Over at The Snitch, we came across this fury-inducing commercial conceived by heart-warming conservative group Move America Forward. (You know, the one chaired by KSFO 560 AM's Melanie Morgan?) Anyway, in it moms and members of the Marines corp throw a patriotic temper tantrum, slam the Berkeley City Council for not apologizing to a bald eagle, want people to sign some sort of ineffective petition, or something like that. They plan to air the......

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According to the fine folks over at The Sword (NSFW), the GayVNs (NSFW) will be held here on Saturday -- you know, those homosexual pornography achievement awards, which led to Mayor Gavin Newsom getting all Berkeley City Council on us after he declared Feb. 23 to be Colt Studio Day last year? -- coinciding with that hairy-large-gay-appreciation festival thing happening. Anyway, last year the GayVNs had comedienne and social critic Kathy Griffin hosting the......

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Fascist Imperial Dogs 1 - Tree Loving Hippies 0- After all that protesting and dancing and carrot juice drinking, the Berkeley City Council chickened out and said they erred in passing that January resolution that disinvited a Marine recruiting station and called them "unwelcome intruders." In that resolution, they also allowed Code Pink permission to blast all sorts of things at the station, gave them a designated parking space in front of it, and permission to protest on Wednesdays from noon to 4 p.m. Why Wednesday? Because it’s Hump Day! They did, however, refuse to issue an apology and used part of their mea culpa to lash out at the Bush administration and the war. This didn't satisfy some conservatives as Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina introduced the "Semper Fi Act" which would redirect money to UC Berkeley and give it to the Southern Heritage Coalition so they can sew more flags with the Confederate flag in them....

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Anti-war fans, pro-war zealots, '60s fetishists, barely-legal Marines, the unshowered, and young college students trying to impress their boyfriends will be out in full force on the other side of the Bay later this evening. Why? Because after receiving loads of national criticism, as well as a few death threats, the Berkeley City Council will decide tonight whether or not to "revoke a letter it approved two weeks ago telling the Marines they are 'unwelcome......

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Well, just to follow up on yesterday's day of violence, we can't find anything about the late-afternoon incident on Ellis Street that a couple of you guys saw, but there was another shooting around 11:50 p.m. in Visitacion Valley. That one was fatal. (The Examiner also has a list of other recent daytime shootings in SF, if you're interested.) Phew, let's get to the less life-endangering stuff. Politicians! Matt Gonzalez's 2003 mayoral campaign team was......

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Pot growing in the wild! Marin County has vowed to crack down on marijuana growers who have been sneaking onto state and federal public property to plant over $100 million worth of weed. The pot is located on both sides of Bolinas Ridge, and Point Reyes National Seashore says they spent over $10,000 to clean it all up. Authorities report seeing one plant that was 10 feet tall and covered with so many buds the......

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--The US Attorney's office is going to monitor the SF elections, like we're East Timor or Florida or something. --Courtney Love was 50 minutes late to her book signing in Corte Madera. --District 6 candidate Manuel Jimenez confirms neither confirms nor denies that he's Latino (see comments!), with a picture of his baptism. --The cops get back the discretion to press pot charges. --Stanford students don't really care about the election. --Does the Bayview need......

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Apparently the "Draft Dellums" posters can come down in our neighborhood now, as we see that Ron Dellums has announced his candidacy to replace Jerry Brown as Mayor of Oakland. Until today it seemed that City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente was a shoe-in for the job, despite the fact that nobody was particularly excited by the idea, aside from Jerry Brown himself (who has endorsed De La Fuente). Dellums, who once sat on......

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[Ed. Note: Labor Day is not just the cut-off point for wearing white shoes - it's a day to honor the workers who make this country great. In our honor (we're workers too!) we will have a special series of daily posts on working, unions and the labor movement here in the Bay Area.] San Francisco has long been a tourist destination - and not just for our cityscapes. Many come looking for an entirely different "beautiful view" - the men and women who practice "the world's oldest profession." While sex for pay is strictly illegal, the fact is that thousands throughout the Bay Area are employed as sex workers - be they porn stars, cabaret dancers, 'masseuses' or ladies of the night. And like any worker, they're fighting for their right to a clean, safe living. The Berkeley City Council is currently considering "Angel's Initiative," organized by the Sex Workers Outreach Project, which would basically decriminalize prostitution by making it the BPD's lowest law-enforcement priority. If the City Council does not ratify the initiative, it will have to be placed on the November ballot as Measure Q. Prostitution Research and Education is sponsoring a discussion this evening at the Julia Morgan theater to discuss this hot-button issue. If you're labor minded and looking for a good time in North Beach, might EssEffist suggest a trip to the Lusty Lady, the only worker-owned co-operative nude dancing venue in the country? That's right, in 2003 the "Live Nude Girls" united to save the business from closing the doors and to improve pay and working conditions for the dancers. While we haven't been, if we were planning a bachelor party, this would certainly be the first stop. "Live Nude Girls Unite!" chronicles the struggles of the dancers to organize in the face of both management intransigence and social stigmatization. When we were desperate for work during the dot-bomb, our craigslist searches for web designer and creative position showed us that there was one web enterprise that was recession-proof - that's right, porn. And yes, we sent in our resumes to see if we could get a job color-correcting photos of nude women. Look, we needed to eat, and a Photoshop levels histogram is about as asexual as it gets. Now, a change to a 1988 federal law requiring "primary producers" of pornography to document the ages of their subjects is being pushed by Attorney General John Ashcroft and would require "secondary producers" to provide the data as well. It also includes language that voids previously accepted forms of identification such as military and college IDs and would require that precise records of distribution, actor's stage names and a cross-indexed reference to other productions featuring an actor be maintained for random spot checks. This would have the power to cripple the small-time web site operators from the Valley to the East Bay in a state with little value politically to the Republicans in an election year....

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