San Francisco News Blog

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The California Employment Development Department released their most recent statistics, and let's say they're less than stimulating. The San Francisco/Marin/San Mateo Counties' collective unemployment rate was 9.3 percent in October, and that's what it was in September. Bo-riiiiiiiiiiiing. Snooze-fest. What's the saying? Everything changes but always stays the same? It's like that, except nothing changes.

San Francisco really brought it to the table, though, once you break it down. Marin's unemployment rate? A mere 8.1. San Mateo County? A scanty 9.1. San Francisco's? 9.9. BOO-YAH. The state of California whupped us all, though, with a heady 12.3. Our hat's off to you, Big Guy.

Jan McHugh-Smith

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A sizable group of animal-loving San Franciscans couldn't be more delighted.

"It's fantastic that her contract is not being renewed," said Hope Johnson, an SPCA volunteer-turned-outspoken critic. "I think she didn't realize what she was getting into."

"Great news!" echoed Kathleen McGarr, another ex-volunteer who is now a member of FixSanFrancisco.org, a grassroots campaign aiming to end the killing of animals in shelters. "I'm very excited."

McGarr and other like-minded former volunteers have been complaining for months about how McHugh-Smith trampled on the vision of the organization and prioritized the finances of humans over the welfare of animals.

Will joint ad sales bring happy days back?

​Apparently Singleton's MediaNews Group -- owner of legion Bay Area newspapers, including the Oakland Tribune, Marin Independent Journal, Contra Costa Times, and San Jose Mercury News -- is forming an ad-selling partnership with Philip Anschutz' Clarity Media Group, which owns the Examiner, a free tabloid daily distributed in San Francisco and San Mateo County.

This alliance, called the "San Francisco Bay Area Buy," will enable joint sells of ads to run in 14 of the companies' newspapers, according to the Journal. The idea is apparently to take on the ailing but still-dominant player in the market, the San Francisco Chronicle.

Dot what?

A portal to the soul

​The American Civil Liberties Union's San Francisco-based Northern California office is launching a campaign to beef up Internet privacy. In a statement released today, the ACLU seeks to "spotlight the need to upgrade laws protecting consumer data" and unveils its nifty new Web site, dotrights.org (try saying that URL aloud five times), which features a two-minute video primer on the issue.

The statement notes that the federal law which ostensibly safeguards Internet privacy, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, was drafted in 1986, back when the only folks with Internet access were Army scientists and aliens. Today, companies and even government agencies take advantage of this lax legal landscape to collect, subpoena, and sell personal information gleaned from our Web-browsing habits -- such as what books we've recently bought.

Robert Pedraza                      By C. Stiles

​In our cover story last week, Worms in the Apple, writer Tim Elfrink detailed the saga of the Rudy and Robert Pedraza, a couple of rogue computer programming brothers who hacked Apple's OS X and retooled it for use on cheaper PCs.

Elfrink wrote about how legal experts believed that the Pedraza brothers had a chance to prevail in San Francisco's Northern District Court, where Apple is suing them for copyright infringement. As of late last week, when U.S. District Judge William Alsup handed down a summary judgment in favor of Apple, that chance isn't looking so fat.

"Psystar infringed Apple's exclusive rights to create derivative works of Mac OS X," Alsup wrote, "by replacing original files in Mac OS X with unauthorized software files."

PayLock

The 'Smart Boot'

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Last week, Oakland became the 14th city in the nation to ink a pact with the PayLock company, which manufactures the Smart Boot. Bart Blair, the company's director of account management told SF Weekly that PayLock has had discussions with San Francisco, too.

And yet, the first thing we thought of when we heard about the nifty devices was the joy of clapping a Smart Boot on a pal's car. Or clapping it on just about anyone's vehicle, and extorting money out of them. But, like we noted before, the company is one bootstep ahead of us. You just can't do this.

Joe Eskenazi

Hooray! The spinal circus is in town!

​In the very same AT&T Parking Lot that was last year graced by the trailers of the acrobats, clowns, and ringmaster of Circus Vargas -- the latter, Ted McRae, ended up staying alone in the lot for days after his RV broke down -- Big Top tents have once again been pitched. But this is no cotton candy and trapeze crowd. Instead it's the traveling spinal circus, if you will.

With the North American Spine Society meeting this week in Moscone Center, it's no wonder the big trucks from Medtronic have set up camp in Mission Bay. The surgical technology company's big rigs, on the outside, look like the trucks you'd use to, say, jettison groceries on the Bay Bridge. But the trucks unfold to form a small complex of tents and trailers containing a mock operating room -- complete with "sawbones" human dummies -- a conference room, power generators, and even a lavatory (a technician overseeing the site was particularly thrilled about that last one).

After the spinal convention lets out, doctors make their way down toward the ballpark and try out the new gadgets in Meditronic's faux OR. It's a business model that keeps the two drivers and technician who chatted with SF Weekly on the road more often than Kerouac or Willie Nelson combined.

How many tweets will this buy?

​Yet the company probably doesn't intend to spend its nest egg on its withering newspaper properties.

Citing unnamed sources, New York Post columnist Keith Kelly reports that Hearst is sitting on a $1 billion war chest, which it probably plans to invest in "digital and non-traditional media." Kelly notes that while the Chronicle and other Hearst papers "have had near-death experiences over the past year," the company's magazines remain relatively stable. Hearst continues to bring in $7 billion of revenue annually and is still profitable as a whole, according to Kelly.

DNA Lounge representative Jamie Zawinski announced on the club's blog today that the besieged nightclub negotiated a settlement with the state's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) that includes a 25-day suspension -- the club will be closed Jan. 4 through Jan. 28 -- and several years of probation.

As SF Weekly has reported in the past, ABC's battle with the DNA Lounge has been ongoing since April 2007 when the club applied to change its liquor license to allow for all-ages events. In order to do this, the lounge installed a $50,000 kitchen because the permit for such a license stipulates that an all-ages music venue also be a legitimate eating establishment. When ABC rejected the application, the lounge appealed the decision -- at which point Zawinski claims the state agency started sending undercover agents in during gay and lesbian promotional events, "looking for dirt."

In July, 2008, the lounge reached a settlement with ABC that finally granted the club permission for the change of  liquor license status. But just before DNA Lounge could enjoy the fruits of its labors, ABC slapped it with another citation -- this time, for "lewdness," "discrimination", and for being a "disorderly house injurious to the public welfare and morals."

News headlines Monday suggest our warning was valid. Advanta Corp., a bank holding company specializing in small business credit cards announced today it was filing for bankruptcy, throwing into question whether the company would pay in-full investment notes advertised in the Chronicle's business section less than four months ago.

On July 12 of this year,  Advanta, bought an advertisement on page D-2 of the Chronicle's business section, surrounded by ads touting ordinary bank certificates of deposit, announcing: "You can now earn: 1 year -- 11.00 percent."

The announcement seemed unbelievable, given bank interest rates at the time topped out at about 2 percent. It apparently was. Investors now seem doomed to receive pennies on the dollar.

In an April cover story, we looked at the dilemma facing the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the state agency created through Proposition 71 to fund stem-cell research: Should the landmark agency direct the remainder of its $3 billion in research funds towards "adult" stem cells -- which are closer to clinical applications, albeit for less serious ailments -- or to embryonic stem cells, which offer hope to intractable degenerative diseases such as juvenile diabetes and multiple sclerosis?

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CIRM board member Jeff Sheehy told SF Weekly back in April that this was "an identity issue" for the agency, particularly since it was founded in response to Bush Administration restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research.

"If we are going to say that we're going to work with adult stem cells, we can be in the translational phase and the clinic now," said Sheehy, who is also communications director for UCSF's AIDS Research Institute. "While they're going to be of benefit to a great many people in California, these adult-stem-cell approaches are probably not going to have a big impact on these severe degenerative diseases that really motivated a great number of people to support Prop. 71, like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, spinal-cord injuries."

The promised land

​The city's Public Utilities Commission and Local Agency Formation Commission -- commonly known as LAFCo, the commission helps formulate energy policy -- yesterday issued a Request for Proposals from potential bidders who would run the program. Called CleanPowerSF, the initiative is a "community choice aggregation" plan that would allow the city to pool all its power customers together and offer them to a private supplier.

CleanPowerSF's purpose is to break up PG&E's monopoly on the city's power supply, ushering in more renewable and local sources of energy. (As such, it has the support of many "public power" advocates, who have supported past unsuccessful efforts to gain voter approval for a city takeover of PG&E's local power grid.) But the softened bid requirements -- in particular the loosening of the city's commitment to CleanPowerSF providing rates for customers at or below those of PG&E -- raise questions about where the effort is headed. In theory, the less stringent bid request could lead to a program that is less green, and more expensive for the city's ratepayers, than what CleanPowerSF proponents have promised.

"I am gratified that Judge Busch clearly recognized the significant threat to public safety Pink Diamonds posed," Herrera said in a statement. The judge also imposed fines of at least $690,000 on the club's owners.

The strip club at 220 Jones Street has been linked to numerous shootings in the Tenderloin, including a June incident when a patron was killed on the sidewalk outside the venue. According to the complaint filed with the court by Herrera's office, Pink Diamonds has also been the site of illicit drug deals, prostitution, and extended-hours permit violations. The city attorney's office says it has required more than 230 service calls by police in the past six months alone.

Are changes coming to SF nightlife?

​Following a three-hour hearing that featured extensive public comment from both supporters and opponents of the legislation, the three-member committee unanimously approved the new law, which would grant the Entertainment Commission added powers to crack down on problematic nightclubs as well as establish stricter oversight measures for how the commission operates.

In a separate vote, Supervisor Chris Daly voted against an amendment in the ordinance drafted by board president David Chiu. The measure would establish limits on how many late-night event permits could be granted by the commission in a given year. Chiu and committee chairman Bevan Dufty voted for the measure, giving it the needed votes to pass on to the full board.

Courtesy of Harmann Studios and the Green Bay Packers. Used with permission.

Craig Newsome celebrates the Green Bay Packers' victory in Super Bowl XXXI following the 1996-97 NFL season

​Former Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers defensive back Craig Newsome has joined the ranks of U.S. athletes suing the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Newsome and others allege that the organization's requirement that college athletes sign in-perpetuity agreements giving the NCAA's marketing arm, Collegiate Licensing Company, exclusive use of athletes' image amounts to a price-fixing conspiracy.

His suit, filed in San Francisco federal court Oct. 14, alleges that the NCAA illegally forced athletes to sign agreements giving away rights to profit from their images.

Tesla's next endeavor?

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"My husband and I, we're members of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, and in fact, I've participated in many Critical Masses, which are awesome, awesome wonderful events in San Francisco Fridays once a month, and they are a time for bicyclists to pull a critical mass on the cars," she said. "So they completely take over the streets, and cars have to wait for hordes of cyclists to pass by. It's so much fun," we quoted Konrad as saying.

Just six weeks later, the company is scheduled on Oct. 30 to open its next outlet in the city that serves as home to the bicycle racing journal Velo News, first Yank Tour de France stage winner Davis Phinney, and a downtown that features dozens of bike shops within stumbling distance of one another.

The Katherine Hepburn Pet Bed costs $1,200

​Save up those unemployment checks, because as of yesterday, a new San Francisco-based high-end pet furniture company, Neko Habitat LLC, is open for business. The company's line of snazzy pet beds run $230 to $250, and the business owner, Hitomi Yasuda of Marin County, says her beds give pets the experience akin to "sleeping on a gentle cloud."

"When I tried to find modern, contemporary pet furniture that expressed just how much I love [my cats] while still staying true to our home's inner decor, I discovered that the pet product landscape was almost entirely barren," Yasuda said.  

Of course, the landscape isn't exactly barren. In fact, there doesn't appear to be any dearth of items with which to spoil a pet during a recession. Design Within Reach offers the Crypton dog bed for $240, and Chic Paw Beds in Sausalito sells the Katharine Hepburn pet bed for a whopping $1,200. There are plenty of Web sites and stores offering luxury pet scents, outfits, furniture, collars, toys and everything else. There's fucking caviar for dogs.

Not over yet

​This just in: Discussion of a proposed overhaul of laws regulating city nightclubs due to take place at a Monday Board of Supervisors' meeting has been postponed.

The suggested revisions to the police code were originally scheduled to be taken up at Monday's meeting of the City Operations and Neighborhood Services committee, but were ultimately left off the agenda at the direction of committee chairman Bevan Dufty, according to committee clerk Victor Young. No word yet on why.

The legislation concerns the Entertainment Commission, a board of political appointees tasked with regulating city nightclubs. The commission has come under heavy fire recently for not cracking down on violent clubs; the legislation being debated would both give it stronger enforcement powers and subject it to stricter oversight.

​People in fields such as petroleum, investment banking, or running chambers of commerce, know what it means to be blessed. They are embedded within industries that love to put on conventions and trade shows. Workers travel to distant cities, check into the Hyatt, mingle with people who went the same (or similar) college as they did, and, at the end of the day, hit industry-sponsored dinners and cocktails.

So it's easy to comprehend why the suits at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce have retained membership in the global warming-denying U.S. Chamber of Commerce, despite recent protest resignations by Apple Computer, PG&E, and Nike.

truckspills.com

It's an amusing photo, but, technically, when food falls off the back of a truck, the general public has no right to purloin it

​It turns out that the can of vegetables you serve for dinner in the near future may have a more interesting story to tell than you do.

You've probably read about the Safeway truck that sped through the Bay Bridge's new "S-curve," lost it, and dumped foodstuffs along the roadway. Clearing up vittles -- and the capsized truck -- closed four of the bridge's five westbound lanes from around 2 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. on Wednesday.

Drivers waddling past in the one remaining lane may have grown hungry looking at all those edible goods while they moved at the speed of a crippled field mouse. Yet, according to a Safeway representative, they may yet have the chance to eat the food they saw on the bridge.
 

The commission will come to order

​The applicants for a recently vacated seat on the city's Entertainment Commission -- a seven-member board of political appointees that regulates San Francisco nightclubs -- appear poised to once again stoke the debate over whether the commission is too cozy with the businesses it oversees.

The Board of Supervisors' Rules Committee will review the three applications at an upcoming meeting on Thursday. The Entertainment Commission's open seat is supposed to be dedicated to a representative from the public-health sector. As we reported in a July cover story, the board's composition had grown extremely lopsided in recent years, with five of the seven seats held by appointees with direct financial ties to the entertainment industry.

One of the applicants will likely face questions about whether he would perpetuate that status quo. David Lupo states in his application that he currently works as a bartender at the North Beach restaurant Sodini's, adding that he has "performed, musically, in many of San Francisco's clubs, bars, cafes, festivals, and street-fairs," over the past two decades.

Windmills aren't the only things spinning

​The gears of the Ministry of Correct Progressive Thought could be seen clanking into action once again this week on the editorial pages of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, where that newspaper's opinion purveyors tried to convince readers that San Francisco should be pushing ahead full-bore with a public power scheme known as community choice aggregation, or CCA.

The argument in itself is a fair one. CCA, known in its local iteration as CleanPowerSF, would advance some widely held local energy priorities, such as greener power, while making the city less reliant on PG&E -- which for a century has held San Francisco in the vise-grip of an electricity monopoly. Yet once again, the Guardian has chosen to play its readers false when it comes to the hard facts on CCA and public power.

The big lie in this week's editorial concerns the cost of CleanPowerSF. Most reasonable people would expect that electricity from cleaner and more local sources would come at a premium, and independent analysts have concluded that this will certainly be the case with CCA. As we explained in a January cover story, the city controller's office estimates that CCA would drive up city residents' power bills by 24 percent -- and predicts that this burden would fall disproportionately on the city's poorest residents.

Time to play hardball

​City Attorney Dennis Herrera filed a motion in San Francisco Superior Court today asking that Pink Diamonds, a notoriously violent strip club at 220 Jones Street in the Tenderloin, be shut down for repeated violations of the law.

Herrera's petition, filed with Judge Peter J. Busch, asserts that the club has been the scene of prostitution, drug deals, illegal alcohol consumption, and noise violations since an injunction governing its operations was agreed to by Pink Diamonds operators in March. The city attorney has asked that the judge close the club and impose at least $689,000 in fines on its owners.

"With our motion today, we're saying enough is enough -- Pink Diamonds needs to be shut down before another life is lost," Herrera said in a statement. "It is obvious that the operators of this nightclub have no interest in running a business within the parameters of the law, and it is equally obvious that this extraordinary step is necessary."

Joyce Goldschmid

Warren Hellman

​The recent announcement that banjo-plucking leveraged buyout king Warren Hellman will toss $5 million from his family fund into a nascent partnership with KQED, the Newspaper Guild, and the U.C. Berkeley School of Journalism elicited a storm of responses from the ever-shrinking pool of professional ink-stained wretches in the Bay Area. On the one hand, there were orgiastic attempts at cheer-leading. On the other extreme, Hellman's use of cheap or free student labor supposedly makes him the Simon Legree of the journalism plantation. 

Perhaps our most visceral reaction to the fledgling Bay Area News Project has nothing to do with the nuts and bolts of its funding structure and journalistic scope. Forbes really hit it on the head when, in its interview with Hellman, it noted "Don't you just hate it when your profession becomes a hobby for rich people?" Worse, don't you hate it when your profession becomes a charity case? Will report for food!

Still, several elements of the nonprofit's amorphous structure raise some red flags with us -- and we called several media ethicists to get their take, too.

In death, Bay Area newspapers and other media outlets changed Donald Fisher's name -- back to Donald Fisher. Previously, the Gap founder was invariably referred to as "Republican billionaire Donald Fisher." Once Fisher died, we started to hear more about his improbable rise to fashion titan, virtual creation of "casual Friday," and generous philanthropy.

Given little attention in obituaries was that Fisher really was among the last of a dying breed -- a San Francisco-born and -bred CEO with deep roots in this city and the ability to lead and fund-raise among the city's moneyed, business class on political issues. In short, he was the center-right's go-to financial guy. And it looks like that role dies with him.

A handful of longtime Fisher associates and city politicos told SF Weekly that the moderate-to-rightist movement in this city has lost its white knight. While Fisher is survived by his wife and three sons, friends and observers say that Fisher was the political one in the family. His sons, SF Weekly is told, are far less conservative chips than the old block. They've continued the Fisher family tradition of philanthropy, but, barring a Prince Hal moment, it seems unrealistic to expect them to suddenly become political, conservative, and start throwing their efforts and money into causes the elder Fisher would have.  

"I think Don Fisher was so big, in a sense, nobody in the family could get in his way or be a shadow to him in the public arena," said Don Solem, of the city public affairs firm Solem & Associates, who worked with Fisher for more than 20 years. "So they did other things." 

Fine. So they don't kill bacteria.

​When we first learned that the  U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was suing The North Face parent company, VF Outdoor Inc., for supposedly making false claims about their shoes preventing bacteria, it sounded a little strange.

The EPA seemed to be suggesting there might be something unsafe about the shoes, which it called "unregistered pesticides," but it turns out that everything about the shoe, and its bacteria-inhibiting insert, was registered with the EPA. The only problem was an overstatement in VF Outdoor Inc.'s marketing materials (which resulted in the EPA reclassifying the shoes as "unregistered pesticides").

The North Face was claiming that an AgION antigmicrobial silver agent in the shoe would inhibit the grown of disease-causing bacteria. Although it's unclear how this is an overstatement (AgION is registered with the EPA as a pesticide), it apparently is, and the EPA is apparently going after VF Outdoor for a cool million, even though it has gone soft on similiar, relatively insignificant violations in the past.

​Warning to people carrying expensive wedding cakes, putting on lipstick or applying the final brushstroke to their masterpiece: Step away from the  task at hand before absorbing this information unless you want results suitable for silent comedy. THE BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS HAS RELEASED WAGE NUMBERS FOR THE BAY AREA!

Wait, hang on a second.

Okay, I'm back. I had to whip out my inhaler. You, lady applying the lipstick. I warned you.

Anyway. Here's the rundown. In May of 2008, the average hourly wage for San Francisco, San Mateo and Redwood city came out to $29.05, which is "roughly" 43 percent higher than the national average, of $20.32. Hmmm -- If the hourly average looks like this then why does your paycheck look like this? Clearly, you are doing something wrong.

Who makes the most? In San Francisco, "Management" makes $61.30 an hour on average, which is higher than the $48.23 national average for "managers" elsewhere. The least? "Food preparation and serving related" workers pull $11.63 and hour, which is also above the national average of $9.72 (keep in mind that San Francisco's minimum wage is now $9.79)

Joe Eskenazi

​News articles about names invariably end up quoting Romeo and Juliet: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet."

Fair enough. Just choose that word and stick with it, or everyone's going to get confused. That's the case at this Mission Street market just between 18th and 19th. While the sign says "Gino's" the awning reads "George's."

We wandered inside to see what the proper name is, Gino's or George's. And the counterman told us it's neither of these.

​Nearly two decades after Diane Sawyer busted the Food Lion grocery store chain for selling rotting meat to customers, the company still seems obsessed with saving money on refrigeration,  according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In 1992, ABC's Primetime Live reported that Food Lion workers soaked rotten fish in baking soda, re-wrapped old chicken in barbecue sauce, and sold rat-gnawed cheese alongside rotting meat. The company sued -- not for libel, but on the theory that Sawyer's producers committed fraud when they signed up as Food Lion employees and hid cameras in their wigs. Food Lion's legal strategy threatened to set back American press freedom to a new pre-Constitutional era, where reporters seeking to going undercover to expose, say, abuse of mentally-ill patients, could potentially be punished for fraud.

A $5.5 million punitive verdict was eventually thrown out in federal appeals court, but not before undercover investigative reporting became largely passe in the nervous-nellie U.S. news business.

Fast-forwarding to the present, and the chain seems to still be determined to make every penny count when it comes to refrigerating food. According to the publication Biotech Business Week, the EPA earlier this month awarded Food Lion its Distinguished Partner Award at the Food Marketing Institute's Sustainability Summit in San Francisco. Food Lion was lionized for "deploying advanced refrigeration technology at new stores," the Biotech Business Week reported.

​UPDATE: 6:50 -- a newsroom source tells SF Weekly that five editorial department employees have been let go, including some names newshounds will know.

Reporter Meredith May -- who penned the Chron's sex slave series -- has been laid off, as has talented photographer Frederic Larson, and multimedia producer Justin Beck. A pair of editorial assistants also were shown the door, but our sources declined to name them. 

Word from the Chronicle newsroom came SF Weekly's way this afternoon that the paper's "after Labor Day" layoff date is right here, right now.

Newspaper employees were informed less than an hour ago that the paper is, once again, downsizing. A bulletin was sent out by the Newspaper Guild that Chronicle management notified the union that "newsroom layoffs are expected to begin this afternoon."

The number of workers, departments in which they toil, or duration of this round of layoffs was not disclosed to the Guild. Newsroom employees SF Weekly has spoken with are anticipating perhaps as few as five -- or as many as 10 or more -- of their editorial department colleagues will be shown the door.