SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 3.13.2026
Headlines for a Friday the 13th
🫨
Trump war sinks America deeper into Iran Oil morass
Country Joe McDonald gone to rest in big country in the sky
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 3.10.2026 UPDATED
The blogger is well aware that Country Joe McDonald’s most well traveled song ‘I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag’ became a people’s anthem of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
The first Country Joe and the Fish album released in 1967 on the Vanguard Records label is a classic. Reading of Country Joe McDonald’s death at age 84 I took the album off the shelf and had some happy memories listening to the 11 tracks. In particular ‘Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine’.
McDonald recorded 33 albums and wrote hundreds of songs over a career spanning 60 years. Country Joe & the Fish were a pioneer psychedelic rock band known for their eclectic performances at the Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore Auditorium, the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, and the original 1969 Woodstock Festival and the 1979 reunion.
Top photo: An older Country Joe McDonald
Trump’s love of War sinks the job market and raises gas prices
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 3.10.2026 UPDATED
Donald Trump’s unhinged, uncalled for, unnecessary assault on the people of Iran is destroying the infrastructure of this thousands year old nation.
The unilateral assault by America and its brethren Israel is causing ruin to the United States economy.
The only benefit to all this Trump inspired death and destruction is the blogger can only hope an angry and fed up American electorate will give a big thumbs down to the hegemon Trump and MAGA in the upcoming congressional elections.
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal 3.6.2026
The U.S. lost 92,000 jobs in February, a widespread and unexpected downturn for a job market that continues to struggle across a broad range of sectors.
The employment numbers, reported Friday by the Labor Department, fell far short of January’s gain of 126,000 jobs. They were also much worse than the gain of 50,000 jobs that economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected to see.
The unemployment rate ticked slightly higher to 4.4%. While that is still low, the Friday report exposes troubling weaknesses in a labor market that has shown very little employment growth in recent months.
SF Mayor Lurie gets the Love from ousted ICE queen Kristi Noem
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 3.5.2026
The Mainstream Media is all aTwitter and in high gear as DHS boss Kristi Noem has been given the “You’re Fired” treatment by Donald Trump.
For the blogger there’s a big San Francisco angle.
Turns out now ex-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) queen has a very chummy relationship with San Francisco Mayor and Levi’s scion Daniel Lurie.
Now we know why the Mayor has refused to cough up details of his conversations with the White House. Conversations last Fall which kept the ICE brigades from invading San Francisco.
I suppose this relationship benefited San Francisco. Still, it would be nice to know the details of the chats.
Excerpted from The San Francisco Standard 3.5.2026
Speaking Thursday during a police conference in Nashville, minutes after being fired as Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem praised San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s cooperation with the federal government pertaining to its local enforcement efforts.
During the Q&A, San Francisco Police Officers Association Vice President Chris Galligan asked Noem whether or not the federal government could help reimburse local law enforcement for the work they do at events like the recent Super Bowl.
“You maybe have some challenges in San Francisco just because of your state laws and local laws,” Noem replied. “Although you’ve got a mayor that works with us very well. He probably doesn’t want me to talk about it a lot, actually. But he has been cooperative and we have great conversations and talk quite often.”
https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/05/kristi-noem-daniel-lurie-donald-trump-enforcement-cities/?
Top photo: ICE Queen Kristi Noem and San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie – Best Friends?
Death and Destruction. U.S.-Iran talks ended how Trump wanted.
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 3.4.2026
Watching and reading about Trump’s years long unilateral fixation with chaos and destruction both at home and abroad it’s obvious he never had any intention to make a deal with Iran.
The “resolution” is the War Trump wants.
Excerpted from BBC News 3.3.2026
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98qpz144nvo
Funerals have been held for students and staff killed in what Iranian authorities have said was a US-Israeli strike on a school in southern Iran.
Iranian officials said more than 160 people were killed when a girls’ school was hit in the city of Minab on Saturday, as the US and Israel launched widespread strikes targeting Iran’s military sites and leadership.
BBC News has not been able to independently verify the Iranian authorities’ death toll.
The school was located near an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base.
The US military said it was looking into reports of the incident, while Israel’s military said it was “not aware” of any operations in the area.
How ‘J’Taime’ icon Jane Birkin Handled the Problem of Beauty
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 3.2.2026
I first learned about Jane Birkin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Birkin decades ago while staying at the Hotel Schriersteren in the Red Light District of Amsterdam.
Her famous, or notorious, duet with her long time partner and collaborator Serge Gainsbourg J’Taime was a staple on the hotel’s juke box.
Hotel Schreiersteren – Amsterdam
Jane Birkin went on to have quite a career of her own. The New Yorker encapsulated her life in a piece after her death
Excerpted from The New Yorker 9.15.2025
She possessed a mysterious charisma and a seemingly effortless sense of style. Both obscured her relentless, often painful search for meaning.
In Agnès Varda’s film “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” from 1988, a nearly forty-year-old Jane Birkin, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tweed blazer, her messy brown hair pinned back, sits in front of the Eiffel Tower and dumps out the contents of her purse. The purse, which she helped design, is named for her: it’s the Birkin bag, by Hermès, one of the most famous accessories in the world. Inside are loose papers, notebooks, a tube of Maybelline’s Great Lash mascara, a copy of Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler,” a Swiss Army knife, pens and markers, a roll of tape. “Well,” Birkin says, in heavily accented French, “did you learn anything about me from seeing my bag?” Then a grin: “Even if we reveal everything, we don’t show much.”
Throughout “Jane B.,” Varda draws attention to the elusiveness of her subject. Birkin, a British-born actress and singer best known, then as now, for the raunchy pop songs she recorded with her lover Serge Gainsbourg, comes across as both open and enigmatic, singular in a way that is hard to parse. Her beauty is undeniable, but its borders are vague. Proud of her own eccentricity, she is also shy and awkward, with the voice of a little girl—hushed, rushed, and airy. Varda dresses her up as Joan of Arc, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, the Virgin Mary, a cowboy, and a flamenco dancer, as if to suggest that Birkin’s mystery is itself a symbol, one as important to modern culture as Renaissance painting and the mother of Christ.
Birkin, who died in 2023, had “it”: an undefinable, unmistakable glamour that shifts our collective sense of what’s cool, or at least of what’s worth paying attention to. Easily mingling English reserve and European sensuality, she had a sweetness that set her apart from contemporaries such as the bombshell Brigitte Bardot or the edgier Anna Karina. “She wasn’t a hippie,” the journalist Marisa Meltzer writes in her new biography, “It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin” (Atria), “but rather a rising star from the upper class,” someone who radiated privilege even when she dressed down. One of the first celebrities to be regularly photographed in her everyday clothes, Birkin was an early icon of street style, traipsing around Paris in sneakers and rumpled sweaters, wicker basket in hand. The outfits could be easily mimicked and therefore easily marketed. Today, when social-media influencers praise “the French-girl look”—wispy bangs, minimal makeup, bluejeans, marinière tops—the look they have in mind is hers.
Birkin, Meltzer writes, was “nonchalance personified.” If this was not exactly an illusion, neither was it the whole story. A lifelong depressive, Birkin often thought about—and at least once attempted—suicide. Her diaries, two volumes of which have been published, reveal a wonderful writer, lyrical and self-lacerating. They also reveal her struggles with the costs and compromises of the It Girl role, how it left her feeling as though she had—as she puts it in Varda’s film—“no exceptional talents” to offset her fast-fleeting youth. What Birkin did have is je ne sais quoi, to her misfortune as much as to her advantage. After all, being famous for your ineffable qualities is perilously close to being famous for no reason.
Unhinged Trump and Israel. Wage criminal aggression against Iran
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 2.28.2026 UPDATED
Donald Trump and his criminal co-conspirator Bibi Netanyahu are waging a criminal war of aggression against the People of Iran.
It is simply a wanton act of raining death and destruction against the ancient country of Persia
Both these criminal instigators Trump and Netanyahu are waging this aggression to deflect from their criminal activities at home. It won’t work.
Excerpted from Al Jazeera 2.28.2026
The United States and Israel have struck multiple locations across Iran, including the capital, Tehran, in what US President Donald Trump described as “major combat operations”.
The attacks come amid negotiations between the US and Iran over the latter’s nuclear and ballistic missiles programmes, after weeks of mounting threats from Trump – and eight months after the US and Israel waged a 12-day war against Iran.
Iran has struck back with missiles aimed at northern Israel and at US military bases in the Middle East. Details of casualties and damage in Iran and Israel are sparse at the moment.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/28/us-and-israel-attack-iran-what-we-know-so-far
Top Photo: The People of Iran will suffer death and destruction at the hands of war criminals Trump and Netanyahu
Trump brings back harsh memories of 1970 State terror
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 2.24.2026
Trump’s Fascist reign brings back the scorching memories of the murder of four students by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4th 1970.
Fortuitously the blogger was thousands of miles away on the Isle of Crete in Greece and was unable to read the minute by minute news reports in the pre internet era of this State murder.
The horrific news was only available days later when the International Herald Tribune hit the news stands in Greece.
In 2026 The blogger wishes he wasn’t in America and forced to live through the Reign of Terror being foisted on America by Trump and his myrmidons. Shameless wannabe fascist flunkies.
Two Dead in Minnesota. The anthem for Felon Trump SOTU
SAN FRANCISCO 2.26.2026 UPDATED
Lee Heidhues
I venture Trump won’t say a word about the two Americans murdered by his Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs in Minneapolis in January 2026.
Has the blogger thinking of the classic song “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young they recorded after the murder of four Kent State University students by the National Guard in May 1970. Following Nixon’s Cambodian invasion in 1970.
The listener can simply change the lyrics of 1970 from “Four dead in Ohio” to “Two dead in Minnesota”.
Police profiling of the ‘unhoused’ aka the ‘homeless’ is despicable
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 2.2.2026
Law enforcement harassment of the ‘unhoused’ population is amongst the worst form of discrimination. Whether the ‘unhoused’ person is behind the wheel of a vehicle, riding public transit or living on the street.
This type of economic profiling illuminates law enforcement at its worst. Taking advantage of the most vulnerable amongst us.
Official harassment of the unhoused is also an easy way for the cops to buttress their statistics. Giving the impression they are performing meaningful work.
It is nothing more than a form of blatant economic racism.
The truth of the matter is that many people fear the homeless. And therefore feel the best way to handle this population is to keep it down and out of sight. The cops are the useful vehicle to serve the paranoid fantasies of the better off citizenry.
Excerpted from the San Francisco Chronicle – Bob Egelko – 2.2.2026
When police in California stop a driver or pedestrian whom they believe to be homeless, they’re far more likely to search, handcuff, deploy force against and arrest that person than others they pull over, according to a new state report.
The ninth annual report by the Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board, or RIPA, based on data from 5.1 million police stops in 2024, reaffirmed previous findings that Black and HIspanic drivers were much more likely than others to be stopped than other motorists. But the disparity in treatment of those who appear to be homeless was new information that officers were first required to provide in January 2024.
Among more than 181,000 stops of people perceived by officers to be unhoused, the report said, 43% were then searched or frisked; 37.9% were handcuffed; 38.68% were subjected to use of force and 47.3% were arrested.
The report comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 2024 ruling, in a case from Grants Pass, Ore., that opened the door for cities and states to evict homeless people from street encampments, confiscate their property and subject them to criminal prosecution. The 6-3 decision said such actions do not violate the constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”
The ruling has led to a wave of local ordinances authorizing sweeps of street camps and imposing criminal penalties for camping or sleeping on public property, even when no shelters are available.
San Francisco responded with hundreds of arrests and seizures of property from homeless encampments, though the city agreed to pay nearly $3 million last year to settle a lawsuit by the Coalition on Homelessness for similar actions it had taken before the Supreme Court ruling.
Top photo: Unhoused person at a bus stop – photo Lee Heidhues
Lee's Perspective 