This past Valentine’s Day, while most people were busy sending valentines, flowers, and chocolates to their loved ones, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors were dreaming about what they love the most—more taxes. Seven of the eleven supervisors (Peskin, Fewer, Ronen, Kim, Yee, Safai, and Cohen) voted for Resolution No.
City Hall, aka "The Man", never had the warmest relationship with the hippies who were questioning their authority, violating their rules, etc., and this fact was demonstrated again yesterday. Political appointees on SF's Recreation and Parks Commission backed the decision of department staff to deny a permit to a promoter seeking to hold a free festival in Golden Gate Park to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the legendary "Summer of Love", the 1967 apex in San Francisco of the mid-1960s to early 1970s countercultural revolution.
Do you ever wonder what sets legislators’ hearts aflutter? Is it a desire to pander to where the most votes are? Do they really believe that passing more laws and mandates will improve the lot of the masses? Do they ever consider that their constant attempts to “help” will actually backfire and hurt those who are supposed to be helped the most? Do they really believe that force—backed by the heavy hand of government—will make this a more civil society?
Like the blob, beware the rollout of CleanPowerSF (CPSF)! It’s coming to your neighborhood soon. Recently service was rolled out to 7,400 commercial customers in the Bayview, Haight, and Castro neighborhoods, and they just added in residents in districts 5 and 8. There is another major rollout planned for this spring.
Cronyism is alive and well in San Francisco. Fourteen months have passed since San Francisco voters passed Prop J, the establishment of a Legacy Business Historic Preservation Fund. This is a government-sponsored and financial grant (giveaway) program cooked up by then-Supervisor David Campos to “help” San Francisco businesses keep their doors open with the high cost of doing business in The City. We recently checked the San Francisco Office of Small Business website, which lists all the companies that have been approved for “Legacy” status, and already 64 businesses qualify for the grant program. The bureaucrats certainly wasted no time acting like Santa Claus.
Three recent articles in the San Francisco Examiner point to a disturbing trend in The City. While it’s understood that the Bay Area leans left and the Examiner has gone completely leftist, nevertheless we see some new lows.
On the issue of San Francisco’s mind-boggling budget, we decided to dig a little deeper to see how San Francisco compares to other American cities. We were hardly shocked to find that San Francisco ranks as number two (Washington D.C.
While the final official vote counts are not all in yet, it’s still a bit of a disappointment for us Libertarians that our Presidential candidates did not fare as well as hoped in this zany election year. At the latest count though, the Johnson-Weld ticket pulled in 4,429,013 votes this time (3.29%). While drastically smaller than the 10% polling touted earlier in the year, still 4.4 million votes is nothing to sneeze at. While we know that some voters chose the Libertarian ticket because of how bad the major party candidates were and will probably vote major party the next time, hopefully a significant number will stick with the liberty movement and vote their conscience again in future elections. Meanwhile Johnson did pull
By Starchild, LPSF Outreach Director
UPDATED NOV. 22 – A hearing on this issue has been scheduled for the November 30th, 10:00 a.m. Budget & Finance Committee hearing, Room 250, SF City Hall (see http://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/bfc113016_agenda.pdf , item #12).
