Usually when a Presidential candidate announces his VP choice it's either to try and help him win some state or area that could help him win or to try and strengthen an apparent weakness. For example, Bill Clinton chose Al Gore to help him try and win the south. And in 2000, George Bush selected Dick Cheney to help alleviate concerns about his lack of experience and evilness. So with that, we announce that Ralph Nader's choice as his Vice President is our very own Matt Gonzalez....

According to the Sentinel: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom will lead an Embarcadero rally today in support of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. The even will be held on the second floor of the Ferry Building, located at 1 Embarcadero, at 5:00 p.m. Members of the media must arrive for setup by 4:45 p.m. Rumor has it that Mayor Gavin Newsom will be joined by a "special guest star": former President Bill Clinton. But......

Hillary Clinton's Inner Tracy Flick...

OK. Hmm. We're not sure if politicians and public servants count as society folk, regardless of their top-drawer Getty connections. (We think once you're in office, we at SFist must then considered you the help, even if you can buy and sell us into sexual slavery.) Granted the image is old and last-year, but here's Gavin's tongue (which is fresh and tasty, we're sure), in case you’ve been kept up at nights wondering about its......

More Carole Migden driving news! The Sacramento Bee (which, we'll admit, we were only perusing to see if there were some more pictures of the whales) has found a woman who's still angry about the time Carole Migden totaled her car back in 1996 (Migden's first year in the State Assembly, and a year before Migden was diagnosed with leukemia). "It's really odd at my age that I just can't get over it," the woman......

Cruciverbalists rejoice! New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz, widely considered the best puzzlemaster in the world, is speaking tonight at Cal Performances. Shortz was profiled in the documentary Wordplay and is credited with modernizing and popularizing crossword puzzles with witty clues, aesthetically satisfying designs, and pop cultural awareness. Folks like Jon Stewart and Bill Clinton (above, with the puzzle he made in yesterday's paper here) swear by Shortz's puzzles, and you will too (if......

Okay, this was a pretty cool event. Peter Morgan, the writer responsible for both Forest Whitaker and Helen Mirren's Oscars this year (for The Last King of Scotland and The Queen) won the film festival's second annual Kanbar Award for excellence in screenplay writing -- so they had him up for an hourlong talk about his distinctive docudrama perspective on contemporary historical events and the flawed personalities behind them, and then they screened The Deal,......

Number of people pictured in this week's Swells society column: 67. Number of people pictured whom we recognize: 9 (including 3 pictures of Gavin Newsom and 2 pictures of Dede Wilsey). Minority count: 5 (7.5%). Getty v. Traina: 10-8 (There's a spread about the LA branch of the Gettys in this month's Harper's Bazaar). Number of choice quotes concerning Gavin Newsom: 2. One by Dede Wilsey (re the Healthy Saturdays negotiations): "I learned that Gavin......

Hey, there's lots of stuff going on this weekend! And in exchange for telling you about it, we're going to ask again for a favor in return -- if you go to any of these events, would you mind terribly sending us your pictures of them, and we'll show them off on the site for you? Tag 'em SFist on Flickr, or mail them to editor-at-sfist.com! --It's time for the Bring Your Own Big......

Ralph Nader is in town this week to promote his new book, The Seventeen Traditions. He did an interview with KGO radio criticizing Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and 2008 Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton. ...

As previously reported on SFist, today is the day the official, real Question Time is supposed to happen. Sometime today, the Board of Supes will read off all the names of people who should be in attendance and add one name to the list, that being Gavin's. Gavin won't be there, of course, because he will be at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, hobnobbing with the stars, both poltical and movie. His attendance at the confab, however, isn't going over very well with some people. ...

On Tuesday, the American -ists will be celebrating democracy and hitting the polls, letting politicians know what they really think. It just made us wonder: if it were up to the -ist-a-verse, what would we be voting for?...

Half by SFist Jon, half by SFist Rita. You guess who wrote which half! --Cal Alum fights the good fight to keep view of Memorial Stadium free. --More lane closures on the Bay Bridge for the very last time. --It's raining. --Who's got San Francisco values around here? --Bill Clinton endorses Cindy Chavez for SJ Mayor. --Animal rights activists and environmentalists hate Pombo. --They're reopening the lagoon by the Palace of Fine Arts. --And cancer......

Yay, Civic Center Mike's back from Palm Springs! And what should he stumble upon while wheeling his suitcases out of the BART station but Bill Clinton's Yes on 87 Rally! (87 is the tax the oil companies for alternative energy proposition. Yes arguments here, No arguments here.) You have to check out Mike's post from the scene, it's hilarious. Here's some of our favorite Mike-style zingers (we're leaving a bunch of them for you......

In the time of chimpanzees there was a monkey.... -Old stuff coming to U.C. Berkeley ...

Since we've been doing a bunch of postings about our super-exciting congressional race, we'd love to come up with some clever title along the lines of "Everybody Hates Chris" but we are coming up with nothing. Sorry-- we're a little jet-lagged these days. Needless to say, we do have some Pelosi & Pals news today as the Washington Post has a big feature on some anti-lobbying bill she's been working on for awhile that could see the light of day if she does become Madame Speaker. Lots of bans on travel and gifts are involved and we'll see what happens the moment she does become Madame Speaker. Our guess is that it'll pass with loopholes a' plenty....

Here we were, worried that this whole Congressman Mark "NAMBLA" Foley story wouldn't have any sort of Bay Area connection so we wouldn't be able to comment on it, but we were wrong. When your representative to Congress is the House Minority Leader, there's a connection to anything in politics. And there is a connection indeed to this story. ...

He's in New York! Tuesday he took off to the Big Apple to attend a three day event for the Clinton Global Initiative conference. That's Clinton as in Bill Clinton, not George Clinton. The Clinton Global Initiative is some big huge three day conference in which various political and governmental big wigs gather to discuss the environment and helping the poor people and Africa and all that stuff that George Clooney and Angelina Jolie talk about. ...

For whatever reason, politicians like to record themselves for reasons of "posterity." Like someday, some historian or what have you, will find the tapes and be so dazzled by the intellectual fortitude of the office debates that they’d write positively glowing reviews of their administrations. This despite the fact, it never goes well. For anybody. Your latest victim of taped recordings is our Governor who is occasionally taping himself for all the future historians out there to document his governing genius...

Okay, here's an update on that lawsuit against AT&T and the Federal Government for illegally snooping on people's phone calls and e-mails. Basically, there are about seventeen similar lawsuits out there in the midst of the legal world and because they're all sort of similar-- whiny Al Queda supporters suing the telecoms and government for doing something unconstitutional, they've been mashed together into one big lawsuit sandwich. That sandwich will be heard in San Francisco's very own Federal Court by one U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker. The reasoning is because out of all the various suits out there, the AT&T one is the most advanced. Bully to the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation and how awesome would it be if they started their own University just so people could say they go to EFF U?) and the ACLU for being on the ball. ...

We're on the Other Coast this week, ensconced with family for Pesach-- that yearly holiday that celebrates our people's release from bondage and their subsequent peaceful and uneventful existence, and even though we can barely find out how the Giants are doing, it's not so difficult to see the latest in Barry news. It's a perjury investigation, baby!...

Wow, Gavin Newsom must really like big hats. (Yes, commenter Matt, we know you like big hats too.) Leah Garchik reported in yesterday's The In Crowd that when CSI: Plumpjack made their triumphant reappearance in San Francisco, Gavin took actress/Scientology activist Sofia Milos out for an evening of fun in North Beach -- first, a performance of Beach Blanket Babylon and then an apres-show at the Tosca bar. Hm..... now who was the last local politico we heard about taking a controversial dark-haired television personality on a date to Beach Blanket Babylon and the Tosca? .....oh right! That would be Gavin Newsom! Dude, it is cold to take the new girlfriend to the exact same places you took the ex-wife. Don't those memories of getting your picture taken there with her by Harper's Bazaar there mean anything to you? This is totally like when Bill Clinton gave Monica Lewinsky the same book of poetry he gave Hillary. ...

1115.org weighs in with their analysis of last night's State of the State, and Capitol Notes' John Meyer takes folks behind the scenes. SF CityScape has high hopes for The City's promotion of interim Planning Director Dean Macris to a permanent post. And San Jose decides they want a city wifi network, too. Many Friends of SFist are down in Las Vegas this week, some at CES, some at AVN, most probably going both......

There were elections yesterday? We had no idea! Well, we don't live in Marin, Contra Costa, Sonoma, or San Mateo County, but apparently pretty much everyone loves to Save The Music (That ad with the little kids disappearing from the school band -- hits ya right there). And CoCo's Acalanes Union School District managed to convince voters to fund up a seventh period of classes for AP and honors-track students. 'Cause nothing says fun like Calculus BC at 4 p.m.! However, voters in Ross decided to keep letting their school's roofs leak, Milpitas wants to have extra-crowded kindergarten classes, and Belmont is no longer funding their shuttle bus service. In other sort-of local election news, Doris Matsui, widow of Robert Matsui, was overwhelmingly elected (with 71% of the vote!) to her late husband's House of Representatives seat. She's the 46th widow to be elected to finish a husband's Congressional term. (Don't think any husbands have yet to be elected to finish out their wives', though don't think Bill Clinton's not thinking about it!). Picture by John Moore from the AP, off the State Department website...

Remember the nineties? Back when nobody knew Scott Weiland was a big junkie, but wondered why every single that Stone Temple Pilots came out with sounded like a song recorded by Nirvana or Pearl Jam? When the Internet was going to change the world for, the, uh, better? When Microsoft Windows was actually a useful operating system, and our major worry was whether or not Bill Clinton could keep his penis out of the mouths......