Drive-by Reporting

Last Thursday, San Francisco became hometown to the world's most powerful woman. Party on dudes, er, babes, er, ladies, um, anyway: Party oooon!

As if.

We'll come to hate this, trust me, just as liberal San Francisco came to loathe hosting U.S. history's most politically powerful African-American man, former California Assembly Speaker and S.F. Mayor Willie Brown.

This city will tire of Nancy Pelosi's power and fame just as swiftly, not because of Madam Speaker herself but for what she'll set in motion.

International reporters for television, newspapers, and the Internet will book more and more flights to San Francisco. They'll troll Fisherman's Wharf to interview salty local types about our famous hometown girl. After they're done, some will venture for coffee to North Beach. The ones staying in Financial District hotels will go jogging along Market Street. Fare-padding cabbies will drive them through SOMA, Hunters Point, the Mission, along Castro Street, and into the Sunset. And as a result, they'll get the idea to write follow-up features about San Francisco. They'll start with notebooks scribbled with a checklist of San Francisco archetypes to confirm. And if they spend more than an hour at the task, they'll phone to their home bureau with a headline-generating truth: Among world-famous cities, San Francisco is the most twee.

In the interest of international peace and understanding, and news you can use, SF Weekly saves the coming foreign correspondent hordes some trouble, answering their questions ourselves.

San Francisco? You guys are the ones with the sleek go-getting mayor, right?

Gavin Newsom's chief press flack Peter Ragone is the most powerful member of a mayoral executive staff that has a collective influence far outweighing that of the boss. The resulting four years of rule by staged events and photo ops created a national image of Newsom as a can-do liberal in the Pelosi mold, thus providing a natural setup for Bild and La Repubblica profiles positing Newsom as San Francisco's next hometown giant.

Unfortunately for Ragone, parachuting foreign correspondents do most of their research during conversations with cabbies going to and from the airport. And taxi regulation is the one civic issue our vapid mayor has taken a longtime personal interest in, and thus botched up. The foreign press' initial taxi-borne interviews will produce a lot of meaty bad press, sadly.

This summer Newsom dismissed members of his Taxi Commission as punishment for firing the mayor's top taxi-regulation bureaucrat. The bureaucrat, a longtime Newsom aide, had recently hired as her deputy a former roommate who, while previously working as a cabbie, took a woman and her kids to the movies, then drove back to her empty home and robbed it. So, Newsom found himself going on the record defending this reputed creepy stalker/burglar as a top taxi regulator.

A few months later, taxi regulation became a worse embarrassment. As if to rub the mayor's face in his own powerlessness before the mostly anti-Newsom Board of Supervisors, the board voted to increase the base fare for a taxi ride from $1.85 to $3.10, despite opposition from Newsom, from riders, and from cab drivers themselves. This made the average S.F. cab ride one of the costliest in America and certain to tax the expense accounts of visiting correspondents. It's an embarrassment for Newsom, a restaurateur whose businesses depend on taxis to deliver customers, and whose political career has been bankrolled by other taxi-dependent restaurateurs.

I can't wait: global headlines sporting the words "San Francisco," "emperor," and "no clothes."

San Francisco: Isn't that the groovy West Coast drug city?

A few months from now, when visiting Dutch reporters from publications such as De Groene Amsterdammer begin poking around for a post-deadline dope score, our status as a stoners' haven may have backfired.

Since the city began in late 2005 a scheme of light regulation of medical marijuana stores (read: enhanced legitimization of drug dealing), around 40 pot storefronts have opened around the city. These shops are essentially middlemen for the growing Northern California wholesale/retail pot industry. At the supply end, indoor-growing facilities are sprouting up around the region in gutted houses, apartments, and warehouses. At the retail end, S.F.-storefront pot is carted regionwide to be sold on the street.

On the back end, meanwhile, DEA arrest reports from around Northern California during the past few months seem to indicate the wholesale market has moved beyond the era of hip supplier/activist Dennis Peron. Officers have been stopping pot carriers with automatic weapons in their cars, and this summer Sacramento-area police and DEA agents busted an indoor growing operation there run by an S.F.-area Chinese gang.

San Francisco cops didn't make that bust, or busts of any other crimes stemming from drug dealing, because officers receive instructions to treat the pot industry gingerly. The enforcement-free zone means they lack avenues to go after the violence and other crime drawn to our growing, multimillion-dollar drug-commerce-Mecca. Next, expect extortion rackets, money laundering, etc.

U.C. Hastings School of Law Dean Nell Jessup has made a point of living in the drug- and crime-infested Tenderloin neighborhood that's home to her school. This commitment has been difficult to fulfill, she said, as the area is home to increasing drug dealing and violence. When I spoke with her in December, just before she met with District Attorney Kamala Harris to discuss the drug problem, she said the neighborhood seemed more dangerous than it was when Jessup lived there decades ago.