Since Mayor Ed Lee has decided that tech companies are the future of San Francisco, it's nice to note that these outfits are often no better than the cheating robber barons of old -- or the modern Leona Helmsleys. The Campaign for America's Future notes that Apple dodged a $9.2 billion tax bill that would have been enough to cover most of the sequester cuts this spring. Read more »

The internal report on SF Housing Authority management berates ousted director Henry Alvarez as a jerk and a bully, somone who made racist and homophobic comments and intimidated staff. But the report also shows exactly how the corrupt politics of San Francisco contracting works. You can't read the whole Chronicle story because of the paywall, but I'll excerpt the part that matters:Read more »

One of the factors that the state regulators took into account when they decided how much PG&E should be fined for the San Bruno blast was the company's financial situation -- that is, how much of a fine could the utility "safely absorb." That's the first sign that something screwy is going on here.Read more »

The guy who wants to build the most expensive condos in San Francisco history on the waterfront is facing a ballot measure that could derail his dreams -- so he's hiring a team of signature-gatherers to put a competing measure on the ballot. Which makes little sense to us, since when the voters are confused, then tend to vote against things, and there will be two measures (confusing) and all the opponents of the 8 Washington have to go is get people to vote No, which is easier than Yes.Read more »

The Warriors and the all-star lineup of nearly every political consultant in town launched a new public relations offensive this week with the release of a new, spiffy set of drawings and a rewritten plan for a waterfront arena. And opponents of the project pretty much shrugged and said: So, what?Read more »

Man, I'm getting old. When I was growing up, in the 1960s, and even when I was in college in the 1970s, and when I was first in San Francisco in the early 1980s, the only ones talking about "armed revolution" were the commies. The system was coming down, fast; the Black Panthers marched around with rifles. The RCP and the Weather Underground and a bunch of other offshoots and fringe groups talked about fighting in the streets. Read more »

President Obama keeps saying that marijuana isn't a big priority for his administration, and his rogue nutcase of a US Attorney in Northern California keeps making it a priority. Now the Drug Enforcement Administration, which also reports to the White House, is joining the action, going after licensed dispensaries in San Francisco and San Jose.Read more »

One of the most important stories on the future of the country's electricity supply has been largely ignored by the major media outlets. My friend Johnny Angel Wendell, who is a talk-show host at KTLK in Los Angeles, passed it on to me, or I might have missed it, too.Read more »