I will hand it to WSJ and Fox News potentate Rupert Murdoch. Say what you will but at least he is very clear in advocating for his “Turn Back the Clock to 1850″perspective on America……….along with the usual snark directed at RBG.

Excerpted from Wall Street Journal Editorial 2.4.2019

“With an enhanced GOP Senate majority of 53, Mr. Trump can keep adding to another achievement—judicial nominees who are remaking the federal bench in the image of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. We wish Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg well, but if illness forces her retirement Mr. Trump could cement what the last three GOP Presidents did not: an originalist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time in decades.”

As a reporter for the campus newspaper I attended debates between Palestinian/Arab and Israeli students at San Francisco State in the late sixties. The sessions were intense and volatile. The dynamic has remained the same in the intervening decades.

Excerpted from Golden Gate Xpress 1.29.2019

A tenured professor filed a lawsuit against SF State President Leslie Wong and other top-ranking administrators on Jan. 14, alleging discrimination based on her race, health and political activism.

Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas program director and professor Rabab Abdulhadi alleges in the suit that Wong, Vice President of Student Affairs Jennifer Summit and former Provost Sue Rosser acted on behalf of Zionist organizations who donate money to the SF State.

In the lawsuit, Dr. Abdulhadi claims these administrators helped foster a hostile work environment by launching repeated investigations into her research, excluding her from cohorts and canceling trips to Palestine to stall the AMED program at the behest of pro-Israel groups like AMCHA, the Jewish Community Relations Council and SF Hillel.

Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi (left) -11.1.2018

Dr. Abdulhadi said her work teaching students advocacy for anti-colonialism is misconstrued as anti-Semitism by these groups to frighten the Jewish community, villainize her nation of origin, Palestine, and obstruct her position at the helm of the AMED program.

Behnam Gharagozli, the plaintiff’s attorney, said because these Zionist organizations happen to be affiliated with wealthy SF State donors, they use the same tactics of intimidation that reflect the political landscape between Israel and Palestine.

https://goldengatexpress.org/2019/01/29/professor-files-discrimination-lawsuit-against-top-ranking-administrators/

The photo is from the Attica Prison uprising in 1971 during which guards killed and injured scores of inmates. Nothing has changed in the past 48 years.

Excerpted from The Guardian 2.2.2019

A congresswoman who visited a federal detention center in New York City where inmates have been stuck in cold, dark cells for days said it was “surreal to hear the inmates banging on the walls.”

“I am frustrated. This is America. In America, everyone has rights,” said Nydia Velazquez, a Democrat whose district includes the Metropolitan detention center in Brooklyn. “It’s a violation of their human rights to be kept in the cold and not to be able to talk to anyone.”

Velazquez visited the jail on Friday after seeing news reports that hundreds of inmates there had spent the past week largely without heat, power or the ability to communicate with their attorneys or families.

Velazquez said she was not allowed to speak to the inmates but got access to common areas and showers. She said she and other elected officials planned to return to the facility on Saturday and hoped to speak to inmates this time.

The New York Times first reported Friday that inmates at the facility had been stuck in their cells without lights or heat since last weekend, when an electrical fire knocked power out.

New York Times Photo 2.2.2019

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/02/inmates-new-york-city-jail-heat-light

The usual story. Law enforcement looks after itself. Always

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner 2.2.2019

The San Francisco District Attorney’s office on Thursday dismissed charges against three sheriff’s deputies who stood accused of staging an inmate “fight club” in San Francisco jails in 2015 after defense attorneys brought forward evidence the Sheriff’s Department had botched the investigation.

Attorneys for the three accused deputies maintain evidence was mishandled and destroyed.

Nicole Pifari, attorney for one of the accused deputies,  in a Motion to Dismiss, told the Court, “Upon further inquiry, the Sheriff’s Department explained that ‘sometime in October,’ approximately seven months after they had received two preservation demands, the Sheriff’s Department destroyed the laptop’s hard drive by smashing it with a hammer.”

The District Attorney’s Office filed felony and misdemeanor charges against deputies Eugene Jones and Scott Neu in March 2015 after Public Defender Jeff Adachi brought forward information from inmates saying deputies had forced them to fight for food like gladiators and gambled on the winners. A third deputy, Clifford Chiba, was also charged with two misdemeanors.

The deputies threatened inmates with violence or withheld food if they didn’t fight each other for the deputies’ amusement, Adachi said.

“It’s extremely disappointing, and it sends the wrong message,” Adachi said. “You are forcing prisoners to fight against each other and betting money on it — and you get away with it. Yeah, charges were brought, but because the Sheriff’s Department bungled its own investigation you’re free to go. What kind of message does that send to people who always assume American jails are better?”

“The problem here as far as I can tell is they didn’t know what they were doing. Keystone cops were assigned to investigate their fellow deputies,” he added. “You can certainly wonder if the investigation was intentionally conducted in an incompetent manner.”

While San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ross Moody granted the district attorney’s motion to dismiss the criminal charges that carried possible state prison terms, a new prosecution team will review the case to determine whether there is enough untainted evidence to proceed with new charges.

At the center of the dismissal decision are statements the deputies were required to make during an internal affairs investigation by the Sheriff’s Department. Such statements, known as “compelled statements,” cannot legally be used in criminal probes because they violate a defendant’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Law enforcement agencies usually isolate administrative and criminal investigations from each other in a process called “walling off” to avoid such conflicts.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/DA-drops-charges-in-SF-jail-fight-club-case-13580636.php

http://www.sfexaminer.com/charges-dropped-deputies-fight-club-case/

Excerpted from Wall Street Journal 2.2.2019 and Visit to German Museum of History 10.2.2018

In the first half of the 20th century, German-speaking Europe experienced world wars, economic chaos and the rise of Nazism. It was an unlikely historical moment for artists to focus on the most private of genres, the self-portrait. But “The Self-Portrait: From Schiele to Beckmann,” a new exhibition that will be on view at New York’s Neue Galerie from Feb. 28 to June 24, suggests that this time and place produced the greatest flowering of art depicting the artist since the Renaissance.

There is nothing stylized about the haunted, unshaven face that Felix Nussbaum gave himself in “Self-Portrait With Jewish Identity Card,” painted around 1943. At the time, Nussbaum was in Brussels, where he had gone into hiding after escaping from a concentration camp. In the canvas, the artist is portrayed wearing a coat with an upturned collar bearing the yellow-star symbol that Jews had been forced to wear. In an ironic contrast, a small I.D. photo on a card he holds up for our inspection shows him in an earlier incarnation, wearing a suit and tie. Arrested soon afterward, Nussbaum died in Auschwitz in 1944.

Born in Osnabruck, the artist and his wife Felka went into hiding in Brussels in 1942.  This self-portrait with his wife and a young helper shows him as a devout Jew, dressed in a blue-and-white striped prayer shawl and wearing a kippa. They follow the front lines on a map, but their faces show no sign of hope for their rescue.  After being betrayed, the Nussbaums were sent on the last deportation train from Belgium to Auschwitz on July 31, 1944.

By Liz Heidhues. February 2, 2019

Today Punsxutawney Phil predicted an early thaw for his thousands of numb and frozen followers shivering in the fractured Polar Vortex.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/groundhog-day-punxsutawney-phil-prediction/index.html

Every Picture Tells a Story, Don’t It – Ongoing Series

Girl with the Cotton Candy Hair – Fulton and Masonic – January 30, 2019

Photo – Lee Heidhues

People of influence like this are beyond reprehensible

Deutsche Welle 1.31.2019

A Holocaust-denying former bishop from an ultra traditionalist Catholic splinter group on Thursday lost a European rights case against a conviction in Germany.

Holocaust denial is a criminal offense in Germany.

Richard Williamson, who denied that gas chambers were used in Nazi Germany’s death camps, argued his right to free speech was violated. But the European Court of Human Rights has described his sentence as “very lenient.”

Richard Williamson had been fined €1,800 ($2,066) for denying there were gas chambers in Nazi Germany’s death camps in a 2008 interview with Swedish television carried out in Germany.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg rejected Williamson’s rights case as “manifestly ill-founded,” describing the sentence imposed on him as “very lenient.” Originally, Williamson had been fined €12,000, but the amount was lowered following an appeal.

Williamson, who is British, argued that the 2013 sentence violated his right to free expression and that Swedish rather than German law should have applied to the interview. Holocaust denial is not illegal in Sweden. 

Williamson was excommunicated by the Vatican in 1988 but allowed back into the church in 2009. After carrying out an unauthorized consecration of a bishop in Brazil, he was excommunicated again in 2015.

It’s Only (Heavy Metal)  Rock and Roll. Legacy of the San Francisco Music Scene

San Francisco Chronicle 1.31.2019

Paul Whaley, whose thrashing drum sounds lifted the San Francisco blues rock trio Blue Cheer out of the psychedelic rock haze and into the realm of proto-heavy-metal, died Monday, Jan. 28, at his home in Regensburg, Germany. He was 72.

The cause was heart failure, said Eric Albronda, the band’s co-founder and former manager.

Whaley was part of the core power trio of Blue Cheer, the loudest band to come out of the Summer of Love era. He completed a lineup that featured singer and bass player Dickie Peterson and guitarist Leigh Stephens in 1967, coming into the fold a year after the group formed in the city’s Haight-Ashbury district.

https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/music/paul-whaley-drummer-who-invented-heavy-metal-with-blue-cheer-dies-at-72

January 30.2019 by Lee Heidhues

Leesperspectives attended San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s first “State of the City Address” at the new National LGBTQ Center for the Arts at 170 Valencia Street. An historic Art Deco building.

The massive hall was packed with a  veritable who’s who of City political life. Former Mayor Willie Brown, still a major presence and mentor to the new Mayor, was in the front row.

Mayor Breed, born and raised in the nearby Western Addition housing projects, was beaming as she gave her first annual address to a packed and enthusiastic gathering.

The 30-minute talk was straight forward, no nonsense and laced with tales of the City and her goal to improve the quality of life here.

The Mayor, obviously proud of The City, cited a list of her accomplishments and goals in the coming year.

Foremost on Mayor Breed’s all-inclusive list are humane policies for dealing with the homeless, clean streets, safe streets and affordable housing.

The Mayor specifically mentioned a 5.8MM budget item to provide for legal assistance to San Francisco’s tenant population faced with displacement via eviction.

The Mayor gave a shout out to several San Franciscans who currently play a role in State and Federal government; Gavin Newsom, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris.

The Mayor, to raucous cheers, reminded the crowd, “Senator Harris could be the next President of the United States.”

Photo:  Lee Heidhues