Tuesday, August 26, 2025

Our history of racial terrorism cannot be wished or washed away

Next month, Colbert I. King will retire from the Washington Post. He's 85 years old and has seen the District of Columbia change, suffer, and revitalize. 

Educated in the DC public schools, he graduated from Howard University and served in the military. He then "worked as special officer for the United States Department of State through 1970, eventually leaving over objections to the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO)." (COINTELPRO was a covert FBI program under J. Edgar Hoover, which spied on and disrupted insurgent political activists, including civil rights and anti-Vietnam war leaders.) King then held a series of government posts culminating in an appointment to the World Bank under Jimmy Carter. After a stint in banking, he joined the Post in 1990. (Bio via Wikipedia)

In a city where the federal government often overshadows the lives and struggles of the residents, King frequently has written of and for his city.

King's response to the Trump regime's military occupation of DC was published in the WaPo over last weekend. (gift article)

The spirit of Old Dixie rises in D.C.
“The South will rise again” was not just the wistful rallying cry of the defeated Confederacy. It was also the South’s declaration that the day would come when rules would be restored to the liking of militarily vanquished White people left smoldering below the Mason-Dixon Line.

That day might have arrived this week when National Guard troops from Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee were deployed to D.C. as part of President Donald Trump’s takeover of law enforcement in our nation’s capital. ...

King knows what he's seeing in his city.

... the District is a bit player in a larger and more pernicious Trump-led movement: namely, to snuff out efforts to achieve racial equality, to silence talk about race, to show disrespect for Black leadership, and to pretend that America is now, henceforth and forevermore, deemed a color-blind but unmistakenly White-dominated country.

Trump is bent on suppressing the reality of America’s legacy of racial discrimination and well-documented, intergenerational transmission of present-day inequality.

He proclaims himself sick and tired of the Smithsonian’s focus on, as he put it on Truth Social, “how bad Slavery was.” ...  But to appreciate this critical juncture — to come to grips with the retrograde, self-defeating course we are now on — Americans must revisit critical chapters in our history. No matter how painful that is. 

Moreover, racism still shapes lives in the District.

Trump might declare race irrelevant. But that will not make it so in life in the District of Columbia — or elsewhere in America.

Race shows up in the experiences of D.C. residents having to endure the restoration of Confederate statues honoring men who fought to preserve slavery. It reeks out of the mouth of a president who denounces their hometown as a hotbed of “savagery, filth and scum.” Race rears its head when a president pretends that race-linked gaps don’t exist in society due to race-related historical and present-day events.

The Confederacy was crushed, but its spirit exists. It should be captured and displayed as part of our nation’s story.

My Union ancestors who fought the Confederacy called it "The Rebellion." The South's shameful legacy is what Trump wants to revive. King concludes with a question:

Trump’s path is no secret. What is ours?

Monday, August 25, 2025

Too bad about Cracker Barrel

As these dis-United States sink into fascism, the right-wing mob's grievance of the day feels too entertaining to ignore. There's a MAGA faction that feels the new (boring, very corporate) Cracker Barrel logo is a defamation of all that is good, patriotic, and holy. 
 
Maybe you've encountered Cracker Barrel, the imitation old white men's diner, at some desolate Interstate interchange? 
 
John Ganz delightfully deconstructs this kerfuffle. 
... It’s sort of pathetic to reflect that we have so few—maybe no—authentic and unmediated experiences that the thing that now really upsets people is an alteration of a simulation of authenticity. 

It’s felt as a loss of national identity on par with the defacement George Washington, because our national identity is now just corporate brands and consumerism. It’s no different than the “trad wife” fantasy, which is also a simulation and simulacrum of pre-modern living. 

You see this across the reactionary right, and it would be amusing if it didn’t muster real political energy: people genuinely angry over the loss of comforting consumer experiences. ...

It’s tempting to look down on people for this, but on further thought, it reflects a deep spiritual poverty in our country. The right is capitalizing on this spiritual poverty, both politically and literally, and saying, “Yes, theyyyyyyyy are taking yourrrr beloved things.” 

This forecloses anybody asking whether we might deserve more. 
An actual small town in America might have problems with drugs, unemployment, it might be reduced essentially to a ruin, but as long as Cracker Barrel or the equivalent exists, people can feel okay about the country. 

The question is never raised, “Hey, why are we being fed commoditized slop all the time?” It becomes, “I want the red-brand slop, bring me my red-brand slop!”

... Conservatism is now the protection and hoarding of old-seeming simulations, hence all the AI-generated “traditionalism.”

Naturally, this brings me to fascism. On the one hand, fascism might seem to be an awkward fit because there was still some volkisch referent, a memory of pastoral existence, in the fascist imaginary. But that, too, was already a kitschy simulacrum of the pre-modern past. ...

Cultural poverty follows material poverty all the way down in too many of our lives. 

Sunday, August 24, 2025

Might Ukraine be winning its war against Russia? We wouldn't know.

The last few weeks of "diplomacy" over Russia's intent to destroy the independent nation of Ukraine have been pretty nauseating. Serious Americans should concede the obvious: our president gets his jollies from acting as Putin's ventriloquist's dummy, while Ukrainians struggle to stay alive and keep a weak and divided Europe on side. It's all just noise, empty noise for Ukrainians for whom the war is about life and death. Meanwhile the American media deliver up the nonsense as if it were meaningful.

Retired Australian General Mick Ryan studies wars, visits wars, and is the sort of guy who makes speeches at international "security"  conferences. His serious view of the Ukraine war is quite different from the common blather: 

Russia’s ability to convince certain foreign politicians that it is winning the war greatly exceeds its ability to actually do so.

There is an often-used metaphor that is employed to challenge Russian narratives about success in this war. It goes like this:

Imagine it is 2006. It is three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. After three years, America has only succeeded in taking 20% of the country, has not yet toppled Saddam Hussein, and has suffered over one million casualties. Would we view this as ‘winning’?

I think it is a useful framework for examining military and strategic success and failure in this war. But I would add another layer to this metaphor which, I believe, really brings home the precarious position that Russia is in. The additional layer is this:

Imagine again that it is 2006, and in addition to the ongoing operations in Iraq with the conditions described previously, that Iraq is undertaking a widespread serious of strikes against oil and gas production, refining and storage facilities across America.

Do we seriously think that this would not have a massive impact on American politics, war policy and the economy? It would certainly have an influence on domestic views of winning and losing and would objectively indicate that America was not winning.

This is the situation that Russia now faces. It is making only minor gains on the ground for massive human and material losses. It is facing an expanding series of Ukrainian strikes against economic and military targets in Russia that it appears powerless to stop.

Let me restate my hypothesis: Ukraine’s long-range strike operations reinforce that Russia cannot win this war.

Yes, our media breathlessly report the U.S. is blocking Ukraine from using U.S.-supplied missiles to attack Russian oil depots.  But Ukrainians, fighting for their lives, have developed their own sophisticated arms industry; Ukraine [is] becoming the ‘Silicon Valley’ of defense as startups develop long-range drones and missiles.

“Fighting in the air is our only real asymmetric advantage on the battlefield at the moment. We don’t have as much manpower or money as they have,” said Iryna Terekh, head of production at Fire Point.

Terekh spoke as she surveyed dozens of “deep-strike drones” that had recently come off the assembly line and would soon be used by Ukrainian forces to attack arms depots, oil refineries and other targets vital to the Kremlin’s war machine and economy.

Spurred by its existential fight against Russia — and limited military assistance from Western allies — Ukraine has fast become a global center for defense innovation. The goal is to match, if not outmuscle, Russia’s capabilities...

Maybe Trump can kill off this development for Putin. But it's going to be hard. The U.S. can no longer count on being able to tell other countries to jump and having them ask "how high?" And the intellectual habits of the U.S. "defense" establishment make Ukraine's increasing independence unimaginable among Trump's lackeys.

Paul Krugman recently shared thoughts about elite mind rot among U.S. "intellectual experts" with Phillips P. O'Brien. Krugman is a Nobel prize winning economist who remains broadly curious; O'Brien is an historian of strategic studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland who watches wars. They agree that conventional wisdom can be both extremely durable and simply false.

O’Brien: ... it's a fraternity of failure. So many people were so wrong that it's much easier for them to defend each other and keep hiring each other and keep referring to each other than admit that they all screwed up and don't know what they're talking about. So it was a community that failed, not just a few people, a whole community failed.

And that community existed in the analytical community, it existed in the intelligence community, it existed in the Pentagon and the ministries of defense. And instead of having a real introspection—like what the heck have we got wrong?—they have gone into self-defense mode. Everyone got it wrong. And that somehow makes it okay. We all got it wrong. And all that means is that the same people who got it wrong to begin with are getting it wrong now, but they're being treated as if they have any idea of what they're talking about when they don't.

Krugman: The parallel in economics is there were a lot of people predicting that getting down from the high inflation of 2022 would require mass unemployment which was utterly wrong. And, you know, we all make bad forecasts, but it was clearly analytically wrong. It just had the wrong model of what this inflation was about. And those same people are still out there, you know, talking to Bloomberg every couple of days and making confident pronouncements. So, yeah.

O’Brien: I mean, we’ve all seen community behavior where a community would rather defend itself than actually look at its own methods, it seems to me. And that's what we're seeing now. Protection of reputation is all. In towns like Washington, New York, Boston, whatever, it's so important to be smart, and to be seen to be smart.

Meanwhile Trump sucks up to Russia's mad nationalist dictator and Russia's killing machine grinds on.

Saturday, August 23, 2025

We want you here -- but no I.C.E.

Sign at the entrance to a Mission District medical office - click to enlarge 
That's the Mission way.

Friday, August 22, 2025

Oh, solidarity!

So Wednesday morning, news spread like wildfire (well, like text and other social media) that ICE (or associated masked men) at the San Francisco downtown immigration offices had disappeared a protester on Wednesday who was impeding their removal of their latest immigrant captive. 

The first call on Thursday was to join the crowd outside the immigation offices, but then the San Francisco Labor Council moved the call to the old federal building on Golden Gate with a half hour to rally time. 

Who was going to get there amid changes like that?

Within an hour about 50 people gathered, just in time to learn that ICE's catch (a citizen!) had been released on bond.

Solidarity means showing up and having each others' backs.

• • •

Mission Local has the story: 

A protester arrested by federal agents outside the San Francisco immigration court on Wednesday has been charged with two federal misdemeanors: destruction of property and assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal officer. 

Bay Area attorneys say this is the first time they can remember such charges filed against a citizen arrested by Department of Homeland Security authorities in San Francisco. While protesters have been charged by federal agents in Los Angeles, moving the practice north is a sign of “escalation,” said Angela Chan, the city’s assistant chief public defender. 

The protester, a U.S. citizen who asked to be identified by her first name, Angélica, was arrested around 10 a.m. yesterday during a chaotic street scene: Video showed ICE agents tackling several protesters to the ground after a crowd tried to stop ICE from transporting an asylum-seeker whom agents had arrested that morning. 

Angélica, a trans woman from an immigrant family, was one of those filmed being zip-tied and led away, her head wrapped in a keffiyeh and held down by officers. Angélica was brought into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters at 630 Sansome St. without a cellphone, her partner Renee said. A day passed before her family heard from Angélica again. 

Holding a citizen at an ICE building is “unheard of,” Chan said. Earlier this month, ICE agents detained two protesters in downtown San Francisco for the first time in recent memory. ...

Thursday morning whichever feds were responsible for Angélica's abduction produced her for arraignment. The crowd a mile away at the federal building cheered the news of her release.

Angélica comes from a union family: her mother is in SEIU Local 1021, her father belongs to UFCW Local 8, a brother is a Teamster. On this occasion, unions and workers proved they knew what to do.

Thursday, August 21, 2025

Not an endorsement. Just an observation.

 
Rather than getting all prissy about Gavin Newsom trolling Donald Trump. Dan Pfeiffer, Obams's former flack, points out we can simply enjoy the show:

Humor Is Good 
Yes, these are deadly serious times, but politics doesn’t have to be drudgery. It can be fun. Humor is allowed—and should be encouraged. Too many people are missing the joke here. ...
Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. The online Trump flunkies and White House staff are completely humorless, which helps explain why Greg Gutfeld is their patron saint of comedy. Newsom isn’t imitating Trump—he’s satirizing him. The whole point of the posts [on X] is to show how absurd Trump’s social media really is. The fact that the Right is freaking out about Newsom while applauding Trump says it all.

Trump is a shit show -- and a crumbling joke. We should remember that.

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Gerrymandering for resistance?

All Californians are being offered a chance to participate in resistance to Trump's effort to eradicate even feeble opposition. Lucky us to have a role, I guess. All Americans don't get such a relatively frictionless opportunity. But we do: on November 4 we'll get to vote on a state redistricting plan that should yield 4 or 5 new Democratic Congresscritters.

It's kind of nauseating to overthrow our own anti-gerrymandering initiative -- but we have to fight and at least this is, not yet, a violent measure unless you are a GOP Congress-member losing your safe seat. 

And it's being led by our very flawed Governor who hopes to ride it to the White House. Sigh. 

Pretty boy puff piece from the Nob Hill Gazette, 2020

I'm a longtime San Franciscan. I know Newsom is a very mixed blessing. Sure, he advanced the cause of gay marriage back in the day. But in the same mayoral season he kicked homeless people for applause lines. Kind of like what he did last spring with trans people. As with all our recent mayors, beginning with Willie Brown, the overriding thrust of his term was to tame this formerly flamboyant city into a sterile corporate headquarters and real estate magnates' paradise.

On the other hand, having Newsom out trying to lead the charge against Trump is a net win. This is how our system is supposed to work: let our pols compete to show they can be the best at enacting their constituents' gut desires.  

Grumpy columnist George Skelton of the LATimes gets it:

“It is really a calculated power grab that dismantles the very safeguards voters put in place,” California Republican Party Chairwoman Corrin Rankin said in a statement last week, echoing other party members. “This is Gavin the Gaslighter overturning the will of the voters and telling you it’s for your own good.”

Power grab? Sure. Overturning the voters’ will? Hardly.

Newsom is asking voters to express a new will–seeking permission to fight back against Trump’s underhanded attempt to redraw congressional districts in Texas and other red states so Republicans can retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.

First of all, that anti-gerrymandering vote creating the citizens’ commission was 15 years ago. It was a wise decision and badly needed, and still a wonderful concept in the abstract. But that was then, this is now....

... Second, that 2010 electorate no longer exists. Today’s electorate is substantially different. And it shouldn’t necessarily be tied to the past. ...

So we have to vote for this thing ... maybe even work for it. Now that's a tiresome reality. Newsom is not my leader, but resisting fascism is my cause and this is one bit of what we can do.

Good neighbors in Redwood City

 
A loud and cheerful little posse of anti-ICE protesters offered "a swig of community action" on the streets of downtown Redwood City Tuesday evening. There can be joy while speaking truth.

ICE is a masked, undemocratic secret police force that gives due process the finger and answers only to Donald Trump.

We will not stand by and do nothing while they disappear our community members, leaving nothing but trauma and despair behind. Let's show everyone in Redwood City and San Mateo County that we stand with our immigrant brothers and sisters in their time of need and we will resist ICE with everything we have.

They'll be back next Tuesday.

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

The questions come back, over and over again

Erudite Partner is up with a new essay, syndicated by TomDispatch, and appearing among other places at the LA Progressive. 

This one is an exercise in reflection on a long life of struggle for more peace, more justice, and basic sanity. It meets our strange, terrifying moment.

On Seeing the Future Too Clearly

... [On living through the Vietnam war...] We may not have foreseen it all — the assassinations, carpet bombings, tiger cages, and the Phoenix Program (the CIA’s first mass torture scheme) — but we were hardly surprised when it all finally came out. Today, there’s a consensus in this country that the Vietnam War was more than a mistake; it was a decade-long exercise in overreach and overkill.

... I sometimes think it’s the fate of many progressives for once in our lives to be right — over and over. This isn’t because we’re particularly good people, although some of my heroes are indeed good people. It’s at least in part because we are people with good luck. 
It’s been our good luck that, at some time in our lives, somebody offered us a place to stand, a viewpoint, an ethical way of grasping the world. ...

The advent of Trump/MAGA fascism demands of us, again, that we ask ourselves, where do we stand and why? 

Monday, August 18, 2025

The Supremes gone rogue

Leah Litman, University of Michigan law prof and former Supreme Court clerk, doesn't mess around. In Lawless, she argues, persuasively and with piercing humor that "the Supreme Court runs on conservative grievance, fringe theories, and bad vibes." Any pretense of deep legal reasoning from the Roberts court's major decisions is just insubstantial smoke covering BS. 

It's a pleasure to get the straight story, even if it is appropriately terrifying.
... the Supreme Court is extremely powerful. It is also poorly understood. The combination makes the Court pretty dangerous. It's easier for the Court to get away with, say, letting aspiring insurrectionists off the hook if people aren't paying attention, or if people think they must have misunderstood what is happening because it couldn't possibly be that ridiculous. 
Except ... it is that ridiculous. ...
It's been a (bad) process getting here. News consumers will recognize some landmarks along the way. 
The country has changed over the last several decades, with more diverse demographics and more inclusive median political views. The changes trend against the Republican Party's view on feminism (or as some Republicans like to call it, the "childless cat ladies") race ("Oh my God, Karen, you can't just ask [African] people why they are white?"), democracy (which some Republicans think is overrated, and maybe unconstitutional), corporate power (which some Republicans think should be virtually unlimited), government itself (which some Republicans think shouldn't exist), and more. Republicans have come to believe the dwindling support for their increasingly fringe views wrongs them. ... 
Since the early 2000s (with roots older than that), the Supreme Court has translated conservative grievance and other bad vibes into bad law. ... It is a little too coincidental that at the very moment Republicans gained a supermajority on the Supreme Court in 2020, the Court suddenly realized that the Constitution required the country to adopt the Republican Party's platform on abortion, voting rights, industry regulation, campaign finance, and a bunch of other stuff, too.
Litman urges us not to confused by mystification around the high court. 
The justices are not pulling Jedi mind tricks that people simply do and cannot understand. It's not like these guys (and Amy) are among the Nine Greatest Legal Minds in the Country. Heck, some of them are just nepo babies [she means Neil Gorsuch, remember him?] . ... These are exactly the kind of people you might expect to be appointed under a rigged system that is controlled by some out-of-touch weirdos. The minority-ruling party that gave the justices their jobs is currently gripped by some kind of antidemocratic fever dream, unconcerned with such things as law, facts, and will of the American people. 
Okay -- this book is not just denunciation of the limited qualifications of the Republicans on the current court. Litman carefully dissects the Court's rulings in five vital spheres in which they are working on enshrining reactionary legal theories. These are the chapters: on women's freedom -- The Ken-Surrection of the Courts; on LGBT rights -- "You Can't Sit with Us!"; on voting rights -- Winter Is Coming; on enabling oligarchs -- There's Always Money in America; toward dismantling the state as we know it -- The American Psychos of the Supreme Court.

Litman is not optimistic, but she remains hopeful that if the people are able to understand that the Court has gone bonkers, we'll figure out how to fix it. We really don't want to be ruled by cranks in black robes.
Okay, that got bleak. In my defense, this is a nonfiction book about the Supreme Court, and the Court is broken and is going to take an awful lot to fix. ... The world is not going to get better because we want it to and big changes will obviously take time ... So let's get started.

Imagine yourself at the beginning of the end of one of the great legal dramas of our time, when the law professor says to Elle, "If you are going to let one stupid prick ruin your life, you're not the girl I thought you were." 

Only now she's saying, "If you're going to let one stupid Court ruin your democracy, you're not the girl (or boy, or nonbinary reader) I thought you were." 
... They've stolen a Court and they are practically daring anyone to challenge them. It's time to call their bluff. 
I found this book a surprisingly enjoyable romp through the wilds of Republican legal malfeasance. The details were not new to me; I follow this stuff. But I love Litman's attitude; we could all use more of it.

• • •

You can follow a wealth of writing and writers who unpack legal developments for untutored citizens. Some of my current favorites include Jay Kuo, Chris Geidner at Law Dork, and Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse. We don't have to be mystified by law; we've got a right to demand that whatever law we live under should be "of the people, by the people, and for the people" in President Lincoln's words.

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Fight the Trump Takeover: Sausalito, Marin County, California

Marin County locals turned out on Bridgeway in Sausalito on Saturday to give the Orange Man a piece of their minds. Many signs were quite militant.
Indivisible Marin called for the demonstration as part the local manifestation of what they call national "Fight the Trump Takeover" protests: 
"The state of Texas is attempting to redistrict to steal five Democrat-held congressional districts to rig the 2026 midterms. It’s all being done at the behest of Trump. He knows he can't win any other way. And Trump isn’t stopping in Texas. He’s targeting Missouri, Ohio, Florida, and every state he can twist to help him steal Congress next year. This is about the future of our democracy and the time to fight this power grab is NOW."
These Marinites get it. Their signs speak less to particular Trumpian issues, injustices and crimes, but more to a general feeling of disgust.

Trump can, and does, try to "flood the zone with shit" and distract us through the sheer volume of his outrages against our country and historic democracy. But instead of overwhelming us, these little protests -- again and again -- seem to bring out new people activated by new depravity. These folks aren't giving up.