Feeling cat-deprived, we visited Reno's unique bookstore, The Radical Cat. Here you can find leftist and feminist books -- and a revolving cast of cats looking for a good home.
Today there were two astonishingly friendly resident felines:
Clumbsy is a dignified older gent -- til he starts playing with a blanket.
We couldn't take them home. But someone will.
The Venezuelan asylum seekers dumped on the remote Massachusetts island are gone -- moved to a base on the mainland where they have access to housing and immigration attorneys.
Florida Republican Governor and aspiring presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has more urgent concerns today. His state is under water. Picking on poor people from abroad will have to wait while he bails out, with maximum help from the federal government.
But the Venezuelans made friends in the strange place they were dumped. The Martha's Vineyard Times reports on a return visit from a few of them.
Stallings told The Times that he and his wife Jackie visited with the Venezuelan migrants at the base on Sept. 21, and later enjoyed time on the Vineyard with four of those folks on Sunday.
“There was an extremely warm welcome when we got to the JBCC,” Stallings said. The general consensus from all he spoke with was “they were so appreciative of the Vineyard — really enjoyed their time with us, and all of them look forward to coming back to visit soon.”
Stallings said the migrants had good accommodations and food provided to them at Joint Base Cape Cod, with their own rooms — something that couldn’t be provided for them at St. Andrew’s.
Stallings said some of them “absolutely” want to make the Vineyard their home. “There’s a handful of them who would really like to relocate,” he said. The desire is tempered with the reality of the lack of housing, but also that there’s ample work, he said. He also said they are coming to grips with the notions of cold weather and snow....
The housing shortage on the island may make it unlikely these folks will be able to settle there. But the Vineyard has long had a good sized Portuguese-speaking Cape Verdian population, migrants who made do, crowded together, and made a strong start on building a life in their new country. Maybe Venezuelans will be the next wave of newcomers to find opportunity in this cold and rocky place.
The New Omicron Booster and Flu Season Have Pushed Pharmacy Workers to Their Limit
... “We were told Thursday that week would be the earliest,” she said. “Suddenly we received a shipment of two boxes that Monday.”
The first day wasn’t so bad—only one patient realized the new vaccine was available. But the following day, “chaos ensued,” she said. Shots were scheduled every 15 minutes from 9:30 a.m. to 6:15 p.m., with no breaks. “That first day, we didn’t even know how many milliliters the patient was to receive in the shot,” she said. “We didn’t know if it was OK to give with a flu vaccine. We didn’t know if it had any side effects. We didn’t even know how to properly post the vaccine to our inventory system.”
Pharmacists also felt the pressure in the early days of the new vaccine rollout. As Matt, a pharmacist and manager at a retail pharmacy near Tucson, Arizona, said, “As the new omicron boosters roll out, the extreme anxiety has returned”—worsened by his company’s requirement that pharmacies accommodate walk-ins at all hours of the day.
Making matters more dire, the new vaccine rollout coincides with flu season, typically the busiest time of year at the pharmacy. ...
Today our CVS pharmacy tech fielded three phone calls which trying to process our out-of-state medical and insurance records. Her work space was jammed with crates and boxes. She explained they were dealing with twice the volume of incoming drug packages and three times the number of requests they usually see -- all with a reduced staff because it's so hard to hire at present.
She was surprisingly cheerful about it, though reporting that she found herself working 14 hour days without stopping to eat.
Corporate capitalism is not about efficiency -- it's about getting the most out of nice people who take pride in their work. That sucks.
This is the woman we are working to keep in the United States Senate.
She's well spoken and clear-eyed.
Our canvass team finds Nevadans very ready to vote to keep free access to all reproductive health care.
Not surprisingly, with this guy as the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, volunteers are beginning to trickle in from all over to help keep Nevada Democratic.
Blogging will be delayed a couple of days as your Reno campaigners are moving residence -- again. Reno is a housing crisis in progress and finding spots for all our canvassers is a game of musical apartments ...
There's so much to worry about -- wildfires, hurricanes, domestic and foreign fascists -- to list a few immediate local threats. But we can't entirely look away from this:
By early September a third of Pakistan was under water. 40 million people, one fifth of the population are displaced, a third of the country was under water and more than half of its 160 districts have been declared “calamity hit”. A million houses have been destroyed or damaged. More than 160 bridges had collapsed or are severely damaged and thousands of miles of roads have been damaged. Hundreds of thousands of farm animals have died, and as many as 73,000 women are expected to give birth over the next month without adequate medical support. In some ways it was a miracle that only 1400 people have so far been declared dead.
It should be a world historic moment. At this point, our habit of talking about climate change as a future risk has once and for all, to stop. One third of the fifth most populous country in the world, one of the most sensitive geopolitical hotspots on the planet, is under water. 40 million people are displaced. The climate emergency has arrived. This is not a drill.
... The final tally for the current disaster is anyone’s guess at this point. If the 2010 floods that affected 15-20 million Pakistanis came to $10 billion, it would not seem unreasonable to set the tally this year in region of $!5-20 billion, which would be 4-5 % of GDP. For an economy already reeling under the impact of devaluation, power cuts, and high energy prices and the extreme heat earlier in the summer, which seriously impaired the wheat crop, it is another body-blow. Both rice and cotton crops are likely to be severely affected.
Even more urgent are the public health risks in a country a third of which has been underwater. Waterborne diseases — malaria, diarrhea, dengue - and apocalyptic clouds of mosquitos pose an acute risk. [My emphasis. By way of economist Adam Tooze, Sept 21, 2022]
The Scientific American explores "Why Are Pakistan’s Floods So Extreme This Year?" The science is not simple, but deserves a read.
I'm old enough that, when I hear the name "AFL-CIO," I think "stodgy" or a "relic" that has become uninspiring.
Not these days. Here's a video from the contemporary labor federation that's full of life. At the UniteHERE Reno campaign, we watched it together this morning for inspiration before sending our canvassers off for another day of knocking on doors.
The Los Angeles Times highlights the importance of Latino voters in the impending midterm election.
Latino voters strongly support Democrats’ policy priorities: letting Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices (91%), canceling student debt (74%) and protecting abortion rights (77%), according to a weekly tracking poll by the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. But Biden’s approval rating with Latinos is just 58%...It's good to see the paper trying to dig into the issues that seem to be depressing Latino enthusiasm for Democrats, but as a person working in a campaign many of whose primary target voters are working class Latinos, I have some observations.
Although Biden appointed a historic four Latinos to his Cabinet, there have been no Latinos appointed as assistant attorneys general at the Justice Department, no Latinos named to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that addresses workplace discrimination, and no Latino leadership at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
“Appointments send a message,” said [Thomas] Saenz of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a former counsel to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. “This goes far beyond the notion of progress. We have actually seen some regression in comparison to the Obama administration.”The Biden administration naturally has a Latina White House aide who says this ain't so. It's hard for me not to think that perhaps these advocates were the easiest quotes for a reporter to get -- a commentary on the sources readily available to the LA Times.
• Communication about Kitchen Table Issues
Another theme in the article is that Latinos are being hit particularly hard by the post-pandemic disruptions in our economy.
Sending working families $1,400 pandemic relief checks, canceling as much as $20,000 of student loan debt and enacting the first gun safety reforms in 30 years after the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, this year are “overwhelming policy successes,” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic consultant and advisor on Latino outreach to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “The problem is the Latino voters don’t know about it. You don’t see ads talking about the litany of successes this White House has delivered for the Latino community.”
... “One of the first things that comes out of people’s mouths when I talk to them in the district is gas prices,” said Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Pacoima). “If gas prices weren’t where they were, then people would be talking more about what we have done.” In those conversations, Cárdenas said he looks to focus constituents on all the things Democrats have done to help working families, as well as last year’s bipartisan infrastructure overhaul. “Biden has a lot to brag about. But something people don’t realize is that over 50% of construction workers are Latinos,” he said. “That infrastructure bill is a tremendous boost to millions of Latino households.”This agrees profoundly with our experience here in Reno, Nevada, where the hospitality workers' union, UniteHERE/Culinary, is campaigning to activate working class voters, many Latino. Even though there are many more jobs advertised here than workers to fill them, people are weighed down by a rising cost of living, particularly the cost of rental housing. And they have very little idea that their Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak and their Latina U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto have been working to ease their economic burdens. We enjoy talking with the people we meet about these efforts. Join us on the campaign and see for yourselves.
In last week’s National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials tracking poll, abortion rights were a top-three issue for 28% of respondents — a huge jump from 2018, when only 4% listed it as such.
These people have reason to worry; both of our Republican opponents have
pandered to extreme anti-abortiionists, though they are now trying to walk this back. Sisolak and Cortez Masto won't let them.
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| The University of Nevada Reno is working to be an officially designated Hispanic Serving Institution |
Days until first rural ballots are sent out: 4
Days until Washoe County mail ballots are sent out: 18
Days until Clark County mail ballots are sent out: 28
Days until early voting begins: 31
Days until the 2022 general election: 48
Some 75-80 percent of the Nevada vote will be cast in Clark County; that's the Las Vegas area. Nearly fifteen percent more will come from Washoe County where Reno is located. The rest will be from the deeply red "rural" counties.
Nothing to do but redouble our efforts.
Some of my co-workers would agree. This period piece was irresistable.“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,”
— Acid Horizon (@acidhorizonpod) September 15, 2022
--Karl Marx pic.twitter.com/66wkAWF1DB
Robert Kagan is one of those Washington think-tankers who provided the intellectual impetus for our misbegotten adventures in regime change after 9/11 in societies of which we were manifestly ignorant. Not my kind of guy. He left the Republicans over the fascistic energies released by Donald Trump, so he's made himself part of the big resistance tent we all need if U.S. democracy is to survive.
Recently, in an interview with Johns Hopkins University political scientist Yascha Mounk, Kagan offered a dire, but imaginable, vision of where the Republican assault on majority rule might lead the country. I found Kagan's imaginings thought provoking because they go beyond the necessary description of our Constitutional dysfunction to what happens if ...?
... it's really up to people. It's up to individuals all the way up, down, and across society, from the president, the vice president, the Supreme Court, the members of Congress, down to volunteer election officials (those are the people who saved us, in a way, in 2020). Unfortunately, I don't know that there is a legal or constitutional fix to what ails us.
What I am most worried about is moving into a period where, let's say two or three states which hold the balance in the Electoral College are completely contested. There is every prospect of mass protests from both sides. People are increasingly tending to come to those protests heavily armed. We could be in a situation in 2024 where there is no obvious way out, and then we'll be left with President Biden, or whoever is in charge at that time, having to make what amounts to extra-constitutional decisions in order to save our democracy, because there is no constitutional remedy.
.. If you're a president in a situation where a couple of states are hopelessly deadlocked because you've got mobs in the street, how do you get out of that situation? At what point are you able to say, “No, I won,” or “they won,” and that's the end of it? Is he going to call out the National Guard? Is he going to call up the Army? Once you have gotten to the point where the established means of choosing a president and all that comes with that have been cast to the winds, you really are in an extra-constitutional situation.
That just means that whatever a president does in that situation, the other side will accuse them of being a tyrant, just the way Lincoln was accused of being a tyrant—to some extent, justifiably so. I don't want Donald Trump to be president after 2024 because I think he will then dismantle American democracy. Because he doesn't have any belief in American democracy. But even before you would get to Trump being in office, you would be in this crisis where we do not have a legitimate president. That's what I'm worried about.
... There's no question that there are conditions in the United States in terms of the way people feel about things, the way people behave, what they value and what they don't—that is a problem that exists apart from Donald Trump. And the question then is, has it always existed? Is there something new about what we're seeing today? I think there's a reasonable case to be made. But racism is certainly not new in America. White anxiety is not new. We never think about this, but the 1920s were a very similar period. What you had then was intense xenophobia, intense anti-immigration, anti-science in the Scopes Trial, the rise of the second Klan—these tendencies have, I think, always existed and are sort of inherent to the American experience, unfortunately. The 1930s were a time that was ripe for a Donald Trump, and the Donald Trumps were out there in Father Coughlin and Huey Long.
... as to these other problems that exist independently of Trump, we do need to work on them, and we need to fight that battle. And that battle now, as we can see, needs to be fought again, at every level of society. You know, you have to fight it at the school board and in the local community center. We are in one of those moments where we can't just wait for our elected officials to solve everything for us.
But to repeat myself for the umpteenth time, I do think that Trump is special. And so I do think if we can get past Trump, yes, there’s a chance that this group, which has always been around, will be out there simmering, bubbling, and occasionally giving rise to some politician’s trajectory, but it won’t be the kind of comprehensive threat that Trump has turned into.
The sign above was captured by a doorknocker in Reno. Passions are high out there.
The UniteHERE Reno campaign is all about door knocking. We're set up to talk with large numbers of voters, persuade them to support our candidates, -- U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto and Governor Steve Sisolak -- and get them out to vote.
But for the last week, wildfire smoke from the Mosquito fire has made the outdoors hazardous and, besides, who is going to open their door to talk to a stranger and let in the smoke?
So we've converted our office into a makeshift phone bank, everyone dialing on their own phones.
This site was a call center before we made it a campaign office, so it is somewhat suited. But all this dialing is very primitive for 2022 and not at all how intentional phone banks are organized. But it is the mark of a serious campaign that we figure out a way to keep doing the work despite obstacles.
For a little relief, we've gotten around to decorating the office which had been a barren shell.
And when the monotony of it all is too much, there's a stretch break.
The smoke has to clear someday soon. Maybe today? So far so good at dawn's early light.
Martha's Vineyard can seem precious, just a little too pretty and bucolic to be true. But the people who choose to live on this New England outpost have heart. When bully boy Florida governor Ron DeSantis shipped to them a group of bewildered Venezuelan refugees, people knew what to do. In two days, new friends were made and clothed in the colors of the local high school. The state of Massachusetts then stepped up to do government's job, moving the people to a base on Cape Cod where they can be processed with access to immigration attorneys.
Photos by way of the Martha's Vineyard Times, all by Rich Saltzberg except as noted.
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| A young refugee embraces new found friend Sara Piazza. |
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| Like most everyone else who leaves the island, the migrants departed on the ferry. Photo by Abigail Rosen |
Nice to know that some people in these dis-United States still know how to behave when confronted with poverty and pain.
Michelle Norris gets the Island.
Yes, there are Land Rovers and yachts here, but the Vineyard is primarily an island of farms and fishermen, a year-round population that lives close to the land and in many cases works hard to make ends meet.
It’s an island that seesaws between overwork and underemployment. It’s a place where everything — gas, food, housing, toothpaste, you name it — costs more than it does on the mainland. It’s a place where 1 in 6 year-round residents is a registered user of the Island Food Pantry and one-third of schoolchildren receive free or reduced-price lunch.
It’s a place where organized groups go “gleaning” each week, picking produce left behind by farming machines so it can be used in the food pantry. ...
The Vineyard says to MAGA Republicans, cruelty to the weak is not who we are.
A bunch of Republicans and Christo-fascists thought they killed of the right for U.S. women and families to decide how many children to bring into the world. Let's make sure they get conked on the head in November.
Washington Post editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes provides the picture.
As readers here know, I'm living in Reno temporarily. So today, in order for my Kaiser insurance to provide a urinalysis, I had to take a 220 mile round trip to Roseville, California. Two hundred twenty miles to pee in a cup. Kaiser insurance doesn't reach me in Nevada.
That's nuts. Just glad I could do it.
The Ukrainians seem, for the moment, to be succeeding in their war against Russian invaders.
In a rapid counteroffensive, Ukraine recaptured much of Kharkiv Province in the northeast of the country, including the city of Izium. The advance, which continues, enabled Kyiv to gain a broader initiative in the war. ... A sudden Ukrainian success on the battlefield provided a boost not only to Ukrainians but to their supporters in Europe, who face a difficult winter of soaring energy prices and inflation. New York Times
Ukrainian success encourages continued European solidarity with this embattled people, despite their justified fear of Russia's ability to cut off energy supplies in winter.
