Bendi the Tuxedo Cat rests on his pasha pillowon his 4th birthday.
Liz and Lee Heidhues 7.5.2025
Liz with her dear friend the Tuxedo Cat Bendi on his 4th birthday.
Bendi checks out the popcorn popped in our 42 year old West Bend popcorn maker purchased at Macy’s in 1983.
An agile Bendi peering into the microwave oven.
Bendi, the black tuxedo cat, has graced our home during the day for the past 15 months bringing joy, thrills, and constant companionship into our lives.
When Bendi is not enjoying the action in the kitchen and throughout the house, Bendi patrols our property both inside and out and climbs onto our roof, performs sentry duty along the fences and discourages vermin, such as rats, from trespassing onto our property.
Inspector Bendi patrols the fences.
His nickname is Inspector Bendi. Inspector Bendi’s curiosity is famous. He looks into every nook and cranny in our house to satisfy his insatiable appetite for adventure.
A pensive Tuxedo Cat Bendi under the admiring eye of Lee.
Several blocks away a flock of crows overlooking Ocean Beach Park which is now formally known as Sunset Dunes Park.
The destruction of rustic California continues to bulldoze its way through the state as developers and realtors cash in on the law requiring tens ofthousands of housing units be built.
Sausalito, the small town north of San Francisco in which I spent my high school years is not immune from this scourge has been taken over by YIMBYism. The one time quaint town, famous for its bohemian and laid back lifestyle, is lurching into the urban sprawl of the 21st century.
The town’s planning commission has green lit a massive building project which will disrupt an entire neighborhood. 19 units will be constructed on four stories. What was for over a hundred years a sleepy section of Sausalito is going to be torn asunder to satisfy the rapaciousness of developers and realtors.
Excerpted from Marin Independent Journal 6.26.2025
The Sausalito Planning Commission has approved the city’s largest new housing project in two decades.
Bridgeway Avenue in Sausalito – undated photo
The site is an overgrown lot and hillside hollow with decaying garages, century-old structures and apparently abandoned cars.
The lot will be cleared and two-dozen trees removed.
Workers will excavate 5,200 cubic yards of soil, which planning commissioner David Marlatt said could be 700 truckloads. The site will be graded and retaining walls built to enclose the complex.
After the meeting, Brandon Phipps, the city community and economic development director, said it is on track to meet its state housing mandate in less than two years. The mandate is to allow 724 more residences by 2031.
Bridgeway Avenue in Sausalito – circa 1960’s
The panel voted Wednesday to permit the four-story townhouse-style complex at 1755 Bridgeway near Easterby Street. The plan calls for 19 condominiums in two buildings.
Four residences will be sold at a reduced price to moderate-income households to satisfy a state housing mandate. The rest will be market rate.
“This is the first major multi-family housing project in decades,” said Andrew Junius, vice chair of the Planning Commission. “These 19 units are going to fit right in. I’m very, very excited to see it move forward.”
The Ferry terminal in Sausalito which takes workers, tourists and local day trippers to San Francisco
The city’s last project of this scale was Rotary Village, an income-restricted 22-residence project built in 2004.
The developers filed their first application for the project in 2018. It has been scaled back in response to concerns voiced by neighbors and city officials, city planner Kristin Teiche told the commission and audience before recommending its approval.
Planning commissioners noted they could not reduce the project’s size under state laws. The commission unanimously approved the complex after amending some conditions where city staff would revisit guest parking issues and the exterior color and design.
“In the last 30 days, the city of Sausalito has approved 31 units of housing,” Phipps said.
Top photo: The property at 1755 Bridgeway in Sausalito on May 9, 2023. A developer plans to build 19 condominiums there, including four for moderate-income households. (Alan Dep/Marin Independent Journal)
My daughter got me up to speed on the Billy Joel old time (1989) political rock ‘n roll…
I found a video which best encapsulates Billy Joel’s musical stroll through the decades of the second half of the 20th century concluding as the Cold War ended in 1989.
Spreading racist bigoted anti-immigrant slurs. The incendiary appeal to the worst in people has served the Felon Trump well for 10 years.
The latest target of his obscene vitriol is the just officially declared Democrat nominee for the Mayoralty of the Felon Trump’s hometown.
NomineeZohran Mondami is having none of it.
Excerpted from The New York Times 7.1.2025
“The president of the United States just threatened to have me arrested,” Zohran Mamdani said in a response on social media, adding that Mr. Trump’s statements “don’t just represent an attack on our democracy but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows: If you speak up, they will come for you.”
He continued, “We will not accept this intimidation.”
President Trump on Tuesday floated an outlandish claim that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for New York mayor, was an illegal immigrant and threatened to arrest him if he blocked immigration arrests in New York City.
Mr. Mamdani was born in Uganda and has lived in New York City since 1998, when he was 7 years old. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2018. If elected, Mr. Mamdani would also be the first Muslim to become mayor of New York City. There is no credible evidence to suggest Mr. Mamdani is not, or shouldn’t be, a U.S. citizen.
Mr. Trump’s attack on the mayoral candidate echoed language he has long used to lend credibility to falsehoods. “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” he said of Mr. Mamdani. “We’re going to look at everything.”
When a journalist raised the possibility that Mr. Mamdani “will not allow” ICE to make immigration arrests, Mr. Trump replied, “Well then we’ll have to arrest him.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has so far declined to endorse Mr. Mamdani, rallied behind him after Mr. Trump’s attacks.
“I don’t care if you’re the President of the United States,” Ms. Hochul wrote on social media. “If you threaten to unlawfully go after one of our neighbors, you’re picking a fight with 20 million New Yorkers — starting with me.”
Felon Trump’s attempt to open 59M acres of land to logging will severely impact California. There are 20 national forests in the State encompassing 4.4M acres.
The San Francisco Chronicle took a walk through the forest of bureaucratic procedure which will be required. When it’s all over the Felon Trump’s effort to destroy these national irreplaceable treasures may fail.
The powerful environmental lobby is ready.
Excerpted from The San Francisco Chronicle 6.26.2025
“Logging, that’s what this is about,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “They don’t like anything that puts a stop to commercialization and exploitation. … Stripping protections from these last unfragmented national forests risks our drinking water, plants, animals and some of America’s most beautiful wild places.”
In California, 4.4 million acres across 20 national forests are protected by the rule, according to the Forest Service. It’s nearly 5% of the state’s total lands and includes stretches of such heavily visited forests as the Tahoe, Sequoia, Sierra, Stanislaus and Inyo.
Many of the spots that are protected border wilderness areas and national parks.
The Trump administration is seeking to undo a 25-year-old rule that shields nearly a third of U.S. Forest Service lands from roads and logging, including large swaths of California, notably areas near Lake Tahoe, Yosemite and Giant Sequoia National Monument.
The announcement of the repeal kicks off an administrative process that requires a technical review of what the impact would be as well as inviting public comment. This could take months, a year or even longer. If the rule is changed or eliminated, litigation will almost certainly follow.
Environmentalists insist that little good will come of revoking the rule. They say the Trump administration’s promotion of the action as a fire prevention measure is simply propaganda.
Lalo Schifrin receives his honorary Oscar from Clint Eastwood– 2018
Lalo Schifrin, whose soundtrack is an integral part of Bullitt, passed away at the age of 93. The soundtrack to Bullitt was one of his early musical creations.I have enjoyed listening to it for decades.
The title theme from Bullitt composed by Lalo Schifrin
Bullitt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullitt is one of my favorite movies of all time. Set in San Francisco in the late 1960’s the film captures the mood of the City decades before its explosion into a hi-tech and venture capitol international hot spot.
The photography of 1960’s San Francisco, particularly downtown and North Beach are classic.
And the final scene at San Francisco International Airport is gripping.
What made Bullitt memorable is the chase scene which traverses the streets of the City and ends up in the fiery crash outside the City limits.
“Everybody tells me how great the music for the chase in “Bullitt” is. I didn’t do any music for the chase. Four minutes before the chase, where there is a foot chase in the hospital, I build and build the suspense and the tension. And finally when Steve McQueen finds a way to get to the freeway, at that moment the music stops suddenly. I told the director it would be a mistake to continue the music on the chase. What you have is two cars, the villain’s and Bullitt’s, and they have different sounds. Sometimes you put the camera in the corner of one of the hilly streets of San Francisco and you don’t know what car is coming, so the audience should hear the sounds of the car, so they know whether the villain or Bullitt is coming. You know what? It worked.” – Lalo Schifrin interviewed in 2003https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalo_Schifrin
Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 6.29.2025
Lalo Schifrin, the trailblazing composer whose music helped define the sound of 1970s action cinema and turned San Francisco into a sonic landmark for filmgoers around the world, died Thursday of complications from pneumonia. He was 93.
Schifrin’s jazz-inflected, rhythmically daring scores for Steve McQueen’s “Bullitt” (1968) and Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” (1971) helped establish the musical identities of two of the most iconic films ever set in the Bay Area.
With a deft mix of suspense, funk and atmospheric cool, Schifrin’s work elevated car chases down Potrero Hill and showdowns at Aquatic Park into unforgettable cinematic moments.
When Felon Trump leaves the White House he will leave behind a legacy of environmental degradation. Not only in America but around planet Earth.
Felon Trump is the willing handmaiden of Big Oil. He loves the billionaires who have funded his three presidential campaigns and does their dirty work with no prompting whatsoever.
As the Wall Street Journal reports Trump is pulling all the political levers he can “to quash the European Union (EU) flagship environmental rules.“
What infuriates Big Oil the most is the clunkily titled Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). Big Oil companies whose revenue exceeds 522M are being required to “pinpoint and curb human rights violations and the climate impact on their operations and global supply chains” reports the Wall Street Journal.
Big Oil Exxon Mobil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods met with Trump shortly after he took office in January. He told Trump, “he believed CSDDD would bog down U.S. Companies in Europe.”
That was all Trump needed to hear and he is now whining about “unfair regulatory burdens placed on American companies.”And doing everything he can to kowtow to his Big Oil benefactors.
Excerpted from the Wall Street Journal 6.28.2025
Oil executives enlisted President Trump in fights against clean-car rules, drilling restraints and climate laws from New York to California. Now, they have won his support in their effort to quash Europe’s flagship environment rules.Â
American oil chieftains and their lobbyists have urged Trump and his cabinet members to use ongoing trade talks with the European Union to push for a rollback of two major climate laws in the European Green Deal. Trump officials have pressed their EU counterparts to scale back those laws in recent negotiations, according to people familiar with the matter.
The administration’s willingness to give priority to the interests of the oil executives—alongside those of several other industries—in a dispute with a vital trading partner shows how influential they have become in Trump’s second term. Oil donors sent millions of dollars to Trump’s third presidential campaign last year, and the administration in turn has tried to shore up demand for their products and rescinded U.S. environmental rules.
Lee and Liz display a locally grown healthy brussel sprouts bunch. Courtesy of the SF Marin Food Bank
Liz and Lee Heidhues 6.27.2025
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – APRIL 20: Volunteers assemble some of 1600 food bags that SF-Marin Food Bank distributes at a pop-up pantry at Bayview Opera House in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, April 20, 2020. Work furloughs and layoffs created by coronavirus shelter-in-place orders are driving thousands to seek food assistance. (Scott Strazzante/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Message to San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan – Budget Committee Chairperson
Connie
We just learned today, June 27, 2025. the Mayor and BOS have cut funding for the SF Marin Food Bank.
The Health and Human Services AgencyHSA is now administrator of the program.
The weekly distribution days yearly have been cut by 13 percent (seven times)
This will have a serious nutritional impact on the voters in your district
As budget Chair you could have stopped this take away from people of an essential human need. Food.
Lee Heidhues
Notice distributed to Food Pantry Participants – 6.27.2025
Doing further research I learned, reading an article in the Marin Independent Journal, that the curtailment of SF Marin Food Bank activities was public knowledge in 2023. See attached article published in November 2023.
A sampling of the healthy vegetables from the SF Marin Food Bank
While the article talks only about food distribution in Marin, the area the IJ serves, it should have been obvious to San Francisco that it would not be immune from the cutbacks.
San Francisco officials should have taken action to ensure that there would be no cutbacks. Instead, the consumers who rely on this essential service were only provided with this disturbing news at literally the last minute.
Harvey Lim grabs the bell pepper supplied by the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank in the Richmond District on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023, in San Francisco.
It’s a muggy summer early evening at the Stade Charlety in Paris and the world of track and field was tuned in to the starting blocks in anticipation of Faith Kipyegon and her attempt to crash the four minute mile barrier for women.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_Kipyegon
Track and field isn’t sexy enough for most Americans. It’s the brute force of football which titillates the carnivorous American.
These hulky overweight muscle bound jocks and fans need to take a look at what athleticism is all about.
Faith Kipyegon ran a 4:06:42 mile. The world’s record for a woman runner
The 31-year-old Kenyan has spoiled running fans around the world time and again for over a decade. She’s set two world records, won three-straight Olympic 1,500-meter gold medals, and earned six World Championship medals. One could rightfully look at her career and say that she didn’t need to accomplish anything else to cement her legacy.
But who other than Kipyegon would be confident enough to take on the pressure? To carry the load of trying to eclipse the “impossible barrier” that people once thought no human could surpass? Of course she would be the one to dare to try. Kipyegon would become the first woman to chase after a sub-4-minute mile.
Kenya’s Faith Kipyegon (R) reacts at the end of her race after taking part in the “Breaking4” event, in an attempt to become the first woman to run a mile in under four minutes, at Stade Charlety on June 26, 2025 in Paris. Triple Olympic champion Faith Kipyegon of Kenya fell well short in her bid to become the first woman to run a sub-four minute mile on June 26. Aided by wavelength technology and 13 pacers, 11 male and two women, Kipyegon clocked 4min 06.42sec over 1.6km in perfect conditions. (Photo by EMMA DA SILVA / AFP) (Photo by EMMA DA SILVA/AFP via Getty Images)
Over 2,000 men have run a mile under 4 minutes in the years since Roger Bannister first achieved it in 1954. No woman has ever come closer than Kipyegon, who set the mile world record at 4:07.64 in Monaco two years ago and ran a 1,500-meter world record of 3:49.04 last year. And just by committing to the sub-4-minute attempt and seeing it through on Thursday, Kipyegon continued down a historic path that she’s been paving throughout her whole career–even though she came up well short of the goal time.
Watch Faith Kipyegon break her own World Record for the woman’s mile. 6.26.2025
The barons of the business world and the Felon Donald Trump are beside themselves angsting out over the prospect that a genuine, intelligent, charismatic newcomer could be the next Mayor of New York City.
In his first comments since Tuesday’s mayoral primary, President Trump called Zohran Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic” while insulting his appearance, voice and intelligence. He added that Mamdani’s ascent was “a big moment in the History of our Country!”
The sense of the corporate freak out is already on full display in the mainstream media.
“It’s officially hot commie summer,” Dan Loeb, chief executive of hedge fund Third Point, and a major Andrew Cuomo backer, wrote on X.
Red baiting the NYC Mayoral candidate
The Red Scare label is sure to be the framework for the next several months. The corporate world, the Republicans and mainstream media work overtime to obliterate the candidacy of Zohran Mamdani. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zohran_Mamdani
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal 6.25.2025
On Wednesday morning, the world’s epicenter of capitalism woke up to find it might soon have a socialist mayor.
Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s stunning win over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic primary for mayor shocked Wall Street. Some of the world’s most influential and powerful financiers were left grasping to understand what Mamdani’s victory would mean for their industry—and whether they would leave the city.
Will Zohran Mamdani have the last laugh next November?
“It’s officially hot commie summer,” Dan Loeb, chief executive of hedge fund Third Point, and a major Cuomo backer, wrote on X.
Mamdani’s campaign was, up until a few weeks ago, a long shot. On Polymarket, which successfully predicted the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, Cuomo had odds as high as 92.5% on May 27. Negative ads against Mamdani paid for by Wall Street-funded super political-action committees, as well as also-ran candidate Whitney Tilson—himself an investor—blanketed airwaves and filled residents’ mailboxes.
Mamdani’s platform includes increasing taxes on those making more than $1 million a year. He has said he would make the city more affordable by freezing rents on rent-stabilized apartments, investing $70 billion in publicly subsidized housing, providing free bus service and opening government-operated grocery stores.
Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani protesting the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.
Lee's Perspective 