Alex Shultz

Elon Musk was, until last year, a self-professed centrist who generally supported the Democratic Party. He was a Barack Obama “fanboy,” according to Walter Isaacson, whose biography of Musk was released this week. Isaacson reported that Musk once waited in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand, and favorably described the former president as “a moderate but also someone willing to force change.” Musk apparently has a much dimmer view of Joe Biden, Obama’s vice president who is now the preside…

A group of Democratic lawmakers in California have asked state Attorney General Rob Bonta to expeditiously seek a court ruling on whether Donald Trump should be removed from California’s March primary ballot. In a letter obtained by Politico and the New York Times, nine California lawmakers reportedly wrote to Bonta that he as state attorney general is “uniquely positioned to proactively seek the court’s opinion to confirm Mr. Trump’s inability to hold office.” The lawmakers reportedly cited th…

California Gov. Gavin Newsom went out of his way to praise disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday during an interview with Andrew’s brother, Chris Cuomo, who was himself fired from a high-profile CNN gig after allegedly violating the network’s ethics policy. On NewsNation, where Chris Cuomo is now an anchor, Newsom lauded the former New York governor’s initial handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. “By the way, your brother did a magnificent job in the beginning,” Newsom told Chris…

ProPublica released yet another investigation about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Friday, this one perhaps even more damning than the rest. The top-line finding from Friday’s report is that Thomas has, on at least two occasions, quietly gone to donor events in Southern California hosted by the Koch network, the conservative political fundraising arm founded by the billionaire Koch brothers. (Charles Koch, 87, is still alive; David Koch died in 2019.) Thomas was reportedly asked to g…

San Francisco has all sorts of intriguing political bouts this upcoming election year. Mayor London Breed is vulnerable to an increasingly crowded lane of fellow moderates; District Attorney Brooke Jenkins will have to run again, this time even further removed from blaming her political bogeyman Chesa Boudin; and Rep. Nancy Pelosi recently decided to run for another term in Congress, slamming the brakes on a BART train’s worth of candidates hoping to expedite their ambitions. And yet, it’s Super…

A makeshift tribute to Dianne Feinstein opened at San Francisco City Hall on Friday, just hours after her death was announced. Feinstein, 90, died Thursday night, according to a statement from her office. Her cause of death is not yet known. Before her lengthy tenure as a California senator, Feinstein served as a San Francisco supervisor and then mayor. City Hall honored her Friday by lowering its flags to half-mast and putting out a remembrance signing station on the fourth floor south gallery,…

On Sept. 29, Dianne Feinstein, 90, died of natural causes. She had cast a vote in the Senate less than a day prior. Feinstein’s death came after months of declining mental and physical health, and years of speculation about her fitness to serve. And yet, her death was described as a “complete shock” by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is among the many prominent Democrats now attempting to recast Feinstein’s final years in public service as heroic, rather than a damning symbol of a broken syste…

Oakland A’s owner John Fisher was called out this week by now-retired pitcher Trevor May in a viral rant: “Take mommy and daddy’s money somewhere else, dork,” May said during his farewell speech on Twitch. Fisher, the locally despised billionaire heir to the Gap Inc. fortune who’s trying to move the A’s to Las Vegas, is indeed spending his money elsewhere: politics. On Sept. 29, Fisher donated to the political campaign of Texas Rep. Jodey Arrington, who repeatedly objected to the 2020 presidenti…

On Thursday, the Oakland A’s encouraged their more than 600,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter) to take a stand against the bullying of LGBTQ youth. They posted about Spirit Day — a now-annual event that the advocacy organization GLAAD promotes to “support LGBTQ youth by creating clear possibility models for them to thrive and be represented in the world.” “On #SpiritDay and every day, we are proud to support LGBTQ+ youth everywhere,” the A’s post reads. Meanwhile, A’s owner John Fisher has s…

In July 2022, Elon Musk tried to renege on purchasing Twitter for $44 billion. Anxious to finalize a deal with Musk at a price point that was generally considered an enormous overpay, Twitter sued Musk. On Oct. 28, 2022, the day before the trial was supposed to start, Musk and Twitter came to terms on the original $44 billion asking price. A year later, Musk is now claiming that he was actually compelled to buy Twitter — now X — out of an overriding sense of civic duty, because he needed to save…