So, just as the horrible SFMTA recently conducted focus groups on the future of Polk, 6th Street is getting its turn.
I’ll tell you, if I were in charge of making 6th street safer, I don’t think I’d put “Slower Cars” at the top of the list.
How about “Less Untreated Mental Illness” instead?
Anyway, our blessed SFMTA will be hosting ”an interactive activation project on 6th Street (between Market and Stevenson)” on May 18th, 2013.
And Twitter will be there too, sort of.
In a better world, Twitter would participate because it wants to, not because it’s contractually obligated to do so.
(And Twitter would pay its fair share of taxes under the rules signed into law by that wild job-killing radical, Gavin Newsom, all the way back in 2004. Twitter, just give me your tax returns and I’ll figure how much more you should have paid and then you can write a check for the difference and send it in to the General Fund.)
NEWSFLASH: The people from the residential hotels you don’t like on 6th Street aren’t going anywhere.
By law.
Oh, and lots of people working at Twitter would still prefer to labor in northern San Mateo County, just saying.
Safer 6th Street is a collaboration between SFMTA, District 6 Supervisor’s Office, Twitter, Neighborland, SPUR, URBAN SPACEship and other community organizations to address the issue of safety in the 6th Street corridor, and gather further input from the local community as to what can be done to create a safer area for residents, workers and passersby alike.
There is an on-going community process to implement safety measures in the 6th Street corridor, including:
In alignment with this process, we ask – how can we, as a community, create a safer 6th Street?
On Saturday, May 18th, between 12-6pm we will be hosting an interactive activation project on 6th Street (between Market and Stevenson), to engage the community and gather ideas and feedback towards this question, with the aim of envisioning a vibrant area and helping to prioritize treatments to the 6th Street design.
Pick your medium – we’ll have a Neighborland board for you to freely write on, a Twitter photo booth, and a collaborative mural installed by ArtIsMobilus.
Until then, share your ideas and comment on others here or on Twitter using the hashtag #safer6th. Through a new integrated platform between Neighborland and Twitter, your tweets will display on the Question page. Any tweets that start with “I want …” and contain the hashtag will auto-magically become ideas on the Question page.
Come join and take part in creating action on the ground!”
I know, why don’t you take out all these spaces and replace them with a separated bike lane or something, SFMTA?
After all, Transit First, right?
Oh, what’s that? These are the spaces that the Board of Supervisors and their aides park in for free every day so that’s where you just happened to end your campaign of completion?
But don’t you care about safety, SFMTA?
Mmmmm….
“This project seeks to implement aesthetic and safety improvements for all users of Polk Street between McAllister and Union Streets. In accordance with the City’s Transit First policy, improvements will primarily be focused on people who walk, use transit and ride a bicycle along Polk Street. The project is funded by Proposition B General Obligation Bonds and is part of an overall citywide effort to curb pedestrian and bicycle collisions and to provide a safe north-south connection for people on bicycles. Pedestrian and bicyclist collision and injury data on Polk Street point to a corridor in need of safety improvements for all those who share the road. In fact, the southern portion from Sacramento to McAllister Streets is part of the 5% of San Francisco streets that have more than half of the City’s most severe pedestrian collisions.”
But it is anti other things, I’ll grant you that.)
In closing, diamonds are horrible. Get anything else but a diamond. People will figure this out soon enough and the worthless piece of rock on your finger will be even more worthless a couple decades from now.
And more importantly, it will be seen by others as worthless.
Could be (but I’ll never know ’cause I only have a rabbit ear antenna and, oddly, there’s no NBC affiliate in my tiny town, nor in the county, nor in any of the neighboring counties and I’ll be damned if the Comcast monopoly is going to get $100 per month out of me for basic cable.)
Anyway, leave us review, let’s travel all the way back to ought-ten:
So now in 2013, George Gascon sees a chance to make amends with all sorts of different groups by being the point man on SFGov’s anti-MUNI bus ad campaign?
Sure looks that way. See the press release below.
Hey, is George Gascon running for Mayor of San Francisco, you know, down the road?
Maybe. (All he needs to do is clear up his case of foot-in-mouth disease by 2017 or whatever.)
Contact: Stephanie Ong Stillman, DA Gascón’s Office
ADA Alex Bastian, DA Gascón’s Office
SAN FRANCISO – Today, District Attorney George Gascón, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, and Supervisors John Avalos, London Breed, Malia Cohen, Jane Kim, Scott Wiener, Norman Yee held a press conference to denounce Islamophobic and racist advertisements by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) scheduled to run on MUNI buses today.
“These offensive ads serve no other purpose than to denigrate our city’s Arab and Muslim communities,” said District Attorney George Gascón. “When any community in San Francisco is attacked, it affects all of us. I and the city leaders standing with me today are exercising our free speech rights in condemning these ads and standing with the Arab and Muslim communities of San Francisco.”
“Hate has no place in our City,” said Mayor Ed Lee. “San Francisco is a city that celebrates its diversity, and hateful speech and discrimination against our Arab and Muslim communities will never be tolerated.”
“Our respect for free speech does not mean we allow hateful speech to go unchallenged,” said Board President David Chiu. “As a former civil rights attorney, I’m proud to stand with our Arab and Muslim American families to send a united message that San Francisco embraces diversity and tolerance, not hate and bigotry.”
AFDI’s founder Pamela Geller has been deemed an anti-Muslim hate extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In August of 2012, San Franciscans were outraged over AFDI advertisements on MUNI that referred to Arabs and Muslims as “savages.” Arab and Muslim community leaders say the new advertisements are even more offensive as they wrongly suggest that all Muslims are defined by extremism and violence, and baselessly target Arab and Muslim San Franciscans who make invaluable contributions to the city’s life and culture.
Supervisor David Chiu is introducing a resolution to condemn the Islamophobic and racist MUNI Ads at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting. In response, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority will dedicate the proceeds from the offensive advertisements to fund a city-wide study on the impact of discrimination on Arab and Muslim communities. City leaders have met with Council on American-Islamic Relations – San Francisco Bay Area, Asian Law Caucus, the Ramallah Club, the Arab Cultural Center, churches and mosques to discuss targeting of vulnerable communities and the city’s commitment to protecting and standing with those communities.”
“There is a privilege to being white in this country. I’m not saying that if you’re white, you have a lot of power as an individual. But if you’re white, you might be more likely to find* a white President,** a white Senator, a white police chief. I mean I’m just saying, right?”
Have you been to college? This is exactly what it’s like.
I mean I’m just saying, right?
*No comprendo. Do not copy. Repeat transmission, Good Buddy. So if “you” aren’t white, then you’re less likely to find a white…
**Or half-white.***
***I mean, I’m just saying, right?
UPDATE, from the Comments section – Twitter, Randy Shaw, the non-profit mafia, etc:
“sorry bout that, it seems out of context, but she actually wasn’t even asked about race, but rather gender relations…she brought up the race issue all by herself, – out of context
you might even find this even more strange, actually…but that’s still not the whole thing…the whole thing is 55 minutes long and it was a meeting at one of randy Shaws hotels, the hartland…in fact, it appears there’s quite a bit of questionable stuff in there, especially about the corrupt twitterloin tax break
notice how one of Randy Shaws clients specifically says that it’s ‘unfair to put people that are just homeless into a hotel like that full of heroin addicts, meth addicts and crackheads’ and how THC staff and Jane Kim completely sidesteps the question and takes it to another context:
it goes on..I’m working on a post myself and making clips…It really looks like the entire mid market tax break is an inside job, controlled by a tiny few non profits
this could really blow up…did she not know she was being taped, with a camera right in her face?”
“People should have to pay for parking. I’m just wondering if there is a less punitive way of doing it for residents,” she said. “I was hoping for more thoughtful alternatives.”
Well that’s Phase 1 – it’s a start.
Phase 2 just might be Direct Action, taking it to the streets to pull up the infernal SFPark meters up by their very roots.
No matter, TZ’s cabaret performers were on hand all smiles yesterday at the news conference* in the “50 Broadway” parking lot near the Embarcadero. This location will be ZinZanni’s new home, if everything works out.
(I’ll tell you, I can’t tell the difference betwixt Gavin Newsom running the Newsom Administration and Ed Lee running the Newsom Adminstration, fundamentally. I mean, Ed Lee is not an impetuous asshole, so that means he behaves better, he tends to show up at these kinds of functions with a smaller entourage and less drama. That’s good, I s’pose…)
Oh, there he is, to the right of the gorgeous Martian(?) lady:
Click to expand
See how this will work? The famous European tent they use will go behind the new building:
All the deets after the jump.
And get over to highly-ratedZinZanni (if you can still get tickets, perhaps on a Wednesday or Thursday) before they shut down on the night of December 31, 2011. It really is quite an experience.
Ed’s gonna win; Ron backs winners early and throws the losers an anchor
Ron’s either buying influence or getting played, take your pick; he’s pouring money into a race that’s already a lock, behind a candidate just waiting for voters to confirm what everyone knows. If naïveté, Willie Brown is using the Twitter deal to pull Ron and his money on board an already winning campaign. If influence peddling, Ron’s using his money to buy himself some friends by backing the clear winner of the race early.
On the face of things, Ron’s a huge fan of the Twitter tax deal that Ed Lee supported after progressive-backed Supervisor Jane Kim surprisingly swung behind Twitter’s demands, making the deal possible. Word on the SF politico street is that the deal was primarily a supervisorial fight between the progressive forces of John Avalos and Chris Daly and the downtown interests getting somewhat behind the big tech scene, rather than being a mayor-driven initiative. It was no surprise that there was a long line of companies right behind Twitter looking to enlarge that financial hole Twitter forced open.
But here’s the political situation Ron has bought into: Willie wants Ed to get a smashing mandate and is seen as the power behind the throne at this point, having convinced a reluctant Ed to run for election after repeatedly promising he would not run. Willie even convinced Ed to break Ed’s deal with the Board to not run in exchange for being appointed in the first place. Considering two Supervisors are currently running for mayor, Ed’s name isn’t worth dirt in political SF. Unless you want something from the Mayor’s office, in which case, hello, buddy!
The other campaigns, especially Leland Yee and David Chiu turned their guns on Lee as soon as he entered, calling him a puppet and a liar in only slightly nicer terms. They failed; Ed survived. Ed is now holding steady at ~35% in the polls after a brief dip down to 30%, with about 40% undecided as of two weeks ago. It’d be shocking compared to the race before Ed entered, but this 4-5 serious candidate race may be over in a single round rather than using the rank choice voting system that was supposed to make this such an interesting cycle.”
Enjoy today’s “civic pop quiz” from The Bay Citizen‘s Editor in Chief Steve Fainaru:
“Dear Sarah,
With elections right around the corner, it’s time for a civic pop quiz (answers at the bottom of the email):
Q: Which corporations are getting millions in city tax breaks…and returning the favor with $100-a-plate fundraisers for the same politicians who pushed through those tax breaks?
Q: Which SF mayor unexpectedly rose to power thanks to behind-the-scenes machinations by Rose Pak, Willie Brown, and Gavin Newsom?
If you’re a loyal Bay Citizen reader, you’ll know the answers. That’s because The Bay Citizen was the only news source to reveal the real story behind these stories. We made the calls and pounded the pavement so that you could know the truth.
Become a Bay Citizen with your donation of $50 or more and show us that you care about sustaining hard-hitting, in-depth reporting that you just can’t find elsewhere. As a Bay Citizen member you’ll receive great benefits:
Invitations to members-only events like our big annual party and happy hours with our reporters;
Free admission to Bay Citizen speaker series; and
Access to Citizen Deals: exclusive discounts at local museums, retailers, and more
Steve Fainaru
