Lee Heidhues 2.4.2022

A German pollster has taken a look at how German voters are feeling two months after the new Coalition government took office. A partnering of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the Free Democrats (FDP).  Voters are disapproving of the new government which is dealing with the Pandemic, a fragile economy and the tension over Ukraine.

What is more intriguing is that by a large majority all spectrums of political thought in Germany oppose weapons being given to Ukraine. The comments of Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock earlier in the year that Germans don’t want  to provide  weapons that could be used to kill Russians is shown in the poll results.

The memory of the Nazi regime invading Russia in 1941 and the resultant slaughter on both sides still impacts Germany.

https://www.dw.com/en/why-germany-refuses-weapons-deliveries-to-ukraine/a-60483231

Germany’s stance regarding Ukraine is heresy to American political leadership where the Mainstream Media is beating the drums to take a strong stance against Russia.

The Wall Street Journal has been particularly critical of the German government, labeling them a weak ally and a country which can no longer be depended on to look out for Western interests.

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 2.4.2022

“Where is Olaf Scholz?” That’s a question that has been circulating on social media in Germany since the beginning of the year.

Whether it’s about arms deliveries to Ukraine, the diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in China, the debate about introducing a general vaccine mandate to combat the COVID pandemic or measures against galloping inflation figures — the chancellor seems all but invisible, his statements seem vague.

This negatively impacted his approval ratings in the latest survey by pollster Infratest Dimap, in which 1,339 individuals across the country were polled by telephone (876) or online (463) between January 31 and February 2.

Only 43% of respondents said they were satisfied with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. One month ago that figure still stood at 60%.

The majority of respondents side with the German government and oppose arms deliveries to Ukraine, and only 43% are in favor of economic sanctions against Russia. The respondents were split on the question of whether NATO should issue security guarantees to Russia. There is more sympathy with Russia in eastern Germany, the part of the country that until 1990 was the communist East German GDR and a staunch ally of the government in Moscow.

Top photo.  German Foreign Minister Baerbock with US Secretary of State Tony Blinken

https://www.dw.com/en/new-german-government-sees-drop-in-opinion-polls/a-60652398

Lee Heidhues 2.3.2022

The battle for holding San Francisco’s notoriously abusive Police Department is reaching critical mass.  The Chief of Police has summarily withdrawn the Department from the agreement that has given the District Attorney responsibility for investigating police use-of-forces cases.

Why?

The incumbent District Attorney Chesa Boudin is adhering to the letter the terms of the agreement and the cops don’t like it.

The San Francisco Police Officers Association will leave no rhetorical stone unturned and will spend whatever monies it takes to try and unseat Boudin in the June 7 recall.

This unilateral action by the Chief of Police is just one skirmish in the political warfare enveloping San Francisco between the lock ’em up law and order crowd and those who are fighting for progressive justice embodied by Chesa Boudin.

Excerpted from The San Francisco Chronicle 2.3.3022

San Francisco’s two most powerful law enforcement officials on Thursday deepened a rift that threatens police reform in the city, trading accusations over Police Chief Bill Scott’s move to sever an agreement that makes the District Attorney’s Office the lead investigative agency in police use-of-force cases.

District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Thursday that it was “no coincidence” that Scott made the decision just days before the beginning of a trial in which San Francisco police Officer Terrance Stangel is accused of needlessly beating a man with a baton — the first of a handful of police use-of-force cases Boudin plans to bring in front of juries.

“Chief Scott’s sudden announcement should alarm the public and everyone who has called for police reform in San Francisco and across the country,” said city Public Defender Mano Raju. “We can no longer permit the police to police themselves.”

San Francisco police-reform advocates began pushing for changes years ago, efforts that took on greater urgency after officers’ killing of Mario Woods in the Bayview neighborhood in 2015. A core contention of reformers is that police officers cannot be entrusted to lead investigations into their own colleagues.

Boudin, who ran for district attorney on a promise of police accountability, is pursuing five criminal cases against six police officers, including Stangel.

San Francisco Police Commissioner John Hamasaki said he was outraged by Scott’s decision, arguing that he should have consulted the commission before pulling out of the agreement and that “we would figure out how to fix it.” Instead, Hamasaki said, Scott went public, conveying the message that the case was “brought wrongfully, and that the jurors should view the … prosecution with suspicion.”

Scott maintained that he had the power to pull out of the agreement unilaterally if necessary.

Thomas “Tip” Mazzucco, a former police commissioner and former prosecutor who helped craft the first agreement between police and Boudin’s predecessor, George Gascón, said it was important for the public to have trust in police use-of-force investigations, and said he hoped the agreement could be preserved

“Unfortunately, the key here is that there’s a lack of integrity, and integrity has been lost,” he said. “As prosecutors, we’re held to a much higher standard.”

By design, making the D.A.’s Office the lead investigator makes police officers uncomfortable, said John Alden, the former head of the Independent Investigations Bureau that Gascón began building in 2016 to investigate police shootings, in-custody deaths and serious uses of force. The nature of an investigation, he said, is to withhold information from the person being scrutinized — an unsettling change for a public agency long accustomed to investigating itself.

Alden, who helped negotiate an earlier version of the agreement before he left the D.A.’s Office in 2019 to run the Community Police Review Agency in Oakland, said, “It’s inevitable that this conflict was going to happen — there’s just no two ways about it.”

The chief’s decision, though, was applauded Thursday by the head of the union that represents rank-and-file officers, the San Francisco Police Officers Association. Tony Montoya said the move may help to buoy sagging morale among officers, who he said have felt unsupported by the department’s top brass.

“Put it this way: No one’s called me and said it was a bad idea to get out,” Montoya said, adding that an upcoming special meeting where union members planned “to discuss leadership within the SFPD” had been postponed.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-police-chief-D-A-Boudin-widen-rift-on-eve-16830599.php

Top photo – San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin discusses a widening rift with the police department during a news conference Thursday.

Noah Berger/Special to The Chronicle

Lee Heidhues 2.2.2022

Tim Redmond, publisher of 48 Hills, has done a dive into the most recent financial disclosures in the effort to Recall San Francisco’s progressive DA Chesa Boudin.

The Recall campaign hired mercenaries to qualify the measure for the ballot, spending $1,4000,000. Mercenaries, many of them from outside California, were housed, fed and well compensated for each signature.

Absent these mercenaries the DA Recall never would have qualified for the ballot.

This Recall is no mom and pop effort. It is a well orchestrated effort by the most extreme right wing cadres in this country to pull off an electoral coup d’etat.

The most shocking finding. Only $150,000 has been raised by small local contributions. The massive balance are contributions from super wealthy individuals and dark money Political Action Committees  attempting to subvert democracy and bring down San Francisco’s progressive District Attorney.

Mercenary signature gatherer – June 2021

Excerpted from 48 Hills – Tim Redmond – 2.2.2022

The latest financial disclosure forms for this spring’s elections  were filed with the city and the state yesterday, and some of the information is just stunning. Not surprising, I suppose, but stunning.

William Oberndorf, The big GOP donor and support of Mitch McConnell, has now put more than $600,000—including an unusual donation of roughly $300,000 in stock—into the campaign to recall Chesa Boudin.

If you take out all the contributions from the multi-millionaires, the campaign has only raised about $150,000. That wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost of paid signature-gathering, which came in at more than $1 million.

The message: Twenty rich people have paid to put this recall on the ballot. (Let’s be serious—for $1 million you can get almost anything on the ballot in San Francisco.) They are pretty much funding the entire campaign.

That money to the recall campaign is all flowing through a separate organization called Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, created to defeat progressives for supervisor in 2020. It’s now by far the primary source of funding for the recall.

In fact, records on filed with the Secretary of State’s Office show that Neighbors—and an affiliated dark-money nonprofit by the same name that doesn’t disclose its donors—made up almost 80 percent of the $1.4 million going into San Franciscans for Public Safety, the main recall group.

And the vast majority of the Neighbors money comes from 20 donors, most of them very rich. Some of them don’t live in San Francisco.

Virtually all of them made their money in tech, venture capital, or real estate.

Top photo: DA Chesa Boudin being sworn into office by Mayor London Breed as his wife Dr. Valerie Block looks on 1.8.2020

Big, big millionaire money is almost entirely funding the Boudin recall

It’s been 10 years since Trayvon Martin was gunned down by a gun toting white man whose defense was “Stand your ground.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Trayvon_Martin

Nothing much has changed. Cops and entitled white people continue to gun down black people with impunity. It’s true there is the occasional exception to the rule when the evidence is clear and public outrage is so strident that the killers face the consequences for their horrific acts.

It was all very trendy for white people to march and flount their Black Lives Matter bling and regalia. That was two years ago. The wanton abuse of Black people in America continues unabated.

June 2020 – Marching on JFK Drive in San Francisco after George Floyd murder by a cop.

It’s the exception in America where cops and racism rule.

Excerpted from New York Magazine The Cut – Brittney Cooper 1.31.2022

In 1892, at the height of the lynching crisis, Ida B. Wells proclaimed that “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.

When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.”

The critical point for me in Wells’s manifesto for Black self-defense is not her overarching respect for the power of guns.

It is her observation about where the aggression begins. Losing that thread of the argument, about who actually starts the fights, is the reason so much white aggression is seamlessly restyled as the right to “stand one’s ground,” to protect and defend one’s kith and kin. Conversely,

Black self-defense is transposed into an act of unjustified aggression and met with fire and fury by both the state and self-deputized white citizens.

There is an earnestness to Black Lives Matter. A kind of barefaced removing of the gloves and the pugilism.

Perhaps this is an homage to Trayvon Martin, who in his last moments was meandering through his father’s girlfriend’s neighborhood, chatting on the phone with his friend Rachel, unconcerned, as all young people should have the freedom to be, with the monster lurking in the bushes.

To this earnestness, the aggressors, who still are almost always white, have responded with cynicism, obfuscation, and gun sales. George Zimmerman added to the chorus by successfully auctioning for $250,000 the gun he had used to kill Martin.

Top photo – Activist Ieshia Evans in July 2016, in Louisiana. Photo: Jonathan Bachman/REUTERS

The Nazis burned books in 1930’s Germany.

School district in Tennessee doesn’t burn books. It bans them. Political book bannning in 21st century America catches fire as an increasingly intolerant neo-Nazi sentiment spreads its toxicity over the country.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/book-burning

Video link of Josef Goebbels exhorting Nazis to burn books

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/asset/f7811d94-5161-4db1-9f1c-9964c49f4553?t=1498195638

Excerpted from The Tennessean 1.24.2022

A Tennessee school board’s decision to remove Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Maus” from its curriculum has drawn international attention, including coverage from CNN, BBC and Times of Israel.

The McMinn County School Board voted 10-0 to ban the book in a Jan. 10 meeting, citing concerns over “rough” language and a nude drawing of a woman, according to meeting minutes posted to the district website. The book was part of its eighth-grade English language arts curriculum.

The book, written by comic artist Art Spiegelman, is a graphic novel that tells the story of his Jewish parents living in 1940s Poland. It follows them through their internment in Auschwitz. Nazis are portrayed as cats, while Jewish people are shown as mice. The novel also includes conversations between Spiegelman and his elderly father as he convinces him to tell his story.

The book was published in 1986, and Spiegelman was awarded a Pulitzer for it in 1992.

“The values of the county are understood,” McMinn County Director of Schools Lee Parkison said during the meeting. “There is some rough, objectionable language in this book.”

School board debates ‘Maus’ removal, defends decision

Eight “curse words” and the nude drawing were at the forefront of the concerns over the book, according to the board minutes.

Board member Tony Allman said he was also concerned about scenes in the book where mice were hung from trees and children were killed. The book also depicts suicide.

“Why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff?” he said. “It is not wise or healthy.”

Instructional supervisor Julie Goodin, a former history teacher, said that she believes the book represents the brutality of the Holocaust.

“There is nothing pretty about the Holocaust and for me this was a great way to depict a horrific time in history,” she said.

The school board released a statement Thursday afternoon defending its decision, citing the “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide” in the book.

“Taken as a whole, the Board felt this work was simply too adult-oriented for use in our schools,” part of the statement read.

As news spread about the school board’s decision, the US Holocaust Museum posted about “Maus” on Twitter Wednesday.

“Maus has played a vital role in educating about the Holocaust through sharing detailed and personal experiences of victims and survivors,” the post read. “On the eve of International #HolocaustRemembranceDay, it is more important than ever for students to learn this history. Teaching about the Holocaust using books like Maus can inspire students to think critically about the past and their own roles and responsibilities today.”

Congressman Steve Cohen (D-Tennessee) released a statement Thursday condemning the board’s decision, calling it reminiscent of the Scopes Monkey Trial. The 1925 trial centered on young high school teacher John Thomas Scopes, who was accused of violating state law by teaching evolution.

Cohen, who is Jewish, helped create the Tennessee Holocaust Commission and has been an advocate for Holocaust education in schools and other institutions.

“Art Spiegelman’s novel opens minds to the history of the Nazi genocide we’re remembering on today’s anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps in 1945,” Cohen said. “I look forward to seeing the school board decision reversed.”

https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2022/01/27/tennessee-school-board-removes-holocaust-mausart-spiegelman/9237260002/

President Biden will be soon be able to nominate a Justice for the US Supreme Court with the imminent retirement of San Francisco native and Lowell High School graduate Stephen Breyer.

Expect another ferocious brawl as the Republicans, who already have cemented their majority on the nation’s highest Court, will trot out every incendiary argument to stop Biden’s eventual nominee from being confirmed.

Excerpted from Wikipedia 1.26.2022

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Breyer

Breyer was born on August 15, 1938, in San Francisco, California,^[4] to Anne A. (née Roberts) and Irving Gerald Breyer.^[5] Breyer’s paternal great-grandfather emigrated from Romania to the United States, settling in Cleveland, where Breyer’s grandfather was born.^[6] Breyer was raised in a middle-class Jewish family. His father was a lawyer who served as legal counsel to the San Francisco Board of Education.^[7] Breyer and his younger brother Charles R. Breyer, who later became a federal district judge, were active in the Boy Scouts of America and achieved the Eagle Scout rank.^[8][9] Breyer attended Lowell High School, graduating in 1955. At Lowell, he was a member of the Lowell Forensic Society and debated regularly in high school tournaments, including against future California governor Jerry Brown and future Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe.^[10]

After high school, Breyer studied philosophy at Stanford University. He graduated in 1959 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors and membership in Phi Beta Kappa.^[11] He was then awarded a Marshall Scholarship which he used to study philosophy, politics, and economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving a second B.A. in 1961.^[12] He then returned to the United States to attend Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review and graduated in 1964 with a Bachelor of Laws degree magna cum laude.^[13]

In 1967, Breyer married Joanna Freda Hare, a psychologist and member of the British aristocracy, the youngest daughter of John Hare, 1st Viscount Blakenham. They have three adult children: Chloe, an Episcopal priest and author of The Close; Nell; and Michael.^[15]

Excerpted from The New York Times 1.26.2022

WASHINGTON — Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the senior member of the Supreme Court’s three-member liberal wing, will retire, two people familiar with the decision said, providing President Biden a chance to make good on his campaign pledge to name a Black woman to the court.

“This is a huge step in preserving his legacy in a way that Justice Ginsburg failed to do,” said Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “He saw what happened to his friend, to her jurisprudence and all the things that mattered to her when she didn’t step down while she was able to. It is a credit to him that he made this decision even though he’s doing a job that he obviously very much loves.”

Mr. Biden is expected to formally announce the retirement at the White House on Thursday, according to one person familiar with the planning for the event.

Justice Breyer, 83, the oldest member of the court, was appointed in 1994 by President Bill Clinton. After the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020 and the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett by President Donald J. Trump, he became the subject of an energetic campaign by liberals who wanted him to step down to ensure that Mr. Biden could name his successor while Democrats control the Senate.

With conservatives now in full control of the court, replacing Justice Breyer with another liberal would not change its ideological balance or affect its rightward trajectory in cases on abortion, gun rights, religion and affirmative action.

But Democrats, who control the Senate now by the narrowest of margins, may have to act quickly if they want to ensure that the court does not become even more conservative. If they lose even a single seat in the midterm elections, the balance of power in the chamber would flip, making it much more difficult for Mr. Biden to win confirmation for his nominee.

Justice Breyer’s opinions have been those of a moderate liberal, marked by deference to experts, the ad hoc balancing of competing interests and alertness to fundamental fairness. His goal, he said, was to reinforce democracy and to supply workable legal principles for a sprawling and diverse nation.

He has been more likely to vote against criminal defendants than other liberal justices. On the other hand, as the years progressed, he has grown increasingly hostile to the death penalty.

He played a starring role in the court’s last term, writing majority opinions rejecting a challenge to the Affordable Care Act and protecting the free speech rights of a high school student.

It’s the Wild West 21st century version in Los Angeles.

Thieves are finding it an easy Mark to break into railcars loaded with consumer goods. Predictably the Union Pacific Corporation which has a slim police force, 200 officers in 23 States, is blaming the “progressive” LA District Attorney for its failure to keep its property safe.

LA District Attorney George Gascon, a former Chief of Police in San Francisco, is spot on when he responded to the Union Pacific, “My Office is not tasked with keeping your sites secure.”

Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal 1.24.2022

Michelle Wilde bought a piece of sand art during a visit to Jerome, Ariz., earlier this month. Rather than carry it home, she had the shopkeeper ship the $145 frame to her.

Instead of arriving at her home in Everett, Wash., the package ended up next to a railroad track in East Los Angeles. The frame was gone. The box remained.

Train robberies date to the dawn of railroads, and Union Pacific has had its share of famous heists. In 1899, Butch Cassidy’s gang robbed the Union Pacific Overland Flyer No. 1 as it passed through Wyoming. The group stopped the train and blew up its safe. A posse was sent out in pursuit of the bandits.

Railroads combat the problem with their own police forces. Union Pacific has more than 200 police officers, but they must patrol thousands of miles of track across 23 states.

Lance Fritz, Union Pacific’s chief executive officer, said rail theft has been a mostly small-scale problem. What is happening in Los Angeles is different. A couple of years ago, opportunistic individuals might see a mile-plus-long train inching through the city and pry open a car to see what was inside, maybe grab a few items, he said, but “today, that’s more organized.”

Adrian Guerrero, a general director of public affairs at Union Pacific, said lenient prosecution means many of those arrested for rifling through railcars have their charges reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense—and are often quickly released. “We just don’t see the criminal justice system holding these people accountable,” Mr. Guerrero said.

In a letter responding to Mr. Guerrero sent on Friday, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón said the number of cases submitted to his office in which Union Pacific was listed as the victim had fallen each of the past two years, from 78 cases in 2019 to 47 in 2021. The DA brought charges in 55% of those cases, Mr. Gascón said, with the others dismissed for lack of evidence or because they didn’t involve allegations of burglary, theft or tampering.

“It is very telling that other major railroad operations in the area are not facing the same level of theft at their facilities as UP,” Mr. Gascón wrote. “My Office is not tasked with keeping your sites secure.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/train-robberies-are-a-problem-in-los-angeles-and-no-one-agrees-on-how-to-stop-them-11642946401?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=1

Today there was a school shooting in Germany.  Prime Minister Olaf Scholz said he “was shocked by the shooting.”

The reason for the prime minister’s  response is the fact that Germany, unlike the United States, has very strict gun possession laws. In gun loving America obtaining a firearm is easy as going into the neighborhood grocery store and buying a candy bar.

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 1.24.2022

One woman was killed and three people injured in a shooting at Heidelberg University on Monday.

Police said at a press conference Monday evening that a man entered a university lecture hall with a double-barreled shotgun and another firearm as a class was running and opened fire.

Four people were wounded. A 23-year-old woman died several hours later in the hospital; the other victims suffered injures in the face, back and legs, police said.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he was shocked by the shooting.

“That one student has died of her injuries … It tears my heart apart to learn of such news,” Scholz said.

The  shooting at Heidelberg University has reawoken some interest in German gun control, which is regulated by the 2002 Weapons Act. In 2019 Germany’s Bundestag agreed to new gun control regulations, including a controversial measure that would have everyone who owns a firearm regularly checked by the country’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV).

According to the Weapons Act, you need a weapons possession card (Waffenbesitzkarte) to own or buy a firearm and a weapons license (Waffenschein) to use or carry a loaded firearm. This means collectors, for instance, only need the first, whereas hunters must have both.

A weapons possession card allows gun owners only to “transport” a firearm, rather than carry it. That means it must be unloaded and inside a locked case when taken out in public. But for those with a gun license, German law has no provision stipulating whether a gun must be concealed or loaded in public or not.

There is also a minor firearms certificate,(Kleiner Waffenschein) which is easier to obtain, and which is needed to carry lower-powered weapons, such as air guns, starting pistols, flare guns, or anything that can only shoot blanks or irritants.

Altogether, the costs for an application, including the required insurance, can run to around €500 ($540).

What kinds of guns are legal in Germany?

German law makes a distinction between weapons and war weapons, with the latter listed in the War Weapons Control Act.

In Germany, it is illegal to possess or use any war weapons. These include all fully automatic or semi-automatic rifles, machine guns (unless antiques from World War II or earlier), or barrels or breeches for such weapons. Pump-action shotguns are also banned under the Weapons Act.

Who is allowed to own guns in Germany?

Applicants for a German gun license must

1) be at least 18 years old,

2) have the necessary “reliability” and “personal aptitude,”

3) demonstrate the necessary “specialized knowledge,”

4) demonstrate a “need,” and

5) have liability insurance for personal injury and property damage of at least €1 million ($1.1 million).

https://www.dw.com/en/gun-control-and-firearms-possession-in-germany/a-52450664