Providing police misconduct records to the Public is a basic Civil Right in a democratic society. The police and their handlers need a consistent reminder of this fact.

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 2.9.2019

A new California law requiring cities to unseal police misconduct records applies to past records as well as new ones, a judge decided Friday in denying injunction requests from several police unions fighting to prevent the release of pre-2019 records.

Kathleen Guneratne, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, said that police unions were well aware of the effects of SB1421 as it was making its way through the Legislature, and unions fought it then, too.

She said there essentially is no “retroactivity” argument, and that public records laws apply to any documents currently maintained by a government agency.

Guneratne called the unions’ court battles “a last-ditch effort to subvert the will of the people and the statute.”

Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge Charles Treat’s decision is the first in a wave of lawsuits across the state by unions that say the state’s transparency law, SB1421, should not force cities and counties to release police misconduct records created before the law took effect on Jan. 1.

Six law enforcement unions in Contra Costa County — in Concord, Richmond, Antioch, Martinez and Walnut Creek, as well as the Contra Costa County Deputy Sheriff’s Association — sought preliminary injunctions to bar officials in their cities and county from releasing pre-2019 personnel records. Several law enforcement associations in Southern California have filed similar suits in their own counties.

Treat said the attorneys for the unions in Contra Costa County failed to convince him the law should apply only to new documents. He denied their requests for preliminary injunctions.

The California Supreme Court has already declined to weigh in on the matter, after the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Employees’ Benefit Association filed a similar suit with the high court.

This leaves the cases to be handled by local courts. Treat was the first to officially rule one way or another, but his order doesn’t set a precedent for other counties.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Contra-Costa-County-judge-rejects-police-13602945.php

I started reading Michael Grothaus 2016 debut novel Epiphany Jones.

My first exposure to this novel came when I read an article in Foreign Affairs about Deepfakes. My curiosity was aroused. I researched Deepfakes on Wikipedia. Wikipedia mentioned the novel Epiphany Jones in discussing Deepfakes in literature. Interestingly, Epiphany Jones is unavailable at the San Francisco Public Library despite its popularity with critics and readers.

You have to love this WSJ hit piece. While striving to be snarky and cutting, the writer unwittingly gives a lot of love to Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez. The misogynist white male dominated Trumpster Republican Party is seeing the future and doesn’t like the view.

This columnist is entertaining.

Excerpt from Kimberly Strassel OpEd- Wall Street Journal 2.8.2019

The Republican Party has a secret weapon for 2020. It’s especially effective because it’s stealthy: The Democrats seem oblivious to its power. And the GOP needn’t lift a finger for it to work. All Republicans have to do is sit back and watch 29-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez . . . exist.

Nice. The Daily Political Correctness Report

The Sporting News 2.7.2019

The disabled list as we know it is no more.

The DL will now be known as the “injured list” according to an ESPN report, which cited a source familiar with the MLB’s plan.

The change is due to the league’s concern that the term “‘disabled’ falsely conflates disabilities with injuries and an inability to participate in sports,” ESPN reported.

Despite the name change, the rules of the DL will remain the same, the report said.

The right to Choice should be non-negotiable. Why is it that men continue to make Victorian Age decisions truncating the rights of Women? America is so backwards when it comes to a Woman’s right to protect her body. I’m ashamed and embarrassed.  In this case it is FOUR men on the Supreme Court who would have restricted the rights of Women. These men have issues!!! Grow up!!!

The Guardian 2.8.2019

Justices vote not to allow enforcement of new regulations on abortion clinics, in case testing conservative court’s view.

The US supreme court is stopping Louisiana from enforcing new regulations on abortion clinics, in a test of the conservative court’s views on abortion rights.

The justices say by a 5-4 vote that they will not allow the state to put into effect a law that requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four liberals in putting a hold on the law, pending a full review of the case.

The four more conservative justices, including Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, would have allowed it to take effect. Kavanaugh wrote a dissent explaining his vote.

The law is very similar to a Texas measure the justices struck down three years ago. Roberts dissented in that case.

The analysis provides a sobering journey through the  linkage between Bolshevism, Judaism and the  20th century rise of anti-Semitism with its catastrophic results.

Review by Christopher R Browning – New York Review of Books 2.21.2019

A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism

One of the great merits of Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe is its demonstration of how Europe’s most pervasive and powerful twentieth-century manifestation of anti-Semitic thought—the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—emerged before the rise of National Socialism and has continued to have a curious life long after the Holocaust and the defeat of Nazi Germany. Hanebrink’s approach is not to repeat what he considers an error of the interwar era—the futile attempt to refute a myth on the basis of historical facts and statistical data. Trying to discredit powerful political myths with mere facts, as we know all too well today, is a frustrating endeavor. Thus Hanebrink seeks instead to understand the historical background and the “cultural logic” of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—how it functioned and morphed through different phases.

The poster:  de Jude

Behind the Enemy Powers: The Jew’; a poster created by the Reich Propaganda Administration and displayed in the Grand Anti-Masonic Exhibition in Nazi-occupied Belgrade, which focused on the alleged Jewish-Communist-Masonic conspiracy to achieve world domination, 1941

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/02/21/fake-threat-of-jewish-communism/

Dystopian and bizarre End to Beginning.

Anterograde Amnesia is a focus of the story.

Memento, released in 2000, begins at its conclusion and travels backward in time to the beginning.

Trump supporters have  Anterograde Amnesia when traveling backward 2016 through 2008.

Director Christopher Nolan (“Batman”) should have made more films of this genre.

The David Julyan soundtrack is eerie.

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

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