SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 1.3 2026
Donald Trump the flatulent Felon has launched an attack on Venezuela.
The unhinged machismo of this punk wannabe strongman is a pitiful display of his failed manhood.
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 1.7.2026 UPDATED
It is nearly five years since Donald Trump led the insurrection and tried to violently overturn the November 2020 election.
The place Trump belongs. Prison
As rebellion flared up in the nation’s capitol America failed its biggest test. Putting this criminal insurrectionist back in the White House a year ago. He should be in prison.
The American sheep like people continue to suffer from Amnesia and are all too willing to let this abhorrent event fade into the historic background.
On this New Year’s Day I went into the PBS FRONTLINE archives. Resting there for all who care to view is the graphic documentary originally broadcast on January 26, 2021. Reasonable people thought this criminal would land in jail. Wrong.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/trumps-american-carnage/
There is one Hero amongst the somnolent lazy American public. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Smith_(lawyer)
Excerpted from The New York Times 12.31.2025
Jack Smith, the former special counsel, defended his decision to twice indict President Trump, accusing him of “exploiting” violence on Jan. 6, 2021, to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, according to a transcribed interview released by House Republicans Wednesday.
Mr. Smith, a former prosecutor vilified by Mr. Trump as a partisan, spent much of the eight-hour, closed-door session on Dec. 17 before the House Judiciary Committee rebutting a range of Republican claims, including the accusation that he had improperly obtained metadata on phone calls involving Trump-allied lawmakers.
“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power,” Mr. Smith said, according to the transcript.
In the interview, Mr. Smith sought to undermine the narrative that the president was an innocent figure persecuted by partisans who weaponized federal law enforcement, a core belief among many Trump supporters.
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 12.18.2025
How tone deaf is the Felon President Trump. A totally cruel malevolent luddite with no concept of the danger fossil fuels increasingly threatens the longevity of Planet Earth.
The rainstorm season is about to hit San Francisco.
Out of some warped sense of political animus Trump wants to dismantle and destroy one of the premier weather monitoring agencies. The National Center for Atmospheric Research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Atmospheric_Research
Why? It’s based in Blue Colorado. An American State which has vigorously battled the Felon Trump. It is mind boggling that the spineless Republicans continue to bow down before this abhorrent man.
Excerpted from The Hill 12.18.2025
A Democratic senator involved in the negotiations over passing a five-bill package of appropriations bills before Christmas said that Donald Trump’s attempt to dismantle a premier weather and climate center based in Boulder, Colo., was like a “stick of dynamite” that exploded any chance of a bipartisan breakthrough on spending.
A potential deal to fund large swaths of the federal government, including the Departments of Defense and Health and Human Services, collapsed on Thursday night after Colorado senators demanded that Congress stop President Trump’s efforts to dismantle a key climate agency.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a leading Democratic voice on climate issue, called the research a “global crown jewel of science” that “helps us learn a great deal about whether which matters a great deal to everyone.”
Colorado Sens. Michael Bennet (D) and John Hickenlooper (D) objected to moving forward with the so-called minibus spending package that, if enacted into law, would result in 85 to 90 percent of the federal government being funding through September of 2026.
But Bennet and Hickenlooper took the lead in bringing the package to a dead halt by objecting to an agreement to set up date and amendment votes on the Senate floor.
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 12.13.2025
I have been listening to the Rolling Stones since I bought my first of many Stones LPs ‘Out of our Heads’ in 1965.
Stones guitarist Keith Richards has gone from rock ‘n roll bad boy drug addict to being featured in the Wall Street Journal.
Written up in the WSJ the reporter talks about the Stones affinity for Chess Records House of Blues in Chicago and how the music of Black blues artists influenced the Stones creativity.
The Stones and the reciprocal love from House of Blues was memorialized in the 1997 CD ‘Paint it Blue – Songs of the Rolling Stones’. 13 Stones songs performed by Black blues artists.
I think the best piece on the CD is Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown cover for Ventilator Blues.
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal 12.13.2025 – Rich Cohen
Solving the mystery of the guitarist’s longevity may be our best hope of aging gracefully.
In America, the average man can expect to live 75.8 years. Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts had gone five years past that and was still playing for audiences shortly before he died in 2021. Stones founder Brian Jones died young in his swimming pool, but several of the band’s other iconic members, from Ronnie Wood, 78, to Bill Wyman, 89, have won the battle with the actuarial tables. Mick Jagger, the demonic frontman, was barely slowed by the replacement of his aortic valve in 2019. An octogenarian, Mick can still be seen dancing on the ashes of Western Civilization.
And yet, for some reason, it is the band’s rhythm guitarist who personifies immortality. As the bumper sticker has it, “Think of the world we’ll be leaving Keith Richards.” How this riff-drunk ragamuffin, who turns 82 on Dec. 18, not only survived but stayed relevant is a mystery, a puzzle wrapped inside a guitar string. Solving it may be the best hope the rest of us have of aging gracefully.
I date my life with Keith to the spring of 1982, when, in the finale of the Central School talent show in Glencoe, Ill., I played the part of the guitarist in the Stones cover band that brought down the house with “Jumpin Jack Flash.”
It was while preparing for the show that I first really learned about Keith: about his legendary 1961 meeting with Jagger at the train station in Dartford, the English town where they both grew up; about their mutual love for the Chicago Blues (Jagger was carrying a stack of albums from Chess Records); about the Stones’ apprenticeship in the basement clubs and bars around London; about the first rush of fame and how Keith shut himself off from it behind a wall made of heroin. It was living through the chaos and tragedies of the 1960s and 70s—the river of opioids, the demise of Janis, Jimi, Jim and the rest—that gave him that vampiric aura. As the roadie puts it in “Wayne’s World 2,” “Keith cannot be killed by conventional weapons.
Top photo: Rolling Stones circa 1963 = Keith is second from left
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 12.11.2025
And people ask why do drunk drivers literally get away with murder?
Let’s Talk about being rewarded for criminal behavior.
It is unconscionable that a drunken driver engaged in one of the most sordid, cowardly and shameful crimes. Hit and run.
The perpetrator ran over an 88 year old woman on increasingly dangerous Streets of San Francisco. She died.
The SFPD finally corralled the perp. What does the Judge do? Grants ‘home detention’ until the Trial. Blowing off the District Attorney’s Motion to keep this killer in jail until Trial.
San Francisco Chronicle 12.11.2025
A man suspected in an Ingleside hit-and-run that killed an 88-year-old woman in October has been charged with murder, prosecutors said Thursday.
Prosecutors asked that Le be held without bail while awaiting trial, but a judge ruled that he would be released to home detention with electronic monitoring, officials said.
Hai Van Le, 48, faces additional charges involving driving under the influence and leaving the scene of the crash. He was arraigned Wednesday and pleaded not guilty, according to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.
On the evening of Oct. 26, victim Lau Sim Lui was struck by a driver at the intersection of Ocean and Ashton avenues. Police arrived at the scene just after 6:40 p.m. and found the woman on the ground in a crosswalk.
Medics declared Lui deceased at the scene a few minutes later, from what officials later said was a severe head injury.
A witness at the scene provided police with dashboard footage of the incident, which showed Le’s vehicle stopped at a red light and then proceeding through the intersection after the light turned green, prosecutors said.
The vehicle is then seen running over Lui, who was in the opposite crosswalk, officials said. Officials said the video shows the vehicle’s brake lights briefly activating before the driver continues east on Ocean Avenue.
MAN CHARGED WITH MURDER IN CONNECTION TO FATAL DUI HIT AND RUN
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 12.9.2025
I have followed Seymour Hersh writing for decades. I became transfixed when I read his classic “The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House” published in 1984. A compendium of the treacherous foreign policy instituted by President Nixon and carried out enthusiastically by Henry Kissinger. Countries in the Western Hemisphere to the near East and Asia, specifically Vietnam and Cambodia, were in their Machiavellian sights.
The soon to be released documentary “Cover-up” is must viewing for those who want to know what genuine, honest investigative reporting is all about in the era of Donald Trump and his relentless assaults on the media. A mainstream media which has been cowed and compliant. Enabling this liar to attack the core of American democracy.
Excerpted from Variety 8.25.2025
As “Cover-Up” reveals, the key lesson of Seymour Hersh’s career is that when it comes to crucial stories of corruption, just about every situation is layered, booby-trapped, woven with deception. The movie is called “Cover-Up” because cover-up is the metaphysical state we live in. The true reporters, like Hersh, are those who dare to expose what they’re told not to.
When Hersh, in the documentary, talks about how American media works, how it’s too cozy with power, he can sound a lot like the Noam Chomsky of “Manufacturing Consent.” But part of what’s so compelling about “Cover-Up” is that Hersh, in his heyday, wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky purist agitator like Chomsky; he was a regular guy who simply wanted the truth to get out there.
The film captures how he sort of fell into journalism, after helping to run his family’s dry-cleaning business on the South Side of Chicago. He was originally a crime reporter, and got his big break in 1963, when he went to work for the Associated Press. Assigned to cover the Pentagon, he would walk out of the scripted press briefings and, instead, wandered the halls and used his sports chatter to befriend high-ranking officers.
That’s how he got wind of the My Lai story, when an officer referenced what was going on with Lt. William Calley (without actually naming him). “Cover-Up” takes us inside the process of how this complex story was brought to light.
That’s how he got wind of the My Lai story, when an officer referenced what was going on with Lt. William Calley (without actually naming him). “Cover-Up” takes us inside the process of how this complex story was brought to light.
A false mythology of the massacre lives on to this day (that American soldiers went “crazy” with violence in the jungles), but the far uglier truth is that the murder of Vietnamese civilians had been ordered as a way to inflate the casualty numbers (which was the Army’s yardstick of success). My Lai wasn’t the only My Lai — far from it.
The story, which Hersh broke in 1969, made his name.
https://screenanarchy.com/2025/09/toronto-2025-review-cover-up.html
SAN FRANCISCO – MASONIC AVENUE NEAR GEARY BOULEVARD
Lee Heidhues 12.8.2025
It was only 10 days ago that I took a hard fall on Masonic Avenue on the pavement in front of the shuttered Lucky Penny Restaurant at 2670 Geary Blvd. Suffering physical damage and a blow to my peace of mind. Happily a number of good citizens, including a nurse from nearby Kaiser, came to my aid.
Feeling something needed to be done to publicize the dangerous streets I posted a recitation of the mishap (see below) and perhaps, more importantly, notified the Department of Public Works. https://sfpublicworks.org/
I learned the property owner is responsible for maintaining a safe sidewalk in front of their land. This morning I went shopping at next door Trader Joe’s and was pleasantly shocked to see white paint painted all along the sidewalk. The property owner has been notified that the dangerous condition must be rectified.
Top photo: The Lucky Penny Restaurant. Trader Joe’s is next to the black car on the right.
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 12.6.2025
A heartfelt plea to the Tat Wong Kung Fu Academy.
It is totally shocking and uncalled for that Master Jeff Chow has been cast aside and no longer providing his mastery of martial arts.
It appears the only reason for his expulsion is office politics at the Tat Wong Academy. There’s no question about his competence and ability to motivate the students.
It’s hard to understand why an institution which prides itself on improvement of the body and mind can be so petty and venal. Totally ignoring and disrespecting the opinions and feelings of its student population.
The following messages sent to Tat Wong from long time student Liz Heidhues and her husband blogger Lee are heartfelt pleas to stop this petty political posturing and return Master Jeff Chow to his rightful place in the martial arts world.
Dear San Francisco Team
I have been attending Tat Wong Academy since 2018 and have been taught by many different sifus – including Joe, Philippe, Brandon, and most importantly the best – Master Chow.
Master Jeff Chow has been a student of Grand Master Tat-Mau Wong for more than twenty-six years, and has been a chief instructor at the Tat Wong Academy since 1998. He was awarded the title of Master in 2013 and is currently ranked internationally by The World Organization of Wushu Kung Fu Masters at 8th degree Black Belt.Master Chow has been fighting Sanshou for the past 15 years and is a competition champion. He was the Silver Medallist for the 2006 Pan American Games in the Sanshou 65-kilo weight category, and proudly represented the USA in 2007 as a USA World Team member. In 2009 and 2011 he served as the official USA Sanshou team coach.He is also a Gold Medallist from many International traditional form and lion dance competitions. Every day Master Chow passes on his skills and passion for Kung Fu to our students, our Sanshou fighters and our Lion Dance performers. Master Chow says, as both a teacher and a martial artist: “I will never stop my kung fu and sanshou training, because they continue to teach me about myself. I hope to inspire my students to feel the same.” He also adds: “Nothing is worth doing unless done well. So stay focused and dedicated and the results are always worth it.” – Featured in the Tat Wong website https://www.tatwong.com/ |
I also have a cordial relationship with Grandmaster Tat Wong, having met him when the school was housed in the old Hibernia bank at 7th Ave & Clement.
I would like Grandmaster Wong to know I am not happy with Master Chow’s ouster.
Master Chow delivers a class worth paying for.
He makes us work our muscles and our minds, inspires us to practice the different forms with passion and speed, and I walk away from his class feeling a sense of accomplishment from a good physical workout.
Master Chow grew up at the Academy. He know his stuff.
There has been no outreach to the students about the removal of Master Chow as our teacher. This is very poor customer relations. I do not want to continue the program if he doesn’t return.
Legacy Customer
Elizabeth Heidhues
Black Belt Club
Tat Wong Kung Fu Academy
I am writing on behalf of my lifetime partner and wife Liz Heidhues.
Liz is extremely upset and disappointed that Master Chow is no longer the instructor.
In talking with Liz over the past seven plus years since she joined Tat Wong it is evident that the physical workout and coping skills Liz has learned have become an essential part of her life.
Now this has suddenly and with no warning been yanked away from Liz.
It’s not right.
Why Master Chow has been eliminated is impossible to understand and hard to accept.
He needs to be at Tat Wong to continue his work and making life in San Francisco safer for all of us.
In Solidarity,
Lee Heidhues
Lifetime partner and husband of Liz Heidhues
Top photo: Liz Heidhues on the way to Black Belt status is awarded her Red Belt by Master Chow – 2.4.2025
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 12.6.2025
Looking afar from the West Coast of America to most Americans Europe seems far away and inconsequential. Only as a tourist destination and photo op.
The reality is that Europe is an integral bastion economically and culturally for the United States.
It’s shocking to read that Donald Trump is striving to turn this centuries long relationship on its head as he seeks to solidify his indecipherable relationship with Vladimir Putin. Trump’s not so secret goal is to let Europe fend for itself while he withdraws into Fortress America.
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal 12.6.2025
Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute for International Affairs in Rome and a former EU diplomatic adviser, said the document lays out a fairly coherent vision of a world dominated by three big powers—the U.S., China and Russia—who have areas of cooperation and zones of influence.
“I think it’s fairly clear that Europe is seen by the administration as being on the colonial menu” for domination by either the U.S. or Russia, she said. “So to me, the real question is: ’What else needs to happen for us Europeans to wake up to this?’ ”
For years, the U.S. government has published an annual National Security Strategy that lays out how Washington sees the world and its approach to dealing with looming threats, from China to Russia to drug-traffickers in Latin America.
This week, the Trump administration’s version seemed to reserve its harshest tone for a new target: America’s closest allies in Europe.
The 30-page document painted European nations as wayward, declining powers that have ceded their sovereignty to the European Union and are led by governments that suppress democracy and muzzle voices that want a more nationalistic turn.
It says the continent faces “civilizational erasure” through immigration that could render it “unrecognizable” in two decades—as well as turning several North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies into majority “non-European” countries. It concludes the region could grow too weak to be “reliable allies.”
The document underscores how radically the Trump administration is reshaping traditional American foreign policy, and it is likely to deepen divisions in the trans-Atlantic alliance, which has largely kept the peace in Europe since World War II and promoted Western values across the world.
The document landed like a bucket of cold water in European capitals. European leaders reading the document need “to assume that the traditional trans-Atlantic relationship is dead,” said Katja Bego, a senior researcher at Chatham House, a think tank in London.
SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 12.5.2025 – UPDATED 12.9.2025
More seriously—more sinister—the White House has just put up a wall-of-shame webpage tracking media outfits and reporters who “misrepresent” or “lie” about the administration. Names are named, outfits identified and shamed. All this is meant to intimidate; it institutionalizes attacks on the media and, considering the broader context, potentially prompts and gives permission to unstable people who might want to act in the president’s supposed defense. The webpage, paid for by taxpayers as part of the White House website, looks not like an insult but part of a sustained campaign. It is a threat. It should be taken down. Peggy Noonan in Wall Street Journal 12.6.2025 – https://www.wsj.com/opinion/were-in-an-era-of-political-violence-cc359449?mod=hp_opin_pos_3
Donald Trump is a Clear and Present Danger to democracy.
I don’t know what’s more distressing.
The White House launching a Media Offenders Website titled ‘Hall of Shame’ https://www.whitehouse.gov/mediabias/ or the general silence with few exceptions from the American media whose First Amendment rights are being trampled.
The shock of all this is that the publishers should be at the proverbial barricades. Press freedom and the First Amendment are under attack. Journalists, editors and publishers must be aware that when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 he destroyed the free press in Germany. If they’re not unaware they’re deluding themselves.
Trump will never get that far. But his intimidation tactics using the power of the Federal government is sending a chilling message
Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 12.5.2025
A new government website lists journalists and media outlets that Donald Trump’s administration considers liars. Experts say the move endangers free media ― and thus erodes democracy in the US.
The website set up by the Trump White House amounts to threatening media outlets, Jonathan Katz, a fellow in governance studies at the think tank Brookings Institution, says, too.
“It can have a chilling effect on free speech, on independent media,” Katz told DW. “We’re watching carefully to see how this affects press freedom in the United States.”
It’s no secret that the current US administration doesn’t have too high an opinion of journalists. President Donald Trump recently called a female reporter asking him about his involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal “piggy.”
And in a press briefing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt talked about how much of her job is taken up by dealing with what she labeled inaccurate characterizations published by White House correspondents.
“The fake news that we see pumped out of this building on a day-to-day basis — it’s honestly overwhelming to keep up with it all,” she said.
In response to what Leavitt said were “fake news and … attacks” being spread by reporters, the White House has created a website that lists media outlets and reporters who, according to the government, publish false, biased or misleading stories.
The new “Media Offenders” website includes featured “Offenders of the Week” as well as a “Hall of Shame” that consists of four pages (at time of publication) of media reports the White House has sorted into the categories bias, lie, false claim, malpractice, omission of context, mischaracterization, circular reporting, failure to report and left-wing lunacy.
In a statement released on December 1, the White House said by creating the website, it “dropped a flamethrower on the Fake News Media.”
https://www.dw.com/en/how-white-house-attack-on-journalists-affects-us-press-freedom/a-75040640
Top photo: Donald Trump only wants to hear what makes him look good. He closes his ears to everything else.
Lee's Perspective 