Mission District Halloween

To rehab my busted leg, I walk the streets of my neighborhood. Seen today as I made my rounds:

 Some of my neighbors are artists. Sure wouldn't want to meet this witch in person. 

Modern city dwellers are never quite sure whether the holiday is about witches and goblins or the fall harvest. Or both. 

Whatever ... beware spiders who emit green webs.

Friday cat blogging

They spend all night running about -- sometimes racing over us. And then they need their beauty sleep.

Mio is a big guy. Apparently he feels secure on that platform.

Janeway prefers an accommodating lap. Anything that might require me to move can wait.

Why, oh why, don't we have better political journalism?

The incomparable Anita Chabria deconstructs President Obama's quip about "the most important issue in America today: the decor of the Cheesecake Factory." (This writer is a genius talent -- why is she still at a journalistic backwater, the Los Angeles Times under owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong?)

Earlier this week, former President Obama made a quip at a Cleveland rally that President Trump has renovated the White House to look like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”

Trump lost it. If we’ve learned anything about the president in recent years, it’s that he loves gold as much as he hates Obama. Roll them together in one moment, and the leader of the free world can’t help but freak out. ...

... if you think this is all a silly back and forth with an unserious administration, think again. Obama is masterful at political strategy, and this wasn’t just a joke. It was rage-bait, crafted for engagement.  

She explains further: 

... The deeper point of Obama’s remarks seemed entirely buried by media coverage that focused on the Cheesecake part. But why Saddam Hussein?

Trump didn’t seem to take issue with being likened to the brutal dictator responsible for killing and disappearing thousands to maintain power. In fact, in all of the rebuttals from Trump and his minions, the Hussein reference hasn’t been mentioned once.

But don’t think Obama choose that reference carelessly, or just for humor.

Hussein ruled Iraq in no small measure though a cult of personality. Like Trump, he loved showy monuments to his power, including a “Victory Arch” in Baghdad (Trump also wants to build an arch); weird fantasy artwork of muscle-bound men and dragons (similar maybe to Trump’s love of AI-generated images of himself); and of course, gold! There were marble and granite and gilt and gold everywhere in Hussein’s homes, even the infamous gold-plated toilet accessories American and British soldiers found when they made it into his palaces.

That ostentatious excess wasn’t just bad taste. It was a show of power. At the same time that Hussein was amassing his wealth and consolidating that cult of personality, his people were broke. 

Now, I’m in no way saying that Americans in 2026 are suffering the way Iraqis were under Hussein. But there’s a Marie Antoinette-style similarity between Hussein’s narcissist tendencies and Trump’s obsession with all that glitters — from the water in the reflecting pool to the walls of the Oval Office — even as the economy crashes. ...

She draws the lesson: 

... it got to Trump in a way that was entirely predictable with his unbridled ego, and a way in which Obama almost certainly knew it would. In a way that links him to a dictator who cared more about gilt than people, but in a way so clever Trump himself grabbed the bait and ran with it.

Hearing his taste criticized, all his beautiful, shiny gold mocked — by Obama of all people — was rage-bait that Trump could not ignore. Trump could not stop himself from responding, and even more, he couldn’t stop himself from demanding others defend him and his gaudy aesthetics.

And the ever-willing members of his cult of personality across government and right-wing media quickly complied — with an attack that Obama surely knew would be the only possible pushback: That he was elitist for making fun of the decor of a wildly popular average-family spot (Obama quickly hit back that the Factory was “his jam” and he, like many parents of teens, myself included, had eaten there numerous times.)

And then she sticks the knife in: 

... Suddenly, in the middle of a pivotal election, all Republicans are hearing about is the Cheesecake Factory, and how wonderful it is their president is plastering gold all over everything while they are wondering if they’ll be able to pay the gas bill this month.

Granted, the Republicans don’t have a lot of bright spots to focus on as they give their final message to voters. But I am guessing that even the reddest of ballot-clutchers doesn’t want to hear about the Cheesecake Factory, or how much marble Trump has installed at the entrance to the White House. That seems tone-deaf.

Obama’s purposeful provocation completely derailed Republican messaging for multiple, critical news cycles, all because Trump couldn’t stand to have his taste criticized by a guy who has become a bogeyman in his own brain.

Trump had to defend his excess, he couldn’t resist — and in failing to check his own ego, again, he put into the bright spotlight the truth that his followers are increasingly unable to ignore: The only thing that matters to Trump is Trump. Not the economy. Not the war, and certainly not the concerns of voters in the final days of the election.

Obama’s one-liner wasn’t just a zinger. It was political gold, an artful bit of rage-bait trolling that casually took control of the narrative with a well-aimed poke. 

Somehow the USofA moved on from a brilliant political mind (and functional president) to a self-centered clown. Trump has talents, but they are only to degrade and self-enrich. Generations of political scientists and historians will pick over theories of why the American people put Trump in office. 

Meanwhile, let's hobble him with a strong Dem election now! 

Dolores Huerta, R.I.P.

I've had the good fortune to interact with a few people whose impact on our world was so much greater than that of most individuals. Dolores Huerta -- labor leader, feminist, and inveterate activist -- was one such. A few of my photos from her long presence in our northern California lives and struggles:

2007 – listening at a community meeting

2009 – at a fundraiser

2010 – leading a chant in Central Valley for Dem candidate Jerry McNerney

2017 – marching with immigrant families

There were so many other times when I crossed paths with Dolores when I was not being a photographer. I was about 20 feet away in 1988 when rampaging San Francisco cops ruptured her spleen during a protest in Union Square. She had guts.

You could count on her to be there. Sure, at times Dolores lent herself to people and causes I might have doubted. But she always gave her energies to what she thought was good for poor people and women. How many of us can say the same?

Finally the generational transition we've been waiting for

In the course of a long, somewhat incoherent, interview that NYTimes super pundit Ezra Klein has published with super odds and data pundit Nate Silver, this confusing exchange grabbed my attention: 

Klein: Like, I think you’re just sort of seeing the arrival of a Democratic class that is just more native to this era — came in during Obama, then was shaped by Trump and understands communication now.

Just something seems to be changing that is actually across a different faction. They all now have stars in a way that I wouldn’t have said was true a few years ago.

Silver: I think some of it is kind of like a Steph Curry effect — with Obama as an analogue — where he starts shooting 3-pointers from where no one has before, and now kids are practicing that in high school, and they graduate and go to college in the N.B.A.

And who is Steph Curry in this analogy?

Obama, yeah.

I mean, yeah, El-Sayed and Ossoff, for instance, are both very influenced by Obama in different ways.

You know, Mayor Pete’s got a little bit ——

Yeah, Pete Buttigieg is another kind of elder millennial talent I would add to this.

I think, in some ways, what happened to Democrats after 2012 was kind of weird, right? Where Hillary lost to Obama [This was in 2008, but the point holds.] Bill Clinton became president in 1993, but for some reason, it’s like: Well, it’s Hillary’s turn now. [Neither of these guys seem to understand that bypassing the woman in 2008 offended a lot of Dem women.] And she had a very competitive primary against Bernie Sanders — and prevailed.

But that, in some ways, felt like a return to a different Democratic Party than the party that Obama was trying to craft. And then Biden, who was expressly chosen by Obama because he was old and not seen as a threat to run for president himself, kind of won amid this flight to safety.

Obviously, some of these were competitive nomination processes. But it feels like some trajectory got interrupted in the Democratic Party. Maybe now it’s being restored, I suppose, a little bit. 

The way I look at this sequence is a lot simpler. Yes, born in 1961, Obama is technically a Boomer according to the demographers. I was born in 1947 and so I am also a Boomer. Hillary Clinton was also born 1947. In terms of the life experiences which defined for us what might be possible, that demographer equation of the life experiences of early and late Boomers is nuts. I was born before the Civil Rights revolution forced its way into white American consciousness; Obama came along in time to be its most prominent politician beneficiary. Sticking us into the same demographic bag misreads American politics and history.

A 2016 Hillary rally

And, unhappily, Hillary Clinton's second serious run at the presidency in 2016 was an attempt to defy generational realities. There were good reasons why she seemed a plausible candidate then, besides a lingering sense among some that it was her turn to be "first woman". She was might have been one of the best prepared politicians to do the work of a presidency ever; that's seldom been the main criteria for election. But in the normal flow of generations, her second run at the big prize (remember she almost won the nomination in 2008) gummed up a better, smoother generational transition. 

And then we got a couple more ancients -- Trump and Biden -- who also ought to have been disqualified by age for the job, but whose interaction kept them in play, for worse, better, and worse. Bernie is a slightly different story -- clearly too old, but representative of an actual American ideology which most candidates are not and which overcame age as a qualification.

Finally, we have to be exiting the Boomer era. We're over, figuratively and increasingly literally! Gen Z and Millennial voters will, finally, be more than half the electorate in 2028. The America that survives Trump will be their America, their culture, their hopes. 

About time. My kind did some great stuff, but it is others' time. 

Sometimes the good guys win

The people can turn back a daunting right wing tide. The world offers lessons for those of us striving to restore democracy in the USofA and to overcome Donnie and the Two-Bit Fascists.

  

From Ezra Levin at Indivisible: 

The authoritarians are falling. In April, a pro-democracy coalition in Hungary ousted Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power. On Sunday, a grassroots movement in Serbia beat Aleksandar Vučić, the Putin-favored strongman who had run the country for 14 years. And the same day in Brazil, Lula upended expectations to defeat Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing failson of the imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Organizing wins. In all three countries, the authoritarians lost to mass grassroots movements that organized, mobilized, and interrupted politics as usual. Hungary had 2,500 semi-autonomous local “islands” organizing against Orbánism. Serbia’s democratic victory was the product of a youth-led movement. In Brazil, a thriving pro-democracy movement fought back against anti-democratic tech giants, including a cross-country pushback against Zuckerberg’s Meta that we were proud to join. 

The margin matters. Hungary and Serbia weren’t close. The anti-Orban party won a supermajority on record turnout, and Orbán conceded on election night. Serbia’s Student List won an outright majority on the highest turnout in more than 30 years, and Vučić conceded the same night. Brazil was close, roughly 52-48, and Flávio Bolsonaro is now refusing to accept the result. Authoritarians will always try to sabotage a close election. A blowout leaves them nothing to work with. 

Lula won in Brazil by increasing turnout beyond what his loss in the first round of voting suggested might be possible. With their democracy on the line, Brazilians chose to vote in overwhelming numbers. If you haven't found a role in our election, check out Indivisible.

Found-graphic by way of a friend south of the border ... 

From outside the bubble: is there still decency?

"Until this moment, ... I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness ... Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

So thundered counsel for the US Army Joe Welsh during a hearing in 1954, before the vicious Republican witch hunter Senator Joe McCarthy. That exchange marked the beginning of the end for McCarthy who died in drunken infamy shortly later.

We probably can trust that Ohio gubernatorial GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has consigned himself to similar infamy to the Wisconsin Senator's with his ad featuring his Dem opponent Amy Acton's abusive mother who has not seen her daughter for 40 years since the mother had to skip the state to escape the law.

Even Mike DeWine, Ohio's Republican governor, had to speak out against this one. About the only Ramaswamy defenders left are JD Vance and Donald Trump.

Even a business correspondent (a good one) from The Bulwark cried out in disgust. Catherine Rampell catalogues Trump's pattern of contempt for injured women and children.

It is loathsome. And yet, in a way, it is also perfectly on message. It is a microcosm of the broader Trump agenda: professing support for the vulnerable while shielding their abusers.

... But Trump’s response to the Ramaswamy ad is worth dwelling on not just because it underscores the depravity of our politics but because it reminds us how his administration, despite its rhetoric, has actually harmed victims of sexual abuse. Beyond Acton, there are thousands of other children and domestic violence victims whose lives have been made materially worse by Trump policies—and, in most cases, for no obvious electoral advantage.

Just for funsies.

For instance, the Trump administration has rolled back efforts to combat sex crimes on college campuses and in federal prisons. ... 

Trump and his supposedly tough-on-crime allies have also cut sweetheart deals with sex predators: Trump gave Ghislaine Maxwell the kid-glove treatment, while Texas Attorney General (and Republican Senate candidate) Ken Paxton offered a plea deal that would have seen an admitted child molester spend only a single day in jail.

More than just letting predators off the hook, Trump has also withdrawn support services for their survivors. The administration has terminated or frozen hundreds of grants supporting domestic abuse and sex-crime victims, grants that had been established under such laws as the Violence Against Women Act. 

The administration has also tried (unsuccessfully) to cut off legal services for domestic-abuse victims who could not immediately prove their immigration status.

And looking forward, Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget request would likewise slash funding for the Office on Violence Against Women by a quarter, including through cuts to transitional housing and legal assistance grants for families.

Relative to the disgusting Acton ad, most of these policy choices have gotten scant attention. But they all deliver the same closing message for the midterms: It was never about helping the kids.

Paul Waldman smartly assesses how Ramaswamy blundered into launching a despicable election ad which led to such universal repudiation. What were they thinking?

... Every time a candidate airs an attack ad, they make a calculation, that voters will be more persuaded by what the ad says about their opponent than what the ad says about them for having aired it. While voters say they don’t like negative campaigning, they respond to it, and if the attacks seem justified and relevant, the attacker can feel safe from backlash. If you’re saying your opponent took bribes or voted for bad policies, voters are unlikely to blame you.

But when the attacks get personal, the risk of backlash increases. And if a campaign is going to use someone’s family against them, they have to be very careful. Especially if the family member you’ve trotted out to offer testimony has a long history of petty crime and stood by while her preteen daughter was raped, then abandoned her.

But this is the nature of today’s right-wing bubble, whose residents are not only acculturated to a particular political style — cruel, vulgar, often hateful — but become convinced that it’s the only effective way to do politics, and to not do politics that way is to be weak and contemptible. That’s what JD Vance — a high-volume consumer of right-wing content and regular podcast guest — means when he says he’s “disgusted” by “whining” from Republicans about Ramaswamy’s ad.

The failure to anticipate the nearly inevitable reaction to the use of Acton’s mother springs directly from that inability to see how things look from outside the bubble. When the backlash began, Ramaswamy acted the way Trump does whenever people are appalled by something he has done or said: Don’t apologize, don’t retreat, blame your opponents, and double down. 

If I were an Ohio resident, I'd be having a hard time voting for Acton. She seems a more authentic transphobe than many Dem pols who are accommodating conventional prejudices. But I sure hope she can defeat Ramaswamy and we can all live to fight another day in Ohio and beyond. 

Yes or no for the transphobes ...

I came across this too late to advise me (I voted 10 days ago) but pass it along in case it might be of use to some others.

The states colored magenta on this map are ones where major candidates have allied with the GOP/MAGA campaign of transphobia in this election season. (At least as of Sept. 8 -- I am late to this because I was locked up in post-fracture rehab when this came out. Map may have been updated.)

Trans-advocate Erin in the Morning explains why it should matter to decent people that some otherwise progressive Democrats are hedging or simply turning away from support for the human rights of trans people. 

The gravest long-term threat to transgender Americans is not just the Republican Party. It is also the campaign to strip support for transgender people out of all parties. Republicans fall in and out of power, and when they lose it, rights lost under their control can be reclaimed. 

But if the Democratic Party itself ever flips to being anti-trans, there is no one left to do the reclaiming. There will never be enough lawmakers who both hold power and support trans rights to repeal the damage, and every loss becomes permanent. It is a one-way ratchet, and it is terrifying.

It is not hypothetical, either. In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party, the ostensibly left-of-center party, completed exactly this flip, and since taking power it has enacted more horrors on the trans community than even the Conservatives before it. British trans people now have no major party to turn to. That is the endgame of the strategy currently being tested here in the United States.

In the linked post, she explains for the colored states who the capitulating and/or bigoted Dems are, offering those who might vote for them the choice to avoid them.

I had missed that our California governor candidate Xavier Becerra had put himself on what I think is the wrong side of the panic over trans participation in sports; if I'd known, I'd have skipped voting for him. He doesn't need me.

Of course, that's an easy choice. He's going to win, regardless of what a few of us do as a matter of conscience/necessity. And any Dem in office will be an easier target to drag on to the right side of inclusion than any GOPer. We know that; after all, it took until gay marriage was a foregone conclusion for Barack Obama to get around to supporting us. It was grassroots energy and legal smarts that to won that round, not our fearful Dem leader. 

In a state where the election was a cliffhanger and the choice was a MAGA villain or a chickenshit Dem, I would have a harder time refusing my vote for the latter. We don't vote for heroes -- we vote for whoever would be easier to influence in directions we think are right. I'm glad I don't live in Ohio where the gubernatorial choices really do stink. But I might vote for Acton even though she seems a genuine transphobe. Living in a flawed world ain't morally simple ...

On the meaning of "No Kings"

Someday, the Trump era in these dis-United States will be over. If something like the Democratic Party writ large inherits the ruins of constitutional government, leaders will have to try to figure out how to achieve some measure of accountability for the Trumps, hangers-on, and oligarchs who trashed the nation. And we can be sure that Donald Trump will attempt to hamstring accountability by granting mass pardons to every swindler and crook who enabled his regime. After all, he's selling pardons right and left these days.

And the president's constitutional pardon power, which he enjoys by holding the office, seems close to absolute: it reads “he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” 

The Founders may have thrown off one king, but they erred in embedding this absolutist fragment in the fundamental law they gave us. So long as we have this Constitution, the only way to stop giving the President and his cronies a "get out of jail free card" is to amend this grant of absolute power -- and that's near to impossible. 

But if we're serious about restoring the rule of law to this country, we have to do something to curb the pardon power. Otherwise the crooks win. Brian Beutler offers a potential path forward: 

... the pro-democracy movement [should try] to build mass support for amending the pardon power now, in the midst of a civic emergency. In a dream scenario, the movement succeeds, and Trump loses the unconditional pardon power before he can abuse it to bring the whole Constitution down. In a likelier scenario, where the movement “fails” to accomplish its nominal goal, a Fight The Power -- or (sorry) Neg Your Pardon movement -- could still surface a great deal of ongoing corruption, and use the corruption as a political wedge. 

Do Republicans really want to be caught opposing sensible limits on the pardon power? No autopardons? No preemptive pardons? No pardons without acceptance of guilt or proof of innocence? Do they want to stand for the idea that Trump should be able to pardon himself for accepting bribes? That he should enjoy blanket immunity to commit official crimes, and then pardon himself for the non-official ones? Well, that’s up to them.

Getting something like this off the ground would require three things: first, a respected House Democrat and a respected Senate Democrat ... to write and introduce the amendment, then use procedural privileges to force repeated votes on it. Second, a campaign to advance the idea in all 50 states. Third, aspiring Democratic presidential candidates to endorse it. 

The cause is urgent and morally righteous. It would also be popular. And, as a matter of realpolitik, it would provide Democrats at all levels (including those wannabe presidents) an opportunity to distance themselves from Joe Biden. Republicans will bellow whataboutism: Whatabout Biden, who preemptively pardoned his family? As they hop aboard, Democrats could preempt those cries. ...

Perhaps we can't actually succeed in amending the Constitution to get rid of this monarchical anachronism. But we should be able to make corrupt use of the pardon power stink to high heaven. That's a gift from Donnie the Grifter to the pro-democracy movement. And taking up the amendment fight, even if we can't complete it, is how we (Dems?) show we are serious when we say "No Kings." 

Let's keep this in mind along with all our other demands in this difficult moment.

Trump betrays Ukraine

I find myself thinking about my mother as I contemplate Donald Trump's betrayal of Ukraine. During the 1930s, my mother was a conventional, youngish, white, upper middle class, Republican woman living in a mid-American cultural backwater; that would be her Buffalo, New York. But before the Depression brought her home to help manage the collapsing family finances, she'd graduated from Smith College and traveled in Europe, "on the continent." 

And somehow, unlike most of her social class, she'd become aware that the ascendancy of Nazism in Germany, embodied by Adolf Hitler, was a threat to human decency and life. After World War II when I came along, she had both German refugee and European-origin Jewish friends, though I don't know if they came into her life later, or whether those connections dated from the 1930s. I do know that she spoke of hearing Ambassador William Dodd explain the horrors of Hitlerism to the highly respectable English Speaking Union in the late 1930s.

In particular, in describing those days, she pointed to the British capitulation at Munich in 1938 when the United Kingdom acquiesced in Hitler's dismemberment of the helpless country of Czechoslovakia. Rather than the "peace in our time" which the English prime minister called this betrayal, she assessed the events differently: "I just knew Munich would mean war for Europe and us all eventually," she told me. I believe this was not entirely hindsight bias; there were people in the 1930's who saw war coming.

Mother followed, with horror and terror, newsreports of Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland (alongside Stalin's Soviet Union) and then, in 1940, the collapse of western Europe before Hitler's armies. My parents had vacuum tube radios through which they listened to reports from the Battle of Britain, the German aerial assault on London when the UK was the last European hold-out. And then Hitler turned on his former ally, invading Stalin's Russia in June 1941. Mother remembered suddenly feeling sure she was seeing the turning point in the war. 

In December 1941, Germany's Japanese ally attacked the US base at Pearl Harbor; Germany declared war on the US; and the war spread worldwide. Mother remembered being confident in eventual Allied victory. She spent the war years rolling bandages for the Red Cross and acting as a volunteer ground spotter for the Air Force which was testing a newfangled devise called radar.

She was proud of her war work and proud of her country which she credited with defeating fascism.

• • •

Like me, Donald Trump was born just after that war. Maybe he didn't have good parents. Apparently none of what the world had just gone through was any part of his upbringing.

Donald Trump's betrayal of Ukraine communicates to Putin -- and Xi Jinping -- that he will do nothing to defend not only Ukraine, but also his own country. He's only interested in stealing whatever he can for himself; the tech bros who prop him up are cut from the same flawed cloth. 

I seldom think much of New York Times editorials, but their response to Trump's willingness of help Russia sell its oil and bombard Ukrainian cities drew an unusually clear denunciation: 

... Over the past two weeks, Mr. Trump has taken a sharp turn toward appeasement. Desperate to reduce gas prices before the midterms, he is now helping Mr. Putin wage war.

On Oct. 9, Mr. Trump announced he would lift sanctions on Russian diesel exports to the United States, a step that will help Russia’s economy and war production. On Friday, he went further, signing an executive order that waived other sanctions. He has also taken steps that do not have a clear economic rationale and instead seem designed simply to please Mr. Putin. Among them are new service restrictions for Starshield, the Elon Musk-run satellite network that Ukrainian forces use to defend against Russian airstrikes. ...

Let us be clear about the scope of Mr. Trump’s cynicism. He is aiding an autocratic leader and dangerous adversary of the United States who is waging a brutal war against a democratic neighbor. Mr. Trump is doing so partly in the faint hope that gas prices, which have jumped because of his reckless war in Iran, will fall over the next two weeks and help Republicans avoid big losses in the midterm elections. He is damaging America’s national interest, and likely sacrificing Ukrainian lives, for his own political interests.

The stakes in Ukraine are much larger than the fate of one nation. The war is a test of whether authoritarian expansion can succeed by military force in the 21st century — or whether the West can rally to protect democracy and innocent lives. 

Trump's perfidy is not unique to our time. There were plenty of Americans in the 1930s who looked at Hitler's Germany and thought "none of our business and maybe I can make a buck ..."  

But there were also plenty who came together, across race and class, who organized and fought in the hope of a better country and a better world. There are lots of us still who want better than Trump's ugly plutocracy. Let's keep working together to get there. Vote and protect the vote in our time. 

Policing the bathroom ...

 

"I'm your Republican congressman. Now that we're in charge, I'm checking to make sure there's no trans people in the wrong bathroom. ... "

Made by the Progress Action Fund.

Founded by Obama Administration alum Joe Jacobson, the Progress Action Fund produces & runs hard-hitting ads to defeat Republicans in swing districts. When Republicans go low, we go lower, because in politics you have to put your opponent on defense & shape the narrative. As President Lyndon Johnson said, “while you’re saving your face, you’re losing your ass.  

Pass it on ... Republican hate campaigns have made this fair game.

On voting for public school governance

Once upon a time, I managed, very successfully, a campaign for a candidate who sought election to the San Francisco Unified School District board. In retrospect, I'm not exactly proud of that. We made sure that our candidate was visible everywhere in the city we could think of, won endorsement from every 2-bit political club we could find, and was listed on every organizational slate card we could afford. The candidate was ubiquitous. Nobody really knew anything about the candidate's intentions -- which were good, but irrelevant to getting elected.  

I've voted in this year's school board election -- and I did precisely what we urged voters to do in that long ago campaign: I checked out endorsements from entities I generally like (Pissed Off Voters is a good one) and filled in the little dot without knowing anything much about any of them. Or, since I'm not a parent, much of anything about the SFUSD.

Parents and kids line up for school opening

I share this discouraging truth because I want to pass on here observations about our public schools from someone who does make a practice of knowing what goes on within them: experienced local journalist Tim Redmond. 

The School Board voted last week to approve a new assignment policy that will make it difficult for any parent to send their kids to anything except a neighborhood school. Board President Matt Alexander made a classic statement: He said that parents have been thinking about their own kids, “but now it’s time to think about all kids.”

That’s what a School Board member should say. When my kids were at McKinley Elementary, the amazing, wonderful, hero principal, Bonnie Coffey Smith, used to remind parents all the time that “all of our kids are all of our kids.”

The problem is that San Francisco neighborhoods are segregated, not just by race but by income and wealth. It’s worth noting that folks in the real-estate industry have cheered this decision: It means homes in neighborhoods near “good” schools will be worth even more money.

Throwing money at government programs doesn’t always work—witness the cops and the military, where more money often means more waste and less effective results. But when it comes to education, by any metric, better funded schools do better for their students. More money means better outcomes; it’s a pretty straight-line correlation.

And neighborhood schools mean more inequality in funding.

The dirty secret of SFUSD is the role that PTAs play in providing extra cash for better enrichment, lower class sizes, and better facilities at schools that serve the kids of wealthy parents. Some PTAs raise more than $500,000 a year for relatively small elementary and middle schools. The parents at schools in working-class neighborhoods can’t possibly match that. So those schools don’t get the same benefits.... 

A serious program for neighborhood schools should involve the basic concept of equity: The schools in areas that have been underfunded and marginalized for decades due to a legacy of historic racism should get the most money. 

That might anger the parents in the rich neighborhoods, who want their money to go to their kids, not to all kids—but that’s the price they have to pay for “neighborhood schools.” 

Could candidates for the San Francisco School Board proclaim these realities loudly? Maybe they try, but they remain inaudible to most voters. There's so much else, with more cash, clamoring for our attention. (Matt Alexander certainly has carried such a message, but I would not know that if I didn't encounter him in other contexts.) 

I end up questioning whether electing a school board really serves the city. Yet we'd probably be worse off without giving parents and teachers someone they can yell at who has needed some level of broad endorsement from the voters. We certainly would not want the Mayor's office to predominate in school policies. Does any reader have thoughts?

Even the NFL says so: It takes all of us

Since my busted leg keeps me from doing more, I'll just pass this on:

An update from California's Central Valley ...

Saturday scenes in the Mission

Hey, there's an election going on!

Most of us have our ballots. Let's get this done.

The owner is this car is opinionated. As it happens, I agree.  

Whoever owns this car has not confined themselves to just voting. Like good citizens, they are sharing their opinions. How very San Franciscan!

Friday cat blogging

Janeway sleeps where she chooses, unbothered by a brushed back ear. Or the wishes of the legs she has appropriated.

 

Mio is aware that he is watched. We're warm furniture.

Republican decodes Democrats and much more: an unlikely oracle

Sarah Longwell listens to voters with a political messaging consultant's perspective and she knows whereof she speaks. How to Eat an Elephant – One Voter at a Time became a best seller because she translated what she learned from hundreds of voter focus groups -- Trump supporters and Trump critics -- into smart, appealing, and graceful campaign wisdom. This is book an easy read and very worth the time of anyone working to defeat MAGA -- and that project won't be over, even if we win a blue wave on November 3.

People out of my world -- folks loosely left of the Democratic Party -- are likely and probably rightly suspicious of Longwell. After all, she's a former Republican operative and the publisher of The Bulwark, the landing spot for Republicans who couldn't stomach their former party's fascist turn. But she's a dyke (that does help; we view our society from slightly outside) and committed to electing even Democrats she can barely stand if that turns back MAGA. I find her determination to ground her politics in listening to infuriatingly muddled American voters a sign of democratic (lower case "d") integrity.

I'm not going to try to summarize this book. Some of it I very much disagree with. But I really do urge you to read it if you aspire to use the Democratic Party to turn back fascism. I will share some charming tidbits. And then I'll take up one of her observations that that meshes interestingly with my experience over 30 years of deep electoral campaign involvement. 

First, some slightly random teasers from the book, not meant to convey a unified message, but to encourage your curiosity: 

• It’s true (sort of) that voters are the problem. But they’re also the solution. Which is why we need to persuade them by developing policy and messaging frameworks that grow the pro-democracy coalition. It won’t be easy. But there isn’t an alternative.

• The irony is, in elite Democrats’ good-hearted attempts to be maximally inclusive, they end up with a set of rituals and language that baffles most Americans and creates a barrier to connecting with voters.

• Trump’s revolutionary effect was that, first, he made his supporters stop pretending to care about virtue. And then he made them embrace vice. ...  Character doesn’t just not matter—bad character is a marker of authenticity when authenticity is the coin of the political realm. The snake who admits he’s a snake is now deemed more trustworthy than the politician who acts—and might actually be—virtuous.

• I’m struck by how personal and visceral COVID vaccine resistance has become. A woman in Alaska told me flatly: “I got the eight shots I got in the ’60s and I have managed to make it this far with those eight freakin’ shots and I am not getting another one pumped into this body.” This isn’t a policy disagreement. This is bodily autonomy fused with institutional betrayal. The grammar of hidden knowledge has colonized the most intimate domain: what goes into your own body. ...

• To do what I’m talking about, Democrats need to toughen up. Stop crying and start sweating. Sorry, you don’t get Fridays off. Democracy’s at stake. Sorry, you can’t work from home all the time. America is at stake. Put on real pants and go to the office. The fascists are outworking you. They’re out-organizing you. Out-communicating you. You’re talking about microaggressions when you need to prioritize the macroaggressions being committed on a daily basis against the American experiment.

• More good news: This is the kind of moment when new leaders emerge. The old guard is exhausted. The appetite for change is overwhelming. The voters are ready—desperate, even—for something new.

If these quotes whet your appetite, pick up this book. 

• • •

Now to one of Longwell's observations, only glancingly developed, which I think those of us trying to preserve the possibility of a participatory US democracy should attend to. She writes:

The Republican operative world I came up in was mercenary and entrepreneurial. We started companies: consulting firms, media ventures, direct mail operations, opposition research firms, PACs. The incentive structure was clear: deliver results, make money, climb the ladder. There was less hand-wringing about process and more focus on outcomes. If something worked, you did more of it. If it didn’t, you moved on. The culture was competitive, sometimes cutthroat, but it was honest about what it was. We worked weekends.  

The Democratic world, as I have observed over the last decade, operates via a different set of cultural norms. People default to starting nonprofits, advocacy organizations, think tanks, and foundations instead of for-profit companies. The culture is mission-driven rather than financially incentivized. There’s a lot of talk about work–life balance, making sure everyone feels included, centering the right voices. The vibe is values first, process oriented, unionized. There’s a lot of talk about mental health. Employees agitate for four-day workweek. ...

I wouldn't say this is a completely fair description of either side as I've observed them over 30 years of (mostly paid) work in progressive campaigns. But I also think there is some truth.

I've seen plenty of Republican campaign efforts which weren't the pure capitalist enterprises that Longwell describes here; they were just rip offs off of candidates and causes by campaign firms that had made a profitable industry of extracting tribute from the gullible and the semi-powerful. I've also seen plenty of the same from Democratic consultants who may have once had their day, but deliver very little value while skating on reputation. (Looking at you, James Carville.) 

Longwell's description of the Democratic side is something I've seen -- but it misses the essential truth of Democratic campaigns which Longwell is now living.  These campaigns, except possibly at the most local level, are inherently coalition efforts, unlike the Republican ones where the base will toe the line. The Dem base -- both funding and activist -- consists of mission driven fractions which agree (or not) to play alongside each other for a season. They are an arena of multiple cultures -- unions, civic groups, religious groups, racial justice advocates, enthralled candidate fans. Getting them to work together productively IS the campaign. 

When Dems win, it looks obvious and easy -- but it never is. And the building of the really large coalitions is largely imperceptible to participants. When it works, we work hard. We exude attractive purpose. We all think our fraction won the day, even when we are vaguely grateful for the larger whole. And the big Democratic coalitions are held together by mission, not primarily money. 

• • •

One other throwaway line from Longwell that I can't resist raising up. 

One of the stranger things about the success of The Bulwark is that it’s basically free. As [her colleague] JVL likes to say, “You can’t save democracy from behind a paywall.” ...  Despite not charging for almost anything The Bulwark puts out, we still have a robust paying subscriber base. What are they paying for?

Long ago, I was part of another movement/community which worked the same way: the Catholic Worker as founded by Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. The cost for a subscription to its newspaper remained from its Depression era origin: "a penny a copy; more if you can, less if you can't." And the cash flow funded not only the paper, but multiple "houses of hospitality" for a community of the otherwise unhoused.

Some people have always known that financial stability flows from mission; the anomaly is that American society and democracy has forgotten this.

Trump makes all moments feel existential

Day in and day out, Jay Kuo chronicles "the condition our condition is in" at The Status Kuo. (Thanks, Kenny Rogers.) He's good at it, as befits an accomplished lawyer, chair of the Human Rights Campaign, Broadway show composer, and doting father.

Sometimes he waxes reflective -- which isn't easy in these times. In The Violence Is the Point,  he takes a careful long view of our ambitious autocrat in chief. 

... Historians and political scientists reviewing the regime’s recent escalations would recognize a familiar pattern.

In “On Violence,” which grew out of a 1969 essay, political theorist Hannah Arendt argued that power and violence are opposites. Power, as she defined it, belongs to people acting together, and it lasts only as long as the group holds. Violence, by contrast, stands in for power once that cooperation starts to slip. “Violence appears where power is in jeopardy,” she wrote, “but left to its own course its end is the disappearance of power.”

Political scientists have since measured the same dynamic. Governments’ use of repression to answer threats to their power and the status quo is so common that scholars gave it a name: the Law of Coercive Responsiveness. Christian Davenport, the University of Michigan political scientist most associated with the dynamic, notes that dissent “has increased repression in every single investigation of the topic,” making it “perhaps the only law” in the study of how states and dissidents interact. His study of the United States from 1948 to 1982 found something more unsettling. Repression tracked the threats that officials declared through speeches, hearings and laws more closely than anything protesters actually did. When those political threats were present, he wrote, “repression increased, regardless of behavioral threats.” A Somali “takeover” of Minnesota, an “invasion” at the border, two dead citizens branded “domestic terrorists”—in each case, the regime manufactures the threat and the crackdown follows. 

So we're recipients of escalating efforts to rub horrific state violence in our faces -- a home invasion by security thugs at a Somali Congresswoman's residence, a proposed public execution, a "whimsical" invocation of nuclear destruction of Los Angeles and San Diego.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s “Strongmen” follows authoritarian leaders from Mussolini to the present, from their rise through their rule to their fall. She identified Trump’s reliance on violence years ago. In the tradition of the fascists, she wrote, he uses his rallies to “train his followers to see violence in a positive light.” That’s why he’s switched from invoking Mobile, Alabama, as a target of nuclear annihilation to a bit about two blue California cities.

Last August, I wrote in The Big Picture about “sadopopulism,” the term coined by historian Timothy Snyder, now at the University of Toronto. He describes it as a kind of “populism where people actually don’t get anything except more pain.” The regime cannot deliver real gains, so it rations suffering and offers its base the consolation of watching others hurt more. I argued then that public opinion “is a barometer of whether Trump’s policies, including sadopopulism, are working or failing.” The barometer now reads failure, and so the regime has doubled down and is escalating.

... We’ve moved from UFC bouts on the White House lawn, to turning nuked California cities into a crowd pleaser to the ultimate spectacle of a planned public execution. In each case, the audience matters as much as the event, if not more. A Law & Society Review study of American executions from 1833 to 1937 found, for example, that the audience was itself part of the event, and that it could grant or deny legitimacy to the execution and to capital punishment as a whole. That’s the very reason why, in December, Hegseth hopes to give Hasan’s execution an audience of anyone with an internet connection. ...

Trump is flailing; all he can think of to do is kill someone.  On the other hand, he's a total chickenshit. His instinct is to TACO, to shy away from the worst in the hope of living to fight another day. 

If unrest reaches a boiling point, history suggests a TACO moment may follow. But just as we witnessed and endured with Jan. 6, the damage to our democracy and the rule of law before Trump finally backs down could be considerable. ...

There's much reason to worry that Trump can make things worse before they get better. but that's all the more reason to do all we can to strip this evil nutcase of as much power as we can in the present.  Read it all from Jay Kuo. 

No kings indeed

So many outrages ... so much to note with horror. DJT sticking his ugly mug on US passports is nowhere near the Mad Toddler's most egregious offense against our democracy and our human decency. 

But I appreciated Adam Gopnik's restrained reflections on the new image in the New Yorker.  

... The President is not a substitute tyrant or king, whose face, like that of the monarch of England (the enemy in the historic event celebrated this year), appears on currency, coins, and postage stamps, but just one more citizen who happens to have been handed a very big job. As that leftist provocateur Ronald Reagan once said, “You don’t become President of the United States. You are given temporary custody of an institution called the Presidency, which belongs to our people.”

... The absence of a living monarch on our money, or on our travel documents, was not an accident haphazardly arrived at but a declaration of equality meant to be flourished and displayed. In this way, a reasonable case can be made that the constant volley of insults to the dignity of our democracy is as grave as the bad policy choices: policy choices can change; the decorum of democracy, once defaced, can never be wholly restored.

So, pity the poor passport! To see it so reduced by the whims of a would-be autocrat at the soothing of a cynical sycophant [that would be little Marco Rubio] undermines our faith not just in free travel but in freedom itself. A U.S. passport should bear the image and the imprint of no officeholder of any kind; it should merely let us pass on our journey through the world freely and without hindrance, just as the old one does. 

No Kings - October 17. 

Team work and friendship

Odds are, most of my San Francisco friends will have seen this, because they too will have been on Brad Newsham's mailing list for the visual protests he has been creating on our beaches for the last 20 years. But others may not have have seen it and you might appreciate this tribute to community and creativity and one team member that demonstrates the best of this area. You can find the whole story on Facebook under Brad's name.   

She knows

A Honduran friend who lives in Mexico posted this. I think more North Americans, especially folks in the USofA, might find this exhortation from a champion of global justice worth raising up:  

The rest of the world gets it. Many Australians, not the most pacifist or internationalist of Anglophones, get it: 

In 2025 Navi Pillay received the Sydney Peace Prize and in 2026 she received the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting international law and peace. 

Navi could not be a more deserving winner. Born under apartheid, she fought for justice in South Africa, women’s rights across the world, helped establish rape as an act of genocide, worked for victims of the Rwanda genocide and called out a genocide in Gaza. 

This woman, whose career has included investigating and calling out the most horrible things that humans do to each other, nonetheless believes in the possibilities we can make together.

Though there is too much avoidable human and animal suffering, too much exploitation, too much greed and too much repression around the globe, many -- perhaps most -- peoples live and work in hope of better lives for those who come after. They look forward, not backward ...

I grew up in a country which looked forward, even as it was oblivious to its many advantages and riches. We have lost that. We need to be reminded that we can walk together with others toward a more just and peaceful world.

And then continue the project of hobbling the Orange Toddler ...