The Usual Suspects passed us the following note in homeroom recently: Word is that a high-level staffer is departing the Mayor's office. But since none of the Real Media have confirmed anything, we won't name names, because we're too chicken to do so. But stay tuned - we'll post links as soon as some reporters and editors agree it's worth running with... But who, you ask? Well, according to San Francisco Sentinel (An aside:......

Well, at least he lives in the Richmond, right? (Some) affordable housing advocates and ethicists are shaking their heads over District 1 Supervisor Jake McGoldrick's poor party timing this week. Remember that lot on Cesar Chavez and Mission that everyone's fighting about condoizing? Well, the Board of Supes had a contentious debate about it on Tuesday, and narrowly voted for development on a 6-5 vote. (hey, Michela Alioto-Pier must've shown up that day!) The swing......

Gavin Newsom, why won't you just do a Question Time before the Board of Supervisors? Was it not enough to force all those citizens into renting chicken suits and drag all those innocent bloggers out at obscenely early hours on the weekends (read: 10 a.m.), just because you've unilaterally decided you don't like to take unscripted questions? Was it really worth it? Now just look what you've made Question Time originator Chris Daly do! That's......

--Are you into those Iowa Futures Market invisible-hand-of-the-marketplace economic-based ways of predicting political races? Usual Suspects has started one for the SF mayoral race. Gavin Newsom is pegged to win at $36.78. --The ACLU is going to sue a San Jose company for arranging those "rendition" flights for outsourcing torture. --Don Perata and his spendthrift ways win him a Golden Pig! --Midwifery in San Francisco suffers another blow. --Wow, the real estate market must......

We cannot get away from the transportation theme around here at Team SFist this week! The latest travel-related news relates to bubble-tea connoisseur Supervisor Ed Jew: despite the pending FBI investigation into his finances, he's left the country for a pre-planned trip to China. (Thanks to the Usual Suspects for the tip!) Aaron Peskin seems to have moved away from his original "let's see what happens and maybe it's all a big mistake" position, since......

From the Usual Suspects, we found a link to a story about Doughgate (we like that one) in the Yale Daily News. As you might as well imagine, it's a big story over there. Anyways, it’s an interesting read as it gives you an idea how it's seen over there in Ivy League Land. Among other things, they have no idea about all the inside San Francisco stuff, like the high schools involved or who the people who hosted the party were. To them it's just a straight forward assault and battery....

Look who's launched his "reelect me in 2007" website! (Thanks, Usual Suspects!) Mysteriously, Gavin and his handlers didn't choose the domain name gavinnewsom2007.com, but went with actlocallysf.com instead. ActLocallySF.org is quite a multimedia extravaganza, with a Flickr page set up, a blog with entries about how Gavin loves the Niners (he's a sports blogger, just like SFist Christopher Rogers!), online polls, a blogroll (which is not up yet -- we hope we're included!), and......

We'd have a sad face too if the Chron came out against our position on Question Time, some mayoral pipsqueak in Santa Clara was out to eat our Niners lunch, and our chief of staff had just resigned because he'd been clashing with our minder Peter Ragone! (Though for full disclosure, this picture's almost two years old.) The latest news on the 2007 mayoral front? The Examiner went down to City Hall and got......

The good folks who bring local political junkies our daily news updates and analysis at The Usual Suspects are all affiliated with a political lobbying/consulting group known as Barbary Coast Consulting. So you know when you see the bright green headline on Usual Suspects that says "Supes Question Giving Contract To Lobbying Firm" and the note in bold from Usual Suspects publisher Alex Clemens that says "We think everyone who reads Suspects should be aware......

We're baaaaaack! (Did you think we'd ever left?) Well, we've moved on to relentlessly houding Gavin Newsom to show up for Question Time and we're also starting to gear up to cover the 2007 Mayoral Election -- but you all know we've still got a special place in our heart for the District 6 election that was. So what's the latest? Well, it's the moment we election geeks have all been waiting for --......

-Bechtel cutting and running from Iraq. -Daly now ahead in D6 race? ...

Ha ha ha ha -- they threw Chris Daly into a swimming pool! Commenter El Greco and photographer Drew Altizer earn a sweet spot in our heart for passing along their pictures of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Center Pool Toss event on Tuesday. As promised, Daly wore a suit. Pat Murphy of the Sentinel was also there with the color commentary, reporting that Daly went into the splash with his wife Sarah, for a bid......

SFist Rita has been going on and on about the District 6 City Life Supervisor Candidate Forum, or, as we refer to it at SFist HQ, "Everybody Hates Chris: Special Debate Edition!" See District 6 candidates Rob Black, Chris Daly, Matt Drake, George Dias and Robert Jordan (sadly, neither George nor Robert agreed to interview requests from SFist, so no links for you!) answer to The Usual Suspects' Jaime Rossi, as he poses quality-of-life questions......

Here's an update on a couple of stories we've been following. -After Gavin vetoed the "Healthy Saturdays" initiative, the Board of Supervisors voted to see if they could override Gavin's veto but couldn't. Once again, the vote came down to a 7-4 vote, not enough to override, with the Usual Suspects-- Alioto-Pier, Dufty, Elsbernd, and Ma-- voting no. The next steps are unclear at this point. McGoldrick says he's in negotiations with Gavin to come to some sort of resolution to the initiative but people are skeptical of Gavin's intentions. Maybe we'll have another ballot measure, but apparently this issue has been deemed too important to be left to us. BTW, we're a little confused about the fact that all the pro-bike people keep on saying Gavin vetoed the measure because he's the bitch of the rich. When did neighborhood activists and activists for the disabled and all the other people who came out against the measure suddenly become rich and powerful developers? Anyways, check out this hilarious interview with Gavin on the Bay Guardian's web site, an interview that takes place while Gavin and the reporter are riding bicycles to City Hall on Bike to Work Day. We imagine the reporter and Gavin puffing away, muttering curses at each other underneath their breath and trying desperately not to roll their eyes too much lest they accidentally crash into other bikers. ...

This week's episode: Everybody Hates The Field. We don't understand why everyone else isn't nearly as obsessed with the District 6 election as we are. How can that be? Thank goodness for the Usual Suspects, who gallantly went out and actually did some research about who's running against Daly in November (only six more shopping months until ELECTION DAY!). So it's Daly versus the field! So who's the field? Well, there's the three people we've......

SFist Karen catches some Andy Goldsworthy-esque art on the beach. Meet the Ritual Roasters, the folks behind local politics website Usual Suspects, the guy who produced The Devil and Daniel Johnston, and some hot sexcake talk! Plus: we shamelessly speculate about the "CIA agent" posting notices around town. In sports: Giants (plus the new Barry show), A's, mountain biking, and the end of the women's NCAA tourney. We wish a fond farewell to abecedarian eater......

All good San Francisco political junkies have Usual Suspects bookmarked on their browser. The local clearinghouse of all things political keeps everyone up to date, diligently reading and summarizing all the articles about anything even remotely related to local politics -- and not just the articles featuring Chris Daly doing something vaguely embarrassing, like some other websites we might mention. We sat down (virtually) with the seven folks behind the scenes and chatted 'em......

What's everyone got against the San Francisco Sentinel these days, anyways? It's got beautiful photography, keeps an ear firmly planted on the ground of City Hall, and runs a fairly-entertaining gossip column to boot! Well, sure, there was that H. Brown controversy, but that seems to have resolved with H's summary axing from the site, right? Well, not quite. So all in this week, editors Pat Murphy and Luke Thomas are besieged on all sides. So SF political newssite Usual Suspects dropped the Sentinel from its blogroll this week. No reason was given, but Murphy's weekly gossip column seems to imply (if you can get through the obscurantist prose) that Alex Clemens said the Sentinel runs articles based on advertiser preference and doesn't get balancing quotes from all sides before running stories. But SFist is on the Suspects blogroll too and we don't get quotes from even one side before we run anything! What gives? Do we need to start reporting now or something too? On the left flank, Supervisor Chris Daly revives his smoldering feud with Murphy and reports that he's gotten a letter from the City Attorney that he believes makes clear that the Sentinel should be considered a political committee and thus should disclose all its donors to the ethics commission. And Supervisor Aaron Peskin wrote a letter to the Sentinel (scroll down) accusing it of being a Gavin Newsom love machine, to which the Sentinel accused Peskin of just being sore that the Sentinel broke the news of a secret Supervisor powwow he didn't want out. So what's going on? Is this some kind of H. Brown-related fallout? An upsurge in anti-Newsom sentiment? An increased call for media accountability for the holiday season? Or did we just lose our copy of the memo announcing that it's Everyone Hates Pat month? ...

Hey, no one told us Hothead Supervisor Chris Daly was going to be on Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night! About O'Reilly, of course. We're so bummed we missed this! (Usual Suspects, will you be selling DVDs like you did with Ammiano on the Daily Show?) Transcript is here, but here's the highlights:

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. ...

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......

On Wednesday we relished reading Matier and Ross's column about a brouhaha involving the San Francisco Film Commission. Seems that while shooting days in The City are up, all is not well between the commissioners and the executive director, Stefanie Coyote -- whom loyal SFist readers will remember from her previous brouhaha with deposed Treasure Island impresario Tony Hall over the Rent production. So Stefanie gets in a fight with former deputy director Michael Billington......

Last night's Police Commission meeting [RealPlayer] started off with rollicking public comment from officers and the public. Officers were particularly upset over the termination of officer Anthony Nelson. Nelson was terminated after breaking the arm of an anti-war protestor and then filing a report with erroneous information about the circumstances. One of the two commissioners who voted against his termination was Peter Keane, who is also the dean of the law school at Golden......

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. ...

Sorry, couldn't resist the opportunity to go all Drudge on this one. Hot on the heels of settling his civil suit, Gerardo Sandoval seems to be telling anyone who'll listen that he wants Mabel Teng's old job at the City Assessor's office. Friend of SFist Alex Clemens at the Usual Suspects (he and Pat Murphy can fight over who scooped whom amongst themselves) sent the following report and analysis: Sandoval is alerting people to......

Well, Randy Shaw apparently got the news that the Gavster's strategists are looking into the possibility of running for the Democratic nomination for the gubenatorial race next year. He writes in Beyond Chron: The prospect of a tossup primary followed by an easy general election victory is no doubt what is motivating the Newsom camp to look closely at the race. The Mayor’s ambitions for higher office have been no secret, and if he......

We all know it -- bloggers really can be such bitches (buy your SFist t-shirt bearing said message right here right now!) -- so guess who's the City's newest entrant in the blogrolls? That's right -- our favorite hothead, Chris Daly! (Thanks to Usual Suspects for the link!) Like Jerry Brown, Daly's started off strong, lashing out at "downtown interests," the Chronicle, and linking to articles listing the number of times he's been mocked by the Chronicle. (Also, an awesome picture of C. Daly carrying books into his office.) Unlike typepadder Jerry, though, Daly's running his blog off the sfgov.org computer, which makes it look less like a blog and more like a newsletter -- meaning, among other things, that you can't leave comments. Aw, come on!! Chris, have you considered a switch to Movable Type? Especially with the Usual Suspects' other news that Bay Blogger alum Adriel Hampton's hanging up his Body Politic gig at the Ex for a job with the City Attorney's office (what? no!!), we'll definitely be putting the DalyBlog into our favorites folder. (Hey, do you think Daly will qualify for a SFPD press pass?) ...

Alex Clemens of San Francisco Usual Suspects posted a link on Friday to a new website which we found on Chris Nolan's Politics from Left to Right. Looks like the documentary by producers Geoff Callan and Mike Shaw, which was mentioned in Tad Friend's bit of kudos-slathering about Gavin Newsom [PDF link from Usual Suspects], now has their website and trailer up. Rush to the Civil Altar, a documentary about our Winter of Love,......

Adriel Hampton reports on his blog that Alex Clemens, the mastermind behind SF politics must-see site Usual Suspects, has confessed that he's bought ad space on the back of Frank Chiu's "Impeach Clinton/12 Galaxies" sign for his company, Barbary Coast Consulting. When accused of taking unfair advantage of an obviously-sick man, Clemens unblinkingly responds that Chiu has been taking ads for some time and that Chiu should at least make some money promoting his zegnatronic messages. ("Anytime someone says 'I saw your ad on Frank Chiu's sign,' he gets a $1 bonus.") While we're not entirely convinced of Clemens' humanitarian instincts, there's certainly no denying that Chiu's got good local coverage. Plus, the ad is awesome: "Creative Communication for 10 of the 12 Galaxies. Serving all 12 by 2007, honest." ...

Okay, we're stealing this link from Usual Suspects, who found it first. (but if we give them credit, it's all okay!) PlanetOut.com, in connection with their voting Gavvie the person of the year, is running an online survey called "Who should play Gavin in the movie?" (We voted for k.d. lang.) More importantly: will Peter Coyote play Tony Hall negotiating the movie production of the movie, in the movie? ...