Free Republic

San Francisco -- Saying he wants to start his second term with a clean slate, Mayor Gavin Newsom today asked all city department heads and anybody he has appointed to serve on a city commission or board to hand in their letters of resignation. On Friday, Newsom also told all senior staffers in his office to do the same. Newsom told department heads at his regular Monday department head meeting that he wanted each of them to turn in letters of resignation, but didn't say how many resignations he ultimately would accept, according to Mitch Katz, director of the city's...

Mayor Gavin Newsom vowed Sunday to maintain San Francisco as a sanctuary for immigrants and do everything he can to discourage federal authorities from conducting immigration raids. The mayor cannot stop federal authorities from making arrests, Newsom told about 300 mostly Latino members of St. Peter's Church and other religious groups supporting immigrants. But no San Francisco employee will help with immigration enforcement. "I will not allow any of my department heads or anyone associated with this city to cooperate in any way shape or form with these raids," Newsom declared. "We are a sanctuary city, make no mistake about...

Only seven more days to demonize San Francisco before Election Day. Today's offering comes from House Republican Whip Roy Blunt of Ohio who issued a Halloween orange headline atop a release distributed to reporters and Republican voters: Nancy Pelosi's Liberal Shop of Horrors: All Tricks, No Treats for America."If Nancy Pelosi is elected Speaker, the American people not only have to fear a liberal San Francisco agenda, but the real concern might be what bills she refuses to allow the House to consider in the first place,'' Blunt says."Can the American people trust liberal San Francisco values when it...

Annemarie Conroy, the director of San Francisco's Office of Emergency Services, was in the political hot seat Tuesday with one member of the Board of Supervisors calling for an inquiry into her management of the office and another urging her to resign. Several supervisors said that learning over the past week that Conroy was attending homeland security classes at the prestigious Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey raised old concerns that she lacked enough training to lead San Francisco's disaster agency. And though Conroy by some accounts has improved the emergency office since taking over, the debacle of hurricane relief efforts...

I love these people, but they drive me crazy. I had a girlfriend like that once; I think we've all had girlfriends like that once. Aren't all girlfriends like that? The San Francisco Board of Supervisors -- well-meaning folks, but they make me nuts. Just this week, they rejected a plan to bring the battleship Iowa to San Francisco and turn it into a tourist attraction and museum. Why? Cecilia M. Vega of this very newspaper summed up the reasons given for the decision: "the widespread opposition to the war in Iraq, the unequal treatment of gay and lesbian enlisted...