All Souls Day/Dia de los Muertos 2026: ¡Sharon Martinas, presente!

I don't know whether she'd have liked this picture. Probably not. But her expression of embarrassed wonder on her 70th birthday, twenty years ago, makes a good entry point for thinking about my friend Sharon Martinas who left us in August.

A generation of white anti-racist activists were formed in their activism by her Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, a training program for organizers which thrived from 1993 through the end of that decade and eventually led to numerous spin-offs. See Facebook posts from Criss Crass and Ingrid Chapman. 

Sharon (née Gold) Martinas didn't often talk about her early life. If you knew her well, you knew that either her birth family had disowned her or she had disowned them. 

Whatever she'd been born to, she early on chose to become a sometimes isolated foot soldier for human freedom and justice. And she never quit.

Sharon had worked in a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Freedom School in Selma, Alabama, in the summer of 1965. At an event in 2010 looking back on women in the civil rights movement, she was still wondering what lessons from that time offered going forward:

I just finished reading the entire Hands on the Freedom Plow book, a lot of sleepless nights. ... One of the things that impressed me so much, not only the commitment, which I already knew, but the incredible courage in the face of life and death. And I know from my own experience — I was in Selma in a Freedom School in '65, and that was my first experience. I had commitment, but I was scared shitless. And so I guess my question to you is two-part. One, if you could speak a little about where that courage came from and the choices you made to exercise it then, and how your experience of acting on that courage has impacted your activist and organizing work in any particular ways since then.

Always the questioner ... and the organizer ...

After Selma, while working as one of the founders of what they called the Experimental College, she organized white students and faculty in support of the Third World Liberation Front Strike at San Francisco State University. The uprisings at UC Berkeley in that era are probably more commonly remembered, but the SFSU strike, which extended for six months from November 1968 to March 1969, may have been more durably influential. The Black Student Union and Asian, Latino and Native students and faculty were a larger fraction of the school population than at Berkeley and formulated achievable demands despite vicious repression. They won a pioneering Ethnic Studies program and commitments to increase enrollment of students of color. Sharon donated her archive of strike papers to an SFSU library in 2004.

In the decade of the 1970s, she served as a legal staff worker at the National Lawyers Guild. Sometime in that era, she acquired the surname "Martinas."

I first knew Sharon when she worked with CISPES -- the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador -- during the 1980s. CISPES mobilized North Americans to support social revolution in that Central American country (which the country still needs). The US government supported violent repression of El Salvador's domestic activists by its oligarchs and generals. Sharon had a particular role in San Francisco. Periodically some Salvadoran citizen would be disappeared and usually tortured by the US-sponsored government. We learned that, sometimes, enough phone calls to the Salvadoran government from the US could save a captive's life and get them released. This was before universal online communications and even mass email. On learning that someone had been snatched up, Sharon would start her phone tree and soon dozens of Spanish speaking volunteers were bombarding authorities in San Salvador. Sometimes captives lived and thrived.

In Mainstreaming Torture my partner Rebecca Gordon describes meeting a Salvadoran woman a decade later whom Sharon had asked her to call on behalf of. She realized we may not understand in the moment the importance of what seem small actions:

Suppose Sharon's little group had failed to make those calls? What if we had been too busy in the days of Gloria's capture to add our voice to those of others demanding her reappearance? ...

Sharon, who didn't speak Spanish and never made it to Central America, made this lifesaving work happen.

In 1993, Sharon began the Challenging White Supremacy workshop along with Mickie Ellinger. I participated in early pilot sessions and appreciated what she was trying to do: re-educate and re-acculturate white people for whom resistance to racism was not their daily bread. A heck of a lot of activists and some organizers got their start from that venture. Take a look at Chris and Ingrid's descriptions linked above.

In that decade, I worked predominantly on founding Californians for Justice (CFJ) as an organizing force to combat racist state ballot measures. Right wingers took advantage of the unease California's majority of white voters felt on account of the changing demographic make up of the state to pass the anti-immigrant Prop. 187 in 1994 and then to outlaw affirmative action via Prop. 209 in 1996. Communities of color were outraged and frightened but not yet acculturated to fighting in the electoral arena. In parallel to the conventional electoral campaigns mounted by non-profit civil society groups, CFJ worked to activate young people and the disenfranchised of color.

Sharon helped make CFJ happen. When we were just getting started and were literally unable to make payroll, Sharon passed along part of a windfall inheritance she had received. And though she was instinctively doubtful about election work, she sent over her CWS trainees to join our trainings and voter contact mobilizations. The CWS folks sometimes edged toward using their cultural capital to drown out others from our base in communities of color, but our trainers complained to Sharon and she worked to ease the cultural gulf. She got it. Connections from that configuration persist to this day. (CFJ still thrives as a movement of youth for better public education.)

Much of what I saw of Sharon in her later days was hard. She practiced a monastic-like rigor of self-denial, never buying new clothes or foods she considered fancy. (If you brought treats, she'd eat heartily.) She still bought new books though, ever the compulsive student of human liberation. She had always had bad lungs and kept herself going by marathon daily pool swimming sessions. I remember charging all the way up to Nob Hill from Market Street next to her in some street demonstration (perhaps over the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012?) and wondering if she could keep it up. She got to the top by Grace Cathedral. She was never easy on herself. 

Eventually her hips broke down; she recuperated in the same Daly City rehab facility where I spent two weeks this September with a busted leg. More and more her life was at home in her apartment with her cat, corresponding with incarcerated prisoners. Those of us who had been formed by working with her visited (for myself, less frequently than I might have) and discussed events of the day and what (if anything) we were doing about injustice.

Sharon was a complicated person with unexpected quirks. One of her annual pleasures was joining us at Episcopal Church Christmas Eve services -- not because she was religious, though I sometimes thought there might be a hidden belief in Something (not Christian) within her. She just wanted her annual dose of Christmas carols and perhaps eggnog.

Now she sings with the elders ... 

Not a pretty picture

Democratic elections warrior Simon Rosenberg ventures into the Donald's dis-eased noggin as we come up to the midterm elections on Tuesday: 

... Trump never thought it would get to this. After all he escaped prison and retook the White House in 2024. He had conquered Venezuela and stolen their oil. He had looted the Treasury, stuffed his pockets, buried the Epstein files, and is building himself an Imperial enclave. He had launched a big war, a war that no one else had dared to wage, for he was mighty, an historic strongman, and he would be bring generations of glory to the Trump name. The stock market had boomed and he was successfully enriching his friends and cutting their taxes too. 

The titanic pay to play scheme he built would yield the Republicans unprecedented campaign cash, building a campaign fire wall that would ensure they keep the Senate no matter what happened in the House. He and his allies had successfully taken control of immensely powerful social and legacy media orgs, and successfully bullied and censored others. The right-wing noise machine supported by his Russian allies kept poisoning our discourse 24/7/365. Schumer and Jeffries were little people, he believed, not capable of mounting any kind of serious opposition. His quislings at the Fed would make sure the economy would be good. He would launch a huge end of election rally blitz that would re-awaken the faithful and lead them to victory once again. 

While things might get bumpy and spicy at the end of the day everything would be fine. He always found a way. The newly crowned Emperor of the Americas would once again slay his enemies and bring victory home to Natalie and MAGAland. The crowds would cheer, he would keep getting rich, and Todd Blanche would keep the legal lilliputians like Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Katie Phang and those Dem AGs at bay. Everything would be fine.

But everything is really not fine. Democrats saw heightened performance in special elections all over the country these past two years. We blew it out in the November elections last year. We saw elevated performances in the primaries all across the US his year. Our candidates have raised gobs of money and the House Democrats have outraised little Mikie J. Inflation kept rising, job growth kept slowing, his glorious war went to shit, and his poll numbers just keep falling. The VP turned out to be a lifeless dud. His friend Lindsay passed. 

An American anti-Trump was elected Pope. Orban fell in Hungary. Putin kept getting humiliated by that little guy from Ukraine. His business partners in Saudi Arabia are getting routed by the Houthis. The Labour Party in the UK found a new leader and pushed the MAGA Reform Party into second place and escalating disarray. 

Vivek took a big, vile swing and gave away Ohio. Paxton turned out to be the shit candidate everyone warned him about. He had to fire lots of misbehaving staff, almost all women of course. The leaks from inside became a geyser. Then this week his allies in Serbia, Brazil, and Israel all lost their elections - yikes! 

The oligarch funded Senate firewall collapsed. And the old, unwell, addled, traitorous, rapacious, venal, big, blubbery baby man was forced to confront his failure and decline by having to campaign to embarrassingly small crowds in places like Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, and South Carolina. He began repeatedly gushing over the beauty and strength of manly men, perhaps as a way of attempting to restore his own. Texas, of all places, was falling. The faithful weren’t showing up in the early vote and young, Black, and Hispanic voters - them - were showing up bigly. 

Not a pretty picture, but one we have reason to believe is accurate.

Meanwhile, the watchword for the coming week is "be prepared, not scared."

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.