Friday Fish wrap

A few items from the SF Chronicle:

• More than 70 protesters, including Warren Langley, former president of the Pacific Stock Exchange, were arrested Friday in nonviolent civil disobedience actions that knotted up morning rush-hour traffic in the Financial District. "It's fantastic," said Patrick Reinsborough, an organizer with Direct Action to Stop the War, the loosely organized group of activists planning "day after" civil disobedience in San Francisco.

Reinsborough scanned dozens of Muni buses backed up along Market Street by three dozen protesters who were sitting in the intersection at Battery Street. "We've given people a taste of what it will be like on the day-after," he said.

But while dozens of protesters chanting "No business as usual," were arrested outside the Pacific Exchange, trading inside was unaffected Friday, said spokesman Jon Werts.

However, the thousands of people trying to get to work on Muni buses were inconvenienced and wages no doubt lost. Nice move asscake.

• Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry's campaign was victimized Thursday during a stop in San Francisco when a middle-aged thief with thinning hair and quick hands snatched a laptop computer from a car belonging to Kerry's campaign spokesman, Chris Lehane.

Making matters worse, the Dell computer was chock-full of campaign information that the Democratic presidential contender certainly wouldn't want his opponents getting their hands on.

Anyone know where G.Gordon was today? snicker. Wonder if Lehane's password is fiftyseven?

• Two Fremont men who met at an anger-management class got into a brawl while working on a home-improvement project together, leaving a dead chicken and a trashed van in their path, police said Tuesday.

The fracas this week had city officials and police clucking as word spread around the normally tranquil East Bay city.

"This was definitely a dysfunctional encounter," said Fremont police Detective Bill Veteran.

Ya think?

• Gov "Johnny-on-the-spot" Gray Davis ordered an investigation Thursday into soaring gasoline, diesel and natural gas prices, questioning whether the oil industry is engaged in illegal profiteering.

Davis asked the California Energy Commission and the state's Public Utilities Commission to examine what he called unexplained price spikes. He suggested that the sticker shock consumers are feeling at the pump and from their heating bills may actually be due to manipulation and a deliberate withholding of supplies.

"The prices are extraordinarily high and don't need to be," Davis said

Davis is a quick study...gas prices hit $4 a gal in San Diego this week as a recall petition gained ground.

• Finally an amusing column from The Night Cabbie wherein a couple of French tourists on a pursuit for American food dish the Prez.

"The French people are very upset with America," she says. "They are not used to taking orders from anyone."

I point out that the French took orders from the Germans and, before that, from the Corsican, Napoleon.

"But Napoleon was a great leader, unlike George Bush," he says.

Yeah, but he was a lot shorter.

Posted by feste at March 14, 2003 07:10 PM