Political action for efficacy: uncoordinated and very well coordinated

Political scientist Lester Spence, who describes himself as an Afro-realist, has observations about the 250,000 people who've canceled the Washington Post in outrage at Jeff Bezos' decision to kill the paper's endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket.

Political scientists who study comparative politics came up with a term to describe a certain type shift from democratic states to non-democratic ones. "Democratic backsliding." They came up with that term to describe transitions that didn't happen immediately, through a military coup, or something like it, but slowly. And they've recently begun using the term to describe the US. Free press tampering is often something that comes with backsliding--either politicians or oligarchs gradually or abruptly reduce the ability of journalists to report.

What happened to the Post and the  [LA] Times is a sign backsliding is taking a turn for the worse. The Post IS NO LONGER FREE IN THE WAY IT WAS LAST WEEK. Once he makes this move, what prevents him from coming after the news next? Take a look again at the quote above. What prevents HIM from coming after those things now that he's done this?

THIS is what people responded to. And people chose this, WHILE UNCOORDINATED, because this was the best signal to send. Far better than canceling Amazon Prime (although that could be next) because an amazon prime cancellation can be read in a dozen different ways.

Now on that response. You're suggesting that mass cancellation can only hurt. But compared to what? What other action would've been better? If there's an action that could've been better...why didn't Post staffers coordinate it? why didn't you coordinate it? I'm pretty sure a draft of the endorsement exists. Why didn't the board send it out? Anonymously even?

I suggest that we're already down a dangerous path. Instead of telling people "STOP" in the absence of ANY OTHER ALTERNATIVE...the answer should be to tell people "GO." And use that energy to develop the internal institutional strength to contest the changes in the paper. ...

Like Spence, much as I doubt the efficacy of uncoordinated political actions, I am thrilled by the volume of the uncomplicated response to what feels a moral political offense.

We have a few more days to prove that Jeff Bezos bet on the wrong horse. Let's keep working.

• • •

And since I'm sharing from Spence, here are some fragments from the Johns Hopkins University professor's own first experience canvassing Philly for Harris-Walz.

I didn’t know what I’d expect to see because I’d never done door to door canvassing before. But there were about 150 or more of us, and of this group I imagine maybe four or five were paid by the campaign (not the Harris Walz campaign but by the group we were working with). The rest of us were volunteers. The youngest I met were in undergrad. The oldest I met were in their sixties and early seventies. It was a multiracial group, and, tellingly, international.

(Foreign nationals cannot donate money or participate in decision making in any domestic political committee but can volunteer their time in other ways.)

... Although the vast majority of these door knocks went unanswered, maybe about 20 percent of the time someone answered the door. The bulk of these folk were fervent Harris supporters—again this last push is about getting people we already know are likely to vote for Harris to do so. There were a few exceptions.

The white brother who answered the first door our crew knocked on spent twenty minutes telling us how scared he was of the Democratic Party, in part because of their response to the George Floyd Protests, and when January 6 was brought up, he said “that was four years ago.” ...

... Perhaps the best story of the two days happened on Saturday. Near the end of our run one of the crew ran into an elderly voter who wasn’t able to get to the polls because she wasn’t mobile, and she was concerned that her mail ballot wouldn’t get to her in time. I went to talk to the sister myself and collected her information so I could help her. My plan was to talk to people at the top of the food chain because technically there was only so much we could do. Maybe we could get a ballot and bring it back to her.

I ended up running into an election judge around the block from her. She wasn’t on our list—I think she stepped outside and saw us door knocking, and I told her what we were doing. She then told us who she was, what she did. So I took the opportunity to ask her how we could help her neighbor. She gave us permission to go back to the neighbor with her information. We told her the neighbor’s name but she didn’t recognize it.

When we went back to the neighbor, the neighbor laughed. “Oh. I know her. I taught her son!”...

 

That's how elections like this one are won -- one vote scratched out at a time, finding our people. 

This afternoon I go back to this work, calling into Pennsylvania with the UniteHERE national phonebank.

Voting together

The east coast branch of the UniteHERE national phonebank took a short turn through North Carolina last week to help on-the-ground organizers turn out voters to this Power to the Polls festival in a Charlotte park and their march to vote. Looks like they had a good time.

It's great to see our work is succeeding.

This effort, like many across the nation, aims to restore some sense of community to the election process though which we make our national and local democratic decisions.

Not long ago, there was only Election Day voting unless you submitted an excuse to vote by absentee ballot. But states in the Pacific Northwest experimented with mail-in voting and discovered this increased turnout (sometimes). Some states added early in-person voting options. The COVID year further encouraged many states to implement various systems of mail, drop box, and other options which reduced crowding and responded to some people's fears of being around others.

So, really, we no longer have Election Day as so much as Election Month. This year almost all states use some version of voting options distributed over time. 

A friend describes what living through the transition felt like:

When we lived in Colorado, we were some of the very early voters in line to cast our votes on Election Day, and at first I really didn't like that we couldn't have that moment duplicated here in Washington State. But now I have grown to prefer it this way, because we can be assured that our votes will definitely be counted and not manipulated in any way.

Early in the transition to early voting options, I was uncomfortable. An election is the most collective experience we participate in as citizens of a huge, wildly diverse, country. As Karl Kurtz wrote way back in 2007:

[Early voting] eliminates the notion of a national civic convocation of the American people on election day...

We've made voting a solitary action for many of us. Is this good? Certainly it is good for campaigners; we push early voting with gusto and profit by it because it reduces the number of people we have to reach on Election Day. (And early voting relieves voters in contested areas of that relentless flood of calls and texts.)

But I'm glad to see more and more groups creating public events like Charlotte's Power to the Polls march to remind people they are in this big thing together.

After all, voting is a chance to join in a celebration of the best aspirations of this country, even in these terrible times!

We even have election parties in San Francisco.

Going to be a rough season for democracy and rule of law

So why did Donald Trump hold a modern day Nazi hate rally in New York City, imitating the German-American Bund's 1939 pro-Hitler shindig?

Because he knows in his devious heart that he is going to lose the election on November 5.

Let me repeat that:

Trump held his hate rally because he knows in his devious heart that he is going to lose the election on November 5.

If Trump were working on the assumption he'd win the vote, he'd be barnstorming the states where the election is contested. He wouldn't be putting on a show in New York City, a place that not only despises him, but even worse, ignores him.

For the Trumpists, Election Day is just the beginning. We can expect violent disruptions where they can pull them off -- possibly to prevent (some people from) voting, almost certainly during the counting. MAGA folks will do outlandish things we haven't thought of yet, and it won't be good.

But in all the battleground states except Georgia and Nevada, Democrats hold executive power; in the other two, government has been responsibly run. Meanwhile Joe Biden is still in the White House. It will be hard for MAGA to overthrow a free election using the power of the state.

We'll certainly go on to a litigation stage. Will corrupt courts try to turn a free and fair election that goes for Kamala Harris into a Trump victory? Probably not -- though we have plenty of evidence suggesting  not to trust John Roberts and the Supremes. Might they decide that the divine right of presidential appointees trumps the electorate? Roberts likes a bit of monarchy as he showed us in the immunity decision. Still, it would probably have to be very close to let them pull that off.

The current MAGA majority in the House of Representatives will come up with quasi-legal stunts to put a losing Trump in office; it's going to take legal grit to hold that off.

Supposing Harris is still on track to be inaugurated, will there be violence then? I think Merrick Garland's overcautious Justice Department may have done us a solid on this: people are still going to jail for the last time they stormed the capital, reducing the number of hardcore crazies who are willing to take the risk of another go at a half-assed insurrection. And this time, the forces of order will be ready.

And that's only what I can see and imagine from my distant perch on the Left Coast. 

• • •

I can't believe that I am saying this, but what lies ahead makes me glad that our candidate is a prosecutor who has seen degenerates like Trump and his sycophants before. We give her a chance by giving her as large an electoral win as possible. That's up to the people of these disunited States.

• • •

And then we push her to cut oligarchs like Musk and Bezos down to size. That, too, will not be easy.

Dying in Darkness

I had to do it. Jeff Bezos' cowardly veto of his newspaper's endorsement of Harris-Walz was too much. How could I have any confidence in an institution devoted to covering Washington after seeing its leadership  run for cover (ineptly) at the approach of an aspiring fascist?

Historical experience suggests this won't shield Bezos unless he is more directly willing to lick Trump's ample ass; oligarchs lose under fascism. See also Mikhail Khodorkovsky who played footsie with Vladimir Putin to protect his oil wealth but lost it all and ended up in a gulag.

As media observer Nancy Gibbs writes: 

[The Post's] “Democracy dies in darkness” motto now moans like an epitaph. ...

F$%#*@! Philly.

As anyone who knows me probably knows, one of the worst things about our election seasons is that they interrupt my focus on football.

 

I can't resist immediately sharing this delicious campaign ad that speaks to my obsessions. And I'm not even an Eagles fan ...

A threat to religious liberty on the ballot

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. And she is the author of a bestselling account of rightwing evangelical Christian religiosity, Jesus and John Wayne. (Link is to my review.)

Currently on her substack, Du Mez Connections, she tries to figure out how to talk to and with evangelical Christians who are attracted by Donald Trump's promises.

On multiple occasions (and included in the GOP platform), Trump has promised to set up a “new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias” that will focus on “investigating all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.”

Promising to “aggressively defend” religious liberty, this plan to go after those “persecuting” Christians will do no such thing.

Instead, the targets of such a task force will likely be Christians themselves.

... Drawing from my own experience, I’ll wager a guess that it will be fellow Christians.

That’s right. If Trump is promising to go after his political enemies, I can only imagine that his Christian nationalist allies will want to go after theirs. And Trump has told them he’ll have their back. At the National Religious Broadcasters convention, he promised his Christian supporters that if he got back to the White House, he’d give them power: “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before.”

What does this mean for Christians who aren’t Trump supporters? For Christians who don’t toe the Christian nationalist party line?

Having interacted with more than my share of Christian nationalist types over the past few years, I have a pretty clear sense of what this could look like.

The greatest threat to the Christian nationalist agenda are Christians themselves.

Christian nationalism thrives on an “us-vs-them” mentality in which God is allegedly on their side.

Christian nationalists are not in the majority, but their power depends on convincing ordinary Christians that any who oppose their religious and political agenda are opposing God—and if you oppose God, you are clearly on the side of the devil.

Fellow Christians who speak out against Christian nationalism get in the way of this false narrative, and that’s why Christian nationalists have spent so much time attacking fellow Christians. Those of us who impede their agenda are targeted as “wolves,” “false teachers,” and “Jezebels,” accused of allying with the devil, of destroying “the Bride of Christ.”

I can attest to the ruthlessness with which Christian nationalists treat fellow Christians who get in their way. We’re attacked with vicious lies, slander, attempts at character assassination, threats of spurious lawsuits, and, for those of us who work at Christian organizations, with attempts to get us fired for speaking truth to their power.

When you are deemed an enemy of “the Church,” of Christian America, of God, anything goes.

I know this well. “We can say what we want about her and do what whatever we want to her,” one of their ilk said about me recently. Such sentiments reveal the underlying Christian nationalist worldview, one that thrives on demonizing enemies, often quite literally.

The language of spiritual warfare gives them cover, but scholars of authoritarianism know that dehumanizing rhetoric is the first step toward political violence.

If you care about religious liberty, Trump’s own rhetoric, his campaign platform, and Project 2025 all should be cause for significant concern. So should the behavior of his Christian nationalist allies.

If you are a Christian who cares about religious liberty, not as a mask for Christian supremacy (and a very specific brand of Christianity at that), but as a fundamental right for all Americans and as a protection for authentic Christian faith, then you should be alarmed.

This time around, there is a genuine threat to religious liberty on the ballot. And the threat is aimed at Christians themselves.

Talk about folks who are hard to reach! This author is close enough to them to have more chance than most people I know. Of course, from their point of view, I know the wrong people.

We have been here before ...

Let's not forget Ukraine. I can't. I see a people who made the mistake of aspiring to become a European democratic society while located next to an oligarchic tyranny whose ruler cannot abide their example. So they must die. If there is such a thing as a just war, Ukrainian resistance to Russian invasion qualifies.

I present here excerpts from Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum's address on being awarded the German Book Trade’s Peace Prize in Frankfurt, Germany. The citation named her “indispensable contribution to the preservation of democracy.” As well as being a journalist, she's an historian and a part time resident of Poland where her husband is Foreign Minister in the current, pro-democracy government. 

The Case Against Pessimism: The West has to believe that democracy will prevail.

... When, in the 1990s, I was researching the history of the Gulag in the Soviet archives, I assumed that the story belonged to the distant past. When, a few years later, I wrote about the Soviet assault on Eastern Europe, I also thought that I was describing an era that had ended. And when I studied the history of the Ukrainian famine, the tragedy at the center of Stalin’s attempt to eradicate Ukraine as a nation, I did not imagine that this same kind of story could repeat itself in my lifetime. ...

... After 2014, and then again after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, cruelly familiar patterns repeated themselves. Russian soldiers treated ordinary Ukrainians as enemies and spies. They used random violence to terrorize people. They imprisoned civilians for minor offenses—the tying of a ribbon with Ukrainian colors to a bicycle, for example—or sometimes for no reason at all. They built torture chambers as well as filtration camps, which we could also call concentration camps. They transformed cultural institutions, schools, and universities to suit the nationalist, imperialist ideology of the new regime. They kidnapped children, took them to Russia, and changed their identities. They stripped Ukrainians of everything that made them human, that made them vital, that made them unique.

... In 2014, Russia was already on the way to becoming a totalitarian society, having launched two brutal wars in Chechnya, having murdered journalists and arrested critics. But after 2014, that process accelerated. The Russian experience of occupation in Ukraine paved the way for harsher politics inside Russia itself. In the years after the Crimean invasion, opposition was repressed further; independent institutions were completely banned.

... In the early, emotional days of the war in Ukraine, many did join the chorus of support. In 2022, as in 2014, Europeans again turned on their televisions to see scenes of a kind they knew only from history books: women and children huddled at train stations, tanks rolling across fields, bombed-out cities. In that moment, many things suddenly felt clear. Words quickly became actions. More than 50 countries joined a coalition to aid Ukraine, militarily and economically, an alliance built at unprecedented speed. In Kyiv, Odesa, and Kherson, I witnessed the effect of food aid, military aid, and other European support. It felt miraculous.

... Since 2014, faith in democratic institutions and alliances has declined dramatically, in both Europe and America. ... Now, faced with the greatest challenge to our values and our interests in our time, the democratic world is starting to wobble. Many wish the fighting in Ukraine would somehow, magically, stop. Others want to change the subject to the Middle East—another horrific, tragic conflict, but one where Europeans have almost no ability to shape events. A Hobbesian world makes many claims upon our resources of solidarity. A deeper engagement with one tragedy does not denote indifference to other tragedies. We must do what we can where our actions will make a difference.

... Slowly, another group is gaining traction, too, especially in Germany. These are the people who do not support or condemn Vladimir Putin’s aggression but rather pretend to stand above the argument and declare “I want peace.” ...

... In 1938, the German writer Thomas Mann, then already in exile, horrified by the situation in his country and by the complacency of the liberal democracies, denounced the “pacifism that brings about war instead of banishing it.”

During World War II, George Orwell condemned his compatriots who called upon Britain to stop fighting. “Pacifism,” he wrote, “is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other.”

In 1983, Manés Sperber, the recipient of that year’s German Peace Prize, also argued against the false morality of his era’s pacifists, who at that time wanted to disarm Germany and Europe in the face of the Soviet threat: “Anyone,” he declared, “who believes and wants to make others believe that a Europe without weapons, neutral and capitulating, can ensure peace for the foreseeable future is mistaken and is misleading others.”

... But let me repeat again: Mann loathed the war, as well as the regime that promoted it. Orwell hated militarism. Sperber and his family were themselves refugees from war. Yet it was because they hated war with such passion, and because they understood the link between war and dictatorship, that they argued in favor of defending the liberal societies they treasured.

We have been here before, which is why the words of our liberal democratic predecessors speak to us. European liberal societies have been confronted by aggressive dictatorships before. We have fought against them before. We can do so again. ... To prevent the Russians from spreading their autocratic political system further, we must help the Ukrainians achieve victory, and not only for the sake of Ukraine. If there is even a small chance that military defeat could help end this horrific cult of violence in Russia, just as military defeat once brought an end to the cult of violence in Germany, we should take it....

The challenge is not only military. This is also a battle against hopelessness, against pessimism, and even against the creeping appeal of autocratic rule, which is also sometimes disguised beneath the false language of “peace.” The idea that autocracy is safe and stable, that democracies cause war; that autocracies protect some form of traditional values while democracies are degenerate—this language is also coming from Russia and the broader autocratic world, as well as from those inside our own societies who are prepared to accept as inevitable the blood and destruction inflicted by the Russian state.

Those who accept the erasure of other people’s democracies are less likely to fight against the erasure of their own democracy. Complacency, like a virus, moves quickly across borders.

... All of us in the democratic world, not just Germans, have been trained to be critical and skeptical of our own leaders and of our own societies, so it can feel awkward when we are asked to defend our most fundamental principles. But we can’t let skepticism decline into nihilism.

In the face of an ugly, aggressive dictatorship in Europe, we in the democratic world are natural comrades. Our principles and ideals, and the alliances we have built around them, are our most powerful weapons. We must act upon our shared beliefs—that the future can be better; the war can be won; that authoritarianism can be defeated once again; that freedom is possible; and that true peace is possible, on this continent and around the world.

It seems essential to post this on the weekend when Donald Trump returns to Madison Square Garden to re-enact the Nazi rally of 1938 during which people who called themselves "America Firsters" celebrated Hitler's regime. They thought to bring it across the ocean. Have we come full circle? 

Will we turn the US government over to an admirer of Putin and Hitler? Yes, this does seem to be the choice before us.

A love story from Texas

Jessica Valenti chronicles Abortion Every Day on a substack. It's an exhaustive and exhausting labor of love for women and for freedom. She knows why she fights on.

Today, the Harris campaign put out what I think may be the most powerful political ad I’ve ever seen. Please know before you watch that it is extremely distressing and graphic. But for good reason—it demonstrates exactly what abortion bans do to American women. ... this is why Republicans are losing and will lose.

They think they can talk about abortion as if it’s some shallow side issue. As if calling women ‘single issue voters’ will make us forget that the ‘single issue’ is our lives.

 This election is about all our lives.

Friday cat blogging

Sometimes I feel as if I were under surveillance. I wonder what Janeway and Mio think I might do if they didn't keep watch on me?

Getting Out The Vote: a tale

From the UniteHERE phonebank: we're calling into Pennsylvania. The state is most likely to be one of the closest elections in the nation.

The job is to contact all the people who've requested mail-in ballots, identify whether they are Harris voters, make sure they actually received their ballot from the county, help them with any details about how to submit the slightly complicated pile of envelopes and required signatures, and make sure they get their vote in on time. 

UniteHERE union canvassers (you can join them via Seed the Vote) have been helping people they meet at the doors in Philadelphia for weeks to request mail-in ballots -- and naturally, many other citizens request them without our encouragement. But in Philly, a lot of mail-ins come because of this door-knocking program. 

So I'm on my last call of a 3 hour shift yesterday ... what sounds like a nice young man answers.

I'm friendly and he agrees to talk for a few minutes. I ask whether he's for Harris -- "hell, yes!"

I ask whether he's got his ballot yet? "Oh yes. And I already mailed it in."

And then the kicker. "I'm doing what you are doing on the doors ... I'm working with a union -- UniteHERE."

I just laugh and we trade notes for a bit on what it's been like on the streets in Philadelphia. He didn't know we had a whole phonebank calling the people they'd pushed to use mail-in ballots. He did know, a lot of Philly people love them some VP Harris!

This was a true experience of a campaign working the way it is supposed to work: my call closed the loop on a process that is what campaigns call Get Out The Vote -- GOTV. Find the voters who support your candidate and do whatever it takes to make sure they actually do vote. That's the task for the next 12 days!

Amid the horror, there's no stopping ...

Almost two weeks ago while phone banking to turn out Harris voters in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was a little surprised that no one mentioned the late-September hurricane which had devastated the Appalachian west of the state.

I know something about campaigning in the wake of a natural disaster since I was leading a political canvassing campaign when the Loma Prieto earthquake shook San Francisco in 1989. That event, despite collapsed freeways and bridges, was not nearly as horrific as the depredations of Hurricane Helene. But the shake shook us all.

Electoral calendars stop for nothing and people enmeshed in them have to stay on track. Yet after such a disaster, the universe feels unstuck and normal life seems frozen -- perhaps because we have lived such violent emotions. People feel lost, in shock, as they do what they must in a changed world.

Being a political person, I have wondered what the hurricane, flooding, and destruction near Asheville might mean for getting out the vote in those hills. Though clearly the electoral contest is not the main emergency for people without light or heat, who have lost homes and livelihoods, the election does go on.

A friend of a friend -- one Fen Druidin -- from the Asheville area described going to the early voting polls:

Everywhere around here, people check in with each other. "Are you okay? Where are you located? How bad was it?"

We all know which parts were hit hardest. At the early voting site, I overheard the poll worker interacting with the woman who had been in line behind me. She'd been quiet and serious the whole time we were in line, not laughing when we did, though others interacted with us.

The poll worker asked her where she lived.

"Swannannoa," she said. [A particularly hard-hit location where many died.]

There was a hush. We all know what that means. It's hard to describe what I mean by a hush. Just. A held breath.

Then, "Are you okay?" The poll worker asked.

"Our house is gone," said the woman.

"Oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry. Do you need anything?"

"We're just waiting on insurance and FEMA to finish their assessments," said the woman. "Then we can move forward. But we're okay for now."

Politico sent a reporter and a photographer to report on the election in the Asheville area. Some excerpts:

They lost their homes and possessions. They’re showing up to vote in NC.

When Hurricane Helene swept through Yancey County, the flood waters took Byrdene Byerly’s home and nearly all her possessions. She escaped from her house with only the muddy clothes on her back and her pocketbook.

But despite all the devastation, on the first day of early voting, Byerly was at the county Board of Elections to cast a ballot for Kamala Harris.

“I’m soon to be 82 years old, and I’ve voted since I was 21,” she said outside the polling place Thursday. “I always vote.”

... The situation, despite remaining dire in some areas, has improved in most places. In an interview two weeks before early voting started, Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, fought back tears as she processed how to balance the election with the immediate devastation many in her state were living through.

“Everyone keeps asking me about voting locations and everything,” Clayton said on Oct. 3, nearly a week after flood waters swept through western North Carolina. “There are still people who have not been found.”

... In the immediate aftermath, the state’s Democrats had paused campaigning in the region, including all texting operations besides checking in on people and suggesting where to find storm-related resources. But now, despite the Democrats’ continued work on local relief efforts in the region, they’re back to deploying volunteers to help mobilize voters, according to a Harris campaign official and activists on the ground.

... “Everything came to a halt that we’d been working on,” said Dalton Buchanan, chair of the Henderson County Young Democrats. “It became not a priority for a bit. It was just in the backside of our mind, that there was politics happening.”

But the reality of the election crept back in, Buchanan said, “when we had to deal with the right-wing extremist people making threats to FEMA, and bad misinformation spreading everywhere.” He said he had to urge some of his own family members, distrustful of the federal government due to some of the GOP’s propaganda, to apply for aid after losing their homes. 

This past weekend, the county party was finally back to canvassing and phone banking.

I recognize some elements of these descriptions. A field campaign apparatus, a mass of volunteers accustomed to going door to door, is well designed to spread good information to people isolated in a disaster and to collect help from those who can. We did that in 1989.

A natural disaster also serves as a breach of the normal which unleashes extremist nightmares into the daylight. Our campaign for legal recognition of LGBT partnerships was accused by right wing preachers of having caused the earthquake. I won't be surprised that some people think Democrats or Donald Trump caused the hurricane.

We in San Francisco persisted as do the people of western North Carolina. That's a good country at good work.

Hearts of the city

Should you arrive at San Francisco General Hospital by bus on Potrero Avenue, you'll be greeted by this imposing, but perhaps also forbidding, maternal figure. Why is she wearing a helmet?

 

Look ahead and you'll see your way marked by cheerful hearts.

 

Gimpy patient and helpful doc seem a bit more welcoming.

 

Perhaps an orderly on break?

 

Good to see this figure getting around.

This public art displays works by sculptor Tom Offerness. He evokes SF General as "the heart of the city" and so it remains despite having been absorbed by San Francisco's best known oligarch, robber baron, and philanthropist Mark Zuckerberg.

Old dude needs a job

Over the weekend Donald Trump decided he would gain cred by pretending to work at a McDonalds drive-up window. The restaurant was closed; the cars driving through had to rehearse. The upshot on Xitter:

#TrumpIsAGlobalLaughingStock @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/0gDHA7ztIx

— Pissed off American Voter💙💙💙🌊🌊🌊🌊 (@JanetLei5) October 21, 2024

A heartfelt endorsement of Harris

Like so many of us, I'm working as hard as I am able to elect Kamala Harris. It's gotta be done. 

At every session of the UniteHERE phonebank, group leaders begin by going around the zoom restating why we are doing this work. For most all of us, it's some variant of "Donald Trump gotta go!" 

Yesterday I posted about an affirmative reason that it seems worthwhile to do this work: Harris is proposing a plan for in-home elder care assistance through Medicare! This could ease the burdens and improve old age for so many.

Today I want to pass on someone else's heartfelt endorsement. Patricia Williams is a legal scholar, credited with helping develop that bugaboo of the right, critical race theory which identifies and examines the role of race in our system of law. 

There's nothing abstract about why she is drawn to Harris as she recounts in an essay in the New York Review of Books. She notes that at Harris's Democratic National Convention, among the speakers were the survivors of that racist miscarriage of justice, the Central Park Five rape case. Irresponsible prosecutors, egged on by terrified New Yorkers led by Donald Trump, sent innocent young Black men to prison for the crime amid howls from tabloid newspapers.

... I attended the 1990 trial of those young men. I sat in that courtroom from beginning to end, and it was the saddest spectacle I have ever witnessed, dominated by fear-laced outlaw narratives that proved more powerful than reasoned evidence. It was an object lesson in how easily fact may be bulldozed and buried by passionate narratives of jumbled nonsense. The bottom line is that there was no physical evidence that linked any of the defendants to this very bloody crime. (The jogger lost 75 percent of her blood in the attack.) ...

Another man eventually admitted he had committed the crime, alone. Trump has never conceded that he pushed for a grotesque miscarriage of justice.

Williams continues: 

... it is Harris’s consistently ethical track record as a senator and as a prosecutor upon which I base my deepest support for her. She has described the often difficult but necessary function prosecutors perform as officers of the court, and she has made clear her belief that a major qualification for public servants must be the ability to see beyond preconceived boxes.

She speaks of dealing with victims, families of victims, and perpetrators themselves; grieving mothers who lost children, whose deaths were not taken seriously, children of children whose trauma reproduces itself in yet more trauma inflicted; people who have served their time behind bars but are released back into the world with little more than a bus ticket and no job skills.

She has dedicated herself to reenvisioning homicides as more than mere statistics, more than deaths foretold, more than the humdrum inevitable outgrowth of stereotyped urban landscapes. Most importantly, in deciding when and how to bring charges in a case, she cautions that if you can’t see that random teenager walking down the street as a possible honor student, or “Tamir Rice [as a child] or Atatiana [Jefferson] as an auntie in her own home, it can have lethal consequences.”

We are all ethically required to “figure out the diaspora,” she said in an interview—years ago, as though speaking to Donald Trump in the present tense. “Your limited view of who people are—don’t put that on [them] because you don’t have the ability to see the variety and the diversity and the depth.”

This comprehensiveness of vision, this capacious balance of law and order and sanity and proportion, this disciplined command of human possibility, is what I hope we restore to our political landscape with her election. There is still a long way—if a very short time—to go.

For a good summary of the Central Park Five story, see the History.com.

Harris has a policy!

Why doesn't Kamala Harris spell out her policies? The legacy mass media keep loudly demanding this.

I'm talking to voters on the phones, at least the ones who don't hang up on me. The Harris voters who I'm helping to navigate Pennsylvania's mail-in ballot maze have two concerns that don't seem to arise from lack of policy plans: they want to be done with Trump and/or to ensure that women can make their own decisions about our bodies.

So you can count me among the surprised when I learned that Kamala Harris was articulating a serious effort to make possible in-home care for elders. That really is a novelty. 

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris ... proposed a major new initiative: expanding Medicare to cover the cost of long-term care at home.

Such a plan could mean the option of staying at home, rather than in a nursing facility, for the millions of seniors and people with disabilities who need help with the daily tasks of life.

It could also mean physical and financial relief ― and new opportunities for school or work outside the home ― for the millions of working-age Americans who today provide so much of that care on their own without much in the way of outside assistance.

If the proposed legislation is enacted, such a program would represent a substantial boost in federal support for caregiving and, by any measure, one of the largest one-time increases in American history. HuffPost

This could be huge for most all of us. Most old people want to stay in their homes as they age, but the way assistance has been structured has made this incredibly difficult. At present, eligibility for government assistance for home care usually requires spending down all you have to become dependent on Medicaid. Naturally most people don't want to do this. Many feel that they would be robbing their children, besides naturally wanting to stay in home surroundings.

I watched this in my own family. My mother-in-law didn't have much savings to retire on. Rent took up more and more of her budget. As her chronic illnesses worsened, she needed help -- not medical help, but help with the tasks of daily living, food shopping, some cooking. But she certainly didn't need to be in a nursing home. Yet Medicare did nothing for her. Ever ingenious, she realized that if she went into hospice care, she could get some home assistance ... so she schemed to qualify. She then survived longer in hospice care than anyone her workers had ever seen, being a tough and artful old bird. It took a special sort of person to pull this off; she should not have had to find a way to game the system.

What Harris is proposing could be life changing for elders and families. I have to ask, why aren't we hearing more about this policy proposal?

In answer, I suspect is that in-home elder care is a burden that falls more on women than on men. Women live longer and find themselves in this fix more often; daughters live with the expectation they'll take up the task of caring for family members. This is coded (and actually is) a women's issue -- perhaps we only get one per election and this year it is bodily autonomy? That's good, but we need more.

Can this get passed into law? Certainly only if enough Democratic Senators and Congressmen win to ensure majorities. And it may take a few legislative rounds for such a major expansion of the government's duty of care to become law. But this is a worthy goal.

Here's Harris making the pitch for her plan. I like the bit about how she cooked for her dying mother, searching for foods the older woman would find appetizing. That's the real stuff!

A loaded gun

LA Times columnist Anita Chabria offers advice on how we need to think of this election: 

So what’s a democracy-loving American, Republican or Democrat, to do?

You have to listen to Trump.

If we don’t know what the MAGA folks are saying — and believing — we lose the ability to see the bigger picture of what is happening.

If we don’t pay attention to the lies Trump is telling about FEMA [in hurricane ravaged North Carolina], we can’t understand how significant it is that a lone man with a gun is threatening aid workers.

That man is the intended result: A person so removed from our shared reality that no impartial fact can sway him from his fear, rage and commitment.

With or without weapons, we will see more of these desperate Americans in coming days.

In Congress, in state governments, in local election boards, MAGA believers are being asked to prepare to contest the election — operating on the notion that fraud is inevitable, and Trump needs their help.

Those asks include going to polls to monitor and even record voters — to expose the voter fraud they so firmly believe stole the last election. They are being asked to watch poll workers as they open mail-in ballots, to check signatures as much as elections officials will allow and look for malfeasance. They are being asked to keep a close eye on Black and brown people who they believe are being paid or compelled by Democrats to illegally vote.

... Nov. 5 will not liberate any of us from this post-fact reality — the election will not vanquish it, one way or another.

But ignoring it is like turning our backs to a loaded gun.

It's all horribly exhausting. This election is a test of our national resilience. Those who came before found their inner strength when they needed it. We wouldn't be here if they hadn't. Can we find ours?

 

Friday cat blogging

 

Here's a cat encountered by election canvassers promoting the Harris/Democratic ticket in Reno, NV. She seems to find doorhangers about Nevada's initiative protecting abortion rights safe to sleep next to. 

The local felines here at home aren't so placid. My comrades on the UniteHERE phonebank met Mio yesterday when our monster cat tromped across the computer while we were in a zoom meeting. Lots of giggling followed.

This election is a tear-jerker

Either the purpose of government is to deliver practical compassion -- or it is to line the pockets of swashbuckling grifters like Elon Musk and deranged crooks like Donald Trump.

Here's the story of one woman who found out who was on her side -- and wants us to know whose side she's on. 

 

Slightly longer than I usually post. But worth watching.

He's not a giant. He's a bumbling coward.

Some observations on the presidential election from historian Heather Cox Richardson: 

... Trump’s campaign seems to be deliberately pushing the comparisons to historic American fascism by announcing that Trump will hold a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington’s birthday. More than 20,000 people showed up for the “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

Nazi enthusiasts march into Madison Square Garden, 1939

Trump’s full-throated embrace of Nazi “race science” and fascism is deadly dangerous, but there is something notable about Trump’s recent rallies that undermines his claims that he is winning the 2024 election. Trump is not holding these rallies in the swing states he needs to win but rather is holding them in states—Colorado, California, New York—that he is almost certain to lose by a lot.

Longtime Republican operative Matthew Bartlett told Matt Dixon and Allan Smith of NBC News: “This does not seem like a campaign putting their candidate in critical vote-rich or swing vote locations—it seems more like a candidate who wants his campaign to put on rallies for optics and vibes.”

Trump seems eager to demonstrate that he is a strongman, a dominant candidate, when in fact he has refused another debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and backed out of an interview with 60 Minutes. He has refused to release a medical report although his mental acuity is a topic of concern as he rambles through speeches and seems entirely untethered from reality. And as Harris turns out larger numbers for her rallies in swing states than he does, he appears to be turning bloodthirsty in Democratic areas.

Today, Harris told a rally of her own in North Carolina: “[Trump] is not being transparent…. He refuses to release his medical records. I've done it. Every other presidential candidate in the modern era has done it. He is unwilling to do a 60 Minutes interview like every other major party candidate has done for more than half a century. He is unwilling to meet for a second debate…. It makes you wonder, why does his staff want him to hide away?... Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on?”

“For these reasons and so many more,” she said, “it is time to turn the page.”

The political professionals who are running Trump's campaign are trying to compensate for their candidate's obvious deterioration by pouring resources into the seven states whose outcome will decide the Electoral College. I wouldn't be surprised if they like having him out of the way, fulminating threateningly somewhere else.

If you live in one of the swing states -- Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona or Nevada -- you are seeing Republican anti-Harris ads in every medium. You might even be seeing a Republican canvasser, usually paid by Elon Musk, though the union and Democratic field programs seem much more robust.

If you don't live in one of those places, you can still do your bit against our cosplay fake Nazi. You don't even have to travel to help Harris. Join the UniteHERE union phone bank and make calls to voters from home.

Lovely ladies with their minds set on freedom

 

Renee Bracey Sherman (l) was in town yesterday, promoting her new book, Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. The author was joined by Lateefah Simon (r), the next Congressperson from California's District 12, the East Bay seat from which Barbara Lee is retiring. 

There was plenty of wisdom, plenty of determination, plenty of delight, and plenty of laughs to share.

Door-knocking story from Pennsylvania

We have arrived at the stage in the seemingly interminable election when, after all the ads, and phone calls, and the flood of mail, it's voter-to-voter contact that seals the deal. In the places where there are close contests -- nationally the seven presidential battleground states, but also innumerable local races we hear less about -- it's the people talking with people that make this season our semi-annual festival of democratic engagement with the country's better aspirations.

So here's a canvassing story from suburban Pennsylvania, by @MattHardigree, grabbed from Xitter.

I door-knocked today for the Harris campaign in Bucks County, PA, one of the most important counties in one of the most important states. I've done a lot of door-knocking in a lot of elections, including this cycle, but what I saw definitely changed my view of this race.

Of course, this is just a single day covering about 90-100 doors. But it was also a persuasion run. We were hitting Ds but also had a list that included Independents and even a few Republicans who were considered possibly persuadable. Only had one pro-Trump door the whole day.

This isn't what I expected. This is a 50/50 county and the part we were in skewed Republican. My cousins Joe and Deb, who are wonderful, help organize this area and know their community well. It's a good community full of hardworking, nice folk, but it's not an easy one for Dems.

When I got there I saw a lot of Trump signs. Their [his cousin's] house stood out because it had a giant Harris-Walz sign, albeit one that was slashed by three men in hoodies a few nights before. It's a street fight out here.

The first neighborhood we hit was a fairly representative middle-class part of the county. We saw a mix of Harris and Trump signs, though more Trump signs. And, sure enough, the first door I knocked there was an older woman who told me "Democrats are ruining this country."

"Ah!" I thought, "it's going to be one of THOSE kinds of days." I wished her a nice day and went to the next house. I had a few nice interactions, a few people weren't home, and then I went to a door to find an older gentleman. He'd passed away and his wife was a lifelong R.

She wasn't on my list, but she was all-in on Harris. She couldn't imagine anyone voting for Trump. This was the first time I heard this from a Republican, but it wouldn't be the last time. The more doors I hit, the more Republicans or former Republicans I met who said the same.

I met an older Jewish gun-owner, a Republican who became Independent in January 2020. I met parents who were registered Republicans but whose daughters became engaged and persuaded them to vote Harris. They asked me to put up a yard sign for them.

I was surprised that the Republicans and Independents were actually the most excited about the election and felt strongly about voting for Harris. Democrats were mostly split into two groups: Older women and younger families.

Older women are extremely active and looking for a fight. At one door I was looking for the daughter and the mom asked me if I was there for Harris or Trump. I said Harris and she said "Good! I keep getting mail from Trump and I keep ripping it up!"

She was hilarious and had whipped her family into caring about voting. She even had her mail ballot and was going to return it to a drop box so she made sure her vote counted. These are high propensity voters and they're voting early.

And they also want signs, partially because they don't want to be intimidated by their Trump-supporting neighbors. This is pretty much the opposite of the experience I had with young Dems and Dem families.

Younger Dems, especially those with kids, are calling relatives and getting people to vote but they're also more nervous. Very few wanted signs and multiple people told me it was because they were afraid of their "Trumper neighbors." All the signs made them nervous.

The next neighborhood seemed slightly more upper-middle-class and signs were about 50/50 when we got there, but more Harris tilted when we left.

Overall (TL/DR), Dems are motivated, not a single Independent was voting for Trump and instead voting for Harris, moderate Republicans were all voting Harris. Other than the first door I didn't meet a single Trump voter.

Dems are active and voting by mail ballot and taking nothing by chance. There are a lot of Trump signs and I think it'll still be close, but a lot of people were happy to tell me they were voting Harris even if they didn't want their neighbors to know.

Some observations on this story:

• Campaign organizers hate election signs. They are bulky to store and distribute. The presence of many of them doesn't promise you'll win an area. But signs matter to voters who need to express themselves as in this neighborhood.

• In our present moment, it's often older women who are carrying the struggle for the Dems. We've had it. We won't go back!

• You can call what these guys are encountering "Republicans for Harris" but you can also just call it realignment. Middle class, sane, white Republicans are becoming Dems in the suburbs, much to the their own surprise.

The nation is in a race between grievance and hope for the future -- who will prevail?

A world turned upside down

Clara Bingham's The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973 just might be the most delicious achievement in oral history I've ever encountered. The author has assembled a huge, wide collection of voices from the period which catches viscerally the experience which is my lived-history alongside so many others. This is not just the political activists, though they are there. It is not just the white women; Black and other women of color also were about remaking their world and this author found them. The artists, the athletes, the educators -- all contributed to inventing a completely new culture, a zeitgeist that radically affirmed women in all our varieties. 

In the wake of this cultural breach, we still live and struggle against vicious enemies who would like to wipe out feminism's achievements -- yes, I'm talking about you Mr. Vance. 

From Bingham's introduction:

In 1963, a twenty-year-old American woman could not expect to run a marathon, or play varsity sports in college. She could only dream of becoming a doctor, scientist, news reporter, lawyer, labor leader, factory foreman, college professor, or elected official. She couldn't get a prescription for birth control, have a legal abortion, come out as a lesbian, or prosecute her rapist. She almost certainly knew nothing about clitoral orgasm or women's history. She could not get a credit card, let alone a mortgage, without the imprimatur of her husband or father. By 1973, the doors to these options and opportunities had cracked open, and a women turning twenty in 1973 faced a future of possibilities that no generation before had ever experienced.

...  This generation of women, as one feminist wrote, found "an opening in history." ... The women in this history [in The Movement] speak in their own words and tell their own stories.

Bingham has done a remarkably coherent job in twenty-one short chapters of organizing these testimonies into an understandable narrative of struggle and accomplishment. I read the book on audio and found this performance sensitively done and perfect for the subject matter. 

(If, like me, you actually know some of the women quoted, it can be a little jarring to hear the voices of actors instead of the women themselves, but go with the flow. On balance, it works.)

• • •

I think The Movement generation of feminists should be encouraged by the fire that still burns among many young women today even if their life experiences have been so very different. Jessica Grose writes a column for the New York Times that focuses on the travails of the 20-30 set; that focus in itself is a breach from the before-the-feminist-revolution times. Of the youngest women, she describes the gender gap in politics:

What’s changed is that young women have more of a voice. According to Deckman’s research, Gen Z women are more politically active than their male counterparts — a major historical shift, as men have heretofore been more politically active than women.

The reason that the gender gap in voting seems so pronounced is not because young men have become dramatically more conservative. It’s because of the political galvanization of the young women who came of age during the #MeToo movement, watching Donald Trump remain the leader of the Republican Party despite numerous credible accusations of sexual misconduct against him, and witnessing the fall of Roe v. Wade.

“For Gen Z women, women’s equality has become a defining issue of what they care about and how they perceive politics,” Deckman, who is also the chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, told me. She quotes a female student from the University of Maryland who told her in a focus group that “Trump winning just kind of scared us all to our cores.” The woman added: “My rights are being threatened and just walking down the street I am being threatened, and I need to do something.”

Petula Dvorak is even more emphatic in the Washington Post. "The 2016 election crushed the girls. Now women, they’re revenge voting." [Gift article.]

Somehow, I don't think the effort among conservatives to sell young Christians on Queen Esther is likely to successfully compete. But they are sure trying.

More good calls, this time into Pennsylvania

Alongside workers in the hospitality industries -- hotels, airports, etc. -- organized by their union UniteHERE, volunteers have been calling the battlegound state of Pennsylvania this week. Specifically, the state capital Harrisburg. It's a learning experience.

Obviously, our main aim is supporting VP Kamala Harris, but there's more at stake here. Such as, the state's Congressional District 10.

That race is between far right Republican Scott Perry, the sitting Congressman, and Democratic newscaster Janelle Stelson, whose 38 years on TV give her a lot of recognition. The candidates are attracting national attention for good reason: their differences tell us so much about what this election is about.

The Los Angeles Times' David Lauter highlighted this contest in a column entitled "All politics local? Not in this election". 

... The former head of the House Freedom Caucus, Perry is one of the few members of that far-right group to represent a closely divided district, rather than one that is solidly Republican.

Since first being elected in 2012, Perry has won five times, but in recent years, his district has grown more Democratic. Republicans have lost ground in the suburbs of Harrisburg, the state capital, and across the Susquehanna River to the west, where the growing population of Cumberland County is increasingly Democratic.

As the district has changed, Perry has become an increasingly uncomfortable fit.

According to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 riot, he took a prominent part in meetings with Trump advisors on efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. In 2022, FBI agents seized his cellphone as part of the investigation into the election plot. In 2023, after Republicans took control of the House, he was one of the 20 far-right lawmakers who repeatedly held up Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s election as speaker.

His opponent, Stelson, worked for 38 years as a television reporter and anchor for stations in the area. That’s given her wide, favorable name recognition.

“The viewers have gotten to know me as a trusted, nonpartisan voice,” she said during the debate, contrasting her pragmatism with Perry, whom she characterized as “the chief obstructionist” in a Congress that has accomplished little.

A former registered Republican, Stelson says she decided to run for office after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe vs. Wade and ended the nationwide guarantee of abortion rights.

Stelson repeatedly hit Perry for his past backing of a nationwide abortion ban without exceptions.

The decision over ending a pregnancy should be left to women and their doctors, she said.

“There’s no reason why Scott Perry knows better than they do what to do with their own bodies in their most intimate decisions.” ...

It's hard to knock off a sitting Congressperson, but just maybe, thanks to women rebelling against being told what to do and support like the national phonebank, Stelson may pull an upset. 

Phone banking isn't glamorous or even always fun, though often interesting. But when enough of us work together, we win.

Friday cat blogging

No matter how hard she tries, Janeway can't get at the little men. She gets bored quite easily. She took no interest in the political debates, but does notice football. Hmm...

Good calls

This past week I had the satisfying experience of calling into Charlotte, North Carolina, with the national UniteHERE election phonebank.

(You too can do this. UniteHERE is the union of people who change beds and serve drinks in hotels. And they know BS when they see it. They are working predominantly in PA and NV, though this day they were supporting a People to the Polls canvass in NC.)

Interestingly, the North Carolina voters didn't much talk about Hurricane Helene, but they did know there was an upcoming election.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has been reporting from North Carolina:

As if the good people of North Carolina haven’t suffered enough lately, they also have to worry about this: a network of child traffickers and pedophiles that tortures and kills children to harvest their blood for an anti-aging elixir known as adrenochrome.

Or so believes the Republican candidate to be the state’s superintendent of public instruction, Michele Morrow.

“The evil, demon-possessed people who worship Satan have been using this to try to keep their youth,” Morrow said in a video she posted on Facebook in 2020. “They’ve been using it as a drug that is more powerful than street drugs. … It is gotten through children who are being tortured and know that they are about to die. Guys, this is deep, it is evil, and it is real. It is truly happening, and we have got to stop it.” Among those she has identified as adrenochrome users is the actor Jim Carrey.

And this is not the only shocking discovery made by Morrow. Just a couple of weeks ago, she informed the public that the plus sign in LGBTQ+ “includes PEDOPH*L*A!!” ...

And that's not all about Morrow:

But here’s the truly crazy thing: Morrow has an even chance to become the state’s top educator. A poll by Raleigh-based WRAL last month found that she is in a statistical tie with her Democratic opponent.

The voters I talked with in Charlotte knew about and supported Kamala Harris. They mostly knew about the crazy Mark Robinson, hate monger, proud "Black Nazi" and porn addict, who the Republicans are running for governor. But they didn't yet know about Morrow. "What's her name?"

Mo Green is a seasoned proponent of quality public education and the Democrat who is running against Morrow. Nobody had heard of him.

It felt a privilege to help at least a handful of North Carolina voters to "do their research" on this vital contest.

Phone banking isn't glamorous or even always fun, though often interesting. But when enough of us work together, we win.

Aaron Peskin for Mayor of San Francisco

I've had Aaron's sign in my front window for weeks. This is the most interesting contest on my California ballot. I'd sure prefer Aaron to any of the alternatives!

London Breed has been a terrible mayor -- corrupt, partial to our tech and real estate overlords, and inept. Mark Farrell is for practical purposes a Republican who has to run as a Democrat in this Left Coast city, beholden to a bunch of billionaires who think they ought to run the world -- and who, like Elon Musk, show themselves incompetent in public life. Daniel Lurie seems a nice man, but being a Levi's heir and non-profit exec doesn't prepare a person to be mayor of San Francisco. Ahsha Safai was a good enough county supervisor from a part of the city everyone neglects -- but can't make a dent.

 

Aaron knows where the bodies, political and administrative, have been buried in this famously labyrinthine city. He's served two contentious but largely successful non-consecutive eight year stints on the Board of Supervisors.

Peskin knows that, by hook or crook, we can't solve homelessness without reform of the current morass of programs. He cares about keeping schools open, about public transit, about making rentals affordable. You know, the stuff that just goes over the heads of the billionaires who want to treat the city as their playground. 

He'd probably be a cantankerous chief executive, but a huge improvement on what we've had for quite a few years.

• • •

One of my dirty secrets is that I hate it that we elect the members of the city school board and of the community college board. I do not feel competent to make choices about who should run institutions that seem to be in chronic, slightly mysterious, trouble. And too often, the people running for these positions hope to use them as stepping stones, rather than digging in to improve them.

The one exception I'm making on this ballot is for Matt Alexander for School Board. He's a former teacher, principal and community activist who actually cares about the schools and deserves another term.

November election in San Francisco

You will be horrified to learn that City voters are offered a menu of A through O propositions to make choices on. I'm being polite when I say this seems excessive.

I can tell you what I did. My research was not exhaustive -- nor, I suspect will hardly anyone else's be.

Prop A. Money for maintenance and upgrades to aging school buildings. YES

Prop B. Money for necessary improvements to San Francisco General Hospital, Laguna Honda and community health projects and parks. YES

Prop. C. Creates an Office of The Inspector General in the Controller’s Office. Since the current mayoral administration has been notably corrupt, this is an attempt at a corrective. We need something. Two of the incumbent mayor's senior staff are already in prison, and likely there will be more. Will a new Inspector General help? Maybe. Something in addition to federal prosecutions seems necessary. YES

Prop. D. Gives the mayor additional powers over the City's maze of commissions and boards. Our governance is a mess, but centralizing these things in the mayor's office seems more likely to hide their workings than to help. NO

Prop. E. Creates a task force to study the maze of commissions and boards. Seems more likely than Prop. D to utilize community input, but I find it hard to be enthusiastic.YES (I guess.)

Prop. F. San Francisco has a cop shortage. To try to incentivize senior police officers to stay on the job past their retirement date, this would give them their retirement pay plus their continued regular salaries. Seems like a heck of a boondoggle to me. It was a boondoggle when the Secret Service tried the same thing. NO

Prop. G. Rent subsidies for very, very, very low income seniors already in "affordable housing". What are we going to do? -- put 'em out to sea on an iceberg? YES

Prop. H. Earlier retirement (age 55) with full benefits for firefighters. The politics of the firefighters unions are a plague on the City, but I can go for this one. It's a tough job, keeping us from burning up. YES

Prop. I. Include per diem nurses and 911 operators in the regular city pension and benefit system. YES

Prop. J. Gives the mayor and the superintendent of schools more power to oversee the spending of the Children’s Fund. Can't figure out what this one does and the ballot pamphlet contains no arguments. Some of the more progressive Supes have signed on. YES (I guess.)

Prop. K. Close the Great Highway, making it functionally a park. I realize this is going to piss off the people who live adjacent, but many of us from the rest of the city already use it for open space to walk on and reach the beach. Besides, it is going to be overrun by flooding and sand as the climate warms and the ocean rises. Might as well get some pleasure out of it in the meantime. YES

Prop. L. Tax on Uber, Lyft, and Waymo to fund the Muni public transit system. Makes sense. YES

Prop. M. Rejigger business taxes so big companies (yes, PG&E) pay more and small businesses less. YES

Prop. N. Create a fund, from private donations, to help cops, sheriffs, nurses, paramedics, and 911 dispatchers pay their student loans. The City has trouble hiring ... YES

Prop. O. Makes San Francisco a sanctuary city for reproductive freedom, including barring cops for sharing any information about reproductive health choices made by anyone in this jurisdiction. Of course. YES

• • •

I shared my reactions to the California State ballot measures here.