tredmond@sfbg.com

I have friends — progressives, activists, good people — who support Ed Lee for mayor. They tell me that Lee is accessible, that he listens to labor and grassroots community groups, that he's going to be good on a lot of issues and that, compared to the mayors we've had in the past 30 years or so, he won't be all that bad.

I respect that. I understand. But I try to remind them, and anyone else who's listening, that the years when Willie Brown ran this town were really, really bad.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.comRead more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

August is a bad time to split town. When I left for vacation a couple of weeks ago, Ed Lee was just starting to act like a candidate in a slow-developing mayor's race. Nobody except my lunatic pal h. brown had any inkling that Public Defender Jeff Adachi would jump into the Room 200 sweepstakes at the last minute. And the Giants were three games up.Read more »

marke@sfbg.com

“We live in turbulent times,” my uncle observed last Saturday. He’s right: the world is roiling.

This past week alone: 100,000 students marched in Santiago, Chile to protest education cuts. (The protest turned violent on Friday when police used excessive force and tear-gassed the crowd.) On Saturday, 300,000 people from across the political spectrum marched in Israel, mainly to protest rising housing costs. (A million-person march is planned for next week.)Read more »

steve@sfbg.com

When a crowd of less than two dozen people watched an eight-foot wooden man burn on Baker Beach during the Summer Solstice of 1986, could any of them have possibly imagined that the ritual would repeat itself 25 years later in Nevada's Black Rock Desert before a sold-out crowd of more than 50,000 people?Read more »

So now I'm really confused.

State Assemblymember Tom Ammiano met July 18 with representatives of BART and the BART Police (three BART lobbyists, a deputy chief, and a sergeant). He wanted to get some sense of what's going on with the investigation into the Civic Center shooting. Ammiano had pushed last year for legislation forcing BART to create a civilian oversight agency for the cops; instead, BART created its own police auditor position.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

I'm not prone to agreeing with right-wing nuts from Riverside County, but there's a county supervisor down there named Jeff Stone who has a dandy idea. He wants to secede.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Stone is proposing that 13 counties in the southland and inland empire split off and become their own state, which would be called South California. We're talking everything south of Madera, with the coastal counties (and Los Angeles) left behind. A real conservative haven of low taxes and limited regulation.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.comRead more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

I'm not going to tell Ed Lee he can't run for mayor. I know he promised he wasn't going to. I know that if he hadn't made that promise, he wouldn't have had the six votes to win the office. I think Lee believed at the time that he didn't want to run in November, and he may believe it now.

But this is still a democracy, and if Lee thinks the situation has changed and he's the only person who can properly lead the city over the next four years, he ought to put his name forward.Read more »

marke@sfbg.comRead more »