It’s election day! Who knew? In San Francisco, the only interesting thing on the ballot is Prop. D., the proposal to put giant Times Square-type advertising signs on Market Street in order to “enliven” it.

Are they kidding? Apparently not. Here are some arguments in favor and a Chronicle editorial against. And here is the whole list of issues and candidates running, including City Atty. Dennis Herrera (unopposed).

Go to the SF Dept of Elections for results tonight.

 
Flickr photo of Times Square by Scott Beale at Laughing Squid.

Saying his “young family” and his day job were bigger priorities, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom pulled out of the race for California governor today.

Newsom was once a Democratic Party rising star. Then:

• his 2004 gay marriage fiat handed right-wingers an issue to organize around, and some say it helped send George Bush to the White house for a second term.
• His marriage to TV news reporter Kimberly Guilfoyle fell apart at the beginning of 2005.
• In early 2007, he admitted an affair with his campaign manager’s wife, and a problem with alcohol.
• His “it’s gonna happen whether you like it or not” taunting was successfully used against gay marriage by Prop. 8 backers in 2008.

And then in April this year he announced he was running for governor. So we see how well that went.

Newsom’s second term as San Francisco mayor lasts through 2011.

The mayor, every member of the Board of Supervisors, and several other elected officials take a 2.4% pay cut with the just-signed budget for the city.

Police have arrested a suspect in the series of car fires that struck the city last week, a 62-year-old homeless woman. She might also be responsible for the porta-potty fires that broke out several months ago.

The Eddie Bauer business is now the property of a San Francisco firm called Golden Gate Capital Partners, though its corporate headquarters will continue to be in Bellevue, Washington.

In a 6-1 decision announced at 10:00 a.m. today, the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, a ballot initiative passed in November that outlawed same-sex marriage in the state. Here is the opinion (PDF file). Marriages performed before Nov. 4, 2008 are still valid, the court ruled.

• Day of Decision photo pool on Flickr.
• Salon’s Katharine Mieszkowski reports from Civic Center.
• 3:00 pm: The mid-day protests are now over; SFist has a list of tonight’s protest locations in SF.
• Live blog of arrests on Van Ness Ave.: SFAppeal
• Twitter hash tags being used are #rejectprop8 and #noprop8. Best tweet so far: “First Adam Lambert doesn’t win American Idol, now this?! Fuckin’ breeders..”
• SF Chronicle staff are twittering the scene on the street, publishing the stream on SFGate.
• The SF Chronicle posts the first substantial story on the ruling.
• The Day of Decision website has a list of over 100 demonstrations planned in cities across the nation, from Anchorage to Atlanta.

An anti-war march with at least a couple thousand diverse participants ventured up Market St this afternoon. The organizers were mostly focused on the sixth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, but the marchers expressed a wide variety of dissatisfaction with numerous foreign & domestic policy issues. The contingent was loud, but peaceful, if not festive at times, replete with marching band and numerous chants bandied about the slow moving crowd that stretched for a couple full blocks.

the ongoing War the US started in Iraq some six years ago was the main impetus for the demonstration.

Unlike recent splintered demonstrations in Oakland, a fairly large contingent of dozens of overtime collecting SFPD officers on foot and motorcycles seemed prepared to quell any possible property damage or disturbances from the bandana’d few who tend to ignite trash cans and engage in the more annoying and disruptive behaviors.

The march assembled near Justin Herman Plaza circa 11am and ended with a rally at Civic Center Plaza at about 1:30 , where a contingent of pro-Palestinian marchers were met with pro-Israeli occupation demonstrators stationed in front of City Hall.

Other marches took place concurrently in locations such as the Pentagon just outside of Washington DC, and in LA, while another protest is scheduled for tommorrow in Fresno.

Bringing up the rear, just behind the infamous Bay Area Women in Black, was this masked lone wolf demonstrator.

Thou Shall Not Kill My Hope

Missed in the general reaction to Tuesday’s news that the San Francisco Chronicle will have to shrink radically, be sold, or closed — as Denver’s Rocky Mountain News went out of business today — was this bit, which I noticed courtesy MediaBistro: The Chronicle is also planning to charge online readers for its SF Gate online presence, Newsosaur reported.

According to the report, “(The plan) would require the elimination of nearly half of the 1,500 employees of the newspaper to wipe out the operating deficit. To avoid cutting that deeply into the staff, the Chronicle plans to boost revenues by increasing subscription prices for the newspaper and to begin charging consumers for access to certain features and sections at its website.”

Some observers speculated that Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group was positioning itself to buy the Chronicle. The company also owns the San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune, and many other smaller dailies in the Bay Area — as well as the Denver Post.

Read more after the jump

Just returning from a month away from SF & America and it makes me appreciate it all the more.

- Our weather rocks. I love putting on a hoodie, layering, whatever we do here to manage the slight variations in cold.
- First day back I walked up to a cafe, met a friend, and sat down to a long Scrabble game over beer. It’s a pedestrian city! We enjoy our casual cafes and don’t have weird alcohol restrictions. It’s a small, but urban city! Yay.
- A big cup of coffee and a not-too-sweet cinnamon roll for under $5. Our food is so high quality and so well priced!
- Bought a honeydew melon and oranges, in mid winter, for a few dollars. It was perfect. The oranges are sweet and heavy, the melon was ripe and tasty.
- You can eat so many different ethnic foods, at so many places, for so little.
- Just to wax American, for my relatives at least I have a new appreciation for the opportunities we have here, for its class-less society, for the attempt at least not to judge people by where they came from, who they were, what class or occupation they had. The lack of history is refreshing, and freeing, basically. (In Sweden, you were locked into your father’s occupation up until the late 1800s.)
- For our political process that allows for different parties and interests to come in and out, without fundamentally changing the process, but representing different interests. (From Bush to Obama, may seem revolutionary to international friends, but as a seasoned American, is par for the course- Reagan to Clinton, i.e. but really- how many other countries’ processes can see that change, and support it?)
- For our honest attempts at understanding recent history, for the flourishing journalism and blogging, and for our interest in accountability. (In Russia, you could really have a debate over whether Stalin was a monster. Same with Mao in China, his culpability is debatable. As a small example here, but we’re ready to impeach Blagojevich. For some, without flourishing journalist estates, that may seem hasty.)

Update to the story below as of 1720h PST: The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that with 9800 ballots remaining, Measure B has passed the 66.67 percent mark.

The ballot initiative to fund a BART extension to San Jose may have squeaked by, KNTV was reporting this afternoon. Though initial balloting showed the measure falling short of the required two-thirds majority, mail-in ballots are turning the tide.

With 17,000 of 42,000 mail-in ballots still to be counted, the vote to fund the 22-mile BART extension with a 1/8-cent Santa Clara County sales tax was 66.61 percent yes; the measure, like any tax increase in California since the 1978 passage of Proposition 13, requires at least a 66.67 percent yes vote.

If the Bart-to-San Jose tax passes, it would complete a surprising trifecta of voter support for mass transit projects at a time when local and state budgets are tight. Earlier this month, voters in Marin and Sonoma Counties passed a rail initiative, and statewide Proposition 1A also passed, kicking off the state’s bullet train project.

The New York Times today began a Road To November series of mood-testing with voters across the country, beginning their survey in San Francisco, where “It’s frustrating to live in a city where everyone assumes that because you share airspace you also share political views,” according to the quantifiably named Joel Muchmore.

Among the slightly arresting details of life in the city discovered by the Times’ reporter are the “Ferry Terminal Market” — she means the Ferry Building Marketplace — and “last Sunday’s ‘leather/fetish’ street fair,” that is, the Folsom Street Fair. She cites the city’s universal health care initiative and the ban on plastic bags, though she fails to point out the ban applies only to markets and pharmacies.

But one bit of controversial public policy she missed completely is the ban on sales of tobacco products at pharmacies, which went into effect today. I just visited a Walgreens, and the cigarette display case was as bare as a Trick-or-Treater’s bag on Election Day.

This Saturday is Nancy Pelosi’s annual free workshop for future citizens to be delivered at a location on the edge of the Civic Center neighborhood… (I wonder if any of the notorious immigrant crack dealers with “Amnesty” who work around the corner near Hyde & Golden Gate will drop by…)
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