Popes and the big tent

Day in and day out, I continue to be astonished and pleased by how much unity the big tent, anti-Trump and anti-oligarchic forces in our country are managing to achieve. 

Before the arrival of Donald Trump clarified much for many, I found Jennifer Rubin, then writing at the Washington Post, a loathsome Republican-excusing right wing pundit. She has been through some changes. The horror of the moment moves all of us in novel directions. Today Rubin writes prolifically at The Contrarian, using her sharp wit daily to skewer our aspiring dictator and his friends. 

I'll applaud this version of Rubin. Here is a bit from today exploring what for her is likely improbable religious terrain taken up by leaders opposing the inhuman global authoritarian project.

Autocrats Don’t Fare Well Against Faith Leaders

... Pope Leo is as much a problem for Trump as Pope John Paul II was for communist Poland. When a native son (Leo of America, John Paul II of Poland) expresses affection for and understanding of his countrymen in their native language during a time of the oppressive rule, the Pope can form an emotional bond that rises above politics. His message of faith, peace, and love reaches far beyond Catholic churches and compels people to focus on matters and values more profound and compelling than partisanship. A Pope in tune with his flock who promotes a values-based worldview can illuminate an autocrat’s smallness, meanness, and desperation.  ...

... As Catholics recall nearly fifty years later, Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland in June 1979 helped ignite a movement that would upend the communist regime. ... A year later, Solidarity formed in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk to spearhead the anti-communist political movement.

The Polish example reminds us that autocrats resort to bullying, violence, and fear because they cannot obtain people’s affection. Through personal experience with a despotic regime, regular people (whether in Poland in the 1980s or Hungary and the U.S. today) eventually recognize the regime as exploitive, corrupt, and cruel.

... The democracy movement is not a religious community, although faith motivates many in their opposition to ICE, racism, and neglect of the poor. Nevertheless, the pro-democracy movement can and should stay grounded in positive ideals — patriotism, decency, fairness, and empathy. Whether those values emanate from religious faith or humanistic values, once people rediscover a sense of obligation to something higher than themselves, they are more likely to lose fear of the regime, forge a community with other inspired democracy defenders, challenge authority, and view vulgar, crazed leaders as weak and transitory figures.

Democracy advocates should unabashedly denounce Trump in moral terms. Launching a war of choice and threatening genocide is evil. Taking away healthcare and food from the poor to enrich billionaires is wrong. Deporting grandmothers and children is cruel.

When the argument becomes right vs. wrong rather than right vs. left, an amoral, corrupt autocrat is cooked. ...

I might not be so generous toward an institutional church which still fails to appreciate the humanity of women and queers, but I too applaud when the generous and inclusive strain in Catholicism rises to the fore.  And Rubin's frame seems very correct in this moment. The autocrat is just in the wrong for us all.

It's Katie Porter time

Until Eric Swalwell's implosion (good riddance to another abuser of women), I hadn't paid much attention to the California governor's race. Any of the candidates might do...

Now I'm forced to dig in a bit -- and a very little reflection makes me realize what an odd contest this is.

• California has enjoyed extraordinary stability in the governor's office for the last 16 years. That's amazing to recognize. First we elected a used governor who had matured  and already knew the ropes (Jerry Brown 2011-2019), then his ambitious understudy who had cooled his jets watching Brown for eight years as Lieutenant Governor (Gavin Newsom 2019-2026). Love 'em or hate 'em, that experience mattered.

• Disposing of Swalwell helps, but there are still too damn many non-viable Dem also-rans on the June primary ballot. (Any who drop out will still appear at this point.) Sacramento denizens Tony Thurmond and Betty Yee never took flight. Xavier Becerra had a Sacramento background, but had been out of state for four years. Antonio Villaraigosa has been out of sight for longer. The tech bros got a late candidate in San Jose's Matt Mahan, but who is he? Can money elevate any of these non-starters?

• None of the three original contenders (now two) came out of experience with California government. California has a huge government, not easily mastered by any pol; ask Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sacramento is its own world, far removed from the daily lives of people, especially in the southern part of this huge state. But here we are left with Tom Steyer and Katie Porter who've never worked in state government. (Neither had Swalwell.)

• I think we can hope the combination of Trump endorsing one of the GOP cranks and getting rid of one of the genuine Dem contenders will ensure we will have some Democrat to vote for in November. But the Democratic Party circus sure doesn't inspire confidence.

So, out of Steyer and Porter, who am I for? 

To be blunt, Steyer has excellent issue positions, but this is no year to elect a billionaire to anything. It's a year to reject billionaires across the board; we need to stoke the populist backlash to the criminals in the national GOP, not default to a money guy in a Democratic stronghold. Steyer is a very good donor wanting to be a real player -- but that doesn't qualify him for me. 

That means I'm continuing to throw down for Katie Porter. I think she is getting the dismissive treatment from a lot of the punditocracy because she's a sharp woman. Her detractors brush her off with what amounts to "nice fat lady; should stay in her place." She made it abundantly clear in her service in Congress that she understands how money works in the lives of working Americans. That should matter in a governor. Yes, she's apparently abrasive; women who succeed in a power job tend to be tough cookies. Can we, finally, get to where women of ambition no longer have to present a charming public face that soothes egos? 

I'll vote in November for any Democrat who survives this shit show. But it is hard to be impressed with the politics of my state.

Strange times we live in

A friend sent me the original "Trump as Jesus raising the dead among the demons" image which you've probably seen. Yes, he posted it. Apparently even Trump's evangelical supporters blew a gasket and he's taken it down. 

But another friend posted an "improved" version which I share here:

Quite a cast of characters. Seems emotionally right. The guy is losing the few marbles he had.

History goes on ...

So Victor Orbán and his illiberal government have gone down to overwhelming electoral defeat in the Hungarian election. 

If most of us notice Hungary at all here in the USofA, it's as some little eastern European country that buddies up to Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, keeping other European Union countries from fully getting on board with Ukraine against Russian invasion. Or something like that. Oh, and that all our domestic American fascists seem to dote on this Orbán guy who just got beat by popular vote

That student of Eastern Europe Timothy Snyder published some philosophical ruminations on the Hungarian story -- and on us -- before today's vote:

... although Hungary might be a small country, we can draw some larger conclusions. The world has been plagued for a century by various “ends of history,” and those ends of history have arisen disproportionately in central and eastern Europe, in Hungary in particular.

The fascists of the 1930s, in Hungary and elsewhere, said that history was over, that all that remained was a biological struggle directed by a party elite. The communists, who came to power in Hungary after 1945 and elsewhere, said that history was over, replaced by scientific administration directed by a party elite. After the end of communism, speaking about Hungary and other post-communist states, too many of us declared that history was now indeed over, since fascism and communism have exhausted themselves, and all that remained was the imperturbable triad of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism.

From Hungary, Orbán showed that this was not true: capitalism could be corrupted; liberalism could be replaced by illiberalism (his word); and democracy could be turned into a ritual. Seduced by Hungary’s success, many on the far right came to see the Hungarian alternative as the next end of history, the way that things would be, the way that things had to be.

And they are wrong; history goes on. Just as Hungary once offered the international oligarchical far right the confidence that a formula had been found, it now offers to men such as Vance and Trump the anxiety that voting might actually make a difference, that democracy might actually turn out to be more than a slogan, that unpredictable change is still possible, that the future is open.

It's interesting to remember how my generation first become aware of Hungary. In 1957, when I was ten, there was a new girl in my small school who had arrived with her parents from somewhere far away. She was skinny and different. I learned she was from a country called Hungary where Russian tanks had put down a revolution and many educated people had fled. We were supposed to feel bad for her. I remember her as bright, speaking pretty good English, mostly notable because her parents made her go after our school day to language school to learn Chinese -- they feared the family would have to flee once again. Refugees learn caution. 

And, as Snyder reminds us, the future is open -- and we have some power to decide what direction it moves in.

Instructions for interpreting our Orange Toddler monster

Is he serious -- or is he bluffing? Journalist and activist Parker Molloy has some suggestions for navigating that question while Trump continues to bark and weave while threatening genocide.

She's insightful in describing how most of our media play Trump's game, falling for his lying feints over and over again.

By Tuesday, Operation Epic Fury had been running for six weeks. The whole time, Trump had been telling anyone listening exactly what he planned to do. He said Iran could be “taken out in one night,” and named the bridges and power plants that would come down. Each of those threats was parsed by the political press. Each was processed as leverage or theater. Each was written off as Trump being Trump.

Then the bombs started falling. On Kharg Island. On power plants. On bridges.

The ["take him seriously, but not literally] frame has a near-perfect track record of being wrong in one direction. It rarely overestimates how far Trump will go. It only underestimates him. A prediction that’s always wrong in the same direction stops being analysis and starts being an alibi.

[Newsweek senior editor-at-large Josh] Hammer reached for the ... line on the day Trump posted that a whole civilization would die that night. That’s the tell. That’s what “seriously, not literally” is actually for. The frame comes out when the sentence is so plainly monstrous that the only defense left is to tell the reader not to read. 

That's the pattern we are caught in by this decompensating madman. If JD cannot pull a rabbit out of an empty hat to cover up the United States' strategic defeat by the mullahs, she predicts we'll see some variant again:

... Since the war began, Trump has repeatedly backed off his own deadlines at the last possible hour. The sequence is always the same: threat, deadline, airstrike, walkback, a news cycle crediting him with dealmaking, the original threat filed away. The walkback itself becomes retroactive evidence that the morning post was never serious. And the next morning, he can say something worse.

By Wednesday morning, the headlines were about the Hormuz ceasefire. The genocide post was yesterday’s news. The laundering was happening in real time. 

Trump is failing at home. Even Melania is undermining his defenses. How about a little genocide in the one arena where his power is still apparently unfettered?  

Friday cat blogging

 

You might say Mio is putting his best face forward. You'd be right. Actually, he's a softy, but in this slightly wary posture, it is hard to tell.

 

Janeway, on the other hand, looks sweet and loving -- until she decides to explore her surroundings with teeth and occasional claws. I have the scars to prove it.

"The strikes were everywhere, all at once."

The Guardian's soft spoken reporter Will Christou spells out the shock in the Lebanese capital when Israel bombed central Beirut, killing at least 250 yesterday. This ten minute clip is much longer than what I usually post here, but I would urge readers to take the time to watch. It's not gory; instead, it is morally devastating.

The leaders of Israel are ethical monsters, as are our own US rulers. As, of course also, are the Iranian rulers and the princelings of the Gulf States. 

We give a f**k

That distinguished commentator on journalist practice and ethics Margaret Sullivan recognized immediately that the Orange Toddler's bleat would cause trouble for honest working reporters. 

The moment I saw Trump’s crazy and dangerous Truth Social post on the morning of Easter Sunday, I could imagine the freakout in newsrooms across the country. The essence of it would be something like this: “How much of this do we publish? How do we report this without breaking with every one of our standards and traditions?” 

The President of the United States demanded: "Open the Fuckin' Strait ..."

Later in the day, and by Monday morning, it was easy to see the results of all those internal discussions.

“Expletive-filled threat,” said the AP.

“Profane” and “expletive-laden,” said the Washington Post.

“Expletive-filled ultimatum,” said USA Today.

All I can say is that, the walls here in the San Francisco Mission district don't do euphemism.

 

Some political commentary looks quite elegant. 

 

Some uses posters. We encourage youth participation.

 

Some window signs are bilingual.

When we go to protest, we don't moderate our language.

 

Hey, we've got our own standards! 

Calling all California Democrats

We've got a race for a new governor on the ballot this year and, for the moment, it's a mess.

As you probably know, California chooses most of the candidates who appear on our November ballots by a crackpot "top two jungle primary" system. (I've always hated this foolishness, but the voters chose it by referendum, so here we are.) Everyone seeking a state office runs on the same ballot in the June primary; that includes all Democrats, Republicans, and whatever other nuts may be out there. 

Only the two with the highest number of votes in June get to move on to contest the fall election when most normal voters get around to tuning in. That's what the primary is for, to pick the genuine candidates. Or at least what it should be for: weeding out those with no chance. 

But this year, a ridiculous number of politicians think Californians just might decide to want them as governor. In addition to two right wing Republicans who have fractional support, eight Democrats are competing for our votes. 

Five of the Dems are living also-rans who have proved unable to break into more than 8 percent (and usually much less) in polling. 

Three of the Dems are running neck and neck in the mid-teens in polling. And of those, any of the three might have a chance to win the job. The other low-polling five are vanity candidates, just taking up space. 

The two Republicans also poll in the teens. No Republican is going to win the governor race against any Democrat. Dems are some 45 percent of the state's electorate, while Reps are about 25 percent while the rest are independents who mostly vote for a Dem.

But while the Dems divide their votes among eight candidates, five of whom haven't got a chance, it's numerically possible that the top two highest voter winners in June could be the two Republicans! Dems would not have a November candidate.

The five also-ran Democrats need to do the state a favor and DROP OUT NOW!

The ones who should drop out now for the good of the state are:

Xavier Becerra: info@xavierbecerra2026.com

Antonio Villaraigosa: contact@antonio2026.com

Matt Mayhan: mayor@sanjoseca.gov

Betty Yee: info@bettyyee.com

Tony Thurmond: info@tonythurmond.com

Some big names there. But these folks have not caught fire and merely endanger their state by staying in a race they can't win. Their personal ambition should give way to the good of the community they claim to want to serve. I've provided email addresses: we can thank them for their service and ask them politely to step aside for the common good. 

Then, take your pick among the genuine Dem prospects; links are to their websites:

Katie Porter 

Eric Swalwell 

Tom Steyer 

If we can get the also-rans out of the running, we can forget about the two Republican knuckle-draggers. But serious California Dems need to step up and let the voters choose their candidate without letting personal ambition risk the well-being of us all. 

• • •

For a more temperate description of this absurd California kerfuffle, see this link. 

This is a madman

I think reporter and historian Garrett M. Graff is only being responsible by discussing the unthinkable out loud. This is what keeps us awake at night.

Is Trump About To Nuke Iran?  
The fact we can't say "no" for sure should terrify us.

... The simple fact that we can’t say “definitely no, absolutely not, for sure” is an astounding commentary on how unhinged and dangerous his presidency has become and how far off the rails the war with Iran has gone as Trump flails about with no plan, no strategy, no exit, and a global economy that day-by-day is reeling from the biggest geopolitical oil shock in history. ...

... I think we have to take seriously the possibility that Trump does consider nuclear weapons as an answer to his own floundering in Iran. ...

 

Graff excoriates the media for failing to digest and raise up Trump's threats seriously. An historian of Watergate, he knows about the "Madman Theory" -- Richard Nixon's bluffing approach to threatening North Vietnam. During Trump's first term, he saw some of that acting in Trump's bellicose threats to North Korea. But he fears Trump's current antics are something else.

... Are we really this inured to unhinged comments that “Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell” doesn’t even warrant a full 24-hour news-cycle?

... This isn’t just “Madman Theory.” This is a madman. Trump’s “leadership” is indistinguishable from your crazy uncle yelling at the TV. He is clearly unwell. And increasingly desperate. He thought he could start a war and turn it off when he wanted, and now has delivered the US a perhaps generational strategic defeat in the Middle East.

... As Vermont’s congresswoman Becca Balint said yesterday — in one of the few and too-rare strong statements of condemnation — “"If President Biden or President Obama had said anything remotely like this, it would be nonstop coverage on every single channel and everyone on the other side of the aisle would be howling about it and demanding that they step down.”

... for the first time, it’s the president who represents an unstable and reckless part of the nuclear equation. Trump, after all, is someone who thinks we could even use a nuclear weapon to defeat a hurricane. We have no idea how the coming weeks of the Iran war will unfold, but does anyone think Donald Trump’s going to be less unhinged and more stable and more thoughtful as the US strategy continues to flounder? .... I’d personally put the chance that Donald Trump uses a nuclear weapon against Iran at some point in the three percent range — which is a stunningly high number, given the history of nuclear weapons and the presidency. ...

Can the U.S. figure out how to curb a lunatic in power? Guess we're going to find out.