Concert and sporting event ticket prices have exploded since the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, but a new California bill could break up their monopoly. And the 49ers and Warriors are completely against this bill, because they benefit handsomely from that monopoly. It’s the hell of going to a major concert event these days that the ticket prices are outrageously expensive, and then Ticketmaster just melts down anyway when you bite the bullet and try to buy tickets. And as has been many times noted, the Ticketmaster add-on fees are often as expensive as the tickets themselves. idk how we g ..read more

Somewhat predictably, the conservative-majority Supreme Court signaled during oral arguments Monday that it will rule in favor of the Oregon town whose law penalizing public camping was struck down by the Ninth Circuit. In what was described by the New York Times as "a lengthy and, at times, fiery argument that lasted over two and a half hours," the nine justices of the Supreme Court sounded split along ideological lines in the case of Grants Pass v. Johnson. The case, which has been making its way through lower courts for the last couple of years, has been the latest battleground in the figh ..read more

We will not be barraged again with sports gambling campaign ads for the November election, as two ballot measures to legalize sports betting in California have been shelved. But we will still be barraged with ads for gambling apps that Californians cannot use.   You know all those gambling app ads that are suddenly ubiquitous on TV sports broadcasts, featuring celebrity pitchmen like Jamie Foxx, JB Smoove as Caesar, or Patton Oswalt pretending he’s in Ancient Rome? The funny thing is that no matter how many of these infuriating gambling ads you see on California television, you cannot us ..read more

Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie is walloping the competition in the mayoral money race, with about four times as much cash raised as Mayor Breed, most of it coming from tech founders, venture capitalists, and his mom. There are two very wealthy men running for mayor of San Francisco this November in Levi Strauss heir and nonprofit founder Daniel Lurie, and former supervisor and venture capitalist Mark Farrell. So we would expect insane and probably unprecedented amounts of money to be pouring into this race. Farrell’s recent entry means he has not faced any public disclosure deadlines for his ..read more

Another of Mayor London Breed's goals in her upcoming trip to China, besides getting a panda for the San Francisco Zoo, is apparently to chat up a university there about opening a satellite campus in SF's struggling downtown. Breed already announced with some fanfare in February that she is trying to lure multiple historically Black colleges to take up some real estate downtown, dubbing the initiative Black 2 San Francisco. The schools the city is talking to in this effort are Charles R. Drew University, Howard University, Morehouse College, Morgan State University, Morris Brown College, Tusk ..read more

As we knew from his first announcements last week about his campaign for mayor, Supervisor Aaron Peskin leaning into the concept of "recovery" — both as it pertains to the city of San Francisco's return to prosperity and his own struggles with alcohol. That's the theme from the outset of Peskin's first campaign video advertisement, posted to X on Wednesday afternoon. It's two minutes long — more than will air as a TV spot, giving him some room to lay out how he differs from the other, more moderate candidates, and to defend against attacks that he has stymied housing development in the city ..read more

After his original plan to forgive $400 billion in student loan debt was shot down by the Supreme Court, President Biden is embarking on a renewed effort that would wipe out substantial amounts of student debt for 23 million Americans, and cancel that debt outright for some. You may recall that last year, President Joe Biden rolled out an executive order to cancel $400 billion in student loan debt, but the Supreme Court shot it down. The Biden administration went back to the drawing board and did find legal methods to cancel smaller amounts of that debt. But now with the 81-year-old Biden not ..read more

SF Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who we've known is running for mayor for over a month now, is finally ready to make his official announcement, but first he leaked it to several news outlets again. On Wednesday night, both local news stations KGO and KPIX reported that Supervisor Aaron Peskin is definitely joining the mayor's race, with the latter station saying that Peskin confirmed this to them directly. Peskin reportedly told KPIX that he plans to run a "positive" campaign, and that the official campaign launch will be Saturday at Portsmouth Square at 11 am. The location, in ..read more

Former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, now a professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, joined with a group of Bay Area lawyers in an amicus brief filed Tuesday in the Oregon case about penalizing homeless camping that the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on later this month. The case, as reported here earlier, is Johnson v. City of Grants Pass, and was brought by two unhoused plaintiffs against the small Oregon town of Grants Pass. It contents that the city's ordinances against public camping within city limits, or the use of blankets or cardboard to protects oneself from th ..read more

A Concord man who left threatening messages on the office voicemails of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has pleaded guilty and received a sentence of 11 months in federal prison. Over the course of the last very divisive decade, House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi has become very familiar with ugly rhetoric and death threats from right-wing loons and MAGA fanatics across the country. 44-year-old David Allen Carrier of Concord, one of those loons, pleaded guilty in December to two counts of making threats against a federal official, in connec ..read more