There might well be a serious argument to be made that public financing of political campaigns would be an improvement over today’s big contributor-driven system. Too bad Proposition 89 is not it.This convoluted, 55-page initiative was moved onto the ballot by the California Nurses Association and a trial lawyer front group. It would be a pipe dream for political reform and a veritable fountainhead of unintended consequences.
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Let’s be serious. In order to get cleaner fuels and domesticate the animalistic behavior of the oil companies, you cannot do it by rolling up a newspaper and swatting those companies. Nor can you do it by persuading a majority of California’s voters to mark their ballots as if to say: "Hesto presto, clean air!"
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Let’s be serious. In order to get cleaner fuels and domesticate the animalistic behavior of the oil companies, you cannot do it by rolling up a newspaper and swatting those companies. Nor can you do it by persuading a majority of California’s voters to mark their ballots as if to say: "Hesto presto, clean air!"
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Fourteen years ago, Dianne Feinstein could have left public service at what others would have considered a pinnacle. As an accomplished San Francisco supervisor and mayor, in times that required sure-handed crisis management, she had nonetheless failed in her bid to become California’s governor. The private life surely looked sweet.
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Especially now, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s unprecedented destructiveness, Californians tend to be dismayed when they first learn about the state’s flood control levees. Many of them — particularly those around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta — are more than 100 years old and made from compacted earth.
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A federal judge has indicated she will not grant the San Francisco Unified School District an extension to finish the first round of disability access improvements required under a 2004 legal settlement. Known as the Lopez case, the district settled the class-action lawsuit by agreeing to a rigid timeline to modernize nearly 100 of its facilities to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
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For too long San Francisco’s supervisors have imagined themselves the consciences of the world. Perhaps because of The City’s intense cosmopolitanism and sheer beauty, it’s easy to be seduced into thinking this place really is the center of the universe.There have been too many occasions whensuch thinking has turned the Board of Supervisors into something just short of a circus. To be fair, it didn’t start with the current board.
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North Korea brags wickedly that it has tested a nuclear bomb and elsewhere in the world, still other ominous events collaborate in pointing the mind toward the poet William Butler Yeats and his much-quoted but ever-powerful, enduring lines in "The Second Coming.""Things fall apart; the center cannot hold," he wrote, and the words seem apt as we think of a world that knows so little order that North Korea’s murderous, Stalinist regime willfully ignores the near-universal plea that it put aside the birthing of this death device.
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The Mission is getting a new soccer field as part of a pilot program designed to give The City’s children more places to play team sports. The artificial turffield at Harrison and 26th streets is the work of the City Fields Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to provide more sports fields in all of the city’s neighborhoods.The foundation aims to improve kids’ everyday lives, spokesman Patrick Hannan said.The foundation has kicked in $4.5 million to fund the projects for the public-private partnership with The City.
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One of the most important roles of local government is to make sure we are safe in our homes and neighborhoods. For the last six years, I’ve tackled public safety issues from San Francisco’s point of view — balancing additional funding for public safety with new, smart investments in communities to prevent violent crime, improve fire safety, strengthen emergency preparedness and provide pathways of hope and opportunity to those at greatest risk.
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URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/archive/19/19?page=452&L=registration.register&quicktabs_6=0
