Free Republic

The title says it all. About "liberalism is a mental disorder" in San Francisco's Castro District From "The Savage Nation" (Monday, November 20, 2012 edition) Quite amusing, worth a listen...

All but overlooked in the Republican Senate landslide is the double-digit loss of seats for Democrats in the House. The outcome casts a cloud on House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s future, potentially throwing the House out of reach for Democrats in 2016 and dashing Pelosi's dream of serving as House speaker with a President Hillary Rodham Clinton. Democrats lost at least 14 seats Tuesday. Because gerrymandering has reduced the number of competitive House districts to roughly 50, or barely 10 percent of the 435 seats, the climb back for Democrats is going to be monumentally steep. Republicans now hold their...

Proposition E, a 2 cent per ounce tax on the purchase of sugary beverages that was heavily opposed by the American Beverage Association, was defeated at the polls Tuesday when fewer than two-thirds of voters supported the proposal. The tax was proposed to combat health-related illnesses like obesity and diabetes. It drew the support of the majority of the Board of Supervisors, which voted to place it on the ballot, and a number of health organizations, such as the American Heart Association and the California Dental Association. The American Beverage Association, which represents the large soda companies, had raised $7.7...

In a new campaign to reportedly raise awareness of "privilege," the University of San Francisco is handing out fliers telling anyone who is white, straight, Christian, or "able-bodied" that they are privileged and need to "check their privilege." The campaign was put together by three professors at the college and Student Life. The fliers also claim that if you believe that your gender identity and biological gender are the same (that is, if you consider yourself a male and you are biologically male), you are privileged as well. No matter who you are, no matter what your situation in life,...

Gordy Soltau, a 49ers scoring machine in the 1950s and one of the franchise's kindest ambassadors, passed away from natural causes Sunday night with his family by his side. He was 89. Inducted two years ago into the 49ers Hall of Fame, Soltau joined the team in 1950 upon its arrival in the NFL. The pass-catching end and kicker led the 49ers in scoring in eight of his nine years, topping the NFL in both 1952 and 1953.

San Francisco is a cauldron of rights, unless you own a home. Buy a property here and you might as well paint a target on your back. That's what Dan and Maria Levin discovered after they bought a two-unit North Beach home in 2008. They moved in to the upstairs one-bedroom apartment and told the downstairs tenant that they eventually planned to use the downstairs apartment for friends and family. (The state Ellis Act allows property owners to evict tenants without cause if they plan to take the property off the rental market.) Five years later, the Levins served a...

New Attorney General Kamala Harris took office Monday with a rapid-fire barrage of promises to target everything from violent gangs to online scams to truancy and prison recidivism rates. Minutes after her swearing-in, Harris sent a message that she plans to be an activist as California's top cop, an innovator with a motto identical to the title of her book: "Smart On Crime." "Ultimately, being smart on crime is about doing more preventing and less reacting, it's about being tough and being tough-minded, doing more of what works and less of what doesn't," she said. Harris, who narrowly defeated Los...

"Who is responsible for the Bay Bridge?" I asked California Gov. Jerry Brown at a San Francisco Chronicle editorial board meeting in May. Before Brown's 2010 election victory, which made him the boss of all Caltrans, Brown was the mayor of Oakland whose political posturing helped delay the retrofit of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge, made necessary after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake knocked down a chunk of the span. It took 24 years and $5 billion more than the original budget for the state to complete the $6.4 billion span. Before the new span even opened, the...

Yo! Yo! Yo! Who says black on white or black on Asian racism isn’t alive and well in America? A bus tour guide in the liberal Mecca known as San Francisco, California, recently went on a racist rant against the Chinese people and the Chinatown district of that city. In a 2:30 minute video that was shot by one of the tourist along for the ride, the guide, who just so happens to be a black woman, is seen wielding what appears to be a bottle of booze while sharing her hate for Chinatown and its residents.

'F*** You Chinatown': Guide Stuns A Bus Load Of Tourists With A Racist Tirade In San Francisco's Famous Asian District Tour guide launched into a racist rant about San Francisco's Chinatown She warned people against moving to the area saying it's 'a horrible place' German tourist filmed the expletive-laden tirade and put it on YouTube Guide said: 'F*** your noise, f*** your parades, f*** your dragons, f*** this' By JENNY AWFORD 23 October 2014 A tour guide stunned a bus load of tourists when she launched into a racist tirade about San Francisco's Chinatown on her last day of the...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- By the time Madison Bumgarner took the mound to throw his first pitch, the San Francisco Giants already held a three-run lead. It might as well have been 100 with the way MadBum and this orange-and-black bunch play in the World Series. Bumgarner carried a shutout into the seventh inning, Hunter Pence homered early and the Giants showed off their October poise, putting a sudden stop to the Kansas City Royals' perfect postseason roll by romping 7-1 in the Series opener Tuesday night.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) supports the elimination of rules that ban transgender people from openly serving in the military, her office told the Washington Blade. “Leader Pelosi believes there is no place for discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces, including on the basis of gender identity,” spokesperson Drew Hammill told the Blade. In May, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said that the ban should be “continually reviewed.”

Employees of San Francisco Print Media Company, the parent company of the Examiner, SF Weekly, and San Francisco Bay Guardian were this morning informed that the latter paper will be shuttered after 48 years. The paper was founded by husband and wife Jean Dibble and Bruce Brugmann — whose visage, urging locals to "Read my paper, dammit" — grew ubiquitous over the years. Its founding mission was to "print the news and raise hell," and, as an independent paper, it ostensibly did just that for 46 years. In 2012 Brugmann and Dibble sold the Guardian to the San Francisco Media...

SF Mayor Gavin Newsom has declared universal access to wireless Internet to be a "fundamental right of all citizens" and stated that access to the Internet "is a civil rights issue as much as anything else."  This is the same San Francisco government pushing a complete ban of all handguns within city limits.  They are putting it to a referendum and proposition H will be on San Francisco city ballots next month.  If it passes, any possession of a handgun within city limits will be banned.  Everyone but government personnel and security guards will have to surrender their handguns within 90 days. ...

San Francisco politicians, eager to showcase their democratic credentials in their liberty-loving city, traditionally have not shied from taking stances on human rights, checking in on everything from apartheid in South Africa to Burma’s military junta. But on Wednesday, as tens of thousands of peaceful democracy demonstrators who had already been tear-gassed marched in Hong Kong, Mayor Ed Lee was on his City Hall balcony hoisting the flag of the target of those protests — the autocratic government of China.

An undercover FBI agent gave campaign donations to an unnamed Bay Area politician during a yearslong undercover investigation into a Chinatown gang and alleged political corruption that culminated in the arrests of state Sen. Leland Yee and Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow earlier this year. This is according to the latest filing by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the federal case against the two men and about 20 others. Besides indicating that a politician other than Yee allegedly took money from undercover FBI agents in exchange for favors, the filing further lays out the relationship between former school board member and...

Here’s the deal. There’s a park in San Francisco with a couple of soccer fields in it. They don’t get nearly as much use as they could because they’re grass fields. San Francisco is kinda rainy, it takes a lot of money and resources to maintain real grass fields, and they don’t hold up as well as turf under frequent use. So, after about 19 times the due diligence necessary for determining the relative safety and environmental impact of turf athletic fields in any other city on planet Earth, most of San Francisco’s leaders—covering the spectrum from Democrats to progressives—decided...

The waters just west of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge hide a graveyard of sunken ships. By some estimates, there are 300 wrecks in the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area alone. But only a fraction of them have been seen by scientists. Marine archaeologists and researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have set out to document those lost vessels. Over the course of a five-day survey that just ended yesterday (Sept. 15), the team discovered the sites of at least four wrecks: the 1910 SS Selja shipwreck, the...

Supervisor David Chiu wants San Francisco to become the first American city to oppose any ban on sex-selective abortions. It apparently has not occurred to him why no other city has chosen to do so. Journalist Mara Hvistendahl, author of "Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men," estimates that sex-selective abortions have "claimed over 160 million potential women and girls -- in Asia alone." Thus, it is rather disturbing to watch one of the most liberal politicians in liberal San Francisco grandstand in defense of a practice that devalues -- destroys, actually...

Supervisor David Chiu wants San Francisco to become the first American city to oppose any ban on sex-selective abortions. It apparently has not occurred to him why no other city has chosen to do so. Journalist Mara Hvistendahl, author of "Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men," estimates that sex-selective abortions have "claimed over 160 million potential women and girls -- in Asia alone." Thus, it is rather disturbing to watch one of the most liberal politicians in liberal San Francisco grandstand in defense of a practice that devalues -- destroys, actually...