It's kind of an interesting Presidential Race in that two of the leading Republican contenders, Romney and Guiliani, are basing their campaigns on bashing the liberal bastions they governed. The obvious reason is to throw some red meat at conservatives by saying not only are they not actually liberal, but that they based most of their governance on beating back gays, Jews, and dark skinned people liberals. So Rudy just put a commercial out saying that he tamed "America's Most Liberal City." This didn't sit well with New Yawkers, however, and Douglas A. Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College, fought back and said, “Blame San Francisco. We’re not No. 1.” more ›

Monica Lewinsky's interest level in working for SF city government just went up a notch, as the SF Board of Supes overwhelmingly voted down Chris Daly's proposal to ban office affairs between supervisors and supervisees. (No, not affairs with supervisors like Chris Daly is a supervisor, affairs with supervisors like your boss. We could probably get a proposition on the ballot barring affairs between the San Francisco Supervisors and their constituents, though -- because, come on, ew.) more ›

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos threw down some serious shade today. "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies," he cried, shaming two senior Yahoo officials. Why? Because the Sunnyvale company named names, handing over private information about Chinese journalist Shi Tao's online pro-democracy action to country officials. (Or, as the New York Times so eloquently put it, their "complicity with an oppressive communist regime." Oh snap.) This landed... more ›

Good news for students of the struggle of the proletariat: even if you don't have time to read Marx, there are alternatives. Like Paul Krugman, Harpers, Howard Zin, Noam Chomsky, the Guardian of London -- and even our very own home-grown SF Bay Guardian. more ›

Reginald Ross, 39, of San Francisco died today after getting struck by a 15-ton shipping container while working aboard the CMS Stuttgart Express. Due to the incident, all longshore workers halted shiploading for the day, and won't return until tomorrow morning. more ›

The way Wired's Noah Shachtman sees things struck us as astonishingly clear and pragmatic in reference to the Lawrence Livermore lab's partnership with Texas A&M. more ›

The Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, gave a speech to the World Affairs Council at San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel yesterday, but was upstaged by a few gay (or bear) activists. more ›

--Check out Ross Mirkarimi's Gavin hair! Didn't someone else try this too? more ›

Esther Hwang picked a bad day for a press conference -- normally, the media would be all over the former Willie Brown secretary turned cheesecake model turned San Francisco Law School student discussing the $1 million lawsuit she's filed against the SFPD for alleged brutality against her outside a North Beach bar -- but with everyone distracted by Ed Jew's flight from the law, Carole Migden's cancer-related bad driving, and in a city that now expects out of its mayoral girlfriends underage drinking, sordid affairs with best friends' wives, and/or misjudged blog commentary, Ms. Hwang's press conference seemed like a quaint trip in the San Francisco wayback machine to the last century. more ›

The University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute has just published a study on the effectiveness of a new method to reduce greenhouse gas emission in California . While it may seem strange that an out-of-state university is concerning itself in California's affairs, we'll take it: the findings are pretty encouraging. more ›

In the wake of the horrible Walter Reed National Army Medical Center scandal in Washington, we asked ourselves what we could do to make a difference for wounded veterans here in San Francisco. Here's how: we've got Veterans Affairs hospitals of our own in the city. more ›

Get ready to go down a transit rabbit hole. more ›

Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that we caught wind of a rumor that the NextMuni website is headed for an upgrade in the very near future. Ooh, that be lovely news, wouldn't it? It sure would be swell if all of the electric lines suddenly became available on the site. What a dandy state of affairs. Huzzah. more ›

-Berkeley joins in on the Stadium fun. -Dems already start in with in-fighting: Pelosi backs John Murtha over Steny Hoyer. What kind of name is Steny anyways? more ›

Our capable and attractive SFist Editor Jon has been all over this story like Sara Lee on cherry pie. Bless him. more ›

Remember that guy who totally hated on Tristan Bettencourt and posted a web site with all sorts of nasty rumors about him? Well, that's nothing compared to what's been put out on Rob Black, one of the candidates running against Chris Daly in District 6. You may think that Rob comes off as one of those aging hipster types who looks like Ted from "Queer Eye", a nice enough guy with an impressive resume of political involvement, but you would be wrong. See, according to the site, Meet Rob Black, Rob Black is actually some deep-undercover ops guy who single-handedly brought oppression, war, and dictatorships to several third world countries. more ›

Just in time for the fall election, a juicy new book is about to be released by one of Arnie's ex's. And wouldn't it be great to achieve such a level of fame that all your ex's write books about you? Err... maybe not. more ›

Public art is often the butt of jokes and viewed with contempt, along with performance art and washed up aging rockers on the county fair circuit. Whatever your feelings are about the role of government in the arts, many people support public art in theory, and its civic impact is meager compared to contracts for garbage disposal, cable television, and towing. Public art controversies are noteworthy in that one sees people get twisted knickers over something being ugly or, to put it politely, "compositionally unresolved." (Personally, we wonder if Baby Suri isn¹t compositionally unresolved.) more ›

We've been closely following this strange attempt by Bevan & Friends to put a stop to Halloween parties in the Castro -- including private house parties. Check out the coverage of Bevan's Wednesday meeting on our Party-Party friends' site; party member Adam reports that the meeting was populated mostly by businesspeople, not residents, and that the primary complains were that revelers relieved themselves in locations other than restrooms, that hate crimes were possible (the evidence presented for this argument was that there were gay bashings at 2006's Pride), that house parties were too unruly and should be discouraged, and that the event wasn't gay enough. Yes that's right, people actually said that. Castro Halloween should be cancelled because there are too many straight people attending. Whereas gays, as we know, are all so terribly well-behaved. Next item on the agenda: cancelling the Fourth of July because someone saw some foreigners standing near an American flag. more ›

magazine kept us sane through a red state adolescence and early adulthood, and we ripped off opinions from editor Victor S. Navasky on a pathetically pathological basis. more ›

. Oakland politicos, please correct us in the comments. What was third-placer Nancy Nadel running about, then?) more ›

The truth is out there -- in Cordelia, outside Vallejo, at the International Bird Rescue Research Center. A technician x-raying a male mallard duck with a broken wing looked down at the x-ray and saw..... THE FACE OF AN ALIEN!!! AAAAAAAAAAGH!!! (We've helpfully circled the face for you on the picture). Can we just quote from this excellent press release?

The IBRRC staff discussed if an alien life form was either consumed by or trying to communicate with the people of Earth through the duck, because the center is located in an area of California known for its mysterious crop circles. Karen Benzel, Public Affairs Director for IBRRC noted that the symmetry of the alien's face is perfect, with an intense grimace, as if it was in anguish after being eaten.

Saturday, Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean and about 400 Democratic Asian American party activists and officials filled the halls of the San Jose Marriott to attend the Asian American and Pacific Islander Democratic Leadership Summit (.pdf). Howard Dean was the keynote speaker and spoke on Saturday morning at around 9:30. He gave the DemocraticMessage, or what we perceived as the "Together, we can do better" speech. [Ed. note: is that the same or different from the "yeeeeaaaaargh!" speech?] For those who weren't there, and are interested, it is similar to the speech he gave to the Jewish Council of Public Affairs. The conference was energizing and uplifting with speeches from the first Asian American Boston City Council member Sam Yoon and from the first Asian American San Jose City Council member Madison Nguyen. The Saturday lunch speaker was Mike Honda, who spoke on leveraging an Asian American background to run for political office. Of course, no conference is without handouts. Consequently, there was an organizing tip handout given out in the late Saturday afternoon titled, "Democratic State Party Structures - How to Navigate and Move Ahead, Four Important Things to Know." This handout did not talk about how Democrats can win elections, but instead focused on the finer points of the Party such as becoming familiar with Robert’s rules of order. Who said that politics was all fun and games? Do not despair though, as another rule from the handout was to "ESTABLISH Political Convictions and Strength." (capitalization in original). Well, Asian-American Democrats, go change the world! Just make sure to do it according to Robert’s Rules of Order and only after establishing your political convictions.

Man, whose job do we not want this week? BART spokesman Linton Johnson's. Poor Linton had to do yet another round of ritual apologies after a massive computer failure crashed BART for about two hours in the middle of the evening commute yesterday. It's been a pretty hellish month for BART, as you can see by perusing our Your Commute archives. (We're only posting on this because we assume SFist Jon has spent the night somewhere between Millbrae and San Bruno, hoppin' mad.) BART just installed a new computer system to run the trains, and three completely-separate incidents have crashed the system every day this week so far. Because BART themselves didn't know how long it would take to reboot, they weren't able to give accurate time estimates -- and adding insult to injury, the first time they thought they got the system up, it crashed like five minutes later. Big ups to Johnson, though, who really has this apology thing down. And as we got on BART this morning, we picked up a marigold-colored apology bulletin from BART Media & Public Affairs, apologizing profusely for the problems, explaining the situation with the computer, and saying they're working hard to fix the situation. It made for good reading as we were stuck between 16th and Civic Center, waiting for the smoking brakes from a train ahead of us to cool down. Picture of the beleaguered Johnson by the Chron. more ›

Dick Cheney and President Bush can draw a sigh of relief this morning as Chris Daly's resolution calling for the impeachment of the President was scuttled off to committee by Sean Elsbernd. The resolution directs the Clerk of the Board of Supes to send copies of the resolution to statewide political leaders, the Democratic National Committee, and members of the House Judiciary Committee where it will probably sit in a very large in-box on all of their respective desks along-side credit card offers, Value Pak coupons, and pleas from Hurricane Katrina victims for more money to keep them from being evicted. more ›

We'll start with the 2005 year-in-reviews. Robert Haaland says 2005 "was a great year to be a queer union organizer." Om Malik points out that the number of broadband connections grew 35% last year. And Jenguin literally looks back at 2005 with a selection of her photos. more ›

The holiday parties and dinners are adding up, but we can't let that slow us down, even if we're, uh, having an interesting time fitting into our jeans. But here at SFist, we cannot allow carb counting, calorie obsession or shallow breathing in our 501s prevent us from all the cocktails the holiday has to spare, no sir. Which is why we're thanking our lucky stars, bombshells and cherry-bomb pinup idols for Bombshell Betty and her Burlesquercise classes. more ›

We love it when our commenters get involved! We were proud when we first noticed a commenter had gotten a letter to the editor published! One of our commenters (who never, ever, brings his B-game to work), we understand has an important role in city government somewhere ! But we've never, ever, ever had a commenter run for higher office before! That's right, faithful commenter and contest-enterer Anthony Faber has thrown his hat in the ring for the SF assessor-recorder's race! Dude, if we were giving away the assessor-recorder position in an SFist contest, antfaber would have a lock on it! So, as his campaign email triumphantly announces: WRITE IN ANTHONY FABER FOR ASSESSOR-RECORDER: HE IS NONE OF THE ABOVE. Run, antfaber, run! Run, antfaber, run! more ›

So what happened with all those stories we've been telling you about all week? Fret no more! Here's your answers! *Madison Nguyen beat Linda Nguyen, 62% to 37%, for the District 7 San Jose city council seat. (Apparently people liked Madison's prior political experience, and may have been turned off by the flyers accusing Madison of having affairs with married men.) *Barry Bonds hit an almost-home run in his first game back, which was ruled a ground-rule double due to fan interference. He hit a single last night. No Old Navy splashdowns yet -- but only five games back from first in the division. *A second shipment of animals from Louisiana arrived yesterday, and will be housed in Marin and the Peninsula Humane Society. Awwww. *And it's day two of the Sutter healthcare workers' strike at Cal Pacific. Picture of Madison Nguyen from her campaign website more ›

Look, you've probably noticed lots of other people talking about this, and look, it's not like we don't care about the Middle East or Iran or anything (hey, we read both Persepolises, we'll have you know -- and Reading Lolita in Tehran.) But -- well, look. We've tried. Good Lord, we've tried. But we just cannot get through these Letters From Iran by Sean Penn that the Chronicle Datebook is faithfully publishing. Not even to mock. We just can't get through them. We can't even scroll through them online, they tire us out so much. We like Mr. Penn fine, don't get us wrong -- he seems like a nice and thoughtful man and a good actor and all that. Just -- well, he's not really a writer, now, is he? A history of US-Iran relations? Iran's ambivalence about the US? Please, Datebook, please -- make it stop! We were wrong -- we would prefer some more articles about how to play Sudoku, or lengthier Jon Carroll colummns. Picture of S. Penn by Robin Weiner, from the Chron more ›