paris-match.com

En le crappeur

​Editor's note: From time to time, The Snitch, being at best a casual fan of World Cup soccer, will provide glimpses into the experience of same.  

Your good old nameless Americans suffered quite the historic setback on Friday, but at least they aren't French: As their team's implosion becomes the World Cup's best drama, Les Bleus became a media meme over the weekend -- and they didn't even play a game.More >>

US Geological Survey

It usually looks better

​Civil Sidewalks, Sit-Lie ordinance -- call it what you will, the ballot initiative to make sitting down on public sidewalks between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. illegal isn't some fringe idea from what passes for SF's hard right.

There's a popular -- some say "grass roots" -- push to give homeless people one more thing to worry about. And the law has its best polling numbers in a neighborhood you might not expect, according the Chamber of Commerce.

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www.sanfranciscosentinel.com

Pick a side

​The San Francisco Board of Supervisors' meeting on Tuesday lasted until Wednesday, at last ending this morning at 12:03 AM. Hundreds of members of the public stood for hours in a City Hall corridor for the opportunity to speak for three minutes each on a controversial -- yet nonbinding and ultimately symbolic -- resolution condemning Israel for its role in the fatal May 31 raid on a flotilla of ships heading to Gaza.

After ten hours, the following was accomplished: nothing. Any one member of the Board could delay the issue by sending the resolution to a Board committee, and that's what Supervisor Bevan Dufty did shortly before midnight. The resolution will be heard again sometime next month, if its sponsors wish to continue to subject their colleagues to this kind of dialogue.

So was it all worth it? More >>

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News this week of Adam Wheeler, the 23-year-old who lied his way into Harvard and almost into Yale, brought back fond memories of Azia Kim, the dorm-squatter who was discovered posing as a Stanford student two years ago.

We have to ask: Who's the better college hoaxer?

TV movie-ready back story:

• Azia Kim was, by all reports, a sweet, church-going Korean American girl with less than stellar academics at a high-achieving Orange County high school. She had told her parents she'd gotten into Stanford, and apparently had to keep up the ruse.

• Adam Wheeler was a middle-class public high school student from Delaware, who seems to have thought himself clever enough to swim with the big fish at Harvard. According to Gawker, he was a Talented Mr. Ripley in training, "cutting a lonely, romantic figure in a vintage letter jacket." The Twilight fans would go wild. 
  

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Natural born American

​This summer, anti-Obama protesters have showed up at the president's town-hall addresses on health-care reform with signs pushing the "birther" conspiracy theory, which asserts that Obama's presidency is illegitimate since he was born abroad.

Last weekend, White House "green-jobs czar" and veteran Bay Area activist Van Jones was forced out of the Obama Administration after conservatives raised questions about his signing a 2004 letter suggesting that Bush knew about and allowed the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to launching wars abroad. The letter was reminiscent of more extreme arguments by 9/11 "truthers," who believe the Bush Administration destroyed the World Trade Center for its own nefarious purposes.

With so much paranoia in the air on the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it seems an appropriate time for Versus to tackle a tough question: Who's crazier, birthers or truthers?

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