This is sick

Eric Lichtblau, who has been a warrior at the NYT exposing government overreach and malfeasance, has plunged down the rabbit hole of false equivalence.

Chants of “lock her up” became a frequent rallying cry at Trump campaign events, and Mr. Trump told Mrs. Clinton at the second presidential debate that if elected, he would instruct his attorney general “to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception.”

If he were president, he told her, “you’d be in jail.” That threat unnerved both Republican and Democratic legal analysts.

The decision he faces echoes one confronted by Mr. Obama and his first attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., over whether to investigate Bush administration officials for extreme interrogation tactics against terrorism suspects that the Obama administration later deemed to be torture.

While Mr. Holder said the country was owed “a reckoning” for torture carried out after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Obama administration ultimately did not conduct a broad criminal investigation. Mr. Obama declared that “we need to look forward, as opposed to looking backwards.”

New York Times, Nov. 12, 2016

Let's see -- technological incompetence and being foolishly private and unwilling to grovel is just like making the United States into an acknowledged violator of international law and torture state?

Lichtblau (and his colleague James Risen) have good reason to indict the U.S. government for using brute legal threats to try to stop them and their sources from revealing information that it wants kept secret.

But this item doesn't pass any elementary sniff test.

Saturday scenes and scenery: north coast interlude

Hanging in the country with five other tough, feminist women of a certain age who need a break this week.

Even for a break, there is no such thing as going away. The kids are alright!

Friday cat blogging

I was just walking down her street, with camera, when she spotted me. Her humans should wash her window.

A poet for my generation passes

...
I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
As time cannot decay
I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the USA
To the USA

Leonard Cohen has died at age 82. His art continues to challenge. It was never easy.

Residue

Not ready yet to say anything very coherent about either the election or our future. So this will consist of tidbits I've run across since the vote.

• The labor historian Erik Loomis writing at Lawyers, Guns and Money had a couple of insights I found cogent.

  I do think the left will be OK in terms of being relatively ready to organize resistance.

  Without going deeply into it, he's concurring with an observation I might also make: unlike under Reagan or even Bush II, there's quite a lot leftish agitation that is alive and well. Fight for $15, for example. And by and large, after decades of internecine bullshit, a lot of forces have finally figured out what old Ben Franklin intoned: "If we don't hang together, we'll all hang separately."
  
  Loomis also opines, I think accurately, that

  I also think it’s pretty clear that presidential candidates need to be inspiring leaders more than any other quality. No one cares about policy. ...But in order to actually win a presidential election, the single most important skill is charisma.

  Insofar as we have a democracy, it exists within a consumer culture that demands sizzle. Loomis points out that this weighs against many women politicians who have crashed the arena by effort and smarts. Political charisma is currently gendered male. When some woman does crash through the ultimate glass ceiling, we'll learn what charisma in a woman pol looks like.

• There are hints in the electoral map of a new and different pattern to our regional splits. Benjamin Wallace-Wells offers glimpse of this.

  The South has long been the conservative heartland. And, because the line of division between North and South traces the nation’s original fracture, we assume that between liberals and conservatives there is a profound historical cleavage, hard to repair. But the emerging conservatism of the Midwest and the growing progressivism of the southeast reflect much more recent changes. Maybe the regional cast of the country is not as fixed as we think.

  I know, that seems crazy on this awful day when Clinton could not win North Carolina or Florida -- or even make meaningful inroads in Georgia or Arizona. But, as a veteran of California's electoral wars through a racial transition, I remain convinced that demographic change can help. The coastal South and the Southwest may be more fruitful territory for progressive change at present than that wintry white Midwestern dead zone from which I migrated. We just got "schlonged" in President Trump's colorful phrase. It's time for some loose-brained reflections.

• John Cassidy points out that journalistic conventions mean we have no idea who is really a member of our "working class."

  ... the relatively well-to-do went for Trump. According to the exit-poll figures, people who earn less than fifty thousand dollars a year—who make up a bit more than a third of the population—voted for Clinton over Trump by a margin of about eleven points, fifty-two per cent to forty-one per cent. The roughly two-thirds of the population who earn more than fifty thousand dollars a year voted for Trump. ... a lot of white voters without college degrees earn more than fifty thousand dollars a year. The lowest-paid voters tend to be younger people and minorities, and they went for Clinton. In that sense, she won the working-class vote.

  Our "professional" media seem incapable of accurately naming who the workers are -- nowadays, the working class consists of the people of color who serve their meals, clean their houses and care for their elderly relatives.

• I'll give the last word here to Jamelle Bouie whose commentary has been searingly clear throughout this long election:

  White won.
  Here’s what we need to understand: This has happened before. For 10 brief years after the Civil War, a coalition of ex-slaves and white farmers worked to forge democracy in the former Confederacy. With the help of the federal government, they scored real victories and made significant gains. But their success spurred a backlash of angry whites, furious at sharing power with blacks and their Northern allies, murderous at the very idea of social equality. Those whites fought a war against Reconstruction governments, and when they won, they declared the South redeemed.
  
  ... After years of [mid-20th century] struggle, we had come to some agreement: We believed in equality. And when a black man won the presidency—the symbolic pinnacle of white power and white prerogative—we celebrated as a nation.
  
  Fifty years after the black freedom movement forced the United States to honor its ideals, at least on paper, it’s clear this was premature. Like clockwork, white Americans embraced a man who promised a kind of supremacy. We haven’t left our long cycle of progress and backlash. We are still the country that produced George Wallace. We are still the country that killed Emmett Till.

Still here in the 'hood

The evening after the night before, the weekly vigil demanding that San Francisco D.A. George Gascon charge the polices officers who murdered Amilcar Perez Lopez was back on Valencia Street.

We've been here every Wednesday since last April.

The Mujeres Unidas y Activas know what we need in the aftermath of the Trumpocalyse. They are also preparing to teach people what rights they retain in this perilous moment.

As the vigil concluded after an hour, the SFPD formed a line to protect their fortress from the several thousand marchers against Trump coming down the street.

The Mission was hopping this night.

They want a future

This, which represents what the election result would have been if only 18-25 year olds had voted, has been all over the internet. But just in case you haven't seen it, I'll put it here.

These younger people, and we all, are in for hard times. There's no point in sugar-coating.

But we don't win by hating our fellow citizens. That's their game. We go high when they go low, and we resist. Lots of us know plenty about hard times. We're smart and we can learn to be disciplined. Besides, as I always say when people wonder why I do politics, there's nothing else to do ...

Fear in the 'hood

I went by the taqueria tonight as the California polls were closing and the East Coast election results were already coming in. The terror was palpable. I have felt this before, in 1994, when this state passed Prop. 187, proclaimed we hated immigrants. Sometimes popular democracy is an ugly thing.

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 5 -- a cog wants out of the death machine

Four years ago on the eve of the election, I was working to pass an initiative that would end California's death penalty and replace it with sentences of life without parole for the most serious crimes. (Then and now, this required a voter measure because our death penalty was made law by an initiative back in 1978. That's why we continue to see these initiatives.) That effort failed narrowly and the question is back as Proposition 62 this year. Let's hope we end premeditated killing by the state this year.

Nobody outside of death row knows more about the death penalty than the attorneys who, year after year, work to give condemned people quality legal representation. Andy Love has described his more than thirty year career trying to do that job right in a searing article in the LA Progressive.

... But it was all too rare that the cases were decided on their actual merits.  Instead, years were spent litigating procedural issues to determine whether legal claims could even be considered at all.

I lost a case despite establishing that the trial lawyer was so debilitated by alcohol that he needed a time out before resuming his representation — although when he did it was too late to investigate and present the powerfully sympathetic life history evidence that most likely would have persuaded the jury to vote to spare his client’s life.  I won a case in which an African American juror who was holding out for a not guilty verdict was kicked off the jury for “failing to deliberate.”  That one took 15 years despite the obviousness of the judge’s error.

...Who gets a death sentence and who is ultimately executed is an arbitrary and unreliable process, based far more on factors of race, on the political leanings of prosecutors and the quality of defense counsel than on the nature of the crime or the character of the defendant.  ...  It is a machine in which the legal procedures one needs to navigate in order to have claims meaningfully considered by the courts are all but impenetrable.  And it is a machine that simply can no longer function — overwhelmed by far too many cases and not enough qualified lawyers to handle them — it takes several decades to reach a resolution, more often because the inmate has died of suicide or what are referred to as “natural causes.”  ... It is far past time to tear the machine down.

He's seen his clients die; he knows whereof he speaks. Worth reading, even if you think you already know all this. I spent over a year working daily to move Californians away from capital punishment and yet found more to absorb here.

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.

No escape from the election

While running trails, I don't expect to encounter election signs, even in a year like this. However galumphing along the town of Pacifica shoreline just south of San Francisco, there's been no avoiding the local battle over Measure W.

Measure W seems to be one of those coastal development fights which are the stuff of California life wherever people live adjacent to the ocean. Keeping real estate developers, often from far away, from selling off the beauty of the coast can be a full time job for locals concerned about quality of life. Yet beach towns do need taxpayers and income producing business. State and local law and regulation has piled up through decades of battles about development which can seem to render the issues in any fight an impenetrable thicket.

The Ballotpedia has a clear description of this particular murky proposition. Despite a lot of verbiage about green building, wildlife habitat, and preservation of natural features, Measure W would apparently authorize residential construction on the site of the Rockaway Quarry.

The quarry is that gray area in the center of this photo.

Yes on W has a slick website. No on W is rudimentary. It's utterly obvious where the big money is on this one.

I was going to recount this story neutrally until I delved into the official ballot pamphlet and discovered that three of the four people who signed the official argument against Measure W are acquaintances whose judgement I respect. So, if I could vote on this, I'd be No on Measure W. I'll be checking these results too on Tuesday night.

***Measure W failed by an almost 2 to 1 vote!

Gentrification city

Company Town Trailer from Snitow-Kaufman Productions on Vimeo.

If you aren't from San Francisco and you want to know what all those privileged San Franciscans are whining about, this film does a good job at sharing the pain from long time residents' perspective -- and recounts a provisional victory in the struggle for a diverse, multi-faceted city.

The story of a neighborhood fighter, Aaron Peskin, taking back a seat on the Board of Supervisors from a shill for the tech money men is worth your time. Aaron is what I call a "good candidate" -- willing to do what it takes and put up with the ugly aggravations of fighting for an office for a purpose beyond personal ambition.

Gentrification isn't just about new people coming to town. An awful lot of San Franciscans moved here from elsewhere, either because elsewhere was intolerable or for this city's wacky attractions. It's true; people come and go and cities change. Lots of San Franciscans didn't much like it when hippies and gays over ran their "respectable" burg several decades ago, but we eventually came to terms.

Today's gentrification is about how big money is polluting our politics and crushing chances for people without hedge funds and tech billions to live here -- forever. And the excluded will include ordinary tech employees who don't hit the big time, as most won't.

Company Town is showing in the Bay Area several places in the next few weeks.

Friday cat blogging

Morty might appear to be hunting, but actually he's displaying himself over the kitchen sink.

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.

This initiative reporting rings too true

As a consequence of knowing I don't have more all out, 24/7, campaigns in me, this is the first election since 1994 that I haven't been at least somewhat involved with some California state initiative, for or against. It feels like a good year to be out of it: our 17 (!) propositions are simply more than smart citizens can realistically digest. In such circumstances, I fear money for ads and superficial decisions win. The California initiative process has run amok, created an industry of signature gathering firms that can get anything with enough funding on the ballot, and often been captured by sleazy corporate players. The voters have actually been pretty good at separating the wheat from the accumulating chaff, but the process remains unedifying.

Being out of the game, I can appreciate reporting that tells a true story about the sort of messy process that can happen when progressives try to use the initiative process affirmatively to win at the ballot box what we can't get through legislatures. David Roberts at Vox has the story of the carbon tax fight going on in Washington state. It's a doozy. Getting a broad coalition on board with your great idea is usually a prerequisite if you don't want to deliver a pratfall to your favorite policy. Enviros in Washington couldn't (or wouldn't) put in the angst to do this. Here's Roberts' introduction.

This is not an election year in which it is easy to get attention, unless your name rhymes with Gump. Nevertheless, it's worth taking note of a colorful, contentious, and counterintuitive political drama playing out in the top left corner of the country.

It’s a fight happening within the left, and like a great many such fights in US politics these days, it reveals sharp differences over how to make progress in the face of Republican intransigence. In this case, the subject is climate change policy, but the fissures being exposed are relevant to all of left politics in an age of hyperpolarization.

Here’s the situation. There’s a carbon tax on the ballot in Washington this November, meant not just to put the state on the path to its climate targets but to serve as an example to other states.

The measure, called Initiative 732, isn’t just any carbon tax, either. It’s a big one. It would be the first carbon tax in the US, the biggest in North America, and one of the most ambitious in the world.

And yet the left opposes it. The Democratic Party, community-of-color groups, organized labor, big liberal donors, and even most big environmental groups have come out against it. ...

His account is rivetting to any elections junky; this is exactly what it is like to try to advance public policy through the initiative mechanism. If you don't build your big tent, you can easily find yourself feeling unsheltered, lonely, and abused. Roberts does well to get and tell the inside story. The left needs to absorb these lessons.***For an entirely different telling, a far more conventional and credulous one, see how the New York Times handles Prop. 732.

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!

Dia de los Muertos

So many casualties along the way...

Books for a tough time

A couple of weeks ago, staff writer Emma Green offered in the Atlantic:

A Reading Guide for Those in Despair About American Politics
... Books may seem like small comfort. But in a time like this, when it’s hard to understand how American culture became so hate-filled, reading is probably the best possible option—to get off the internet, pick up a book, and think about how the country has gotten here.

She asked a dozen people who struggle with our culture's parameters and possibilities for three recommendations. I am well acquainted with one of them, and aware of most of the others. Their recommendations are worth perusing.

And just because I can, I'll offer my own three suggestions for reading for the season, one of which duplicates one that Green also received.

1. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist. Here's the raw story of how we became the white supremacist society we are. Just about everyone benefited, except the slaves who mostly were worked to death. No wonder the survivors are so tough. My discussion here.

2. Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes. On first sight, this might seem a book about the follies and crimes of the U.S. in Afghanistan. It is that, but that is not all. It is a deep examination of how sustainable social arrangements function and it is profoundly suggestive about the condition of our own polity. My discussion here.

3. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. Stevenson is a lawyer to the damned -- and much more. He demonstrates what a civil rights lawyer can accomplish, patiently building a case for more just application of law to the lives of his poor, largely Black, clients. And he is an institution builder, growing a law firm from nothing that is changing outcomes in the U.S. south and beyond. These days, he is building a National Lynching Memorial. If you want to meditate on actually doing something against hate, read this book.

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.

War, war and more war

Here's a succinct, superb video showing where in the world the United States is currently bombing human beings, extra-constitutionally, and for murky purposes.

Mohamedou Slahi has been released from Guantanamo

The ACLU provides this video. After more than a decade of captivity, Slahi explains:

Forgiveness is my inexhaustible resource ...

For more on this remarkable man's imprisonment, torture, and moral fortitude, read his amazing Guantanamo Diary.

A woman who wanted it all, despite knowing the terror

I've always had an eager interest in women who traveled in or reported from the places where history is obviously (usually violently) happening. I've written here about reporting from the wars of the '00s by some of these women, including Anne Garrels, Carlotta Gall, and Sarah Chayes. You see, I'm envious. I came up at time when it simply would have taken more audacity than I possessed (as well as probably a heterosexual orientation) to pursue the paths these people followed into danger zones. How did they manage to do something as unattached women that I couldn't even imagine?

Lynsey Addario sets out to answer that very question in It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War. I knew Addario's photographs from the New York Times and followed the drama of her capture and release by Qaddafi-supporters in Libya. How did she come to be in that terribly exposed -- for the photographers utterly beautiful -- place? Wasn't she afraid she'd be raped? Was she raped? (No, mauled.)

It's all here as well as the rest of the story of a (still youngish) life driven by something like a calling to create irresistible images of some of the planet's most violent horrors. She's not political, except being consistently on the side of her human subjects. That's enough to make her an instinctive critic of U.S. military enthusiasms, even as she sympathizes with U.S. soldiers caught up in the horror.

Addario, more or less by accident, traveled as a freelance photographer in Afghanistan when the Taliban still ruled in 2000. She struggled to navigate that culture.

The freedom, independence, and sexuality that I, as an American woman, held at the core of my being completely contradicted the Afghan way of life under the Taliban. I knew I had to shed my own views in order to work successfully here.

...From the start of my journey, I struggled with how to skirt the Taliban photography ban: images burned my eyes and my soul, but I was too nervous about the consequences to dare to sneak a picture as I looked out the car window ... I had to remind myself not to look men in the eye. There were so many rules and restrictions, especially against photographing women.

But she persisted, negotiated, and cajoled, shooting a portfolio of images -- and returned to India to discover that, in those pre-9/11 days, big media had little interest in photos from Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, that changed when the U.S. invaded in 2001. Addario rushed from New York to Pakistan, through an anti-American Peshawar and a hostile Quetta, and on to Kandahar soon after the Taliban were forced out. Everywhere she used her access as a woman photojournalist to shoot the pictures of women that a homosocial society denied to men, while also capturing male street life.

When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took the U.S. into Iraq, Addario came in through Kurdistan. It didn't take her any time at all to understand that something was very wrong. Though moved to weeping by the sight of Iraqis digging up mass graves of Saddam Hussein's victims, their kin, she immediately

... suspected that the American government was lying to us ... In the months after Saddam was deposed, Iraq fell apart. ... Nothing made sense. American troops allowed the looting of the National Museum but protected the caged lions at the house of Saddam's son Uday. To the media, the troops proudly displayed the Hussein brothers' sex dens ... while basic services like water, gas, and electricity failed to materialize. The superpower couldn't provide for a basic quality of life. ...

As the Iraqis recoiled from the U.S. troops, the troops took their mystification out on journalists -- even a short woman who by this time could identify herself as from the New York Times.

"Get the fuck out of here, you fucking bitch," he said again. ... The other soldiers still had their guns pointed at me. ... Americans wanted to bring democracy to Iraq, but a convenient form of democracy that allowed them to censor the media ...

.... something had changed in me after those months in Iraq. I was now a photojournalist willing to die for stories that had the potential to educate people. I wanted to make people think, to open their minds, to give them a full picture of what was happening in Iraq ...

Newly dedicated to stories of suffering and survival, Addario went on from Iraq to Sudan and the Congo, to Afghanistan again (this time embedded with an embattled U.S. platoon), and then to Libya. Her adventures are no less enthralling, but the theme shifts to her efforts to form an enduring relationship (she did, marrying fellow journalist Paul de Bendern), to mother a child of her own, and to continue to win conflict assignments while living a life somewhat more within conventional expectations for women. She wanted it all, and pretty much got it. She was not about to allow her new conformity to keep her from her work, risking travel in Libya, Mogadishu, and even Gaza under siege while pregnant with her son.

Wonder of wonders, Penguin Press printed this mostly text book on high quality paper which means the sprinkling of Addario's images appear more cleanly than one ever sees in a newspaper.

This is a heartening, even inspiring, auto-biography. Enjoy and marvel.

Getting nippy around here

Often, distraction is required. EP and Morty have found it.

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.

Friday cat blogging

Morty has decided my padded desk chair is where he wants to take his afternoon nap. He does not wish to be disturbed.

Sign of the season

The Great Pumpkin rises above San Francisco.

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.

Honorable man down

Tom Hayden, who died Sunday, did with his life what I often fault members of my activist generation for failing to do. Instead of flailing at the margins, or launching off into leftist flights of fantasy, he dove into the real politics of power in California and tried to implement what he could of what his values demanded. The results were frustrating and imperfect; that's politics. Meanwhile he continued to try to express and explain values that sometimes took him away from the mainstream, consistantly opposing U.S. military adventures. Leftists often found him as frustrating as did the right; as recently as last spring he announced in the Nation magazine that his long-held commitment to empowering the African American community required him to endorse Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. Many who remembered him howled.

There was a complicated integrity in Hayden's life. May we all do so well.

The other voter suppression scandal

Today is the last day to register to vote on November 8 in California. In many states, the registration deadline has already passed.

Quite properly, Democrats have been fighting efforts by Republican state legislatures to reduce the opportunities for people of color and young people to exercise their right to vote by means of restrictive voter ID requirements and other bureaucratic impediments. They've had some successes, notably in North Carolina where a court ruled that the state's new voting law was designed with "almost surgical precision" to reduce African-American voting. That law is on hold this year.

But the additional travesty embedded in most states' election administration is the requirement for voter registration well before election day.

Somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of eligible citizens can't vote because they are not registered. Did they want to be registered? Who knows? Do they even know? Some may, but when you're off the socially approved track, the glib answer to why you never got into the game is that you didn't want to play. If you later decide you want in, you shouldn't be kept out for no rational reason.

Registration might have made some sense when records were laboriously kept on paper -- though not much sense. Your address does determine which local candidates you can vote on, so it makes it easier for the people running the election if they know in advance how many ballots of what kind they need. But that shouldn't be a terrible hurdle in the age of electronic voting.

In the era of big data, voter registration requirements are anachronisms. In general, the states know who we are and where we live. There are outliers, but not many. Registrars could manage to run elections without knowing how many ballot papers to print.

And ten states do offer same day registration at the polls: Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Wyoming. Washington, DC is also a "same day" jurisdiction. The specific procedures differ; some sort of ID or verification is usually required, but the point is to make participation easy. California will join the same day registration states -- next year. Nothing terrible has happened in states without advance registration; a few places have done without it since the 1970s.

Demos describes what implementing same day registration accomplishes.

[SDR] Assists geographically mobile, lower-income citizens, young voters and voters of color. Keeping voter registration records current is a big challenge under current systems, which place the onus of updating records on the individual. Census data show that over 36 million people in America moved between 2011 and 2012, and nearly half of those moving had low-incomes. Young adults of all income levels also move more frequently—for school, for jobs, for family. Same Day Registration offers those who have recently moved but failed to update registration records another opportunity to register and vote. Research indicates that allowing young people to register to vote on Election Day could increase youth turnout in presidential elections by as much as 14 percentage points.

Experience suggests that more people vote when we make it easier and less intimidating. (Duh!)

Same day registration is a reform worth fighting for.

Election season in San Francisco

Erudite Partner joined some of her students in canvassing against our latest Hate the Homeless ballot measures with Tenderloin Votes yesterday.

This is California's drought

Encountered in a bathroom stall at a conscientious community center.