Katya Sedgwick

Like many other Americans who had the misfortune to live under socialism, I’ve been having lots of flashbacks lately. In particular, I find that the presumptive President-elect Joe Biden gives out serious Brezhnev vibes. The general secretary of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, Leonid Brezhnev was not a healthy man. He was a chain-smoking workaholic who’d been appointed to a series of very stressful positions — you try to rise in ranks under Joseph Stalin. He served in World War Two, when he was wounded, and suffered a concussion. Brezhnev’s mind and body took a toll; his first, minor stroke happened in 1951, when he was still in his forties.

Gavin Newsom is not a very good liar. The California governor, who recently issued a coronavirus ruling prohibiting Christmas and Thanksgiving gatherings of more than 10, or members of more than three different households, has broken his own rules. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Newsom attended a birthday party for a lobbyist at the ultra-lux Wine Country restaurant French Laundry. Six couples were present at the maskless, non-socially distant soirée, including functionaries from the California Medical Association, which advises the governor on the pandemic measures.After putting the state on yet another lockdown, a shifty-looking Newsom recorded a video explaining what happened at that $400-a-plate affair.

The most under-appreciated fact of the 2020 presidential campaign is that Kamala Harris, the woman likely to soon replace the geriatric Biden should the Democratic ticket win, is a creature of San Francisco political machine. Harris was born 56 years ago today in Berkeley, the daughter of two graduate students, and spent her formative years in the East Bay. She attended Howard University where she learned nothing about rap, returning to the Bay Area afterwards. Her political career took off after an affair with then California State Assembly Speaker, and the future mayor of San Francisco, and the City’s powerbroker, Willie Brown. Brown was twice her age at the time, and his wife was battling cancer.

Oakland, California In April, when spring fever ran high and California saw protests against the unending lockdowns, Gov. Gavin Newsom promised that ‘politics and protests will not drive our decision making. Science, data, and public health will drive our decision making. #StayHomeSaveLives.’ As it turns out, the anti-lockdown movement was right to be suspicious of tyranny. Not only are the decisions about opening up — or, more accurately, not opening up — political, but local and state governments are intent on taking the crisis as an opportunity to alter our way of life forever. Newsom has now tied reopening to ‘racial equity’, through reduction of COVID rates in black, Hispanic and Pacific Islander communities.

District Attorney Chesa Boudin personifies everything that’s wrong with San Francisco: weak on drugs, weak on crime, weak on racist assaults and weak, even, on the trafficking of minors. Some say that’s why the campaign to recall him is gaining momentum. Others counter that he doesn’t even matter.Boudin is a son of not one, not two, but four domestic terrorists. His biological parents went to prison for a Brink’s robbery when he was one, surrendering the boy to their Weather Underground bosses Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, to raise right. The Baby Underground grew up, got a Rhodes scholarship, completed a law degree at Yale, and went to work for the Venezuelan socialist dictator Hugo Chavez.