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Thunder from West Portal: Quentin Kopp savages the Warriors' Embarcadero Wall and its $220 million taxpayer subsidy

06.11.13 - 10:36 pm | Bruce Brugmann |
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(Scroll down to read Kopp's column from the Westside Observer)

When then State Sen. Quentin Kopp was appointed to the bench in San Mateo County, some of his fellow judges took him out to lunch.  “We hope you realize you have now given up your First Amendment rights,” he was told.

Judge Kopp did as he was told and kept silent for years on the bench on the many issues he felt strongly about and would have taken on in the public arena.   Today, however, he is retired, given up judicial restraint, and is back in action exercising his First Amendment rights with gusto. Operating from a desk in the office of Atty. Peter Bagatelos in West Portal, Kopp blasted the scavengers on behalf of an initiative aimed at upending the scavenger monopoly and controlling rates (he was right.) He has fired away at the RosePak/Willie Brown/Chinatown power structure on the Central Freeway.
He regularly blasts Mayor Lee for “compliancy” on big development, District Attorney for any number of misdemeanors and indiscretions, and former Sup. Sean Elsbernd for being Sean Elsbernd.

Now, in the current edition of the Westside Observer, Kopp has hit his stride with an acidic but well argued column titled appropriately, “The Art of Picking the Public Purse.”  Read more »

Distance and racism

06.11.13 - 8:48 pm | Johnny Angel Wendell |
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Right now, I'm approximately 116 miles from the Mexican border.

When I was growing up, I was 1600 miles from the same border. I was in Boston--I had a discussion today with some musicians from Boston that are "alarmed" at "the end of America" because of "amnesty". When I pointed out that in the last 24 years, LA had become more "Latino" (I sussed out that the issue wasn't illegal immigration as it never really is, when they started in with "press 2 for English") and that crime and pollution was down and land values up--might as have been talking to my toenails.Read more »

Supervisors approve condo legislation with veto-proof majority

06.11.13 - 5:53 pm | Steven T. Jones |
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The San Francisco Board of Supervisors today voted to approve compromise legislation that will allow more than 2,000 tenancy-in-common homeowners to convert to condominiums in exchange for a 10-year moratorium on the city’s current condo conversion lottery that now allows 200 conversions annually.Read more »

Bully for the ACLU! It went after the real lawbreakers

06.11.13 - 4:13 pm | Bruce Brugmann |
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Scroll down to read the ACLU complaint in the New York Times story

For me, the crucial question was not whether Edward J. Snowden broke the law but whether the U.S. government had broken the law in secretly setting up and secretly expanding what the American Civil Liberties Union called its “dragnet”collection of logs of domestic phone calls.

Read more »

Dede Wilsey re-elected prez of Fine Arts Museums board with little fanfare

06.11.13 - 3:52 pm | Parker Yesko |
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At a quarterly meeting on June 6, Diane “Dede” Wilsey was summarily re-elected as president of the Board of Trustees of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF). The election marks her sixth consecutive term in a post she’s held since 1998, a tenure made possible when the board eliminated term limits in 2009.

She ran uncontested, and her unanimous endorsement by the board’s Nomination Committee was granted, in the words of Committee Chair Lisa Zanze, to be “mindful of the need for continuity” at FAMSF.Read more »

8 Washington and the Warriors

06.11.13 - 2:20 pm | Tim Redmond |
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I won't be a bit surprised if the Warriors start putting money behind Simon Snellgrove's efforts to win ballot approval for his 8 Washington condo project. And it won't be just because of general developer solidarity. And I don't think the basketball team owners are counting on a lot of fans living just down the Embarcadero -- odds are a lot of the people who buy Snellgrove's ultra-luxury condos won't live in San Francisco much of the time anyway.Read more »

Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir talks asylum options for NSA whistleblower

06.11.13 - 11:17 am | Rebecca Bowe |
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Birgitta Jónsdóttir is waiting for Edward Snowden to drop her a line.

The Icelandic Member of Parliament and Wikileaks supporter happens to be in San Francisco at the moment, working to raise awareness about the trial of Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning, and preparing for a speaking engagement this evening where she’ll appear alongside Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971.Read more »

Supervisors pose tough but important questions to Mayor Lee

06.11.13 - 10:59 am | Steven T. Jones |
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There’s a full agenda at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting today, from the condo conversion lottery bypass legislation to approval of the term sheet from the massive development project at Pier 70, but some of the most interesting and potentially newsworthy items are at the very beginning of the agenda, when Mayor Ed Lee will answer questions posed by the supervisors.Read more »

Heads Up: 7 must-see concerts this week

06.11.13 - 10:29 am | Emily Savage |
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Dear 2 Chainz: we’d like to formally apologize on behalf of our city, if you were indeed robbed at gunpoint (details are a bit murky at this point). Terrible things happen in every city, and San Francisco is no exception. But we must trundle forward, as a city of sonic fiends who love this place called home, always exploding with new bands, and welcoming traveling acts from around the world.

This week, we celebrate a particularly beloved member of own pack: Sonny and the Sunsets has a new record, and it’s a leap in yet another direction for the singer-songwriter and his crew. There’s also a Date Palms album release, a visit from New Zealand rockers the Bats (locals the Mantles open), the return of Cold Cave, some existential slop-punk from the Trashies, and a tribute to “rock‘n’roll specialist” Buddy Holly. Music lives on, despite despair.

Here are your must-see Bay Area concerts this week/end: Read more »

Drama queens (and kings), start your engines: SF Opera's summer season is here

06.11.13 - 10:17 am | Marke B. |
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The annual SF Opera summer season is always a treat -- the programmers get a little wild, and the risks, like last year's extraordinary Nixon in China, always pay off in adventurous spirit. (Ticket prices, starting at $22, aren't bad, either).

Honestly, I have no idea how they manage to squeeze all the creativity of three whole productions onstage in the space of one month, but that's opera for you. Kinda magic, kinda crazy, all pretty fascinating.

Oh, and music. Incredible music.

Read more »