A lesson for us all

 

Last Sunday in church I had an unexpected experience. At the end of the service, the musician launched into a stirring rendition of James Weldon Johnson's hymn, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" -- otherwise known since the early 20th century as the "Black (or Negro) national anthem." 

 

In the sort of overwhelmingly white churches I attend, the hymn has become a commonplace. There was an era when a gay community whose men were dying in droves during the worst of HIV/AIDS took it up enthusiastically. That made a certain emotional sense; the lyric speaks the joy of the dismissed and discarded.

 

Yet I have been uncomfortable. The practice smacked of cultural appropriation; what right did a bunch of historically illiterate white Americans have to Black Americans' hymn of liberty?

 

Now the Trump administration has sought to erase the federal holiday that marks Juneteenth, the day of liberation from chattel slavery for four million Americans. No more free admission to National Parks to mark Black liberation under the MAGA regime!

 

Civil War historian Kevin M. Levin discusses why it feels so much more plausible and honest for us all to celebrate Juneteenth in this awful year when Donald's decrepitude tries to overrun us all.

Juneteenth Is Not Someone Else's Story 
Emancipation didn't just free four million people. It rebuilt the country the rest of us still live in.

 

... Juneteenth is a federal holiday now. It belongs to the country, which I understand to mean that it belongs to all of us, and not in some abstract, ceremonial sense. Emancipation did not simply liberate four million enslaved people and leave everyone else untouched. It rewrote the Constitution, redefined citizenship, and forced a reckoning over federal power that still shapes our politics. It launched a fight over Reconstruction whose outcome determined who could vote and who counted as a full citizen, a fight whose unfinished business runs through Jim Crow, through the civil rights movement, and into our own disputes over voting rights and equal protection.
 

... None of us, whatever our ancestry, lives outside the world that emancipation built. 

I am not ceding anything. This is part of my history too, not because I share an ancestral claim to bondage or liberation, but because I am an American living inside the consequences of that rupture and the story of how four million people moved from slavery to freedom is the central drama of this nation’s history.
 

... Black Americans inherited Juneteenth as lived memory, as family history, as a chain of testimony passed down with a weight and intimacy I will never replicate. Nor do I have any interest in attempting to do so.
 

... Nobody should cede this story. Juneteenth is the only national holiday that celebrates the freedom of over four million people, in a nation that has long claimed to be ‘exceptional’ in advancing freedom. We should all be reaching for it, from wherever we stand, both as historians and students of history. Because a nation that only half remembers its emancipation has not yet finished becoming free.

This Juneteenth, it behooves us to celebrate emancipation and refuse to cede our aspirations for more perfect freedom.

Lift every voice and sing,
'Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list'ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won." 

Thought for a Wednesday.

Busy today. I find myself living in a construction site; thirty years of deferred maintenance has its - expensive - consequences. I am sometimes distracted.

The early 20th century four-story school building across the street is an even larger construction site --and  has been now for a couple years and looks to take a few more to get finished.  

As soon as the workers across the street put up plywood to cover their fencing, the graffiti gremlins come out. They promote the neighborhood sentiment,

'Nuff said, for a busy day.

A Third Reconstruction? The end of the beginning?

Or possibly we've turned a corner? A lot of commentators in DC seem to think so. As Josh Marshall remarks:

... you build autocracies when you’re popular (often by goosing the economy in a smart and concerted way), not when you’re swirling the bowl with approval ratings in the mid-30s and falling.

Trump's stupid human cockfight on the White House lawn can't distract from the reality that he has lost a dumb war and murdered thousands of Iranians and a few Americans out of sheer vainglory. 

It can't even distract from the court-ordered removal of his illegally placed name from the Kennedy Center. For now he is covering up the wound, but his body and brain are obviously failing. 

The array of Trump setbacks don't mean that the Orange Toddler and his tribe of second rate grifters and sycophants won't wreak vast additional damage on our country and people. They can and they will. But just perhaps we can begin to look ahead

I like the prescription offered by Chris Geidner who chronicles the legal fights which the defense American democracy entail every day: 

... The lessons to take from the Kennedy Center debacle — itself by no means over — are essential to understanding how we get out of this moment and, in particular, how we move forward while Trump remains in power. 

First: Stand up, speak out, and challenge them. [Congresswoman Joyce] Beatty’s lawsuit, like so many over the past 17 months, was the result of a person who thought the Trump administration did wrong and lawyers willing to back that person up in that fight. 

Second: Remember that this is not a quick process, especially not litigation. It took nearly six months for this clearly illegal act to be reversed. 

Third: Realize they’re going to push back — and that they’re going to get more unhinged as you are closer to winning. Friday’s D.C. Circuit filing was embarrassing (at best), but, at this point, it should not have been unexpected. 

Fourth: Support one another. From the support Beatty got for her effort to the guy going around offering pizza to people at the Kennedy Center on Friday night, Trump’s effort to destroy community is best combatted by simply not allowing it. 

Fifth: Be ready for the fact that they’re not going to be nice about the losses — and that there will be malicious compliance and passive aggressive compliance (as well as, yes, noncompliance at times). But, as here, even the temporary noncompliance was a sign of how much this win mattered — and gave way to compliance by morning. 

Sixth: Celebrate the wins. They purported to change the name, it was despised and also illegal, Beatty sued, the lawyers did their job, the judges did as well, and — after an absurd 48 hours — they took down his name. Take the W. 

Seventh: Get up the next day, and start it all over again.

David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo offers a hopeful, but sobering take on our moment: 

... Make no mistake: This was the first step in what will be a decades-long effort to strip Trump from American public life and repair the damage he has done. It will be slow, pain-staking, halting, and thankless work — and perhaps most frustratingly it will have to overcome the inertia of faux reconciliation and indifference. 

The political dynamics of this renewal, America’s reconstruction history suggests, will be brutal. 

Each effort to undo what Trump has done will be met with howls of outrage, real or not, to maximize the political price exacted. Elected officials will have to decide whether to expend political capital to pay that price. If the 2008 financial crisis and Trump I are any indication, the stomach will not be there to engage in these fights even in the immediate aftermath of Trump II, let alone for the decades it will take to finish the work. 

The destruction of state capacity is the biggest and hardest thing to reverse. But the cosmetic and structural changes Trump has wrought without legal authority, in D.C., national parks, and the White House itself will carry symbolic weight that is likely to trigger the kind of backlash past Democratic administrations have avoided. 

If we don’t begin to confront now the scale and scope of the work ahead, we, too, will wilt when the times comes. 

It won’t be easy for all the obvious reasons but also for a particularly Trumpy one: He hasn’t just broken things. He’s replaced them with crap. Trump’s own track record across decades in business and his first term in the White House strongly suggests that we will face the additional friction point of projects done poorly, on the cheap, and not built to last. 

Shoddy work is a direct product of two Trump mainstays: corruption and performative spectacle. If it’s all just a grift, it doesn’t need to last. It just needs to wow the audience and produce the opportunity to cash in. The suckers are stuck with the aftermath. 

Everything Trump manages to accomplish creates a double whammy of burdens for those who to seek to undo it: the actual cost of demolishing, repairing, rebuilding, and replacing, plus the opportunity cost of what else could have been done instead. ...

He concludes: 

That’s why blocking Trump at every turn now has double the benefits.

So this indeed is the task for our Third Reconstruction, not only to win our institutions, not only to eradicate the white supremacy that enables the current regime, but also to reform our democracy so as to preclude another set of con men from taking advantage of our discontents. Are we up to the task?

No to ICE in Gilroy!

Californians will recognize this image: a string of marchers trudging under the sun carrying banners alongside rich fields in a wide agricultural valley. City people may forget at times, but this too is our state.

The location on Sunday was just outside Gilroy, in southern Santa Clara county. Why the march? The Trump/Miller deportation machine is threatening to build an ICE detention facility among these fields.

Neighbors are not having of it.

Gilroy is proud to call itself the Garlic Capitol of the World. 

A go-to source for information about the Gilroy detention plan seems to be the independent non-profit newsroom, the San Jose Spotlight. They've got the goods: 

Blueprints confirm ICE involvement in South County facility

Detailed blueprints show an ICE office with detention and processing space is planned in South Santa Clara County.

The 111-page document obtained by this news outlet, dated Sept. 17, 2025, illustrates a future U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility with detention areas, detainee processing areas, interview and holding rooms, spaces for mothers with infants, visitation rooms, weapons and ammunition rooms, tactical equipment storage, offices and a fitness center planned at 7240 Holsclaw Road. Certain pages of the document bear the logos for ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The planned facility is located in an unincorporated area right outside Gilroy.

San José Spotlight obtained the blueprints after first reporting on public records that gave an incomplete picture of what was being built. ...

County and Gilroy elected officials want no part of this project; California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sued to block what he claims is an "Illegal Development" of an ICE facility.

 

Country people understand that sometimes elders need a seat in the heat.

Once more, to the Beach ...

Several thousand of us took to Ocean Beach once again yesterday to denounce the Trump regime as Brad Newsham and his contemporary incarnation of a band of merry pranksters have taught us to do. We've made this human art over 30 times since the first which sought to impeach George W. for his wars.

Drone photo of the human art piece we created

There's plenty of local outrage about the Epstein files.

 

The vibe at these events is at once determined, angry, and celebratory. We like seeing each other.

Here we both enjoy getting in costume .. and mean it.

Friday night festivities

The weekly resistance Dance Party on the 18th Street overpass over Highway 101 in San Francisco greets the evening traffic.

Recorded music competes with the loud traffic and many affirming honks from passing cars.

Sometimes a frog joins the party.

 

From the bridge and the surrounding surface streets, there's no vantage point from which to see the signage.

But yesterday's message that dozing Don is asleep at the wheel seemed popular with the drivers passing underneath.

Organized by RiseUpToAction and friends, the party will be on the bridge every Friday at 4:30pm through the November elections according to the group's newsletter.

Resistance can be a party!

How Democrats win California: there are a lot of us and we vote

Republicans don't win statewide and urban elections in California. There simply are too few GOP voters to get their candidates over the top. So -- naturally -- for a party that has a hard time with reality, they say our elections must be rigged. Bulls__t!

I am no longer a subscriber to the Los Angeles Times. The editorial policies of the paper's nutcase, Trump-loving owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, made sure of that; I quit. But I still seem to get the paper's California Politics e-newsletter and that means I can read occasional dispatches from one of the most plain spoken columnists writing anywhere, Anita Chabria. 

Chabria recently responded to Republican whining about our elections with a useful explainer of how the state conducts our voting.

... Voter rolls are a huge refrain in conspiracy theories and the subject of numerous (mostly unsucessful) lawsuits by Trump’s Department of Justice. Trump is demanding that the federal government “audit” the voter rolls to ensure ballots go only to legal voters, which is one of those scary and ill-conceived ideas that sounds reasonable on the surface.

... So what’s the deal with voter rolls? Are they really the dark heart of a Democratic scam to rig elections? Or is the scam that Trump and MAGA are attempting to use the boring and bureaucratic nature of voting rolls to do the very thing they claim to be fighting — undermine of free and fair elections?

... Voter rolls are the lists of eligible voters kept by each state. States run elections, because, well, the Constitution. But that structure is also a good idea because states keep closer track of who is a legal resident and where they are than the federal government. 

Republicans charge the Dems cook the books, putting fraudulent people on the rolls. Not so.

... voter rolls are “loose,” according to Chris Fowler, a professor of geography and demographics at Penn State who specializes in voting rights. Most states have laws that strive to be inclusive and are slow to remove people from the lists, precisely because we want as many people to vote as we can get.

Some people in California are added when they get a driver’s license. Some people move and ask the postal service to update their voter registration. Some people register once, move dozens of times and never think to tell their secretary of state.

Some people die. Some people get married and change their name. Some people don’t vote for 10 years, then do. You get the idea. Life happens, and updating voter registration is rarely our first thought.

But doesn't that mean that people who shouldn't be on the rolls can vote? Well no.

... here’s what the conspiracy folks leave out: Being on the voter roll doesn’t automatically mean a vote will be counted or even that a ballot will be sent. It’s just the starting point of everyone who might be invited to the party.

There are numerous safeguards, such as signature verification, that cast ballots go through before the vote is considered legitimate. When there is doubt, the vote is “cured,” which is an unnecessarily convoluted way of saying local election officials may go as far as tracking down the actual voter and making sure they are legit. Yes, if there is a question, actual people contact an actual voter. If they can’t get in contact, the vote is usually set aside.

The MAGA demand to audit voter rolls ignores all this reality and is instead based on the false idea that voter rolls translate directly into counted votes.

The game MAGA is running with voter roll audits is that it was never about election integrity. It’s about suppressing the vote of Black people, brown people, young people and others who tend to vote Democratic and also tend to have more unsettled lives that would lead them to have inaccurate information, such as conflicting addresses, on the voter rolls. 

I should add that Chabria is also a fair minded commentator. She points out that the baseless whining is not from all Republicans. 

[Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve] Hilton on Tuesday addressed the president’s unfounded but vociferous claims that Democrats have massively cheated in our recent election.

“We’ve got teams standing by, we’ve got lawyers standing by, very focused on that,” Hilton told reporters, including my colleague Seema Mehta, outside the L.A. elections headquarters. “We don’t want to let anyone down, we don’t want to let anything slip away, and we’ve seen nothing.”

Hilton made the November runoff; he's not served by denouncing the vote. He's going to lose; there aren't enough Republicans in California to make a contest. If you want to know who Hilton is, I recommend this delicious piece on his toxic past as a British conservative ad-man by Finton O'Toole in the New York Review of Books. [Free link.]

Friday cat blogging

 

Whatever is going on out there, Janeway seems to yearn to be part of it.

Mio is such a big boy, he not only hangs off his bed. He even hangs off the furniture.

We're all being schooled for moral depravity

Once again, the United States is putting itself in the international war crimes business. If a distinguishing feature of GW Bush's "War on Terror" was institutionalized torture of unfortunate captive brown men, it seems that a central motif of Trump's imperial adventures is using and enlisting the people of the U.S. military in the murder of civilians. 

The ongoing sinking of small boats off Central America without any proof of their involvement any offense is one instance.

Now we get news of an apparently intentional airstrike on a civilian water treatment facility in southern Iran; at least 20,000 Iranians will lose access to clean water.

Strikes early Wednesday destroyed what appears to be a drinking-water facility on Iran’s southern coast, near the Strait of Hormuz, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Around the time of the strikes, the U.S. Central Command said in a post on X that it had conducted attacks near the strait “with precision munitions from U.S. Air Force and Navy fighter jets.” 

Iranian state media reported that the U.S. had hit water storage buildings and a local official said that water was cut off to more than 20,000 people living in a town and villages nearby. Temperatures in the area have reached above 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week.

Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews Phillips P. O'Brien responds to this report without equivocation. 

Is It A War Crime?

Without a doubt. Attacking other infrastructure was probably a war crime as well (think bridges or power plants) but there can at least be arguments made that these are dual use facilities. Militaries use bridges, military production uses generated electricity. If the US destroyed all the bridges in Iran or shut off all the power, as Trump has threatened numerous times, I would definitely consider it a war crime. However, lawyers could try and argue that because of military use, these are allowable targets.

However, a reservoir serving a civilian community is unarguably a crime. The military will get its water somehow, the civilians will suffer. 

And note, this is one of the hottest and driest places on the globe. Academic data for the Sirik region confirms that summer temperatures routinely peak between 45°C and 48.5°C during the warmest months. That is over 115 degrees Fahrenheit. That is comparable to Death Valley in California.

A human being cannot live long in such a climate without water—so either the locals will die of dehydration or, more likely, some will drink contaminated water and die from that.

Either way the US has attacked, seemingly deliberately, a facility vital to the maintenance of human life that has no discernible military utility. So yes, it is a war crime. 

We need to understand that when the military of the United States commits these atrocities against international laws and norms -- as well as against our own legal codes that are supposed to govern our soldiers, sailors and airmen -- something else is happening beyond the immediate rupture of standards.

The Trump/Hegseth regime is corrupting the military, intentionally enlisting serving personnel in crimes. Our rulers want our military to get used to doing these things.

But, like the Bush regime before him, Trump is also corrupting us all. Do we accept that doing wanton murder to prove a point (probably unsuccessfully) is just something this country does? Are we that kind of country? If so, who are we?

We probably don't much care; these crimes are far away and inflicted on people we don't know. And most of the world is certainly not surprised. They live alongside an American colossus that periodically defaults to murderous illegal war-making.

But previous episodes of this national pastime usually evoked some squeamishness from the perpetrators: "No -- it wasn't that bad, it was a mistake, we didn't mean it." 

The Trump regime does mean it: it wants to teach us to thrill to unvarnished, extralegal murder. 

We're living in a magical kingdom with a demented guide

 

The irreplaceable Jonathan V Last at The Bulwark captures the complete lunacy that the madman in the White House and his billionaire buddies have led us into with his Iran debacle

Markets 

The funniest part of this whole thing—the real sorcery—is that the world’s financial markets agree that we’re in a great place and the current status quo is amazing.

America and Israel launched our war against Iran on February 28. Since then,

• America spent in the neighborhood of $30 billion on the war.

• The world experienced the worst oil shock in recorded history.

• Inflation is running very hot.

• There’s been something like $58 billion in damage to infrastructure in the Middle East, which has curtailed industrial outputs independent of the shipping crisis.

• Global companies have lost at least $25 billion in revenue because of the war.

And yet the S&P 500 is . . . up since the war started? Way up?

It gets better! In two days’ time, we will have the biggest IPO in history. SpaceX will shatter records. It will be valued at close to $2 trillion dollars. It will make Elon Musk the world’s first (acknowledged) trillionaire.

It’s going to be the most obscene financial orgy in a century. Like watching John D. Rockefeller and Louis XIV spit roast Caligula.

Iran and the SpaceX IPO are the same thing. Magical thinking. ...

We apparently have an appetite for this sort of thing. Until we don't. Neither Louis XIV (felled by senile gangrene) nor Caligula (killed by associates) ended well. 

Death of Caligula

The American republic, eventually, broke up John D. Rockefeller's oil empire by court order in 1911 and he went on to invent modern foundation philanthropy, for good and ill.

It's all about big boys with blow up toys

Economist and all-round stand up guy Paul Krugman skewers the Trump boys.

... Clean energy has become a bogeyman in the culture wars: mining and burning coal are considered “manly” activities, while renewable energy is portrayed as woke and effeminate. Real men don’t worry about black lung and airborne particulates, let alone climate change.

So a combination of big money and fragile male egos drives Green Derangement Syndrome. And the same is true for both the Iran debacle and the refusal to learn from the catastrophe by turning to Ukraine.

Why was the United States so unprepared for the Iranian drone threat, despite the obvious successes of Ukrainian drones against Russia? Well, as investigative reporters delve into the story, I would urge them to follow the money.

America has a huge, highly profitable defense industry, dedicated to a suite of technologies that are rapidly being rendered obsolete, as $4 million Patriot missiles, that take years to build, are being used to shoot down $35,000 Shahed drones that can be manufactured in months.

So it wouldn’t be surprising if defense-industry interests are playing a significant role in the Trump administration’s refusal to admit that the rules of war have changed — the same way that fossil fuel companies have campaigned against the new realities of energy technology. After all, a deal with drone-savvy Ukrainians would mean less money going to US defense contractors.

While this is speculative, we do know that recognition of the drone revolution in warfare by Trump and his inner circle would require that they abandon their fantasy of macho military power ...

... In military strategy as in energy policy, Trump is betraying America in the service of money and machismo. 

This country will have to grow up, one way or another, whether frying or fried.