tredmond@sfbg.com

Occupy Oakland has been very good at exposing one local problem — police brutality. The first raids, and the tear gas and rubber bullets that flew afterward — showed the world how poorly trained the Oakland cops are and how unprepared they were for a largely peaceful demonstration.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

I really can't get that upset about the broken bank windows in Oakland. This is minor stuff, a tiny part of what has been largely a peaceful Occupy movement. The windows have been replaced, the banks and their insurance companies have paid for it, the Occupy people helped clean up ... whatever.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

One cool October day in 1985, when I was a young reporter at the Guardian, a friend who was visiting from New York where she was working with Gay Men's Health Crisis, called me with an urgent message:Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

I say it over and over again, because some people clearly aren't paying attention:

Corruption matters.

When the mayor of San Francisco surrounds himself with people who don't show any respect for campaign finance or ethics regulations, who think it's fine to skirt (and possibly break) election laws, it undermines faith in local government.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

I feel like was just getting over the 40th anniversary party, and now here comes 45. Guardian anniversaries are like birthday parties; they keep creeping up on you. Except that, in this case, getting older isn't something to worry about. It's a sign of strength that a weekly paper founded with a little money scraped together by two Midwesterners in 1966 has survived, grown, and become a standard-bearer for the alternative press in America.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

It's nice to see that the days when you could get away with calling protesters commies are back. CNBC says that the Occupy Wall Street activists are "anarchists" who are "aligned with Lenin." Actually, none of the anarchists I know are remotely Leninist. The communists of old were all for the creation of a powerful state. Lenin read Bakunin in his early years, but later declared that anarchists were "bourgeois revolutionaries."Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

Every mayoral candidate who wants the progressive vote showed up for the Guardian forum Sept. 21. Everyone except Mayor Ed Lee.

Yeah, the mayor's a busy guy. But state senators and city attorneys and public defenders and city assessors and supervisors are busy, too, and those people managed to get to the LGBT Center, where more than 100 people were packed into the fourth floor room.

Jeff Adachi made a point of talking about "showing up" — and everyone knew exactly what he was saying. Where was Ed?Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

So the people who advise President Obama have finally figured out that he was on the road to becoming a one-term president — and the United States was on the road to ruin under President Perry. Whatever combination of self-preservation and fear was at work, it worked, at least for the moment.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

If you want to put more money in the pockets of working people, cutting the federal payroll tax — which, for many, is a larger tax burden than the income tax — makes perfect sense.

If you want to create jobs, cutting the payroll tax for businesses is a risky proposition.

Most new jobs in the United States are created by small businesses — and the payroll tax, while significant, isn't a dramatic hindrance to job growth.Read more »

tredmond@sfbg.com

I've been wondering for months now how all of the rich people who come into San Francisco for the America's Cup are going to get around. The event plans call for the Embarcadero to be closed during the festivities, which means no cars. The F-line is nice, but slow — and even with new trains, has limited capacity. And I don't expect to see a lot of the millionaire yachting types riding the bus with us commoners.Read more »