It was a happy day a week before Christmas on car free JFK Drive as a large group of people of all ages gathered on a cold December day to celebrate The First Annual JFK Promenade Holiday Party.
Musicians entertained the crowd. There was artwork being created by the kids and a Bubble Lady added to the joyous occasion.
Photos – Liz and Lee Heidhues – 12.19.2021
It’s a new day in Chile as the country’s voters have elected a true Progressive as President. The emphatic victory by Gabriel Boric over an unrepentant remnant whose father served in the dictatorial Augusto Pinochet regime is a signal victory for progressives worldwide.
The spirit of Salvador Allende is smiling. The Socialist President was deposed in a violent coup by General Pinochet with the backing of the American government on September 11, 1973 ushering in 17 years of dictatorship.
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal 12.19.2021
SANTIAGO, Chile— Gabriel Boric, a congressman and former student protest leader, was elected president Sunday, auguring a shift far to the left in a nation that has long been a stalwart of centrist, market-friendly policies in Latin America.
Mr. Boric’s ascent to La Moneda presidential palace comes a decade after he gained national prominence as the shaggy-haired leader of protests that paralyzed Santiago in 2011. Thousands of students demanding tuition-free universities had blocked streets with burning barricades.
Mr. Boric received 56% of the votes, defeating conservative rival José Antonio Kast, who conceded and congratulated the president-elect on Twitter.
Mr. Boric will take office in March.
His election was assured by the strong support of young, urban voters seeking greater public spending despite the most polarizing campaign in a generation. At 35 years old, the tattooed lawmaker will become Chile’s youngest leader in modern times after meeting the minimum age to run for the presidency this year.
Mr. Boric, pronounced BO-rich, represents what analysts say is a new generation of leftists in Latin America. In addition to promising a greater welfare state, politicians such as Mr. Boric pledge to fight climate change while expanding rights to native peoples and gay and transgender people. Mr. Boric, who has publicly said he has obsessive compulsive disorder, has also called for more support for people with mental health problems.
“His program is a very 21st century vision of the left. It’s not the traditional left,” said Jennifer Pribble, a political scientist and Latin America expert at the University of Richmond. “He personifies a challenge to the older hierarchy.”
A descendant of Croatian immigrants, Mr. Boric grew up in Punta Arenas, a small city in Chile’s southern Patagonia region. His father, an oil company engineer, was a member of the center-left Christian Democratic party. The younger Mr. Boric moved to Santiago to study law at the University of Chile, a degree he didn’t complete.
In 2013, at age 27, he was elected to Congress, leading a younger generation of leftist politicians and social activists who were sharply critical of their center-left predecessors, including former Chilean presidents. He accused them of selling out by applying neoliberal policies that saddled Chile’s middle class with debt and poor pensions.
“If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave,” Mr. Boric said earlier this year. “Don’t be afraid of the youth who want to change Chile.”
Mr. Boric’s election marks the end of three decades of centrist rule that made this country of 19 million a global model for free trade and a magnet for foreign investments in Latin America. The country had slashed poverty following the end of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.
Support for the traditional center-left and center-right parties that governed since the return to democracy in 1990 collapsed following protests in 2019 amid anger over the high cost of living and demands for better public services.
The Greens are now part of the governing coalition in Germany. Its presence is immediately being felt in the area of foreign policy.
The new Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock who turned 41 on December 15 is off to a quick start putting her own stamp as the Green Party leader on Germany’s foreign policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annalena_Baerbock
Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 12.18.2021
Whichever way you look at, German foreign policy is about to get more exciting than it has been for a while — a welcome development.
You certainly can’t accuse Annalena Baerbock of lacking drive and determination. Barely in office, she has completed a whirlwind tour abroad, with visits to Brussels, Paris and Warsaw. Then it was off to the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in Liverpool, followed by a disarmament conference in Sweden.
And she’s not afraid to get her hands dirty. After the verdict in the Berlin Tiergarten murder, which explicitly states that the murderer, a Russian national, acted on behalf of Russian authorities, Baerbock declared two employees of the Russian embassy persona non grata and summoned the ambassador.
In a smart move, Baerbock has taken over responsibility for international climate negotiations, which until now has always been part of the Environment Ministry’s remit. It signals an upgrade for the Foreign Office and a logical step for a Green minister.
Still, foreign policy is likely to become a constant bone of contention within the coalition made up of the Social Democrats (SPD), Baerbock’s Greens, and the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP).
Essentially, the lines of conflict run like this: Baerbock wants to throw out previous foreign policy strategies with the bath water and give human rights policy and climate protection a new status in her remit. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the SPD, on the other hand, is s stickler for the continuity of Angela Merkel’s policies. Sooner or later, they will clash.
Government members were quick to laud Baerbock for her swift and decisive action following the verdict in the Berlin Tiergarten murder. However, whether she can count on them to support her quest to prevent the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from becoming operational is another matter. If Russia were to attack Ukraine, the EU would certainly consider it. But only then.
The Social Democrats have always been and still are in favor of the gas deal with Russia. Chancellor Scholz laid it out quite succinctly recently, saying the pipeline was now no longer a political problem — it would be up to the authorities to approve it or not. He knows full well that Germany will need the gas once the last German nuclear power plants go off the grid next year, and even more so if the expansion of renewable energies fails to pick up as quickly as the Greens would like.
On nuclear disarmament, Baerbock is pushing for fewer stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
Yet there are still US nuclear weapons stored in Germany that could be dropped from German aircraft in the event of a crisis. That’s known as the nuclear sharing policy which will continue under the new government — not least because Germany is planning to procure new aircraft for that purpose. As it stands, Baerbock’s campaign is nothing more than an appeal.
https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-who-is-in-charge-of-german-foreign-policy/a-60174353
We all wish Donald Trump would disappear forever. Sadly that doesn’t seem likely as the ex President continues to spout off his unedited obscene commentary.
Here’s the latest target of his unceasing wrath which comes after he excoricated his thought to be friend ex-Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu with a “Fuck you” for making nice with President Biden.
Daily Beast 12.17.2021
The comments with journalist Barak Ravid were in relation to how Jewish people feel toward Israel, and according to Trump, they don’t seem to care about the Jewish nation.
“The Jewish people, in the United States, either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel,” he said before fully blowing the dog-whistle. “I mean, you look at The New York Times—The New York Times hates Israel, hates it. And they’re Jewish people that run The New York Times. I mean, the Sulzberger family.”
Never one to understand a filter, former President Donald Trump veered into antisemitism in a recent interview . “It used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress,” he said. “Today, I think it’s the exact opposite, and I think Obama and Biden did that.”
The release of Trump’s diatribe comes a day after his on-and-off favorite network, Fox News, got in trouble for posting an antisemitic cartoon featuring billionaire George Soros, who is Jewish, as a “puppet master” controlling Democratic prosecutors.
Who would have thought that the Mayor of San Francisco would ever receive prime time law and order love on the editorial page of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal?
I’m sure you’re getting a lot of Red State love tonight
Wall Street Journal 12.16.2021
As crime has risen, the defund-the-police movement has become a political liability even for Democrats in progressive cities. Exhibit A is San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed appears to have had a law-and-order conversion for the ages.
“It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city—it is time for it to come to an end,” Ms. Breed said Wednesday in a fiery speech that defied her previous tolerance for growing public disorder in her once charming city. “And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policies, and less tolerant of all the bull— that has destroyed our city.”
That’s a welcome statement, but it’s a reversal for Ms. Breed, who championed sizeable cuts to the police budget in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. The mayor now says she’ll introduce a supplement to the current budget to pay for more policing. She also wants more funding in the next budget for officer overtime and police-academy classes.
Ms. Breed added that one immediate priority is “fixing the lights, adding additional lighting in very dark areas, dealing with broken trash cans and trash all over the neighborhood.” She wants to target open-air drug dealing, and she’s also coordinating with police and the sheriff’s office on a felony warrant sweep. That sounds suspiciously like broken-windows policing.
What prompted this change of heart? Ms. Breed acknowledged Wednesday that “the fact is things have gotten worse over time.”
No kidding. By Dec. 12, San Francisco had 53 homicides this year, up from 48 in all of 2020 and 41 in 2019. Smash-and-grab robbery gangs and shoplifting in the city have become global viral videos, and police data show an 18% increase in larcenies since last year. Homeless camps on the street, drug use, and public disorder are rampant.
Residents are fed up with the lawlessness, and tourists are afraid to visit. San Francisco’s radical district attorney, Chesa Boudin, faces a recall election in June. There’s a lot of ruin in a city, but apparently even the progressives in San Francisco may have had enough.
Lee Heidhues 12.15.2021
San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s law and order siren song is a thinly veiled shot at District Attorney Chesa Boudin as she continues to work for his recall from office. Make no mistake the Mayor wants the DA recalled so she can name an ally to the position.
Wrapping herself in the mantle of being a crime fighter the Mayor is really doing the domestic political chores for the San Francisco Police Officers Association and their reactionary allies.
Time for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to show some “Progressive” chops and speak up and speak out against this blatant law and order pandering to the uptight, fearful and paranoid minority in San Francisco
Mayor London Breed’s proposal is nothing more than a politician rebranding herself as as a law and order convert tossing raw meat to the Chesa Boudin Recall reactionary mob and their right wing money bags
Excerpted from Mission Local 12.15.2021
Mayor London Breed’s announcement yesterday that she wants to give law enforcement more access to surveillance technology left privacy experts and political figures baffled – the 2019 surveillance technology law she wants to amend already permits law enforcement to access such data, they said.
A spokesperson for the ACLU of Northern California told Mission Local in a statement that it opposes attempts to undermine the surveillance technology ordinance, adding that “a diverse community coalition supported the ordinance” when it passed in 2019, “putting needed guardrails on police surveillance.”
“The SFPD has a long record of racial discrimination and abuse and gutting the ordinance to give police unchecked access to real-time surveillance will endanger the people of San Francisco, particularly immigrants, the unhoused, people of color, and religious minorities,” said the statement. “Weakening the ordinance will undermine police accountability and harm people’s rights and safety for years to come.”
Brian Hofer, who co-authored the 2019 legislation which aims to limit access to surveillance technology, agreed: “They’ve either never read the ordinance or they’re being deliberately misleading.”
Lee Hepner, a legislative aide to Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who sponsored the 2019 law, said the law does not prevent the Police Department from using real-time monitoring. He wondered whether the mayor was getting “bad advice.”
Current law also already allows for police to access this type of footage – live feeds of an ongoing looting incident, for example – without Board approval whenever there is “danger of death or serious physical injury. ”
Instances of mass retail theft, like the ones Breed is using as examples of the law’s deficiency, already allow police to bypass the approval process due to “exigent circumstances,” said Hofer. “During a smash-and-grab … there’s obviously a risk to somebody.”
And after any crime event, police routinely pick up street video footage.
Experts say mayor’s drive to override surveillance law misstates law’s restrictions
Lee Heidhues 12.14.2021
San Francisco Mayor London Breed is coming down four square as the law and order Queen and spokesperson for the Police Officers Association with her controversial call to flood the Tenderloin with cops and providing them with more surveillance tools.
The Mayor, who was born and raised in the nearby Western Addition housing projects, is well aware of drugs, crime and their impact on society.
The Mayor must know that arresting street level drug dealers and users is not going to solve the crime problem.
The Mayor is taking this action to score political points with a fearful, uptight and paranoid electorate. The reality is that the crime level has not increased. In fact, the rate of crime in several areas is actually down.
That is not stopping the Mayor from plowing full speed ahead with her lock ’em all up talking points. The kind of law and order rhetoric which was perfected by politicians such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Excerpted from San Francisco Standard 12.14.2021
Mayor London Breed dove head first into some of the biggest debates over policing Tuesday when she seized on the perception that San Francisco is becoming less safe to call for more police and more police surveillance.
Critics, like John Hamasaki, a criminal defense attorney and member of San Francisco’s Police Commission, called the proposals a “backlash to Black Lives Matter” and an example of the “police union seizing power.” He said he does not support officers gaining live access to cameras and questioned the efficacy of putting more police on the street.
“We have been arresting and incarcerating dealers both at the state and the federal level,” he said. “And it hasn’t changed the circumstances on the ground in the Tenderloin.”
During a fiery press conference at City Hall, the mayor announced a series of crime-fighting initiatives that included more overtime funding for police to crack down on drug dealing in the Tenderloin and giving police access to public security cameras in real time during emergency situations.
While Breed acknowledged that her proposals would make people uncomfortable, she also made it clear that she wasn’t going to get hung up on such criticism. Spurred by viral videos of thieves breaking into cars and ransacking stores in Union Square, Breed said it was time to turn the tide on a public safety problem that has persisted in San Francisco for years and has only gotten worse.
Breed Backs More Cops, More Surveillance as Public Safety Concerns Swamp City Hall
Lee Heidhues 12.13.2021
Mayor London Breed is in a very calculated way singing a siren song to take control of the public schools under the mantra of good government.
This is the same Mayor Breed who is enthusiactically supporting the February 2022 recall of three elected School Board members.
Some “progressive” San Francisco voters are aligning themselves with disgruntled parents who want to give up their right to elect a School Board and give it all to the Mayor who would appoint the new commissioners should the Recall succeed.
London Breed must be loving every moment of this calculated move as she tries to collect all the chips in San Francisco style political poker.
Time for a history lesson. Or Back to the Future.
Prior to 1972 the School Board was appointed by the Mayor. Local citizens did not like that way of doing business because it took away their voice in selecting the School Board. At the time allegedly “progressive” San Francisco was upset about “busing” students away from their neighborhood schools to achieve racial balance.
So, the easy fix was to change the system to an elected a School Board and then harass these newly elected officials to roll back “busing”.
Excertped from San Francisco Chronicle 12.13.2021
Mayor London Breed is pushing an ambitious school board oversight plan that threatens to withhold city funding from classrooms if Board of Education members don’t change their behavior.
San Francisco classrooms, under a proposed change to city law, could lose millions in city funding each year if school board members continue to micromanage, treat others poorly or persist in chasing short-term political wins, its backers say.
School board Vice President Faauuga Moliga, whom Breed initially appointed to the position to fill a vacancy, panned the idea.
Breed announced the unprecedented and unusual oversight plan Monday, which would require majority support of the supervisors and then the approval of voters in June.
The Children’s First Initiative would also restructure city government by creating a new Children’s Agency, which would oversee two existing children-related city departments. The agency would be on par with the powerful Public Utilities Commission and the Municipal Transportation Agency.
“This is about good government and accountability,” Breed said at an afternoon news conference. “It’s about ensuring that the city dollars are being spent wisely. Part of that is making sure we’re grading ourselves … and right now, we’re failing.”
The measure signals Breed wants to keep a focus on children and keeping families in San Francisco, one of her signature issues, while also taking on a controversial school board facing a $125 million deficit and a recall of three members. The mayor frequently criticized the board during the pandemic for failing to reopen classrooms while focusing on renaming schools and other policies that critics considered political or symbolic.
Top photo – Mayor Breed with Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax 11.30.2021
Lee Heidhues
I have always abhorred Ronald Reagan, his politics and what he stood for in America.
I wanted to believe the arch reactionary movie actor turned politician, Governor and President was thankfully long gone from public view.
Obviously not. In the pages of The New Republic I read that Ronnie’s favorite publication has been brought back to life. Albeit in Trump MAGA Twitter form.
The illustration below is one artist’s version of Reagan returning from the crypt to read his favorite magazine, Human Events.
Excerpted from The New Republic 11.26.2021 Jake Bittle
The total abasement of the right-wing media space.
The old magazine Human Events might not have had noble ideas, but it at least took itself and those ideas seriously, whereas the new magazine cares for nothing except conspiracy and provocation.
It turns out that the gutter is an ideal place from which to do one’s sniping.
In March 2019, former Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam announced that he and a conservative lawyer named Will Chamberlain were going to resurrect the storied right-wing journal Human Events, which had been muddling along for years.
It was Ronald Reagan’s favorite magazine. According to one of Reagan’s biographers, his staffers often sought to hide it from the president, lest the articles sway his view on some already-settled issue of taxation or Soviet détente.
Two years later, the historic magazine has become yet another right-wing click factory, pumping out trumped-up investigations and snarky rewrites just as Breitbart did before it. The renaissance of the magazine provides the perfect capsule summary of the conservative movement’s long downward journey from pages to pixels.
More than anything else, though, the revived Human Events feels pointless, yet another mill to churn out the same grist.
The vast majority of articles are wispy-thin rewrites of reportage from The Wall Street Journal or Fox News, designed more to serve as fodder for Will Chamberlain’s never-ending Twitter feed than as material for someone who wants to learn what is going on in the world.
When Raheem Kassam relaunched the publication, he said he wanted it to represent “Trump as a philosophy, not Trump as a man,” and in a certain sense the resuscitated website has done that, but only in the sense that Trump’s “philosophy” consists of culture-war red meat and conspiratorial chicken feed.
No doubt there’s a market for the personalities Human Events is elevating, since it’s the same thing that everyone else on the right is doing—Chamberlain has almost 200,000 Twitter followers.
https://newrepublic.com/article/164396/human-events-trump-ronald-reagan-magazine-maga
California Governor Gavin Newsom has never been shy about taking a controversial position.
His decision to order San Francisco officials to perform same sex weddings shortly after he became Mayor in 2004 started the political ball rolling on what eventually ended up with the US Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage in America.
Now Governor Newsom has set his sights on the epidemic of assault rifles and ghost guns. Don’t under estimate Newsom’s forward looking political street smarts.
Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 12.11.2021
In a new approach to gun control inspired by Texas’s controversial approach to banning most abortions, California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday announced that his administration will work to make it easier for private citizens to sue people who sell assault rifles and parts for untraceable ghost guns.
“If states can now shield their laws from review by the federal courts that compare assault weapons to Swiss Army knives,” Newsom said in a press release late Saturday, “then California will use that authority to protect people’s lives, where Texas used it to put women in harm’s way.”
Jessica Levinson, a Supreme Court expert who teaches constitutional law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, told The Chronicle that the announcement is another example of Newsom hoping to be a “quarter step ahead of public opinion and one step ahead of where he can go legally,” pointing to his support of same-sex marriage, legalization of marijuana and other laws.
“He is proposing to use a mechanism that many — that he and many others — have vilified. But I think it’s quite smart, right? I think it’s a big ‘Fuck you’ to the Supreme Court,” Levinson said. “If you’re going to allow unconstitutional laws — or I should say in this case, constitutionally questionable laws — that are insulated from judicial review, then we’re going to use that to our advantage.”
“SCOTUS is letting private citizens in Texas sue to stop abortion?!,” Newsom tweeted Saturday. “If that’s the precedent then we’ll let Californians sue those who put ghost guns and assault weapons on our streets.”
State officials will aim to craft a measure that would allow residents to seek damages of at least $10,000, plus legal fees, against anyone who manufactures, distributes or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit in California.
Lee's Perspective 