Bookworm Room

Tweet If you’d like to see a wonderful, fascinating compare-and-contrast photo essay, you’ve got to read Zombie’s Walk for Life vs. Roe v. Wade birthday party: Abortion showdown SF. To begin with, I love Zombie’s writing style, which is an invigorating blend of erudition, true humanism, and snark.  Additionally, the post is a very useful [...]

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Tweet Tom Ammiano, San Francisco’s reliably far-Left supervisor, was in the local news today because he’s come out with a new proposal that can be called “the homeless bill of rights“: Among other things, the proposed law would require legal representation for anyone cited under such laws as San Francisco’s sit/lie law or anti-panhandling ordinance. [...]

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Tweet Courtesy of the Navy League, today I boarded the USS Makin Island as an official ship’s greeter.  My visit was a bit more fraught than past experiences have been, so I thought I’d walk you through the girl’s guide to visiting the USS Makin Island, starting with pre-visit preparations: Review boarding instructions at last-minute [...]

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Tweet San Francisco’s plastic bag ban went into effect today.  Not only does it ban plastic bags entirely, it also forces people to pay 10 cents for every paper bag they use.  The new rule in the City is bring your own bags or suffer.  All the usual suspects are happy.  What’s interesting is that [...]

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Tweet Housing in San Francisco is expensive because the City is bounded on three sides by water and on the fourth side by another city.  Housing in San Francisco is expensive because it’s one of the most beautiful and interesting cities in the world, so a lot of people want to live there and are [...]

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Tweet Aside from getting to see downtown San Francisco without actually having to shlep into downtown San Francisco, I liked Zombie’s latest photo essay because it shows how disaffected Obama is.  The Left hates him, the Right hates him, and he spends time hobnobbing with the rich.  He is not a man of the people.  [...]

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Tweet Writing a couple of years ago about the streets of San Francisco, in a post I called “Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco,” I had this to say: Last week, I had occasion to make four separate trips to the City.  Each was unpleasant. The first trip, I got a flat tire from broken glass in [...]

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Tweet I remember the hippies as dirty, drugged-out, pathetic human beings lying on the streets in the Haight Ashbury.  Their continuing legacy is one of drugs, sexual self-indulgence, and mindless statism wrapped up in equally mindless slogans of “love” and “fairness,” as if a government is capable of giving love or imposing fairness from above. [...]

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Tweet Here’s the lede: The great thing about living in San Francisco is that it is socially and culturally responsible. The bad thing is, a city that is so socially and culturally responsible can’t resist taking the bait when a fringe group tries to provoke a reaction. In a non-Bizarro world, one might think that [...]

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Tweet San Francisco used to be charming.  Now it’s just kind of creepy — or, at least, large parts of it are.  For example, the OWSers are creepy.  Even creepier is what happens when the OWSers come together with the nekkid Santas.  And I have to ask, as I always do:  Why is it always [...]

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Tweet I don’t know who created this, but it’s clearly someone deeply familiar with San Francisco and its mindset (click on thumbnail for full size image):

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Tweet The City That Knows How, which is how long-time San Francisco columnist Herb Caen viewed his beloved adopted city, is at it again, this time with proposed legislation saying you can’t enter restaurants nude, nor can you, as a nude person, sit down in a public space without putting something under yourself first.  How [...]

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Tweet I do not understand the liberal love affair with government.  Government is inefficient and it bullies people.  Had a business engaged in the same conduct as the City of San Francisco, it would have apologized profusely or found itself flamed to death.  A government, however, can act with impunity, because it holds the power. [...]

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Tweet The news is good, at least for the time being, but I was rather amazed to learn that JROTC, which has been around since before WWI, all over America, is “controversial”: The San Francisco school board gave the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps yet another vote of confidence Tuesday, ensuring that the controversial military [...]

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Tweet I often say I’m shocked by something that crosses my computer screen, but that’s not really true.  I mean, I probably sort of shocked insofar as I’m surprised that someone has behaved according to type, but in an extreme way, or that something I’ve long assumed would happen actually did happen (or, in a [...]

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Tweet San Francisco is definitely up in the top five when it comes to “most Progressively governed cities in America.”  No surprise, then, that the city’s finances are in a shambles.  What is a surprise is the fact that, faced with a looming budget collapse, the City has suddenly discovered capitalist incentives:  it’s offering the [...]

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Tweet San Francisco’s Tenderloin district is not a nice place, and never has been:  hence, the name “Tenderloin,” which is short hand for the fact that it is City’s soft underbelly.  PETA, though, just hates the thought that a neighborhood could be named after a cut of meat, so it’s taking a stand.

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Tweet One of my “crossing the Rubicon” moments came upon me about twenty years ago, when I went to the main branch of the old San Francisco public library (before it moved to its snazzy, very expensive new digs), and tried to check out a book.  I found myself standing in a line of about [...]

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Tweet This little squiblet from C.W. Nevius’ column in the SF Chron (which is about the only thing in the SF Chron still worth reading), sums up everything that is wrong with San Francisco: Greg and Christy Baciocco, who have run NuStar Heating and Metal Supply on Otis Street since 1989, are resigned to their [...]

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Tweet In Progressive cities, long-established businesses pull out because (a) they can’t afford the cost of doing business in a Progressive-run city and (b) the work force is substandard (which may go a long way to why the City’s voters consistently elect Progressives).

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Tweet I blogged earlier this week about the fact that San Francisco, which is broke, was trying to find $137 million so that the feds would provide it with almost $1 billion dollars in funds to build a 1.7 mile subway tunnel.  Federal money, of course, is your money.  This is not money belonging to [...]

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Tweet I wasn’t paying attention to this, but it turns out that San Francisco, which already has a fairly comprehensive public transportation system, wants another 1.7 miles underground — at a cost of $1.6 billion.  Think about it.  That cost is almost one million one hundred million for every tenth of a mile. Now, I [...]

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Tweet From today’s Chron: Soon-to-be-dethroned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may have been a favorite target of Republican candidates in the midterm elections Nov. 2 – by one count more than 400 of their ads featured her as the enemy – but voters in her famously liberal home turf of San Francisco still love her. A [...]

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Tweet If one man has his way, San Francisco voters will be able to ban circumcision in San Francisco: His proposed measure would “make it a misdemeanor to circumcise, excise, cut or mutilate the foreskin, testicle or penis of another person who has not attained the age of 18,” [snip] Under the proposed measure circumcising [...]

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Tweet As Jonah Goldberg pointed out in Liberal Fascism, socialists, as part of their ongoing effort to perfect mankind, are obsessed with food intake.  The Nazis were especially focused on purifying the Aryan body. Now, I’m not likening the San Francisco Board of Stupidvisors to the Nazis — God forbid! — but I am pointing [...]

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