‘Mayor Lee is banning all consultants who are working on mayoral campaigns from working on his ballot measures,” said the email I got exactly one month ago from a local consultant.
Read More
Even Ed Lee probably couldn’t tell you exactly when he decided he wanted to run for mayor, with all the months of chanting and back-patting and the regular city business at hand.
But my guess is that last week, as he stood next to President Barack Obama and Willie Mays inside the White House he thought: You know, I could get used to this.
Read More
Here in the land of easy outrage and protest, I hope it’s not too late to ask our fist-pumping agitators to occasionally get it right.
Like maybe express anger over the senseless shooting of 11-year-old Linda Ngo in the Western Addition last week by reputed gangbangers who recklessly fired bullets in the air.
Or perhaps you could work up a froth over the fact that BART police still carry firearms, and hold a rally calling for them to be re-stocked with pellet guns.
Read More
How does a law regulating emissions become a law protecting circumcision? In Sacramento, the practice is called “gut and amend” and it is a tactic commonly used to get urgent bills in front of the governor for signature. The regular legislative calendar requires that all bills for any legislative session be introduced by a certain date — this year it was Feb. 18. Of course, the world keeps on turning after that date, so sometimes someone has to take a previously introduced bill and make it a new, more important one.
Read More
There were a lot of tearful hugs down at city courtrooms this past week, just the kind of thing you would expect in a place filled with daily legal drama.
But the emotions didn’t belong to the usual lineup of defendants and families, it was hitting the court reporters and clerks who were overwhelmed by an unprecedented round of layoffs triggered by budget cuts courtesy of the governor and state legislators.
Read More
If life went according to script, we could write our own endings.
But no one knows better than Chris Cunnie that the plot rarely follows suit. If so, we wouldn’t have a scenario where the old sheriff is about to tell an aspiring sheriff there’s actually a new sheriff in town.
Read More
At almost four hours long, Thursday’s Board of Supervisors Rules Committee meeting was more than any sane person could sit through. And so, I give you my summary of what happened when supervisors Sean Elsbernd, Mark Farrell and Jane Kim heard testimony about certain measures headed for the November ballot because activists wrote a law and four supervisors signed it. First is the proposal to prevent “all recreation facilities” from being “leased to private entities.” This one was signed by supervisors John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar and Ross Mirkarimi.
Read More
There was considerable consternation last week when a minor California politician from a place most people can’t find on a map offered the suggestion that the state should be split in two, a kind of red-versus-blue version of our once-golden place.
The proposal got a lot of knees jerking and a number of tongues flapping, and you have to wonder why. After all, the idea is so 1850s.
Read More
The road of good intentions is filled with unavoidable obstacles, which makes you wonder why San Francisco insists on adding to the clutter.
And for a town bent on community input for decisions big and small, you would have to question why city officials seem to go out of their way to avoid their own designated process.
Read More
“Mayor’s question time is this Tuesday,” I mentioned to my friend as I perused the Board of Supervisors agenda for today’s meeting. “Oh, you mean that thing where Mayor Lee shows up at the board with scripted responses to scripted questions and doesn’t really tell us anything?” my friend said. “That’s the one!”
Read More
URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/archive/17516/17516?page=12
