Traffic cameras coming to Market and Octavia? ...

A classic that still holds up today: California State Assemblywoman Fiona Ma carrying her dog in a Snugli. Aw. Image credit: SFist Rita......

Denied. Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu - who helped raised cash for Mayor Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Fiona Ma, Hillary Clinton, and the victorious Barack Obama - was sentenced to three years in prison today for defrauding investors of nearly $1 million over 15 years ago. He was ordered to spend a sojourn behind bars after a Ponzi scheme involving latex gloves. This case is separate from a "separate federal complaint ... by the U.S.......

You thought she was gone, but no: Fiona Ma is still coming to us from beyond the grave! Or Sacramento or wherever she is now. Despite having left the Board of Soups back in January, Ms. Ma's official SFGov webpage lingers on, like your one friend from back home who kept hanging out at the high school after graduating. But you'd never guess, from looking at it, that's she's moved on; it's the first......

Keep those LOLJEW pictures coming! We can't get enough! What's the latest? Poor Tapioca Ed! His legislative aide Barbara Meskunas spoke to the media this afternoon to let them know that her boss took the day off work and was "explaining the tragedy to his family." What's he got to explain? Don't they already know they don't live in San Francisco? How's Ed doing? "As well as can be expected," Meskunas sighed. She added, "It's......

San Franciscans awoke last Saturday morning to discover a strange robot had taken control of the horizontal and the vertical on their answering machines: a recorded voice begging victims to support Assembly Bill 266. "Press one to be connected to Assembly Member Ma's office, and ask her to support AB266," the telemarketer offered. Who's responsible for bugging us with politics on our day off? No idea. The author of the recording (at least, the......

--They tore down that house everyone's laughing about. --The Niners got San Francisco to cough up money originally intended for parks to go to fixing up Monster Park instead. They're just going to move to Santa Clara anyways, guys! --Mission Bay bores Chron architecture critic John King. --Fiona Ma sponsors legislation to make it easier for, say, Gavin Newsom to change his name to Gavin Newsom-Siebel. --Aaaaaaa-choo! --The SF Sentinel's photo tips. Also, they......

When we complained about Frontier Airlines LAX-SFo flights going away, our helpful commenters had a short discussion on high-speed railways and what a great thing they'd be. How timely, then, that the CoCo times is reporting the latest on that possibility....

Thanks for everyone's help in the 4FQT comments on fixing the light levels on our pictures from Gavin's 4th Fake Question Time townhall meeting! As readers suggested, we downloaded the Gimp (we're too cheap to shell out for Photoshop) and tried to figure out what exactly fixing a "logarithmic color curve" entails. We still don't know, so we basically just played around with a bunch of features and retouched the pictures as seen here.......

You could tell Mayor Gavin Newsom came in expecting the full costumed brigade this morning at Fourth Fake Question Time-- we definitely saw Gavin flinch when SFist Elaine saw him coming into the Excelsior Boys and Girls Club right at 2 p.m.. this morning and shouted out, "Holler!" -- but it was as chicken-free as a lunch at Cafe Gratitude, for the latest installment of Gavin Newsom's town hall meeting, this one on the......

In the latest attempt to do something, anything, to improve the Muni's timeliness as dictated by the Transit Effectiveness Project, the Powers that Be are contemplating adding cameras to Muni buses to try and catch people who double park in bus-only lanes. The reason, of course, is that people blocking buses from going down the road cause some of the delays. Both Gavin and Ken Garcia looked at early footage taken and said they were amazed at all the double parkers they saw. They also agreed that while the dialogue in the footage was great, they thought the whole thing was too derivative of Godard. ...

Here's a roundup of today's news...

There's no Swells society column today! Sad! So we're doing a Fake Question Time By The Numbers instead. Number of people in attendance: 200. Number of chickens: 6. Number of times Angela Alioto referred to "Bessie," a 94-year-old homeless woman she's befriended: 6. Number of questions Gavin collected: 2 inches of cards (We'd estimate maybe around 100). Number of questions Gavin read: About 10 (grouped into categories, except for our question, which he did not......

We're back again! Only for today, though. Your fearless editor SFist Jon returns later this morning. --Brr. It's cold in here. There must be some Toros in the atmosphere. --Federal judge stops the new owner of the Mercury News from working with the Chron to consolidate local media coverage. --Yahoo defeats Google. --Ed Jew gets sworn in as the District 4 supervisor next week -- Fiona Ma stepped down early. --Is this for real?? They're......

We can't be bothered to type up all these intriguing little political news tidbits into that many separate posts for the day! So we're compiling them all here. --That map above is from David Latterman's analysis (.pdf) of the yes votes on our favorite proposition this season: Question Time Proposition I! Greens are nos, blues are yes. Look at all those haters in Districts 7 and 8 who didn't want us to ask Gavin......

We bloggers are old-fashioned, but we remember a time when the front page of a newspaper was reserved for, you know, news. But not so Thursday morning, when The Examiner decided to do away with their usual collage of headlines and photos in favor of a full-page advertisement. Well, not totally full-page; at the very top, the masthead was still in place. So, it didn't just look like "hey, here's some random ad," it......

We had so much fun breaking down the RCV numbers in District 6, we thought we'd tackle District 4 next! Congratulations, Ed Jew! He wasn't even considered a factor when the Chron covered the race, and now he's the first person in SF RCV history to come from behind (2nd place) to win the election in overtime. So coming in after the election, the top four candidates were (in order): Ron Dudum, Ed Jew, Jaynry......

There's a new fight brewing over the transformation of SOMA from gritty industrial/dot.com boom hot spot to chic condo place-to-be and it's not led by Chris Daly. Or advocates for the poor. Or even Beyond Chron. Nope, it's being led members of a tennis club who are complaining about the demolishing of the San Francisco Tennis Club at Fifth and Brannan to make way for condos. Fighting Developers-- not just for the poor anymore. ...

Does anyone else remember those awesome signs they used to have behind the driver on the old MUNI buses -- "Information Gladly Given But Safety Requires Avoiding Unnecessary Conversation"? Well, get some information -- and maybe even have some unnecessary conversations -- at Ross Mirkarimi's Town Hall Meeting On MUNI tomorrow, Wednesday November 1! Ross and (SFist obsession) MTA Director Mr. Nathaniel Ford (!!!!!) will be on hand "to discuss your concerns about service,......

Speaking of cleaning up the streets, people on Polk Street are trying to have a major rehaul done in an attempt to make it less grimy. Twenty-nine commercial spaces are either vacant or under construction along the Lower Polk corridor and all the businesses and developers are looking to help clean the area up in order to increase their business. For whatever reason, they think that having to climb over transvestite heroin junkies nodding out isn't the kind of thing people want to do if they come to a neighborhood. And also, lots of vacancies equals more crime and the more crime the more vacancies and so on and so forth. ...

We're begging for your help here, readers -- begging! Can someone with a digital camera PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE go to this event and send us your pictures of Chris Daly getting thrown into a swimming pool? We'll throw in some SFist swag if you do! We'd go ourselves, but admission is $125 (and we don't have a digital camera anyways). The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Center is sponsoring their 16th Annual Celebrity Pool Toss this Tuesday......

RESOLVED: That you want to become more informed about the issues in the local SF elections. So we're trying to compile a handy-dandy list of all the forums we can find, arranged by district and by date -- but we can barely find anything out there! So we're posting what we've got, and asking everyone else to post other dates in the comments if you've got any. See you guys at the debates -- we'll......

Well, look who's in imminent danger of violating the curfew for the kids under 13! Here's a picture of Gavin Newsom cutting a rug at District 4 candidate Doug Chan's kickoff event, first located by -- you got it -- commenter ThatChick! Okay, here's the informative section: Doug Chan's running against Fiona Ma's aide Jaynry Mak for the District 4 seat (Fiona seems to be hedging her bets and has endorsed both of them.)......

While doing our standard election-night browsing, we dropped by the Guardian to see if any late reports were filed online -- but the site was down! Details at this point are still very, very sketchy, but the initial report from Steven T. Jones suggests foul play:Maybe there is something to this 6/6/06 numerological weirdness after all. The mood seems dark and sinister for an election day. And it was certainly some devilish characters who......

50 out of 50 Wednesday precincts reporting -- Tonight: Come see newly-anointed state assembly representative Fiona Ma, along with DA Kamala Harris, performing at the SF Black Film Festival's Urban Slam spoken word event tonight, at the Theater Artaud. My name is Fiona/ Janet Reilly is bologna..... The Urban Slam starts around 8:15, after the 6:00 p.m. screening of the movie Sp!t, a documentary about the hip-hop poetry slam scene. $10 for the movie, $10 for the slam. Theater Artaud is at 450 Florida (x Mariposa). Tickets here. Thursday: Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote that Sean Penn movie "21 Grams", will be at the Balboa for the 7:00 p.m. screening of "The 3 Burials of Melquidas Estrada," for which he won the Palme D'Or last year. Arriaga will be signing copies of his book The Night Buffalo starting at 6, and at 7, he'll be leading a discussion about screenwriting tips. The Balboa's at Balboa and 38th Ave. and Friday: Shoo-be-doo-waaaaaah -- the Pacific Mozart Ensemble presents an evening of a capella jazz and pop songs at the Green Room in the War Memorial Building on 401 Van Ness. $20. Finger-snapping is always our favorite. Download musical excerpts here....

We have been totally obsessed with Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan's Opal Mehta woes. Every day, we would think, Bostonist is so lucky. Isn't there any connection here to the Bay Area? Well, now we have one! And for our Assembly District 12 Ma v. Ja column, no less! State legislator (and former child actor) Sheila Kuehl has accused Janet Reilly of plagiarizing Kuehl's health care proposal and claiming it was her (Reilly's) own. Get Kissed......

Commenter Seamus! We love the name "Ma v Ja" for our new column about the 12th Assembly District race between Fiona Ma and Tori Spelling Janet Reilly! So, to update everyone on the whole "Did Fiona Ma volunteer for a Republican governor Mike Rounds's campaign in South Dakota?" issue, the answer is no. A red-faced IRS has discovered that their database somehow screwed up, and Fiona's work as the treasurer on the Kimiko Burton for......

We're launching a new sporadic political column, following Fiona Ma and Janet Reilly's battle for the 12th Assembly District. If anyone's got a better name for this column, post it in the comments! Anyone who's played one-on-one against Mayor Newsom's gotta have some game! Look at the fire in Fiona's eyes in this picture! Bring! It! On! After a fairly moribund start (for our purposes, "moribund" means "not too terribly hilarious in that car-wreck kind of way that we like") to the SF West-siiiiiide State Assembly race between Fiona Ma and Tori Spelling Janet Reilly (wife of the famously-aggressive political strategist Clint Reilly), where the candidates have agreed on almost everything except school exit exams and the death penalty (Fiona is against the first and for the second, Reilly is the opposite), things heated up today with the first use of the word "Nixonian." Yes! According to Ma, Reilly's people faked her name on IRS filings and have been falsely telling everyone that she was the treasurer in the 2002 campaign for Mike Rounds, the anti-abortion South Dakota governor. Ma is pro-choice. The Examiner did some research and found out that the Reilly campaign has been emailing Mark Leno and NARAL about it. Reilly's people (through Eric Jaye, Newsom's old campaign guy) now say they didn't fake anything, don't know if it's correct or not, and are now trying to find out from the IRS why Fiona's name is listed on those forms. Why would Fiona Ma be working on a campaign in South Dakota, anyways? We can barely get her to work on campaigns in San Francisco! ...

The best roommate we ever had had a surefire (ha) way to summon a malingering Muni -- all he'd do was light a fresh cigarette and, like magic, the tardiest of busses would appear. Since then, our former roommate has quit smoking, and now Muni has, too, as yesterday the Board of Supervisors approved legislation banning smoking at all public transit stops in the City. Introduced by Fiona Ma (who knew she was still......

Come here, widdle Andrew, let Mommy bury you in her bosom! San Francisco's current best Freudian drama took another lurch into the Viennese land of cigars and trains steaming into tunnels, as the Chronicle reveals that Sunset doyenne and Tom DeLay wannabe Julie Lee told everyone she was going to start her fundraising/money laundering scheme because she just really wanted her little boy to become a San Francisco city supervisor, and the only way he could do that was by raising money for (now-former) Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, so he would endorse Andrew. Julie Lee was convinced Shelley would become the president. (Of the United States? The guy who yelled at people in a bathrobe and with a toothbrush in his hand?) Oh, how mothers crush the dreams of their offspring! Andrew Lee just wants to grow up to be a rap star! Nonetheless, he dutifully ran for office, and came in fourth in his 2002 election (losing to hottie supervisor runner-up and the producer of his first album, Fiona Ma. Dude, it's like when Kanye West went out on his own). Then he tried to get on the PUC board to please his mother, but was stymied by the coup de Daly. Poor guy! What about his dreams? Stand up for yourself, Andrew! "Mom, you've just gotta let me LIVE MY LIFE! I gotta rap!" Picture of Julie Lee (on left) with (anti-gay) Rose Tsai from Asianweek...