Image: EFF The secret room at AT&T's Folsom Street facility is in the news again. Staffers from the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation are in DC this week and next, trying to convince Congress that telecoms shouldn't be given retroactive immunity for their cooperation with the NSA's secret (and illegal? or illegal-ish?) wiretapping programs. Mark Klein, the AT&T technician who spotted the NSA's wiretapping room in the AT&T building and blew the whistle, is......

-- Figurines, Dappled Cities, Union Trade: Rock bands -- with a little easy-listening thrown in there for balance! -- bust it out starting at 9 p.m. at Bottom of the Hill; $10. -- Custom Made Theatre's Silent Auction on the Stage: Bid on trips, theater tickets, and mighty fine art, and much more (just like dem rich do!) but in a more accessible setting. Fol-rock band the Jiffy Lube Allstars -- featuring Jason Garrison,......

We always hate it when we see a new Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker, because we know it's going to be something really upsetting that the Bush Administration's done. Last week's article detailed just how badly Donald Rumsfeld treated Gen. Antonio Taguba, who did the investigation on the abuses and torture at Abu Ghraib. Give Gen. Taguba a hero's welcome and hear his story in person at the Commonwealth Club tonight at 6......

Jerry Brown, our recenty elected State Attorney General and St. Ignatius College Prep alum, isn't afraid to take the Bush Administration to task for its weak stand on fuel efficency for SUVs, minivans and pickups. He's seeking more than the paltry one-mile-ish increase, to 23.5 miles per gallon from the current 22.2 miles by 2010. He called the change "absurd." Damn right. He posits that a standard of 10 miles-15 miles better would suit us far better. ...

We have our own little bit of PurgeGate on our end of the country. Maybe not the most exciting part of the story, as it doesn't involve voter fraud or missing e-mails, but still a piece of the puzzle. ...

Sorry to be the bearers of bad news, but for those of you looking for a good excuse not to go to the Raiders/Cards Bottom-of-the-Barrel-Fest this Sunday, what was looking like the best possible excuse ever just fell apart. That excuse? Oh, terrorists unleashing a dirty bomb at the game....

Few things are more annoying than a government that touts a righteous altruism then acts in ways that brazenly contradict it, and then seeing the news media deliberately let them get away with it. When the world's sole superpower toys around with foreign nations as if they were little army men on a map, they must stymie their opposition with duplicity and mistruths, which is exactly what the Bush Administration has done. ...

This week saw contention between Google and the US Department of Justice, as the Bush Administration asked a federal judge to force Google to comply with a subpoena for search records. (Link to CNET News.com; they've also aggregated their complete coverage of the story). The records are intended to be used to support the validity of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. AOL, MSN, and Yahoo were also asked to turn over records, and......

Well, the 2005 body count in SF is now up to 92 after a man was found strangled to death in a SoMA hotel, making this the worst year in SF for murders in ten years. In response, Chief of Police Heather Fong held a press conference the other day to address people's concerns. Chief Fong seemed somewhat defensive, at one point blaming the uptick in murders over the last three months on the nice weather we've been having. "If it’s always nice out, people start drinking, there are arguments and violence ensues," she said. See, it's the Bush Administration's fault for not adopting the Kyoto Protocol! Fong did note that black-on-black gang violence is down 35% this year, but murders in the Western Addition and the Mission are up sharply from last year (The Western Addition had 20 this year and 6 last, and the Mission had 13 as opposed to 4). Aren't at least some of the murders in those areas considered gang-related too? And you know, what about those Nortenos and Surenos -- what going on with the Latino gangs? And intriguingly, our city controller's calculated that for each murder, the city loses about $38,000 (in police and medical expenses). No wonder no one can afford a house these days. The Ex also has a totally and completely fascinating connect-the-dots map of all the murders this year in SF. (.pdf only, but worth the download wait.) Our only quibble -- we thought the first murder of the year took place at Fisherman's Wharf: where's that one? ...