Don't miss joy as a Virginia state Voting Rights Act becomes a law

We're about be in for a season of Democrats trying to extend voting rights through federal legislation, which is their constitutional right through Congress. It's going to be a complex struggle.

And meanwhile, Republicans are trying to reduce who can vote, as an Arizona lawyer defending restrictions explained to the Supreme Court last week:

“What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?" Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, referencing legal standing.

 “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” said Michael Carvin, the lawyer defending the state's restrictions. “Politics is a zero-sum game. And every extra vote they get through unlawful interpretation of Section 2 hurts us, it’s the difference between winning an election 50-49 and losing an election 51 to 50.”

He thinks everyone voting is unfair and must be illegal! GOPer rejection of majority rule is getting explicit and very ugly.

But horrible as this is, something perfectly amazing just happened in Virginia. 

Not so long ago, Virginia was Dixie, the land of celebrating the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee. It was a place that still had segregated toilets in my youth -- driving through with my mother escaping Buffalo winters on spring break, I marveled in horror.

In the last few years, an emerging majority of people of color and a significant fraction of suburban whites in the DC and Richmond suburbs have won the state legislature and governor's office for Democrats. That new majority worked to pass a Voting Right Act for the state. Listen to a legislator, Delegate Marcia Price, and share her delight in this once unthinkable accomplishment:

Those of us in other states won't know all the names of allies that she shouts out to, but we can catch the gist: it takes everyone working together to make democracy real.

"There is nothing extraordinary about us that do the work. It is just the choosing to do it. So whatever your lane is, whatever your time, talent and resources can get done ... GO DO THAT!"

Dems went big and they won

Many of us aren't conditioned to expect much from Democratic administrations, even ones we've worked hard to elect. But this American Rescue Plan, as they are calling the bill that Democrats -- without a single Republican vote -- passed out of the Senate yesterday is a BFD.

People are hurting. Some of us have had a "good pandemic" -- able to work from home online, not spending much, merely feeling some social isolation. But so many have seen jobs disappear and/or are stuck at home with kids who aren't getting educated. I see them in the line around the block at the Mission Food Hub each week; I wave at them in doorways when I deliver boxes for elders and families who can't even go out to pick up for themselves.

The American Rescue Plan is a true something. It takes the condition of the least among us seriously.

It includes checks of $1400 for people who make less than $75,000, making up the difference between the $600 the last coronavirus relief measure provided and the $2000 the former president demanded. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. The bill provides federal unemployment benefits of $300 a week until Labor Day to supplement state benefits. It provides $350 billion for state, local, and tribal governments, which will prevent further job cuts and enable services to continue. It provides $130 billion for schools, as well as support for rent payments and food. With its expansion of child tax credits, subsidies for childcare, expansion of food assistance, lowering of costs under the Affordable Care Act, and rental assistance, the American Rescue Plan could cut child poverty in half by the end of this year.

Its benefits should begin helping low-income and moderate-income people immediately, injecting money into the economy to help us recover from the economic effects of the pandemic, even as we are starting to get vaccinated to emerge from the pandemic itself.

The bill is a statement about the role of the government. Rather than trying to free individuals from the burdens of supporting an active government by cutting taxes and services—as Republicans since Reagan have advocated-- this bill uses government power to support ordinary Americans. It is a return to the principles of the so-called liberal consensus that members of both parties embraced under the presidents from Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took office in 1933, to Jimmy Carter, who left the White House in 1981. ... [My emphasis.]

Sure, it's not perfect. It does nothing about the minimum wage which is stuck at $7.25/an hour. On Twitter this afternoon I was already seeing what seems a solid prescription for activism: 

1) see whether recalcitrant Democratic Senators can be corralled to vote for any increase in the minimum such as $12/an hour;

2) get the $15 minimum on state initiative ballots -- in practice it wins; 

and 3) where we've got a chance to win Senate seats in 2022 (off the top that's WI, OH. PA, and NC), get commitments to $15 during the campaigns.

But let's give Senate Dems some credit. They did some of what we elected them to do; victories build for further victories.

No easy answers

As I wait for the electrician, here's a quick take on the frustration I feel when thinking about nuclear power.

The mantra of the best folks working to reduce carbon emissions by ending our dependence on fossil fuels these days is "Electrify Everything!" Insofar as I can understand, this seems believable as a strategy to mitigate the climate change we're living.

But, for many of these climate hawks, Electrify Everything! includes not only extending the life of existing nuclear plants, but also building new ones, perhaps smaller and more numerous.

And I'm open to the idea that our engineers may have learned a lot from 75 years of managing nuclear energy and 50 years of building and running power plants. Experience does lead to improvements. 

But when I encounter these discussions that insist on the necessity of nuclear power, I always try to interject the question -- what are we going to do with the radioactive waste? These plants throw off materials that will be dangerous to life for thousands of years. What are we going to do with this stuff?

This brings me to the random article I ran across this morning in the Washington Post:

A decade after Fukushima nuclear disaster, contaminated water symbolizes Japan’s struggles 

Ten years ago, three power reactors on the Japanese coast melted down when hit by a tsunami. Heroic workers managed to contain much of the nuclear material released but

more than 1,000 huge metal tanks loom in silent testament to one of the worst nuclear disasters in history...

The tanks contain nearly 1.25 million tons of cooling water from the 2011 disaster and groundwater seepage over the years — equivalent to around 500 Olympic-size swimming pools — most of it still dangerously radioactive.

The power company that owns the disaster site says this contaminated water can be treated and released into the ocean. Or at least most of the hazardous nuclear isotopes can be removed. If they do it right and patiently. Not surprisingly, given the damage that their industry has already suffered as a consequence of the accident, people who work in fishing off Japan and South Korea are doubtful.

And scientists not tied to the power companies maintain that a pledge to eliminate all the extremely radioactive corium from the waste is a lie, given that "the technology to do so doesn’t yet exist."

There are tremendous incentives to trust that we can push the question into some future of how to truly remove the radioactive waste we generate while replacing fossil fuels with nuclear. But the track record is not reassuring.

Let's hope smart engineers and governments can do better on this without poisoning people who become sacrifices to progress.

Blogging break

We seem to be in Texas today. The electricity in this house is partially off since the rain squall last night; unable to troubleshoot. Fortunately, Rebecca can carry on her Zoom teaching from the back porch where it is working. Waiting for the electrician or someone like him ...

UPDATE: turns out our situation was a little like Texas: a tree limb in high wind damaged incoming wires. 

Here's a bit of San Francisco's Texas, just for fun.

Friday cat blogging

It's tiring work, herding humans.

Unhealthy choices

The other day Dr. Anthony Fauci, our coronavirus whisperer and guru, was asked which vaccine we should seek to receive.

“All three of them are really quite good, and people should take the one that’s most available to them,” Fauci said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

There are differences between the new Johnson & Johnson shot and the first two, but your health chances, and your community's chances, are way better when you get inoculated with any of them.

I sure hope we Americans can avoid making vaccine choice yet another of the soul-draining excess choices that conservative economic ideology has thrust on our lives. I'm old enough to remember when everyday living didn't force us to decide such things as which phone company to use, which cable and streaming services we wanted for video input, which Medicare drug plan to sign up with ...

It wasn't so bad actually. I for one am quite willing to forgo wide consumer choices in most everyday matters so long as I get a basic level of needed service.

Paul Krugman has a great recent column that highlights the less visible costs to many of us when the freedom to search out the cheapest or best choice merely adds to our debilitating stresses.

It’s true that both Economics 101 and conservative ideology say that more choice is always a good thing. Milton Friedman’s famous and influential 1980 TV series extolling the wonders of capitalism was titled “Free to Choose.” . 

... But the argument that more choice is always good rests on the assumption that people have more or less unlimited capacity to do due diligence on every aspect of their lives — and the real world isn’t like that. People have children to raise, jobs to do, lives to live and limited ability to process information.

 ... There’s a growing body of research suggesting that the costs of poverty go beyond the trouble low-income families have in affording necessities. The poor also face a heavy “cognitive burden” — the constant need to make difficult choices that the affluent don’t confront, like whether to buy food or pay the rent. Because people have limited “bandwidth” for processing complex issues, the financial burdens placed on the poor all too often degrade their ability to make good decisions on other issues, sometimes leading to self-destructive life choices.

What I’m suggesting is that a society that turns what should be routine concerns into make-or-break decisions — a society in which you can ruin your life by choosing the wrong electric company or health insurer — imposes poverty-like cognitive burdens even on the middle class.

... And it’s all unnecessary. ... So the next time some politician tries to sell a new policy — typically deregulation — by claiming that it will increase choice, be skeptical. Having more options isn’t automatically good, and in America we probably have more choices than we should.

All this "choice" can be literally too much to bear. Carrying a "cognitive burden" that's good for marketers and corporate vendors does not enhance living for a lot of us. Even if what we're offered is not a scam (Krugman's main concern), it can be a distraction from living as we would hope to.

A writer you may not know about yet ...

My dear friend Sandra's book, Poetry for the People, was just chosen a "I Heart LesFic" Book of the Month. Listen up.

Winning Senate candidates

Matt Yglesias has written a long argument for why Democrats should want candidates in some states who are a little less in accord with our most progressive stances. He asserts we cannot win the Senate with people who are completely onboard with our best positions; most states lean at least a little to the right of the big states that are reliably Democratic and our candidates would do better if they reflected that reality. The essay is challenging and worth reading. 

But that's not what I want to write about here because Yglesias includes something that political commentators usually fail to do: along with Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia, he lists Nevada as a place where Democrats have been winning very narrow victories. That's true. In 2020, Joe Biden's margin in Nevada was less than in Michigan and Pennsylvania and was also challenged with crackpot GOP fraud theories. In 2016, Hillary Clinton's margin was similarly tiny, 27,202 votes.

Jacky Rosen

But Nevada is also a place where Democrats hold both Senate seats, one elected in 2016 (Catherine Cortez-Masto), and one replacing a Republican in 2018 (Jackie Rosen). As far as I can tell, neither of them vocally staked out stances that separated them from national Democratic policy planks. They may not have been screaming for gun control, but Cortez-Masto, as a former state attorney general, was onboard with regulating guns. The NRA spent heavily against her. Both Senators held a conventional Democratic women's position in favor of legal abortion.

Now perhaps Nevada is a unique place where Dems can get away with being more progressive. It's a lopsided state, consisting of two urbanish areas (Las Vegas and Reno) with 85 percent of the voters. This makes it the 5th most urban state according to the census, though for those of us in bigger cities, we might not recognize that. The rest is desert -- and everywhere access to water is the underlying issue. What Nevadans call "the rurals," the desert counties, vote strongly libertarian Republican. The entire state is heavily dependent on tourism; though Las Vegas hotels are mostly union shops, this is still a low wage, contingent worker economy.

Steve Sisolak

Yet mainstream progressive Democrats can win here, contra Yglesias' theory. I saw little of the 2016 race, but I saw Rosen's run in 2018 up close. She defeated her Republican opponent by hanging his vote to defund Obamacare around his neck and showing ads of him yucking it up with Trump. Rosen had the good fortune to be running in the same election alongside gubernatorial candidate Steve Sisolak, a seasoned white pol who looks like an old-time construction boss. He was a reassuring figure. Neither Democrat was successfully painted as dangerously liberal and both won, though not by a lot.

These Nevada Democrats did have the advantage of strong canvass operations mounted by the hotel workers' Culinary Union/UniteHERE. The urban areas are so discrete, and the overall population is also small, so that turnout work can have an impact. UniteHERE replicated that push in 2020 for Biden. 

Does the Nevada example hold against Yglesias' thesis that if Dems hope to win the Senate, they need candidates who trim their progressive sails (or never had progressive stances)? I am not sure it says much either way. Candidates do need to be good fits for their states -- convincingly attuned to their local issues. They need to be good communicators. And they may also need luck in the national environments in which they get to make their cases. With the nationalization of elections, I'm not convinced most voters ever take in the policy positions candidates are offering; they just figure out which kind feels right.

And both Nevada's experience and Georgia's Senate run-off elections this year show that on-the-ground voter mobilization can swing races that are close. Pundits poo-poo this, but we can see the results in the Senate today.

City struggles

As a Mission resident, I tend to assume that land use fights are about gentrification. The paradigm: some developer has acquired a buildable bit of the neighborhood and wants to erect something that will drive out existing impoverished residents and replace them with folks with more money. Despite the recognized reality that San Francisco needs more housing, communities band together and squaw, sometimes winning mitigation payments.

But while Walking San Francisco today, I came across lots of evidence of another sort of San Francisco land use kerfuffle out in the West Portal neighborhood.

These signs dotted a several block area. People care.

I have not been able to find what I would call unbiased discussions of the proposed project -- though just reading the proposal as described to the building department seems pretty horrifying. Apparently the builder wants to put five large single family houses on a nearly vertical hillside. 

The signs throw the kitchen sink of objections at the project. There's a whiff of injured expectations of privilege about them.

However, an op-ed in the local Examiner -- an almost newspaper -- by a neighborhood activist presents a convincing story of previous efforts to build on this particular hillside leading to mudslides and broken foundations. 

People who live across the street from the five proposed homes are terrified that a large rainstorm during construction — or even just the construction itself — will result in the mountain coming down on top of them.

It’s happened before.

In the 1970s, damage from an earlier landslide and the continuing threat of more rockfalls temporarily closed a church at the base of Edgehill. In 1982, another slide forced a preschool to move. In 1995, rocks fell on a site at the base of the mountain where 13 homes were being built by developer William Spiers on Knockash Hill Court. Engineers inspected the site, declared it safe, and construction continued.

In January 1997, however, after a torrential rainstorm, the hillside above Knockash Hill Court gave way, and 100 tons of boulders, mud and debris overran a 10-foot-tall retaining wall and slammed into the new homes below. ...

I might join the opposition knowing that history. 

On the other hand, as a general matter, it galls me that this builder wants to put in single family homes. What the city needs is more four-plexes and small apartment buildings. And this West Side neighborhood isn't doing its share. That omission keeps my neighborhood on a war footing against gentrification.

Vaccine holdouts

The newsmedia seem to consider it important that ex-president Trump and Melania Trump got inoculated sometime before they flew off to Mar-a-lago. Glad to hear it; contrary to appearances, he is human.

But this seems more important:

click to enlarge

As Deen Freelon points out, 

Black vax hesitancy has dropped by half over the past three months. GOP hesitancy has barely budged.

Some folks are slow to get the message.

2nd shot

This morning the E.P. and I trooped down to Moscone Center and received our second vaccinations. In two weeks, we can expect to be as protected as currently can be.

We don't expect much change to our very limited activities until the state and city change their rules, but it feels different to have this protection. Moscone was a kind of happy civic festival, the workers as delighted as those of us getting jabbed.

Normalization

I'm not willing to pretend that this was lawful.

Last week our new President delivered a 500 pound bomb "message."

Biden launched an air strike against the facilities of Iran-backed militias in Syria that have been launching rocket attacks against U.S. targets in Iraq. When asked today what message he was sending, he said: “You can’t act with impunity. Be careful.”

Uncharacteristically, a smidgen of me is sympathetic to what Biden claims to be doing here: he's emphasizing that, though he intends to put all he can into resurrecting the Obama-era "deal" that constrained Iranian development of a nuclear weapon, he's not taking lightly any adjacent provocations, especially threats to U.S. troops. Curbing an Iranian push for nukes is a good idea. And after a president who wouldn't do anything to respond Russia's putting a bounty out for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, a U.S. president might need to take a stand. 

But it remains worth mentioning that if U.S. troops weren't blundering about in tangled conflicts in other people's countries, there would be less need for such a show of force.

And there doesn't seem much doubt that Biden is continuing one of the worst features of a lawless chief executive: presidents aren't supposed to make war without authorization from Congress. Senators know this and also have mixed feelings.

Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said Friday that Congress "must be fully briefed on this matter expeditiously," noting that "offensive military action without congressional approval is not constitutional absent extraordinary circumstances."

Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations committee with Kaine, said that the recent strikes by Iranian-backed militias on Iraq bases were "unacceptable" and that he inherently trusts Biden's national security decision making ability. But he added that retaliatory strikes that are not necessary to "prevent an imminent threat, must fall within the definition of an existing" authorization for use of military force. 

"Congress should hold this administration to the same standard it did prior administrations, and require clear legal justifications for military action, especially inside theaters like Syria, where Congress has not explicitly authorized any American military action," said Murphy.

California Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna reacted more bluntly.

"This makes President Biden the seventh consecutive US president to order strikes in the Middle East. ... There is absolutely no justification for a president to authorize a military strike that is not in self-defense against an imminent threat without congressional authorization."

Here in the U.S. we don't think much about this (comes of being an empire) but this airstrike violated international law. So explains Rutgers Law professor Adil Ahmad Haque at Just Security:

The U.S. airstrikes almost certainly violated international law, for two basic reasons. The airstrikes did not repel an ongoing armed attack, halt an imminent one, or immediately respond to an armed attack that was in fact over but may have appeared ongoing at the time ... And the airstrikes were carried out on the territory of another State, without its consent, against a non-State actor (or two, or more)... These two reasons, combined, are decisive. It cannot be lawful to use armed force on the territory of another State when it is clear that no armed attack by a non-State actor is ongoing or even imminent.

It's very difficult for this country to understand that we can't claim to be essential pillars of "the international liberal order" if we ignore the legal apparatus that order has fostered when we find it convenient.

Pandemic blues

I had a telemedicine appointment yesterday. There's nothing acute wrong with me that I know of, just a few aches as might be expected of a somewhat used body. But Medicare expects me to have an annual check-up (or in this case check-in) and my doc plays by the rules.

So we checked in and agreed there was nothing much to be done for me. She's been my doc for half a decade, but we aren't close. But, just to be decent, I asked her whether the pandemic has been crazy for her.

Immediately, her anguish and rage came pouring out. I've never seen her so animated. She almost cried. She's at home, with two kids under ten, out of school now for nearly a year.  They don't take well too zoom. The San Francisco Unified School District can't seem to open even for the little ones. She'd never thought this could happen, but maybe they'll have to go to a private school if she can find one. Meanwhile her employer expects her to see patients both by telemedicine and half-time in person and she's at her wits end.

All I could say was "Hang in there ..." And wonder whether San Francisco parents might indeed recall our foot-dragging School Board.

• • •

Washington Post pundit Molly Roberts offered some musings for this awkward pandemic in-between time, when some of us are fully vaccinated, some have had one shot so far (that's me), and most are still wondering when there will be enough of the magic elixir to reach them. Not to mention the considerable number who don't intend to be vaccinated.

We’ve silently written laws for responsible but tolerable existence over the past year. Now, we are in the process of amending them to accommodate a more nuanced reality.

... We’ve stayed sane so far because we’ve lived this lonely life together. Maybe that’s why officials are so reluctant to tell the vaccinated they now have a pass. Everything might fall apart when we stop asking everyone to sacrifice.

... We’ve spent a spring, summer, fall and winter calibrating our socially distanced lives, and now another spring has arrived and we’re beginning again. The yeses, noes and maybes are changing — but some of them are only changing for the vaccinated, and others of them can’t change as fully as they might so long as the unvaccinated remain. Yes, you can go to the grocery store now if you’re vaccinated, but still limit your time and your trips. No, you can’t throw out your mask, no matter what.

... Socially distancing we’ve finally figured out; socially sort-of distancing from some and socially even-less distancing from others will prove a puzzle.

... And this isn’t only a concern of figuring out what is safe, but also of relearning how to behave. ... Back to normal, when we make it there, won’t feel normal at all.

Let us all just get there as soon as can be ...

Friday cat blogging

She's not a big reader, but she's quite the explorer, seeking out strange new nooks and crannies.

Re-election preview

For all my friends who have worked on getting out the vote in Nevada -- guess what's coming: the re-election campaign of U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto. Republicans have the knives out for her.

The first Latina to serve in the U.S. Senate, Cortez Masto defeated Rep. Joe Heck (R-NV) in 2016 by just a little more than two percentage points — and her 2022 race is also expected to be tight. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), which exists to elect more Republicans to the Senate, released its first ad of the cycle against Cortez Masto last week.

Hard working UniteHERE doorknockers attribute her victory in 2016 to their turnout work for Hillary Clinton -- who also carried the Silver State by a sliver.

In my very short canvassing experience in that year, it seemed rare in Reno to meet a voter who'd heard of Cortez Masto, then the state attorney general. But they voted for Hillary and Cortez Masto came along for the ride.

Since then, Cortez Masto has become a rising star, heading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) (the fundraising committee) during the 2020 election cycle.

Here's her announcement video:

 

Democrats cannot afford to lose any Senate seats in 2022.

Will we recall Gov. Gavin?

It looks more and more as if Californians may face a recall election of Governor Gavin Newsom, probably in November of this year.

Having lived through the Gray Davis recall in 2003, I'll pass along a few observations:

• It looks as if the standard collection of right wing kooks -- "vaccine opponents, QAnon followers and other denizens of the far fringes of American politics" --  started this effort.  It's their 6th(!) since Newsom's election in 2018. They have achieved lift-off thanks to an extended signature gathering period and the frustrations of the pandemic. We'll find out by the end of April whether they've collected enough valid signatures, but they seem to be on track. 

• In November 2020, Trump won 34 percent of the vote in California. To oust Newsom, recall proponents have to find a lot more voters than that. Are independents mad enough to go for this? Will Dems stay home?

• Despite Newsom's fumbling and bumbling of coronavirus measures -- and his unmasked dinner with lobbyists at the French Laundry while we sheltered in place -- his popularity is still around 50 percent. 

• A recall election has two parts: one vote on whether we want to toss the incumbent and, if the first passes, a free-for-all vote to replace him. In 2003, 135 people threw their names in the hat (the filing fee is cheap) and Arnold Schwarzenegger won with 48 percent of the vote. 

• You can't beat something with nothing. So far, only the Republican Newsom demolished in 2018 (John Cox) and the former Republican mayor of San Diego (Kevin Faulconer) have offered themselves as replacement governors. There will be many more if this comes to pass.   

• A recall election is, officially, just an ordinary state election. This means that other measures -- initiative propositions -- can appear on the recall ballot. I know that because in 2003 we fought off Prop. 54 which would have prevented California authorities from collecting the demographic information which tells us that Black and Latinx communities are getting hammered by COVID. As far as I can figure out from the California Secretary of State's website the only initiative that might be ready to go this fall (and that may not be required to go to a vote until 2022) is a tobacco industry effort to repeal the ban on flavored tobacco products.

California's conventional pundits don't think a recall would succeed. Dan Morain (who wrote the inevitable book on Kamala Harris) gives a recall low odds:

Voters are cranky now. That could change by the fall if people are vaccinated, kids are back in school and the economy is on the mend. If all that happens, Newsom could rightly take credit and emerge stronger politically. And in California, the party of Trump would continue its downward slide.

I've never been a Gavin Newsom fan, but I cannot imagine the circumstances in which I would vote to recall him ...

Media consumption diet: here comes Substack

Digital communications guru Howard Rheingold reminds us all:

"Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention."

When I looked in my email this morning, I realized I had a half dozen substantive newsletters waiting for me ... and realized it was time to write another one of these media consumption diet posts. So where do I get my news these days?

Over the last couple of years, I've given up and accepted that if I want quality online journalism, I have to pay for it. And given how little of anything else I've had to spend money on this pandemic year, I've gone hog wild on supporting journalism/paying for subs. So these days, I pay for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker.  I donate dollars/memberships/subscriptions to probably 20 other web-available journalistic outfits, from my neighborhood's Mission Local to Open Democracy. 

Since I've set myself up to have access to so many periodicals and other sources, how do I decide what to read first? I can't, and don't want, to read everything. Some of choices are topical: I keep an eye on election information, follow my country's imperial adventures, and am curious about the sociology of U.S. religion. I'm always interested in demographics and in struggles for more justice. I don't chase stories of outrages for outrage's sake, but if activism can accomplish something, I want to know what people are doing.

But I've made so much web based information accessible to myself, that I've had to figure out what to bother to check out and what to skip. And I realize that more and more I follow particular individual commentators, particular bylined writers, that I've learned to trust. If they move on from one outlet to another, I'm likely to follow. For example, I subscribe to The New Republic to keep up with Walter Shapiro. And I pay for New York Magazine for Olivia Nuzzi and Rebecca Traister. 

I'm consistently furious with the New York Times because I have to click on anything they categorize as a news story to find out who wrote it; other newspapers give the byline in the teaser. I would think the NYT union would be hopping mad, but I guess the prestige of writing for the Times overrides that slight to the authors. The other newspapers don't put me through that.

 

All of which brings me to the morning haul of email newsletters: I''m now following quite a few writers from whom I can learn, or who I enjoy, onto the Substack newsletter platform.

Anna Wiener explored Substack's business model for the New Yorker in December. From the consumer point of view, Substack is a medium through which to pay for and read email newsletters from writers I've discovered elsewhere -- usually on more recognizable journalistic platforms. This fits very well with how I read in other venues. Wiener is skeptical; she rightly observes that the form largely works for writers who have already established themselves elsewhere. 

But for the moment, I'm finding various Substacks satisfying. I use them to keep up with people who annoy me (Matt Yglesias via Slow Boring and Yascha Mounk via Persuasion come to mind) but who nonetheless make my horizons wider. I read Heather Cox Richardson (Letters from an American) putting current events in U.S. historical perspective with pure pleasure. I read David Roberts (Volts) because nobody explains climate change better. I'm grateful to Peter Beinart for being honest about U.S. empire and also about Israel/Palestine. Ditto Tony Karon. Nadia Bolz-Weber and Diana Butler Bass expand my religious sensibilities. 

Yes, all this adds up. I'm not sure how long I'll keep it up. I'm not sure how well the Substack phenomenon will hold up either; these people are out on their own creating a lot of content with little support. 

Media changes -- that's why I like to review my media consumption diet every few years.

We've got our work cut out for us in 2022

The diligent election nerds at DailyKos Elections have completed their calculation of the 2020 presidential results for all 435 House seats nationwide. That is, if the district elected a Democrat, did it also go for Biden? -- or vice versa.

Click to enlarge.

Obviously the most competitive seats next time around are those which show a split decision. They summarize:

Biden carried 224 congressional districts while Donald Trump prevailed in 211. That's very close to the 222-213 split between House Democrats and Republicans that emerged from the November elections, which is due to the fact that both parties occupy a similar number of so-called "crossover" districts: Seven Democrats hold seats that Trump won while nine Republicans represents districts that went for Biden.

The number of crossover districts—16 in total—is extremely low by historical standards ...

They've been doing these calculations every two years since 2009. 

In California, two Biden seats won by Republicans in 2020 stand out as targets. 

• District 21 (David Valadao) is located in the Central Valley west of Fresno. It's gone back and forth between the parties based on turnout for the last couple of cycles; Democrats need to find a way to reliably turn out the registered base here.
• District 25 (Mike Garcia) in eastern Orange County went Democratic in 2018, then flipped Republican by less than a 500 votes in November 2020. Garcia stands out as having voted against certifying Electoral College results on January 6 and then against impeachment. That is, he has signed on with the election fraud hoax and the sedition caucus. The losing candidate in 2020 was Christy Smith. Don't know whether there will be a contested primary for the Democratic nomination next year.

I'd love not to think about the next election, but if we've learned anything over the last few years, it has been we can't leave these matters to the professional politicians.

The futile war

Not for the first time, but for the umpteenth time since 2001, headlines like this are proliferating.

We Must Accept that Afghanistan is Lost

Or, from a newsletter targeted at military and vets:

The proverbial ‘fall of Saigon’ is fast approaching in Afghanistan: Upbeat talk of Afghan forces being “better than we thought they were” may soon be put to the test.

Over ten years ago, I posted this iconic photo of the last U.S. personnel evacuating Saigon in 1975. It seemed appropriate to how our Afghanistan war was going then. Could the most militarily powerful country on the globe really be driven out? Apparently yes, then. It still seems on point. Time to get the hell out of Afghanistan! No good is being served.

Whatever we thought we could do in that faraway country, it is not now and never happening. Once we made the place inhospitable to Osama bin Laden, we never even truly figured out our objectives -- and more Afghans, and allied soldiers, and U.S. troops died -- for what end?

World Beyond War has a new campaign addressed to the governments which can make this stop:

The governments of Albania, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, UK, and US all still have troops in Afghanistan and need to remove them.

These troops range in number from Slovenia’s 6 to the United States’ 2,500. Most countries have fewer that 100. Apart from the United States, only Germany has over 1,000. Only five other countries have more than 300.

Governments that used to have troops in this war but have removed them include New Zealand, France, Jordan, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Ireland.

We plan to deliver a big THANK-YOU to every government that removes all of its troops from Afghanistan, along with the names and comments of every signer of this petition.

We also plan to deliver a demand to remove all troops to every government that has not done so....

If you sign petitions, you probably need to sign this one -- and to get across to the Biden administration that the human cost of blundering on is too great to justify taking a small political hit for losing something we never had.

Trump putsch: a job for old men?

The Capitol insurrectionists of January 6 were overwhelmingly white and predominantly male. That much is obvious from pictures and from common sense. But the ones so far identified share another characteristic that seems surprising. It would not be accurate to say they were mostly "really" old -- but they were decidedly not young.

According to the Atlantic, the source of this chart:

... the demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older ...

And that's a little bizarre. Revolutionists who storm an established regime are almost always young.  Think of the crowds of Egyptians who occupied Tahrir Square in 2011, dooming the longtime dictator Mubarak. Or of the crowds who tried to preserve democracy in Hong Kong last year. 

Or, for that matter, think of the Founding Fathers who fought the American Revolution. In 1776, those major military leaders, Marquis de Lafayette and Alexander Hamilton, were 18 and 21 respectively. The political leadership was only a little older: John Jay, 30, Thomas Jefferson, 33, John Hancock, 39, John Adams, 40. And the patriarch of them all, General Washington, was all of 44.

News accounts keep surfacing of insurrection participants who might really be called old.

• A husband and wife planned their role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack with a group of Oath Keepers, federal prosecutors alleged in charging documents filed Thursday. Sandra Parker, 60, and her husband Bennie Parker, 70, were allegedly affiliated with the same group of Oath Keepers militia members that has already been indicted on conspiracy charges for the alleged planning they did before participating in the riot. 

• ... [one arrestee] was 70-year-old Lonnie Coffman, an Alabama man who authorities say brought a car full of weapons and explosives to Washington, D.C.

What the hell is going on with these members of my Boomer cohort? Feelings of activist desperation  often recede as we age. And these folks don't seem to have acquired the tempering judgement that often accompanies mere time on the planet.

Sure, they belong to Trump's cohort of aggrieved white people who believe they remember a time when their kind was top of the pyramid. Their memories are distorted by bigotry, but I can easily imagine them watching the Biden inauguration festivities and thinking -- this is not my culture; where do these people come from? Their kind lost pop cultural hegemony decades ago; I often think a feeling of cultural loss is a lot of what makes middle class white people such suckers for the politics of resentment.

A Huffington Post article about younger people trying, and failing, to detach their parents from the QAnon conspiracy theory, offers some further insight. If anyone you know is QAnon-believing or QAnon-curious, I cannot recommend this story too highly. Here's a sample of what unhappy relatives are learning about their loved ones:

‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents

... Kara, a 46-year-old health care worker in the Midwest, said her mom’s descent into QAnon was gradual at first but accelerated once she retired. Now it’s out of control.

“My mom’s the most giving, wonderful person. Or, she was,” Kara said. “This has taken over her life.” 

... Kara’s mother went to college and worked in health care. The belief that she must be uneducated is a dangerous misunderstanding of how people fall into QAnon — which in many cases has less to do with intelligence than with circumstantial vulnerability. 

Fear and confusion are major drivers of conspiratorial thinking; a key reason why QAnon’s allure skyrocketed early in the pandemic is because droves of panicked people were desperate for answers about the coronavirus that expert authorities couldn’t immediately provide. QAnon quickly conjured up its own twisted version of events, tactically affirming people’s fears while seeding suspicion of credible information sources. (QAnon is also a common destination for white supremacists, whose racism can’t be explained away by their educational status.)

Has the pandemic combined with racism to create a group of frightened old people who ended up idolizing Trump and attacking the Capitol? So it seems. Can they be helped back to reality? Not so easy.