California elections: I was both wrong and right

California's June primary election taught me some lessons about the numerous vehement opinions I bring to our election system.

For many years, I argued that widespread adoption of "abseentee" or "vote by mail" would detract from voter engagement rather than increase it. I was wrong.

I used to argue that campaigning to enhance Election Day -- marches, parties, the common accompaniments of 19th century elections -- would be the best way to increase turnout. This sort of thing does work in some contexts: homeless advocates have been known to march groups of street-living foks to City Hall to vote with some effect. But there is overwhelming evidence that automatically sending every eligible voter a ballot that can be mailed, dropped in a drop box, or delivered to a polling place is more effective.

Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle describes the extraordinary success of mail ballots in our state:

... California had the second-highest voter turnout (40%) of any state that has held a primary so far this year.  The state with the highest turnout: Oregon (41%), which, like California, mails a ballot to every voter. 

Trump doesn't like this, but if you want more civic participation, make convenience voting easy! 

• • • 

However, seeing the "top two" primary voting system in action in picking the candidates who will be on ballot in November was the absurd farce I've always thought it. In loathing the "top two," I was right. 

Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton skewers the strange consequences of this systemic gimmick. 

... [Former state Sen. Abel] Maldonado says he crafted the current system 16 years ago believing it would produce “pragmatic and commonsense” officeholders. But that has failed, he acknowledges.

... Voters, regardless of party affiliation, can vote for any candidate. And the top two vote-getters, regardless of their party, advance to the general election. ... The idea was that candidates would be forced to appeal to centrist voters — not just party ideologues — and more moderates would be elected.

... Actually, the electorate has become so polarized in recent years — particularly during the Trump era — that very few centrist voters seem to be left.

... Democrat Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, favors dumping the top-two.

For one thing, she says, there was too much focus this spring on whether any Democratic gubernatorial candidate would qualify for the November ballot. Fear spread that so many Democrats were running that they’d splinter the party vote and two Republicans would finish first and second.

She wanted to hear less talk about the horse race and more debate over substantive issues.

“People were obsessing about a Democratic shutout,” Gonzalez said. “And people were waiting until the last minute to fill out their ballot because they wanted to vote for the candidate who was ahead to make sure someone made the top two. We didn’t have a policy discussion.” ...

Maybe we can get rid of this abomination? We implanted it by ballot initiative and we would have to vote it away in order to revert to a system in which each party gets a nominee. My instinct is that this would not be an easy campaign to win: voters tend to be protective of any arrangement which they think gives them more choices and presumably that's what defenders of the "top-two" would argue.

• • •

Meanwhile, it would be totally hypocritical of me not to point out that my candidate for US Congress from San Francisco is only still in the running because of the "top-two" system. If we'd had party primaries, Scott Wiener would be a Democratic shoo-in for November. In the current system, Connie Chan, still gives us a chance to elect a progressive, union supportive, Chinese immigrant from this city.  That seems like a good idea ...

Father's Day 2026

Roger looks pleased with himself, doesn't he? Although he remained fairly fit until he no longer could keep going, he didn't much go in for physical labor. On some photos like this, my mother wrote derisively, "Posed!" Later in life, she did the shoveling. 

This was in Buffalo, sometime in the winter of 1938, almost a decade before I arrived on the scene. He was in his mid-30s here.

If loving a child and doing no harm is enough -- and I sure think it is -- he was a good father.

Yet more on the Juneteenth holiday: against forgetting

Kevin Young self-describes as a post-evangelical pastor. Also a white guy and "a lifter." Not my instinctive go-to for theological or other insight. 

Yet, as belatedly and arduously the Juneteenth holdiay becomes more internalized as a national holiday, as well as a Black remembrance, he offers a perspective that I find compelling. He writes:

... The Hebrew scriptures are obsessed—I mean absolutely OBSESSED—with memory. 

The command to remember appears over 200 times in the Old Testament alone. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt,” says Deuteronomy 5:15. God did not issue that command as a footnote but as the foundation of Israel’s entire ethical framework.

You were oppressed. 
You know what oppression feels like. 
Therefore, you do not oppress.
Remember!

To forget is not simply to be careless. In the theology of the Hebrew Bible, to forget is to sin.

When white people dismantle the legal protections of Black voters, erase Black history from classrooms, defund the celebrations of Black freedom, and quietly remove the holidays that honor Black lives from our national calendar, we are not just making administrative, fiscal, or even political decisions. 

No.

We are committing an act of spiritual forgetting. We are sinning against memory, and we are willfully sinning against the image-bearers we have chosen to forget. 

The alternative to forgetting is both pain admitting to horrors and joy in human liberation -- joy at the defeat of our particular American slavery, but also joy in in the possibility of wider community and a better future. This is a choice. "Let us march on til victory is won!"

Juneteenth 2026

Let us celebrate "a new birth of freedom!" 

Sociologist Robert P. Jones makes a suggestion that works for me:

... The period of 15 days that span the space between Juneteenth and Independence Day could ... function as an enduring season of critical patriotism for our time. Alongside the celebratory fireworks and other well-established practices surrounding the Fourth of July, we could develop a new civic liturgy that include the creative interplay of lament and celebration, reckoning and repair, truth-telling and hope. Borrowing from the High Holidays model, Juneteenth could function like Yom Kippur, recalling our struggles to overcome our shortcomings and achieve freedom, while Independence Day could echo Rosh Hashanah, recommitting us to shared national ideals.

Such a practice could also embrace a conviction that is deeply engrained in Judaism, Christianity, and indeed most religious traditions—that no people can live with integrity into the future if they cannot face their past failures to live up to their principles. ...

Bringing the Juneteenth and the Fourth of July together in a creative mutual orbit, where each is embraced by the gravitational force of the other, can also help us develop other rituals that are honest about our country’s failings while also being hopeful about its possibilities. 

Perhaps it takes time for a new federal holiday to acquire full potency. 

Juneteenth, proclaimed nationally in 2021, has been a living remembrance within Black culture, migrating from Texas along with the diaspora and particularly noted in California where so many African American citizens arrived from the southwest. Nationally the holiday still might take further seasoning. Somehow I doubt that Trump and MAGA will succeed in erasing this happy anniversary, anymore than they'll succeed in Making America White Again. All together now, "let us march on 'til victory is won!"

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!