Jeff Adachi, John Avalos, David Chiu, Bevan Dufty, Dennis Herrera, Joanna Rees, Phil Ting, and Leland Yee will all sport their finest bikinis (or not) during this Saturday's fundraiser car wash for McKinley Elementary School. No word yet if frontrunner Ed Lee will show up for some sudsy fun in the sun, but a boy can dream. Anyway, here are the rules: more ›

San Francisco Assessor-Recorder and mayoral candidate Phil Ting today demanded fellow candidate Mayor Ed Lee to follow the rules of public financing spending limits. 'If Mayor Lee wants to raise money outside of the public financing system that is his choice, but he should also choose to abide by the spending limits that help ensure public trust in our political process," Ting said in a written statement. more ›

In our brief roundup of which mayoral candidates are showing their faces in public this week: Avalos and Ting meet and greet the Women's Political Committee, Avalos celebrates his endorsement from the League of Pissed of Voters, Joanna Rees' takes her coffee talks to Mission Bay and the Bayview, while David Chiu and Bevan Dufty will (no doubt) wow the crowds at Rasselas Jazz Club in the Fillmore. Also: a bonus event from Ross Mirkarimi for Sheriff. more ›

Arriving late to the Pier 38 offices of Automattic yesterday evening for a mayoral candidate forum on Open Government, we caught the tail end of opening remarks from a panel comprised of the nine candidates for mayor that people actually take seriously. The polite debate that followed ostensibly focused on the vague topic of technology, but actually drifted everywhere from Treasure Island development to smartphone apps for Muni Operators. Mostly it was an opportunity for these candidates to see who could toss around the most buzzwords without sounding like a complete tool while their media team set their thumbs on fire tweeting updates and pull-quotes to loyal Internet followers. more ›

City Assessor and Mayoral Candidate Phil Ting wasn't too keen on MTA's plan to increase the number of parking tickets they hand out this year. So he did what every reasonable person who wants to see some change in the city government would do - he launched an online petition on his site ResetSanFrancisco.org for people who agree with him that "more parking tickets are one of the worst ways to close the budget gap". Not exactly a transit-first policy from a guy hoping to get a nicer desk in City Hall. more ›

San Francisco is gearing up to marry people. But they need volunteers! Might you be one of them? SF Appeal reports, "Sometime in the next week or so, Judge Walker is expected to issue a very short ruling saying that the current hold on same sex marriage (called a 'stay') will either either remain in place through the appeal process (which could be many months), or will rule to lift it and allow same sex marriages to be performed in California." Which is to say, same-sex couples could get married (legally!) as soon as a few hours or a few weeks or a few months. But said ceremonies will have to be done fast before the 9th Circuit court reinforces the stay. more ›

San Francisco Assessor Phil Ting is starting a campaign to amend Proposition 13, the 31-year-old ballot measure that limits the increase of property taxes statewide to 2% a year. He argues that corporations no longer should reap the benefits of a measure that passed in order to keep seniors and the disenfranchised from losing their homes. He says the ads that aired before Prop 13 passed "never talked about Disneyland, or Universal Studios, or Sunset Records getting the same kind of protections that Grandma or Grandpa Smith would get." more ›

These two would-be brides were all dressed up with no place to go at San Francisco City Hall yesterday. more ›

Nancy Pelsoi at the recent Citizen Workshop in San Francsico. more ›

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 ›

SFist Jim is going to kill us, since he sent us these pictures on the promise that we'd write something up about the panel that Sen. Leland Yee (above) and Assessor Phil Ting appeared on the other day about the dangers of foreclosure and predatory loans -- but we just think this picture is awesome. Whatever happened to that website "Are You Kidding Mee," that was devoted solely to the various scrapes that Leland Yee had gotten into? more ›

Today, at the Yerba Buena Gardens, officially Mark Leno kicked off his "Stick it to Carole Migden" campaign. In attendance were such notables as Phil Ting, Kamala Harris, and the Ma-ster. more ›

A photo of Phil Ting's press conference about the S.F. Solar Task Force. more ›

A reader passed along a picture from today's press conference with City Treasurer José Cisneros and City Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting, where they bragged about how they collected $24 million more than expected in property assessments. Of that $24 mill, about 10% is from the backlog that Ting inherited from previous management and 50% is from mid-year reassessments. We're not entirely sure we know what that means, but we'll certainly take that extra $24 million for the city! more ›

SFist Jim stopped by the swearing-in for San Francisco assessor-recorder (and buzzed-about mayoral possibility?) Phil Ting last night and snapped these pictures for us. Yes, that is a subdued-looking Gavin Newsom, hiding in the stairwell of the Assessor-Recorder's office, a floor away from the prying questions of the media. Gavin made some awkward jokes about the awkwardness of the situation, refused to take the one question shouted out about whether he'd seek reelection (Dan Noyes, was that you?), and fled the scene shortly afterwards. (To be fair, Newsom had a campaign kickoff event in Chinatown to get to, set up by Alex Tourk before the scandal hit and to which media were not allowed). more ›

SFist Jon's having computer woes, so we're covering all the rest of the races here too. more ›

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.) more ›

Love is in the air, everywhere you look around... Nerds in love, and you know we love it. Geeks are back, baby! And if your pardner gets hilariously wonky jargon-jokes like this, you may have just found your special someone. In the "why we love The City department:" The annotated notebook Dinah Sanders lost? Found! And turning up the cute dial past eleven, congratulations to Neekole and Brandon on their first anniversary! more ›

Well, if those gloomy housing forecasts weren't enough, it's now official, folks -- the San Francisco real estate bubble has burst. "Kiss of Death" Al Gore has bought a house here. Al and Tipper bought a unit in the new St. Regis Tower, which is right between the MoAD and the SFMoMA on Third and Mission, above the hotel units. Folks are guesstimating that the Gores spent $2 million on the condo. $2 million! Why, you could get 2 actual bedrooms in Pac Heights for that price! Act now, folks, only twenty condos left! Don't you want to go to homeowners' association meetings with Big Al? Intriguingly, the Gores' press release mentions casually that they'll be living around the corner from none other than that other Democratic spoiler, Gavin Newsom, who they claim lives at the Four Seasons. Look, Care Not Cashers, Gavin lives in a hotel too! more ›

Just like Ron Chun dreamed it would be -- His Highness Gavin triumphantly hands Phil Ting the coveted assessor/recorder scepter! Ting was the only one who had to go through the RCV wringer this go-around -- but since Ting got about 47% of the vote the first go-around, second-place Sandoval (with 37%) would have had to have gotten 77% of the second-place choices of the Ron Chun voters to take that ermine cape. (We hope it was faux-ermine, at least!) The RCV tallies are starting to come in now, and though it's not official, Ting wins it with 56% of the adjusted total. We did a little math on the numbers and it looks like Ting got twice as many of Chun's second-place votes as Sandoval did. The political statistician on call at SF Usual Suspects, David Latterman, has put together an interesting (but .pdf) preliminary report about the assessor/recorder election, which hypothesizes: voters still have a hard time with RCV, Ting did very well in the Castro and Noe Valley (which is attributed to King Gavin The Ambivalent's influence), Sandoval didn't do as well with the progressives as everyone thought he would (hand-wringing), and RCV seems to help moderates more than the left-wingers who got it instituted in the first place. Also: pretty maps. more ›

Time to find out if all those "if this special election tanks, Arnold's political future tanks with it" prognostications are true. Because the Governator just got slapped by California voters like a redheaded stepchild. Every single proposition he endorsed has gone down in flames. Most troubling was Prop 73, which nearly passed with over 48% of the vote according to the latest numbers (though it went down 79-21 locally). It's times like these we wish we had John Burton's number so we could call him for a quote. He must have some doozies saved for just this occassion. more ›

At the risk of soundling like we don't have a TiVo, we have to ask, have you seen the crazy-ass Ron Chun commercials? Dig if you will this picture: there we were, lightly dozing during a aftenoon Sci-Fi channel showing of when suddenly we jolted awake from our dream of Gavin as King of San Francisco to realize that it was NOT A DREAM. more ›

SFist welcomes some new members of the family -- in English and in French (anybody want to contribute in Mandarin?). Oh, and Rehab the Crab! more ›

We're so excited! We've never actually known someone we've written about in the Political Junkie column before! Usual Suspects is reporting that 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goolett Place is abuzzzzzzzz with the word that GavNew's going to appoint Phil Ting to Mabel Teng's former assessor/recorder position. Phil's the current executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, but we actually know Phil because he and your Junkie were in a Mandarin Chinese class together at a jointly-shared institute of higher education! Your Junkie was hung over through a large number of those classes but nonetheless remembers that Phil was always very attentive and had good pronunciation. (Who knew he had all that real estate experience?) Could Newsom be appointing Phil (who we've always thought of as progressive) to try and forestall Sandoval in the November 2006 assessor's election? Is Newsom trying to get Phil out of the way for the District 4 run that Phil was going to make? Is Newsom trying to get Building Inspection Commission Phil out of trouble with the land use crowd? Or is Newsom trying to make sure that Chris Daly doesn't appoint public-power Phil to the PUC board when Newsom goes on vacation? So many things to think about! Especially since everyone else in our Chinese class just went to medical school or something. If the rumors are true -- congratulations, Phil! We can't think of a nicer person to sign San Franciscans' marriage licenses. more ›