Offices in Capitol Hill received a manila envelope with a letter claiming responsibility for today's bombing of a landmark military recruiting station in Times Square, NYC. Our parent site, Gothamist, tells us that "WNBC reports that the letters, which arrived today, included a photo of the Army recruiting center 'before it was bombed and...the words 'We did it.'" Which group is claiming responsibility, exactly, remains to be known. According to the AP, Senator Dianne......

Jackie Speier runs for Congress again, after a 29-year break. ...

Congressman Tom Lantos died this morning from esophageal cancer at the age of 80. He represented most of the Sunset, as well as a big chunk of San Mateo County. He was the only survivor of the Holocaust to be elected to Congress, and worked for years on human rights issues. That said, he ticked off quite a few people locally by supporting the Iraq war, although he had recently been pretty critical of the......

In terms of propositions this year, especially SF propositions, it's a pretty lean year. Both A and B, in fact, seem to be so non-controversial that neither the SF Republicans nor Starchild appear to object. Then there's Proposition C....

Net Neutrality Symposium at USF...

Dispatches from TJICistan points out a delightful fact about General Frederick N. Funston--the apparently sensitivity-free Medal of Honor recipient known for his manliness in both the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War, and the current namesake for Fort Funston--who once boasted the following. Ahem: I personally strung up thirty-five Filipinos without trial, so what was all the fuss over Waller's 'dispatching' a few 'treacherous savages'? If there had been more Smiths and Wallers, the......

After reading this, we were fit to be tied. BigHeadDC claims that recently-retired Trent Lott has a taste for male escorts. Sort of. We think. Coochie-choochie-coo. Who the hell knows. It's a post that's a bit too coy in revealing direct facts, reminding one of the Ted Casablana's maddening gossip column, The Awful Truth. According to BigHeadDC: The boy happens to be real, and his "stage name" is Benjamin Nicholas. One of the politicos......

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......

Queer rights groups freaked out, threw a tizzy (understandably), and nixed their support for a workplace discrimination civil rights bill "after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., pulled transgender people from the legislation that would protect gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination." And since nothing says action like an angry missive or online petition, a letter signed by gay groups was sent to Congress yesterday demanding them to......

--Another shooting in District 5. And a man robbed at gunpoint in the Sunset. --Jerry McNerny, the man who unseated Pombo, is having a fun time in Congress. --Yikes! A guy took a 2-foot machete to the pizza store manager when his pizza took about 45 minutes to deliver. We feel there's a lesson there for everyone involved in this story. --People are unhappy about the private San Francisco Day School's proposed expansion plans.......

We mentioned a few weeks ago that the funding for California's oft-proposed bullet train system is suspect. Things are looking up in a way, as the High Speed Rail Authority approved the project's first phase. However, the Fresno Bee recently reported another wrinkle: Since the management for San Diego, the Southern California Association of Governments, is pushing for "magnetic levitation trains," rather than steel-wheeled ones, that city may get left on the boarding platform. ...

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs. It was a rollercoaster ride of emotions this week at DCist. Like the rest of country, we were floored by the news of so many dead coming out of Virginia Tech, and with so many of the victims and their relatives from the D.C. area, we felt it important to pay......

-Barbara Lee, Lynn Woolsey and Maxine Waters get standing ovation from Congress for not voting for House resolution against the war. It'll make sense if you read it. -Gavin says restaurant shutdown ain't gonna happen. -DeAnza College rape case gets sent to the DA. -Rudy G. visits Oakland city. -What will become of Bay Meadows? -Cockfighting ring broken up in Oakley. Little Jerry is okay. -Berkeley City Hall finally named after Maudelle Shirek despite complaints......

-There was a protest in the Mission over the the latest bit of immigration raids. -Flaks o' Gavin on gay porn proclamation: we did what? Oopsie. ...

Hey, folks, your Trimethyldioxypurist is back with a quick follow-up to the review of Meth Coffee we posted yesterday. We're tempted to just link to this press release without comment. ...

A few photos of the MLK Breakfast at the S.F. Hilton, Monday morning, 1/15/07...

We don't know about you, but it's friggin cold out there. Well, not for some of you. It seems as though places that are supposed to be cold are warm and places that are supposed to be warm are cold. Or maybe that's just us. Either way, we're freezing. Austinist said goodbye to their co-editor (sell-out) and played rumor monger ">on the SXSW lineup. And when dozens of dead birds littered downtown Austin, it's......

-The Board of Supervisors really don't like Annemarie Conroy. -Members of Visitacion Valley gang plead guilty for gang-like behavior. Meanwhile former gang leader in Oakland shot dead. -Building inspector who bought property that was under review resigns. -Headline in the Onion: Nancy Pelosi Wants Congress to Want to Pass Bill: New Speaker Thought House Knew This Was Important to Her. -You know how several months ago everyone was talking about buying hybrids and the need......

If hoops is a game of streaks, right now the Warriors are Frank the Tank. They're flying so high, they're looking down on the Democrats. They're looking so good, Gavin Newsom is jealous. They're buzzing so hard, they're getting calls from Courtney Love (and Mel Gibson?).

We know this is completely wrong to admit, but voting here in San Francisco, the bluest of blue states, is always a bit unexciting. While the rest of the country is taking part in what we're always told is the Most Important Election Ever, we are once again left out of the thrills. Our gubernatorial race never took off and the race for Senate and Congress was such a no contest that one ran commercials featuring her grandchild and the other gave more speeches in Pennsylvania than here in her home city. It's kind of like rooting for the local Division AAA basketball team make their way through the Division AAA tourney while everyone else is obsessed with the NCAA Tourney. And while you want the local guys to win, you can't but help care more about schools you never attended in the Big Dance. What we're trying to say is that for whatever reason we seem more emotionally invested in the Virginia Senate Race than whatever is going on here. ...

As fall settles in and another calendar page gets turned, thoughts turn from bbq's and vacations to holidays and the realization that '06 is coming to an end. With all that going on, with change in the air, we wonder what is it that made that makes the -ists ponder? ...

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. ...

This HP story is getting crazier and crazier. Today, the NY Times is reporting that HP was thinking about planting spies in at least two publications to figure out what was going on. The idea was to either place undercover admin temps or cleaning crews at CNet and the SF office of the Wall Street Journal who would then do a bit of snooping and eavesdropping. Another memo uncovered mentioned planting HP spies next to certain people to tag along and investigate them. Wasn't there an episode of "Alias" like that where Sydney Bristow dressed up like an Office Temp complete with iPod and back tattoo to shadow some reporter only to discover they were really their long lost second cousin removed who supposedly died in a fiery motorcycle accident but really used it as a ruse to escape the Chinese? ...

--Former HP board chair Patricia Dunn and leading Palo Alto attorney Larry Sonsini will testify before Congress about that whole leak thing. --John Karr may be a free man. --It's noisy at Stanford. --City attorney Dennis Herrera throws out a proposed ballot proposition about redevelopment in the Bayview. --Heads roll after the fights outside the Raiders game last week. --It's so crowded in the SF prison that inmates get bitten by spiders. Gavin decides to......

A flat fee for BART? -- And speaking of BART, a new BART stop is about to be built, the first one since the SFO extension in 2003. It'll be called the West Dublin/Pleasanton stop and will be built between the ten minute gap in stops between Dublin/Pleasanton and Castro Valley ...

Otherwise known as stories we missed while we were on vacation... -The last time we heard from Krissy Keefer, the Green candidate for Congress, she and some of her gal-pals were banging the Taiko drum and handing out cookies to celebrate her official entrance into the race. We maybe a little fuzzy on our American history, but we think Lincoln started that way too. Anyways, we hadn't heard from her since then but last week, she and her Merry Band of Dancers took part in a celebration of Fidel Castro's 80th birthday, which the San Francisco Sentinel described as a "spectacular evening ensemble of music, song, dance and poetry." Keefer's dance troupe performed and Keefer performed the monologue during the performance. You know, nothing says "striving for mainstream political acceptance" like staging dance performances to celebrate Fidel Castro. While it's not official, word has it that Keefer is in talks to take part in a new VH-1 reality show "Dancing With Dictators." It's not know yet who'll she be dancing with, but we here the Stacey Keibler/Mahmoud Ahmadinejad team will be pretty hard to beat. ...

We were stumbling around the internets yesterday and discovered that our very own Ms. Pelosi has set up a YouTube page. How with it, our Ms. Pelosi. And what will you find there? Oh, just clips of her playing soccer, lip-synching to pop hits, and ranting into a web cam whenever Tim Russert refuses to take her phone call. And boy, is her "Lazy Sunday" parody, "Lazy Appropriations", hilarious ("Lazy Appropriations start debate in the late afternoon/call Steny Hoyer just to see how he's doing/Hello? What up Stens?/Yo Pelosi what's cracking?/You thinking what I'm thinking? (Earmarks!)/Then it's happening"!). No, actually, you'll find clips of her and her peeps giving speeches on the House floor. Sadly, none of them appear to be mash ups with clips from anime cartoons. ...

Our own Dianne Feinstein continues to put her own stamp on Congress' annual "Seersucker Thursday" tribute to Southern style. Not since the last "Jeans Day" at their local Catholic High School has this country seen such a gang of folks giddy about a short-term change in dress expectations, and DiFi keeps the fun rolling with her gift of seersucker suits to her female colleagues in the senate. She (or more accurately, we suspect, her hapless......

Like a lot of you, we stumbled into the election booth last Tuesday and discovered much to our surprise that we had to vote for Nancy Pelosi. Did we know that? Does she actually ever campaign here? We can't really recall ever seeing any ads or posters or even bumper stickers promoting Pelosi, like, ever. Is there anyone out there who could challenge her? Well, have no fear, the Green Party is here. ...

The weeks starts out right when a sucker punch on the field lands Chicagoist in the middle of a Sox/Cubs throwdown and the fists continue to fly in the comments. Despite suburban resident Ms. Pinney's best little try no books will be banned anytime soon and the El is really really gross. Houstonist is there to start compiling the punditry when when the guilty, guilty Enron verdict comes down. This guy seems to be able......