Looking backward: whatever happened to the Republicans?

I'm still trying to capture what I found missing in Rick Perlstein's Invisible Bridge.

The Berkeley economist Bradford DeLong took a crack at the question in the title of this post yesterday. I think his rant gets at what Perlstein either wasn't willing or able to raise up. Here are some long excerpts:

... You and I alike still wonder what Pete Wilson thought he was doing, and how the other senior Republicans in the California Republican Party reacted, when Wilson decided that he could try to win another term's governorship by blowing up the party's future in an increasingly Hispanic California. Wilson's strategy [a nativist initiative in 1994] was momentarily advantageous to him, but enormously shortsighted--and unjustifiable if he has any sense of loyalty to his Republican comrades or to the Republican Party of the future.

Perhaps it is be[s]t to think of it as the curse imposed on the Republican Party by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. The 1964 Civil Rights Act seemed to them to create an opportunity for the Republican Party. It could attract Southern Democrats conservative and hostile to civil rights by covering the flag of racism under the banner of libertarianism and individual freedom. They could thus make the South competitive.

There is this line in the comic book The Watchmen: "You think I am locked in here with you. But actually you are locked in here with me!"

Nixon and Goldwater thought they were locking a segment of ex-Southern Democrats into the Republican Party under conditions that would [gi]ve them a subordinate role. But now the Eisenhower, the Nixon, and I would say even the Herbert Hoover and Barry Goldwater Republicans find themselves locked in and in a subordinate role with a bunch of people who are very difficult to live with. People who think the world is against them. People who think that, somehow, others are manipulating the system and stealing their stuff. Sometimes those others are "eggheads"; sometimes they are, in Nino Scalia's terms, those "pursuing the homosexual agenda"; Black welfare queens are a constant threat; immigrants--God alone knows why a party that thinks it is for the entrepreneurial and upward-striving doesn't regard someone who has managed to dodge the dogs and walk a thousand miles from Chiapas to get here as their best friend--are a threat; feminists seems to be a constant threat. I really do not understand it.

... Alongside this transformation of the Republican Party into the Party of the Wingnuts, there has come the end of the Republican Party as a party of economic development, economic growth, and upward mobility. They are, now and for the forseeable future, much more the party of entrenched, and increasingly, inherited wealth--people for whom economic development and creative destruction is actually a minus.

A generation ago the Koch enterprises were interested in economic growth: disrupting old arrangements and building a high-productivity petroleum-based economy as the energy sector and energy businesses expanded massively. A generation ago Sam Walton was very interested in growth, productivity, prosperity, and disruption as he sought to build up the most efficient nationwide retail chain in the world. And now? Are the Koch brothers today interested in accelerating and profiting from the structural transformation that is coming as we move from a petroleum to a non-carbon energy economy? Not at all. Kansas governor Sam Brownback used to be in favor of wind energy in Kansas. The Koch brothers said: "frog". He hopped. Now he is opposed to it.

Are the grandchildren of Sam Walton going to be incredibly interested in creative destruction when it takes the form of the destruction of the value of Walmart? No. ...

I note that DeLong, located in California, knows that racism underpins what Republicans have become. As in Nixonland, Perlstein's big picture history can't reach that conclusion. Perhaps professional conventions or his location makes that impossible. But it is still true. Republicans embraced white supremacy explicitly. And the rest is history.

The Washington Merry-Go-Round whirls on

Maybe this book doesn't seem to hold together because the events it covers were a falling apart -- and they presaged no subsequent coming together. Or maybe Rick Perlstein really has just thrown a lot of research at a wall and we're presented with what sticks. I came away from reading it unsettled. I wanted to be enthralled, but The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, an account of the political history of the years 1973-76, didn't impress me as equal to the analytical coherence of Perlstein's superb Nixonland. (I still have not gotten to his earlier Barry Goldwater book, Before the Storm, and still mean to.)

As with Nixonland, my reading of this one is influenced by having lived this history, though since I was in San Francisco, I was busy enough locally not to pay very close attention to national events. During the Watergate investigations, I worked as a messenger on foot in downtown San Francisco. Sometimes it seemed as if every time I emerged from a building, a new headline had gone up on the boxes of the San Francisco Examiner on every corner. I consciously decided at that time that I would not try to follow the ins and outs as they emerged, but would wait for more coherent journalistic accounts after the fact. Eventually I read All the President's Men and probably some other Watergate books, but I don't carry a catalogue of malefactors and events around in my head the same way I do for more recent eras. I did enjoy that great moment when the U.S. was expelled from Vietnam and also watching Nixon slink away after his resignation. Some good things happened in those awful days.

So what new insights do I take away from Perlstein's over-800 page opus? Certainly a much clearer grasp of the history and chronology of Watergate. An explanation of why Massachusetts is still flying the POW/MIA flag: I had not known that the Nixon administration allowed relatives to believe that many US soldiers fallen in Vietnam whose bodies were not returned might someday turn up, even when they knew better. That cruelty should have been an impeachable offense! I also learned that many of the so-called "Watergate Babies" -- Democratic Congressmembers elected in the wake of Nixon's fall -- were skeptics about using government for reform from the get-go, setting up the center-right Democratic policies of Carter, the ineffectual Democratic opposition to Reagan, and the accommodating Democratic Leadership Council style of "reinventing government" under Clinton(I).

At the center of Bridge is that putrid con man, Ronald Reagan. Perlstein makes the case that for several decades our politics were dominated by a politician who responded to being raised in an alcoholic home by constructing his own reality and then honing his ability to draw others into his fantasies. As a child, he wished himself into boys' adventure tales; as a man he presented himself as the hero-savior who would rescue a forever innocent and always good America from evildoers. And far too many of us wanted just that in a leader. Sadly, Perlstein's picture feels a truthful indictment of this country much as Stephen Kinzer's The Brothers concludes we wanted comforting Daddies in the frightening atomic '50s.

People want to believe. Ronald Reagan was able to make people believe.

We're suckers for this kind of thing.

The era Perlstein is chronicling here included the nation's last attempt -- before the Senate Intelligence Committee report released last December -- to rein in our spooks. In the Senate, Frank Church investigated the CIA and turned up assassinations and coups in other nations galore. I had not, before reading this, been so aware of Congressman Otis Pike's House committee whose work was perhaps even more revealing.

The report ... was, for a government document, a literary masterpiece and hard-hitting as hell. ... [it documented] the CIA's wasteful spending, ... its bald failures at prediction, its abuses of civil liberties, and its blanket indifference that any of this might pose a problem. ... it detailed a number of failed covert actions -- not naming countries, but with plenty of identifying details to make things obvious enough for those who cared to infer. ...And something about all this seemed to spook cowed congressmen -- who were soon voting to neuter themselves.

The CIA offer the usual complaints -- security would be harmed and operatives endangered -- and Congress voted to suppress its own report. CBS reporter Daniel Schorr had a leaked copy and, with some difficulty, got it released. Most of the media thought he should have been fired. The upshot was the creation of the ineffectual Congressional committees that still offer the sole legislative oversight of our spooks. Perlstein reports an interview with Congressman Pike:

"It took this investigation to make me realize that I had always been told lies, to make me realize I was tired of being told lies." And he explained why he thought the intelligence scandals hadn't achieved the public concern of Watergate ... "Oh, they think it is better not to know. There are too many things that embarrass Americans in that report. ... they are asked to believe that their country has been evil. And nobody wants to believe that ...."

Still true -- but if we can't toughen up enough to look at what is done in our name, this so powerful, so unconscious, so well-meaning, so brutal country will remain a force for evil indeed. Will we settle for that?

I borrowed the title for this post from a newspaper column I connect with that time. Now I have discovered that Washington Merry-Go-Round has a sort of life after death as an occasional opinion piece.

Senate votes to reinforce torture ban

On coming into office, President Obama issued an executive order against the torture practices of the Bush administration. Until today, the only bar to resumption of these crimes was that, for the moment, we had a President who had said "no." (As least we hope Obama's ban is comprehensive -- amidst our rulers' addiction to secrecy, we have no real way of knowing.) Today the Senate (78-21) voted to add a ban to the Defense Authorization bill. Whether this will survive legislative sausage making remains to be seen.

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos provided these portraits of shame.

• All the votes for executive freedom to torture were from Republicans. Yet those 21 were less than half of the Republican caucus. That might not always have been the case.

• Nice to see that no Democrats voted for torture.

• Two Republican women (Fischer of Nebraska and Ernst of Iowa) apparently think a little cruelty is just fine. It's important for such women to prove their toughness?

• Among Republicans running for president, Lindsey Graham loves him some enhanced coercion, while Cruz and Paul voted for the ban. Marco Rubio ducked, the only senator not voting.

Turning the country away from torture is not a moment. It is a process -- one that requires vigilance.

Your birth month may predispose you to some diseases

Wonkblog has come up with another intriguing study that may (or may not) tell scientists something about how seasonal environments facilitate adult susceptibility to some conditions and diseases.

Mary Regina Boland, Nicholas Tatonetti and other researchers at the Columbia University Department of Medicine examined records for an incredible 1.75 million patients born between 1900 and 2000 who had been treated at Columbia University Medical Center. Using statistical analysis, they combed through 1,688 different diseases and found 55 that had a correlation with birth month, including ADHD, reproductive performance, asthma, eyesight and ear infections.

... For respiratory, reproductive and neurological illnesses, people born in October and November were more at risk. For cardiovascular disease, those born from September through December were more protected, while those born in winter and spring (January to June) had higher risk. And since so many lives are cut short due to cardiovascular diseases, being born in the autumn was actually associated with living longer than being born in the spring.

...Tatonetti, the principal investigator, said it’s not yet clear exactly why some diseases are prevalent in certain birth months, but that it likely often has to do with the environment that a baby is born into, including seasonal variations in vitamin D and allergens.

Apparently, I lucked out by being born in July. And October and November look like bad news.

I do wonder whether these results are peculiar to people born in a northeastern U.S. climate.

Who knows what they'll do with big data next?

H/t Kevin Drum.

No Fly list sputters along

For awhile, because we'd been told we were on it, I wrote a lot about the U.S. government's No Fly list -- and the various other watch lists that popped up after 9/11. Last year I wrote up a good book on the history of terrorist watch lists. It seems governments instinctively restrict travel when they can get away with it.

These days, I fly unimpeded.

But lots of people -- mostly Muslim people it seems -- remain stuck in No Fly hell, not entirely predictably or rationally.

The latest case I've run across is that of Mourad Benchellali. Benchellali was released from Guantanamo in 2004. A French citizen, he was sold to the U.S. by Pakistanis after he escaped Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. invasion in 2001. By his own account, as related by the British human rights activist Andy Worthington, he was a dumb 19 year who blundered into a mess.

His father was a radical imam who had tried (and failed) to fight in Bosnia, his brother Menad had tried (and failed) to fight in Chechnya, and his brother, his father and even his mother had all spent time in French prisons, but he insisted that he went to Afghanistan for “an adventure” and as a way of enhancing his status, hoping that he would be “viewed differently” in his neighbourhood, and that his reputation might “match” that of his brother. He admitted that his sense of adventure was “misguided and mistimed,” and blamed his brother for encouraging him to go, and for arranging for him to attend a training camp. “For two months, I was there,” he wrote after his release, “trapped in the middle of the desert by fear and my own stupidity.”

The U.S released him to his home country in 2004, where he was tried, convicted of associating with terrorists, and given credit for time served in Guantanamo. A complex appeal process actually got the charges dropped, and re-raised, and dropped again. In 2008 Worthington reports that he explained further in an interview to McClatchy Newspapers:

It was June 2001, and I thought I’d take a vacation, be back in time for classes in September. Later, the papers would say I was a desperate outsider [in France], trapped looking in on an uncaring nation. But that’s not true. I was happy. I was getting an education. I had a job. I had a fiancee. I just thought I wanted a bit of adventure.

So what has he been doing since he returned to France beside writing a book alleging he was tortured by the U.S. in Kandahar and Guantanamo? He's been traveling about, using his own experience as an example to discourage young people tempted by the Islamic State's recruitment pitches. He's a counter-jihadi recruiter! He has flown in Europe with no trouble.

But when invited to speak at a conference on peace and radicalization in Montreal, he was prevented from attending by the U.S. No Fly list.

No, he wasn't coming to this country. But the U.S. makes any airline passing through U.S. airspace submit a passenger list. He was refused boarding in Lyon. At least he was told the U.S. list prevented him from keeping his appointment; too often people are just kept in the dark about what prevents them from flying.

I can't help wondering -- is Benchellali's continued inclusion on the list inefficiency on the part of list keepers who never remove anyone? Or do they really think this speaker against terrorist recruitment is a danger? Or is it because his story puts the U.S. in a bad light? We are not allowed to know, of course. National security theater in action ...

Creeping Koch coup?

This post will be a little wonky but I hope of some interest. It's about what, in electoral organizing, we used to call "the damn lists" and now are more likely to call "the data." These are the files of voters that campaigns use to choose the people they seek to reach and turn out to vote. If during election season you are afflicted with calls and mailers, you've been selected by one or more campaigns to target. They have their reasons, or at least think they do.

Until quite recently, "the lists" were both expensive proprietary commodities purchased from private list vendors and full of garbage, such as names of people who had moved, died, or even never existed. Any phone numbers were as much as 50 percent wrong. The hanging chad fiasco in Florida in 2000 led to enactment of the Help American Vote Act. This federal law had a very mixed record of improving election administration, but state voter files did gradually become more accurate during the early '00s. As more state and local records came online, lists also became cheaper.

Meanwhile, internet connectivity became near universal and computers themselves became faster and cheaper. By the 2008 election cycle, well funded campaigns, especially Obama's, provided sophisticated user interfaces to their various offices and volunteer operations while keeping the data on central servers. They invested in improving that data by cross-referencing registered voters with commercial information that might suggest their leanings and interests. What had been horribly complex and clunky in the 1990s became far easier and much more efficient. (People still printed "the lists" and struggled to organize them -- see above.)

There's more going on here than just better computerization. Every time a campaign uses this voter data within the master system, that experience improves the quality of the records. Bad phone numbers and addresses get removed; sometimes new voters are even added. The quality of the information gets better.

Fast forward to the present ... according to Jon Ward writing at Yahoo News, the Republicans are currently having a struggle about just who controls their data. In 2008, they fell far behind the Dems in their data management. In the 2012 cycle, the Romney campaign tried to play catch up and create its own Republican system. This famously blew up on election day, completely screwing up Get Out The Vote operations. Ever since, both the Republican National Committee and the Koch brothers' various political ventures have been jousting over systems and most importantly who controls the underlying master data. The Koch empire has apparently created a front end called i360 that operatives consider more functional than the RNC's offering. But the Republican National Committee, not surprisingly, thinks the Party itself ought control the data.

Ward reports on the Republican national chairman's aim in this kerfuffle:

The core issue, from [Reince] Priebus’ point of view, is one of loyalty and allegiance. The RNC is a permanent entity, committed to the Republican Party without question. The Koch network is too independent from the party to be trusted with possession of the GOP’s most valuable core assets. If the Kochs — whose political history is steeped more in libertarianism than it is in any loyalty to the Republican Party — decided next week to use their database to benefit only their massive multinational corporation, they could do so.

... And the problem for the RNC is that while it has political data going back roughly two decades, you need more than just data in order to be the data hub for a political party. And that is where the RNC has fallen short. Its data is good, and it has continued to enrich it and even to help campaigns and key battleground states build sophisticated voter universes through the work last year of a company called TargetPoint. But campaigns need to use data, not just have it on the shelf. This is where companies like i360... have gained an edge.

... [The RNC] decision to take their dispute with i360 public shows the level of alarm inside the RNC at the growing clout of the Koch political empire. They have concluded that the Koch political machine wants to replace them and to essentially become a shadow party. “It’s pretty clear that they don’t want to work with the party but want to supplant it,” the source close to the RNC said.

... The fear at the RNC is that this would give a private business empire the master voter file in Republican politics, and the party’s main committee would be reduced to that of playing a bit role.

A couple of months ago, I speculated that the decision by the Supremes that billionaires could try to buy elections might lead someone to decide to dispense with all these clamoring Party pols and just purchase the presidency for himself. (I assume a male Daddy Bucks, though of course I could be wrong.) Looks like at the moment the Kochs are maneuvering for a somewhat unfriendly takeover of an entire political Party. This is dangerous to democracy, because for all their faults, political parties are mass-based citizen organizations. But it sure is "pass the popcorn" territory for political junkies.
***In the 1990s when I was training community organizations how to get into the electoral arena, hardly any of them could afford "the lists." They were begging, borrowing and stealing from whatever political or union sources might give them data to work with. One of the first points I made to these groups was always: whoever provides the voter data determines what your campaign is accomplishing. And if you don't know their interest in supplying you, you are opening yourselves to being used. Still true, but the scale looks much larger among Republicans at the moment.

Ikea stigmata

Too many screws; too small holes; too few calluses. All done.

A little less hysteria, please

In 2004, then Senator and Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry told a reporter:

'We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance.''

I still think he was right. To me, this was Kerry's finest moment in a unfocused and sometimes craven campaign.

The people of this country used to be far more able to slough off occasional outbreaks of political violence without lapsing into hysterics. This is a big country. Unless terrorists obtain some real weapons, the damage they can do is limited, though obviously devastating for anyone unlucky enough to cross their path.

Does anyone reading here remember this?

... in New York, terrorists took advantage of peak holiday travel to explode a bomb, equivalent to twenty-five sticks of dynamite, that they had hidden in a coin locker -- collapsing the floor and ceiling, hurling shrapnel from the metal lockers that pierced through flesh and left body parts scattered through the main baggage claim area at La Guardia. Fourteen people were killed. No one ever claimed responsibility. No perpetrator was ever found.

Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge

That was in 1975. I certainly don't recall that particular horror. If it happened today, we would be exhorted to immerse ourselves in the story 24/7, hold commemorations, and take on the full trauma. There were 89 bombings that year in the United States attributed to terrorists. I don't remember us deforming our entire society in response. We may not have kept calm, but we simply carried on.

This week Gallup published a poll about our attitudes to the proper balance between civil liberties and intrusive government measures against the threat of terrorism.

Republicans and Democrats currently hold similar views of whether maintaining security or protecting civil liberties is more important in government anti-terror efforts. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 66% say civil liberties should be the higher priority and 29% say protecting citizens from terrorism should be. Meanwhile, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents prioritize civil liberties over security by 64% to 32%.

At the same time, most people (55%) think the sort of spying on citizens for which Edward Snowden provided evidence does not violate their civil liberties. But 41% do feel violated. Frankly, I'm surprised the latter number is that high. Our "civil liberties" are very abstract as they relate to government spying without felt consequences. For a lot of people, liberty means not being shot by a rampaging police officer, not some agency collecting your internet activity. Meanwhile we freely give away our "private" preferences and excitements on Facebook.

The question about whether we feel violated is a new one for Gallup. We won't know until they ask it repeatedly whether this is a perception that changes with the news. I think it might -- either way.

In general, this poll made me feel a little better about the good sense of my fellow citizens. Maybe we can stop responding foolishly to distant provocations. That would be hard with politicians fueling fear, but collectively we're not completely nuts.

H/t Digby for pointing to the poll.

Friday cat blogging

Let's give Morty the day off today. He might not think so, but there are other cats in the world. This one observed me very early on a Sunday morning when I sometimes run in the streets before there is anyone stirring. There are a goodly number of urban outdoor cats slinking about at 6 a.m.

This slightly moth eaten survivor is bolder yet. We met in downtown San Francisco on a major street in South of Market. Perhaps the adjacent store is home?

Nepal since the quakes

I have traveled in search of mountains. Among the many places I've been lucky enough to put down a toe, something about Nepal and its people seeped into me especially deeply. In gratitude from a world away, I continue to try to see the aftermath of the violent earthquakes of April 25, 26 and May 12.

Anagha Neelakantan, writing at the International Crisis Group blog, describes the disaster:

Nepal’s people live a constant struggle to accumulate some insulation from the hardships and arbitrariness of life. They contend with a challenging landscape of hills, high mountains and plains threatened by dangerous rivers, capricious weather, an immutable bureaucracy and treacherous politics. It often takes just a little thing to tip the balance against survival. ...

... So far, over 8,500 people are known to have died and close to 18,000 injured. About a fifth of Nepal’s 28 million people have been affected, with hundreds of thousands still enduring unimaginable suffering. Thirty of Nepal’s 75 districts were hit, 16 of them severely. About 600,000 homes have been destroyed, and tens of thousands more rendered uninhabitable, leaving some three million people without a roof over their heads. Over one million people may end up being displaced.

Neelakantan was deputy director of the Crisis Group’s Asia program until 2013. Previously she worked for the United Nations Mission in Nepal and as a political analyst, becoming executive editor at the Nepali Times. In a place where foreigners are easily bewildered even as we are delighted, she knows what she is seeing. Some of her observations:

... there are already sharply divergent narratives about the earthquake and the response to it. These accounts reflect some of the faultlines in Nepali politics, governance and society, and in international engagement with Nepal. The complex politics surrounding the response to the earthquake will influence how much people suffer and for how long. They will also determine whether the enormous reconstruction effort needed in the affected part of the country will bring the country together, or return Nepal to the politics of partisanship and bitter polarisation.

One narrative, often embraced by some internationals, has the government as the bad guy: slow, incompetent, power-hungry and criminal, thus incapable of leading the reconstruction. From a Nepali perspective, internationals are often seen as unaccountable and un-transparent, expensive, and disrespectful of Nepali expertise and sovereignty. ...

... It is deeply ingrained in the psyches of internationals and many professional Nepalis that the way to fix grave problems in Nepal is by treating them as the subject of development projects. So reconstruction efforts after a natural disaster, for example, or compensation for war victims, are treated just the same as if they were programs in maternal health or sanitation and hygiene. Yet clearly, a natural disaster on this scale needs a response that is more robust, transparent and creative. Replicating often inefficient and overly complicated habits from the development world is one of the worst things that could happen to the reconstruction efforts, even if it is perhaps inevitable.

Nepal’s development industry, by which I mean international agencies and NGOs, as well as Nepali NGOs, the government and bureaucracy, is sclerotic and often inefficient. This is not to say it does not ever work; it obviously does, in some ways. Yet it also sometimes creates or entrenches dynamics of inequity or resentment. The development industry is by now fused with the Nepali state by such great mutual dependency that a rupture of any significance seems unlikely. ... All sides bear responsibility for the storied corruption of the sector and, at the worst of times, insensitivity to what could trigger new conflict.

Donor agencies are far from innocent in this grubby picture, despite holier-than-thou criticism of the government of Nepal and Nepali partners: their programming often ignores history; they are so enamoured of comparative experience and international best practice that they can miss the reality right in front of them; they privilege “expert”(read foreign) knowledge over “local”perspectives; they play favourites; and at their worst, they count the lives of internationals as having greater value than of Nepalis. Like their Nepali counterparts, their perspective is grievously Kathmandu-centric. ... [Kathmandu is the capitol and only large city, over 4 million people.]

... The tussle between Kathmandu and internationals is only part of the story. Politics, in the form of party politics, became an increasingly formalised part of the development projects following the peace deal. In the districts, “all-party mechanisms” became a way for parties to divide up the spoils of the development budget as a way to keep the peace at the local level. Similar mechanisms are being put in place for relief distribution. While in some areas they appear to be functioning reasonably so far, there have been reports from other areas that the distribution of relief has been politicised to the point of endangering lives. ...

Nepalis achieved a tenuous national peace after a decade of civil war in 2006. But institutions of government are still "under construction." Will they be able to rise to and constrain the challenges of this massive disaster?

Overlooking Kathmandu, 2010

And will Nature compound the human agony? The annual monsoon rains will soon drench Nepal. Accordingly to Accuweather:

... the wettest period stretches from the end of June to the beginning of September, a nearly three-month chunk of the year where storms bring unsafe conditions to those without a proper form of shelter.

During monsoon season, up to 80 percent of the yearly average rain will fall. With this year expected to align with average rainfall totals, Kathmandu could receive more than 40 inches of rain in less than four months."

[According to Tim Osburn of Shelterbox,] in some cases... villages sitting in higher elevations could see a landslide start a mere half mile up the terrain. At that point, there's nothing else to do.

"They've spent a lot of time and energy getting temporary shelters up," Osburn said. "But when standing up to a monsoonal rain, you could see the work going right down a hill after one of those."

World Policy reports that only 22 percent of the international appeal for the Nepal disaster has been funded.

Personally, I've contributed via Oxfam America and Mercy Corps, in both cases because they had programs in the country before this emergency. I can't swear these are good channels for aid, but I make the guess they are better than newcomers without experience. The Nepalis need us to do what we can.

Fields outside Kathmandu. Did they slide? Will they wash away? Or fill with displaced migrants?

A brutal and compassionate memoir

Back in the day -- not even so long ago, say the 1980s -- before gay people won assimilation within the great mass of everybody, we produced a goodly amount of identify fiction. These books were often unpolished stories in which we simply existed. And we needed this kind of writing. We needed to see ourselves as characters among the rest. These novels didn't have to be great, though some weren't bad; their being good enough to exist served an affirming purpose. There was a moderately solvent cottage industry publishing and distributing these efforts. I know. I worked in it briefly.

And then, there were a few writers whose output was more challenging. Jeannette Winterson's novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, the story of a child-woman diverted from Pentecostal ministry in working-class northern England by discovering she loved a girl, was one. The novel won the Whitbread Award in 1985, became a TV series, and is included within the English high school curriculum.

Winterson has returned to some of the same ground in a 2011 non-fiction exploration of what it meant to be an adopted child, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? The title is what Winterson's adoptive mother asked her when she learned of her first girlfriend.

Young Jeannette had what seems, from the outside, a dreary and violent childhood. Even if the family who adopted her had been more functional, life in working-class Accrington, near Manchester, was hard. Frequently they were hungry.

Dad got paid Fridays and by Thursday there was no money left. ... Everyone on the street was the same.

But the couple who took home this baby wasn't functional at all. Her adoptive mother -- always referred to as "Mrs. Winterson" -- was plain crazy and broken. She ruled the family, imposing on them all her misery and fear through irrational petty cruelties. She was utterly unready for the arrival of a baby she had not borne.

Until I was two years old, I screamed. This was evidence in plain sight that I was possessed by the Devil. ...

Babies are frightening -- raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body. My new mother had a lot of problems with the body -- her own, my dad's, their bodies together, and mine. She muffled her own body in flesh and clothes, suppressed its appetites with a fearful mix of nicotine and Jesus, dosed it with purgatives that made her vomit, submitted it to doctors, who administered enemas and pelvic rings, subdued its desires for ordinary touch and comfort, and suddenly, not out of her own body, and with no preparation, she had a thing that was all body.

A burping, spraying, sprawling faecal thing blasting the house with rude life. ...

The young Jeannette found two consolations: the pubic library and her parent's Pentecostal Church. The former offered access to the foundation for her future profession:

The Accrington Public Library was a fully stocked library built out of stone on the values of an age of self-help and betterment. ... Outside were carved heads of Shakespeare and Milton, Chaucer and Dante. Inside were art nouveau tiles and a gigantic stained-glass window that said useful things like INDUSTRY AND PRUDENCE CONQUER.

The library held all the English lit classics, and quite a few surprises like Gertrude Stein. I had no idea what to read or in what order, I just started alphabetically. Thank God her last name was Austen ...

The Church was one of those institutions that those of us in the comfortable reaches of English-speaking culture look down upon. Winterson's picture of its life is fascinating, gentle, and reflective.

Elim Pentecostal Baptist Church, Blackburn Road, Accrington was the centre of my life for sixteen years. ...

Elim Church did not baptize infants. ...There are psychological advantages to choosing life and a way of life consciously -- and not just just accepting life as an animal gift lived according to the haphazard of nature and chance. ... I know the whole process very easily becomes another kind of rote learning, where nothing is chosen at all, and any answers, however daft, are preferred to honest questioning. But the principle remains good. I saw a lot of working-class men and women -- myself included --living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the Church. These were not educated people; Bible study worked their brains. They met after work for noisy discussion. The sense of belonging to something big, something important, lent unity and meaning....

...the certainty of a nearby God made sense of the uncertainty. We had no bank accounts, no phones, no cars, no inside toilets, often no carpets, no job security and very little money. The church was a place of mutual help and imaginative possibility. I don't know anyone, including me, who felt trapped or hopeless. What did it matter if we had one pair of shoes and no food on Thursday nights before payday?

I like that: "the church was a place of mutual help and imaginative possibility." It seems a good vocation for any organization whose central precepts cannot be proved by the benchmarks available to a scientific culture.

This same nurturing church subjected Winterson to a violent exorcism and cast her out because she loved another young woman.

I'm not going to summarize further. This is very much a book for anyone whose life has included adoption, from any side of the exchange. I've seen adopted and adopting friends wrestle with conundrums and demons I would never have appreciated, coming as I do from a very conventional family and lineage.

What I come away with is an impression of Jeanette Winterson's mature kindness. For all the rage and pain her adoptive mother's demons visited on her, she concludes:

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way. I didn't have that, and I was a very nervous watchful child. ... Mrs Winterson did not have a soothing personality. Ask for reassurance and it would never come. I never asked her if she loved me. She loved me on those days when she was able to love. I really believe that is the best she could do.

***This is one of those books I read by ear. The author reads the audiobook; she's a wonderful reader of distinctive prose.

Wayback machine: no wonder total surveillance has a bad rep

Erudite Partner is researching the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials of captured Nazis in preparation for her new book. She passes along this tidbit from the testimony, not exactly on point for her subject, but of contemporary interest. Apparently whatever technical means might currently be available, government snooping is a constant.

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: You took over a special intelligence organization in 1933 which was devoted to monitoring the telephone conversations of public officials and others inside and outside of Germany, did you not?

GOERING: I have explained that I had erected a technical apparatus which, as you said, monitored the conversations of important foreigners to and from foreign countries -- telegrams and wireless communications which were transmitted not only from Germany to foreign countries, but also from one foreign country to the other through the ether, and which were intercepted. It also monitored telephone conversations within Germany of: (1) all important foreigners; (2) important firms, at times; and (3) persons who for any reason of a political or police nature were to be watched. 

In order to prevent any abuse on the part of the police, this department had to obtain my personal permission when it was to listen to telephone conversations. Despite this there could, of course, be uncontrolled tapping of wires at the same time, just as that is technically possible everywhere today.

Trial Transcript

The people who create these systems most always think they are the best judges of whether the systems are being used properly and lawfully.

Robert H. Jackson was a Justice of the Supreme Court who took on the additional job of chief United States prosecutor at Nuremberg.

Herman Goering was one of Hitler's earliest confederates, later the head of the German Air Force during World War II, the leading appropriator of European art seized from Jews and conquered peoples, and the most senior Nazi surviving the war. Jackson called him "half militarist, half gangster." At Nuremberg he was sentenced to death, but cheated the hang man by taking poison.

Let's end voter registration drives ...

The other day, Hillary Clinton came out for universal, automatic voter registration at age 18. That woman will likely do a lot of things I hate, but if she keeps pounding on this drum, she'll do us all a service.

Registration has got to go. There is no reason for this outmoded hurdle, except to make it harder for some eligible people to vote. None.

Oregon is showing the way. The state has recently implemented a New Motor Voter Act:

The new law eliminates the need to fill out the voter registration card. Instead, the information you provided to DMV will be forwarded to state elections officials. They will notify you by mail that you have established your eligibility to vote and you don’t need to do anything if you want to be registered. The postal notification will allow you, the new voter, to affiliate with a party or choose not to become a registered voter, aka "opt out."

Sure, people need to take some responsibility to keep their records up to date, but the post office and the DMV should capture most such moves. (Amazon, Google and your internet provider also probably know too ...) Once you are in the system, you are in the system. As I always say on this topic: the NSA knows where you are. If we can't thwart the spooks (and we probably can't), why shouldn't we use that government knowledge to ensure everyone has the chance to vote?

Commentary on Clinton's speech has raised up some hard facts. Jamelle Bouie spelled out the racial implications of restrictions Republicans have passed wherever they could recently.

... tellingly, the prevalence of those laws has a lot to do with the demographics of the state. “Of the 11 states with the highest African American turnout in 2008, 7 have new restrictions,” notes the Brennan Center for Justice. “Of the 12 states with the largest Hispanic population growth between 2000 and 2010, 9 passed laws making it harder to vote.”

Law school professor (and former Obama administration official) Cass Sunstein makes points so obvious it is easy to miss them:

Free speech and freedom of religion are every American's right; no paperwork is required to get them. To be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures or to enjoy a right to a jury trial, there is no need to register with the authorities. The right to vote should be treated the same way.

... many millions of Americans are being automatically enrolled by their employers in retirement and health insurance plans -- and, as a result, participation rates have risen dramatically. ...

... Automatic voter registration appears to be working well enough in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Chile, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, and there’s no reason to think that it cannot succeed here.

Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein emphasizes that, if we want to increase voter participation -- and we should if we believe in equality and democracy -- doing away with the registration obstacle is likely to be the most effective improvement we can make. Apparently researchers are now doubting the claims for "convenience voting" -- vote by mail, unlimited absentee voting, early voting etc. The people attracted by these tweaks to the system are mostly just changing when they cast their ballots, not whether they bother.

However the same research shows that automatic, universal registration does add present non-voters to the mix. Our current system works to limit who votes on a class basis. Bernstein explains in his slightly convoluted way:

Even if it’s not much of a barrier, those who are deterred are almost certainly the same people who lose out in a system that cannot (and in my view should not) help but reward those with more resources.

It is within our technological and political capacity to do better.

Wayback machine: State of War

Fair warning: this blog may begin to feel like a Wayback Machine this summer. Why? Because Erudite Partner (aka Rebecca Gordon) has a contract for another book. Skyhorse Publishing has decided she's a "fearless author" and has her writing a work to be called American Nuremberg in their new investigative series.

Tony Lyons, president of Skyhorse Publishing, and David Talbot, the founder of Salon, announced a partnership today to launch Hot Books, a new Skyhorse book imprint that will publish investigative books on controversial issues. Skyhorse will be joining with Salon to create a co-branded digital platform for Hot Books.

Hot Books will seek to ignite national debate on the most urgent problems facing the country, filling the investigative gap left by newspapers and magazines as they cut their budgets for in-depth reporting. ...

Ambitious, but no doubt we need more investigation.

Rebecca's new topic is an "indictment of the U.S. officials who should stand trial for post-9/11 ... crimes." ***

The Wayback aspect of this is that I'm assisting by looking into some of the excellent reporting written in the decade after 9/11. This feels plenty relevant, with Jeb Bush stumbling over whether he'd have supported invading Iraq in 2003 "knowing what we know now." I call "bullshit!" It was completely possible, with a modicum of information about Iraq, to know then that the Iraq adventure was FUBAR from the start.

It was also possible to know -- not perhaps in detail, but certainly in outline -- that our spooks and our various military units were perpetrating horrors on captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, and various other dubious locations well before Seymour Hersh broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in 2004. The major media were still cowed and cowardly, but a lot of the terrible facts seeped out.

One of the good journalists in that awful time was the New York Times' James Risen. His 2006 book, State of War royally pissed off the CIA; they didn't give up trying to force him to reveal his sources under threat of jail until this year! That was probably over disclosures of dumb dirty tricks on Iran, but Risen also blew the whistle on NSA surveillance of all of us everywhere despite the qualms of his employers. He also described the outline of the CIA torture program almost a decade before the Senate torture report.

As many of us were at the time, Risen was clearly trying to fathom why particular U.S. leaders responded to 9/11 by adopting so many illegal and clumsy stratagems. In addition to the particular culpability of individuals within the Bush crew, he also indicts the structure and apparatus of the lumbering imperial colossus:

The absence of effective management has been the defining characteristic of the Bush administration's foreign policy and has allowed radical decisions to take effect rapidly with minimal review.

The ease with which the Bush administration has been able to overcome bureaucratic resistance throughout the government has revealed weaknesses of both the military's officer corps and the nation's intelligence community.

Though several "security" fiefdoms have been built and defended since those days, it is not clear that our political leaders are either smarter or more committed to moral conduct than was the Bush crew in 2001. Nothing structural has been put in place to prevent continuation or revival of the worst abuses. No prosecutions -- "looking forward, not backward" -- means there's no institutional impediment to doing this all again -- and more.

Good woman down

Ronnie Gilbert, singer and peace activist extraordinary, has died at age 88. The New York Times has a respectful obituary. Here in Northern California, we were fortunate to have this vibrant artist in the progressive community for many years.

The 1982 documentary "Wasn't That a Time!" about the singing group, The Weavers, to which Gilbert belonged in her youth is available (with German subtitles) at the link. Hope it stays up. It's worth the minute of German introduction.

This photo is from a Grannies Against the War demonstration in 2006.

Saturday scenery: froggie 'Frisco and friends

I am not a fan of what I think of as "frog gnomes" -- the little figurines that people display in yards and on porches. However, while Walking San Francisco, I encounter a lot of them.

They run to perky.

Some of them seem to proliferate.

Others seem more solemn.

Some people's affinity for frogs is considerably more serious. The named site claims to be "the world's leading amphibian conservation organization."

Up in the Sierra foothills, you can even encounter the Calaveras County's celebrated jumping frog outside a grocery store. I'm kind of glad I didn't stumble into that one on a dark night.

Know hope

Who knew the most inspiring figure of the early '00s would be, not the skinny guy with the African name, but the skinny nerd?

At the turning of the millennium, few imagined that citizens of developed democracies would soon be required to defend the concept of an open society against their own leaders.

Yet the balance of power is beginning to shift. We are witnessing the emergence of a post-terror generation, one that rejects a worldview defined by a singular tragedy. For the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we see the outline of a politics that turns away from reaction and fear in favor of resilience and reason. With each court victory, with every change in the law, we demonstrate facts are more convincing than fear. As a society, we rediscover that the value of a right is not in what it hides, but in what it protects.

Edward Snowden, New York Times, June 5, 2015

Blue or red?

Wonkblog (Washington Post) has reported on a Verdant Labs study of the political allegiances of persons in a multitude of professions.

Some of the political leanings shown here are unsurprising. But I hadn't thought of pawnbrokers and exterminators as particularly likely to be Republicans; on the other hand, who knew gardeners and chairwomen were likely Democrats?

Data like this is part of what determines which political online ads you see and what election mailings jam your recycling. Even the best data still sometimes leads to mistaken targeting. After all, despite the odds, I know a luxury car salesman who is a Democrat.

Follow the link to Verdant if you want to look further at how they break out categories such as academic disciplines. It's fun.

H/t Episcopal Cafe where they took note of the extremely Democratic leanings of Episcopal priests.

Friday cat blogging

When Morty is occupying his tower, he is almost always photogenic. Or asleep.

Who's a "real American"?

It's good to see Hillary Clinton speaking out early and loudly against Republican efforts to toss people likely to vote for their opponents out of the electorate. She's got her lawyers on the case according to the linked article.

All sorts of inventive schemes for reducing who votes have been recently become law in Republican controlled states: requiring IDs that some voters won't have such as poor elders with no drivers licenses; shortening the period of early voting; limiting who can help voters become registered. It goes on and on. We have several years of experience with who often loses their chance to vote under these schemes: preponderantly poor people, Black and brown people, young people. That is, anyone who isn't a "real American," preferably older and property owning.

Last year the Supremes limited the ability of the Justice Department to fight this stratagem by knocking out parts of the federal Voting Rights Act. There are plenty of Black people still alive who remember when it was worth your life to try to vote. Now that right is threatened again.

This time next year, much closer to the actual 2016 election, we're likely to be awaiting a Supreme Court decision on another Republican brainstorm for reducing the electoral influence of their competitors. As it currently stands, all jurisdictions implement the legal standard of "one person, one vote" by counting everyone who is a resident of a given area. The Census counts everyone -- including lots of people who aren't voters such as children, felons who have lost their voting rights, undocumented immigrants. For decades, legislatures drawing districts have used those counts. The Court has been asked to rule that states can fulfill the "one person, one vote" requirement by only counting people who are eligible to vote, not all the others living in a place. The case is called Evenwell v. Abbot. Yes, this one is from that bastion of voter suppression, Texas (Abbot is the Governor there).

The elections geeks at Five Thirty Eight opine:

A move toward counting only eligible voters, as logistically difficult as it may be, would drastically shift political power away from the urban environs with minorities and noncitizens, and toward whiter areas with larger native-born populations.

They make some additional speculations about the implications of such a Supreme Court-driven change; this would increase Republican dominance in the House of Representatives, though probably not in Senate or Presidential contests.

What seems most ominous about the Court taking this case is that the justices' decision to decide it is out of far right field. They could have ducked it. Lower courts are not split on the issue: those courts have been following the settled precedent which has all states counting everyone in a location whether or not they are eligible to vote. The Supremes had no obligation to mess around in this. But evidently -- and we can guess which party appointed them -- some of them do want to fish in these waters. That doesn't bode well for inclusive counting.

In addition to its electoral implications, as soon as I read about this case, I wondered if its turning up in the Republican voter suppression arsenal might not imply something more about how a fraction of the U.S. population is thinking about citizenship. As a settler colonial country that never had enough labor -- despite economic ups and downs -- this country has always wanted more hands. And mostly, once people arrived here, it was assumed that they or their children would be citizens. Yes, there was the obvious exception for African-origin slaves before 1865. And some later Mexican and Chinese contract laborers faced obstacles, although even these people's children were covered under the birthright citizenship provision of the 1868 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

Republicans are wrestling a demographic fact. The white people most of their base thinks are "real Americans" will no longer be an absolute numerical majority by 2050. And even as they refuse to make a path to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants already here, new immigrants will keep on coming (amidst economic ups and downs) and the country will continue to need their labor. Who do they think is going to take care of old people as we age? (Ai-Jen Poo has spelled this out.)

Ultimately, the Republican base can only preserve their power by killing off the expectation that people who come to this country to work will eventually become citizens and then participants in our democracy. They are fighting hundreds of years of national history. Will we let them change such a basic national assumption?

Land theft and slavery were our original sins. Attracting people to work among us but allowing them only truncated legal rights is our current temptation.

UPDATE: Hillary really went all out, calling for automatic universal voter registration of all 18 year old citizens. Good for her. This is the first time I can remember a national politician going there. After all, if the NSA can keep track of all our communications, it ought to be possible to get us all enrolled to vote.

Where are the Republican women?

California has been represented by two women Democratic Senators for over two decades. My Congresscritter, Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, has been in office even longer. And her predecessor was also a women. No wonder I find this chart surprising.

The line representing Democrats shows that women are, quite rapidly, climbing toward parity of numbers with men of their party in Congress. Republican women got stuck around 1990.

The New York Times article from which I lifted the chart emphasizes the magnitude of the gulf between the parties.

As one measure of the gap, 17 Republican women have served in the Senate in its history, and 14 Democratic women currently serve in the Senate.

This article says the disparity reflects a lack of Republican women in lower offices, especially state legislatures. But why?

My political intuition tells me that women's priorities -- supports for families and children, for expanded educational opportunities, for equal pay for equal work -- fit more comfortably with Democratic orthodoxies than with the priorities of the GOP. But that seems too simple an explanation. The category of women is not monolithic. Certainly there are plenty of assertive conservative women (even if I think they are bonkers.) You would think they'd be demanding more places in the limelight.

This is what happens in the 'hood ...

... and too many other places, too many times.

Moratorium on luxury housing in the Mission

Half my neighborhood will be at San Francisco City Hall today, saying "just slow it down a bit and let us breathe ..." This explains:

Broke-Ass Stuart Explains the Mission Moratorium

Not sure what the Mission Moratorium is? Here is a cartoon where I explain it all.

Posted by Broke-Ass Stuart on Thursday, May 28, 2015

I find these white board videos convey meaning effectively -- assuming they are well done. Maybe that's just a personal preference; I could not persuade others on my last campaign that one of these would be worth trying. I am not very visually literate. Most people are far more so, nowadays.

North Charleston's communities of resistance

I wonder whether Kerry Taylor is going to catch flack for this one. He is writing about progressive movement dynamics that seldom are subjected to friendly light. Taylor teaches history at The Citadel and is a progressive Southern activist. In an interesting article in Facing South, he aims to disentangle why, comparatively speaking, a particular South Carolina community has managed to win some movement toward justice after Officer Michael Slager shot unarmed and unthreatening Walter Scott -- on video. Slager was fired and charged, an almost unheard of outcome. So far this year, only 3 of 385 police shootings have led to charges against officers.

Obviously the video was critical here. If it hadn't existed, Slager and the cops might have been able to get away with a phony story. But beyond that, Taylor outlines the depth of pre-existing organization in the Black and progressive communities in the area that has facilitated effectual action for justice. At moments of community crisis, if everyone affected can engage respectfully with each other forces, chances of a better outcome increase. This is not easy; ideological, political, cultural, stylistic and interest divisions among people are normal and usually heightened by trauma. When these are overcome, even for short periods, movements get something done. Otherwise, frustration sets in.

Taylor enumerates some forces North Charleston progressives had going for them besides the video:

• heightened mainstream awareness of police killings of black men after Michael Brown's and Eric Garner's deaths;

• longstanding NAACP branches in North Charleston and Charleston;

• Pastor Thomas Dixon and organizers from the Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network;

• support including meeting space provided by the International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422 where Walter Scott's brother was a member;

• the Charleston chapter of the Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment (CAFE), a labor support organization;

• the unhappy experience of responding to the 2014 police killing of 19-year-old African American Denzell "Jaba" Curnell without achieving any charges;

• young African American leaders of Charleston Raise Up which campaigns for a $15 minimum wage for fast food workers;

• a Black Lives Matter Charleston group formed in December 2014 to demand police accountability.

The community movement then picked up momentum.

• "Green Party supporters, South Carolina Progressive Network members, longshoremen, and peace and labor activists joined Black Lives Matter in its early days."

• ... "highly committed students from the College of Charleston, the Medical University of South Carolina, Trident Tech, and the Charleston School of Law were spurred to action ... participation of high school students from Academic Magnet and the Charleston County School for the Arts was also notable. ... Black Lives Matter developed around a base of African Americans from a wide range of backgrounds."

Taylor credits Black Lives Matter Charleston with advancing a leader of unusual capacities.

Black Lives Matter Charleston's leadership has been decentralized, but Muhiyidin d'Baha, a musician with graduate training in the social sciences, quickly emerged as the face of the movement. As a public speaker, d'Baha has charisma. He conveys the fear and the fury of those who have been victimized by police harassment and violence. ... [Along with his mentor Charles Payne, d'Baha] distinguishes organizing from the act of "mobilizing" for large-scale, short-term spectacles that are often centered around a single charismatic personality. The organizing tradition is a democratic alternative to the hierarchical and authoritarian strains that run deep in many aspects of American culture, including the black church.

When protest actions started in the wake of the Scott killing, the communities were somewhat ready to speak out -- and potential fractures in their unity were easy to imagine. Some of the old line groups didn't appreciate some of the militance of the newly recruited forces. But according to Taylor, so far all parties can at least imagine a division of labor.

Black Lives Matter has embraced the idea that a diversity of tactics can be a  movement strength. The struggle will continue on many fronts, requiring multiple lines of attack from organizations with varied structures and strategies.

While Black Lives Matter is the most inclusive and democratic of the local police protest groups, its lack of structure may hinder it from moving from the politics of moral suasion to the politics of reform. In this regard, leaders of the NAACP, National Action Network, and the Coalition may be better positioned to negotiate with the city of North Charleston, though their bargaining strength will be weak unless they harness the threat of further disruptions instigated by Black Lives Matter and its associates.

Recognizing that their differences can be confusing and discouraging to supporters, Charleston activists have recently attempted to improve their level of coordination and to sharpen their efforts around a concrete program of reform. Even with perfect cooperation, it will be an uphill battle. [Mayor Keith] Summey is up for reelection in the fall but faces weak and divided opposition. ...

The need for unity within community movements that fight entrenched power may seem obvious, but reaching it and keeping it is hard work. Different adherents to movements will play different roles; an insistence that everyone adopt the same tactics all the time is a recipe for internal explosions. Yet, in moments of crisis, everyone has to be moving in pretty much the same direction to make the maximum gains. Taylor is hopeful about North Charleston. Let's hope he's right and learn from the dynamics he outlines.