The only way anyone would believe this is to hear the tape. Well, the Washington Post obtained a copy of Trump’s frantic plea with Georgia election officials.

The reality that this wannabe Despot will be gone in 17 days is beyond fantastic.

Excerpted from Washington Post 1.3.2021

President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.

 

The California Department of Corrections and the San Francisco District Attorney are being excoriated after a parolee driving a stolen vehicle ran down and killed two women in downtown San Francisco on New Year’s Eve.

The political knives are out in full force in San Francisco.

Put the knives back in the drawer. The sad reality is that two women are dead. No amount of over heated rhetoic will change that reality.

San Francisco Chronicle 1.2.2021

Hanako Abe seemed excited about what the new year might bring.

“#PeaceOut2020. Physically apart, yet closer than EVER to family and friends this year,” the Japanese-born San Francisco resident wrote New Year’s Eve on her Instagram page, accompanied by a selfie with a beaming, wide smile. “Also taught me so much of perseverance, gratitude and self-love. We are resilient.”

But Abe, 27, would not live to see the new year. Later that day, she was one of two people who were fatally struck and killed walking in San Francisco. Also killed was Elizabeth Platt, 60.

Authorities said the driver of the car that hit Platt and Abe, 45-year-old Troy Ramon McAlister, was intoxicated and driving a stolen gray Honda when he hit the two women on Mission Street about 4 p.m. Thursday. He fled the scene and was arrested by police who found him hiding in a nearby commercial building, authorities said.

McAlister declined to be interviewed at a San Francisco jail, where he is being held on charges including manslaughter, hit and run, burglary, resisting arrest and driving under the influence.

The deaths of Platt and Abe ignited a furor directed at San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, whom critics have accused of not holding criminals accountable.

Scene of two New Year’s Eve deaths at Second and Market Streets in San Francisco

McAlister was on parole for robbery at the time of the crash, having been released from state prison in April. In the months between his release and the crash, McAlister was arrested several times, on charges including suspicion of car theft, possession of burglary tools and violating the terms of his parole. But he remained free rather than being sent back to prison.

Just before the crash, police said, McAlister committed a burglary nearby.

The tragedy has led to finger-pointing among law enforcement agencies. Boudin said his office referred those cases to state parole agents instead of charging McAlister — but conceded Friday that it “was a mistake to think parole supervision would be adequate.”

A spokesperson for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, though, said the agency’s parole office “followed all procedures after these incidents, including conducting investigations and making appropriate referrals for the individual.”

“None of the parolee’s arrests following his 2020 release have yet to result in the filing of criminal charges by the district attorney,” the corrections spokesperson said.

Without mentioning Boudin or the District Attorney’s Office by name, San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said in a statement that “we must all be held equally accountable for the decisions we make, because they can have serious implications for the safety of those we serve.”

“San Franciscans deserve nothing less,” Scott said, “and that’s what they’re demanding from all of us in the criminal justice system.”

Abe had worked as an analyst for commercial real estate firm JLL since 2018, according to her LinkedIn page. She graduated from the University of Central Arkansas in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and previously attended Campbellsville University in Kentucky.

She volunteered frequently, including at the Arkansas Foodbank, as a referee at robotics competitions and as a judge for youth art competitions, her LinkedIn page said.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Victims-of-fatal-S-F-hit-and-run-crash-identified-15841967.php

The WSJ is to be commended for this editorial. I can hardly wait until Messrs. Ossoff and Warnock are victorious. Progressive economic and social policies will be implemented. Competent and progressive cabinet members and appointees will be in place. Congress will look after the People. Progressive Judges will join the Bench. I hope the WSJ is proven correct in its prediction. It will be a fantastic political and economic 2021 for the 99 percent. Yes!!!!!

By Wall Street Journal Editorial Board 1.1.2021

What’s at Stake in Georgia

Here’s the difference between a Democratic and Republican Senate this year.

What’s the difference in policy between a Senate run by Chuck Schumer with 50 Democrats and one run by Mitch McConnell with 51 or 52 Republicans? That’s the question that matters for the next two years, so it’s worth explaining the stakes with realistic specificity in Tuesday’s Georgia Senate runoffs.

Start with control of committees, which would shift markedly leftward. Republicans would lose their ability to investigate issues like FBI abuse and Hunter Biden’s China dealings. A GOP Senate is likely to approve most of Mr. Biden’s cabinet picks, but Democrats would whisk through even controversial nominees like Neera Tanden at the White House budget office or Xavier Becerra at HHS. There would be no check on judicial nominees.

Georgia voters

Democratic chairmen would include Bernie Sanders, who would try to gut the Pentagon at the Budget Committee. Sherrod Brown at Banking and Elizabeth Warren on the financial institutions subcommittee would try to change rules to steer lending and capital to their priorities and punish lending to fossil-fuel companies.

Ron Wyden, who would run the tax-writing Finance Committee, wants to tax gains in capital assets each year even if they aren’t sold. The Judiciary Committee would go to Dick Durbin, who after having deposed Dianne Feinstein would target conservative nonprofits and think tanks for political attack.

Congress needs only a simple majority to repeal Trump Administration regulations under the Congressional Review Act. Say goodbye to the new rule speeding environmental reviews on public works. A 50-vote Senate (with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking ties) also guarantees a huge tax increase since current rules allow a simple majority to pass a budget.

That probably means an increase in the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%, plus higher rates on individuals, capital gains and dividends. Democrats will need the money to finance the trillions of dollars in additional spending they want. Buoyant financial markets don’t seem to have discounted this possibility, and the tax increases are sure to be retroactive to Jan. 1, 2021. Forget about extending the temporary provisions of the 2017 tax reform.

Some of our friends think Democrats couldn’t blow up the 60-vote legislative filibuster rule with a mere 50 votes. Their confidence hangs on West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, who says he supports the filibuster. But imagine the political and media pressure on Mr. Manchin if Republicans use the filibuster to block Joe Biden’s agenda. He’s always been a loyal party man when it really matters.

If the filibuster stays, Mr. Biden will need to compromise to get GOP votes for an infrastructure bill, new ObamaCare subsidies or repealing Section 230 on tech liability. A public option on health care is probably out of reach, as would be much of his climate agenda.

But if the filibuster goes, so do bipartisan restraints. Statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico become possible, with four new Senate seats to cement a Democratic majority. Mr. Biden’s aggressive union agenda has a chance, including overtime pay mandates and easier organizing of franchise chains. So do nationwide mandates for ballot harvesting and mail-in voting, a ban on arbitration in business contracts, price controls on drugs, huge subsidies for green energy and perhaps a carbon tax. We could go on.

Nancy Pelosi’s narrower majority in the House might constrain some of this. But she proved in 2010 with ObamaCare that she is willing to sacrifice swing-district Members to pass progressive priorities. She has also suggested this will be her last term as Speaker, which means she’ll care more about her legislative legacy than keeping the House in 2022.

All of this is what the candidates should be debating in Georgia. But President Trump has obscured the stakes with his claims of November vote fraud and demand for $2,000 Covid checks. The irony is that if Democrats take the Senate, Mr. Trump will have made it much easier for Mr. Biden and Mrs. Pelosi to repeal the President’s achievements. The consequences would echo far into the future.

Top photo – Democrat Senate candidate Jon Ossoff

It’s a genuinely sad day in San Francisco history.  

We live close by the historic Cliff House and walk by it regularly.  We ate dinner there on several occasions. It was always a great experience.

The Cliff House has been a life long presence. Now what the fog, wind and climate could not do has been done by the Federal government. Its unwillingness to sign a lease with the restaurant owners signaled the end of the landmark Cliff House.  

It’s just more collateral damage inflicted on this country by Donald Trump.

NBC Bay Area 12.31.2020

The Cliff House restaurant in San Francisco closed its doors for good Thursday after 157 years, and the iconic sign atop the building was removed, much to the chagrin of dozens of revelers who gathered at the Bay Area landmark.

Workers removed the sign one letter at a time Thursday, the restaurant’s official last day of operation, though it has been closed for months because of coronavirus restrictions. Proprietors Dan and Mary Hountalas have said the building will no longer be a restaurant but instead a federal office building, according to their sources.

The permanent closure can be attributed in part to the coronavirus pandemic, which has restricted operations for much of the past year to takeout service. But the restaurant also has been mired in a contract dispute with the National Parks Service over concessions.

The owners say a 20-year contract expired in June 2018, and since then, the parks service has issued one 6-month contract and two consecutive one-year contracts.

The last contract expired Thursday.

The Cliff House no more. December 31, 2020

The closure put 180 employees out of work, the owners said, adding that they “attempted to institute takeout service in early June but after 10 weeks could not continue to sustain the unbearable losses associated with takeout.”

The historic restaurant has been operating since 1863, and it is one of San Francisco’s legendary landmarks.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/cliff-house-restaurants-last-day-to-be-marked-by-removal-of-iconic-sign-in-sf/2434686/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_House,_San_Francisco

Photos – Lee Heidhues

 

 

”Must be from a real estate agent,” Renee says when a mysterious videotape arrives on the doorstep. Probably not: the tape spies on Fred and Renee when they thought they were alone.

No. “Eerie Visions with a Mood of Menace” is not a retrospective on The Year of the Pandemic.

It is the title for New York Times columnist Janet Maslin’s review of the 1997 David Lynch film “Lost Highway.”  An appropriate way to look at this horrific year is to watch this disturbing over the top piece of cinematic Art. 

If watching the film is not on your New Year’s “do” list I invite  you to take a listen to the soundtrack. It is bizarre as the film.  Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor, Lou Reed and Marilyn Manson are part of the eclectic brew in this soundtrack delight.

A link is attached at the conclusion of the article along with a Wikipedia look at Lost Highway

New York Times – Janet Maslin 2.21.1997

SOME artists have to strain for the shock effects that leave a spectator haunted and unnerved. Not David Lynch. The unnatural is second nature for Mr. Lynch, whose twisted, libidinous imagery yields nightmare films of such strange and menacing flair. At their evil best, which is also their worst, they leave you in no great hurry to be alone in the dark.

David Lynch

”It’s like when you are sitting alone, you sometimes have the feeling that there are different parts of you,” Mr. Lynch has said, explaining the state of mind summoned by his new film. ”There are certain things that you can do, and there are certain things that you would never do unless there was a part of you that took over.” That’s reason either to see Mr. Lynch’s coolly ominous, attention-getting ”Lost Highway” or to dial 911.

”Lost Highway,” an elaborate hallucination that could never be mistaken for the work of anyone else, finds Mr. Lynch echoing the perversity of ”Blue Velvet,” the earlier film of his that this most closely resembles. Both films share an eerie, mocking tone and some of the same aural and visual vocabulary. (Foreboding sounds like a dull roar. Certain walls have a womblike reddish hue. Women excite a furious mix of lust and loathing. Drivers hurtle down the middle of dark roadways, racing along the yellow line.)

Never again is a Lynch film liable to be as radically original or disturbing as ”Blue Velvet”; this director repeats himself too readily for that. But ”Lost Highway” holds sinister interest of its own. Much less shrill than ”Wild at Heart” or ”Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” the only other Lynch features since the 1986 ”Blue Velvet,” this one constructs an intricate puzzle out of dream logic, lurid eroticism, violence, shifting identities and fierce intimations of doom.

In describing the film’s deliberate ellipses and the weird, unexplained transformation of its main character, comparisons to Kafka and Lewis Carroll are invited. A more useful point of reference may just be ”The Wizard of Oz,” since there’s no indication that Mr. Lynch, for all his skill in manipulating this story’s strangeness, is any less baffled by his film’s conundrums than the audience will be. And he allows a too-deliberate pace to lessen the tight grip this material needs. When exploring the scarier realms of the subconscious, it’s best never to let the viewer get the upper hand.

Patricia Arquette

The plot, a conversation piece to set the Internet buzzing: Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his red-haired wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette), are essentially strangers. Everything about Renee leaves Fred alienated in the extreme. He feels humiliated. He can’t interest her sexually. He doesn’t trust her, and for good reason (everything about Ms. Arquette’s sexy, deadpan delivery suggests new frontiers in marital treachery). When Fred, a musician, goes out to play at a jazz club, Renee says she will stay home and read. No heroine of Mr. Lynch’s has ever looked ready to curl up with a good book.

”Must be from a real estate agent,” Renee says when a mysterious videotape arrives on the doorstep. Probably not: the tape spies on Fred and Renee when they thought they were alone.

It doesn’t take much more of this for Fred to be ready for a crackup. It happens when he goes to a party and meets the film’s ghoul, played in truly frightening fashion by Robert Blake in whiteface. (Mr. Lynch’s tricky humor, manifest in many of the film’s smaller touches, provides background music that sounds like the pop song ”Spooky” to welcome Mr. Blake, who is exactly that.)

A cellular phone and a video camera are all it takes to turn Mr. Blake’s character into the scariest screen gnome since the red-cloaked dwarf in ”Don’t Look Now.” Next thing Fred knows, Renee is a bloody corpse and he himself is on Death Row without a clue about what exactly has happened. The film enjoys its well-timed moments of deliberate confusion, even though audience patience will eventually wear thin.

In jail, Fred suddenly changes so greatly that he becomes a young garage mechanic named Pete Dayton. Pete, played by Balthazar Getty with the same guarded, desperate manner as Mr. Pullman’s, hasn’t killed anybody, and so he is entitled to be set free. Pete’s half of the film mirrors and distorts Fred’s story, and then it introduces Ms. Arquette a second time. Now she’s the blond moll of a gangster named Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia). And she has become a much hotter number, sexually desperate for Fred/Pete.

The fact that both Ms. Arquettes show up in the same photograph, or that she repeats some identical dialogue in both incarnations, is the sort of detail that ”Lost Highway” invites its audience to ponder. A structure that begins and ends at the same moment in time, with a debt to the Mobius strip (or to ”Pulp Fiction”), is another intriguing feature. But the film has more of these touches than it has explanations. Eventually it raises the overwhelming possibility that nobody is entirely in the driver’s seat.

As the film moves closer to its vision of oblivion, it presents Mr. Eddy as a leering sadist (a Lynch fixture) who traffics in pornography and seamy thrills. Mr. Eddy’s transgressions are supposedly perverse, but the movie exploits Ms. Arquette as frankly as he does. As ever, Mr. Lynch brings much more gusto than is absolutely necessary to the crueler, raunchier, more misogynist aspects of his material. It says something about the film’s target audience that the rock stars Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (on the soundtrack) and Marilyn Manson (playing a porn actor) are part of this show.

The film’s subtly fascinating aural track credits Mr. Lynch for sound design and once again employs the wonderfully unsettling music of Angelo Badalamenti. (It’s worth the extra trouble to see this film in a theater with decent speakers.) The screenplay is by Mr. Lynch and Barry Gifford, who wrote the novel ”Wild at Heart.” Another of his books, ”Night People,” included the phrase ”lost highway.” Those two words apparently gave Mr. Lynch all the inspiration he needed.

”Lost Highway” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes violence, profanity, supernatural strangeness and graphically rendered sexual situations.

LOST HIGHWAY

Directed by David Lynch; written by Mr. Lynch and Barry Gifford; director of photography, Peter Deming; edited by Mary Sweeney; music by Angelo Badalamenti; production designer, Patricia Norris; produced by Deepak Nayar, Tom Sternberg and Ms. Sweeney; released by October Films. Running time: 135 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Bill Pullman (Fred Madison), Patricia Arquette (Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield), Robert Blake (Mystery Man), Balthazar Getty (Pete Dayton), Robert Loggia (Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent) and Marilyn Manson (Porno Star No. 1).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Highway_(film)

https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk032yXr0aQWvsTQDe9S9_0wohODspw%3A1609383022142&ei=bjztX8qUCJaS0PEP0_az2AQ&q=lost+highway+soundtrack&oq=lost+highway+soundtrack&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQDFAAWABgi1toAHABeACAAQCIAQCSAQCYAQCqAQdnd3Mtd2l6&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwjKg976mvftAhUWCTQIHVP7DEsQ4dUDCA0

 

 

The Chinese government in a brutal act of suppressing the media has jailed a citizen journalist. What was her alleged crime?

Zhang Zhan exposed the government’s botched response to the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan. For shining a light on government incompetence Ms. Zhan will spend the next four years in a Chinese prison. She is in the midst of a hunger strike and may very well perish.

What the Chinese government has done is criminal and an assault on human rights.

Excerpted from The New York Times 12.28.2020

Zhang Zhan, 37, a former lawyer, is the first known person to be tried for challenging the Chinese government’s narrative about the coronavirus pandemic.

Excerpted from The New York Times 12.28.2020

A Chinese court on Monday sentenced a citizen journalist who documented the early days of the coronavirus outbreak to four years in prison, sending a stark warning to those challenging the government’s official narrative of the pandemic.

Zhang. Zhang’s trial, at the Shanghai Pudong New District People’s Court on Monday, lasted less than three hours. The official charge on which she was convicted was “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a vague charge commonly used against critics of the government. Prosecutors had initially recommended a sentence between four and five years.

Ms. Zhang appeared for the trial in a wheelchair, one of her lawyers, Zhang Ke Ke, wrote on Monday on WeChat, a messaging app. Mr. Zhang had written in a post a few days earlier that she had lost a significant amount of weight and was almost unrecognizable from even just a few weeks before.

Ms. Zhang barely spoke during the hearing, except to say that people’s speech should not be censored, wrote Mr. Zhang, who is not related to Ms. Zhang.

One of Ms. Zhang’s lawyers, Zhang Ke Ke, outside the Shanghai Pudong New District People’s Court on Monday.Credit…Leo Ramirez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Zhang Zhan, the 37-year-old citizen journalist, was the first known person to face trial for chronicling China’s outbreak. Ms. Zhang, a former lawyer, had traveled to Wuhan from her home in Shanghai in February, at the height of China’s outbreak, to see the toll from the virus in the city where it first emerged. For several months she shared videos that showed crowded hospitals and residents worrying about their incomes.

 

In China, the news media is tightly controlled by the state. Some citizen journalists try to offer more independent reporting, which they post on the internet and social media platforms. But their work is often censored and they are routinely punished.

Ms. Zhang was fiercely critical of the government in her dispatches, asking why it had tried to silence whistle-blowers about the virus and questioning whether Wuhan’s lockdown had been enacted too harshly.

It just boggles my mind that Americans blithely ignore the reality that over 300,000 people have died this year during the Pandemic.

The grim reaper reality has yet to sink in.

Americans insist on pursing their normal lifestyle as if the Pandemic never hit this country.

I’m shocked. I shouldn’t be.

Art above – Liz Heidhues

Excerpted from Washington Post 12.28.2020

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/air-travel-hits-pandemic-record-amid-surging-infections-and-hospitalizations/2020/12/28/c9d27114-494d-11eb-a9d9-1e3ec4a928b9_story.html

Acts of wanton racist violence and vandalism in America are all too common.

It is even more disturbing and disconcerting when such cowardly acts take place in the so called “progressive” Oakland-Berkeley-San Francisco community.

Sick and twisted people are free to spew their toxic acts in any place at any time.

San Francisco Chronicle 12.27.2020

After Breonna Taylor sculpture smashed in Oakland, artist denounces ‘racist intimidation’

Police are investigating an act of vandalism against a bust in downtown Oakland honoring Breonna Taylor.

The ceramic sculpture, which was erected in Latham Square just two weeks ago with the phrase “Say Her Name Breonna Taylor” on a plaque, had sections smashed off Saturday, artist Leo Carson said.

Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was shot by Louisville police when officers entered her home in March during a botched drug raid. Protests spread across the country in the name of Taylor and George Floyd, as well as other Black Americans killed by police.

Carson, who lives in Oakland, got tipped off to the vandalism on Saturday and headed to the scene. He found the damaged bust, its broken pieces placed back on the pedestal.

“I was really devastated emotionally. I was sad and angry,” he said. “Really, it’s an attack on Breonna Taylor and Black Lives Matter and it’s racist intimidation.”

An Oakland police spokeswoman said the department is “aware of the incident regarding the vandalism of a bust honoring Breonna Taylor.” A police report has been filed and the incident is under investigation, police said.

“I was a participant in the Black Lives Matter protests and inspired to put my artist skills to work,” Carson said of what inspired the artwork.

“I will be repairing it, piecing it back together as best I can, but the damage will be visible,” he said.

Carson has created a GoFundMe account to raise money to have the bust cast in bronze and said any excess funds will be donated to Taylor’s family.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/After-Breonna-Taylor-sculpture-smashed-in-15830875.php

Trump’s abhorrent  What about me?  is the total responsibility of his Republican enablers beginning with Mitch McConnell.

The tawdry and reprehensible antics of Trump and the Republican party were best summed up by a fellow Republican earlier this week.

Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a critic of the president, noted that,

“The Republicans are getting punked again by the guy they shilled for, who does not care about their interests or any principle they stand for,” Mr. Steele said.

“He made a four-minute video in the White House ranting about things his own administration did, and meanwhile some mom is trying to figure out how she can avoid eviction and get Christmas presents under the tree for her kids. That’s the heartbreaking part.”

Excerpted from New York Times 12.26.2020

WASHINGTON — Expanded unemployment benefits were set to lapse for millions of struggling Americans on Saturday, a day after President Trump expressed more criticism of a $900 billion pandemic relief bill that was awaiting his signature and would extend them.

Mr. Trump blindsided lawmakers on Tuesday when he hinted he may veto the measure, which he decided at the last minute was unsatisfactory. The most pressing issue prompted by the president’s delay was the fate of unemployment benefits. At least a temporary lapse in those benefits is now inevitable.

The sprawling economic relief package that Congress passed with overwhelming bipartisan support would extend the amount of time that people can collect unemployment benefits until March and revive supplemental unemployment benefits for millions of Americans at $300 a week on top of the usual state benefit.

If Mr. Trump signs the bill on Saturday, states will still need time to reprogram their computer systems to account for the new law, according to Michele Evermore of the National Employment Law Project, but unemployed workers would still be able to claim the benefits.

Graphic – Deutsche Welle 12.26.2020

Further delays could prove more costly. States cannot pay out benefits for weeks that begin before the bill is signed, meaning that if the president does not sign the bill by Saturday, benefits will not restart until the first week of January. But they will still end in mid-March, effectively trimming the extension to 10 weeks from 11.

The country is also facing a looming government shutdown on Tuesday and the expiration of a moratorium on evictions at the end of the year because of the president’s refusal to sign the bill.

Jack and I took a midday holiday walk just inside the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) as the rain began to fall on December 25.

So quiet, peaceful and beautiful.

Photos – Lee Heidhues