It doesn’t surprise me that the San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins who likened legitimate protestors to Hamas terrorists last October wants to throw the proverbial book at those who blocked traffic and inconvenienced motorists on the Golden Gate Bridge last Monday.
This DA has already exhibited her bias and should recuse herself from any involvement in potential prosecutions.
This is the same Brooke Jenkins who has yet to bring charges against the 78 year old driver who plowed her Mercedes SUV into a bus stop last month and slaughtered a family of four from Brazil on their way to the San Francisco Zoo.
Aftermath of horrific death scene in San Francisco caused by a criminally negligent motorist – March 16, 2024
I’ll say it right here and loudly, too. Brooke Jenkins priorities are misguided and screwed up.
Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 4.17.2024
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins urged anyone delayed by protests that shut down the Golden Gate Bridge on Monday to file a report to authorities because they may be victims of false imprisonment and entitled to restitution.
Brooke Jenkins priorities – Prosecute protestors not criminal motorists.
The bridge was closed for several hours after demonstrators chained themselves to parked cars to prevent vehicles from passing, part of coordinated regional protests to oppose U.S. support for Israel that also temporarily blocked Interstate 880 in both directions. Jenkins, who is considering filing charges against the Golden Gate Bridge protesters, urged anyone detained on the bridge to contact the California Highway Patrol’s Marin Division at 415-924-1105 or chpmarin@chp.ca.gov. Commuters were asked to provide their contact information and a detailed statement about how they were impacted by the blockade, she said.
“You may be entitled to restitution and have other victims’ rights,” Jenkins said Tuesday afternoon at a news conference.
Jenkins joined Gov. Gavin Newsom and others in denouncing the protesters’ actions. The governor said he had received calls from Bay Area residents caught in traffic during the protest as they drove children to school, rushed to medical appointments or frantically tried to get to work on time.
Top photo: Family of four from Brazil run down and killed by a criminally negligent motorist. The family was waiting for a bus at the West Portal Muni station in San Francisco on Mar. 16, when an SUV smashed into them. Diego de Oliveira, a Brazilian national who worked at Apple, his wife Matilde Pinto, and their 1-year-old and 3-month-old sons all died.
“Timothy McVeigh was a tragic guy who thought our differences were more important than what we had in common.” President Bill Clinton.
Watching the film Civil War last weekend gave me a look at what might be the future of America.
I need a real life reminder about the birth of the domestic terrorism movement in America. The harsh reality of the birth of contemporary America will soon be available for all the world to view.
The bombed out Federal Building in Oklahoma City – April 1995
It’s been ongoing for nearly three decades. The bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 was akin to the insurrectionist attack on Ft. Sumter, Charleston, South Carolina on April 12, 1861. That assault began the first American Civil War (1861-1865).
The second Civil War has been upon us since 1995 with Donald Trump as leader. Commanding violent bands of dangerous well armed insurrectionistshell bent on bringing down the American government.
Excerpted from The Guardian 4.16.2024
Civil War, director Alex Garland’s imagining of a divided states of America, appears to have touched a nerve, topping the weekend box office. For some cinemagoers, it may offer escapism. But for those who remember a spectacular act of domestic terrorism that struck the heartland a generation ago, it may feel more like destiny.
An American Bombing tells the story of the single deadliest act of homegrown terrorism against the government in American history. On 19 April 1995 Timothy McVeigh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh ignited a truck bomb outside the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children.
“Our documentary will help people understand, how could we even get to a place where a commercial movie like Civil War can be released and it’s not sci-fi?” says Marc Levin, director of An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th, an HBO documentary about the growth of anti-government sentiment through the lens of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Victims of the terrorist bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City – April 19, 1995
“We’ve always kind of believed in American exceptionalism. ‘That can’t happen here. Oh, no, it could happen in Yugoslavia. It can happen in other places but not in the United States of America.’ Making this film has sobered even us up.”
Executive producer Katie Couric helped secure an interview with Bill Clinton. His previous experience as governor of Arkansas, which saw a rise in extremism, meant that unlike others who initially assumed the Oklahoma City bombing must be the work of Islamic militants, he immediately suspected domestic terrorism.
Jeffrey Toobin’s book “Homegrown. Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism” dissects the life of Timothy McVeigh
Clinton offers a chilling conclusion about McVeigh and his relevance to a bitterly divided America in 2024. “It doesn’t matter whether he was right about anything or not,” he says in the film. “What matters is he decided he should kill people he didn’t know including little kids. But the words he used, the arguments he made, literally sound like the mainstream today. Like he won.”
The law and order reactionary racist rabble, funded by the deep pocket MAGA billionaire crowd, has set its sites on a black woman Pamela Price, District Attorney in Alameda County.
Make no mistake this Recall directed at a progressive black woman is racist at its core.
These reactionaries have succeeded in placing a Recall measure on the ballot to oust the progressive DA. The Recall effort began just months after DA Price took office in January 2023.
This is the same despicable crowd which politically lynched Chesa Boudin, the progressive San Francisco DA two years ago.
The San Francisco Chronicle very directly points out who is behind this insidious effort.
Excerpted from The San Francisco Chronicle 4.15.2024
The recall campaign, with more than $2 million raised for their effort, hired the same consultant who worked on the 2022 campaign that led to the successful recall of former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
Price, a former civil rights attorney, won her seat with 53% of the vote in 2022 after she promised to reduce mass incarceration, lighten sentences for defendants under age 25 and hold police accountable for misconduct. When she took office, she drew opposition from prosecutors and community members who view her policies as too lenient.
In July, less than seven months into her term, her critics formed a recall committee.
Alameda DA Pamela Price must beat back a deep pocket MAGA funded Recall.
Critics of Price who organized a campaign to remove her from office collected 74,757 valid signatures, the Registrar of Voters said in a statement. The campaign needed at least 73,195 valid signatures to trigger a recall election.
The Board of Supervisors will consider the results at a meeting April 30, the registrar’s office said. The recall campaign called on supervisors to schedule a special election within 125 days as outlined in state law.
“There are so many ways it could have ended for him. He didn’t want to quit.”
The moving tribute to an old-timer who loved the thrill of covering combat for the New York Times.
The tension of the war photographer in Civil War
We sat mesmerized as the whirr of helicopters and staccato rat-a-tat-tats of machine guns exploded across the giant screen of “Civil War (2024)”, a genius of a war film which opened Friday at the AMC Kabuki in San Francisco.
America immersed itself in Vietnam’s Civil War with the result. 55,000 dead Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.
The modern-day scenes in the film evoked the chaos of the 1960s at the height of the Vietnam War.
A journalist screams in pain over the death of his colleague in Civil War
There are some scenes that made us writhe in pain. When an insurrectionist demands of the journalists whom he has taken hostage to prove they are American by speaking unaccented English to his questions, and two of them fail his test, we felt the agony of the guy who was Asian, as his tongue froze in fear and he barely managed to blurt out the words that he was from Hong Kong. Those were his last words.
April 12th also marked the 163rd Anniversary of the start of the original Civil War, when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor on a Friday on April 12,1861,capturing Union territory.
Ft. Sumter, Charleston South Carolina under siege – April 12, 1861. Beginning of the Civil War (1861-1865)
April 12th is also the 6th Anniversary of Liz’ first False Citizen’s Arrests in 2018. An act totally beyond the pale of any human conduct. Our next-door neighbors falsely arrested and imprisoned Liz for asserting her rights as a property owner. Liz was brutally handcuffed because of their false arrest. Taken away by SFPD and placed in a filthy cage in county jail for hours. Until Lee Heidhues raced to her rescue on his bicycle with $20,000 cash to buy back her freedom. A False Citizen’s Arrest in the hope of inflicting such mental distress on Liz, we would sell our house we have owned for decades and move away.
The forces of insurrection in Civil War.
With its police barricades and tents in the streets, its low gravely voices and endless cigarettes, its F- bomb laced shouts and protestors being beaten by baton-wielding police, “Civil War (2024)” seemed a re-enactment of the long-ago Vietnam war until a huge explosion shatters the screen. Our attention then becomes riveted on a small group of journalists rushing into the carnage to document the bodies lying crumpled in the mayhem.
Kirsten Dunst. The war photographer in Civil War – The New Yorker artwork
This corps of journalists wearing “Press” flak jackets now commands the screen. The lurid circus of civil insurrection has begun. Journalists must photograph and record it from every angle, even to the point of insanity and the sacrifice of their own lives. “Civil War (2024)” transfuses our veins with the adrenaline that is the grueling, shocking, and unforgettable drug of war.
Americans in Vietnam. circa late 1960’s – LIFE Magazine
The glossy pages of 1960’s Life magazine jumped into mind, with its enduring photos of grime-streaked bloodied faces of GI’s sitting around a campfire, or an Army truck stacked high with body bags, an eerie “déjà vu” one gets watching a graphic war film similar to “Full Metal Jacket” or “Apocalypse Now” reminding us that war is inhuman. “Civil War (2024)” is in this same category of mesmerizing images. War is impossible to describe with words. The horror and moral terror can only be felt in watching graphic scenes and hearing its inhumane cacophony.
“What a fucking rush,” says one lifer watching the militias fight one another.
Civil War in the streets of Washington, DC
The weariness of the war journalist: Every time I shot a war zone and got the photos right and sent them home that said, “Don’t do this” . . . is embellished by the grim irony the camera is not as useful a tool as a machine gun in war: “It’s not a story if it never gets filed.”
Eyes on the target in Civil War.
The voyeurism of seeing bodies blown to bits and the reality that the next fusillade might bear the names of the journalists aiming their cameras at the carnage is part of the overall suspense.
Americans up against the wall in Vietnam
There are sardonic exposures of the apathy of family and neighbors who pretend that war in the nation is not raging, and atrocities are not being committed: “Your parents? Where are they?” “He’s sitting in his farm in Missouri pretending none of this is happening.”
Liz’ biggest gripe about this film is – its targeted audience is American and it is rife with that which appeals to American tastes – endless car crashes, a stunt where two cars recklessly speed side-by-side down a winding road and the occupants in them trade vehicles squeezing through rolled-down windows, loads of shoot-em-ups, a hairy gas station stand-off, cigarettes smoked down to their butts and tossed into the environment, and a splendid scene of a freeway jammed with scorched and twisted bodies of cars in a true apocalyptic vision of where America is going to end up with its car crazed culture.
What Kind of American Are You? – Civil War
The scene of the journalists driving through a forest set on fire by the rockets and bombs of war predicts the doom of climate change when it shows a vast cool stream over which a lone helicopter darts, much like a dragonfly, while behind, drifting burning orbs light up the horizon.
Journalists under siege in Civil War. There are no innocent bystanders.
When a bullet hits the out-of-shape, lifer, old reporter driving the vehicle of the journalists away from a confrontation, we know that he is not going to make it through this war when he says “I can’t drive” as he bleeds to death in the vehicle. The admission that he cannot drive anymore are his last words. What is meant to be a moving scene of bereavement when his friend and lifelong colleague washes his blood off the leather upholstery of the driver’s seat left Liz musing why so much of this film was centered around cars. What if all the stunts had taken place on bicycles?
Vietnam. How the war was won against hi-tech occupiers.
The civil war in Vietnam was won by Indigenous people who fought the invading force, the Americans with their arsenal of napalm, Huey choppers, and fighter jets, on bicycles and with far less sophisticated firepower, and won.
“God Bless You All and God Bless America” are the words of the fictional president as The End closes in.
“Civil War.” Thinly veiled Trump. “God Bless You All and God Bless America.”
It’s been nearly two years since the San Francisco MAGA gang spent 8M in its successful political lynching of District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
Chesa has diplomatically and quietly, perhaps too quietly, departed the toxic political scene of San Francisco. Now ensconced at the University of California School of Law as the founding executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center.
Nonetheless Chesa is still convenient political fodder for reactionary Republicans and credulous Democrats in the US Senate. The subject of this abysmal behavior is the nominee for a position on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. Adeel Mangi would be the first Muslim to serve on a federal appeals court.
Why are the know nothings in the Senate so put out? Adeel Mangi serves on the advisory board of the Alliance of Families for Justice. A New York non profit. So, what?
Here’s the rub. The Alliance sponsored a fellowship in the name of Kathy Boudin. Chesa’s mother. She was imprisoned 20 years for her part in the October 1981 robbery of a Brinks truck. Three police officers were killed. Kathy Boudin never fired a weapon. She was a getaway driver.
After her parole, with the help of then law student Chesa in 2003, Kathy Boudin became a stellar citizen. She earned a doctoral degree. Became a college teacher in social work and law.
Chesa’s mother. The late Kathy Boudin who passed away in May 2022 just weeks before the political lynching of her son.
Chesa was a year old at the time of the 1981 incident in Nyack, New York.
Still, the San Francisco MAGA crowd kept this yoke on Chesa’s back from the time he announced for DA in late 2018 until his political lynching on June 7, 2022. And Chesa continues to have abuse tossed his way.
Now the abuse is moved to a national stage. Adeel Mangi may pay the price. It’s the worst kind of character assassination and guilt by association.Directed toward the nominee, Chesa Boudin, and his late mother Kathy Boudin.
Excerpted from The San Francisco Chronicle – Bob Egelko – 4.5.2024
Chesa Boudin’s background as the son of radicals imprisoned for taking part in a fatal armed robbery helped to fuel the campaign for his recall as San Francisco’s district attorney in 2022. Now, President Joe Biden’s nomination of an attorney who would become the first Muslim to serve on a federal appeals court appears to be doomed because of the nominee’s distant connection to Boudin’s late mother.
Adeel Mangi has been endorsed for the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia by groups that include the National Council of Jewish Women and the Anti-Defamation League as well as the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the NAACP. But three Democratic senators, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have come out against him, probably enough to block his confirmation in the closely divided Senate.
The reason? For Cortez Masto, it’s Mangi’s membership on the advisory board of the Alliance of Families for Justice, a New York-based nonprofit that provides support and legal representation for the families of prisoners.
Mangi, who practices civil law in New Jersey, said in a letter to Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., that he is not involved in the operations of Alliance of Families for Justice and worked with them only in a legal case for the family of a mentally ill inmate who was killed in prison, winning a settlement that required installation of cameras and microphones at the prison. He said he did not know Kathy Boudin and had nothing to do with the fellowship named for her.
“I condemn any violence against law enforcement officers,” Mangi wrote, noting the endorsement of his nomination by several police groups, though others have opposed him.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said Mangi “is being targeted by a malicious and debunked smear campaign solely because he would make history as the first Muslim to serve as a federal appellate judge.”
It was just over 24 hours ago that Supervisor Aaron Peskin dove into the San Francisco Mayor’s race. It was a tumultuous joy felt celebration in the heart of San Francisco.
Out here in the San Francisco countryside by the Pacific Ocean it is a much quieter scene.
Mayor in waiting Aaron Peskin is an avid swimmer. The photos taken this afternoon will be an oceanside venue where Mayor Peskin will get some relief from the ardors of City Hall.
The Pacific Coast shoreline in San Francisco looking south with windsurfers in the sky.
People enjoy the oceanside below the San Francisco Cliff House.A Tantra Wheel. Beautiful piece of artwork in the sand along Ocean Beach.The view looking north towards Marin County with Mt. Tamalpais in the background.Aaron Peskin’s supporters are ready for the upcoming election.
Top photo: Aaron Peskin takes a swim in the frigid San Francisco Bay near Alcatraz Island.
SAN FRANCISCO – CHINATOWN PORTSMOUTH SQUARE Lee Heidhues 4.6.2024
When it comes to Mayoral campaign opening day crowds, Supervisor Aaron Peskin has no competition.
Launching his campaign on a sunny Spring morning in a packed Portsmouth Square in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Aaron Peskin was joined by several hundred beyond enthusiastic supporters.It was a gathering of the City’s Progressive glitterati and a representative sampling of multi-cultural San Francisco.
The other entrants in the race. Mayor London Breed; Supervisor Ahsha Safai; Levi Strauss & Co. scion Daniel Lurie and Mark Farrell can only dream of having such a throng cheering them on.
Aaron Peskin’s opponents displayed their boorish behavior. A small cadre brandishing bullhorns and whistles tried vainly to disrupt the festivities. The ringleader of this pathetic crew was Jade Tu whose day job is campaign manager for one of the Mayoral aspirants Mark Farrell.
Supervisor and mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin at his campaign kickoff rally. April 6, 2024
Liz Heidhues. San Francisco native displays her homemade campaign artwork – BREED IS BOUGHT $$ PESKIN IS NOT
Part of the crowd at Portsmouth Square cheers on Aaron PeskinThe crowd gave Aaron Peskin its undivided attention.
Aaron Peskin addresses his supporters with specific objectives he will implement as Mayor
The seniors of Chinatown are a bedrock of Aaron Peskin’s support.
Parrots for Peskin
Mayor to be Aaron Peskin points the way to Room 200 at San Francisco City Hall.
Cameras were in abundance.
Jade Tu, campaign manager for mayoral candidate Mark Farrell with a small group of agitators, attempted to disrupt the event. My sources tell me the disruptors were paid to perform their obnoxious chore. When the allotted time was over they crawled away to their swamp.
Top photo: The crowd cheering on Aaron Peskin under the San Francisco skyline.
The callous murderous reasoning, which boggles my mind, is the slaughter is necessary to protect a closely related species of the barred owl. The northern spotted owl.
The word which comes to my mind is Eugenics. Rather than being practiced on humans as did the Aryan Nazis in Hitler’s Germany against Jews through genocide. The American government proposes to promote one animal species by eliminating another.
A fledgling barred owl sits in a tree at Muir Woods in Mill Valley in 2011. Michael Macor/The Chronicle
Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 3.26.2024
A collection of 75 animal rights and wildlife organizations sent a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Tuesday asking her to stop a plan by federal wildlife officials to shoot more than a half-million barred owls in Northern California, Oregon and Washington in an effort to protect aclosely related species, the threatened northern spotted owl.
The plan to shoot the barred owls, the letter said, will result in accidental shootings of other native owls, the poisoning of habitat if lead ammunition is used, and the disruption of forest ecosystems. The letter also claims the plan is destined to fail because of its large scale, covering millions of acres, and the limited success of previous federal efforts at controlling species for conservation purposes.
In this May 8, 2003, file photo, a northern spotted owl sits on a tree branch in the Deschutes National Forest near Camp Sherman, Ore. Don Ryan/Associated Press
“This plan will cause severe disruptions to wildlife from the forest floor to its canopies, producing an untold number of mistaken-identity kills of other native owl species (including spotted owls), disrupting nesting behavior for animals, poisoning wildlife from dispersed and fragmented lead, and causing rapid dispersal and social chaos among many other species inhabiting these forest ecosystems,” the letter said.
A mother barred owl and her babies
The letter was spearheaded by two animal-rights organizations, Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy. The other dozens of signers are mostly state and local animal-welfare groups.
They first appeared in the West in the 1970s, state wildlife officials said, but their numbers began increasing in the 1980s and 1990s and have continued to rise. Meanwhile, the less-aggressive spotted owls have seen their populations decline.
Federal wildlife officials last fall proposed hiring hunters with shotguns to kill barred owls in forests on public and private lands across the three states. They would shoot about 20,000 the first year, then continue killing them for the next 30 years. The plan has been studied and gone through a public comment period, according to the groups, but not yet approved. No firm timeline for the approval process exists, the groups said.
A note to Heather Knight – New York Times San Francisco ‘Nightcrawler’ correspondent (formerly at the San Francisco Chronicle) 4.2.2024
Heather
Seeing your laudatory piece on Mr. Garry Tan.
Going into journalistic contortions. Trying to paint a picture of Garry Tan as nothing more than a civic minded do gooder.
You can’t hide the reality. Garry Tan is a vicious political operative with a fat wallet “trying to buy City Hall.”
Makes me think of your fawning articles on former San Francisco District Attorney Suzy Loftus and current DA Brooke Jenkins.Who replaced the progressive DA you helped destroy with your pen, Chesa Boudin.
The good news is San Francisco Chronicle readers are spared your misleading propaganda cheerleader style reporting.
The bad news is NYT readers may take this PR blurb re Garry Tan as truth.
And I thought you are scribbling for the Times not the New York Post.
Excerpted from The New York Times – Heather Knight – 4.2.2024
Garry Tan. A man evangelizing for change in San Francisco, owning a condo that used to be part of a church comes in handy.
(Blogger’s Note: Sound familiar? Accused felon Donald Trump hawking his “God Bless USA” bible for $59.99)
Last year, Tan scooped up the $3.95 million space near the city’s palm-tree-studded Dolores Park to hold events like this one — events he hopes will shift San Francisco from its idealistic progressivism toward nuts-and-bolts centrism.
Under cathedral ceilings and soaring stained glass windows, Garry Tan clutched a microphone as he greeted a crowd of political centrists, including San Francisco’s mayor, local prosecutors and police brass.
“Welcome to the church of turning San Francisco around!” said Mr. Tan at a fund-raiser he was hosting for local Asian American female political candidates just days before the Super Tuesday elections this month.
But Mr. Tan’s passion, as it is for a growing number of tech industry leaders, is San Francisco politics. He is one of a cadre of love-them-or-hate-them tech executives and investors with lots of opinions about the city and endless piles of cash to, as they say in the tech industry, move fast and break things. (Their critics would say it’s more like they’re trying to buy City Hall.)
Garry Tan and his money politically lynched progressive DA Chesa Boudin in a campaign complete with red baiting innuendo
To some of San Francisco’s political establishment, Mr. Tan, 43, has become the most annoying in a parade of wealthy tech executives. He has created a bombastic online persona while spending about $400,000 on local politics in the past few years — with potentially a lot more to come. And on the social media site X, where he has 425,000 followers, Mr. Tan doesn’t just rub some people the wrong way, he enrages them.
Just after midnight on Jan. 27, he posted on X, formerly Twitter, that seven left-leaning members of the city’s Board of Supervisors, listed by name, should “die slow,” punctuated by an expletive. It was a subtle reference to the rap legend Tupac Shakur’s famous track “Hit ’Em Up,” released 28 years ago as an insult to his music rivals. But to some people, it sounded like a threat.
Die slow motherfuckers – Garry Tan
Mr. Tan was, he admitted when an X follower asked him, drunk.
A few hours after his post went up, Mr. Tan deleted it and apologized. But plenty of people had already seen it.
A couple of days later, some supervisors received anonymous letters at their homes bearing Mr. Tan’s face and the words: “Garry Tan is right! I wish a slow and painful death for you and your loved ones.” Aaron Peskin, a supervisor who is considering challenging London Breed, the San Francisco mayor, in the November election, was one of a few supervisors to file police reports based on Mr. Tan’s post.
Envelope addressed to Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin
Mr. Tan has tried to learn from his online mess — or says he has. In person, he speaks kindly and calmly and smiles often, frequently bowing to people while making a prayer gesture with his hands. At his political fund-raiser in the former church, he said he was sipping a mocktail, a “Green Goddess” with apple, celery and cucumber juice.
“Alcohol doesn’t have a lot to teach me these days,” he said. Asked whether that was because of the drunken post that got him in hot water, he said, “There’s some correlation.”
He thinks moderate Democrats with common-sense ideas are taking back their city, and he’s supporting centrists on the November ballot in hopes they will seize a majority of the board of supervisors.
Garry Tan speaks kindly and calmly and smiles often, frequently bowing to people while making a prayer gesture with his hands.
Mr. Tan encouraged his fellow middle-of-the-road Democrats at the church turned condo to keep the faith. “Politics can be rough. As centrists, we find ourselves facing criticism for questioning policies that haven’t delivered,” he told his quasi-congregation, his voice rising. “My dedication to making San Francisco a city that works for everyone is a commitment I will not abandon.”
The crowd of about 100 roared.
Mayor Breed then spoke about the “dogfight” of San Francisco politics and thanked Mr. Tan, one of her donors, for braving it.
Several supervisors named in Mr. Tan’s controversial post called for candidates who received his donations to return the money. None did. Mr. Tan said the police had never contacted him about the post. The San Francisco Police Department did not respond to requests for comment on whether an investigation was being conducted.
“And no, I’m not giving my money back!” she said to laughter.
Top photo: Irving Penn exhibit – de Young Museum San Francisco
It’s April Fools Day. But when it comes to Donald Trump it’s never a joke.
Never mind that the Trial for his election interference hush money payoff to porn performer Stormy Daniel begins on Tax Day April 15 in a Manhattan courtroom.
Never mind that Trump’s campaign posted a picture of President Biden tied to the back of a pickup truck.
Never mind that Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social platform, closed Monday at $48.66 per share after its opening at $80 last week.
The big news is Trump’s “God Bless USA” bible he’s shilling for $59.99. The New York Times Maureen Dowd nails this shameless con artist Trump to the cross of hypocrisy.
Excerpted from The New York Times – Maureen Dowd – 3.30.2024
Declining faith in religion and rising faith in conspiracies create fertile ground for a faker like Donald Trump. If the profane pol is re-elected, we’ll all reap the whirlwind.
On this holy weekend, one man is taking the Resurrection personally.
Trump is presenting himself as the Man on the Cross, tortured for our sins. “I consider it a great badge of courage,” he tells crowds. “I am being indicted for you.” Instead of Christlike redemption, he promises Lucifer-like retribution if resurrected.
In January he put up a video on Truth Social about how he is a messenger from God, “a shepherd to mankind.”
Trump is, as the nuns who taught me used to say, “a bold, brazen piece.” He is a miserable human who cheated on his wives, cheats at golf, cheats at politics, incites violence, targets judges and their families and looked on, pleased, as thugs threatened to hang his actually pious vice president.
Yet, more and more, Trump is wallowing in his messiah complex.
Two-Corinthians Trump wouldn’t know the difference between Old and New Testaments. So he may not realize that, rather than a sacrificial lamb, he is the golden calf, the false god worshiped by Israelites when Moses went up to Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments.
Just as the Israelites melted their ornaments and jewelry to make the calf, Trump is trading tacky products for gilt to pay gazillions in obligations. After his $399 golden Never Surrender High-Top Sneaker, Trump is selling a $99 Victory47 cologne for “movers, shakers and history makers,” in which “a crisp opening of citrus blends into a cedar heart, underpinned by a rich base of leather and amber, crafting a commanding presence.” A gold bust of Trump tops the bottle. (Victory47 perfume for women comes in a Miss Universe-shaped bottle.)
Weaponizing his martyrdom, Trump is selling $59.99 “God Bless the USA” Bibles adorned with a flag and the chorus of Lee Greenwood’s song handwritten by the singer, plus the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Pledge of Allegiance.
“Happy Holy Week!” he wrote on Truth Social. “Let’s Make America Pray Again. As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless The USA Bible.”
David Axelrod says that, even as a secular Jew, he’s offended: “This is a guy who has violated 11 of the Ten Commandments.”
Trump posted a promotional video claiming “Christians are under siege” and vowing to “protect content that is pro-God.” He held up the Bible — recalling the appalling moment in 2020 when Ivanka handed him a Bible from her designer bag and he clutched it in front of St. John’s Church, opposite the White House, moments after the police tear-gassed protesters and journalists in adjacent Lafayette Square at a demonstration about George Floyd’s murder.
“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many,” Trump barked. “It’s my favorite book.” Maybe the Bible has replaced that Hitler book Trump’s ex-wife said he kept by his bed. But it’s all a scam. Running for president is about enriching himself, just as when he peddled NFTs, steaks, ties, suits, bath towels, vodka, water, office chairs, Trump University and mug-shot mugs. He even sold pieces of the suit he was wearing when he took the mug shot.
“I want to have a lot of people have it,” Trump said of his Bible. “You have to have it for your heart, for your soul.”
Just what the world needs: a soul cleanse with a grifter Bible, where the profits could well be going to pay legal costs in trials about breaking commandments — bearing false witness to try to steal democracy, coveting a porn star, then paying the star hush money to keep quiet about the sex.
What could be more Elmer Gantry than that? As Sinclair Lewis wrote about his corrupt, power-hungry, narcissistic, womanizing preacher, “He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday school, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.”
Religious snake-oil salesmen have a storied history in American literature and films, from Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood” to Peter Bogdanovich’s beloved movie “Paper Moon,” about a conniving Bible salesman and his small helper. But it’s shocking when the charlatan might be in the Oval.
Lee's Perspective 