Thursday, February 20, 2020

Left Coast Affairs Correspondent: "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" at Your Local SF Bookstore

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The Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Left Coast Affairs and Other Inexplicable Phenomena’s attention was grabbed by a bookshop storefront next to his favorite San Francisco burger joint. Yes, that's real beef—the SF Board of Supervisors hasn’t mandated 100% locally sustainable tofu patties... yet.

Out front of Green Apple Books near Golden Gate Park was the typical genus of publications marketed to the enlightened and totally sane San Francisco inmates, including this gem on the outdoor shelves:

"The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President." (click photos to enlarge)




Looking at some of the chapter names it seems like the writers might have a real shot at winning either a Nobel Peace Prize or an even more credible appearance on The View with Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, and Greta Thunberg.

This book also makes a strong case that TDS has reached permanent brain damage proportions among many in the academic community. For example, in a 2017 Salon interview the book’s editor Bandy X. Lee, MD warned Americans about the existential threat to humanity posed by a President Donald Trump by anticipating “our survival as a species may be at stake.”

She also recently diagnosed attorney Alan Dershowitz via television shows as suffering from “shared psychosis… …contagion of symptoms, usually delusions of persecution“ (a description that might just better fit academics who fret that “our survival as a species may be at stake?”) for defending Trump during impeachment proceedings, despite never having met or interviewed him.

Lee also included Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan in her “shared psychosis” telecommuter diagnosis, all of it incidentally an ethical violation of the American Psychological Association's "Goldwater Rule" against diagnosing a patient she hasn't examined. All 27 contributors to her book are guilty of violating the Goldwater Rule as well.

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2020/01/27/dershowitz-requests-yale-to-investigate-psychiatrist/

Other contributors include left-wing sage emeritus Noam Chomsky who famously cheered on the Cambodian Khmer Rouge’s 1975 overthrow of the U.S-backed Lon Nol regime as a democratic people’s movement. Shortly afterwards Chomsky cast aside reports of mass killings as right-wing propaganda, and when later faced with the undeniable deaths of 25% of the Cambodian population at the hands of the Khmer Rouge he about-faced and blamed the U.S. military’s B-52 bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail for enabling the people’s movement to succeed in the first place.

More recently Chomsky flew to Caracas to praise Hugo Chavez and tell him personally before a live broadcast how “I can see how a better world is being created and can speak to the person who’s inspired it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHTe2Pn7ACg#t=00m45s

A full list of Chomsky gaffes is too long to mention here, but we should sit up and take notice anyway—because he’s applying the great sum of his political wisdom to save us now from the greater threat of Donald Trump. After all Chomsky praised Hugo Chavez and the Khmer Rouge but now he warns us Trump is the real catastrophe so think how bad we must really have it.

Not seen in the photos is “Part 5: Humanity's Perpetuation and Survival” with essays warning of everything from the danger of a Trump-launched nuclear war to environmental Armageddon.

But remember, it’s Trump who has the mental issues, not these academic health experts who are clearly of sound mind. And local San Franciscans who fill their shelves with these books are the self-professed enlightened and educated class who exemplify sanity as well.

ps. Barnes and Noble’s website offers praise for “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” from mentally balanced reviewers such as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, and “[I] fear for America” left-wing journalist Bill Moyers who still defends Dan Rather in the forged National Guard documents 2004 CBS scandal but forewarns us that American democracy under Trump will die “from too many lies.”

Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada and the former head of the Psychiatry Department at the University of California San Francisco round out the fair-minded reviewers.

Friday, February 14, 2020

Left Coast Affairs Correspondent: San Francisco Voters to Decide Prop D, a Per-Foot Tax on Vacant Retail Property

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3 MIN READ - CO welcomes the embarrassment of riches which is the Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Left Coast Affairs and Other Inexplicable Phenomena—with an update on the latest ballot measure insanity from San Francisco.



Enlightened and progressive San Franciscans head to the polls March 3rd to vote for 2020 primaries candidates, fill district seats on the city’s Board of Supervisors, and consider several new ballot measures.


Among the measures is Proposition D, the “Vacancy Tax” that punishes storefront property for the sin of being empty—at a rate of $250 per sidewalk-facing foot per year in the first year of vacancy, $500 per foot the next year, up to a maximum of $1,000 per foot after three years.

That’s right, a property owner whose retail storefront measures a modest 50 feet in width can be subjected to a $50,000 per year tax just for not having a tenant.

The irony of this measure is particularly cruel considering it’s San Francisco government policies that empty out retail space in the first place, chasing away small shop owners via strangling taxes and regulations.

Consider just a few of the cost inflators on doing business in the City by the Bay:

-Regulation and permit overdose. It takes up to 24 different government permit application approvals, licenses, and multiple training classes to secure permission to open one restaurant in San Francisco, at an average cost of $750,000.

-San Francisco’s voter-approved “Health Mandate” tax, adding 4% to the cost of a restaurant diner’s bill (that’s on top of the 8.5% sales tax for a total of 12.5%—all before tipping).

-2018’s voter-approved Proposition C, a 0.5% gross receipts “homelessness tax” on San Francisco large businesses. That’s 0.5% of a firm’s top-line revenues—not profits—regardless of whether the company makes money or not.

Two weeks after Prop C passed pharmaceutical distributor McKesson announced it was moving its headquarters from San Francisco to Irving, Texas, and discount broker Charles Schwab will leave for its new Westlake, Texas campus.

-2019’s 143% increase in the “Jobs-Housing Linkage business fee” which now stands at $700,000 per 10,000 square feet of office space development.

-San Francisco’s voter-approved minimum wage of $15/hour which took effect in 2018, only to be raised to $15.59/hour in 2019 (and will rise to over $16 later this year and by several percentage points every year after that).

-San Francisco’s heavily unionized workforce which benefits from California’s refusal to adopt “right to work” laws and effectively allows the imposition of compulsory “closed shops” on businesses.

-And in one of the saddest paradoxes of all, 2018’s voter-approved 3.5% tax on “commercial rents” to fund child care. Yes, a tax on the very leases the city government is now accusing landlords of insufficiently providing.

And that was just a sample.

So San Francisco voters drive small businesses to ruin by drowning them in taxes and regulations, only to castigate landlords for not filling the retail space.

As usual, Prop D supporters, local politicians, and city left-wing activists argue that it’s the “greed” of commercial landlords who refuse to rent space at moneylosing prices that causes ugly empty storefronts. Therefore the heartless capitalists must be taxed into submission until they agree to lease at lower rates that more of San Francisco’s crippled businesses can afford.

But mirroring the argument that “greed” drives higher prices of everything in California, the fallacy of this pseudo-logic is that San Francisco is a city full of proud progressives who claim to have forgone caring about greed, exploitation, and profit long ago. Yet red state cities like Dallas, Houston, Nashville, Charlotte, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, and San Antonio are overrun by evil, money-lusting, conservative businessmen donning Lord Palpatine robes and MAGA hats while dreaming from their top floor corner offices of pushing grandma off the cliff to make an extra buck.

And strangely San Francisco’s epidemic of empty retail storefronts doesn’t afflict moneygrubbing middle America.

And in the greatest callous irony of all, Prop D’s authors claim the tax proceeds will be used to subsidize and assist San Francisco small businesses—surely many of the same that they drove into the ground with crushing taxes and regulations in the first place.

Imagine that, killing off businessmen by taking their dollars with one hand, then offering to help by giving them a little of the extorted money back with the other.

Ronald Reagan foresaw the Poop City’s circular reasoning and that of Prop D’s supporters nearly forty years ago when he observed that:

“Government’s view of the economy can be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

Proposition D requires a two-thirds majority to become law.

More details at Reason (below)

https://reason.com/2019/12/10/san-francisco-ballot-measure-would-tax-empty-storefronts-in-attempt-to-boost-retail-sector/

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

San Francisco's "Poop Patrol" Chief Arrested by FBI on Bribery, Corruption Charges as Human Feces Complaints and Homeless Budget Both Soar to New Heights

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1 MIN READ - The Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Economic Affairs and Other Egghead Stuff takes a breather from his healthcare series… to hold his breath scrutinizing something altogether unhealthy.




As a longtime resident of San Francisco, the COCEA has long been skeptical of endless new taxes that each time promise to finally “fix” the liberal mecca's perpetual homeless and poop/syringe problem.

Yet in 2018 the city’s voters passed Proposition C, levying a 0.5% gross receipts tax on San Francisco businesses to raise hundreds of millions more dollars to spend on the homeless problem atop the previous baseline hundreds of millions already being spent. The then-forecast new $750 million budget would surpass a mindboggling $100,000 in city money spent per homeless individual.

Well it's been over a year and surprise! The evidence shows the yet-again inflated budget hasn’t achieved anything other than fund graft and fraud that has funneled taxpayer dollars into the pockets of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats (read about FBI bust below).

And what about the human waste? San Francisco's “Poop Patrol” city employees earn $185,000 in total annual compensation while the feces has piled even higher. But wait, we hear that another huge, progressive tax hike will this time truly lick the problem (not literally, we hope).

And how about a little insight into the progressive mindset on this issue? During the 2018 elections the COCEA's Facebook feed was flooded with Prop C ads. In response to comments that "There's no accountability, the money will be wasted just like all the previous budgets," San Francisco progressives consistently replied (paraphrasing) "I don't give a damn if it works. Corporations got their Trump tax cut. We're taking back what's ours."

Read the details here:


https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/01/31/san-franciscos-mr-clean-arrested-by-fbi-for-alleged-porta-potty-scandal-as-human-waste-piles-up/