Free Republic

It’s been scrawled across the pavement in front of government buildings in bright yellow paint, etched into cardboard signs and poster boards as a rallying cry during protests and addressed as a possibility in countless city council meetings. “Defund the police.” While cities across the country continue to reel in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, some city officials, politicians and activists are taking action, working on measures aimed to divert funding away from what they view as bloated police budgets, and toward community-based organizations. The objective, commonly summed up with the controversial phrase, has both ardent...

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke to Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures today. He didn’t hold back.He told the Fox News host, “something’s not quite right” with Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein. Pompeo wondered about her 20-year ties to a Chinese ex-spy and her frequent meetings with the Iranian foreign minister.They discussed sanctions on the Chinese and Pompeo made it clear that U.S. companies need to understand what their business with China means in terms of slave labor in particular.Pompeo noted the President will soon take action against TikTok and other companies owned by the Chinese Communist Party that present...

Great news in California. If you can’t go to church why not head off to your favorite gay bathhouse. Gay bathhouses could have an easier time returning to San Francisco, after the board of supervisors approved an ordinance that would ease restrictions for adult sex venues on July 21 with a unaminous [this typo is not mine] vote.This will amend the Heath Code, requiring the Director of Health to “adopt minimum health and safety standards” for commercial adult sex venues. It will also remove decades-old policies that required these businesses to monitor sexual activities and prohibited private rooms and locked...

A Chinese researcher who took refuge from U.S. authorities at China’s consulate in San Francisco is now in American custody and is expected to appear in court on Friday, a senior U.S. Justice Department official said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said in a statement on Thursday that she will propose an amendment to the next coronavirus aid legislation that would withhold aid to states that do not have a mask mandate. Feinstein said: In the last two weeks, 41 states saw an increase in coronavirus cases, with a total of 3.5 million infected nationwide. California, Florida and New York each topped 300,000 cases, and Texas will soon follow. We’ve seen 60,000 new cases in five of the last six days. We’re failing to control this virus and it’s time for serious action.

Irony is almost always lost on abortion activists, especially when they are talking about how important it is to protect people’s lives. They never see that it’s intellectually inconsistent to talk about how much they want to save people’s lives after birth when they are perfectly fine with taking people’s lives before. That’s exactly the issue with comments from Diane Feinstein yesterday. She condemned states that have issued orders stopping abortions, along with other medically unnecessary procedures in order to stop the spread of the coronavirus. In so doing, she said it’s perfectly fine to save peoples lives from COVID-19...

Link only - Bloomberg via Washington Post (democracy dies with democrats) - https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/firm-linked-to-pelosis-husband-got-virus-loan-data-show/2020/07/06/ddbfe428-bfbd-11ea-8908-68a2b9eae9e0_story.html

<p>SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — These days, the price of a San Francisco home can easily top a million dollars. But one savvy investor has bought up a whole street in the city's most exclusive neighborhood for a mere $90,000.</p> <p>Trouble is, some of the extremely wealthy residents of Presidio Terrace were not aware their street was up for sale and are not pleased it has been sold.</p>

We're continually amazed by the brave gazillionaires who list their multimillion-dollar homes in this environment -- economic crisis or not -- knowing that their properties won't fetch top dollar. And we're equally fascinated by how few of those houses have sold. Among the multimillion-dollar San Francisco houses listed over the last week, three are priced above $5 million; six are priced between $2.7 million and $4.7 million; and a couple are prices slightly upwards of $2 million. The priciest of the bunch is 1188 Lombard Street -- a three-bedroom, Mediterranean-style Russian Hill home owned by Byron Meyer, who, as far...

Readers may recall, as early as March, city dwellers in California fled to suburbs and remote areas to isolate from the virus pandemic. The proliferation of remote work arrangements has led this shift to become more permanent. At first, the exodus out of the city was due to virus-related lockdowns, then social unrest, and now it appears a steady flow of folks are leaving the San Francisco Bay Area for rural communities as their flexible work environment (i.e., remote access) allows them to work from anywhere, more specifically, outside city centers where the cost of living is a whole...

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan donated $75million to a San Francisco hospital in 2015 It was the single largest contribution by private individuals in support of a public hospital in the U.S. It came with the condition it would be renamed Zuckerberg San Francisco General hospital The name change immediately sparked backlash from some medical staff The push to drop Zuckerberg's name increased this week in light of an advertiser boycott of Facebook San Francisco supervisor Matt Haney has joined nurses' calls for the change SNIP

San Francisco’s plan to put homeless people in hotels and motels is not going well. One recent morning a disheveled, visibly disturbed man ran frantically around the lobby of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, the historic and elegant property located at the crest of tony Nob Hill. As one of San Francisco’s designated Front-Line Worker Housing (FLWH) hotels, it’s reserved for health-care and public-safety employees working on Covid-19 related matters. But San Francisco is surreptitiously placing homeless people in luxury hotels by designating them as emergency front-line workers, a term that the broader community understands to mean doctors, nurses, and similar...

Steve Bing, a producer, philanthropist and screenwriter, has died by suicide in Los Angeles. He was 55. Police and the coroner’s office said a man fitting his age jumped from a Century City apartment building on Monday. Sources told TMZ he had been suffering from depression. Bing, who inherited a fortune of some $600 million from his grandfather, L.A. real estate developer Leo S. Bing, also contributed millions of dollars to Democratic political causes. In 2003, he co-wrote the action comedy “Kangaroo Jack,” and he also contributed to “Missing in Action” and wrote an episode of “Married With Children.” Bing...

Protesters in Golden Gate Park toppled statues of Fr. Junipero Serra, Francis Scott Key and President Ulysses S. Grant on Friday night, spurring a national debate over the complex legacies of those historical figures amid a broader movement to remove what critics say are monuments to white supremacy. A group of roughly 100 people pulled down the monuments displayed in the park’s Music Concourse near the de Young Museum and California Academy of Sciences, an eyewitness said. Police were called to the area just after 8 p.m., and said people in the group threw objects at the officers. The crowd...

Landlords will be permanently barred from evicting tenants if they can’t pay rent due to coronavirus-related issues, like job loss or getting sick from the virus, under legislation passed by the Board of Supervisors Tuesday. The legislation passed 10-1, with Supervisor Catherine Stefani in dissent. Mayor London Breed already issued an emergency order banning evictions during the public health emergency — and for two months after — to help people avoid displacement during the pandemic. She also eliminated late fees and interest and gave tenants more time to pay back their rent. But many still worried about the looming threat...

Dolores Park got a polka-dot makeover on Wednesday morning courtesy of the San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department. To aid social distancing as the summer beckons and the region moves into Stage 2 of Gov. Newsom's statewide reopening plan, white chalk circles were painted across the popular two-block park on the western edge of the city's Mission District. The social-distance guidance circles, around six feet in diameter, are designed to help park-goers know when they are getting a little too cozy amid the coronavirus pandemic, and San Franciscans largely welcomed the addition Wednesday afternoon.

Within minutes after the phone lines opened, people reported they could not get through, by 10 a.m., an hour after it opened, many of the 'phone lines crashed'. The State of California is offering $500 each to illegal aliens as part of a $75 million coronavirus relief program — even as it asks federal taxpayers for help paying for its $54 billion deficit. The governor, Gavin Newsom, announced in mid-April that the state would provide $75 million in cash assistance to the 150,000 who are selected. Philanthropic organizations and private donors pledged an additional $50 million, for another 100,000 immigrants.

Developments unfolding today in the Justice Department probe of insider trading involving members of the US Senate. US Senator Kelly Loeffler, Republican from Georgia, has turned over documents.... Now under FBI investigation Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr is stepping down temporarily.... The FBI has also talked to Dianne Feinstein, Democrat from California, about her husband's stock sales in recent months..... A US warship transiting the Taiwan Strait Wednesday. The guided missile destroyer USS McCampbell making the journey through the waterway between Taiwan and China.... Annexation of Judea and Samaria, commonly called the "West Bank", was not the top issue...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) spoke to the FBI and handed over documents last month related to recent stock transactions by her husband that have come under public scrutiny. "Senator Feinstein was asked some basic questions by law enforcement about her husband’s stock transactions. ...She was happy to voluntarily answer those questions to set the record straight and provided additional documents to show she had no involvement in her husband’s transactions," a spokesman said. Feinstein's conversation with the FBI took place in April and the spokesman said that "there have been no follow up actions on this issue." Feinstein's husband sold...

Feinstein questioned why Reade waited so long to bring forward her allegations. “And I don’t know this person at all who has made the allegations. She came out of nowhere. Where has she been all these years? He was Vice President,” Feinstein said. To “attack him in this way to me is absolutely ridiculous.” “No, I do not,” she said when asked if she believes Reade, according to the Hill.