This morning, Democrats in Congress are hosting a Medicare for All shadow hearing — a walk-through of what it will look like in the Capitol when we finally have the votes to pass guaranteed health care.
The hearing features expert witnesses, including NNU President Jamie Brown, RN, who will explain how our health care system is broken and how Medicare for All will fix it.
While this is a big step in our effort to pass guaranteed health care, a shadow hearing won’t change the law. For that, we need more Members of Congress to support Medicare for All. That’s where you come in.
Our elected leaders need to know their constituents demand guaranteed health care — which is why we’re reaching out to them directly.
We’ll connect you directly to your members’ offices and give you a script. All you need to do is pick up the phone.
Our call tool will let you know if your members of Congress are or aren’t Medicare for All co-sponsors. If your members are not co-sponsors, urge them to support guaranteed health care by signing on as a co-sponsor of the legislation. If they are already co-sponsors, thank them for their support and ask them to make passing single-payer health care a top priority.
A child helps load food boxes at a food bank in Garden Grove, California on January 19, 2026.
(Photo by Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)
“The damage from the SNAP cuts could worsen quickly as some states are considering ending their SNAP programs entirely as soon as October 2027,” warned one expert.
At least 1.5 million children have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits since US President Donald Trump signed the Republican budget package into law last summer, enacting the largest cuts to federal food aid in the nation’s history.
The new estimate of food aid loss among children comes from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), which said Tuesday that SNAP participation was down by over 4.5 million people overall between July 2025 and April 2026. Refuting the Trump administration’s narrative, the liberal think tank emphasized that the unemployment rate nationwide has been roughly flat since last July, meaning it is “very unlikely that reduced need is driving the decline in SNAP participation.”
Arizona has seen the most staggering decline in SNAP participation. It has fallen 48% overall and 49% among children in the state since enactment of the Trump-GOP budget law, which instituted new work-reporting requirements for some recipients and punishments for states with elevated payment error rates. Under Republican law, states will for the first time have to pay a portion of SNAP benefit costs, which previously were fully covered by the federal government.
“Grotesque and indefensible,” policy analyst Michael Linden wrote in response to the new data, noting that the Republican budget law slashed taxes for wealthy households while decimating SNAP.
Earlier this week, The New York Times published a report detailing the horror show residents have experienced as they’ve attempted to reenroll in SNAP after improperly losing benefits due to bureaucratic chaos stemming from the GOP law.
Sharon Parrott, CBPP’s president, said Tuesday that the consequences of the massive SNAP cuts—totaling around $200 billion over the next decade—have been “stark: an ill grandmother raising teens can’t get her SNAP reinstated despite being eligible, and parents are skipping meals to save food for their children. Families who have had their food assistance taken away are turning to overburdened food banks, which cannot fill the gap.”
“ House Republicans are looking past this emergency in their budget legislation—while using it to help farmers struggling with high costs due to Trump’s tariffs and oil prices driven up by the war in Iran,” said Parrott, referring to the GOP’s new reconciliation package.
“The damage from the SNAP cuts could worsen quickly as some states are consideringending their SNAP programs entirely as soon as October 2027, when the cost shift takes effect. States unable or unwilling to pay the costs they incur will have no choice but to end the program,” Parrott warned. “People across the US consistently say they want Washington to focus on affordability, especially the cost of food. Mitigating last year’s cuts to SNAP and staunching the number of families and children losing SNAP would be a good place to start.”
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
US Senate candidate Troy Jackson speaks to a crowd on July 19, 2026 in York County, Maine.
(Photo by @TroyJackson207/X)
“For 30 years, Susan Collins has told us that she’s concerned, she’s told us that she’s troubled, and she’s told us that she’s disappointed, but when the stakes are the absolute highest, too often, she stood with Donald Trump.”
With three days to go until Maine’s statewide convention, where delegates will officially nominate the Democratic US Senate candidate who will face Republican Sen. Susan Collins, presumptive nominee Troy Jackson is hitting the ground running—denouncing Collins’ repeated claims of “concern” over the MAGA agenda she’s enabled as he points to recent polling in his favor.
“Working Mainers can’t afford six more years of ‘concern,’” Jackson said on social media Tuesday evening after the University of New Hampshire released polling from July 15-20 that showed 49% of respondents backing the former state Senate president and logger, compared with 46% who supported the five-term senator.
The poll was released days after Jackson swept last weekend’s 16 county-level nominating meetings, where voters selected the delegates who will go to the convention on Saturday. Jackson won 478 out of 500 delegates who were voted on last weekend; 100 state committee members will also take part in the convention, and how they intend to vote is unknown, but Jackson has emerged as the clear front-runner after former candidate Graham Platner dropped out of the race due to sexual assault allegations, which he denied.
Following the county meetings, Jackson’s top opponents, including Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, epidemiologist Nirav Shah, and activist Jordan Wood, dropped out of the race and endorsed him.
Jackson, who ran for governor earlier this year, has also received endorsements from top labor unions in Maine and current and former state lawmakers, while garnering $1 million from more than 25,000 donors since he first expressed interest in succeeding Platner as the Democratic candidate just over two weeks ago.
“Susan Collins has billionaires. We have a movement,” said Jackson on Wednesday.
He also posted a video of a recent speech he gave in York County, emphasizing his desire to include all working people in his push to unseat Collins.
“There is a place for you in this movement, because we’re not going to defeat Susan Collins by making this movement smaller,” said Jackson. “I know what happens when working people decide that they’ve had enough. When we do, we stand up, we lock arms, we fight back, and then we win.”
I know what happens when working people decide that they've had enough. Together, we'll make sure Susan Collins and the Republicans find out soon. pic.twitter.com/6p5S5EHtdm
Jackson also sought on Wednesday to tie Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to President Donald Trump. He has previously pointed to Collins’ vote in favor of funding US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, particularly in light of an ICE agent’s killing of Biddeford, Maine resident Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, and on Wednesday posted a photo of Collins with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
The senator presided over a committee hearing Tuesday regarding the cost of Trump’s $37.5 billion war on Iran, and signaled a willingness to provide $33 billion more.
“For 30 years, Susan Collins has told us that she’s concerned, she’s told us that she’s troubled, and she’s told us that she’s disappointed, but when the stakes are the absolute highest, too often, she stood with Donald Trump,” said Jackson at a recent rally. “We need courage, we need a fighter, and we need someone who remembers exactly who sent them to Washington.”
Since announcing his candidacy, Jackson has also spoken out in favor of Medicare for All—supported by 78% of Democrats, 71% of Independents, and nearly half of Republicans in a Data for Progress poll last year—and on Tuesday Collins attacked him as “firmly aligned with the democratic socialists.”
Candidates who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America and who back universal social programs have won recent elections in New York, Colorado, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
Jackson told NBC News Tuesday: “I see myself as a Mainer and a working-class person. You know, we have socialism in the state with public schools, with plowing the roads… I don’t see myself as anything but a guy that wants to make good change for people I care about.”
On social media, he turned Collins’ frequent refrain back around on her.
Reilly, who died over weekend at 79, was a political consultant, real estate baron, media tycoon and a legendarily difficult boss. But he may have been most difficult on himself.
Clint Reilly, 1947-2026. He helped to elect a bevy of Bay Area politicians, including Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. Illustration by Neil Ballard
Clinton Thomas Reilly was, in many ways, a quintessential San Franciscan.
He was a wholly self-made man who ascended from poverty and despair to the heights of city society, but never lost the trappings of the milkman’s son he was.
He put heaps of his own money into political races and charitable causes and raised even more. Many a local and national politician beat a path to the basement of Reilly’s restaurant, Credo, to swap stories with the man himself.
No longer: Reilly, the self-made mega-millionaire, groundbreaking political consultant, real estate baron, art collector, philanthropist and media tycoon, died over the weekend at age 79, of what sources describe as chronic lung disease.
His story reads more like something out of San Francisco’s rough-hewn past than its anodyne present.
Born in Oakland and raised in San Leandro, Reilly was the oldest of 10 children; his father was a milkman and his mother sold hot dogs at the ballpark. His beloved sister Jill died in adolescence and, barely a teenager, Reilly left home to join the seminary and study for the priesthood.
He instead dropped out as a young man and slept in church rectories for years as he worked on programs for the poor. He volunteered for the United Farm Workers and traveled to Florida’s Dade County to combat bigoted anti-LGBTQ politicians as a straight ally when that was a truly dangerous thing to do.
He operated a junk shop and ran political campaigns on the side. He became the state’s foremost political consultant, working to elect Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer and many others — and parlayed his financial success into a real-estate empire.
He ran for San Francisco mayor. He lost. He sued the Hearsts. He didn’t lose. He bought the former Hearst flagship, the San Francisco Examiner. He became, as friends and protégés echoed, consequential.
Prior to events at the sumptuous Julia Morgan Ballroom, on the 15th floor of the Merchants Exchange Building, Reilly would drop in, unannounced, in a suit and sneakers and scare the bejesus out of the waitstaff with his mere presence. He skulked around like he owned the place.
He did.
Exterior shot of the San Francisco City Hall entrance on April 14, 2026. Photo by Zoe Malen
Reilly got his start in politics in his mid-20s, managing Dick Hongisto’s campaign for sheriff in 1971. He did this as something of a side gig while running a junk shop, where, in a truly 1970s detail, Reilly repurposed old milk cans into kitschy decor, and bought and sold used school desks.
When Supervisor Quentin Kopp recruited Reilly to run his 1979 mayoral campaign against incumbent Dianne Feinstein, he did so at the insistence that Reilly get out of the used-milk-can business.
“I hired him on the condition that he devote all his time to my campaign,” says Kopp, 97. “Which he agreed.”
Reilly was busted for drunk driving while running Kopp’s campaign. Despite calls to fire Reilly, Kopp stuck with him. Reilly, by his own account, quit drinking in 1981 — and, adds Kopp, “once he stopped, you never had to worry about his advice.”
Kopp, of course, lost to Feinstein, but it was closer than it could have been. For Reilly, the campaign punched his political ticket. And Feinstein definitely noticed: Four years later, in 1983, she hired Reilly to run her defense against a recall attempt.
Reilly overperformed here: While Feinstein was a relatively popular mayor, a full 81 percent of city voters inveighed against the recall. The recall ended up making her stronger, and the same went for Reilly.
He became a wealthy consultant, then a fabulously wealthy businessman and philanthropist and his consulting protégés are seeded throughout the political landscape; it harks to the Bill Walsh NFL Coaching Tree.
“I answered a help-wanted ad in the Chronicle in 1982. Clint hired me,” says Eric Jaye, one of the city’s most veteran political consultants. “There were three of us in that flat on Bush Street. When I left six or seven years later, there were 75 people working there. It was one of the largest political consulting firms in America.”
Reilly ran bigger and bigger races and made more and more money. He raised eyebrows by courting incumbent Republican governor Pete Wilson and seeking to run his 1994 campaign before signing onto the campaign of Wilson’s opponent, Kathleen Brown.
Reilly earned millions of dollars during the “insurance wars,” running ultimately losing campaigns on behalf of auto insurance companies in an electoral death match vs. trial lawyers.
The fortune he walked away with seeded his foray into real estate. Employing the same skills he earlier demonstrated in buying and selling milk cans, Reilly gradually amassed a high-end real-estate portfolio.
While Reilly left consulting in the 1990s, he was never far from politics. In 1999, he decided that, rather than run candidates for election, he’d do it himself.
He challenged incumbent mayor Willie Brown, whom he condemned as the acme of corruption and cronyism. Despite spending a huge outlay of his personal fortune, Reilly received only 12.5 percent of the vote, and was personally tarnished by allegations of abysmal behavior during his drinking days.
Reilly, always the master campaigner, had no answer here.
At Point Cavallo. Photo by Thomas Hunter II.
Reilly was a complicated man. He did not amass his great wealth and career success with anything resembling grace.
He was a notably aggressive, political hard-charger in an era marked by them. He was a legendarily difficult boss. Even former employees with some fond recollections of Reilly say they wake up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, after nightmares that they were still working under him.
The litany of alleged Reilly workplace misbehaviors former employees recounted to newspaper reporters resemble outtakes from the Kevin Spacey character in “Swimming with Sharks.” Reilly held his employees to high standards — often unfair and impossibly high standards. He did the same for himself.
“He worked people very hard and he, himself, would be working until 2, 3, 4 in the morning,” said political consultant Jim Stearns, who worked with Reilly and ran his 1999 San Francisco mayoral campaign.
“It was quite a common occurrence to schedule a meeting for 5 p.m., be delayed until 10 p.m., finally sit down at 11 p.m. and then the meeting would go on for three or four hours. That was his style.”
Reilly acknowledged his temper was a problem, and expressed remorse for it in print. “There’s no excuse for” the anger so many colleagues recount, he told the Los Angeles Timesin 1994. “I feel badly about it.”
But anger, in Reilly’s profession, was something he couldn’t afford to do without. Candidates, he continued in the Times, “are not hiring me because they want me to get along with everybody. They’re hiring me because they want to win. The campaign is a war, you know?”
And Reilly won plenty of his wars.
“He was beyond innovative. He was a pioneer,” says consultant Ace Smith, the go-to man for Gov. Gavin Newsom and Vice President Kamala Harris, who first met Reilly in 1979.
“All these fancy national consultants used to meet with him and they were stunned about the way he was doing polling. Their idea of targeting was getting crude demographics from ZIP codes. Clint literally introduced the entire industry to what has become targeting and micro-targeting. He was the pioneer of that, full-stop.”
To do this, Smith continued, Reilly “bought and owned one of the first VAX computers,” a closet-sized, 1970s mainframe. He amassed voter databases and rendered them searchable and sortable.
With this sort of information — parsing constituencies on a granular level down to the “left-handed Lithuanians” — Reilly’s campaigns could communicate with voters far more efficiently.
“You could be five or 10 times more efficient,” Smith continued. “If you use your budget like that, you can talk to the right voters five or 10 times when, previously, probably two times would be the best case.”
This was, to adopt Joe Biden’s later phrasing, a big fucking deal. “A lot of people took Clint’s ideas,” says Smith, “and claimed them as their own.”
Voting sign outside of a Mission District polling station on June 2, 2026. Photo by Zoe Malen.
Two years after losing the 1999 mayoral race, Reilly sought to rehabilitate his image.
He provided unfettered access to the SF Weekly for an in-depth profile. The resultant article was an exceedingly deep dive but, insofar as people remember it, they recall Reilly’s own mother, Bess, telling the SF Weekly of her eldest child: “People do not really like him. He’s not lovable.”
Oof. If Reilly hoped to once more take a crack at elected office, this was a devastating setback. In context, Bess Reilly’s statement made more sense: “Clint can’t tolerate petty people. He’s not into small talk. He’s not beholding. He pushes people; you know you have to.”
But that quote provided a potential coup de grâce for any opposing political consultant with even a scintilla of Reilly’s talent; taking things out of context is a hallmark of political messaging.
Reilly also told the SF Weekly that modern political campaigns are intended to hook into people’s fears and prejudices, not their hopes. This, too, was deployed against him.
So that was that. But voters and spinmeisters, in this case, didn’t have the only say.
“I did love him,” said Washington, D.C.-based consultant and strategist Anthony Garrett, a former San Francisco politico. “He embraced me and was always extremely supportive. He saw talent in me. He was sort of like an older brother to me.”
“I swam in the same waters as Clint. But we always knew he was special.”
City hall voters cast their ballots on June 2, 2026. Photo by Io Yeh Gilman.
What made Clinton Thomas Reilly tick? Both critics and allies alike point to a primary motivator: Respect. No matter how successful Reilly was, career-wise and materially, he seemed to always desire affirmation.
“When Clint was an active political consultant, there was always this need to get an affirmation that he was good, talented, smart, on an equal plane not only with his peers in his [consulting] profession, but also with the candidates themselves.”
His friend and former employee Jaye says that, “Clint, from day one to his last day, always felt like he had something to prove.”
It was, with a moment’s thought, a bit bizarre: Reilly seemed to desire the approval of people who hadn’t accomplished a fraction of what he had, and certainly hadn’t bootstrapped it with no help at all, as Reilly did.
“He was keenly aware of class,” said Garrett. “He was keenly aware of what it means to not be treated the way someone wants to be treated and to want to be seen.”
Very few political thinkers may have been better than Reilly at sizing up the psychological pressure points of an opponent. It is not clear if he ever fully turned this skill inward.
Cable cars go up the hills in San Francisco. Photo by Junyao Yang on Oct. 2, 2022.
In 1993, Reilly sued the Hearsts and then-Examiner executive editor Phil Bronstein following an altercation at the paper’s office. Just what the hell happened has never been definitively established, but Reilly left the building in an ambulance and required nine screws and a metal plate to repair his broken ankle.
While the terms of the settlement have never been made public, Reilly told the SF Weekly that he bagged $600,000.
In 2000, he sued the Hearsts again, attempting to block the Examiner’s purchase of the Chronicle. That plan ultimately came to pass, but Reilly’s suit revealed that Hearst executives and Mayor Willie Brown discussed favorable coverage of the mayor in return for Brown’s support of the newspaper merger (the Hearst Examiner, surprise, surprise, surprise, endorsed Brown for mayor in 1999). That was a salient detail for the public to know — and the $2 million federal Judge Vaughn Walker awarded to Reilly didn’t hurt a bit.
In 2020, Reilly bought the Examiner. Considering his history with the Hearsts, it was mind-boggling that he’d end up owning the paper. His purchase likely saved the erstwhile “Monarch of the Dailies” from oblivion.
But Reilly had the bad fortune that the San Francisco Standard, funded by an even wealthier San Francisco politico, Michael Moritz, emerged not long thereafter.
It soon filled the niche the Examiner could have if it was willing to pay top dollar for journalism, as the Standard does, and take on establishment figures Reilly considered friends, as the Standard does.
The SF Weekly was a sister paper of the Examiner, and Reilly made the decision in 2021 to shutter the Weekly to devote more resources to the Ex.
Despite promises to preserve SF Weekly’s archive, the exact opposite transpired. You cannot find the 2001 SF Weekly profile of Reilly on the SF Weekly site (author Peter Byrne put it on his own site).
You cannot easily find any of the articles, from any of the publications he owned, recounting the era when Clint Reilly was a primary mover and shaker in this town.
But he was.
“He was equal parts tenacious, terrifying and inspiring,” says one former employee. “He was a civic force.”
“He believed politics could change people’s lives,” said Jaye. “He took it seriously. Politics, to many people who practice it, is a game or a grift; it’s what you do until it’s socially acceptable to hit the bars. Not Clint.”
We won’t ignore your neighborhood
When a San Francisco neighborhood has a Mission Local reporter, it means someone is there. We’re following new housing projects proposed on your block, keeping tabs on what your district supervisor is up to at City Hall, and letting you know when longtime businesses close (and new ones open). When big news breaks, we already know the context.
Most neighborhoods don’t have that. Yours could.
That’s what Mission Local is building. Our reporters don’t parachute in — they write consistently on San Francisco, so you’re never reading about your neighborhood from someone who just looked it up.
So far we are in five of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. But we know all San Franciscans deserve our kind of coverage. Will you join us?
Joe is a columnist and the managing editor of Mission Local. He was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.
“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.
He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.
The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.More by Joe Eskenazi
The Official White House Website features a “Media Offenders” / media bias portal that catalogs independent commentators and journalists, including political podcaster David Pakman, criticizing their coverage. (Note: While Amy Goodman and her show Democracy Now! are frequently discussed in relation to independent media landscapes and retrospectives like the documentary Steal This Story, Please!, she is distinct from the specific digital creators highlighted on this registry). [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
White House Media Oversight Portal
The List: Published on White House Media Bias Reporter, targeting prominent progressive digital influencers and commentators.
The Purpose: The administration characterizes the database as accountability and a response to alleged media bias or misleading claims.
The Reaction: Critics, free-press advocates, and named commentators have called the government-hosted list an escalation and an unacceptable pressure campaign against independent press. [1, 2, 3]
Home / Connect / Ring the Alarm Bells: The Ten Rules of Trump’s Authoritarian Playbook
Authoritarianism isn’t down the street or around the corner — it is here right now. We are at the most perilous moment for our democracy since the Civil War.
We now have all three ingredients of a strongman state in the United States:
a rubber-stamp Congress doing the President’s bidding
a Supreme Court finding “invisible ink” in the Constitution to enhance the President’s powers; and
a power-hungry president behaving like a king, breaking the law and violating the checks and balances of our Constitution.
People think of democracies dying at the hands of men with guns. But, in the modern era, they more often die at the hands of elected officials who erode the separation of powers to solidify a strongman state.
That will require robust citizen action and an unmistakable rejection of authoritarianism at the next election. Both are essential to restore and revitalize our democracy.
Our mission is clear: Let’s save our “We, The People” republic!
RULE ONE: Fire the Referees RULE TWO: Pack the Government with Loyalists RULE THREE: Demonize the Enemy Within RULE FOUR: Disregard Due Process RULE FIVE: Silence Free Speech RULE SIX: Steal Congress’ Power of the Purse RULE SEVEN: Abuse Government Authorities RULE EIGHT: Weaponize the Justice System RULE NINE: Use the Military to Suppress Dissent RULE TEN: Rig the Next Election
Your Power as a Citizen
1: Join an organized, nonviolent protest or demonstration. 2: Write and call your elected officials – and share personal stories! 3: Join an organized, nonviolent general strike or boycott. 4: Host a monthly friends meeting to discuss policy and political issues. 5: Help someone running for office. 6: Run for office! 7: Join an affinity group that organizes around issues. 8: Train as an observer of ICE operations. 9: Help turn out the vote. 10: Show support for vulnerable communities.
District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood said he still believes “there is a will in our city to still address the underlying issues of food insecurity.”Craig Lee/The Examiner
Following pushback from local lawmakers and other leaders, District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood said he will introduce new legislation aimed at improving residents’ access to groceries.
The Board of Supervisors Rules Committee on Monday tabled Mahmood’s Affordable Groceries Act, which would have placed on the November ballot a pair of measures meant to address citywide closures of supermarkets in recent years while also expanding residents’ ability to buy fresh foods.
The first, the Abandoned Pharmacy and Grocery Stimulus, would have offered tax credits and permitting assistance to grocery stores and pharmacies bringing business back to vacant lots. It also would have taxed corporations that left their spaces intentionally empty.
The second, the Affordable Grocery Fund, would have established a fund to help convert corner stores into fresh-food markets.
Mahmood said earlier this month that Supervisor Connie Chan, who chairs the Budget and Finance Committee, told him she would not be scheduling a hearing at the request of Mayor Daniel Lurie, arguing that the proposals needed more work before going to a vote.
Mahmood said his new legislative proposals, which will be introduced at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, take key components from his originally proposed measures.
“San Franciscans are hungry for bold ideas to tackle affordability,” Mahmood said Monday.
“I remain committed to working with anyone and everyone to advance the solutions we agree on today, while continuing to push for the bigger changes our city needs,” he said.
Mahmood’s new package will entail three efforts. The first would restore funding to Healthy Retail San Francisco, a citywide program that focuses on turning convenience stores in low-income neighborhoods into retailers selling healthy foods.
His second endeavor would aim to expand The City’s First Year Free program by exempting grocery stores from building and planning permit fees. Mahmood said he would also propose expanding the Storefront Opportunity Grant Program by funding the construction of new grocery stores in parts of San Francisco with limited food-market options.
The last piece of Mahmood’s proposed package would legislate new density bonuses for any housing development that would incorporate a ground-floor grocery store in its construction plans. Mahmood said the proposal is modeled on New York’s Food Retail Expansion to Support Health program, which was established in 2009.
The program provides zoning incentives that allow property owners to construct slightly larger buildings in mixed residential-and-commercial districts if their plans include supermarkets. Mahmood said he would also propose reforming how The City subdivides existing vacant parcels to make it easier for new grocery stores to open locally.
“The price of groceries is growing exponentially year-over-year,” Mahmood said.
“This is a national problem, but one that other cities are boldly tackling,” he said.
Artificial-intelligence security startup C1 recently leased a new headquarters space in SoMa — and it’s just one of many companies in the sector that are expanding in The City
In a statement, Chan said she was “disappointed“ in Mahmood’s “continued misrepresentation of our communications and his apparent lack of knowledge of the legislative process.”
Chan said she supported the intent behind Mahmood’s ballot measures, but that his proposed legislation had fallen short in being presented as “sound economic and revenue policy for San Francisco.”
“As supervisors, it is our job to do the work, to make the hard decisions daily,” Chan said.
“We are elected to create sound policy to present to voters, not rush through any piece of legislation, let alone a ballot initiative that is not ready for prime time and would not provide its intended impact,” she said.
Though Mahmood noted that his ballot measure failed to drum up support among colleagues, the District 5 supervisor said conversations with multiple city departments, community organizations and residents over the past two months showed him that there is a strong shared interest in addressing food insecurity and expanding people’s access to grocery stores through creative approaches.
New legislation being proposed this week by Supervisor Bilal Mahmood would help fund the construction of new grocery stores in parts of The City where only limited options currently exist.Craig Lee/The Examiner
District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton, who chairs the Rules Committee, said Mahmood could look into additional funding sources, such as the Food Empowerment Market Fund established in 2021.
A $1.5 million allocation from that fund helped create the District 10 Community Market, a 4,000-square-foot market that gives residents in The City’s southeast corridor the chance to shop from a free selection of groceries. Customers can also be connected with social services.
Walton said the program’s success was something that Mahmood “could possibly build off.”
Mahmood said at Monday’s committee meeting that he still believes “there is a will in our city to still address the underlying issues of food insecurity.”
“The people deserve immediate relief,” he said.
Examiner staff writer Patrick Hoge contributed reporting to this story.
How SF Can Promote Recovery, Safe Streets. Of all the strategies San Francisco has used to reduce drug-filled sidewalks—- the $22 million Linkage Center, $13 million crisis clinic at 822 Geary, the $6-14.5 million for the RESET Center, and the over $10 million annually spent using tourist hotels as shelters—none matches the positive impact of drug-free housing.
So why hasn’t the city aggressively funded this strategy?
Why Drug-Free Housing is Best Strategy
Last week, the Board of Supervisors passed Matt Dorsey’s legislation mandating that new supportive housing sites be drug-free. The challenge now is to get the city to add sites, and to finally offer drug-free permanent housing.
Residents of drug-free housing are more likely than addicts to either work or be seeking jobs. They are not hanging out using drugs on sidewalks.
Contrast two hotels on the 600 block of Geary.
The city has leased the Abby Hotel at 630 Geary as drug-free temporary housing for years. There have been virtually no neighborhood complaints. But after the Breed Administration began using the Adante Hotel at 610 Geary as a shelter that was not drug-free, neighborhood complaints exploded. Responding to these concerns the Lurie Administration closed the Adante shelter earlier this year.
Similarly, the Tenderloin Housing Clinic’s drug-free program at the Drake Hotel at 235 Eddy left the area in front of and near the hotel clear of sidewalk drug activities even when they were exploding elsewhere. (I head THC and it publishes Beyond Chron).
Prior to the then-vacant Kean Hotel on Mission between Sixth and Seventh Street being leased to the Salvation Army, it had a huge open-air drug market nearby. It disappeared once the Kean became drug-free temporary housing.
Those seeking drug-free housing are out to improve their lives. They want to get as far away from drug users as possible.
That’s why drug-free housing involves more than recovery by individuals. It’s a core public safety strategy that San Francisco should expand.
City Invests in Costly, Ineffective Alternatives
It’s mind-boggling how much money San Francisco has spent trying to close open-air drug markets but instead making sidewalks and the city less safe.
The Linkage Center was supposed to get drug users off Tenderloin sidewalks. Driven by harm reduction ideology that says you can improve safety by creating de facto safe injection sites, it caused Central City drug activities to explode. The city spent $22 million wrecking the Mid-Market, SOMA and Tenderloin economy and expanding sidewalk drug use.
The city purchased 822 Geary because Mayor Breed saw an opportunity to open the nation’s first safe injection site. But legal concerns halted this plan. So after buying the site for $6.2 million the city had to find a new purpose. It became a crisis clinic Mayor Lurie routinely praises it as an example of what the city is doing to address the drug and public safety crisis.
But 822 Geary did not make the Tenderloin safer. There never was drug activity in front or near the site. It’s become a citywide clinic that should have been connected to SF General or another medical facility. Instead, the city converted what was a longtime grocery store and then a Goodwill into a crisis clinic.
For all the talk about the Tenderloin needing a grocery store, let’s be clear: the best site was at 822 Geary. It was long home to Solo Foods grocery. The city’s acquisition was a negative for the Tenderloin.
The RESET Center
It’s too soon to issue a final verdict on the RESET Center on Sixth Street. But it’s not too soon to conclude that it has not met expectations. And that it is virtually certain to fall far short.
I, along with the Tenderloin Business Coalition, backed the RESET Center. We thought it would return cops to the street faster after arrests. I spent a lot of time on this issue in 2014. We had a breakthrough then but it proved temporary.
The RESET Center at 444 Sixth Street has only served Southern Station. JJ Smith’s videos (check out July 12) show that Sixth Street drug activities are still thriving. SOMA activist Lara Hashimoto emailed the mayor’s office last week, stating “that despite having RESET in our neighborhood we continue to see the same volume of drug addicts and continue to rely on MMCBD and Urban Alchemy to move these individuals off our block every day.”
We appreciated Mayor Lurie’s RESET plan and his openness to new strategies for combating sidewalk drug use. But despite using RESET exclusively for Southern Station, the 6th and Market open-air drug market still thrives.
Under RESET police arrest people for public intoxication or being under the influence of illegal drugs. They are then brought to 444 Sixth Street instead of jail. The RESET Center is not a jail and those brought there are free to leave once they can care for themselves. Most of those arrested soon return to the streets. The first two reports found only 29% and 27% of those brought to RESET accepted treatment. The mayor’s office describes this as a success.
That’s a very low bar for “success.” The city is funding a program where over 70% refuse to even enter treatment. We don’t know how many leave after a week. Or stay until completion.
The RESET bottom line: the city is spending millions—even with its creative performance-based outside contract—on a population that overwhelmingly doesn’t want recovery. Police resources are not making a visible difference.
Why not instead prioritize drug-free housing for those who do want to get help?
Wouldn’t that do more to get sidewalk drug users off our streets?
The mayor’s funding of Urban Alchemy has reduced sidewalk drug activities on Sixth Street. So did drug-free housing at the Kean.
The city should prioritize proven strategies that close drug-filled sidewalks. How about following Dorsey’s legislation with a major investment in drug-free housing?
Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s new book is the revised and updated, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. His prior books include Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.
Democrats on Capitol Hill and voting rights advocates on Tuesday sounded the alarm about Republicans in the House of Representatives trying to push through voter suppression legislation under cover of passing a ban on congressional stock trading.
According to a Tuesday report from Roll Call, House GOP leaders recently added “unrelated language” to what was a bipartisan bill banning congressional stock trading that would “require voters to produce photo ID at the polls, a signature issue for President Donald Trump.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) hammered Republicans for what she said were underhanded tactics that are undermining what had been a serious bipartisan effort to halt congressional stock trading.
“Republicans are trying to pull a trick this week,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a social media post. “They say we are voting on an ‘insider trading’ bill, but have snuck in massive SAVE Act-style voter suppression measures to it. This is a GOP effort to sabotage national mail-in voting, disguised as a trading ban. I’m voting NO.”
Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said that the caucus was opposing the GOP’s legislation not just for its attacks on voting rights, but because it only forces congresspeople to stop making new stock trades, while not requiring them to divest of their current holdings.
“House Republicans are not serious about enacting a meaningful congressional stock trading ban,” said Clarke. “The combined Stop Insider Trading Act and Voter ID Act… would allow members of Congress to continue owning, selling, and, in some cases, purchasing individual stocks while simultaneously imposing stricter voter ID requirements that would make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to vote.”
“This bill is a Trojan horse,” Clarke added, “using the premise of congressional ethics reform to advance a broader effort to restrict access to the ballot box.”
The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) on Monday sent lawmakers a letter opposing the GOP-backed legislation, which it said would “impose onerous new requirements on voting.”
Among other things, the group said the proposed legislation would “demand Americans provide ID to cast a ballot but only accept an unreasonably narrow list of acceptable types of documentation,” excluding the kind of “widely held and reliable forms of ID that young people and voters of color disproportionally rely on.”
The CLC also said the bill doesn’t provide “sufficient safeguards” for voters wrongly deemed ineligible to prove they are legally allowed to participate in US elections.
A page on congressional contact portal 5 Calls recommended users oppose the GOP-backed bill, which it described as “partisan legislation” that “uses the guise of much-needed ethics reform to sneak through an unpopular and unrelated attack on voting rights.”
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
District 1 supervisor Connie Chan (left), former software engineer and Capitol Hill staffer Saikat Chakrabarti. Photos by Yujie Zhou.
Saikat Chakrabarti, who failed to score a place on the November ballot for California’s 11th congressional district, said Wednesday that he will support Connie Chan’s race through the November election.
Already, his newly formed SF Solidarity PAC has spent $425,000 for Chan.
“I’m gonna do what I can to help her win,” said Chakrabarti.
Earlier, Chakrabarti offered his campaign staff of some 250, mostly paid canvassers, the option of working on his new independent expenditure committee to back Chan through July 10.
Now, his support of Chan will be through the general election on Nov. 3.
The field team plans to return to residents who were Chakrabarti supporters in the primary and persuade them to vote for Chan in November.
It’s unclear what the campaign will do after that outreach is finished.
“We’re going to look at where we are at the end of the month [July 10] to see how much more work is left to do, and to see what we need to do to actually make sure she wins,” said Chakrabarti.
Nate Allbee, Chakrabarti’s campaign consultant, who now works on the SF Solidarity PAC, oversaw the Chakrabarti campaign’s field operation, one of the largest paid-canvasser operations in San Francisco history, with canvassers paid top dollars.
So far, Albee said on Tuesday, they have talked to 500 Chakrabarti supporters in Wiener’s old supervisorial District 8. Some 80 percent of them said at the end of the conversation that, yes, they’d vote for Chan, according to Allbee.
“I mean, that’s really high,” he said.
Chakrabarti won 17 percent of the vote in District 8 compared to 26 percent for Chan and 51 percent for Wiener.
Chakrabarti, who self-funded his own campaign with $10 million, is also committed to spending whatever it takes to help Chan.
“We haven’t made a decision on how much funding the campaign will need, but the goal is absolutely to make sure Connie wins,” said Allbee.
Chakrabarti said, “this is about trying to help the progressive movement at large in Washington.” He added he’s also putting “significant financial support” towards helping close to 20 other progressive candidates across the country.
He’s still trying to decide how much money to put into each race.
Locally, Chakrabarti sees himself playing whatever role necessary to help the progressive movement and fix issues in the city. He’s been a generous donor to nonprofits, and he’s willing to contribute more right now when many are facing budget cuts.
He’s also open to being a supporter — and possibly a sponsor — for ballot measures that represent causes he supports.
“There’s no calculus of which faction or which tribe or whatever,” he said. If he agrees with the idea, he said, “I’m going to support them,” giving as an example Wiener’s November measure to fund public transit.
Map by Kelly Waldron.
How significant are Chakrabarti’s money and endorsement for Chan?
Chakrabarti’s endorsement of Chan doesn’t mean his votes will automatically transfer to the 47-year-old supervisor of District 1.
Before the primary, the general perception was that whichever candidate, Chan or Chakrabarti, advanced would need almost all of the other’s votes to have a chance of defeating Wiener in November.
Until the last few weeks of the campaign, Chan and Chakrabarti were careful to avoid upsetting each other’s supporters and instead directed most attacks at Wiener. That now makes it easier for Chan to convert Chakrabarti’s voters, his campaign said.
“We never said, ‘Don’t vote for Connie,’” when knocking on doors, Allbee said.
However, with Chakrabarti clearly antagonistic to Representative Nancy Pelosi’s way of doing business, it’s unclear if his supporters will embrace Chan, the candidate with Pelosi’s endorsement.
And it’s unclear how much Chakrabarti’s quick backing of Chan means.
Joe Arellano, Wiener’s campaign spokesperson and advisor, said many of Chakrabarti’s supporters who are urbanists will transition to Wiener, who has branded himself as the pro-housing candidate in the race.
And some may just disengage entirely from the process, “because they were in it for the cult of Saikat and his personality. It doesn’t simply transition over to Connie as soon as he’s gone,” said Arellano.
“Some of Saikat voters who were really motivated by his outsider and anti-establishment messaging might not feel excited about either candidate” and may sit out the general election, added Mike Chen, a Wiener supporter and a member of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee.
“It’s one thing to win some votes for yourself, it’s much harder to use your own profile to sway an election where you are not on the ballot,” said political consultant Derek Jansen. Chakrabarti “is just not a real factor in San Francisco.”
The two assets he could bring to Team Connie are funding and, potentially, an endorsement from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. However, his campaign fell short of earning the latter, and Chan could earn that on her own.
“I don’t think [Chakrabarti’s endorsement] is gonna have a huge impact. But it is not nothing,” San Francisco State University political science professor Jason McDaniel said.
To an extent, “she doesn’t need him to get progressive voters. She got more of them than he did,” he added. For the remaining ones, “I don’t think they liked him and hated her,” meaning they would go to Chan, the sole progressive candidate in November, even without Chakrabarti’s support.
Chan may be her own best advocate
A plus for Chan is that she has few political enemies. In a two-person race, where the competition to claim support and allegiance in San Francisco’s political circle has been fierce,
Chan has created an environment where “she’s made it easy to come over and help her. And I really appreciate that,” said Allbee.
This may have something to do with Chan’s philosophy as a politician.
“I believe in direct communication and building intellectually honest and respectful relationships,” she said in response to a Mission Local Q&A in May.
Allbee agreed. “Connie doesn’t have a lot of enemies for a reason. It’s just how she acts in politics and how she treats people. It’s not surprising to me that she has such a broad coalition at all … When you disagree with Connie on something, there’s a basic level of respect.”
“Over the years,” he added, “I’ve always felt like Connie was somebody that I could disagree with in a friendly way.”
We won’t ignore your neighborhood
When a San Francisco neighborhood has a Mission Local reporter, it means someone is there. We’re following new housing projects proposed on your block, keeping tabs on what your district supervisor is up to at City Hall, and letting you know when longtime businesses close (and new ones open). When big news breaks, we already know the context.
Most neighborhoods don’t have that. Yours could.
That’s what Mission Local is building. Our reporters don’t parachute in — they write consistently on San Francisco, so you’re never reading about your neighborhood from someone who just looked it up.
So far we are in five of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. But we know all San Franciscans deserve our kind of coverage. Will you join us?
Yujie is a staff reporter covering city hall with a focus on the Asian community. She came on as an intern after graduating from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and became a full-time staff reporter as a Report for America corps member and has stayed on. Before falling in love with San Francisco, Yujie covered New York City, studied politics through the “street clashes” in Hong Kong, and earned a wine-tasting certificate in two days. She’s proud to be a bilingual journalist. Find her on Signal @Yujie_ZZ.01More by Yujie Zhou
Help Outreach Working Group lift the fog of corporate media. Donate to help us maintain this website and distribute literature on the street.
We protest Heritage Foundation EVERY MONDAY (Join us!!!!) By admin | September 2, 2025 | Uncategorized Cliff Cash Comedy Premiered Jul 26, 2025 Every Monday at The Heritage Foundation 214 Massachusetts Ave. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza Every Friday at Fox News D.C. 400 N. Capitol St. Washington D.C. 4pm protest 6pm pizza We are... Continue reading →
Milk Club Trans Caucus Meeting Date: Tuesday, July 28 Time: 5-7 PM Location and Zoom Link: Meeting info available to members of the Milk Club Trans Caucus. Please reach out to trans@milkclub.org if you would like to join the Milk Club Trans Caucus.
Milk Club Joint Caucus Meeting & Trivia Night! Date: Tuesday, July 28 Meeting: 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM Trivia: 7:30 PM Where: Teeth – 2323 Mission Street, San Francisco Milk Club invites you to our Joint Caucus Meeting featuring the HIV Caucus, Trans Caucus, and BIPOC Caucus. This is a space to organize, connect,... Continue reading →
One Million Rising: Strategic Non-Cooperation to Fight Authoritarianism Virtual Event · Hosted by No Kings Time Wednesdays 8 – 9:30pm EDT Location Virtual event Join from anywhere About this event Across the country, authoritarian forces are getting bolder and more dangerous. Trump and his allies are not hiding their agenda: mass deportations,... Continue reading →
Two nights ago, nearly 450 people from around the country joined us and our partners for a massive Medicare for All National Organizing Call! The Medicare for All movement is flexing its muscle, and we spent the call standing united with our coalition partners, Progressive Democrats of America, Public Citizen,... Continue reading →
THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2023 AT 2 AM – 4 AM PDT How to create trust in a group? Details Event by Extinction Rebellion Empathy Circles online EMPATHY CAFE Duration: 2 hr Public · Anyone on or off Facebook How to create trust in a group? This is the question that arose in our... Continue reading →
Milk Club East Bay Caucus Kiki & Organizing Meeting Date: Thursday, July 30 Time: 6 PM Location: Hella Bees – 2340 Harrison St, Oakland RSVP: bit.ly/MilkClubEBKiki Milk Club is launching the East Bay Caucus and we want YOU there! Come out to Hella Bees in Oakland for an evening of food, drinks, dancing,... Continue reading →
Trump Regime Takedown: Every Saturday Saturday, March 7, 2026 12:00 PM 2:00 PM Tesla San Francisco999 Van Ness AvenueSan Francisco, CA, 94109United States (map) Google Calendar ICS Keep democracy alive every Saturday by showing up, taking a stand, and sticking together for the long haul. Standing together is better than standing alone. Let’s get together... Continue reading →
by 
by 
