What's so scary about same-sex marriage?

Our right-wing fellow citizens are in a panic. This goes beyond the crackpot fear that U.S. military maneuvers this summer are a cover for a coup by Obama. They are also scared that the Supreme Court may rule to legalize marriage equality: Texas is seriously preparing to defy the court.

Nobody has ever been able to show how gay marriage hurts the marriages of heterosexuals; what's fueling the anxiety?

Seems crazy, but the reporting of Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches helps make it explicable. She recounts this discussion during oral arguments on the case now before the court:

... Justice Samuel Alito asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli whether the tax-exempt status of religious colleges and universities who opposed same-sex marriage would be in jeopardy should the Court hold for the plaintiffs. Verrilli hedged, saying he’d have to know more details to answer the question, but conceded that that it would “be an an issue.”

This exchange was enough to incite panic among conservative evangelicals.

They've been down this road before. As I learned (and discussed) from Randall Balmer's history of Jimmy Carter's brief ascendancy, the glue that brought together ring-wing activists with conservative Christians in the late 1970s was that the I.R.S. yanked the tax-exempt status from Bob Jones University. The school had refused to end racially discriminatory practices such as its ban on interracial dating.

Today's conservatives fear that if gay people are recognized as having full civil rights, we'll expect and receive similar protections. The fact that they are protected under the First Amendment from being forced to perform religious marriages for us does nothing to reassure them. They want a "right" to discriminate in all aspects of life without fear that doing so will have any cost to them.

Posner found a legal expert who pointed out that the Bob Jones case had not led to widespread I.R.S. efforts to ensure that groups enjoying the privilege of non-profit status did not practice racial (or gender) discrimination.

There hasn’t been another Bob Jones -- not because religious organizations don’t refuse to serve or recognize religious beliefs inconsistent with their own, but because the IRS has given them wide latitude to do so. Every day religious organizations likely refuse to serve members of the public who do not adhere to their religious beliefs.

Still, conservatives are seriously worried. They want an unconstrained freedom to call us perverts and to discriminate against us -- and they are losing that.

The part of Jebbie talking about Iraq that caught my attention

Most reporting on the Republican proto-candidate's declaration has focused on his saying that he'd invade Iraq over again, knowing what he knows now. And that's bat-shit crazy. But that's not what grabbed my attention.

This did.

Bush said that the administration of his brother, President George W. Bush, failed to establish security in Iraq after toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein. That caused Iraqis to turn against the American invasion, Jeb Bush said.

“By the way, guess who thinks that those mistakes took place as well? George W. Bush,” he said.

"So just for the news flash to the world, if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, this might not be one of those," he added.

Clearly it is more important to Jeb Bush that he not piss off his family than that he learn from the catastrophic imperial adventures of his brother.

This guy never cut the cord. I don't want my country governed by the family dynamics of a bunch of dysfunctional plutocrats.

A masterful history; an exemplary historian

One of my current pleasures is listening to the In Our Time podcasts from BBC broadcaster Melvyn Bragg.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the history of ideas -- including topics drawn from philosophy, science, history, religion and culture.

The subject matter is wildly diverse; in the last three weeks the broadcasts have taken up the life of pioneering British novelist Fanny Burney, the composition of the earth's core, and Rabindranath Tagore.

Along with my delight in the subject matter, I am drawn to Bragg's programs for another reason: on every one of them, no matter what the topic, at least one of his academic experts is a woman.

It was not always thus. One of the reasons I dropped out of graduate study in history in 1970 was that I almost never encountered women historians. Maybe there were more than the important men running the departments I was in ever pointed me to. But if so, I didn't know of them.

The one exception whose writing I admired and knew I'd never be able to equal was C.V. (Dame Cicely Veronica) Wedgwood. She wrote about continental Europe and England during what we call the "early modern" period, the 16th and 17 centuries.

Recently I ran across her monumental history of The Thirty Years War, first published in 1938. This narrative history is just as brilliant, and feels as sound, as I thought Wedgwood to be, all those decades ago.

What we call the Thirty Years War was a sprawling contest of dynasties and armies that fought out their feuds between 1618 and 1648 across the smaller feudal and commercial states in Central Europe, leaving famine, disease and destruction in their wake. Wedgwood convincingly maintains that, though the Protestant and Catholic affiliations of rulers and their subjects had something to do with this orgy of carnage, the ambitions of kings, kinglets, and generals had more.

In her introduction, she offers the best defense of writing history as the story of "great men" that I've ever seen articulated.

The year 1618 was like many others in those uneasy decades of armed neutrality that occur from time to time in the history of Europe. Political disturbances exploded intermittently in an atmosphere thick with the apprehension of conflict. Diplomatists hesitated, weighing the gravity of each new crisis, politicians predicted, merchants complained of unsteady markets and wavering exchanges, while the forty million peasants, on whom the cumbrous structure of civilization rested, dug their fields and bound their sheaves and cared nothing for the remote activities of their rulers.

For most of "history," what we think of as "history" had about as much relevance to most people as periodic weather catastrophes. What distinguishes the "modern" era from most of the past is that more of us think we ought to matter.

So Wedgwood's book is a story of the men (and a few women) whose intrigues and unreflective stubbornness in ambition launched and perpetuated the fighting. She is not gentle in describing them. Here's a sample of her style, a description of a bit player, a Danish king whose intervention on behalf of his fellow Protestant rulers proved fruitless.

Christian IV was not negligible. His misfortune was to reign at the same time as Gustavus of Sweden, so that popular report, dazzled by so brilliant a rival, has given him too small a place in European history. ... Monogamy had never suited his exuberant nature, and the number of his bastards grew in time to be a Danish problem and a European joke. A good linguist, he was also a good talker.

He encouraged the arts and sciences in his northern capital as few had done before him, and his palaces at Kronberg and Copenhagen reflected in their opulent decorations, their lavish gold ornaments and plump plaster cherubs realistically tinted pink, something of their master's warm and vigorous personality. 'One could hardly believe he had been born in so cold a climate,' an Italian had once commented. ...

Interestingly, for this was one of the facets of writing history for which women were once considered unsuited, Wedgwood is very good at recounting the military maneuvers and battle tactics of the period. She does not shy from explaining how engagements were won by the application of such fire power as was available at the time. Apparently Gustavus of Sweden had a leg up as a tactician on all the other militaries. But, since the armies all lived off a countryside laid waste by successive passing troops, after 30 years the coherence of all these forces simply disintegrated.

Writing in the run up to another all-European war, Wedgwood described this early modern conflict in scathing terms:

After the expenditure of so much human life to so little purpose, men might have grasped the essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword. Instead, they rejected religion as an object to fight for and found others.

... The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its result, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict. The overwhelming majority in Europe, the overwhelming majority in Germany, wanted no war; powerless and voiceless, there was no need even to persuade them that they did. The decision was made without thought of them. ...

Most of us are still working on having enough clout to thwart our rulers when they get it into their heads that war is the answer -- at least we sometimes have the space to work on that project. ***Until I consulted C.V. Wedgwood's Wikipedia entry I had not known she was a lesbian, a partnered for 70 years!

For the 70th anniversary of V-E day

Erudite Partner was in the Phoenix Airport today when a flight full of World War II veterans arrived from a visit to Washington for the 70th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe.

She took pictures.



Last year during the bookapalooza we got a look at the new World War II monument on the national mall. Click to enlarge and read President Harry Truman's tribute.

Like the war itself, the monument is gargantuan. I don't think we can really imagine what complete, desperate, necessary mobilization of the entire population would be like these days.

Even here in left-most San Francisco, there are reminders of what those willing and not-so-willing combatants accomplished.

Mother's Day

When my mother died over 15 years ago, a neighbor told me: "For awhile your picture of her will be as she was at the end of her life, but later you'll remember her as she was when she was younger." This seems to be true. This picture is how I remember her now, as she looked in the mid-1950s. I think I took that picture with the family's little Kodak box camera.

Mother disapproved of Mother's Day. She considered it an occasion for consumerism (not that she would have have used that language.) "It was invented by the florists," she said.

Mission activists take over City Hall

When the City authorities and the tech barons who buy them won't listen, it is time to drop in on City Hall. Several hundred Mission District residents and friends flooded the rotunda of that ornate building on Friday.

A goodly number of the SFPD waited in the wings, but they were on their most civilized behavior. They need to be.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi chatted with friends in the crowd.

The demands included a moratorium on construction of luxury housing in the Mission, stop evictions, preserve affordable housing, and don't allow construction of the huge planned project at 16th Street and Mission -- dubbed "the Monster."

The balconies around the rotunda provided an obvious setting from which to hang messages ...

... apparently display of banners is forbidden, giving the waiting cops something to do. We were peacefully relieved of most of the signage.

This animated preacher reminded the crowd that San Francisco had cleared the Black community out of the Western Addition neighborhood thrity years ago -- and would do the same now in the Mission and Bayview.

They wanted the Black and Brown people to build this city, but now they don't want us anymore. They are clearing us all out.

Dancer and performance artist Krissy Keefer who runs a studio at 24th and Mission spoke about displacement of our creative workers. Supervisors John Avalos and David Campos listened.

After the speeches, the crowd marched around the second floor mezzanine, passing the Supervisors' offices. Supervisor Jane Kim came out to applaud.

There was no welcome or any response at the Mayor's office. The perky bust of Diane Feinstein in the corridor is not how I remember her from the days when she occupied that space.

Through it all, couples, and their relatives, and their photographers wandered through the crowd seeking to keep their marriage appointments with the Clerk's office. I have to say, they seemed remarkably undisturbed by the unexpected excitement.

When racial harassment is just everyday life

A few months ago I complained that Radley Balko's book on U.S. police militarization and the drug war had a gaping hole in its center: it did not set these evils in the context of our historic structural racism.

That's not where Balko stands today. In fact he devoted a long recent Washington Post column to correcting the omission. After a lot of words responding to a couple of rightwing hack columnists and Hillary Clinton, he tells the story of Antonio Morgan. Morgan's life is a testimony to the accuracy of the Justice Department report on how Ferguson (and other small St. Louis suburbs) have turned their police departments into extortion rackets preying on their Black citizens. Balko puts a face on what for most of us might be an abstraction. The dreadlocked Morgan has been arrested some 20 times, mostly on traffic nuisance tickets, many of those after racial profiling stops. Twice he's been collared for more significant charges, both times the outcome of hostile interactions with police officers who felt empowered to tell him his business.

Morgan is no one’s definition of a “thug.” He’s a guy who breaks his back to keep up the business that supports his family, despite obstacles that, frankly, most white business owners don’t have to endure. For all he’s been through, he is remarkably composed. He deals with the daily harassment in a remarkably manner-of-fact way. He takes photos of his business and the cars outside it. He records all of his phone conversations and most in-person conversations he has with public officials. He has a laptop filled with nothing but photos, documents, and recordings should he ever need them as evidence. Engaging in such defensive preparations on a daily basis would drive a lot of people insane — or perhaps be an indication that they’re already there. He does it because he has to. As he put it, “You have to struggle just to catch up.”

... Antonio Morgan’s business is located in the town of Pine Lawn. It’s one of the most egregious offenders in the county. But Pine Lawn is 96 percent black. Most of its city officials are and have been black. In fact, Anthony Gray, the attorney for Michael Brown’s family, is the town’s former police chief and current prosecutor.

But Antonio Morgan is still a victim of racism. The reason black people in St. Louis County are unfairly and disproportionately targeted by police for minor offenses is due to the very structure of the county’s political and court system. ...

Do read it all.

Friday cat blogging

Morty considers our concentration on these lighted screens to be an unwarranted interruption of attention to him.

History as snark

In honor of a British election (excellent pre-primer here) in which that nation's electoral system and internal unity seem sorely tested, it seems appropriate to note a charming history from another time. In 1935 the journalist George Dangerfield published The Strange Death of Liberal England--1910-1914 describing a series of trials from which the country was only rescued by the Great War in Europe. In this author's telling, without that patriotic emergency, the contradictions within Britain's transition to a modern democracy might have led to civil war. The signs and violent eruptions were everywhere.

The four presenting crises of this short period were the Conservative (Tory) Party's sabotage of the governing Liberals' legal process to enact the supremacy of the House of Commons over the House of Lords; the traumatic divide in Irish nationalism which pitted the island's Catholic majority against Protestant Ulster, secretly abetted by the Tory leader; the upper class women's suffrage rebellion led by the Pankhursts which employed rioting, arson and bombs to agitate for extension of the franchise; and a militant working class movement which evolved from demands for union recognition and a minimum wage through a series of violent general strikes that seemed pointed toward an anarcho-syndicalist revolution. The mildly conventional Liberal Party of that day had no answers for all this ferment (and in fact has been a minor element in British politics ever since.)

All this is fascinating, but the bare facts do not convey the pure delight of Dangerfield's book. This is history as snark, biting and sometimes scathing about the follies of the figures of the day, but also ultimately gentle in its treatment of their unheroic flailing. I often laughed out loud while reading it.

Here's a taste of the style, describing the indomitable and more than slightly crazed upper class element in the women's uprising:

... the revolution was on its way, and the way it took was the way of all revolutions. Its end was a valuable one -- the solidarity of women, the recovery of their proper place in the world; its means were violent and dubious. But no revolution has ever taken place without the sudden, the unbridled uprising of long suppressed classes and long ungratified desires; without cruelty and rage: nor is a revolution anything but the savage assault of right instincts upon wrong ideals. The Georgian suffragette was not personally attractive, or noble, or clairvoyante. People who make history very seldom are. Providence has bestowed upon them an instinctive response to the unrecognized needs of the human soul, and though this response is often wry and more often ridiculous, life could scarcely progress without it.

By 1910 the ideal of personal security through respectability had become putrid: therefore it was necessary that it should die. And to accomplish its death there assembled, crowding up from the depths of the female soul, as uncouth a collection of neglected instincts, hopes, hatreds, and desires as thorough-going a psychological jacquerie, as ever came together at any time in human history ....

Victorian notions of respectability must be killed and there were deaths in the women's revolt, as in the other uprisings described here, though among these women the casualties were mostly a few of the women themselves. It is also worth noting that "Votes for Women" finally began to progress when the excited "respectable" ladies of the Pankhurst faction found themselves allied, not entirely willingly, with working women.

Dangerfield writes in the light of not only what all historians know -- how the story came out -- but also in the looming awareness of that the disruptions of that time turned into the as-yet-unimagined horror of the Great War. The 1914-18 conflict swept all these ripples away and changed the landscape of British democracy forever.

This book is not easy going for an early 21st century reader in the United States. We don't talk or write like this. But I found it delightful -- and quite unique among narrative histories.

This was not what I had in mind

Rather than fall on my ass, I stubbed a toe while barefoot this morning. Guess I had put myself on a schedule I couldn't quite keep up. So it goes.

Regular blogging will resume when this stops throbbing.

How-to books are nothing new

I wonder if the bookstore has adopted the advice in these. Encountered here:

345 Judah St, San FranciscoNo website I can find. I still love this city.

Rights we don't use can erode

The law says we can photograph and film law enforcement officers while they are about the people's business. This often feels a bit risky. The ACLU in California is making it easier.

Their new iPhone app lets anyone shoot and automatically upload of interactions between cops and the rest of us. The app's best feature is that all it takes is one tap on the screen to send the recording off through the ether; unless police departments have the capacity to jam (do they?) the ACLU has it and there is no longer any reason for the cops to attack the phone. Maybe they'll even figure that out someday if enough of us wander around equipped to make instant reports?

I've installed the app. It seems simple to operate; there's a test feature and everything seems to work as described. If you allow the phone to geo-locate, it can even point you to locations where others using it are filming. There's a video tutorial here.
***I can imagine using this even though I'm just an old white lady who happens to live in a conflicted neighborhood. Twice in the last couple of months I've observed police-civilian interactions that might have been worth recording. Having this option will likely make me more inclined to film next time -- that's probably part of the point for the developers.

So what are we doing?

Last week a friend responded to events in Baltimore (and in Ferguson and in Tulsa and in South Carolina and in Cleveland and on Staten Island and in the 100s of other less well known locations in which Black lives have visibly not mattered at all):

I am so discouraged. We should not be continuing to fight these fights after almost half a century.

She's right of course (though I might extend the period involved for a couple of hundred years). And like most people likely to read here, she isn't the kind to actually give up.

In fact, burning buildings in Baltimore served as enough of a heads-up to the powers-that-be in that city to get some charges entered against the cops who had a role in Freddie Gray's death. So that's something.

But most of us aren't going out to riot. Been there, done that, but that's for very young people who move rapidly and believe themselves immortal (if not simply worthless). For the rest of us, there have to be other answers.

The Miami Herald's columnist Leonard Pitts is projecting a series of columns on what ordinary folks can do. Here's part of one, quoting his friend the Rev. Tony Lee's advice to a middle aged white woman:

I have a framework for people like her and for others,” said Lee. “It’s educate, advocate and participate.

"Educate means to get educated on the issue. A lot of times, what will happen is...you can end up having a lot of blind spots because you haven’t educated yourself on the issues... As she’s becoming more informed, start talking to the people in her life. She should never minimize what it means to talk to people who are around her, people that she daily deals with...."

Having educated herself, he said, she should advocate, i.e., start “to deal with and talk about these issues and how she feels about them to people who are in decision-making authority in her region, whether it’s her local lawmakers or even her national representatives.

“Just get connected,” he said. “All organizations can use volunteers, [even if] it’s just to come in and say, ‘I’d love to work the phones for you all for a couple of hours a week.’ But find a space to participate. The other piece of participation is to be able to give. Many of the organizations in her region and nationally, need resources to be able to do the work...Never think that any gift is too small.”

Pitts concludes:

It is, admittedly, not an agenda as immediately and viscerally gratifying as street protest. But it highlights a salient truth about American social transformation.

On the street is where the change is demanded. At the table is where it is made.

That last is hard for anyone who has felt the adrenaline rush of releasing the rage and pain on the streets. And change almost never comes without people willing to take it to the streets.

But it also requires others -- lawyers, citizen advocates, financial contributors -- who build the infrastructure to keep the heat on the system when the protesters are resting at home. So what are we doing?

The Vatican's tin ear

It looks to me as if the Catholic Church has decided to make a Sarah Palin play. What do I mean by that? A "Sarah Palin play" is a symbolic act to advance a cause based on so little comprehension of the target audience that it backfires on the mover. In 2008 John McCain had a vague sense that he wasn't getting the level of white women's support that the GOP needed to win the presidency. So he pulled the sassy, brainless half-term governor of Alaska out of obscurity and loosed her on the nation, thinking he'd fixed his gender gap. We've seen how that went.

The upcoming sanctification of Franciscan Padre Junipero Serra seems a Sarah Palin play. Apparently the people who advise the Vatican on such things think they can pass off the European Spaniard who founded the California missions as the forerunner of contemporary Latinos and Spanish-speaking immigrants who may (or may not) feel oppressed within Anglo U.S. culture. This seems analogous to the notion in the dumber precincts of the GOP that all they have to do to overcome the distrust they've sown among Latinos through years of xenophobic calls to deport tia and abuela is put up a Cuban face for a candidate.

Father Serra was a man of his time, building the infrastructure to convert a heathen land and make the natives into good, obedient servants of the Spanish monarchy and its armies. The substantial native population of Californian, the most dense in North America before European contact, consisted of ignorant children in Serra's understanding of the world. Once they accepted his God, they were to be locked away from their own culture and from their families and put to work. If they resisted (and they did), they could be whipped, beaten or killed.

Serra may not have been intentionally cruel, but the Spanish invaders and the diseases they brought with them killed of 5 out of 6 of the indigenous people of California within 100 years. More than 5,700 Indian bodies from that period are buried under church buildings at Mission Dolores in San Francisco; the overall death toll of Spanish conquest was likely over 200,000. The coming of the Spanish to California achieved what we now call genocide. Not surprisingly, the descendants of the survivors aren't applauding the Franciscan's canonization.

But the Vatican tin ear demonstrated by the Serra canonization goes far beyond the understandable protestations of native survivors of the European colonial genocide. Professor Guzman Carriquiry, Secretary in charge of the Vice-Presidency of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, a Uruguayan, insists that Padre Serra is an inspiring model for U.S. Latino Catholics today.

... the canonization of Serra should help more people recognize the contributions Hispanics have made and continue to make. ...

"And it will allow many millions of Hispanics who live in the United States to free themselves of a mentality that says they are barely tolerated and frequently discriminated against foreigners on the margins of society," he said. Instead they should see themselves "in continuation with a line of Hispanics who for centuries have inhabited large areas of what is now the southwestern, central and eastern United States. They can rightly affirm, 'We are Americans,' without having to abandon their best cultural and religious traditions."

This is pretty tangled. While some migrants from south of the border may identify with the Euro-Spanish part of their ancestry, others very often think of themselves as victims of the Spanish empire that the founders of their countries threw off in the early 19th century. For a significant number of newcomers from southern Mexico and Central America even today, Spanish is a second language to some indigenous tongue.

Most U.S. Latinos are nominally Catholic -- but are they likely to identify with a Spanish cleric who forcibly converted Indians and built a colonial economy? Or is Serra just another European imposition erasing their history?

All photos from a polite gathering of protest outside Mission Dolores on Saturday, May 2.

Spring time in the city

As the days get longer, these herons venture away from their nests at Stowe Lake ...

to take a walk in Golden Gate Park.

This one was walking near the bay at Crissy Field. They all seem quite certain that no predator is going to interrupt their strolls.

A good thought for International Workers Day

Around here, May Day has largely merged with the demand for immigrant rights -- and that's not surprising, given who constitutes the low wage working class in California these days.

The unions, the housing activists, and people demanding police accountability are rallying together today.

Marriage arguments quibble

San Francisco florists see opportunity

I hadn't been paying much attention to the marriage equality arguments before the Supremes this week. Oh sure -- 14 states are hold-outs and many, many gays and lesbians still live with diminished legal rights as a result. And in many of the states where gays can legally get married, we can still be fired for our sexual orientation. (We also have no protection against employment discrimination under federal law. Thank the Republican Congress.) There's still a lot of legal cleanup to be won.

But full equality is on the way, court or no court. As Linda Greenhouse says "reality has outpaced doctrine, and the court’s only role is to catch up."

When I do glance through the coverage, I can still be surprised by inane commentary coming from supposedly informed sources. In particular this, from Jeffery Toobin:

Justice Anthony Kennedy gave voice to an issue of real concern when he mused, toward the beginning of the argument, about just how quickly the country was changing, and about the part the Supreme Court should play. “One of the problems is, when you think about these cases and the word that keeps coming back to me, in this case, is ‘millennia.’ ” By that, Kennedy meant that the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman has been around for thousands of years. “This definition has been with us for millennia. And it’s very difficult for the Court to say, ‘Oh, well, we know better.’ ”

What Kennedy is saying -- and what Toobin passes on without correction -- is simply hogwash.

"Marriage" in the form Kennedy seems to be thinking about is maybe a couple of hundred years old. If that. Heterosexual pair bonds have obviously existed as long as there have been humans. We have ancestors. But these people organized themselves in all sorts of arrangements because "marriage" is a construct that people use to regulate kinship, economic and cultural relationships. In Kennedy's "millennia," "marriage" has frequently served dominant males to establish paternity and power -- and had little to do with either exclusive pair bonding or the wants of individual participants (especially female individuals.) Among the working strata of most human societies (and that's just about everyone) "marriage" has been a productive economic unit within which people toiled in separate (and usually unequal) spheres.

The cozy couples of Kennedy's imagination are mostly a modern western European invention. It's very human of us that we are inventing some additional forms.

Forty years ago ... last flight out of Saigon

The war that formed the awful backdrop of my young adulthood ended like this on April 30, 1975.

Our elites have still not taken the lesson: no attempt by the United States to install an enduring regime by direct force in someone else's country has taken root since 1945 -- except perhaps in fly-speck Grenada. Even our less direct interventions have come to little except carnage and oppression.

As the generation dies off that saw the United States facilitating the recovery of western Europe and Japan from militarist and fascist barbarism in the mid-20th century, can we accept that this age no longer tolerates empire?

Photo via Wikipedia.

Coordinated cries for justice

Israeli activists demonstrate across from the Prime Minister's Residence demanding to end the blockade on Gaza, April 29, 2015 (photo credit: Free Jerusalem Facebook page)

According to the Jerusalem Times:

Sahar Vardi, a 24-year-old history student at Hebrew University wearing a black t-shirt reading “Gaza my dear” in Hebrew and Arabic, said she and a group of activist friends organized the Jerusalem protest after being asked to do so by a female student in Gaza with whom she was in touch through Facebook and Skype. ...

“The common denominator of all the people I speak to in Gaza is that they’re in despair,” Vardi said later. “That’s why this event gives me so much hope. Here are young Gazans, many of whom never left the Strip, who despite everything believe in protest and the ability to change. I think it’s incredible.”

... “We were specifically asked by the Gazans to bring their voice to Israel,” she said. “That’s impressive.”

In San Francisco, the unflagging activists of Jewish Voice for Peace answered the Gazan's call in front of the barricaded Israeli consulate downtown.

So Bernie is stepping up to challenge the Clinton coronation ...

View image | gettyimages.com

Thanks Bernie. It would be great if the Vermont independent Senator sticks out the primaries until California votes on June 7, 2016. I would have someone to vote for. It's hard to imagine he'll last that long. Running and not winning is expensive and he's not likely to attract his own sugar daddy.

Vermont Public Radio reports he'll announce Thursday. Since he's been haunting early primary states like Iowa and South Carolina, this is no surprise.

Sanders' basic message will be that the middle class in America has been decimated in the past two decades while wealthy people and corporations have flourished.

His opposition to a proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal (T.P.P.) shows how he plans to frame this key issue of his campaign.

"If you want to understand why the middle class in America is disappearing and why we have more wealth and income inequality in America than we have had since the late 1920s, you have to address the issue of trade,” Sanders said in a phone interview on April 23.

***Oddly enough I once worked on a campaign in which Bernie was one of our opponents. He lost. So did my guy, a former governor and antiwar Democrat, Phil Hoff. Vermont sent an undistinguished incumbent Republican named Prouty to sit in the Senate. Prouty died in office the next year, 1971. Vermont continued its drift to the left, giving the Senate its only "democratic Socialist" in 2006.***I'm particularly glad to see Sanders stepping us as events in Baltimore are spotlighting Martin O'Malley's history as the guy who brought "zero tolerance" policing to that unhappy community. When you empower the police to stop, frisk, arrest, and harass and occasionally kill Black citizens, eventually you get riots. That's just the way of world.