Reading Mueller: two elements make the crime

I think we have confirmation that President Trump hasn't read the Mueller report -- or perhaps that he is functionally illiterate as the many gaps in his general knowledge suggest.

As you've certainly heard, the Orange Tweeto recently gave a long interview to ABC News.

Asked by ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos in the Oval Office on Wednesday whether his campaign would accept ... information from foreigners -- such as China or Russia -- or hand it over the FBI, Trump said, "I think maybe you do both."

"I think you might want to listen, there isn't anything wrong with listening," Trump continued. "If somebody called from a country, Norway, [and said] ‘we have information on your opponent' -- oh, I think I'd want to hear it."

Mueller has carefully explained just why Trump's willingness to accept foreign offers of "opposition research" could be a crime; the President would do well to attempt some reading.

In the section of the Mueller Report titled "Prosecution and Declination Decisions," the Special Counsel carefully lays out why he did not bring any charges against Don Jr. or Jared Kushner in relation to the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting at which these campaign leaders met Russians offering "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. Mueller interpreted the law against foreign contributions to require that what foreigners offered be "a thing of value" -- in this case likely, but not something ever settled by a court. He's completely clear on what is wrong with foreign intervention in a presidential election.

... candidate-related opposition research given to a campaign for the purpose of influencing an election could constitute a contribution to which the foreign-source ban could apply. A campaign can be assisted not only by the provision of funds, but also by the provision of derogatory information about an opponent. Political campaigns frequently conduct and pay for opposition research. A foreign entity that engaged in such research and provided resulting information to a campaign could exert a greater effect on an election, and a greater tendency to ingratiate the donor to the candidate, than a gift of money or tangible things of value. At the same time, no judicial decision has treated the voluntary provision of uncompensated opposition research or similar information as a thing of value that could amount to a contribution under campaign-finance law. ... It is uncertain how courts would resolve those issues.

In addition, for what occurred at the meeting to constitute an indictable offense, the people involved had to know receiving Russian help to the campaign was against the law.

Most significantly, the government has not obtained admissible evidence that is likely to establish the scienter [knowledge] requirement beyond a reasonable doubt. To prove that a defendant acted “knowingly and willfully,” the government would have to show that the defendant had general knowledge that his conduct was unlawful.

Mueller couldn't prove the Trumpkins knew what they were doing.

That cannot be said of the President. He's just announced he'll commit the same putative crime if he gets the chance. There's no defense of ignorance here.

I'm slowly reading the Mueller Report out of respect for all the lawyers who have been struggling to maintain the rule of law in a lawless season. They are heroes of a sort, even the ones I disagree with politically. Previous installments:
Reading Mueller: of social media and hacking
Reading Mueller: Russians, Russians, and more Russians

Reading Mueller: of social media and hacking

As an expression of regard for all the lawyers and other serious students of authoritarianism whose observations and dogged work have helped keep me sane since the election of Donald Trump, I'm reading the Mueller Report. Lawyers, pundits, and Robert Mueller himself seem to beg citizens to "just read it." So I am reading it. It will be slow going, not because it is hard to read, but because it is simply depressing. Look for occasional progress reports here.

Initially, here's what I gleaned from the first two sections; these describe activities for which Mueller entered indictments with bills of particulars during 2018, so much of their content has been thoroughly chewed over in the media.

"Russian Active Measures Social Media Campaign"
The Mueller investigation determined that a Russian public/private entity -- that is, it was fronted by one of Putin's oligarch buddies -- the Internet Research Agency:

... operated social media accounts and group pages designed to attract U.S. audiences. These groups and accounts, which addressed divisive U.S. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists.

Rubbing salt in our national wounds and our enduring shame,

the IRA created accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. organizations and grassroots groups and used these accounts to pose as anti-immigration groups, Tea Party activists, Black Lives Matter protestors, and other U.S. social and political activists.

Mueller confirms what Timothy Snyder hypothesized from looking around in The Road to Unfreedom; the fuel here was our own injustices and divisions.

Among the fake personas/accounts that Russian operatives created was something that called itself "Blacktivist." I vaguely remember material from Blacktivist floating through my Facebook feed; I also remember sensing that something was a little off there. But, I thought, lots of odd opinions float about.

Since I write in an opinionated way about contentious matters of race, gender and power, I would not be surprised if automated internet trawling looking for easy targets had picked me up. And I have some confirmation that is true. I seldom pay any attention to this blog's stats which, though rudimentary, give me a very rough sense of where traffic originates. I remember being surprised by the number of hits from Russia in the 2015-2017 period. I can't isolate and retrieve the numbers from that time (I really don't pay much attention); but I can report that over the blog's life nearly 14 percent of its traffic was identified by Google as originating in Russian. I have occasionally written about Russia long before Trump but nothing to really call attention .... WTF???

The Russians used the social media program to keep us inflamed. And they found a ready audience -- most especially among the Trump campaign and its hangers-on.

Among the U.S. “leaders of public opinion” targeted by the IRA were various members and surrogates of the Trump Campaign. In total, Trump Campaign affiliates promoted dozens of tweets, posts, and other political content created by the IRA.

Mueller treats the U.S. persons who disseminated Russian material as unwitting dupes; some ordinary citizens even organized pro-Trump rallies. Though it is painful to think of this "active measures campaign" as a successful foreign intrusion on our election, in truth the Mueller description reads exactly like what any well-resourced, ethically under-scrupulous, U.S. political campaign would likely attempt to organize, hopefully a little more transparently. There is no suggestion that the actual Trump for President campaign had the capacity to do anything this competent.

And by 2020, every campaign (and who knows how many countries) will probably have some more or less covert branch/offshoot trying to replicate this. Campaigns glom on to what worked in the last cycle ...

"Russian Government Links To And Contacts With The Trump Campaign"
The Mueller report summarizes this section:

Beginning in March 2016, units of the Russian Federation’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) hacked the computers and email accounts of organizations, employees, and volunteers supporting the Clinton Campaign, including the email account of campaign chairman John Podesta. Starting in April 2016, the GRU hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The GRU targeted hundreds of email accounts used by Clinton Campaign employees, advisors, and volunteers. In total, the GRU stole hundreds of thousands of documents from the compromised email accounts and networks.109 The GRU later released stolen Clinton Campaign and DNC documents through online personas, “DCLeaks” and “Guccifer 2.0,” and later through the organization WikiLeaks. The release of the documents was designed and timed to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and undermine the Clinton Campaign.

Some observations:

• The hacking and email dissemination was a military operation. That's worth remembering; Russia is carrying on a covert war against the US political system.

• Much of the hacking was facilitated by "spearfishing" -- tempting people to click on phony emails which contained embedded code that gave the hackers access to their files and permissions. Such human social engineering is an awful lot of what makes hacking possible. It's not magic or the machines; it's us.

• The Report documents that this Russian military campaign used several internet personas to strategically release hacked Clinton and Democratic Party emails, ending up going through Wikileaks. I found myself wondering: was Wikileaks a preferred cut-out for the Russians because the organization retained some slight residual credibility from its early days as a rather cheerful, anti-authority, anarchist outfit?

• Going through Wikileaks meant going through Julian Assange, holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London while hiding out from rape charges in Sweden. Assange seems to be one of those characters whose "politics," perhaps once imaginative or even hopeful, has curdled into preening hatred of anyone who gets in his way. Mueller reprints a snippet of Assange's hatred for Hillary that starts as a species of analysis and goes off a frustrated, mysogynist, cliff.

  “[w]e believe it would be much better for GOP to win . . . Dems+Media+liberals woudl [sic] then form a block to reign in their worst qualities. . . . With Hillary in charge, GOP will be pushing for her worst qualities., dems+media+neoliberals will be mute. . . . She’s a bright, well connected, sadisitic sociopath.”

  This stuff was in the leftish, mostly male, air we breathed. I wrote about it a week before the 2016 election. Though it starts from realities, it easily degenerates into venomous stupidity. The Russians used our weaknesses to break our system; was Assange just another dupe?

• Mueller reproduces some of Donald Trump Jr.'s messages about (not to) Wikileaks. These snippets support the pundit theory that the younger Trump was simply too stupid to charge with any witting crime.

In general, though the hacking and email releases through cut outs were Russian military operations, for me the Mueller report confirms what those who know Russia better than we do, such as Masha Gessen, have been trying to tell us: “[Putin's] not actually so scary.”

These sections of the Mueller Report left me believing that the Russian social media manipulation and the cyber attack got very, very, very lucky through exploitation of a cluster of clowns -- of whom the most cretinous became President -- whether or not Trump is actively guilty of anything. To be continued as I read further ...

Reading 2020 through a study of 2016

Racism done it; what a shock!

Political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck document overwhelmingly that the overriding factor which enabled Donald Trump's election was racial anxiety, or as I'd put it, white fragility in a society and culture feeling more and more unfamiliar to some white people by the day. They quote Hillary Clinton's summation approvingly:

... her campaign 'likely contributed to [2016's] heightened racial consciousness.' 'As a result,' she wrote, 'some white voters may have decided I wasn't on their side.'

This is their major, well-documented, take away, but the conclusion was not what has made Identity Crisis The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America valuable to me.

If for nothing else, I'd urge interested activists (and others) to consider two points that stood out to me in this book.

Many of us had a completely inadequate understanding in 2016 that any Presidential election after an incumbent from either party has been in office for eight years is going to be something close to a toss-up. I know this was not part of my thinking. After even a successful presidency, there will be pent up grievances and pressures and room for demanding some change. These authors conclude that Obama's strong approval ratings and the good economic conditions probably predicted something like "a 72 percent chance of a Democratic [Clinton] victory -- a real, but hardly definitive, advantage." A lot of us leaped from an intuitive sense that this was the case to a misplaced confidence that Clinton would certainly prevail over the manifestly weak Trump candidacy. Pollsters interpreted their own data in the same light; Nate Silver has maintained plausibly that the polls weren't so much wrong as that too many of us failed to look at them realistically.

Sheer volume of media coverage enabled Trump to dominate the Republican primary race; he just crowded out the rest of them. Trump was such a ratings draw that the TV networks sometimes covered his rallies (circuses of hate, I'd call them) even when nothing was happening. The authors describe the general principles:

... nominations often present a challenging task for voters. There can be lots of candidates, some of whom are familiar only to political cognoscenti. How then is a voter to know which candidates are "good"? Which candidates have adequate experience? Which candidates have beliefs that a voter shares? Which candidates can win the general election? Voters need information to answer these questions, and the news coverage helps to supply it.

... Candidates who meet standards of "newsworthiness" garner coverage. Because news coverage of campaigns typically focuses on the horse race -- which candidates are winning and losing, their campaign strategies, and the like -- candidates will earn more coverage when they raise large sums of money or do unexpectedly well in prediction polls or early primaries and caucuses. News coverage also features events that are novel -- such as when a candidate first announces his or her candidacy -- and episodes that make for good stories, with compelling characters and conflicts. When candidates succeed by any of these metrics, even if they have been largely ignored to that point, they will be suddenly "discovered" by media outlets and, therefore, by the public. Their poll numbers will increase ...

...
Does that description of a primary seem familiar? It should. We're in precisely that phase with the Democratic hopefuls these days. I am reading current 2020 coverage through a lens very much informed by this insight about media influence from Identity Crisis.

For example, here's a snippet this week from Thomas Edsall:

G. Elliott Morris, a political data reporter for the Economist, noted on Twitter that O’Rourke has received more cable news coverage in the five days since his announcement than any other candidate during the full post-announcement week. O’Rourke is on a path to get 180 percent of the coverage received by Bernie Sanders, the previous leader on this measure.

Will this move the polls? Will a lot of media attention bring more? We'll see. FiveThirtyEight has published an informative graphic showing how much coverage each current Dem aspirant received from their kick-off.

Or this from political scientist Brendan Nyhan:

With most candidates’ speeches and rallies generating relatively few headline-worthy sound bites, reporters and commentators often instead turn their focus to theater critic–style assessments of a candidate’s strategy and campaign skills. In its most dangerous form, this form of coverage centers on manufactured narratives about a candidate’s personality. These narratives often center on whether the candidate is “authentic” — a media construction that ignores the reality that all candidate behavior is strategic.

He's on to something there. The journalists need to shape an attention-grabbing story out of whatever politicians offer; they will flock to the off-beat and the bizarre. Then more coverage leads to more coverage ...

A reporter new to covering politics offers some revealing reflections from Iowa on the experience of following candidates in the early stages:

Voters listen to candidates differently from the way reporters do. I can see why people who cover these events regularly start to get cynical or at least start to tune out the message. After hearing it four times, even I could probably repeat Harris’s stump speech by the end of that day. But what I didn’t realize until I got here — and should have, and hope to remember — is that everyone in the crowd is hearing those speeches (and most importantly, those jokes) for the first time. I’ve probably heard Harris say Americans need to base policy on “science fact, not science fiction” about 15 times. But the elderly man in front of me in Ames still chuckled when he heard it Saturday night and elbowed his wife, who did the same.

Out of such as this are winners chosen. Not only this, but very much this. I'm sometimes skeptical of academic political science; is it really science? But I'm finding Identity Crisis very much applicable to our current moment.

Hillary Clinton as "good candidate"

If Hillary Clinton is elected today, as I expect she will be, this will have come about perhaps more than we recognize because she has been what I call a "good candidate." This is a label I've applied to quite a few aspirants for office, including some I disagree with or disapprove of more than I do of Clinton -- for example, Anthony Weiner.

So for the heck of it I am going to enumerate on this election day just why I mentally call Clinton a "good candidate."

• She wants the job. She acts as if out of an absolute conviction that she is the person the country and the institution of the presidency needs. This conviction is a little crazy, but winners at whatever level have to have it. Many candidates don't have it or can't sustain it. I've worked for several office seekers who didn't allow themselves that utter self-certainty and they were not as good candidates as those who dared it. In this race, nothing less would have provided the grit to hold up under the abuse -- abuse she certainly knew went with seeking the job.

• She and her team made a plan and stuck with it. From within, even low level campaigns consist of an annoying, almost constant, series of unforeseen eruptions and emergencies. At every turn, well-wishers and hangers-on urge the candidate and staff to change course to meet the immediate disruption. Some of these challenges may even require a response. But winning usually demands staying with the plan and letting the latest distraction roll off your back. This is true, even if the disruption is real and the plan imperfect. An imperfect but solid plan beats no plan every time. The Clinton campaign has seemed to know that.

• She has demonstrated she knows how wide reaching her campaign's tent had to become. This may not be so obvious to those of us who are not instinctive Clinton fans, but she won the nomination by attracting and holding the allegiance of regular Democratic Party stalwarts, especially African Americans and other leaders of color, over decades of work on Democratic policy issues. Bernie could win many outsiders and some newcomers to Democratic politics, but she had the regular base from the get-go. And then she extended her coalition outward quite successfully to pick up people who could be drawn in. The resulting agglomeration will almost certainly be fractious and demanding (and inevitably not satisfied) but for one electoral moment, she got the scale right and built a coalition base to win. Ezra Klein has pointed out that winning by building a coalition is very much a woman's way to prevail -- and that perhaps gendered expectations of leadership by pure charisma makes it hard for us to see this as high political skill.

• Democrats have built up terrific voter data and Hillary Clinton's campaign believed in using it. She does deserve some credit for this. The email nonsense revealed that she really had no grasp of contemporary technology. But she, or the people she hired to manage the mechanics of her campaign, seem to have taken advantage of every analytical possibility that understanding the electorate offers. This is where the candidate can get in the campaign's way. It certainly looked as if she knew enough to leave decisions to the data crew about how to use available resources to target people and regions. If only she can be so smart about running the executive branch ...

• She used surrogates gracefully. It takes an awful lot of ego to run for office. Knowing that she is not a figure who inspires, she seems to have been comfortable with having people out on the campaign trail for her who could upstage her -- not just entertainers and such, but even the sitting President and his popular spouse. It's worth remembering, for example, that in 2000, Al Gore refused the help of a far more popular predecessor than Obama is today. Perhaps this particular "good candidate" trait is also a gendered instinct.

No one gets to be President without being some species of good politician. Most likely after today we will get to see what sort of President Hillary Clinton becomes.

Election oddments, part 4 -- organizing for a better Georgia

Rebecca Traister passes along this woman's inspirational project. It won't happen this time, but Stacey Abrams, state house Minority Leader, has a clear, practical plan to pull Georgia in a more progressive direction. She's not just shooting shit; over time, she intends to win. Some excerpts from a much longer interview:

So how’s it going?
I think it is -- going. We’re moving in the right direction. It will always be a heavy lift because until you’ve proved it’s possible then it’s always potentially impossible. And Georgia has not had the level of investment in our elections that you would need to see since the 1990s, since the last President Clinton.

... the demographic migration in Georgia is massive and it’s unique; between 2000 and 2010, 1.5 million new people moved into Georgia, 1.2 million of whom were people of color. ... By 2024–2025, it’s estimated that Georgia will be majority minority and that majority will be 33 percent African-American, 11 percent Latino, and 9 percent Asian-American.

And so your aim is to turn out all these new residents to vote.
You want everyone. You want white swing voters. But your untapped population, the population we haven’t spent a great deal of time or effort on, is people of color. And the goal is spending time early, convincing them that their votes matter. If you want progressive policies, these are the folks you go to.

... In 2014 we began to focus on it, because I’d heard about this 800,000 number for years. And that’s not to say that there haven’t been civil-rights organizations on the ground trying to tackle it, but it’s expensive. You’re not talking about a population that walks up to your door and asks to register; you’re talking about a population that no one ever asks to register and therefore never thinks they should register. Which means instead of standing at a festival, you have to go and knock on their doors. And not everyone lives in Atlanta. Which means going to rural communities, going to depressed communities, going to communities where there is absolutely no trust in politics or in politicians. And that is an expensive endeavor.

You very rarely hear about enthusiasm for Clinton in the national narrative.
I think there’s a false comparative that exists in this election, where Barack Obama is used as the barometer for enthusiasm. Barack Obama was a phenomenon. He, over the course of fewer than four years, went from an unknown state senator who defied political history and racial history and stepped onto the stage with a mix of skills we had not seen before. And he did so in such a singular way that to ever compare any other presidential candidacy to his is to by definition devalue what he accomplished, but also to create a false expectation for everyone else.

Let's hope Abrams can keep on keeping on.

Tomorrow this election will be over, praise be! For today I'll be putting up collected oddments that have caught my eye which will soon be just history.

Election oddments, part 3 -- gotta feed the GOTV troops

In election seasons, I try to donate small sums (I do mean small) to candidates in races that might matter, very early on. That means I'm on the list of every significant Democratic Senatorial candidate in this cycle (except Bayh [IN] who can spend his own money and Duckworth [IL] who has always had the seat nailed) and a small cast of House contenders. Then I stop contributing, having reached my limit. You can probably imagine the state of my email these days; hourly dozens of frantic pleas arrive and I delete them.

In this context, I loved this one. It's unlikely that money for TV ads has been effecive over the last month and possibly ever was effective. But money to feed the people who are doing the only work left to seems a legitimate thing to ask. This one is from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

On Tuesday this thing will be over, praise be! For the next few days I'll be putting up collected oddments that have caught my eye which will soon be just history.

Election oddments, part 2 -- North Carolina voices

Jamelle Bouie has been talking with voters of color in that contested battleground:

“I think people are nervous about the direction we’re heading in with so many minority groups rising up, taking on corporate positions, political positions,” said Constance Martinez, an auditor who lives in the area. “They think America is going to be snatched from underneath them.”

... The popular narrative of this election is that it represents a rising nationalist tide in American politics. And that’s true, although this nationalism is shaped and defined by white identity and white racism. But there’s another side to that story, revealed in conversations with voters of color. For them, this election is one where they assert their place in the United States—where they say that this is their country too.

“They aren’t losing anything,” said Martinez of Trump voters. “They are gaining so much more. As a united people we are so much more than we are divided. I hope this election shows them that they have nothing to fear. That we are one country and we are moving toward one people.”

On Tuesday this thing will be over, praise be! For the next few days I'll be putting up collected oddments that have caught my eye which will soon be just history.

Election oddments: part 1 -- landslide counties

This graphic was part of a larger New York Times story about how people with different political leanings have sorted themselves into separate geographical communities over the last two decades. By "landslide counties," they mean counties where either the Republican or Democratic presidential nominee prevailed by more than 20 percent. Mostly what it seems to say is that white Democrats live in cities, brown and black Democrats are more widely dispersed and white Republicans live in rural and exurban areas. Also that there are a lot of voters in urban counties!

Their data is worth perusing, but this picture of the sort caught my eye for a different reason. See that large gray area that takes up most of central California? Aside from northern Maine and rural Wisconsin, we in this state have the largest territorial expanse in the country where neither party has an overwhelming advantage. That's interesting. Presumably, at least in part, it means that there are significant numbers of Latino residents, some of whom are voting and many more of whom might, throughout that area, keeping party contests more competitive.

No wonder the current Congressional race between Republican incumbent David Valadao and Democratic challenger Emilio Huerta (grandson of labor activist Dolores Huerta) in the 21st Congressional district is so heated, featuring wild and arguably false charges from the GOP camp. Huerta has been criticized as a weak candidate by some Dems. We'll see how this intra-Latino race turns out in a year with growing Latino turnout.

On Tuesday this thing will be over, praise be! For the next few days I'll be putting up collected oddments that have caught my eye which will soon be just history.

Just for fun ...

there's this:

Scholastic, which seems to be contemporary equivalent of my grammar school My Weekly Reader, an educational youth magazine, offered kids K-12 a chance to vote. As Sam Wang says, here's 2024 staring back at us.

In comments, several people try answer questions from one man's daughters about why the kids are so much more Democratic leaning than adults. The most cogent offering (for me) was this:

Although 88% of public school students were White in 1960, the corresponding figure today is 49%.

We better all get used to it. This is who we are.

Getting out the Latino vote

If only Latinos voted in proportion to their (registered, citizen) numbers, this country would be a different, perhaps better, place. But, mostly, they don't. In 2012 only 48 percent of eligible Latinos voted.

These days, academics and campaign professionals rely on practical experiments to discover how to persuade unlikely voters to go out and cast a ballot. Latino Decisions reports on one such experiment under the title Mobilizing Latinos with Identity Appeals. Researchers arranged for telephone calls to good-sized populations (several thousand in each set) of potential Latino voters in California and Texas in areas which were majority Latino. One group got a message about recycling. One was urged to vote by "the American Voter Project," trying to turn out “American voters” to make the “American community heard.” Another was contacted by the “Latino Voter Project,” as part of a campaign to turn out “Latino voters,” and was designed to make the “Latino community heard.”

The results appear in this chart:

Researchers concluded that more affluent Latinos, who usually have been in the U.S. for a generation or more, respond well to the "American" message -- but many (even most) Latinos for whom Spanish language culture is daily life respond better to the "ethnic identity" message. Both messages increase Latino turnout significantly, especially if targeted to the appropriate voters.

The chart reminds me of what I learned in the 2004 campaign when I worked in Albuquerque in campaigns that might have been expected to help the Democratic presidential candidate. Nowadays we take for granted that New Mexico is a blue state. But in 2004, George W. Bush narrowly outpolled John Kerry. The Latinos I worked with (who mostly called themselves Hispanics) were not surprised: they said no campaign had never contacted any of their relatives. These citizens might as well as have not existed as far as both Republicans and Democrats were concerned.

The Latino Decisions chart says to me that simply contacting Latino voters about the election at all, with any message, raises turnout. In some places, the better message is American patriotism; in most Latino places, the best message is Latino identity. But in either case, what comes first is bothering to reach out to people who may not think voting is for them. The dividends of making the contact will be large.

The Clinton campaign seems to be running a strong field operation where it matters. Their data -- their understanding of who their potential voters are -- is very good. Here's hoping they are doing the job of making those contacts in the places where potential Latino voters have been accustomed to being ignored. That's how to get out the Latino vote.***The Washington Post has a terrific story about how canvassers from the Center for Community Change are going to door to door in Florida to turn out unlikely, but registered, Latino voters. Many don't know for sure how or where to vote, but they are eager to absorb explanations from a Spanish speaking canvasser. These people will not feel ignored!

On hating Hillary

Can "the left" please get clear on what we have against Hillary Clinton? It probably doesn't matter -- as "the left" we're pretty puny. But as objects among the targets of the right wing noise machine, sometimes articulate ones, we might matter a little during the coming Clinton presidency.

So it wouldn't hurt to do a practice run by deconstructing our reaction to James Comey's vacuous disclosure of something indistinct about emails involving Anthny Weiner, Huma Abedin, and the prospective president. It seems to have come about because an FBI director knew the wingers in his department would blow it open if he didn't speak up and then Republicans would beat up on him. Comey's a self-seeking coward apparently. This is significant to us? Really now!

Substantively, it's hard to imagine we, "the left," give a shit. I mean come on, this axis is just tabloid gossip fodder (consensual fodder, unlike Mr. Trump's sexual assaults on women within his reach).

And we have no need to jump in with the media firestorm. In any Hillary Clinton media pile on, we can be tempted to participate -- hey, we the ignored get to spend a few minutes on the side of the noise machine. How satisfying ... and the right will offer endless opportunities during a Clinton presidency.

That's more bullshit. Unlike the right, we don't hate Hillary Clinton for being an uppity woman whose life has been about desacralizing the works of that loathsome old huckster Ronald Reagan. (Good oped by Susan Faludi on this point.)

We don't hate Hillary Clinton because she is "crooked." Like most all people who enjoy privilege at whatever level, she is almost certainly guilty of bending and warping the rules for her personal and family benefit. (Not of course on the scale of Mr. Trump, but that goes without saying.) In this, she's just normal in a society in which we're taught it is every person for themselves. Law constrains most people at least somewhat, including Clintons. We think it should constrain everyone equally, don't we?

Unlike the right, we don't hate Clinton for her domestic policies. She could always be better. But if she has her druthers (likely she won't) she'd implement measures that materially benefit poor women of all races and ethnicities. That should matter. And, perhaps even more than Mr. Obama whose own race has forced him to keep his head down, she'll be open to pressure from communities of color on justice issues because these communities will have elected her. She needs to defend immigrants in any way she can within the law. That's not a reason to hate her.

A wiser left would largely avoid hating politicians at all. They do what they do in response to incentives we should seek to understand - and to influence. Some of them may seem congenial human beings and many do not, but that is just how it is.

We will be properly and intensely critical of Clinton because 1) unless constrained, she'll bend toward the interests of financiers and corporations that gouge ordinary people and 2) she's historically a war hawk, inclined toward military adventures in the face of increasing imperial impotence. "Jail the bankers!" and "No more wars" are slogans for "the left." "Crooked Hillary" and "Jail the bitch" are the calls of people who are as much our enemies as Clinton's enemies.

Let's try to remember that, lest a Hillary Clinton presidency confuse we, "the left," about who we are.

So we don't have to hate Hillary. Spewing Clinton-hate is the right's tactic. And we certainly don't have to adopt right wing memes as we respond to another President Clinton.

Hey -- we've known this in Cali since 1994

Paul Waldman reports the obvious about this election year.

The “Emerging Democratic Majority” is coming to pass. Back in 2002, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote a book of that name, arguing that a new progressive coalition was poised to become the American majority. “Today’s Democrats,” they wrote, “are the party of the transition from urban industrialism to a new postindustrial metropolitan order in which men and women play equal roles and in which white America is supplanted by multiracial, multiethnic America.” The book was embraced by liberals and mocked by conservatives, particularly after George W. Bush was reelected in 2004. But it has become clear that the Democratic coalition is not only the majority right now, it will become an even larger majority in the future.

Nobody embodies that emerging Democratic majority more than Barack Obama, the multiracial cosmopolitan urbanite who assembled the “Obama coalition” Clinton so desperately wants to keep intact. So she’ll take any opportunity she can to associate herself with him, especially since instead of nominating someone who might pull some of those voters over to their side, Republicans chose a candidate who would only exacerbate their disadvantage and narrow their appeal.

It continues to frustrate me that pundits and the rest of the country don't realize that this story played out in my state, coming to fruition -- without an Obama -- during the '00s. For more, see this, or this, or this.

Yeah, we're a little off kilter sometimes, but we're also showing there is a future for a new (North) American dream. Get used to it.

Donald Trump gender bending

Erudite Partner and I were talking about this interesting article this morning and realized it raised all sorts of speculative possibilities.

Donald Trump Talks Like a Woman
... The chest-pounding real estate mogul from New York has emerged as the quintessentially masculine candidate. Love him or loathe him, Trump’s campaign has been defined by the ways he has asserted his maleness—mocking his opponents for their low energy, bullying his critics, sneering at perceived weakness, boasting of his sexual prowess, vowing to hit back twice as hard as he’s been hit.

But academic research has picked up something that thousands of hours of campaign punditry has missed completely: Donald Trump talks like a woman. He might be preoccupied with grading women’s looks, penis size and “locker room talk,” but the way he speaks and the actual words he uses make for a distinctly feminine style. In fact, his speaking style is more feminine by far than any other candidate in the 2016 cycle ...

Politico

Julie Sedivy's thesis is provocative and she's seems onto something here. But, good old fashioned feminist dykes that we are, we found ourselves wondering whether Trump's speaking style might reveal further insights into his relationship to gender, that malleable and someimes uncomfortable construct within which we all navigate our lives.

• Does Trump come across as such an inauthentic sleaze because we feel the contradiction between his masculine presentation and his feminine speaking pattern?

• Is his comic book masculinity actually a cover for gender insecurity?

• Does his childish attraction to women who display Barbie doll femininity derive from inability to deal with more adult experience of gender?

• Oh gosh, is Trump -- hidden even from himself in the deep recesses of his psyche -- actually gay?

Inquiring minds don't actually want to know. But his guy is so out there, one ends up asking.

Election looking good in Nevada

By now, I feel confident that any identified Cortez-Masto (Senate) and Clinton voter who lives behind one of those dots on this map of a Reno neighborhood has turned out to vote. The only way to get rid of the canvass team I was part of last week will have been to get it done with.

And there is hard evidence that the push in the Silver State is working. Michael P. McDonald, who is rounding up reports on early voting at the HuffPo, has this:

Nevada

In-person early voting began on Saturday, and like North Carolina, the volume of voting increased dramatically. As I write this on Sunday, data are available only for Clark (Las Vegas) and Washoe (Reno) counties [where the vast majority of Nevadans live]. These are the two most Democratic counties of the state. Not surprisingly, Democrats lead all early votes in these two counties. With 68,927 early votes cast, registered Democrats lead Republicans 50.3 percent to 31.5 percent. (Nevada will begin reporting statewide numbers this week.)

Looking at the party registration numbers, Jon Ralston reports registered Democrats are voting above their voter registration levels, up 12 points in Clark and 11 points in Washoe. Republicans are running below their voter registration levels, down 2 points in Clark and 1 point in Washoe. Ralston was careful to document how Republicans outperformed in 2014, so Trump supporters should take heed when he says, “Democrats destroyed Republicans in the first day of early voting in Nevada.” There is nothing in these early voting numbers that contradict recent polling showing Clinton taking a lead in the state.

Congrats to the GOTV teams!***In general, early voting is looking good for a Democratic Senate majority according to the Cook Political Report, the most granular of sites that try to forecast election results.

Choices, often false

Jesuit Father Thomas J. Reese mulls our social circumstances at at the National Catholic Reporter: Churches and political parties are in the same pickle. He draws a parallel:

... the percent of people who do not identify with a political party has been increasing just as the percent of people who do not identify with a religion are increasing. This is bad news for both political parties and churches.

... The reasons people abandon organized religion and political parties are similar.

• The institution is not fulfilling their needs. Both parties and churches are not serving the felt needs of many people, especially the young.

• They do not believe in its platform (teachings). Parties and churches are speaking to activists and elites, not to real people.

• They are disillusioned with the institution's leadership. Political and religious leaders have been caught in lies and cover-ups. Too many have been caught in sexual and financial impropriety. They do not believe in transparency. They use their positions for their own advancement rather than in service to their people. ...

In short, people feel betrayed and abandoned by the institution, and their response is to abandon the institution whether it is a party or a church.

This seems a neat comparison. But is it accurate? The more I chew on it, the less I think the parallel works.

The U.S. society in which we live is above all else an individualistic consumer society. Most of the time, we're bombarded by any number of commercial interests which teach that our greatest freedom is to make choices. This usually amounts to buying one thing or another that we may or may not need. And if we're lucky enough to be able to be in the game -- to choose the latest thing we want -- we can feel pretty good about the world.

Churches and political parties belong to different orders in our lives.

Once upon a time -- nearly all of human history -- God was not a choice. Getting right with God (however conceived) was a necessity and that usually happened by being in relationship with God's institutional manifestation, in whatever form this dominated in a particular society. Some combination of science and ethical formation within individualistic and consumerist culture has made God merely optional, a choice among many, in our society. The "nones" opt out because they can. They are no less acting conventionally than those of us who opt in. (We who opt in usually think God is not a choice, but that is another topic.)

The state, on the other hand, is not optional.

If we are comfortable with how our world is working, we can think the state doesn't matter to us. This is nonsense; the only way I can tease it out is that some of us think the state is working for us. The state sets the parameters of our lives, whether through regulating what and how we can possess what we "own," through organizing the systems that make living together possible like transport and schools, and by empowering police and armies with the power of life and death. Getting off the grid, or out of the realm of the state, is fantasy.

By accident of birth, we live in a quasi-democratic polity in which citizens have some levers with which to influence, even control, the activity of the state. We are citizens, not objects to be moved around. This is unusual in human history, as unusual as the notion that God is a choice. But it has considerable reality, however remote that may feel.

Political parties are among, but not the entirety, of how citizens can corral the state to our benefit and purposes. Identifying with parties is optional. Being a citizen, and hence an actor or potential actor in how our society shapes itself, is not optional.

Taking seriously the difference between how God-choice and citizenship-choice work in our world easily explains one of jarring paradoxes of this election season -- evangelical Christian attachment to that anti-moral monster, the Orange blob. Evangelical leaders have absorbed the reality that, in their society, citizenship trumps all. (Damn that man for polluting a useful metaphor.) As Robert Putnam and David Campbell concluded in American Grace,

When religion and politics were initially inconsistent, religious commitment, not political commitment, was more likely to change.

It's the (North) American way.

On the campaign trail in Nevada

Melvin and I just spent several days together knocking on doors in Reno and Sparks, looking for voters supporting Hillary Clinton and Democratic Senate candidate Catherine Cortez-Masto. UniteHERE/Culinary Workers Local 226 has been hard at work here for months; Melvin started right after Labor Day. This is not new for Melvin. His mother brought him along as a teenager on a canvass in 2012. That year, he joined the team for the last three weeks, decided he could do more with his life than join the Marines, and ended up in community college. Now he is a seasoned pro, charming and cajoling voters with gusto.

Nevadans know their votes are important. They've been bombarded by TV ads for months. Their phones ring constantly. One of the inducements we had to offer to people we with talked with was that, if they used the early voting opportunity that begins today, they'll stop hearing from us.

Some unscientific observations:

• Because Nevadans are so used to this attention from campaigns, and seemingly a little flattered by it, they open their doors more readily than in other places where I've done this work.

• Because of this willingness, and perhaps also because I've turned into a white-haired old person, voters seemed far less afraid of me when I knock than I've become inured to. Another older woman had the same observation.

• I encountered a gratifying number of gay households. I don't expect that in a place that feels to me "suburban." Silly me.

• A small, but significant, number of the voters I encountered had met/seen Cortez-Masto. Las Vegas is the overwhelming center of population in the state, but government is in the north where Reno is the big place, so a woman who has been state attorney general for a decade is a known quantity.

• Whenever I met someone who was undecided about choice for president, I asked that person to give me a reason they would vote for Trump. Nobody came up with one.

Current polls show Clinton pulling ahead in Nevada and Cortez-Masto pulling into a tiny lead. She's getting the help of the kind of ground get-out-the-vote operation I joined up with all over the state; that can pull a candidate through. Should Cortez-Masto win, she'll be the first Latina elected to the Senate.***

I've had fun in the past making sociological observations about the food provided by campaigns. UniteHERE broke the pattern with this breakfast offering, though the inevitable pizza turned up the next day. But no donuts!***

Reno is a bearable size small city surrounded by stark desert and mountains. This was the view out my window.

The casinos are as ludicrous as might be expected. But Circus Circus was cheap and efficient. And what's not to like about a hotel that lines its corridors with pictures of staff like this one? It is also the sole union hotel in town.***

This local Libertarian gets the prize for the best sign I walked by. Doubt if he'll get many votes, but everyone needs a laugh in this season. Only 17 days to go ...

Media consumption diet for this election year

Friends have asked me what I read to keep informed during this awful election. I read too much for my peace of mind, I think.

But since I've posted on this topic before, I do notice I've changed my sources somewhat.

For a long time, I've paid for and read the New York Times. I also regularly read the Guardian; it has done terrific work recording the hundreds of killings by U.S. police departments. And this election season, the Washington Post successfully lured me to pay up for its coverage. For months, it seemed to be doing the most thorough job of digging into Donald Trump's many shady enterprises. David Fahrenthold has been THE essential source of Trump revelations. The Wapo columnists are interesting, especially Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman at The Plum Line.

Several individual reporters/pundits have provided exceptional coverage and insight. Farai Chideya has offered profiles of subsegments of the electorate. Jamelle Bouie, chief political correspondent at Slate provides historically grounded commentary from an African American perspective. And Rebecca Traister at New York has succeeded in describing consistently and thoughtfully how woman hatred plays out in this contest.

Two newer journalism sites have often outpaced the legacy news media organizations, carving out niches that begged to be filled. I sure hope Vox thrives. There's amazing journalism coming from Ezra Klein's baby. And I find Talking Points Memo essential, not so much for their click bait outrage snippets, as for Joshua Marshall's historians perspective on the circus.


But probably the most important shift in my media consumption diet has been the addition of numerous podcasts. This has to do with being retired from the paid fray. I'm running and walking and photographing with delight. And at the same time I'm listening. Often this means audiobooks, but for the last six months it has frequently meant podcasts. The Vox guys (and Sarah Kliff) contribute The Ezra Klein Show and The Weeds. These provide interesting, thoughtful, background on just about anything in the news. I don't always (often?) agree with all expressed here, but that is what makes these productions interesting. Another podcast I value a lot is Code Switch: a conversation about race and identity. Finally I should mention one election focussed production, The United States of Anxiety, a series well worth listening to which digs into race and class dynamics as this season reveals them in suburban Long Island. It is terrific journalism. The first three of these I'll still be listening to after November 8.

On claiming our victories along the way

I'm in Reno this week, knocking on doors with members of the Culinary Workers of Nevada (UNITE-HERE) trying to push out the vote for Catherine Cortez-Masto. Cortez-Masto would be the first Latina in the Senate, nothing to sneeze at. Yes, this will help win Nevada for Hillary Clinton too.

So this seems a good moment to share Erudite Partner's latest TomDispatch article: Why Fighting for Justice Is Like Surfing.

... How do outrageous ideas — for example, that women are human beings, or that the U.S. locks up way too many people, or even that gay people should be able to get married if they want to — suddenly morph into everyday commonsense? It’s rarely an accident. It almost always involves dedicated people working away for years on an issue, often unnoticed, before it seems suddenly to surge into general awareness. ...

Read it all at the link. It will cheer you up.

And if this ugly election gets you down, do something. There's nothing more cheering than working for justice. You don't have to go far afield as I have; there are almost always necessary local campaigns that are organized to put you to use. Really -- working together with others for our victories is part of enjoying them.

The worst ballot ever: part three, San Francisco measures

Can it really be that having spent hours on the state propositions, I now have City Measures A through X plus RR to try to comprehend? Yes, it can. Here goes:

Measure A: School bonds We need to fund the schools. (See also state Prop. 51.) Yes.

Measure B: City College parcel tax We need to fund City College. (See also the Community College Board.) Yes.

Measure C: Affordable housing loans We voted bonds in 1992 for seismic upgrades and some of that money is still around. This redirects it to affordable housing. Yes.

Measure D: appointments to vacant elected offices Since Willie Brown's time (1996-2004), mayors have frequently been able to overturn the will of the voters by replacing uncooperative supervisors with more malleable ones. Sometimes a sitting supervisor won higher office; sometimes the mayor dangled a plum appointment. This would stop that practice by requiring a special election for any vacated seat within 180 days. Let the people vote! Yes.

Measure E: Street trees WTF? The Department of Public Works has been passing off responsibility for trees on sidewalks (often the work of Friends of the Urban Forest) to property owners. Too many of these would rather cut the trees than assume the cost of care. This would raise $19 million to cover the cost of city care of the trees by a parcel tax based on property frontage. We'd be willing to pay for the care of our tree. Yes.

Measure F: Youth voting in local elections Would allow 16 and 17 year olds to vote in San Francisco elections. If we can pass this, we'll be emulating Scotland. That seem like a pretty sane place. Youth activists jammed up the system to get this on the ballot. It's a great story. Yes.

Measure G: Department of Police Accountability This isn't going to solve the problem of the San Francisco Police Department running wild in communities of color. That's going to take "reconstitution," starting over with a command structure that comes from outside the old boy network and current police union. This would give what has been called the Office of Civilian Complaints at least a tiny amount of independence. Yes.

Measure H: Public Advocate New York has one of these and it seems to have got a pretty good mayor, Bill de Blasio, out of it. A Public Advocate's job is to make sure you’re getting fair treatment from the government. My termed out supervisor David Campos thinks we could use one; Campos is a smart guy so I am willing to give it a whirl. Yes.

Measure I: Funding for seniors and adults with disabilities This is a "set-aside" -- a budget category that legislators won't be able to wheel and deal with. I don't like that sort of thing. We elect people to figure out how to make all the interests get their piece; they should do their jobs. Yet I also know that some populations get screwed by the "regular" process. Am I really going to vote against old people? No. So, reluctantly, yes.

Measure J: Homeless services and transportation Well we certainly need them, so yes.

Measure K: Sales tax increase But apparently San Francisco can't have homeless services and transportation unless we also vote an additional sales tax. This is extortion. Let the tech billionaires pay for keeping the city whole! Apparently we can't do the obvious -- tax the people with the money -- so we have to do this. Very reluctantly, yes.

Measure L: Muni oversight This would let the supervisors appoint some of the members of the board of the transit system. Currently the mayor appoints all of them. Since nobody in their right mind thinks the mayor stands up for the interests of anyone but developers and tech money men, it would be helpful to introduce some popular friction into an otherwise closed system. Yes.

Measure M: Housing and development commission This aims to move some power over development away from the Mayor's Office because in recent seasons, the Mayor's Office has seemed to be shilling for developers rather than acting in the interests of all San Franciscans. Measure like this are what happens when people feel excluded from control over their homes. Yes.

Measure N: Non-citizen voting in School Board elections Sure -- remember whose kids are in the schools. These kids are our future. This is not a crazy San Francisco novelty: it happens in some parts of Maryland and Chicago. Yes.

Measure O: Office development in Hunters Point Lennar is a big corporate developer, long beloved of our mercenary city fathers going back to Willie Brown. It's always been their hope to develop the old Navy property and the city's last Black community by giving it away to Lennar. This would violate existing city rules which limit office development because developers never pay for the infrastructure and transit costs their projects create. The rest of us pay for that stuff while the corporations take the gravy. Lennar already won bounteous permits in Hunters Point. Enough. No.

Measure P: Competitive bidding for affordable housing San Francisco has an experienced cast of nonprofit housing developers based in our different communities such as Chinatown, the Mission, etc. This would require three bids for any city project, forcing groups that have managed to arrive at an intricate web of interconnections to compete. If there weren't three bids, a nonprofit housing project could not go forward.. Talk about the kind of over-regulation that conservatives (like the measure's conservative author Mark Farrell) usually rave against. It almost makes you think that the author doesn't want any nonprofit housing at all. No.

Measure Q: Tents on the sidewalk This is another Hate the Homeless measure. We vote on this sort of thing every few years. Street camping is already illegal -- but after all, we must Hate the Homeless. NO.

Measure R: Neighborhood crime unit Great, we've got a supervisor wanting us to vote to require the SFPD to focus on "quality of life" issues. That is, more Hate the Homeless. How about an initiative to disarm these killers on the loose among the communities of color? There's a bit of micro-managing I could get behind. NO.

Measure S: Hotel tax allocation We already tax hotel visits. Let's put some of that into housing homeless families. Yes.

Measure T: Lobbyist contributions Bars certain lobbyist contributions to candidates, though it is not clear whether many would escape its prohibitions. This kind of law often just moves money around. Still we have to try. Yes.

Measure U: Affordable housing requirements This would let developers off the hook for building as large a proportion of housing units for low income people as the current law requires -- and thus raise their profits. San Francisco is a profitable place to build. Make them recognize that the city's citizens retain some rights to control what they build and how many of us they can force out for their gain. NO.

Measure V: Sugary beverages tax We certainly should tax sodas! The beverage industry is trying to describe this as a "grocery tax". Sugar water is not my idea of groceries. This is coming; they can only hold it off for so long. Yes.

Measure W: Mansion tax This would raise the transfer tax on properties that sell for more than $5 million. I can't believe it would kill the buyers and sellers. Yes.

Measure X: Arts and industrial space retention San Francisco wouldn't be San Francisco if there were no place for the arts and small shops. But if the tech money gets its way, we'll have nothing but gleaming steel and orange paneled condos. This tries to help. Yes.

Measure RR: BART bonds I like BART (our subway). It's expensive, unless, like me, you are on senior fares, whereupon it is the best bargain around. It was designed for commuters from suburbs while we could really use more lines to get around town. But we need to fund its upkeep. Yes.

Part one: federal, state and local candidates.
Part two: state propositions

The worst ballot ever: part two, state propositions

The candidates on my crazy California ballot were the easy part. Here I'll pass along how I voted on the 17 state ballot measures. Yes, this is democracy gone berserk. There is no way to make informed choices on all of this. Worse, having just been out of the state for two months, I'm nowhere near as on top of these as I might be. But here goes:

Prop. 51: School bonds Since we've made it almost impossible to raise taxes, we issue bonds. The general election has reminded me how important education might be to preserving decency. Yes

And this little six-year-old said: "Because the other guy called someone a piggy, and you cannot be president if you call someone a piggy."

from Michelle Obama, Oct. 14, 2016

Prop. 52: Medi-Cal hospital fee This seems to be about making private hospitals pay their fair share. Yes

Prop. 53: Revenue bond vote This would make us vote on more items we know nothing about; longer ballots ahead. It isn't always comfortable, but in general we're smarter to delegate most governing to our legislators. No

Prop. 54: Legislative sunshine Makes the legislature publish what is in bills before votes and requires steaming video of all sessions. Yes though weakly. You can't entirely legislate transparency. If some want to play tricks, they'll find ways.

Prop. 55: Tax extension on the rich No brainer here. These are tax rates that already exist. We can't have the state we want unless it is paid for. Yes.

Prop. 56: Cigarette tax Hell, Yes!

Prop 57: Earlier parole This one has parts. It would open the possibility of parole for 30,000 non-violent felons and allow prison authorities to credit inmates with "good behavior." All fine and good, but it also shifts the decision on whether to try juveniles as adults from prosecutors to judges. That might turn out to be a significant reform as prosecutors have too many tools to get easy plea agreements as it stands. All these are baby steps toward dealing with a a racist, crazy-quilt system, but better than the status quo. Yes.

Prop. 58: English language learning This repeals one of California's racial backlash initiatives (Prop. 227) from the 1990s when the white electorate was trying to wish away the emerging majority of color. We effectively outlawed bilingual education with that one. These days we appreciate that bilingual education can be an effective strategy for ensuring that newcomer children learn in the public schools. About time! Yes.

Prop. 59: Overturning Citizens United Puts us on record as wanting the Supremes to allow regulation of corporate money in elections. No legal effect, but a cause about which reformers are passionate. Yes.

Prop. 60: Condoms in porn films This is the sort of thing that makes the state a national laughing stock. Rightly. Both Dems and GOPers think this is unnecessary, stupid law. We'll probably pass it. Not sure if I can bring myself to vote on it.

Prop. 61: Drug prices From the ads I've seen on TV, Big Pharma thinks this one might cost them. It enables the state to mandate that it pay no more for drugs than the Veterans Administration. Anything to nick Big Pharma. Yes.

Prop. 62: Death penalty repeal Finally something I know something about. Long time readers here will know I spent all of 2012 campaigning for a previous version and it lost narrowly. The death penalty is arbitrary (only about three county prosecutors call for it), crazy expensive, and inevitably racist in application. A federal judge who looked into it called it "dysfunctional" and "beyond repair." People realize this when they think about the reality that we have something like 750 men on death row and haven't executed any of them since 2006. Californians have had four more years to learn that the promise of retribution or closure embodied in the death penalty is cruel phony-baloney. Yes.

Prop. 63: Ammunition sales Most anything to restrict wider access to guns seems right to me. This is a step in the right direction. The law would require background checks for ammunition purchases and establish a system to get guns away from people with felonies or domestic violence orders. Yes.

Prop. 64: Marijuana legalization Gonna happen. About time no one goes to jail for pot. Yes.

Prop. 65: Carry out bags The plastic bag makers want us to help their polluting industry. This is a con. Ain't it great that we have a system in which, if you spend enough money, you can make us vote on anything? No.

Prop. 66: Death penalty enforcement Prosecutors strike back. Recognizing that sentiment against the death penalty is growing statewide, they want to try to resuscitate it. It is not that they are naturally blood thirsty (at least most of them.) But we have to understand how the "justice" system actually works. Those jury trials you see on TV are vanishingly rare. Most people charged with crimes make a plea bargain with the prosecutor for an agreed sentence rather than take the expense or risk of trial. Prosecutors love having the death penalty in their armory -- "take this plea or we'll make your offense a death case." That's powerful stuff. The so-called reforms in Prop. 66 won't work. I have great confidence that the capital defense lawyers will still be able to gum up the works -- and that California therefore will be no more likely to save money or execute offenders if this passes. Prosecutors don't need us to make their job easier. NO

Prop. 67: Plastic bag ban Now we're talking. San Franciscans have proved able to do without plastic bags; the rest of the state can too. This is what the plastic companies fear: we don't need their polluting product. Yes.

Having worked through these, I'm a little surprised how many I am voting "yes" on. That won't discourage the interests that put them on the ballot, but quite a few seem sensible or perhaps necessary because legislators can't or won't dare pass them the old-fashioned way.

Part one: federal, state and local candidates.