So what's going on with this whole newspaper lawsuit and injunction thingy we mentioned earlier? Well, sit right back, grab a beer, and listen up because this is super-exciting stuff. ...

Interestingly, the only local news source that seems to be covering the story about Clint Reilly's attempt to stop McClatchy Co. from buying the Mercury News are the McClatchy Co-affiliated papers (which include the Oakland Tribune.). Reilly's filed an antitrust lawsuit to scotch the deal; you may remember he unsuccessfully tried this trick in an attempt to stop Hearst from buying out the Chron. Federal District Judge Susan Illston (who, when she's not wrangling with......

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....

So some group that supports Mrs. Ma mailed out a flyer recently and let drop some info sure to raise the blood pressure of your average SF Soccer Mom and SF Progressive-type, that the Reilly's send their daughter to a "an exclusive private school." Quelle horreur! How can the Reilly's claim to be down with the common folk if they send their children to a private school! Well, it turns out that the eldest Reilly daughter goes to not just any private school, but a Catholic one. So in retaliation, Reilly supporters stepped up and took it to the next level-- Ma hates the Catholics. It's oh so simple, actually: Ma attacks Reilly for sending children to a private school, private school is Catholic, so Ma is really an anti-Papist bigot who thinks the Janet Reilly will call the Pope before every major vote, wants to burn heretics at the stake, and sings "Every Sperm is Sacred" every night before dinner. Says a mailer handed out after mass on Sunday: "All of us hoped that this anti-Catholic attitude ended in 1960 with the election of President John F. Kennedy. It is appalling that it still exists here in San Francisco in 2006." As far as we know, the flyer was not ripped off from somebody else. ...

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! ...

Last week's winner, the Guardian (which now has no pictures of the current cover on its site for us to use to illustrate this post -- this is a picture from Sonic Reducer): How Tim Redmond set up wifi in his home. Robert Haaland, subject of the latest poorly-scanning Joe O'Donoghue poem, pens an op-ed on the Gap. Background on the (now-averted) school strike. Doesn't Janet Reilly kind of look like Tori Spelling? [picture is......

Pillow Fight February 14th!!! Who wants to bet that Frank Chu just shows up? Banjo-pickin' blogger Jordan Klein will be appearing tomorrow and next Friday as part of the San Francisco Bluegrass & Old-Time Festival. And congrats to Irene McGee for landing her show "NoOne's Listening" on 106.9 FM. We love photography, we love parliamentary procedure -- Robert Haaland shot the recent Budget Comittee meeting on health care coverage. The Schadelmann covers Janet Reilly's......