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Politics Blog

Obama greeted with anti-pipeline protesters

04.04.13 - 10:04 am | Rebecca Bowe |
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Hundreds of protesters gathered in San Francisco’s upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood on April 3 to greet President Barack Obama with signs and chants opposing the Keystone XL pipeline. Nationwide, environmentalists have been pressuring the president in recent months to reject construction permits for the oil infrastructure project, which would transport oil to U.S. refineries from Canada's Alberta tar sands.

The president was in San Francisco for a $32,500 per person Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) fundraiser at the mansion of San Francisco billionaires Gordon and Ann Getty, preceded by a $5,000 per person cocktail reception hosted at the Sea Cliff residence of Tom Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund manager, and his wife Kat Taylor. Steyer and Taylor are vocal critics of the pipeline and have donated to environmental causes.

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No progress in condo conversion standoff, despite the Chron's spin

04.03.13 - 4:30 pm | Steven T. Jones |
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Perhaps it was just an unfunny April Fool's Day joke or some wishful political spin, but the San Francisco Chronicle's April 1 article about how tenancy-in-common owners and their political supporters are pushing legislation that would allow them to bypass the condo conversion lottery seriously misrepresented the city's biggest current political standoff.Read more »

Feds' use of spy tools under scrutiny due to privacy concerns

04.03.13 - 1:58 pm | Rebecca Bowe |
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If the FBI is trying to pinpoint the location of a suspect in your neighborhood, investigators could sweep up information from your mobile device just because you happen to be in proximity to their target. Civil liberties advocates are concerned that the practice is a major invasion of privacy.Read more »

Norquist exposes tax avoiders

04.03.13 - 10:53 am | Tim Redmond |
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I'm not a big fan of Grover Norquist, who will be in town April 4 and who is so against taxes that he apparently would have refused to pay his share of the cost of World War II (back when the government actually asked taxpayers to pay for wars as they were being fought, instead of pretending they were free and borrowing money that future generations will have to repay). Read more »

GOP 'dark wizard' and Occupy 'anti-leader' to speak in SF on the same day

04.02.13 - 4:32 pm | Rebecca Bowe |
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This coming Thursday, a central intellectual figure of the Occupy Wall Street movement will give a talk on “Austerity and its Discontents.” And across the city, at the very same time, powerful anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist will mix it up with an elite group of San Francisco Republicans (yes, they really do exist).Read more »

Tree-sitter shot, 70 feet up, by CHP rubber bullet

04.02.13 - 2:21 pm | Tim Redmond |
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Tree-sitting is nothing new. It's happened all over California, going back decades. It's a dangerous, but often effective protest tool that stops logging in its tracks.

Nobody with any official sanction is going to cut down a tree while there's a human perched in it -- and it's been notoriously difficult for the authorities to remove people from platforms high above the forest.

And now, in Mendocino County, police response has entered a new phase.Read more »

Behind the decision to accept cuts to in-home support services

04.02.13 - 10:49 am | Steven T. Jones |
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For the last four years, advocates for those with disabilities have successfully fought to stave off the 20 percent cut in In-Home Support Services that then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had proposed to help balance California's budget, each year winning legal injunctions preventing the cuts while the case wound it way through the federal court system.Read more »

DA’s office makeover may have skirted the rules

04.01.13 - 5:20 pm | Rebecca Bowe |
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In a San Francisco Chronicle article published March 31, District Attorney George Gascon was quoted as saying he would not “even bother to defend” his decision to accept payments and in-kind donations for office furniture, valued at $26,445, from a roster of influential donors.Read more »

The Guardian drone

04.01.13 - 5:03 pm | Rebecca Bowe |
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The Bay Guardian today unveiled a plan to take Bay Area journalism “to the next level,” by offering readers an up-close look at local politics through the use of disruptive, innovative, crowd-sourced, cutting-edge technology that was inspired by the sharing economy. Read more »

Scholarship fund for poor college reject

04.01.13 - 2:49 pm | Tim Redmond |
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The Bay Guardian Family Foundation has announced a special scholarship fundraising program to help Suzy Lee Weiss attend the college of her dreams.

Weiss, who slacked off four four years in High School watching The Real Housewives, revealed her plight in the Wall Street Journal, announcing that the elite schools of the US lied to her.Read more »