Canvassing my neighbors for peace

Yesterday I spent a few hours canvassing my neighborhood for the Million Doors for Peace. The project aimed to marry electoral technology and practices with peace activism to keep the issue of the ongoing war in Iraq on our easily distracted officeholders' minds.

One of the novel features of this electoral season is that cheap, easy manipulation of reasonably accurate lists of voters has finally come. For years, those of us who worked on field campaigns struggled with "those damn lists." The materials we got from voter registrars and vendors were inaccurate, expensive and difficult to print in forms that we could use. Volunteers spent endless hours inputting or correcting data that might, or might not, be used to turn out supporters in the election. It was all painfully cumbersome.

Nowadays, campaigns put voter lists online in easy-to-use database software. The Million Voices project aimed to recruit 25,000 volunteers who would each be assigned 40 new or infrequent voters who were their near neighbors to visit on Saturday. We could easily download our individual lists (based on our addresses) and print them. The instructions were online as well. All we had to do was go door and door and ask folks to sign a petition to our Congresspeople urging them to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq within one year. The rationale was simple and sensible:

Most Americans oppose the war in Iraq, but have never been directly invited to participate in an anti-war action. By engaging people where they live, neighbor-on-neighbor, Million Doors for Peace will elevate the debate over the war and its costs.

I can testify that online technology worked perfectly. I got my list with no problem and I uploaded my results with no problem. I don't know yet how many peace activists actually worked on this project, but I am willing to believe the Million Doors organizers that this was "the year's largest anti-war mobilization." I'll post an update when I get a report on how we did. ***So what was it like going door to door for peace? I've separated my report from the foregoing as I think my experience was profoundly idiosyncratic, a product of the wonderful but difficult San Francisco Mission neighborhood where I live.

It didn't take me long to hit every address I was assigned. Every one of them was within a long block of my house. You see, I live in a very dense, very transient pocket of the Mission. As many as six of these "new or infrequent" voters were behind the same door. Or rather, as I quickly discovered, may have lived there at some time.

"Daisy? ... oh yes, I think she lived here a couple of years ago.

Maria? Well we get mail in that name sometimes...but we have no idea who she is..

A large chunk of my voters were long gone.


The neighborhood was already well draped with candidate literature. We have a hot contest for who will be the next supervisor for District 9. I assured everyone I talked with that I wasn't representing any candidate.


But mostly, the doors near my house look like this: fenced off by a metal gate with three broken doorbells and no name plates. I was unable to reach 6 theoretical "voters" there.

Though this is described as a Latino neighborhood, and it is, most of the people on my list were probably young whites who had moved on, judging by the people I did meet at those addresses.

So my results were pretty puny. Two folks agreed to sign the petition; I verified that about 10 were no longer here; and the rest were unreachable by me in one days work. That would be terrible results in an electoral canvass. It is a rule of thumb that a canvasser in a suburb can reach about 14 people an hour and it has been true in my experience. But not here, not in the Mission.

My most interesting encounter was probably with the woman who wouldn't sign the petition because she unapologetically approves of the war. We sure don't have a lot of those around here. I guess gentrification is coming ...

S.L.I.M.E. marches on

Goodness -- near honesty coming from the New York Times:

Q. So is it fair to say that Americans who are neither rich nor reckless are being asked to rescue people who are? What is in this package for responsible homeowners of modest means who might be forced out of their homes, perhaps for reasons beyond their control?

A. Yes, you could argue that people who cannot tell soybean futures from puts, calls and options are being asked to clean up the costly mess left by Wall Street.

You'll be glad to know why not only crony capitalist Republicans, but also our supposed defenders of the little guy among the Dems will vote for pillage:

...the parties are likely to reach an accord. Many members of Congress are eager to leave Washington to go home and campaign for the November elections, and no one wants to face the voters without having done something...

The Trillion Dollar S.L.I.M.E. Act of 2008

This is a guest post from my partner Rebecca who knows more about matters financial than I do. She's smart.

It seems the Bush administration has suddenly woken up, looked around, and been shocked to discover that its friends and allies in the financial world are losing a lot of money. For months ordinary people have been losing their homes, while Bush & Co. pressed the snooze button. Now that the slime has begun to touch the Big Boys of Wall Street, they're hitting the panic button instead.

The New York Times reports this morning that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and President Bush are asking Congress for "far reaching emergency powers to buy hundreds of billions of dollars in distressed mortgages despite many unknowns about how the plan would work."

If Congress does what Bush & Co. are asking for, the result will be the SLIME Act of 2008. Under Bush's plan, the government would not even administer this cesspool of bad debt. Paulson says that the Treasury Department will hire "professional investment managers" to run the most expensive government program ever undertaken in this country. Professional investment managers? Aren't they the guys who got us into this mess in the first place?

That's why I call the Bush plan the S.L.I.M.E. Act. It's the Successful Looting and Investment Manager Employment Act.

The Times is right about the "unknowns," but I'd like to suggest a few things we do know about the Bush plan:

1) It's not a plan. It's a set of broad new powers for the Treasury department. Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson are asking for a blank check from us to buy up somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion dollars worth of almost worthless securities from Wall Street banks and investment firms. The theory is that the government will be able to turn around and sell these securities (which are basically bundles of sliced-up bad mortgages) to recoup some of that "investment." But if the banks can't sell them, why should we be able to?

2) These new powers would seem to have no limits -- on time or money. There's no ceiling on the amount to be spent or on how long the Treasury department will be permitted to go on buying bad investments from banks that make bad bets.

3) We the taxpayers are not just "taking over" bad assets from the banks that own them. We will be buying them. Nothing in the Bush "plan" says who will set the price, or how high the price can go. The more the banks can get for these securities, the smaller the loss for their investors. They have every incentive to set the price as high as possible. And Bush & Co. have every incentive to scratch the backs of their Wall Street buddies and go along with that high price.

Remember that back in the 1980's the biggest thievery happened after the Reagan administration set up the Resolution Trust Corporation to buy up the failing assets of savings & loans institutions. The government paid top dollar then, and a lot of rich people got richer even as the institutions they had been running went under.

4) There's no rush. Yes, the financial sector of the economy is in real trouble. But this problem didn't appear over night. In fact, it started back in the Clinton administration, when Congress undid bank regulations that had been in place since the Depression. If it took ten years to get us into this mess, Congress can take more than ten days to get us out of it.

Congress should take the time to make sure that any bailout for the banks and investment firms also includes:

• Mortgage relief and renegotiation for people at risk of losing their homes

• Clear price limits and negotiation mechanisms for purchasing bad assets

• Plans for re-regulating the banking and investment industry

• As little S.L.I.M.E. as possible!

Peace movement keeping on

In San Francisco's Bernal Heights, neighbors vigil for peace on September 19. The fellow in the red on the right is local candidate for city Supervisor in District 9, Eric Quezada.

Yesterday marked the beginning of the second year of the Iraq Moratorium campaign. The project urges activists all over the country to take public antiwar actions on the third Friday of every month until we end that war. And people do. This vigil group stands at Cortland and Andover each month.

Meanwhile, over at U.C. Berkeley, a teach-in was taking place in the student union building, bringing together veterans of the anti-Vietnam movement of 1968 with contemporary antiwar activists.


Current students were pretty interested.

Nobody had all the answers for the contemporary peace movement, but there were some interesting observations. I wrote down some quick bits from the speakers.


The only woman on the panel, Antonia Juhasz, author of the forthcoming book, The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry -- and What We Must Do To Stop It, exhorted her listeners:

We shouldn't expect a headline that says "Antiwar activism turned the US people against the war." But something did turn them around. We need to embrace our successes as well as recognize how much we have to do.

The two vets from current wars brought energy and passion.

Cleavon Gilman joined the Army in 1999. It was peacetime and he needed a job. They made him a corpsman. In Iraq, he saw soldiers he knew blown to pieces. He worked for a time at a prisoner processing facility where Iraqis were held on suspicion of being terrorists. The U.S. troops guarding them mostly saw "hajiis" and "niggers." He said "these 'terrorists' looked pretty peaceful to me." Pretty soon he figured out there was a pattern. A U.S. unit would search a town; their base would get attacked. "There was a kind of cause and effect thing happening over there." He left the military and now is student at UCB.

The other vet, Forrest, had served in Afghanistan. A member of Iraq Veterans against the War, he described the changes in himself as his experiences in the war zone pushed him from a gung-ho post-9/11 patriotism to a belief that "we're being like Hitler."


Professor Carlos Munoz of UC Berkeley clings to the convictions that animated so many antiwar activists in 1968, insisting

"movements are hurt by electoral politics"

Sixties activist, later a California legislator and currently a principle founder of Progressives for Obama, Tom Hayden brought messages more in tune with today's campus enthusiasms. Of Senator Obama he maintained

Sometimes there are figures who come along who create the space for a movement to fill. ...If he wins, the struggle will be to hold him accountable.

If McCain wins, there'll be a race between radicalization and depression.

Hayden warns that the wars of the next few years are likely to be "counterinsurgency" operations rather than invasions with large troop commitments.

Counterinsurgency means you try to get non-white people to fight your wars against each other.

[Our rulers don't want us messing with their wars.] We are the target of counterinsurgency. ... We need less 'study war no more' -- it is going to have to be 'study war much more.'

Hayden looks to veterans and a new generation of activists to make the wars of the empire visible to the people our rulers would rather keep in the dark. He sees continued activism as the way to create momentum for peace.

No joking matter ...

Got to be the best line of the day:

One of the nice things about being a Democrat with a stock portfolio is that your risks are fairly well hedged. If the market goes up, then you make money, and if the market goes down, then you're more likely to see a Democrat elected President.

Nate Silver,
Five-Thirty-Eight

When you are screwed, you might as well laugh. Perhaps until you think about this:



That's 3:16 on what the financial meltdown would mean if Republicans had managed to privatize Social Security. With the bailouts, it appears they too have successfully hedged their bets: while the casino spun happily on, they made money. When the crash came, we the people get to save their sorry asses.

Republicans for Obama

San Francisco Chronicle writer Carla Marinucci passes on the news that

California Republican Richard Riordan, the millionaire businessman and former mayor of Los Angeles, has announced he's endorsing Barack Obama for president. ....

''We want the best person to be president of the United States, whether they are Republican or Democrat, and clearly Obama is the best candidate,'' said Riordan, a former state secretary of education, adviser to and long-time supporter of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is backing John McCain.

''Senator Obama is the kind of leader we need to get us through these tough economic times.''

Riordan is a kind of Republican who is almost extinct in California: a plutocratic realist. Around here, Republicans have dwindled to a minority party, a fractious repository for intolerant Christianists, explicitly racist white people terrified of demographic changes, and wacky climate change deniers. The only way they get any political traction is stirring up fear and repugnance for other Californians.

There are a few other prominent Republicans endorsing Obama, among them a retiring Congressman from Maryland, Wayne Gilchrest, and former Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee. These gentlemen also apparently think that being in government is about facilitating and preserving the country's wellbeing, rather than about purging the impure and enabling pillage by the lucky.

I doubt I share hardly any policy prescriptions with these Obama-endorsing dissenters from the GOP, but I can imagine I might share some values. What's frightening is that I don't believe I share any values with the other, much more numerous, kind of Republican. And since I think that in the end it is all about community, that's scary because we are stuck in this together.

How racism works (campaign edition)

Someone I don't know named Kelvin LaFond has written a letter to the editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that describes how racism works in the Presidential election with admirable brevity. I don't know whether that newspaper will/did print it, but I can reproduce it here [minor edits for clarity].

What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said "I do" to?
What if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after she no longer measured up to his standards?

What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicted to pain killers, but acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama were a member of the "Keating 5"?
What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

This is what racism does.

It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

Obama defends Constitution

On Constitution Day (did you know we had such a thing?) this video [5:45] seems on the mark. Last week at a town hall meeting in Michigan, Barack Obama called on an articulate and very distressed citizen who gave a mini-speech as so many questioners will. She wants her country back.



And after some overly bellicose warm-up posturing, Obama explained and defended the principle of habeas corpus and the rule of law. He knows why we need it.

"We might think we've grabbed Barack the terrorist, when in fact we've got Barack who is running for President."

He could say more. He could say a lot more. But unlike the other guy, he demonstrates that he knows what the Constitution is and that we need it to set some limits on the arbitrary power of the state. Electing him would give those of us who care about the rule of law a place to start clawing our country back.

H/t the Washington Independent.

Trapped by no fly list This story is no joke

Abousfian Abdelrazik is a Sudanese-Canadian. He immigrated in 1990 in search of a better life as a machinist. In 2002 he flew to the country of his birth to visit his sick mother. And, against his will, he has been there ever since.

He was twice imprisoned by the Sudanese, locked up from August 2003 to July 2004 and November 2005 to July 2006, despite no charges against him. He reports he was tortured.

Apparently his name turned up on a United Nations terrorist watch list. He is suspected of ties to Al Qaeda, though no legal process has shown any connection. He may have known with some shady people at a mosque he attended in Montreal. In April 2008, still on an international no fly list, he took refuge in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum where he is still holed up. The Canadian government has been reluctant to help their citizen and no airline has been willing to book a flight for him. Abdelrazik has four Canadian children, one of who he has never seen.

There are reports that Canada's big southern neighbor may be involved in the quasi-imprisonment of this guy.

Canadian intelligence warned against allowing Abdelrazik to return over fears it could upset US officials, who also have him on a no-fly list.

The daily said Washington labeled Abdelrazik a threat on July 20, 2007 -- the same day he was released from Sudanese custody.

At one point the Canadian government said it would issue him a new passport (guess what, his old one expired while he was locked away?) but now they have backed off. Amnesty International has gotten involved.

"If there are valid security concerns in this case, deal with them lawfully and fairly through Canadian law in Canadian courts," said Alex Neve of Amnesty International.

"It is time for the government to take swift action to ensure Abousfian Abdelrazik is able to return to Canada," he said. "It is time for him to face justice, not injustice."

Not surprisingly, Canadian Muslims are very concerned about this case. If Uncle Sam fingers someone, does he drop in a black hole? Perhaps.

As a United States citizen, I find it depressing that my government is apparently pushing Canada to violate its own legal standards -- and depressing that Canada is going along.

John McCain: imprisoned in wars past;Too ready for future wars

"He will make Cheney look like Gandhi." So says a guy who is pretty scary himself -- right wing commentator Pat Buchanan. This video is a little slow developing, but stay with it. [5:02]



So much for the implications of McCain's "understanding" of terrorism. He can't or won't take in the reality of the world we all live in.

One of McCain's major foreign policy advisers is Robert Kagan. According to H.D.S. Greenway in the Boston Globe, here's how Kagan thinks the United States should conduct its foreign policy:

Today's so-called realists, Kagan says, are "supposed to be locked into some titanic struggle with neoconservatives . . . but rather than talk about power, they talk about the United Nations, world opinion, and international laws." Sissy stuff.

Greenway points out how backward looking this is:

Clearly China wants to be part of the world economic system and has little interest in threatening neighbors. True, China believes Taiwan should one day return to the fold, but is not bent on invading Taiwan and accepts the status quo as long as Taiwan does.

As for Russia, it cannot be excused for its lunge into Georgia, but it was the US-trained Georgian Army that upset the status quo in South Ossetia. Nations, like human beings, can feel threatened and lash out when attacked, but hostility is not an immutable trait.

It would do no harm to recognize that Russia has an interest in what happens in the countries along its southern flank as does the United States on this continent.

To view Russia and China as nothing more than villains striving to expand their power at the expense of the West is simply to fight the last war, the Cold War, over and over when the geopolitical terrain has changed.

At root, what ails McCain is that the war that screwed up his life and body was lost while he was captive in Vietnam. His suffering (not self-sacrifice, please; the Vietnamese did exactly what he would have done and shot back and he ended up a prisoner) took place in the context of national defeat, not national glory. The guy wants another chance at winning a shooting war. And he blames those pesky civilians who stood up for the Constitution against Richard Nixon for robbing his sacrifice of the kickass triumph he feels entitled to.

McCain went on, "I believe I might take this one step further. We had literally all Americans out by 1973, and we had a Vietnamese army that was pretty capable but they needed our air support … and Richard Nixon could not use air power because of Watergate,...

"I think it was winnable," he said.

The author of this Atlantic Magazine article concluded:

In one area, though, he has been more or less constant: his belief in the power of war to solve otherwise insoluble problems. ...

For McCain, the doctrine of preemption clearly falls outside the realm of mere politics, as does the need to "win," rather than "end," wars; the safety of America demands that they be fought, and honor demands that they be won.

The agony McCain suffered in a losing cause has left him unable to adjust to realities. Apparently he really believes the U.S. can "win" by destroying other countries despite bankrupting itself and without concern for "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." He is a dangerous man.

Stop it with the emails!

I get lots of email and so do you. Much of it lately has consisted of long lists of shocking or mocking commentary on Sarah Palin. Or Palin joke. Or photoshopped pictures. Some of it has been anguished complaints about the blatant lying from the McCain campaign,

Okay -- but can we stop throwing these bones to each other now? There's a vital Presidential campaign to work through...

John McCain has found no agenda to run on, except continuing in a muddled way with the failed policies of the Bush era. The Palin selection is just a reckless, attention grabbing ploy by a washed up candidate. McCain has nothing to run on. He gives us an attractive, slightly vicious, bauble to distract us.

Then he touts the only asset he's got: his personal history, his past honor. POW, POW, POW. But since he has no real agenda for the country, all he has done is drag his own moments of pain and courage through the campaign season mud. It's kind of sad.

Those of us who want something else need to help voters turn away from McCain, to understand that he has had to trash his own best moments because he has no vision, and to explain that Obama does offer the possibility of hope and change.

I like this from Jeffrey Feldman:

John McCain lies because he does not know how to solve real problems, because he has no faith in the American people, because he wants to force the country backward instead of lead us together into the future.

More and more people are getting hammered by a financial system that treats the work and wealth of our people as a giant casino for the flashy and greedy. Can we afford more of the same? Of course not.

We want better and fortunately someone is offering better. With Barack Obama, we have a chance to hope again in our country. Yes, we can.

In transit today

More airplanes, more zoning out to survive the plastic cattle cars we fly in.

I had a pretty special seatmate on one leg:


Her name is Bean. Whenever the stewards were elsewhere, she stuck her head out of her carrier and checked out the scene. I think she got treats from her person -- she certainly was entirely quiet and calm about this novel experience.

51 days and counting...

If you don't like how the Presidential campaign is shaking out, if you are disgusted by the racist appeals the sleazy McCain campaign is peddling, don't whine. DO SOMETHING.


These folks did. They were registering young voters at the Mission satellite campus of the City College of San Francisco last week.


Of course, they would give the forms to anyone, but it was pretty clear who they wanted to elect.

To get involved in the Obama campaign, start here. It sometimes takes persistence to find volunteer options you can do in a campaign, but sitting back and complaining isn't going to make a difference.

And if you can't stomach the Obama campaign, try signing up for the Million Doors for Peace this coming weekend.

Friday critter blogging Meet Beanie

She doesn't look mean, does she? But Beanie is a working dog, the terror of stable rats. She catches them and shakes til their eyes pop out.

Then she goes and looks for a lap to sit on.

Mournful thoughts for 9/11, seven years on

I'm writing in an airport waiting to rush off on yet another trip halfway across the country. Busy, busy, busy.

I've negotiated "security," that silly ritual of pulling off shoes, pulling out laptop -- as I write this I realize, it being 4:45 am, I forgot to pull out my quart size bag of toothpaste and hair gel. Not a peep from the screeners as my bag passed through the scanner with the forbidden items in the pocket. So much for this theatrical ritual.

Within days of 9/11, a wise friend wrote an open letter with some advice for his stunned community of progressive friends. I paraphrase from memory: Do not, whatever you do, start talking about chickens coming home to roost ... in this national atmosphere of shock, anger and grief, people won't want to hear.

Seven years on, I will say aloud that those chickens are still coming home. The terrible attacks stunned a nation drifting in blissful but culpable ignorance. Too many of us thought we could ignore the ambitions of billions of other human beings who yearn for lives of some security, for respect for their histories and unique cultures, for a decent share of global wellbeing. Their pain was not our concern as we, five percent of the world's population, grabbed 25 percent of the world's energy resources, to take one example of our disproportionate consumption.

A kindergartener would know that such a division of the toys couldn't last -- but we are mightily armed kindergarteners crashing around in the world as if the planet were our playpen.

Our rulers used our naïve anger and ignorance to lead us into one completely unjustified war based on lies. In that war, we've torn apart a country, covered ourselves in shame as torturers and murderers -- and, despite all our power, are in the process of being thrown out, though we don't acknowledge this. Meanwhile, we're mired in another failing and spreading war in the wilds of Central Asia where we can rain death from the skies, but cannot bring peace and stability on the ground and see no disengagement in prospect.

And at home, fear and vengeance have trumped attachment to Constitution and the tradition of the rule of law, not men. These emotions have assaulted the virtue that accompanies our innocence, our generous hopeful spirit. We have become hooked on adrenaline and anxiety. We accept the theater of security and allow massive spying on individuals and raids that sweep up and disappear the Muslim, brown, foreign others who we are encouraged to fear.

We are locked in a Presidential campaign in which fear and greed are using every racist, sexist tactic in the book to try to drown hope and change. ***Later. Yet another airport. My flight is delayed. What else is new?

And yet, and yet...none of this post-9/11 horror show is over yet. Terrible possibilities that have not yet happened cannot be allowed to kill good possibilities that might yet triumph. Every day we live, we have the chance to make our impasse worse -- or make some tiny bit of this sad country a little better.

We can create friction that grinds away at the wall of fear and ignorance. We can try to choose for life and hope. There aren't really any other options. That can happen here.

Less worrying -- more working

Feeling down about the apparent stall of Barack Obama's campaign since the conventions? There's a remedy. DO SOMETHING!

Today MoveOn.org offered me a chance to act; I did as instructed and I feel better already. This project is over -- but you can achieve the same moderate relief from campaign anxiety. Stop fretting; start working.

Here's the poop on my little effort this afternoon, worthy of reporting, I think, because it was a smart project and a smart use of contemporary technological possibilities.

The email explained:

Starting tomorrow, thousands of your fellow MoveOn members in battleground states will be volunteering at hundreds of local Obama campaign office -- knocking on doors, making phone calls, registering new voters, and more.

They're going to make a big difference -- which is why we want to make doubly sure that we're giving them the right addresses and phone numbers.

That's where we need your help. Can you spend a few minutes calling at least ten Obama offices to make sure the info we have for them is correct?

I didn't have time, but it seemed a good idea and I did it anyway.

The online tools were good. Here's the script:

Here's what the call screen looked like after I'd finished a call:

Here's what popped up after 6 calls:

This was worth doing. If your campaign is going to use volunteers, you have to make them confident you are not wasting their time. That includes sending them to the right address at a time when the campaign office will be open. Don't laugh. On a project this large, it would be easy to screw up and burn off some willing enthusiasts.

The folks getting the calls at Obama offices were nice, full of energy. The offices I called had just opened. They liked the idea of MoveOn sending in the troops. They'll welcome you and put you to work if you go join them.

As a multi-national corporation once urged: "Just do it."

The Otherness of Barack Obama: "It's the names"

This McCain ad aims to make sure you remember the Democratic candidate is a "skinny Black guy with a funny name."

The other day a friend of mine admitted something she found very upsetting, something she was sure she'd be condemned for. She finds the idea of Barack Obama in the White House frightening.

She's a hard working, accomplished, late middle-aged, working class white woman. Deeply ensconced in the liberal ambiance of Northern California, she will vote for Obama in November; about that there is no question. But she finds the idea of him as president scary.

Friends, a little shocked but supportive, pressed her -- "Why? What is it that gives you that feeling?"

She suggested, "It's my racism..." But we knew that, though true as it is for all of us who are white, was too vague to be meaningful. She thought some more and explained, "It's the names. I felt it when I watched Michelle's speech and his daughters came on stage. They were called something I can't pronounce."

Obama's daughters are named Malia Ann and Sasha (short for Natasha, actually).

Neither of these is an uncommon name in the present United States. According to the name frequency tool described here, Malia ranked 403rd in popularity for girls in 2007. The name did not appear with any frequency before the mid-1970s. Sasha, as a girl's name (I think of it as something men are called in Russian fiction) ranked 350th in 2007. It was 256th in the mid-1980s and largely unused before the 1960s.

My friend's name, which I am not going to share out of respect for the quality of confidence she gave us in discussing something that troubled her, hit 259th in the mid-1930s and just about disappeared from common usage shortly after she was born.

And "no names starting with Barack were in the top 1000 names in any decade" according to the same tool. That may change.

So what is with white perceptions that African Americans have "strange" names, besides a stratagem to deflect awareness of our own racism?

I did a little light-weight research on the history of African American naming customs here and here. Both authors suggest that laying great stress on the empowerment of naming may have roots in the African customs brought by the slaves. But since losing the power to choose one's own name was of the essence of slavery, selecting one's name became identified with freedom.

The slaves brought to the U.S. from Africa had to endure a number of brutal crimes against them, not the least of which was being stripped of the names they were given in their native countries. These names held great importance, as they were often bestowed during special ceremonies held to celebrate the giving of a new name. This forced abandonment of something so precious destroyed a vital link to their countries of origin and took away a heritage that dated back much further than that of their enslavers. ... Slave owners thought nothing of replacing what they considered to be strange-sounding, exotic names with ones they could more easily pronounce. ...

After the conclusion of the Civil War, one of the first things that many freed slaves did was cast aside the names that had been forced upon them by their former masters and adopt new names that reflected their freedom.

In my own lifetime, I've seen another flowering of African American naming choices. When I was younger, I thought, from experience, of Black people as having names like "Eddie Washington" and "Eva Jefferson." But since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, African Americans have exercised joyous creativity in naming their children, adopting names that people thought of, rightly or wrongly, as authentically African, or Muslim, or simply beautiful.

This freedom in naming has a cost in discrimination from white society. The National Bureau of Economic Research reports a complex 2001 study in which resumes from fictitious persons whose race might be signaled by their names were sent out in response to Chicago "help wanted" ads.

Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback.

Names matter.

During the Democratic National Convention, I remember reading somewhere a complaint that every speaker kept saying over and over "Barack Obama..." this and "Barack Obama..." that. Maybe that was far more intentional than I realized. Maybe the speechwriters and speech vetters over-repeated the candidate's name in order to help inoculate white America against our instinctive racist recoil from an unfamiliar moniker.

On some level this works. Note that my friend described her discomfort with "the names" as stemming from the family, not the guy himself. We're getting used to "Barack Obama." We're getting used to thinking of "the skinny Black guy with the funny name" as our next President. We have a ways to go, but together we can get there.

Fun with taxes?

I must be kidding. But folks might like this. Follow the link to ObamaTaxCut.com, answer some simple questions (no hunting for all those papers) and find out how you'd fare under Senator Obama's tax proposals.

Bonus: you also get your tax fate under McCain's regime.

Putting us to the test: Are the American people stupid?

You decide. [3:58]

What is the Iraq war costing?

The total cost of the Iraq War will be over $3 trillion, according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard public finance professor Linda Bilmes. That's enough to buy a new Toyota Prius for every household in America.

For a new example every day, just visit War? Or Car?

Recent ones I liked included: Buy Ohio State - Michigan tickets until the sun becomes a red giant and Buy a platinum vibrator studded with diamonds for each woman in Europe and the Americas.

Visit frequently, then do something about this criminal waste -- including electing Obama.

Back to the real world: Descent into Chaos

The debased politics of the United States certainly can make one question whether the rule of law or democracy can be sustained in a commercial communications environment. But until recently, the world did have a good-sized supply of true believers in these accomplishments of European civilization: the insurgent "western-leaning," educated classes of exploited and misruled former European colonies were some of the most ardent believers anywhere. For example, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh is reported to have admired the U.S. Constitution -- until the United States committed itself to preventing the Vietnamese from choosing their own path.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid was another such believer whose trust has soured. His new book, Descent into Chaos, is both the record of his personal disillusionment and a meticulous, invaluable, chronicle of how the United States has destroyed hope for democracy and development in Afghanistan, the other Central Asian "Stans," and Pakistan in the years since 9/11.

Rashid, and many like him, thought the United States would have to side with freedom in his native part of the world.

Initially, it seemed that 9/11 assured that the world would address the social stagnation and state failure in South and Central Asia. ...Afghanistan had to be rescued from itself. Autocratic regimes in Pakistan and Central Asia had to change their repressive ways and listen to their alienated and poverty stricken citizens. Iran had to be made part of the international community. The West had to wake up to the realities and responsibilities of injustice, poverty, lack of education and unresolved conflicts such as those in Kashmir and Afghanistan which it had ignored for too long and which could not longer be allowed to fester. The West and democratic-minded Muslims had to help each other counter this new and deadly form of Islamic extremism.

The attacks of 9/11 created enormous trepidation in the region as America unsheathed its sword for a land invasion of Afghanistan, but they also created enormous expectations for change and hope for a sustained western commitment to the region that would lift it out of poverty and underdevelopment. Surely the 3000 American dead lying in the rubble n the Hudson as well as the others in Pennsylvania and Washington had not died in vain. Surely we would remember them not for the revenge that the United States was about to take on Al Qaeda, but for the hope that their deaths had brought to a neglected corner of the globe. Instead, seven years on, the US led "war on terrorism" has left in its wake a far more unstable world than existed on that momentous day in 2001.

The book is an exhaustive, pained narrative of the abysmal U.S. failure in Central Asia.

As the U.S. gets slowly booted from Iraq, this region is going to become the main zone of imperial conflict. Past performance ensures that the result will be bloody for the local population and probably fruitless for the NATO nations now embroiled there.

Ominously, today Juan Cole points out that with regard to the war in Pakistan/Afghanistan (yes, the U.S. is engaged in military action in both countries), "Obama looks closer to the thinking of the US officer corps in Afghanistan than does McCain."

If you want to know where your military is at 3 am, I cannot recommend Rashid's current book too highly.

P.A.N.T.H.E.R: "Sexism exsts"

[3:22] Watch when you need a laugh.

We have a "special responsibility" to disabled people

Long before Sarah Palin and her child (the one born last April with Down Syndrome) were even a gleam in John McCain's ambitious eye, I ran across this video in which Barack Obama describes what he would do about federal policies that assist physically and otherwise challenged people.

I have to say that I was surprised by the quality of it. The man knows the subject; he actually knows what is he talking about. And he has a concrete command of what government can and should do to assist disabled folks taking their rightful place in society. It is absolutely worth watching. [3:40]

Some of the assumptions that underlie his policy proposals:

• "We must build a world free of unnecessary barriers, stereotypes and discrimination."

• "Every nation has a special responsibility to look after those who can't live on their own."

• "We must support independent community-based living for anyone who chooses it."

Take the time to watch this. You'll be impressed. For Barack Obama, disabled people are not some "special interest" or suitable object of charity; disabled people are part of the national "we."

Friday critter blogging The dogs of Dolores Park

A week ago we caught one of the last performances of the San Francisco Mime Troupe's Red State. (Not to my taste, but other views were mixed.)


Over a small ridge, a middling size crowd listened to speeches and music commemorating the Chicano moratorium.


Renee Saucedo urged the crowd to attend a Town Hall meeting on the ICE raids on migrant families.


But for sheer enjoyment of the park, the winners were the many dogs.






San Francisco is having an extended summer this year. Dolores Park was at its best.

Oddest moment in McCain speech at RNC

We have bit of a competition for this prize. Fairly early on, Mr. Seven-or-So houses bemoaned the fate of a couple who

"lost their real estate investments in the bad housing market."

Gee, what about the 343,000 who lost their homes in the first half of this year? Most people live in their homes, John. Homes are kind of important to them. Sorry about the folks with the investments -- but how about the folks who need somewhere to live?

This oddity was rivaled by another:

"We believe everyone has something to contribute and deserves the opportunity to reach their God-given potential from the boy whose descendents arrived on the Mayflower to ..."

I keep reading that and wondering, what is he talking about? Some of my ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. They've been dead for a long time. Nobody is arriving now to have descendants. To be honest, I expected find this was a delivery gaffe -- but I found it in the text of the prepared remarks. I have no idea what McCain was talking about.

But that's over. Even the TV news babblers seemed relieved as they chatted about the failure of the balloon drop to emerge properly. On to November...

UPDATE on the foreclosures that John McCain seems not to understand: According to the Associated Press

A record 9 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage were either behind on their payments or in foreclosure at the end of June, as damage from the housing crisis continues to mount, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Friday.

But the source of trouble in the mortgage market has shifted from subprime loans made to borrowers with poor credit to homeowners who had solid credit but took out exotic loans with ballooning monthly payments. ...

More than one out of 10 borrowers with a prime adjustable-rate loan is now delinquent or in foreclosure. That portion, 11.3 percent, was up from 9.7 percent in the first quarter and is expected to continue to rise as more homeowners see their monthly payments spike.

This isn't about investments -- this is a prelude to homelessness for people who were encouraged to overextend themselves when banks and mortgage brokers saw an opportunity for a quick profit. The borrowers may have been foolish, but the people who set them up for this fall were crooks. And McCain doesn't get any of this. He has lots of houses.

The ThreeSame monster

Smug, ignorant and a little mean -- John McCain seems to have done the near impossible: found yet another Republican governor of small accomplishments to inflict upon a country that needs competence and a smidgen of sense.

McCain has apparently become a reckless man lost without any political compass except his own ambition.

Oddest line from Sarah Palin's speech at the RNC

My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of "personal discovery."

This seems a little incongruous coming from a person whose complete lack of qualifications for the office ensures that running for it can only be a journey of personal discovery.

Unremitting heat in a trashed city

While Republicans party and politicians pander in St. Paul, life goes on in the strange, harsh Baghdad that the U.S. invasion and occupation have made. Here's a bit of a word picture from Laith at Iraq Today.

It is summer in Iraq as it is in the northern half of earth but summer in Iraq is something different. ... let me say it is like hell. Yes, we practice hell every minute during summer in Iraq with a temperature of 107 degrees. Furthermore, Ramadan started. Today is the second day of Ramadan. ... That means to control myself from dawn until sunset. I must not eat or drink and I have also to control my nerves because fast means more than feeling hungry or thirsty. It means to feel the suffering of poor people and to behave like real good people.

When I come to office, I pass through the city center....Most of the convoys of the officials pass through this area also. ...A convoy of one of our (sacred officials) was waiting to pass. Six pick- up trucks of the Iraqi national police and the car of (his majesty the sacred official) is in the middle of them. I was walking in this hot day while his majesty was in his bullet proof air conditioned vehicle.

I was about to cross the street when one [of] the policemen ... shouted "Stop. Wait. Don't pass." I was like "what you want me to wait in this sunny place for the sake of a man?" I lifted my shirt mocking "see there is not explosive vest." ...A young soldier from the checkpoint on the side of the street came towards me smiling. He took my hand and he helped me to cross the street as if he was telling the policeman to be a human being. The policeman kept watching without saying a word. I felt I'm a child who can't do anything without the help of an adult....

With such officials who moves only with protection and air conditioned vehicles and who know nothing about their duty in Iraq and with such a stupid policeman (we have a lot of policemen who are the same as the one who stopped me); with such arrogan[ce] Iraq has no chance to walk one step forward.

Laith wants her country back -- and more and more sees no hope for ordinary Iraqis while politicians dither.

What was Coleman thinking?

"John McCain has a face that says 'YES.'" Norm Coleman (Senator, R-MN, a former mayor of St. Paul) just said that in a speech at the Republican Convention. I was driving, so I didn't catch the context -- I doubt that I wanted to.

Journalist Amy Goodman speaks in St. Paul

"Reporters are the eyes and eyes. They are what protects democracy. When those eyes are shut, when the ears are closed, democracy is threatened, and that's what they do when they arrest journalists." -- Pacifica Radio report.

Goodman's show tells the story.

ST. PAUL--Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar have all been released from police custody in St. Paul following their illegal arrest by Minneapolis Police on Monday afternoon.

All three were violently manhandled by law enforcement officers. Abdel Kouddous was slammed against a wall and the ground, leaving his arms scraped and bloodied. He sustained other injuries to his chest and back. Salazar’s violent arrest by baton-wielding officers, during which she was slammed to the ground while yelling, “I’m Press! Press!,” resulted in her nose bleeding, as well as causing facial pain. Goodman’s arm was violently yanked by police as she was arrested. ...

Goodman was arrested while questioning police about the unlawful detention of Kouddous and Salazar who were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman’s crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.

She was not supposed to do that, not supposed to let us know what goes on in the streets while the oligarchs party.

I'm frequently critical of street demonstrations as unimaginative and unfocused. But we should all be far more critical of "policing" that amounts to violent repression of unpopular opinions.

Labor Day

It's a little hard to tell whether these workers rendered in a heroic mural on the rectory of St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church in the San Francisco Mission District have put their shoulders to the wheel or are about to be rolled over.

Whatever else we get out of this election, let's hope the resulting Congress and President will approve the Employee Free Choice Act which would make it much harder for employers to keep their workers from forming unions if they wish.