And speaking of corruption ...

It's break out the popcorn time in San Francisco. Another round of City Hall crooks are being dragged into the light by a diligent U.S. Attorney. 

Heather Knight at the Chron asks a reasonable question: Why were lavishly paid public servants allegedly bribed for so little?

Leaders of mammoth city agencies -- agencies we depend on for garbage disposal, for our electricity, for public housing -- make in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars in salaries annually but dispense favors for petty payments of expensive wine and trips to China. They seem to be cheap dates for the hustlers and developers who make the real money in this rich and sometimes cruel city.

Every few years it's a similar story -- some bigwig is revealed to be on the take. Some stories are more baroque than others -- remember when, just a few years back, we had a state senator charged with gun trafficking. Or there was the cop son of a police chief who beat up a citizen over a fajita. 

Corruption in the city by the bay is often entertaining to watch. 

The Chronicle hints at the background of so much of it, attaching a picture of former California state assembly speaker and San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. (Yes, he writes a column for the newspaper.)

So many of these people are out of his lineage ... remember when he stuck the city with a head of waste management whose qualification for the job was betraying his Republican colleagues in the state assembly to vote with Willie?

The current mayor is out of Willie's tree, as was the previous one, and the one before that, who is now our governor. Maybe they weren't in on the petty crimes. Maybe they weren't in on the small time con stuff; maybe they are/were devoted to good government. But it's hard not to suspect one might find a bit of stench about them -- they've run in suspicious company.