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Tobacco crackdowns target e-cigarettes, despite their lack of secondhand dangers, raising questions about the basis of current bans

This Week's Paper

Music Video Race, DNA rights, Jack Abramoff, Tablehopping, Seth Rogen, leather party, summer yoga guide, Ed Mock, more. Articles Online | Digital Edition (iPad, Android enhanced)

From the Blogs

The Warriors Arena: Art Agnos v. Gary Radnich

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Here's a fun one: former Mayor Art Agnos debating the Warriors arena with Gary Radnich and Larry Krueger. Radnich has always been my favorite sports guy, ever since his days on KRON TV (although Kruk and Kuip are the best live-action announcers), and Agnos is my favorite ex-mayor. (Lord, I gave him a hard time when he was in office, and he sometimes deserved it, but he's been great as a former.)Read more »

Reactionaries hate bicycles

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After perusing a rather bizarre Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal the other day on the issue of bicycles as instruments of totalitarianism and being reminded of the idea that bike paths are part of a "new world order'', I've been asking myself, what is it that right wingers have against goddamn bicycles?Read more »

Former Hayes Valley Farm site Occupied, renamed Gezi Gardens

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"We're doing this to help give the community a choice," Ayr told me, sweeping his arm out. "Everyone should have a voice when it comes to issues of land use and green space, which is rapidly disappearing in the city. That's why we're inviting the community to meet here tonight [Tue/4 at 6:30pm, also Sat/8 at 3pm] and see what we're about. This is a land liberation concept, we're calling it Free the Land, or Liberate the Land."

Ayr was leading me around the former site of Hayes Valley Farm, the lauded public experiment in urban farming on an undulating patch that used to be a freeway entrance, which has now been cleared to make way for a 185-unit development on half the the lot (low-income housing is slated eventually for the other half). 

Well, not quite cleared. Ayr was showing me around an Occupy-like scene, with an agricultural twist. 

Read more »

Kickstarter America's next war!

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Got an email this morning from the pressing plant down in OC that is stamping a three-song vinyl single I recorded earlier this year. Ready next week--hoo-hah! As I did one of these last year also, the drill begins again--mailers to vinyl specialists and radio and first and foremost, to the backers of this project. "SHE" is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign that I did last year.Read more »

Heads Up: 8 must-see concerts this week

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When does cute become cloying? Because this newly viral video of a baby playing along to the Beatles with his dad is seriously tickling me pink -- it's pretty damn adorable -- but after watching it a dozen or so times, it’s left me longing for something noisy and gross, just to wash off the darlingness of it all.

And the best shows this week are something of demonstrative polar opposites as well. There’s sugary Australian pop act Lenka, and fellow Aussie post-punks Total Control, then global dream popsters Trails and Ways, and metal battlecruiser Slough Feg, Americana punks Parquet Courts, and the Sunset Island fest, known as the "electronic music picnic." They are all in the mix.

Here are your must-see Bay Area concerts this week/end: Read more »

Trans March, Dyke March embrace Bradley Manning as trial begins

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The "Wikileaks court-martial" of Bradley Manning began yesterday -- as predicted, it opened "with dueling portrayals of a traitor who endangered the lives of his fellow soldiers [the government's characterization] and of a principled protester motivated by a desire to help society who carefully selected which documents to release [Manning's defense]," writes Charlie Savage in the New York Times

As that was happening, the SF Trans March stated on its Facebook page, "The San Francisco Trans March will be honoring Bradley Manning on June 28th at the opening of the 2013 PRIDE weekend!!" Manning has identified as transgender; the Trans March organizers stated that they are "retaining Manning's male name and pronoun at the request of his people." (If Manning's attorneys do indeed introduce gender dysphoria as a defense strategy, as they have stated, it will certainly add another layer to this complex story.) 

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The incoherence of the American right

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According to the American Right, circa now, the following are truisms:

The bias in the liberal media is crippling the valiant patriot but to re-implement the Fairness Doctrine (where both sides would get equal time) stifles the same valiant patriot.

An undocumented immigrant must wait ten years and pay massive fines to become an American citizen or at least work here legally and that's nowhere near the imposition of a half hour background check.Read more »

Zynga implosion shows the danger in SF's technophilia

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We’ve long been skeptical of the overblown and self-interested claims by tech titans and their political allies that this dot-com boom changes everything and that it could never go bust, like last time. Read more »

In which drag queens read Amanda Bynes tweets and the Internet temporarily boomerangs

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Have you ever tweeted with such dedication and furor that you reached a higher plane? That the world fell away and you were left with the impression that, through a series of carefully crafted @'s and acronyms, you could express life's true wonder? I have, courtesy a stage full of drag queens performing Amanda Bynes' Internet breakdown/meta-world breakthrough on Friday night. 

Today, Amanda Bynes called RuPaul ugly and she may have gotten another nose job. Go ahead and don't read up on the situation if you have no idea who Amanda Bynes is because as she's fond of telling us, EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW YOU CAN READ ON TWITTER and below are my tweets from that magical Friday night. Read more »

Google and Wikileaks: The takedown

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By now half the Internet has read the New York Times piece Julian Assange wrote on Google. In theory, it's sort of an analysis of "The New Digital Age," a book by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and former State Department official Jared Cohen, which got a lukewarm review in the Times a month ago. Read more »

Some wins, some losses in Sacto

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The state Assembly and Senate passed the usual flurry of bills on May 31, the last day for initial-house approval, with some unusual drama that temporarily sidelined a medical-marijuana bill by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano.

By the time it was all over, several other Ammiano bills passed, a measure by Assemblymember Phil Ting to ease the way for a Warriors arena on the waterfront won approval, and state Sen. Mark Leno got most of his major legislation through.Read more »

Mt Everest and tantrum-tossing talk junkies

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The world has been rather ugly of late, hasn't it? From man-made horrors in Turkey as the government sprays its people with agent orange to Syria's unending conflict to Mother Nature's wrath in Oklahoma--more trouble every day as the Mothers sang in 1966. So when I saw an article on Mt. Read more »

Lou Reed's not so perfect day

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Last Friday, it was revealed that Velvet Underground co-founder and occasionally proclaimed "godfather of punk rock" Lou Reed had undergone a life-saving liver transplant in Cleveland. Reed, 71 was "dying" according to his third wife, Laurie Anderson. She says that Reed is already improving and up and around doing tai chi, but that "he will never be completely better''.Read more »

Sonny Bono, inventor of punk rock

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Did Sonny Bono invent punk rock?

"I Got You, Babe" and "The Beat Goes On" are at root the most primitive songs of the era--just as nean Read more »

Jean Stapleton, RIP

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Jean Stapleton, best known as "Edith Bunker" on TV's "All In The Family", passed away in New York. She was 90.

Not only was she an actress of amazing skill and poise, but consider the obvious: There would never be an "All In The Family" today (discounting cartoons like "The Simpsons" or "Family Guy").Read more »