Free Republic

It can be easy to be jaded about the Beat writers in San Francisco, but even the most indifferent literary snob would be hard-pressed to walk away from "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg" at the Contemporary Jewish Museum without feeling fuzzy inside. Organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and running through September, "Beat Memories" is a collection of about 80 photos taken by Ginsberg and his friends in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s. Nearly every image is notated with the wobbly handwriting of Ginsberg, who added paragraph-length captions to the images in the 1980s...

Perhaps you, like me, assumed that the City of San Francisco, California would avoid any governmental sponsorship of a particular religion, and would never house a place of worship of a specific religion on its own property. And if such government sponsorship ever came to light, you would be certain that the ACLU and the atheist activists would raise their voices in protest. But not when it comes to Islam. The San Francisco Chronicle's investigative duo Matier and Ross tell us: Muslim cabbies now have their very own place at San Francisco International Airport to wash their hands and feet...

SAN FRANCISCO — VISITORS have forever left their hearts in San Francisco. But leaving the rest of your body here isn’t so easy: there’s no place to live. The City by the Bay is going through one of its worst housing shortages in memory. With typical high demand intensified by a regional boom in tech jobs, apartment open houses are mob scenes of desperate applicants clutching their credit reports. The citywide median rental price for a one-bedroom is $2,764 a month, but jumps to $3,500 in trendy areas. One reason for the shortage? Me. I’ve recently joined the ranks of...

Ruth Asawa's "San Francisco Fountain" owes Apple big time. Before the tech behemoth announced its plans to plop a slick, glassy Apple Store where Levi's and the fountain plaza reside, many locals were blithely unaware of the bronze landmark. Mayor Ed Lee apparently forgot about it when he cozied up to Apple execs announcing their plans to bulldoze (in effect) and build over the northeast corner of San Francisco's Union Square. The fountain -- which features iconic Ess Eff landmarks molded by school children and other city folk in baker's clay, then memorialized in bronze -- is in an ugly...

All In The Family The US has entered into a contract with a real estate firm to sell 56 buildings that currently house U.S. Post Offices. The government has decided it no longer needs these buildings, many of which are located on prime land in towns and cities across the country. The sale of these properties will fetch billions of dollars and a handsome 6% commission to the company handling the sales. That company belongs to a man named Richard Blum. Who is Richard Blum you ask? Why the husband of Senator Dianne Feinstein, that's who. What a bunch of...

1950s San Francisco, as seen through a submarine periscope In 1951, the USS Catfish (SS-339), a WWII-era diesel submarine, cruised into San Francisco Bay. The crew snapped a handful of pictures through the periscope, showing what the city and Alcatraz looked like from the submariners' perspective. It's a bit eerie to see the city through the periscope's reticles, almost as if it were a target. It offers a historical perspective a largely pre-skyscraper San Francisco, but also creates the sense that the city being spied on.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Gov. Jerry Brown recently stepped in it when a reporter asked him about the Bay Bridge. In March, 32 of 96 key rods in the under-construction eastern span cracked after they were tightened. Dao Guv -- who, as Oakland's mayor, helped delay construction of the new span to win a tony, world-class design -- gave the wrong answer: "(Scatological stuff) happens." The state Senate Transportation and Housing Committee held a hearing Tuesday to find out how such stuff happens. State Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, wants to know. As a member of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in 1998,...

An indecent exposure citation was reported Wednesday on the 400 block of Nancy Pelosi Drive in San Francisco. The city renamed Middle Drive East, which connects Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and John F. Kennedy Drive, after the House minority leader last year. “When I heard about it I said, ‘No, no, please don’t do that. I’m embarrassed, please don’t do that,’” Pelosi said at the ceremony last year, “until I heard that it was between JFK and MLK Jr. Drive and then I thought, ‘Well, I would like to go there and bear witness to the greatness of those...

Brown says public still confident in Bay BridgeGov. Jerry Brown said Tuesday that he believes the public still has confidence in the safety of the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge despite concerns about construction of the $6.4 billion span that is scheduled to open later this year. State transportation officials recently disclosed that nearly three dozen seismic safety bolts on the eastern span of the bridge had broken. But Brown says people generally understand there will be construction problems on major infrastructure projects. "Don't know if it's a setback. I mean, look, sh&# happens. That's all I can say,'' Brown...

Enforcement of San Francisco’s 2010 law to reduce city government vehicles was supposed to begin two years ago. Now that it has finally started, the requirement is being put to the test. Nine city department heads have submitted waivers to protect hundreds of trucks, sedans and other vehicles from elimination. --SNIP-- The fleet has long faced criticism for abuse and waste, a fact seen as a blemish on San Francisco’s environmentally conscious image. In recent years, city leaders have launched efforts to reduce vehicle dependency, such as by partnering with car-share programs. In 2010, San Francisco adopted the landmark Healthy...

San Francisco park workers and volunteers spent much of Sunday picking up and hauling away 10,000 pounds of garbage strewn all over the eastern part of Golden Gate Park known as Hippie Hill, the remnants of Saturday's annual yet unofficial pot-smoking bacchanalia. But this year's annual celebration - which falls each year on April 20 and is known as "420" - drew a larger-than-average crowd of between 10,000 and 15,000 revelers on the warm weekend day. They proceeded to smoke, drink, eat and rack up more than $10,000 in costs for city crews to clean up the mess, ironically just...

San Francisco’s Black Talon Ban Comes a Little Too Late In the massive surge to draft new gun control legislation across the nation, you could be forgiven for not noticing the local San Francisco push to ban hollowpoint ammo. Specifically, the new law bans Winchester Black Talons. This is interesting if for only the fact that Winchester hasn’t made Black Talon ammunition for two decades. Why ban the sale of practically nonexistent ammo? California’s history of shooting sprees is at the heart of the issue. Following the 101 California Street shooting, where Gian Luigi Ferri used a blend of ammo,...

Barack Obama is an addict. And his drug of choice is the money showered on him by Bay Area billionaires.

**SNIP** "She's operational, she gets the job done," Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said during a round table meeting at the Feminist Majority Foundation's headquarters in Beverly Hills. "She's going to be focused on what she is doing here, but her election will lift up people across our country." Pelosi appeared with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), U.S. Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), U.S. Rep. Janice Hahn (D-San Pedro) and legendary Democratic party activist Roz Wyman, who in 1953 became the youngest person to win a Los Angeles City Council seat. Speaking in front of vintage pictures of suffragettes, the women all returned...

Announcing the 2013 Free Republic Meet & Greet It is that time of year again. Time to start planning for our annual meet & greet. After several weeks of planning, we finally have some details for this event. This year’s meet & greet will be the weekend of Friday, September 13th. We chose San Francisco this year due to some great sponsorship opportunities that will reduce the amount of money FReepers will need to spend. Friday’s events will begin with a dinner sponsored by Lou Malnati’s Pizza at the Bohemian Club, 624 Taylor Street, San Francisco, California. The Bohemian Club...

SAN FRANCISCO --The most expensive public works project in California history just got a little more so. At least 32 massive seismic stabilizing bolts on San Francisco’s newly redesigned eastern span of the Bay Bridge failed during a stress test earlier this month, imperiling the structure’s Labor Day weekend grand opening. Of the span’s 96 bolts, which range in length from 9 to 17 feet, 32 snapped when stress meant to simulate the lateral motion of a large earthquake was introduced, the Sacramento Bee reported

Hyping "growing support" for same-sex marriage, CNN's Carol Costello asked a supporter of California's Proposition 8 on Monday if he was "on the wrong side of history" for legally defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Her tone fits right with Friday's CNN panel where a traditional marriage supporter was disgustingly marginalized as a segregationist and compared to a slave owner. Costello cited GOP strategist Karl Rove admitting that he could see a Republican presidential candidate publicly support same-sex marriage in 2016. She then asked Austin Nimocks of the Alliance Defense Fund, "Austin, you heard what Karl Rove...

When the state-imposed manager of Detroit, Kevyn Orr, starts the job on Monday he will wade into a city of crumbling neighborhoods where police fail to respond to some calls, arson fires burn out of control and residents scour charred buildings for scrap metal to sell. Except for the business district and a cultural area including a university, museum and some theaters, the city of Detroit, population 700,000, is in bad shape. Orr, a Washington, D.C.-based bankruptcy lawyer, will have the official title of "Emergency Financial Manager." But his remit as an unelected administrator will range far beyond money. His...

San Francisco Supervisor David Campos is about to introduce a law to end the city's 8-foot "bubble zone" around reproductive health clinics in favor of a new 25-foot "buffer zone." It's hard to imagine City Hall entertaining a law to curb the free speech expression of union representatives, Critical Mass bicyclists or anti-war activists, but anti-abortion protest is not welcome in this town. "We respect the right of people to have freedom of expression," Campos told the San Francisco Chronicle. "What is happening is more than that; it's intimidation." One man's free speech is another man's intimidation. When I went...

The San Francisco Symphony said on Sunday that it has canceled its upcoming East Coast tour as its musicians continue to strike over compensation. **SNIP** Orchestra management said in a statement that musicians rejected a "cooling off" period that would have allowed concerts to resume. Musicians went on strike on Wednesday after contract negotiations fell through. The orchestra said on Sunday that musicians have rejected a number of proposals, including one that offered increases in musician compensation to achieve a new annual minimum salary of $145,979 with annual increases of 1% and 2%.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters present at her weekly Capitol Hill news conference to “get excited” about newly elected Pope Francis. While discussing with Capitol Hill reporters on Thursday her experience watching the selection of the new pope, Pelosi said: “Isn’t it exciting? I think so. Get excited. This is big, this is big.” Earlier in the press briefing, Pelosi said she was happy to hear Pope Francis chose his name based on Saint Francis of Assisi, for whom Pelosi’s home city of San Francisco is named. …

Pamela Geller, most famous for fighting what she called the "ground zero mosque" in New York, bought ads on the sides of 10 San Francisco buses that feature hateful quotes from Osama bin Laden, accused Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan and failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad -- under the headline "My Jihad." "Jihad, holy fighting in Allah's cause, with full force and weaponry is ... an obligation and duty in Islam to every Muslim," reads the Shahzad quote. And underneath: "That's my Jihad. What's yours?" San Francisco City Hall responded in knee-jerk fashion -- holding a news conference drenched...

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – A controversy has been re-ignited this week as ten new ads go up on San Francisco Muni buses containing quotes used by terrorists. “Killing Jews is worship that draws us closer to Allah,” reads one of the ads, which has people debating the line between free speech and hate speech. “The purpose of our campaign is to show the reality of Jihad, the root causes of terrorism. Using the exact quotes and text that they use,” said Pamela Geller of the American Freedom Defense Institute.

San Francisco leaders are denouncing a series of anti-Islamic advertisements that will appear on 10 city buses. Several leaders joined Arab and Muslim community leaders to publicly condemn the ads as racist and offensive.

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – A controversy has been re-ignited this week as ten new ads go up on San Francisco Muni buses containing quotes used by terrorists. “Killing Jews is worship that draws us closer to Allah,” reads one of the ads, which has people debating the line between free speech and hate speech.

No fewer than 572 San Francisco city workers and executives made more than Gov. Jerry Brown last year. More than 1,500 city workers made more than state Attorney General Kamala Harris. And that's without overtime. "That's pretty staggering," said Tom Dalzell, head of the California Citizens Compensation Commission, which sets pay for state lawmakers. --SNIP-- The days when the headline-grabbing "$100,000 club" was made up of a handful of top managers and overtime earners are long gone. Last year, city controller's records show, roughly a quarter of the city's 36,000 full- and part-time workers made more than $100,000 - without...

Bay Area bridge commuters will be ponying up $37 for each of the 150,000 people expected to walk across the new Bay Bridge span during the big Labor Day opening celebration. That's the breakdown on the math for the $5.6 million in toll money going toward the public side of the public-private celebration marking completion of the new eastern span.

An "inexperienced" nudist who decided to join the ranks of naked men in the Castro district before the city banned most public nudity has been acquitted of indecent exposure - a criminal charge that his attorney said was the result of a big misunderstanding. Richard Sierra, 48, had been accused of inappropriately touching himself in public, but his lawyer told a jury in San Francisco Superior Court that Sierra had simply been uncomfortable exposing himself completely and arranging himself in a way that gave a passer-by the wrong impression. On Thursday, the jury acquitted him. It all started Nov. 11,...

Super Bowl- Anyone have any thoughts on which city will be trashed and burned first nd/or how many shoe and TV stores will be looted and trashed afetr the game? I'm guessing Baltimore win or lose!

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey has stepped down as president emeritus of the New School, a university in New York City. … Kerrey recently agreed to become executive chairman of the San Francisco-based Minerva Institute for Research and Scholarship. …

When I was a boy in the 1960s, my father had nine season tickets to the San Francisco 49ers, and on Sundays in the fall would often bring as many as seven of his 11 children to see the team play at Kezar Stadium. Kezar was at the southeast corner of Golden Gate Park, adjacent to the Haight-Ashbury District. In 1967, there was probably no greater side-by-side contrast of the diverging trends in American culture than between the people inside that stadium, watching a game played on grass, and the people outside the stadium, smoking grass. At the age...

It’s no secret that San Francisco hasn’t invested much money in bicycling improvements — almost nothing until the past couple of years. But even those relatively small investments have led to a surge in the number of commuters riding their bikes in San Francisco. Over the past decade the number of trips being taken by bicycle have increased by 71 percent. Now, bike advocates — and the Municipal Transportation Agency — would like to see what happens if they put some real money — perhaps as much as half a billion over the next five years — behind biking.

It’s not just an out-of-control IRS or EPA. And it’s not merely the punitive demands and restraints of the new federal healthcare law. American enterprise is being stifled and squelched by state and local governments, in ways that most Americans don’t even see. With increasing propensity, elected officials nationwide are at times suffocating private businesses with regulations, and at other times competing directly against them – and it happens among both Democrats and Republicans. A striking reminder of this emerged last week, when it was reported that Democrat San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee was contemplating some sort of “ban” on...

Abstract: Recently, many jurisdictions have implemented bans or imposed taxes upon plastic grocery bags on environmental grounds. San Francisco County was the first major US jurisdiction to enact such a regulation, implementing a ban in 2007. There is evidence, however, that reusable grocery bags, a common substitute for plastic bags, contain potentially harmful bacteria. We examine emergency room admissions related to these bacteria in the wake of the San Francisco ban. We find that ER visits spiked when the ban went into effect. Relative to other counties, ER admissions increase by at least one fourth, and deaths exhibit a similar...

Mayor Ed Lee is floating the idea of tearing down the stub end of Interstate 280 in San Francisco in hopes of creating a new neighborhood and speeding up the arrival of high-speed rail service downtown. The idea, laid out by the mayor's chief transit planner, Gillian Gillett, in a memo to the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission, would be to knock down I-280 before 16th Street - eliminating the ramps both at Sixth and Brannan streets and at Fourth and King streets. It would be replaced by a street-level boulevard akin to those built after the Embarcadero and Central freeways...

On Jan. 7, exactly two weeks before we are to simultaneously celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and inaugurate Barack Obama to his second term as President of the United States, sinister advertisements went up in dozens of subway stations around New York City, making evident that despite the undoubted strides our nation has made toward achieving justice and equality, bigotry and fear-mongering remain alive and well in America. The American Freedom Defense Initiative, headed by Pamela Geller, an inflammatory demagogue with a long history of anti-Muslim incitement, purchased space in 39 stations for ads with an...

California is losing its children. After decades of simultaneously worrying about and cashing in on its ever-growing population, the Golden State now awaits a new challenge: too few children and, eventually, too few skilled and able-bodied workers. "Kids are no longer overrunning us. Now they're in short supply," said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California. "It changes the priorities for the state." The number of California babies born each year began dropping steadily in 2007, according to state public health records, but the birthrate began slowing years before. From 2002 to 2011, there was a statewide...

San Francisco’s present-day citizens got a recent visit from the “future” — a DeLorean hovercraft wowed onlookers by spinning out near the Golden Gate Bridge on Saturday.

A San Francisco supervisor wants to rename the city's airport in honor of civil rights leader Harvey Milk, a change supporters said would send a global message about the importance and struggles of gays and lesbians for equality. Supervisor David Campos will introduce legislation Tuesday that would place the proposal to rename San Francisco International Airport as Harvey Milk San Francisco International Airport before voters in November. To send the name change to voters, Campos needs the support of five other supervisors, and Monday he already had four co-sponsors.

San Francisco officials are planning to ban the possession of hollow-point bullets and require notification of the police for any single purchase of more than 500 rounds of ammunition. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, City Supervisor Malia Cohen is introducing the ordinance in response to last Friday’s deadly shooting in Connecticut of 20 school children. …

A gun buyback day in San Francisco and Oakland brought out huge crowds Saturday as local residents turned over firearms for cash. Each person turning in a working firearm to police was given $200 cash. The line was around the block in San Francisco where the group ran out of cash by early afternoon and started handing out I.O.U.'s. A woman named Jean-Margaret Strauss was one of the first in line. She said the shooting in Newtown helped motivate her to turn in three guns that used to be her father's. She said her guns weren't jeopardizing anyone, but turning...

NOTE The following text is a quote: Alabama Men Arrested on Terrorism Charges U.S. Attorney’s Office December 11, 2012 Southern District of Alabama MOBILE, AL—U.S. Attorney Kenyen R. Brown of the Southern District of Alabama and Stephen E. Richardson, Special Agent in Charge of the Mobile Division of the FBI, announced that Mohammad Abdul Rahman Abukhdair, 25, and Randy Wilson, also known as Rasheed Wilson, 25, both U.S. citizens living in Mobile, were arrested today on terrorism charges filed in the Southern District of Alabama. A criminal complaint signed on December 10, 2012, charges Abukhdair and Wilson with conspiring to...

If you want to understand leftism — and everyone needs to, because it has been the most dynamic religion of the past one hundred years — one good place to start is with San Francisco. Or, perhaps more precisely, with nudity. Or, even more precisely, with public nudity. Last month, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted by the barest (pun not intended) margin, 6 to 5, to ban public nudity. By “public nudity,” the law means only displaying one’s genitals in public. San Francisco women are still free to walk around topless. But that is not unique to San...

A blown transformer at the Van Ness Muni Station in San Francisco caused the shutdown of the Metro subway system Monday evening. Muni officials said the transformer blew at about 6 p.m. as a result of rain damage from Sunday's storm. Subway service had not reopened late Monday, but light-rail vehicles were running on surface lines in the western part of the city. Also, cars on the F-Market line, which runs above ground, had been turned around at 11th Street for a time because of an earlier accident at Market and Dolores streets. The line was reopened at 8:35 p.m....

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who is Catholic, indicated on Friday that she supports forcing St. Mary’s Medical Center, the oldest continuously operating hospital in her San Francisco-based congressional district, to provide health plans to its workers that cover sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs free of charge even though the Catholic faith says this Catholic hospital may not do so because these things are intrinsically immoral. “We are committed to furthering the healing ministry of Jesus,” says the hospital's mission statement. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius—who, like Pelosi, is Catholic—issued the sterilization-contraception-abortifacient mandate as a regulation under...

(11-29) 12:56 PST San Francisco -- Things are looking up for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's controversial plan to transform the old tank factory and postal facility at 390 Main St. into a suitable place for regional agencies to cohabit - particularly the price tag. The estimated cost now stands at $218 million, which is $38 million higher than the original estimate from July 2011 but $51 million more than the most recent estimate, adopted in November 2011. (The projected cost fell after the agency bought the building at a lower price.)

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted narrowly to forbid public nudity in the City by the Bay. This is considered to be outrageous by defenders of the right to public expression.

A San Francisco sheriff's deputy was hauled to his own county jail this morning after authorities identified him on a surveillance camera as the suspect who allegedly robbed a local Bank of America. Officer Albie Esparza tells us that on Nov. 7 about 4:50 p.m., Deputy Phil Tong, 36, allegedly walked into the Bank of America at 3701 Balboa St., handed the teller a note that said he had a gun, and demanded cash. He fled with $1,700 and was last seen on Balboa Street headed toward 39th Avenue. Police say they recognized him on the surveillance camera holding a...

San Francisco nudists said on Monday they would continue to walk the streets naked regardless of a proposed law that would order them to cover up. City authorities are meeting on Tuesday to decide on a new anti-nudity law that is being supported by residents and business owners in the city's Castro district. The law would make it an offence for anyone over the age of five to "expose his or her genitals, perineum or anal region on any public street, sidewalk, street median, parklet or plaza". Lloyd Fishbach, left, who was standing naked at the corner of Castro and...

SAN FRANCISCO, November 19, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) - The pendulum of the sexual revolution may be swinging slightly back toward sanity in San Francisco, as the city is set to vote on a new law that may bar public nudity – except at the city’s gay pride march and other events covered by permit. The ordinance, introduced by Supervisor Scott Wiener who oversees the city’s homosexual Castro District, would make it illegal for any adult and most children to “expose his or her genitals, perineum, or anal region” in public. The behavior of some naturalists at the district’s public plaza pushed...