Free Republic

Want more food deserts in San Francisco?Here's how you get more food deserts in San Francisco.According to Reason magazine:The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering a remarkable policy that would allow people to sue grocery stores that close too quickly.Earlier this week, Supervisors Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin introduced an ordinance that, if passed, would require grocery stores to provide six months' written notice to the city before closing down.Supermarket operators would also have to make "good faith" efforts to ensure the continued availability of groceries at their shuttered location, either through finding a successor store, helping residents form...

San Francisco Mayor London Breed says a potential ballot measure to move citywide elections to presidential years is a democratic socialist power grab, and the proposal's author is pushing back. Breed, a Democrat, characterized Supervisor Dean Preston's proposal to hold the next mayor, sheriff, district attorney, city attorney elections and treasurer in 2024 – and every four years after that – rather than in 2023 as Preston and a "group of democratic socialists" deciding "they want to have more control and power of being able to get their people elected." Preston, the board's first democratic socialist supervisor in decades, introduced...

Pretty soon they'll need a scoreboard down at San Francisco City Hall to keep track of the "gotcha" shots flying between Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin and Mayor Gavin Newsom.The game opened with Peskin taking a swipe at Newsom for jetting off to Hawaii with gal pal Jennifer Siebel the day after the big Cosco Busan oil spill.Newsom responded by pulling out of a Chinese Chamber of Commerce trip to China that included Peskin and Rose Pak, the chamber boss with whom Newsom was also feuding.Peskin returned the favor by busting Newsom for using $650,000 in Muni money to...

San Francisco -- San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin made a series of harassing telephone calls to officials at the Port of San Francisco and threatened to eliminate their jobs and cut funding to the agency because staff members disagreed with him over building-height limits on the city's waterfront, the port director said in a letter obtained by The Chronicle. In a letter sent to the city Department of Human Resources and Mayor Gavin Newsom's office, Port Executive Director Monique Moyer said that in August, Peskin threatened the jobs of port staff members in four telephone conversations, which...

SAN FRANCISCO Prop. 82 backers picket Gap store Backers of Proposition 82, which would offer free preschool to all California 4-year-olds, called for a boycott of Gap Inc. because of its owners' opposition to the June ballot measure. About two dozen Prop. 82 supporters set up a boisterous but peaceful picket outside the Gap's San Francisco flagship store at Powell and Market streets on Thursday. John Fisher, whose father is Gap founder Don Fisher and who manages the family's multibillion-dollar investment portfolio, gave $25,000 to the campaign opposed to Prop. 82. Family members also have contributed to business groups campaigning...

You can't flip through a newspaper or wander around the Internet these days without stumbling across a debate over whether bloggers are journalists. This isn't trivial. Journalists often get access to places and information that others don't. Because they're surrogates for the public, they can get close to the action when emergencies break out. They benefit from the California Shield Law, which allows them, in most instances, to keep secret sources secret.... The Federal Elections Commission soon will explore whether campaign-finance laws apply to partisan bloggers whose work may, in effect, be akin to donating their services to campaigns.... It's...