Sam Spade's San Francisco

San Francisco Supervisor Sophie Maxwell said the non-stop murders in her Bayview - Hunters Point district "is a terror."

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, whose district includes the equally infamous Western Addition says the current crime wave needs to be declared a crisis by the City.

Last night five people were shot to death on the Streets of San Francisco. Last year at this time 47 people had been killed in San Francisco. This year the total is already 62. (These figures do not include the people mowed-down by that insane SUV driver, and, do not include the baby found dead in MacLaren Park.)

It's time we stop ignoring the obvious and take-off the blindfolds. Let's ask these questions:

- What does the population of the Bayview - Hunters Point have in common with the population of the Western Addition?

- What is it about the people living in these neighborhoods that causes some among them to be prone to so much violence and lawlessness?

- Why have such large segments of the community fallen victim to such extraordinary violence from within themselves?

- What can be done to bring the people of the Bayview - Hunters Point and the Western Addition back into safe, functional, healthy social settings to such a degree that their neighborhoods and families will be safe from wanton lawlessness?

- What role do the corner liquor stores that dot the Bayview - Hunters Point have in creating an environment ripe for drug sales and violent crimes?

- What can DA Kamala Harris do to toughen her stance on violent crime prosecution?

- What can the San Francisco Superior Court do to send a strong message of detterent to criminals passing through our court rooms?

- What can San Francisco's largest employers do to make entry-level jobs available to young men as a way of offering aletrnatives to careers of drug sales, crime and felonies?

- What can the Black community do to police itself and heal itself and how can the rest of San Francisco help?

- Why are so many young Black men in San Francisco so willing to enter lives of crime and why are they so willing to reject the moral and ethical principals by which the rest of us live?

Let's start by asking the tough questions and see where the answers take us.

Yesterday the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) announced a Request for Proposals for two new stem cell research grant programs: The Scientific Excellence through Exploration and Development (SEED) Grant Program and the Comprehensive Research Grant Program.

CIRM was created by Proposition 71 passed by California voters in 2004.

CIRM, headquartered here in San Francisco, will dispurse $3 billion in state funds set aside for stem cell research. Over the next two years the Institute anticipates awarding up to $24 million for as many as 30 SEED grants over two years. Additionally the Institute will disperse upwards of $80 million in grant money for comprehensive research programs.

Tower Records began life as a single store in Sacramento. It was very similar in appearance and size to Amoeba Records on Haight.

Then Tower Records began a period of explosive growth. The chain opened stores throughout California and eventually throughout the United States.

Today it is all crashing down arround us. Fewer people are buying music from retail stores and vinyl records, of course, are already classified by many as nothing more than 20th century collectibles.

Trans World Entertainment, one of the largest specialty music and video retailers in the United States, has over 800 stores in 26 states. Brands currently controlled by Trans World include Wherehouse Music, Coconuts Music and Movies, Strawberries, Spec's, CD World, Streetside Records and Planet Music.

Tower Records has been losing so much money that Trans World will assume ownership without paying a dime. Trans World agreed to pick-up Tower Record's entire debt load.

Trans World, unless it drastically changes its business plan, will also slowly shrivel up and blow away just as Tower Records is doing. The era of buying music as a physical product (vinyl records, CD, DVD, tapes, etc) is coming to a close. In not too many years Virgin Records, Blockbuster and Netflix will be nothing more than memories. People simply do not buy as much music and video in solid physical format as they used to in the prior century.

Rather, we buy a bundle of rights along with the digital music we download so easily with iTunes or MTV's new URGE music service that integrates so well with Microsoft's Media Player 11. Most record shops are going the way of blacksmith shops, shoe repair shops and offset printing shops. They are disappearing. Yet, a few specialty niche record shops will make it.

Amoeba Records will probably do an even better business catering to CD and vinyl record collectors. It's interesting to note that the business model Tower Records had at the time they began their expansion back in the 1960's was a model very similar to the one used successfully today by Amoeba Records. Tower Records abandoned that model in favor of high-volume replicated chain stores. That business model did not outlast the 20th Century.

Russ Solomon, who began Tower Records in Sacramento, opened his second store on the corner of Bay and Columbus in San Francisco in 1967. Tower Records has been a San Francisco institution for nearly 30 years.

Although we have come to expect that any public works project in San Francisco will invariably reach completion late and be heavily over budget, it is still significant sticker-shock to note that the Third Street Light Rail Project is $120-million over budget.

The Third Street line is now complete and it is currently designated as the T-Third line. The T stands for "Test". MUNI is currently running shakedown trips on the line, a necessary precaution before full passenger service begins sometime in January.

Running streetcars along Third Street is nothing new. Back in the first few decades of the Twentieth Century streetcar service along what was known as the Bayshore Corridor helped encourage the development of the Bayviewiew community. Today, the BV-HP communities are in need of a complete makeover. Hopefully the new light rail service will drive efforts to remold and remodel the Bayview and Hunters Point communites.

The line will cross the Fourth Street Bridge and run along Third Street and Bayshore Boulevard, ending at the in Visitacion Valley. MUNI has provided 19 stops for the new service. The map at the upper right shows the location of the stops. Click on the map once to open in a separate window. Click again to enlarge.

Running Beneath Chinatown

Phase 2 of the lightrail extension plan is construction of the Central Subway. MUNI will bring tracks north from King Street along Third Street, where the tracks will enter a new Central Subway station at Bryant Street. The line will proceed underground, crossing beneath Market Street and running under Geary and Stockton Streets to Stockton and Clay Streets. There are plans for underground subway station Moscone Center, Market Street (where the new line will cross existing lightrail lines beneath Market Street at the Montgomery Street Station, and then on toward a new Union Square subway station and terminating at a new underground station at Clay Street in Chinatown.

For more information on the Third Street Light Rail project please contact the following:

Third Street Light Rail Construction Office
501 Cesar Chavez Street, Suite 200 (near Third)
San Francisco, CA 94124

Phone:
Fax:
Telephone Hotline:
Email:

Mailing Address:
Third Street Light Rail Project
501 Cesar Chavez Street, Suite 200
San Francisco, CA 94103

A message to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, District Attorney Kamala Harris and Police Chief Heather Fong:


NO, Gavin,

NO, Kamala

NO, Heather


It is NOT OK to keep releasing dangerous criminals like Marvin Jeffery, Jr. back onto the streets.

Like all San Franciscans I was infuriated by the Bayview gang murder of SFPD Officer Isaac Espinoza. Now we learn that a particularly disgusting cancer of a human being, Marvin Jeffery, Jr., has been released time and time again back onto our streets by the police, by the District Attorney's Office and by the Courts ... all because he is a rat on his own kind ... he informs on felons, murderers, gang members and other assorted zoo animal criminals from the Bayview - Hunter's Point.

If you have not yet read this disturbing investigative report in today's San Francisco Chronicle by Jaxon Van Derbecken, please read it here. (DANGER IN TRUSTING A GANGLAND SNITCH, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, August 13, 2006)

It is self-evident that we, the citizens and the people of San Francisco, have a very serious problem with our officials setting policies in regard to informants. I call upon the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, The San Francisco Police Commission, the Mayor's Office, Kamala Harris and Heather Fong to take up this issue and do a thorough, complete, investigative study of policies currently in place that permit authorities to disregard the criminal process in favor of criminals who agree to be informants.

Question: What process or procedure is used in these cases?

Question: How are these determinations made?

Question: What checks and balances are in place?

Question: At what level is the Mayor's Office involved?

Question: Are the Board of Supervisors given an opportunity to provide direction or are they summarily ignored?

Let's blow the lid of this creepy practice and publicly take a look at these policies under the light of day. If the findings and subsequent actions do not bring the policies more in line with common sense and prudent reasoning, then, we the people, can look at replacing the responsible politicians and decision-makers. We can send them home through the power of the ballot box and elect people who remember for whom they work.

The police often like to remind street criminals that they, they SFPD, run the streets. The police are wrong. It is the people who run the streets and everything else in San Francisco.

Who is here to remind the police of that fact?

We, the people, ultimately decide what is best for our community and this disastrous policy of letting dangerous criminals run free because they are police informants must, MUST, MUST STOP.

California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) is hoping to build a massive new medical campus and hospital on the site currently occupied by the Cathedral Hill Hotel (formerly the Jack Tar Hotel) on Van Ness between Geary and Post.

A architect's preliminary sketch of the CPMC Van Ness project is seen above.

Currently under consideration by the Planning Department, CPMC would completely demolish the existing hotel building. In its place CPMC would build a massive 331-foot hospital building. The current plans also call for CPMC to build a separate medical office building across Van Ness and construct a pedestrian tunnel beneath the street to connect the primary buildings of the new campus.

CPMC is one of the largest private not-for-profit academic medical centers in California and is affiliated with Sutter Health. Sutter Health received an exemplary status award from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and they have been noted for exceeding national standards for quick response to heart attacks from the National Registry of Myocardial Infarction.

The new CPMC campus will employ more than 4,000 people and bring new life to the Van Ness corridor.

You can read the preliminary Environmental Impact Report filed with the San Francisco Planning Department here.

We have all heard about retreating glaciers, melting ice caps and thousands of icebergs floating in the sea. It's no longer science fiction. It's real and it's happening today - right now!

San Francisco is famous for its hills. The traditional definition of a San Francisco hill is a mound higher than 100 feet. There are 42 hills in San Francisco using this definition. Mount Davidson is our tallest hill and it measures 925 feet. The rest of San Francisco is pretty much at or just slightly above sea level. The Marina, Hunter's Point and the Financial District all sit on landfill ... and we cannot forget Treasure Island which is constructed of leftover dredged muck taken from the bottom of the bay.

Now scientists report that the Greenland ice cap is melting at alarming rates ... much faster than previously thought. Scientists believe that if the Greenland ice cap melts completely it would raise the levels of the world's oceans by an average of 21 feet.

Moreover, scientists have not yet fully calculated what additional impact the melting of the massive Antarctic ice cap will have on global ocean levels.

When Earth's climate has finished its shift toward a hotter, more humid and tropical planet, the map of the world will be greatly changed. Some entire nations will be submerged. Many major cities, including most of the seaboard cities of the United States will be under the sea. The total land area of the planet will be substantially reduced.

What would happen to San Francisco if the ocean were 21 feet higher? That figure would rise even higher once the Antarctic icepack melt is factored in. We would become a city of 42 islands. Most of the East Bay would be pushed back to the Oakland Hills and all the agricultural islands of the Sacramento River Delta would be submerged and San Francisco Bay would increase 200% in size.

It won't happen in our lifetimes, but our great-grandchildren will begin dealing with the brunt of the impact. In the coming centuries the major global issue will be a geopolitical struggle unlike anything yet seen by humankind.

And it will have all happened because of .... oil.

dona nobis pacem.

Sue Bierman was a friend to many San Franciscans, myself included.

Sue died Monday in a traffic accident. Sue was 82. She had a good life and she shared much of her life with the people of San Francisco.

Do you remember the Embarcadero Freeway? It was a hideously ugly elevated mass of concrete roadway that sat above the Embarcadero on graffiti-covered concrete sticks. It ruined the ambiance of the area and it assured that no tourist dollars were going to be spent anywhere in the area. Now, the Embarcadero Freeway is gone and the entire area is thriving, attractive and impressive.

Did you know that the same politicians who were responsible for the Embarcadero Freeway wanted to do the same kind of thing to Golden Gate Park? It's true. At one point there were plans to extend the freeway right into the Golden Gate Park panhandle. It would have destroyed neighborhoods, created unbelievable congestion, devastated the Haight-Ashbury and completely ruined the quiet beauty of one of the world's most beautiful city parks. That was back in the 1950's and 60's. It was Sue Bierman who, as a new member of the Planning Commission, rose to the challenge and fought the city government to protect the beauty and livability of our City.

When she was 68 years old, a time when most people are retired and out of action, Sue Bierman decided to run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. She won! In 2000 Sue retired from the Board because of term limitations. In 2003 Mayor Willie Brown appointed Sue to the San Francisco Port Commission where she carefully watched over the continuing restoration of the Ferry Building and the redesign and beautification of the Embarcadero.

As San Franciscans, every one of our lives are better for having had Sue Bierman among us. The City and County of San Francisco is the better for having known Sue. She had a long and successful life. She was a real winner.

Thank you, Sue, and goodbye.

California Highway Patrol Officer Brent Clearman (shown at right) was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver in Oakland. The incident took place at 10:35 PM on the 66th Avenue on-ramp to northbound Interstate 880.

There is a manhunt underway for the driver. Whoever is responsible for this death fled the scene after knowingly killing Officer Clearman. Whatever the identity of the perpetrator, this person is the worst and most dangerous kind of person to have running free in our community. Anyone who would strike and kill another human being, leave them on the side of the road to die, and then speed away to hide and avoid answering for his or her crime ... is without any doubt ... the lowest and least desirable person to have in our community. That person really and truly belongs behind a solidly locked state prison cell.

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UPDATE: (6:30 AM, 8-AUG-06). The CHP arrested an Oakland man, Russel Rodriguez, 47, on charges of felony hit-and-run and vehicular manslaughter. The search for Officer Clearman's killer has been terminated.


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The CHP does not yet know the identity of the perpetrator. They need our help. Be on the watch for a 1992 to 1996 Buick LeSabre, champagne color, with some degree of front end damage. The damage is the result of Officer Clearman's body striking the front end grill area and possibly the headlight area of the killer's automobile.


Officer Brent Clearman was too good a man for us to lose. He was an energetic and dedicated CHP officer and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps with 12-years of service including a tour in Iraq. He left the Marines as a staff sergeant and joined the California Highway Patrol.


Let' s get Brent Clearman's killer off the streets and into a prison cell where a useless cancer of humanity like that belongs.

BuzzZZZzzzZZZzzzz.

We all know the sound of the ugly little predator dancing around our ears late at night. It's the mosquito!

Carried by contaminated mosquitoes, West Nile Virus killed 19 and sickened 880 Californians in 2005. There have not yet been any reported cases of WNV in San Francisco, but conditions are getting ripe for an outbreak.

The virus is spread by migratory birds. Mosquitoes become infected when they feed on infected birds and the main route of human infection is through the bite of an infected mosquito.

Global Warming and Climate Change

Global warming is causing birds to migrate earlier. Record rains this past winter have created ideal mosquito-breeding conditions. The recent record-setting heat wave experienced locally has provided mosquitoes with an incubator in which their eggs, floating on warm standing water, hatch by the millions.

People Living with AIDS

People with weakened immune systems may become very ill from WNV and need to take special precautions to protect themselves from infection. For more information on West Nile Virus in San Francisco and how to protect yourself, visit the special WNV web site created by San Francisco Environment here.

Lambda Legal is the symbol of civil rights defense excellence not because they chose to be, but because of the high level of competent service they have given to the American people. Make no mistake about it. The work done by Lambda Legal benefits everyone in this country, not only LGBT citizens.

Shown in the photo above right: Lancy Woo and Christy Chung, lead plaintiffs in the landmark San Francisco lawsuit defending marriage rights and equality.

Lambda Legal deserves recognition. They have an impressive track record of victory after victory for LGBT people. Take, for example, the case of Lawrence v. Texas.

When Lambda Legal heard that John Lawrence and Tyrone Garner had been arrested for having consensual sex in the privacy of John's home, it became evident to them that this case could be the one to end the criminalization of gay people once and for all time. Lambda Legal attorneys went to work and developed a strategy to fight the case. They took it through the courts all the way to the United States Supreme Court and they won!

In San Francisco the Lambda Legal office has been pusruing a number of landmark cases, among them:

Air Transportation Association v City and County of San Francisco. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld San Francisco’s landmark Equal Benefits Ordinance as a reasonable civil rights measure that does not violate state or local law or impose undue costs or burdens on city contractors. San Francisco requires city contractors who provide benefits for employees’ spouses to provide comparable benefits to employees with domestic partners. The principal defendant, Air Transportation Association, is a shell organization. ATA's members are nearly all the carriers that operate out of SFO. A list of ATA members may be found here.

Woo v Lockyer. In March of 2004, the California Supreme Court ordered that San Francisco stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and the ACLU filed suit against the state in Woo v. Lockyer, which argues that denying marriage to same-sex couples violates the state constitution’s guarantees of equality, liberty, privacy and expression for all Californians. Five other marriage equality cases later were coordinated with Woo v. Lockyer before San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer.

One year later, on March 14, 2005, Judge Kramer ruled that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry. Judge Kramer, who was appointed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson in 1996, said, “The state’s protracted denial of equal protection cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has become traditional. The idea that marriage-like rights without marriage is adequate smacks of a concept long rejected by the courts: separate but equal.”

The lead plaintiff in the case is Lancy Woo, a 39-year-old lifelong San Francisco resident who has a seven-year-old daughter with her partner, Cristy Chung, 41. Woo’s plaintiffs are 12 couples, five of whom had appointments to be married in 2004, but were turned away after the state Supreme Court halted the San Francisco marriages. That court later invalidated the roughly 4,000 marriages that same-sex couples had celebrated in February and March of 2004. In addition to the couples, other plaintiffs in the case include Equality California and Our Families Coalition, agencies that educate the public about the benefits of allowing same-sex couples the equal right to marry. Thanks largely to Molly McKay and Davina Kotulski, Equality California (EQCA) has been right on the front-lines of the marriage equality movement since day-one.

Jennifer C. Pizer, Senior Counsel for Lambda Legal in the Western Regional Office, is lead attorney on the case for Lambda Legal. Lambda Legal’s Legal Director, Jon Davidson, is assisting Pizer with the lawsuit. Other attorneys on the case include: Shannon Minter and Courtney Joslin of lead counsel National Center for Lesbian Rights; Tamara Lange of the ACLU of Northern California; Christine Sun of the ACLU of Southern California; Stephen Bomse and Christopher Stoll at Heller Ehrman White and McAuliffe; and David C. Codell.

Kovatch v. California Casualty Management Co. Ending five years of litigation, during which this case traveled to the Court of Appeal and the California Supreme Court (which declined to review the mid-level appellate victory), the parties reached an amicable, confidential settlement in July 1999. The case concludes leaving a published Court of Appeal’s decision which applies tried-and-true principles of antidiscrimination law, for the first time, in a sexual-orientation discrimination context.

Once an award-winning, top-performing employee, Kovatch faced unrelenting antigay harassment in the San Diego office of California Casualty Management Co. In July 1998, the Court of Appeal reinstated Kovatch’s tort claims for wrongful termination and emotional distress, holding that the antigay epithets, ostracism, and undermining of Kovatch’s work relationships parallel the sort of conduct which, when motivated by other types of unlawful bias, support a discrimination claim. The appellate court held that Kovatch’s allegations, if true, were sufficient to prove not only that his termination was wrongful, but that the harassment warranted an award of damages for emotional distress.

S. D. Myers v. City and County of San Francisco. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously against this would-be city contractor, handing the American Center for Law and Justice yet another setback in the extreme right’s persistent nationwide crusade against domestic partnership recognition.

This case had piggy-backed on ATA, with S.D. Myers pressing similar claims that the EBO is preempted by federal and state law. Agreeing with the district court below, the 9th Circuit ruled that S.D. Myers failed to prove that the EBO burdens interstate commerce improperly. It likewise failed to show that the city is exerting power inappropriately. Absent any violation of federal or state law, the city may pick and choose with whom it spends its tax revenues.

S. D. Myers Inc. has a history of stepping on people's civil rights. In S. D. Myers Inc v Government of Canada the Ohio-based company filed suit against Canadian officials because they banned the export of PCB waste from Canada to the United Sates. S. D. Myers can make money from PCB waste and they want other countries to send us their PCB waste so S.D. Myers can turn a pretty profit handling and disposing of the waste.

Other cases currently being fought by Lambda Legal include safeguarding health care for transgender people, advancing laws against discrimination in the workplace, and, deafeating anti-gay adoption laws in Middle America. To learn more about the battles and struggles currently on the Lambda Legal plate, visit this site.

Another major player in the LGBT civil rights struggle is San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera. He, his staff, Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Board of Supervisors have stood solidly on the side of equality from the beginning.

I cannot end this report in good conscience unless I pay tribute to the work of California State Assembly Member Mark Leno. Without anyone or any organization even coming close to his record, Mark Leno has demonstrated by his action before the California Legislature that he is our grandest and finest champion for LGBT civil rights.

Biosecurity is a new and evolving field established to prevent bio-terrorism. San Francisco is home to the most advanced stem-cell research institute on the planet. Through many UCSF research programs based here, a very major portion of the advances being made in immunology and AIDS research are being made right here in San Francisco.

We need to be informed about and defended against bio-terrorism. The field that addresses such concerns is biosecurity.

Left in the hands of scientists, UCSF Police and SFPD authorities and university administrators we would probably be in good hands. Unfortunately that's not how things work in 2006. The federal government feels a need to be involved, if not completely assume command.

Enter: the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB ... also known to some as the National Science Advisory Board for BS). It is a Bush Administration creation, so don't get your hopes up and expect too much.

The NSABB is a wonderful exapmple of the cowboy ineptitude of the Bush White House. The Bush White House has not only botched-up much of the Department of Homeland Security and devastated FEMA, but now they add another layer of jabberwocky. Read the following statement from the NSABB web site describing what and who they are. It is a wonderful example of Bushspeak ... that difficult-to-follow assortment of mis-matched words we see so often coming from the Bush White House. This statement is about as clear as a lead bell. Read it yourself:

"The NSABB has been established to provide advice to federal departments and agencies on ways to minimize the possibility that knowledge and technologies emanating from vitally important biological research will be misused to threaten public health or national security."

So, do I feel more secure living in San Francisco, a world center for bio-research, knowing that George Dubbya and the boys are riding herd over us all?

Oh my God. We are in deeeeeeep trouble!