Another Reason for CNN to Avoid San Francisco

One of the largest supermarkets in Downtown San Francisco—the Whole Foods Market at Eighth and Market streets—intends to shut down at the close of business Monday just a little more than a year after the store opened, company officials told The Standard.

“We are closing our Trinity location only for the time being,” a Whole Foods spokesperson said in a statement. “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.”

A City Hall source told The Standard the company cited deteriorating street conditions around drug use and crime near the grocery store as a reason for its closure.

To San Francisco politicians on the progressive left, this may sound like just another case of “basic city life experiences.” But it’s a tragedy for San Francisco residents whenever street crime drives another business to close its doors. And for CNN, given the overlap between the Whole Foods customer base and the staff of the news network, it represents still another obstacle to covering an important story.

CNN’s Jordan Valinsky reports from New York about the San Francisco store closure:

The nearly 65,000-square foot location at Trinity Place in the city’s Mid-Market neighborhood shut its doors Monday to “ensure the safety” of its employees, a Whole Foods spokesperson said… The store’s website has also disappeared.

Heralded as a “flagship store” following its March 2022 opening, the Whole Foods was one of the largest supermarkets in downtown San Francisco. The store sold 3,700 local products and was designed with “nods to classic San Francisco,” according to a news release.

Years from now residents will regard as classic the politician who finally decides to rescue a beautiful city from chronic lawlessness.

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Annals of Socialized Medicine
Sachin Ravikumar reports for Reuters from London:

Junior doctors in Britain began a four-day strike over pay on Tuesday that is likely to cause unprecedented disruption to the state-funded National Health Service (NHS), prompting the government to warn of a risk to patient safety.

Tens of thousands of junior doctors — qualified physicians who make up nearly half of the medical workforce — are striking for pay rises better aligned with inflation, in a walkout that follows a three-day doctors’ strike last month….The strike is the latest to involve NHS staff, following walkouts by nurses, paramedics and others…

It comes as the NHS experiences one of its most severe crises in its 75-year-history, overwhelmed with some 7 million patients waiting for hospital treatment, severely affecting areas such as cardiovascular care.

Sadly, the government-run health system is so poor that for some patients it probably feels as though the strike began long ago. Nick Triggle reported for the BBC last month on medical backlogs, including in cancer care, “with just 54% of patients starting treatment within two months following an urgent referral by a GP.”

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Annals of Increasingly Socialized Medicine
Ann Kempski and Ge Bai write in The Hill:

North Carolina recently became the 40th state to expand Medicaid. No politician wants to talk about an inconvenient truth — employers and workers in North Carolina will pay higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs because the Medicaid expansion will drive up hospital prices. And it is the federal government’s fault.

North Carolina legislators will levy a tax on North Carolina hospitals’ costs as a result of the expansion. Hospitals will then receive federal matching funds more than three times the tax they pay to win hospitals’ support, under a program called Health Care Access and Stabilization Program. The deal is being touted by North Carolina’s politicians as a win for state taxpayers because federal taxpayers are on the hook to pay.

In the first post-expansion year alone, at least $3.2 billion in federal taxpayers’ money will arrive. This enormous open-ended flow of federal money incentivizes hospitals and the state to continuously hike hospitals’ costs…

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Why Is

Waiting to Announce He’s Running Again?
There are many reasons why the president might want to hold off on announcing a re-election campaign. Among them is that until he is a candidate, it’s easier to allow taxpayers to pick up the tab for what are essentially campaign events touting his alleged achievements.

Mike Memoli, Peter Nicholas, Carol E. Lee and Monica Alba report for NBC News:

Top White House advisers are set to make final decisions on launching President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, even as the would-be candidate seems to show little urgency to formally declare his 2024 plans, several sources familiar with the discussions told NBC News…

One concern that White House advisers have mentioned privately, a person familiar with the matter said, is that Biden can’t raise campaign money until he declares his candidacy. The trade-off is that Biden can look and act presidential by making full use of Air Force One and the presidential bully pulpit to spread his message…

Deciding when to announce one’s candidacy “always comes down to money,” a Democratic campaign strategist said. “Biden doesn’t need a platform; he doesn’t need to rent a plane to travel around the country and talk to people. He doesn’t need a campaign right now.”

… Michael Toner, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, noted that running a campaign creates expenses that Biden can avoid by delaying his announcement. “The real burn rate comes from staff hiring and event costs,” Toner said. “These presidents are used to really nice events that are expensive to stage. They just are. It’s a chicken-and-egg issue: The later you start your campaign, you don’t need as much money.”

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Reader Mail

Using the climate change logic to explain the increase in MLB home runs, we can surmise that the increase in motor-vehicle fatalities is due to the increase in EV traffic.

Kelly O’Brien

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James Freeman is the co-author of “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi” and also the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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(Lisa Rossi helps compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Tony Lima.)

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