A year ago we had a “caretaker” mayor selected through Huey Long-style backroom negotiations. Although Ed Lee had staunchly maintained that he did not desire to be mayor, through a series of convoluted machinations we have been set up to have him for another four years.
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If you walk down the sidewalk swinging a 6-foot (or longer) chain over your head, the San Francisco police will arrive to put a stop to that threateningly anti-social behavior.
But if instead of swinging a chain, you clip a dog to one end of the chain and clear a 6-foot swath of sidewalk out of your way, the behavior is not generally thought to be anti-social. Indeed, anyone who dares to suggest that dog owners rein in their pet is sneeringly dismissed as “anti-dog.”
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The San Francisco Examiner has done good coverage on the huge overtime pay that off-duty “10B” police officers earn by charging private security clients like ballgames and party promoters. The top “moonlighter” last year made $82,695 in overtime alone, certainly far more than I make owning and operating a small business, and far in excess of San Franciscans’ $56,000 average income.
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Mayor Ed Lee was shocked by two brief power outages during this month’s televised Monday night 49ers game. He called it a “national embarrassment,” demanded an investigation and promised to make sure it “doesn’t happen again.”
I have lived on Treasure Island since 1999. Recently we had six power outages in 30 days. One lasted six hours, another nine hours and two outages on Thanksgiving totaled 10 hours. There are 2,500 people living here, one-third low income and many disabled.
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Hopefully the time has come for Mayor Ed Lee to take some time to carefully examine the dysfunctional Care Not Cash program. That misguided plan robs San Franciscans desperately seeking to extricate themselves from sleeping in shelters and going hungry.
City shelters house a collection of difficult individuals, including the mentally ill, and are staffed by some employees who are guilty of misconduct or poorly equipped to perform their jobs effectively.
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Many dog owners are inconsiderate. Most apartments and houses in this city have yards, yet these people take their dog to leave their droppings on other people’s property. I always tell the dog owners my flowers are not for their dogs to urinate on. These inconsiderate people always get mad at me. Then they come back and we argue again. They think just because they have a dog we should all love dogs.
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During the NFL preseason, the 49ers and the Raiders played their annual exhibition game. Fighting erupted in the stands. There must have been a spontaneous reaction as fights broke out in several locations.
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PG&E is in the national news again, this time for two power outages during the televised Monday 49ers game. PG&E says it can be blamed for only one of the outages and the cause is unknown, although there are pictures of a transformer on the Candlestick property blowing up.
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How much longer must the world wait for the United Nations to take serious action against Iran’s nuclear weapons program?
Of course the leaders of that rogue nation tell us that their nuclear endeavors are strictly for energy production, but all of us, including the U.N. Security Council, are sure that weapons of mass destruction are their goal.
It’s no surprise that the Security Council is dragging its feet, because after all, so many of those members are in bed with Iran anyway.
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San Francisco Planning Commissioner Michael Antonini’s statement about the America’s Cup, and that he “can’t think of another event, truthfully, since the ’39 World’s Fair that will be worldwide recognition for The City” is woefully shallow. With or without the 2013 America’s Cup yacht race, San Francisco’s worldwide recognition is already solidly established.
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Thursday’s San Francisco Examiner front-page news story about the Board of Supervisors’ resolution blasting the $700 billion U. S. military budget injected political opinion. The story sarcastically stated that the supervisors were “too busy crafting unsolicited foreign policy positions” to realize that the “city of San Francisco is not a member of the United Nations.”
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Lately there has been controversy about the Muni operators’ trust fund payout. The prevailing view seems to be that it was wrong to pay us that money in today’s economic climate.
This money is supposed to be from a trust fund set up in 1968, following passage of Proposition G in November 1967. The fund was set up to reimburse us for the money we had to pay to have health coverage for our dependents, because until this July we did not have coverage for our dependents. It has never been a “bonus” and was never supposed to come out of the general fund.
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The planning code for our city of 800,000 residents has grown to 3,000 pages. Why was it necessary to create such a code, which architects and the public can’t read and can’t use to find references and digests for every situation? It hurts everyone in terrible ways.
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In his Thursday op-ed, Ed Reiskin, exeutive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, stated that he would “seek all solutions” in his effort to improve Muni. Unfortunately he is not being quite truthful.
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San Francisco democracy needs to bring back legitimacy to the electoral process by eliminating ranked choice. The runoff system guarantees that those elected would always have the endorsement of the majority of the voters. In a runoff election, voters do not need further clarification, as Supervisor Scott Wiener pointed out.
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