores are economically inefficient and should just go away:Read more »

An internal Bank of America email has surfaced, making it clear that the megabank is concerned about the national day of action against evictions and foreclosures being carried out today, Dec. 6, by the Occupy Wall Street movement. The leaked internal memo suggests BofA is taking Occupy housing actions very seriously.

According to the email, which was sent to BofA's third-party Field Services suppliers, the nationwide protests "could impact our industry." Read more »

Right now, all the signs say no -- the economy isn't improving, he's pissing off his base, the GOP kicked his ass in the 2010 midterms, and a vast majority of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. But then, at this time in 1991, all the signs said that George Bush I was unbeatable.

And then, of course, you have the Republican candidates.Read more »