Ignorance by intent

You have to love Marc Rosenblum's parting shot on leaving federal employment: 

“I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration,” Rosenblum said in a LinkedIn post over the weekend. “Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.”

Rosenblum served as executive director of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics in the DHS (that's the Department of Heimat Security for the historically minded).

“He had one of the most interesting charges at DHS,” a former colleague tells WIRED of Rosenblum. “There's 22 component agencies, and so there are 22 different ways of aggregating data that were just completely siloed.”

“So Marc's charge was to consolidate all the data and put it in a way that internally, I at headquarters could know exactly how many Coast Guard interdictions happened off the Coast Guard station in Miami, and how many of those were Cuban, Haitian, Nicaragua, Venezuelan. And then kind of conceptualize that with the same population of people that were crossing the Southwest border,” the former colleague adds.

Knowing and showing that sort of information, it's no surprise he no longer felt he had a place in current government. Reconstructing the government's ability to understand what is going on in this huge, multifaceted country will be one of the more difficult tasks required when we evict the MAGA morons.

ICE is evil

Here's another San Francisco action from Saturday. I had thought to attend this one also, but accepted that getting to two had to be good enough. Do turn the sound on and listen when you open.

The Human Banner crew has done it again! 

ICE kills

 

San Franciscans gathered Saturday outside the Tesla dealership on Van Ness Avenue.

The national movement follows two recent, horrific killings by ICE agents. On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a beloved father and worker, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Houston, Texas, while driving a work van. On July 13, ICE agents killed 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, in front of his partner and toddler. There have now been 53 deaths in ICE custody since Trump was inaugurated, 33 deaths in fiscal year 2026 alone. 

ICE agents were not even looking for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

Salgado Araujo, 52, was killed during a traffic stop by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, prompting thousands of Houstonians to take to the street in protest and to demand justice. 

Salgado Araujo was a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the US for more than 30  years without legal status, according to his family. He was not the intended target of the ICE operation that resulted in his killing. 

... Democratic Congressman Christian Menefee said ICE needs to be “torn down to the studs” and rebuilt as an agency that recognises the “dignity of the people that it encounters”. 

“But we all know that that will not happen under this administration,” he added.

Johan Sebastian Guerrero, shot in Maine, again was not an intended ICE target. 

Investigators have not released details of the shooting in Biddeford. But a spokesman for Senator Angus King said this week that the senator had been told by senior officials that Mr. Guerrero was not the intended target of the immigration operation. Mr. Guerrero was in his car just after 7 a.m., as he headed to work.

Benjamin Gideon, a lawyer representing the Guerrero family, said at the news conference that Mr. Guerrero had been working in the United States lawfully. “The Trump administration issued him a permit to work in this country legally,” he said. “And they issued him a Social Security card and a Social Security number.”

“Do we accept the idea that innocent, loving partners and loving and devoted fathers of 3-year-olds can be collateral damage to this government’s policies?” Mr. Gideon asked. “Do we agree that this is just an acceptable cost of doing business?”

Passing motorists on busy Van Ness Avenue honked enthusiastically. The Tesla dealership is a regular weekly protest site and drivers know what to do. 

• • •

Later in the day, members of Indivisible hosted a more contemplative memorial for ICE's victims at Sue Bierman Park, gathering around an improvised altar.

Where's the Peace Movement? Where it has always been.

On one of the Bulwark podcasts recently (sorry -- can't remember which one), head honcho Sarah Longwell tossed off a throwaway laugh line about the Orange Toddler's assault on Iran: "now where's the Peace Movement?" 

I'm appreciative of the Bulwark. Their conservative revulsion from the Trump regime demonstrates guts and integrity -- what we all need. But moments like this remind me that, coming from the right, they are butt ignorant of whole dimensions of American political activism.

Longwell neither understands how a Peace Movement begins nor the trajectory through which one is built. In my long experience through Vietnam, Reagan's Central American incursions, Afghanistan and Iraq, here's how that goes:

1) As Longwell knows professionally, the first stage of a Peace Movement is getting some critical mass of the American people to pay attention to something very far away. We don't habitually pay attention to what happens in other countries. Peace Movements start by getting more people aware and caring that our government is doing something wrong. Sometimes that involves dead GIs. The war mongers contest objections by claiming what they are doing is necessary and reasonable. Peace Movements have to dent that argument in the public arena.

2) Once some significant number of Americans buy into an understanding that some wrong is being done in our name, a Peace Movement can generate friction from within the institutions in which people gather: churches, schools, workplaces, unions, etc. Local groups can eventually generate some level of broad coalition infrastructure bringing together objectors from multiple sectors. 

3) Eventually, the accumulating opposition to the current war will be noticed by politicians. In our Peace Movements, politicians whose natural state is raising a finger in the wind to test which way it is blowing seldom lead. A Peace Movement is making strides when the pols encounter strong winds against whatever war we're in now. When the organized people lead, the pols -- Democrats first in the last 50 years -- follow.

All phases of this Peace Movement trajectory are currently well underway in the time of the Orange Toddler and MAGA, 

Nowadays, we are able to watch video of US missiles blowing up fishing boats, Iranian schools, electric plants and bridges. This seems wrong. Since our regime doesn't bother to present any plausible argument for its use of force, we skip both the becoming aware and the argument phase. 

Meanwhile, by assaulting all the pillars of civic life, MAGA, Elon, and Russell Vought have already roused important components of civic resistance. There are local, sectoral and even national activist formations, notably 50501 and the more than 3000 local Indivisible chapters.

And Democrats get it that they can't make excuses for Trump's violence, that opposition is popular. (They even begin to get it that it has ceased to help them to excuse Trump-buddy Bibi's genocide.) They are now running on stopping this shit, including the wars.

Where's the Peace Movement? From its perspective, the Peace Movement of our time is one and the same with the entire resistance movement to Trump. In fact, if you are aware of the history, the resistance to Trump has taken the same trajectory as all Peace Movements of the last 70 years. This mass political activism is apparently only dimly perceptible to folks who have come up through the right.

Perhaps those of us on the left side find Trump's mass evangelical base equally incomprehensible? I suspect so, which is why I try to study its adherents and activity. This is a country where mass enthusiasms both left and right can still set the political climate and sometimes agenda.

Friday cat blogging

The boy is substantial. When people first meet Mio, they are often surprised by his heft. He carries it well, all 18 pounds of him. When he wants to, he can sprint and even jump surprisingly high, chasing after Janeway in a flurry of fur.

She's even faster. When not enticing Mio from a sultry posture, Janeway also dashes about, often leaping onto furniture to menace her big playmate.

We stay out of the way when they get the zoomies. 

MAGA's nostalgia for a fictitious white America

The Trump regime shows very little actual imagination. MAGA looks backward to a non-existent past when men were men and dark people knew their place. Columnist Jamelle Bouie has their number: 

... You can understand the two Trump presidencies as attempts to relive and re-enact the most atrocious moments in American history, as if the nation were led by toxic obsessives who relished the cruelty and criminality of the past and worshiped perpetrators as heroes — the supposedly hard men who built the country we know.

The president himself gestures toward this game of copycat when he hails Andrew Jackson or praises William McKinley as a man who made America great. And the administration itself seems to want to consciously emulate those moments of infamy and ignobility in the American past.

The administration’s hegemonic war in Venezuela and anti-Canadian saber rattling evoke the crudely imperial posture of the United States at the turn of the 20th century. 

... Its use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving deportation force, aimed at anyone who looks suspect, is more than a little reminiscent of the federal bounty hunters deputized under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. 

It is also an echo of the first Red Scare, the Palmer raids and J. Edgar Hoover’s hunt for radicals during the Woodrow Wilson administration. ...

Bouie concludes:

[Trump's] vision of the future rests on a rotten nostalgia, and his plans for getting there were drawn from the wreckage of a shameful past.

Healthy, living countries look forward. MAGA poses the question: do we choose life?

• • •

The Trump regime's hatred of migrants frequently seems to focus on Mexicans, Central Americans and other speakers of Spanish. But MAGA's venom is also directed at many others, particular those long time targets of racist nativism: Chinese immigrants. Catherine Rampell is the economics decoder for The Bulwark; she picked up on the focus of the White House's attack on the Smithsonian Museum. 

... the White House recently released a 162-page report on the most critical issue facing voters: woke museum exhibitions. ... the most telling section of the White House report relates to its defense of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The report’s authors bristle at any suggestion that this famously racist law may have been motivated by any kind of racial animus. After all, such an acknowledgment might raise uncomfortable questions about the policies of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller—policies that are explicitly modeled on laws like this one.

... The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first major federal law to restrict immigration based on race or nationality. It banned nearly all Chinese laborers from coming to the United States for a decade; it also blocked Chinese immigrants who were already in the United States from ever becoming naturalized citizens. The premise was: If you were of Chinese descent, you were incapable of ever becoming an American, on account of your race.

The law was born of widespread anti-Chinese sentiment. It was passed amid a decade of growing repression and violence against Chinese immigrants in the Western United States, which resulted in massacres such as those in L.A.’s Chinatown (1871) and at Deep Creek in Oregon (1887), as well as many other acts of violence in the region before and after the bill was made law.

And then as now, economic precarity laid the predicate for virulent nativism. The late nineteenth century was a period of significant economic and technological upheaval owing to industrialization, job displacement, and the country’s evolving geographic footprint (including the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, which relied heavily on Chinese and Irish immigrant labor).

There's nothing new about MAGA's nativism. Unless we're from indigenous native ancestry, we all came to this continent from somewhere else. And, together, we make the country however great it may be and become.

Gone but not forgotten

Bishop Christopher Senyonjo has passed. Rest in peace.

He was that rare priest in the Anglican Church in Uganda who understood that LGBTQ folks were just yet more suffering humans, in need of knowing God's love. He was booted out, denied his pension, and harassed for his stand.

I had the privilege of spending several days with him at Seabury-Western Seminary in 2009.

Here he preached in San Francisco.

His life and story taught many of us that there are so many people all over the world -- people we might never hear of -- doing what they think is right and what they understand Love to demand.

What did she die for?

We can assume Stephen Miller thinks she was disposable, if not a pollutant in the blood of the white nation. Donald Trump certainly never gave her a thought.

She's dead in Trump's little error in the Orient, the war he's thoughtlessly dragged this country into. The same war which has also killed thousands of Iranians and thousands of Lebanese, all just collateral damage sacrificed to Don and Bibl's fantasies of total victory over their enemies.

 

Former GOP Congresscritter and veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan Adam Kissinger brings the perspective of a person who has fought. The way Pete Hegseth's military is limiting what we know sickens him.

A missile strike does not end when the fire goes out. The pressure from the blast moves through doors, walls and the spaces body armor cannot protect. A service member may get back on his feet, answer a medic’s questions and return to work. On a Pentagon spreadsheet, that can look reassuring. 

In the body, it may mean headaches, vertigo, trouble sleeping or memory problems that persist long after the uniform comes off. The military’s own medical experts warn that blast exposure can produce symptoms that are delayed, difficult to detect and potentially life-altering.

That distance—between what an injury looks like in a report and what it feels like to the person carrying it—is where the Trump administration has chosen to hide much of the cost  [to American personnel] of its war with Iran.

Roughly 430 American service members have been injured since the war began on February 28. But in the week before an Iranian attack killed Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, and 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, at a base in Jordan, Iran struck American forces in the country three other times. Those attacks injured dozens of troops and damaged several helicopters. ...  After the latest deaths, Donald Trump wrote that Iran would “pay for that killing many times over.” Vengeance was announced before the administration explained what another round of escalation was supposed to accomplish. ...

Kinzinger knows the lessons of history that Trump doesn't know and would erase if he could. (Ever wondered what posturing pretty boy Pete serves his master for?)

A Pentagon that treats scrutiny as hostility will eventually lose the credibility it needs during a genuine emergency. That loss cannot be repaired by a patriotic video, an angry social-media post or a secretary declaring that casualties will stiffen American resolve. Credibility accumulates through disclosures that are often inconvenient to the people in charge. It disappears when every unwelcome fact is treated as aid to the enemy.

The Vietnam-era “credibility gap” did not begin with one spectacular lie. It widened as official optimism repeatedly failed to match what soldiers, reporters and eventually the public could see. Body counts became measures of progress. Internal doubts remained hidden while presidents and generals described success. ...

The deception can travel inward. When injuries are classified as minor, attacks go unmentioned and damaged aircraft vanish from public briefings, leaders may begin making decisions inside the same edited reality they have constructed for voters. A government that cannot admit what the enemy has done will have trouble judging what the enemy can still do.

Trump has made lying and incompetence central to his method of governance....

And Isabelles of this country die for Donald's deceptions.

• • •

Michael Tomasky makes some educated guesses about where this all is going. 

The World’s Worst Nightmare: Donald Trump in Charge of a Real-Live War: 
There are no best-case scenarios when a corrupt, vainglorious toddler is running the world’s deadliest military. 

Read and weep ...

Trumpism is our Brexit

Watching the British transition to a new governing Labour Party prime minister from afar, I had what is probably a very obvious insight about this country which seems worth musing on.

First the disclaimer: I know very little about British politics and the broad stroke observations that follow may be inaccurate. I only dare write this because the actual subject is our, American, political follies -- and those I know plenty about.

Andy Burnham's takeover as Prime Minister makes him the seventh person in the top British job in the last ten years. And there is overwhelming agreement that his country is not serving its citizens as well as they wish it would. There's a housing crisis; there's a health care mess; international standing is precarious; racial tensions are unremitting; and "affordability" seems a mirage. The level of government turnover suggests the political landscape is both full of pratfalls and beset with confusion.

From across the pond, it seems obvious that the passionate, the successful exercise of popular sovereignty that was the the narrow 2016 vote to leave the European Union has been a sad wrong turn. Without Europe, Britain is poorer and weaker and the governments trying to manage national assertion within economic and intellectual isolation have been feckless failures. They can't satisfy anyone. The majority of Brits seem to think that Brexit was a mistake; and also they don't want to jump back into heated controversy over it. That hurt. There's a sharp age difference among the people: 

It may also be, as one British pollster observed, that the 2016 majority for Brexit “has literally died out,” since the Leave camp at the time included a disproportionate number of elderly voters. And so the conversation in Britain is shifting to what can be done to reverse the damage ...

Sound familiar ... ?

There's flooding in Texas, there's strife in Iran ... Apologies to the Kingston Trio

Like the Brexiteers, the Trumpists in power destroy without building. Stick that old crank JFK Jr at Health and Human Services, throw out the scientists, and you get a cyclosporiasis epidemic. Two cheers for the microbes! Empower Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget and government ceases to be able to do its job. MAGA cheers while emergency management is cut until no one answers the phone as flood waters rise.

Like the Brits, when the American people shrug off our impulse to destroy government without building (I think largely we do this so as not to have to deal with brown people ...), reconstruction is going to be tough. You can't stop the clock and you certainly can't go backwards. When people experience Trump's grafting minions, his anti-science religious know-nothings, and the gloating of our domestic oligarchs, we don't like it. The reaction will and should be extreme.

I trust we'll take government back. The federal system and the country's vast wealth gives us a fighting chance to pull out of our Trumpist national nosedive into self-pity, perhaps more smoothly than the Brits. But what are we going to do with our chances?

Found out and about

The Mission District is full of houses which have been made canvasses for murals. On a recent walk, I encountered these:

 

The visual conceit works, I think.

Heck of an amendment to a bank of very ordinary garage doors.