Harvest Blessing

Before life turned him into a vintner, the Rev. John Staten taught academic theology. Nearly 40 years ago, he was my partner's adviser when she was an undergraduate. Now he annually offers a blessing of the harvest at his family's Field Stone Winery in Sonoma County's Alexander Valley. This past weekend, we were privileged to join a group of Staten friends and fans for the annual celebration.


The program for the gathering offered a text:

There is a reality in blessing. It doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is power in that. I have felt it passing through me.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

I found it easy in this setting to drift off into the beauty of the land.


After song and reflection, we all shared grape juice so fresh it tasted alive.


Katrina Staten chatted with her guests.


The Alexander Valley was quiet and bountiful on Saturday afternoon.

Hold Olympia Snowe accountable

If Senator Olympia Snowe is going to be the crucial "decider" of what kind of health care reform we are allowed to have, those of us out outside of Maine can at least help some of her constituents remind her of what she owes to them.



You can help get this ad on the air in Maine at this site.

McChrystal confirms Afghanistan is FUBAR

Nice to see that President Obama's commander for Afghanistan is apparently operating in the real world. According to the Washington Post, via Mr. Insider-Stenographer Bob Woodward, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is telling his boss that our imperial adventure in the Hindu Kush is FUBAR -- politely, Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition. Some facets of the folly, per McChrystal:

"The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF's own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government..."

"Pre-occupied with protection of our own forces, we have operated in a manner that distances us -- physically and psychologically -- from the people we seek to protect. . . . The insurgents cannot defeat us militarily; but we can defeat ourselves."

"Afghan social, political, economic, and cultural affairs are complex and poorly understood. ISAF does not sufficiently appreciate the dynamics in local communities, nor how the insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power-brokers, and criminality all combine to affect the Afghan population."

"It is realistic to expect that Afghan and coalition casualties will increase."

"The insurgents control or contest a significant portion of the country, although it is difficult to assess precisely how much due to a lack of ISAF presence. . . . "

FUBAR indeed.

Being a General, McChrystal then concludes the only answer is more guns, more troops, more of the same. This isn't so clever. It looks like what the President actually needs are some new ideas -- like how to extricate us from the failed adventure bequeathed to him by his predecessor. Or will he let himself be squeezed by his generals?

Pelosi tears up; calls out incitement to political violence

In blogland, something that happened last week can usually be considered to have long slipped down the memory hole, out of our knowledge. But, belatedly, Joan Walsh has drawn my attention to my Congresswoman choking up while talking about the dangers that may flow from violent political speech.

Here's the short [1:18] video.

Pelosi remembers the late 1970s in San Francisco when a deranged white male, who had been a Supervisor, a police officer and a firefighter, acted out some people's perception that a liberal mayor (George Moscone) and an elected queer (Harvey Milk) could not lead a legitimate government. So Dan White shot them both at City Hall.

Nancy (we call our pols by their first names here) is not the first San Francisco veteran to recall those shootings in the context of the Obama presidency. Diane Feinstein, who found the bodies, made an odd reference to "the ballot or the bullet" during the inauguration ceremony.

Nancy and Diane are tough birds. They honestly do fear that current racial and economic resentments, amplified by sensational Republican mass media, could lead to political violence. In fact, this nasty stew already has as the murder of Dr. Tiller in Wichita while serving as an usher at this church shows.

Combine guns with wackjobs and tell them they have the right to feel unmanned and you get murder.

I take some offense at Joan Walsh's assertion that the assassinations of Moscone and Milk "permanently disabled liberal politics here." Come on, Joan: just as one example, San Francisco has created citywide universal access to health care (for residents, in the city). That seems a pretty good example of liberal accomplishment that the rest of the country could emulate. (Thank you, former Supervisor and now Assemblyman Ammiano.)

I don't think we can count on Republicans to dial it down. They haven't got much to run on these days except stoking resentment.

This stuff has limits as long as "law enforcement" and the military doesn't join it. I don't think it is paranoia to wonder whether, as in San Francisco in the 1970s, some of the legally-empowered guys with the guns might share resentment against a Black man who dares to be president. I see every movement President Obama makes as informed by awareness of that potential. Quite what that means I can't spell out, but I don't think political observers can discount the degree to which this President is forced to shape his agenda around trying to tamp down the national demons.

The season is underway

The football season is here -- this makes me happy, even though I consider my delight at watching big men beat each other up athletically as a slightly guilty pleasure.

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates I was delighted to learn that the Center for Responsive Politics has compiled the data on where NFL teams (meaning mostly their owners) invest their political money.

Yes -- political donations are an investment. My donations are in politicians and causes that I think will advance progressive policies. (I especially favor liberal Democratic primary challengers to Blue Dog obstructionists.) Football owners have their own priorities.

Interestingly, the NFL itself gives predominantly to Democrats. They spend nearly $1.5 million a year on lobbying. They've also created a new Gridiron PAC that has contributed $63,000 to 19 federal candidates in the last year -- two thirds of them Democrats, presumably friendly Congressional committee chairmen.

Among the owners, Alex Spanos of the San Diego Chargers is the heavy hitter, having given $2.4 million to candidates since 1990, four times what any other owner has kicked in. Ninety-eight percent of that went to Republicans.

No other team or owner is in Spanos' league as a political donor, but many give some contributions, largely to Republicans. I'm not surprised that owners largely give to the GOP -- rich guys stick together.

Interesting, President Obama's campaign dredged out a few prominent football donors. Dan Rooney of the family that owns the Pittsburgh Steelers actually campaigned for him during the Pennsylvania primary -- and in 2009 Rooney was named ambassador to Ireland. Lovie Smith, coach of the Chicago Bears also supported Obama; guess he's a homer. Peyton Manning proved a poor judge of political winners, supporting Fred Thompson; Andy Reid of the Eagles liked Mitt Romney. Oh well -- they know how to do their day jobs.

In the period between 1990 and the present for which the Center for Responsive Politics has data, a short list of teams gave over 60 percent of their political cash to Democrats. Probably most of these contributions reflect local political considerations, but nonetheless the list is interesting: Philadelphia Eagles, St Louis Rams, New England Patriots, Miami Dolphins, Buffalo Bills, Oakland Raiders, and, thank goodness, the San Francisco 49ers (84 percent to Democrats).

A case of ICE abuse?

This story poses a question to President Obama and Secretary of "Homeland Security" Napolitano. Will you look backward and investigate, and look forward and make amends, in response to outrages perpetrated by the Bush-era U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)?

If what this guy reports about how he was treated is true, heads should roll. Given what we know about how the ICE operates (see for example Postville), I have no reason to think the story is false.

The following account is from the Pakistani English language newspaper Dawn :

Hasan says that on January 7, 2006, two men from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a subdivision of the DHS, arrested him and took him to Fayetteville, Arkansas. 'I was told that I was a criminal, a fugitive and a terrorist. I kept telling them that I had done nothing wrong, but they wouldn’t listen,' he remembers.

'I was put in a cell and told to strip. While I was undressing, the taser came out. The agent kept zapping me until I passed out. When I woke up, I was lying on the floor naked and wet. He then started hitting and zapping me.'

Pulling his shirt up, Hasan reveals torture marks that remain visible after four years. His front teeth are missing due to heavy beating and he informs that his left hand remains numb. 'They kept asking me, what do you know about the 9/11 attackers? Who do you know in Al Qaeda? How much money did you send to the terrorists? What are your plans for bombing the nuclear plants in the US?'

Hasan also recalls being chastised for marrying a white woman and being told by a federal agent that he would ‘make a career’ on Hasan’s case. 'I kept pleading with them that you’ve got the wrong guy, but they never stopped,' he adds.

According to Hasan, he was moved between several detention centres in the US, including one in Memphis, Tennessee, and another in Texas. 'I couldn't bear the torture. I wanted to be deported and started writing letters to the ICE asking for it. Then a month later, an ICE deportation officer appeared and said I could be sent to Pakistan only after I sign three pieces of blank paper. Otherwise, I was threatened that I would languish in cells forever and be sent to [the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay].' It was at this point that Hasan opted for deportation and was flown out to Pakistan.

According to Hasan, prior to being picked up by ICE, he had been a legal resident of the U.S since the 1980s, had earned two degrees and held a good job. He is married to a U.S. citizen who has joined him in Pakistan with their two children. The family desperately hopes to return to the United State, feeling completely unmoored and unsafe in Islamabad. Hasan still thinks the US is "a great country. Americans are the best people ..."

Two video interviews with the couple recorded this year (available here and here) give more details about this ugly situation. The US born wife's father apparently was violently hostile to their marriage and may have used immigration authorities to get rid of his son-in-law. The immigration agents were both abysmally ignorant about "terrorists" and evidently felt free to abuse any South Asian, especially one who had married a white woman.

Under the Bush administration, the couple didn't think there was any point in telling their story. It remains to be seen whether there is any point now.

Health care reform shorts: Customer seeks answers from insurance company

Virginia Organizing Project covers its employees through Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield. The group works for health care reform, so they weren't entirely surprised when this year's annual rate hike was 14.1 percent. Lots of executive salaries must be paid.

But they did take offense to get a letter from the company explaining that it was lobbying against any government provided health care.

So they decided to visit Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield to ask for an explanation of what the company is doing with their premiums. VOP's director left in handcuffs. [3:10]

Afghanistan war: a "significant public relations challenge"

That chart was at the beginning of this year. Now U.S. troop numbers are up to 68,000 and General McChrystal wants more, though it is impolitic to blurt it out.

White House Details Ways to Rate Progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan

"This will be an honest effort to grade ourselves," one senior administration official told reporters, saying that in some cases "there will be a significant public relations challenge" if the White House, or an outside panel, determines that elements of the program are failing.

New York Times, Sept. 16, 2009

Let's see:

• You occupy a country for 8 years and your enemies (or anyway some set of people who are pretty hostile) now control more of it than you do;

• Most of the opium that reaches your European allies now comes from that country;

• You hold an election in which one third of the "votes" are suspected of being fraudulent and which many tribal groups assume was illegitimate;

• Your own people and most of your allies no longer see any purpose in prolonging the dying.

This goes beyond "public relations." This is failure.

Stop it -- now.

Jacob Alexander, R.I.P.

Appropriately, I learned that Jake had died from a flier in Golden Gate Park. From his obituary, I learned that he was 78, a creator of fabric art, and had traveled widely and lived imaginatively. None of that seemed surprising.

Every week day for decades, he walked the path adjacent to Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park. According to a San Francisco Chronicle article from 1999, he started the practice in 1982, moving from the Mission to the Panhandle to get closer to his starting point. Regular as the sun, he greeted everyone on the path, slapped hands, hugged and wished passersby well.

I must have first met him soon after he started walking -- I've been running in the park since the late 1970s. We'd say hello and I'd wonder if his walk was some sort of spiritual path. I was always glad to see him; he acted as if he was equally glad to see me.

In the 1990s, I worked out of Oakland and seldom got to the park during the week, so I didn't see Jake. Then, at the beginning of this decade, I was back on the San Francisco side of the bay, running in the park again. And there was Jake, still walking daily. To my astonishment, he remembered me among the 1000s he must have greeted over the years and wanted to know how I was doing these days.

"Still going..." He agreed. "Still going..."

I last saw him sometime in the spring. I'll miss knowing he is there.

You can read more about Jacob Alexander, see some of this art, and find the announcement of a memorial walk to be held in his honor on September 20 at his website.

A new guy with guts and some good instincts

Richard Trumka, a former head of the United Mine Workers Union, will become head of the AFL-CIO on Wednesday. Labor may be down, but it's not out. It is still the anchor of progressive forces when it comes to popular mobilization. The President knows that; he showed up to speak at labor's convention.

According to the Washington Post, Trumka assesses President Obama this way:

"He really gets it," Trumka said. "He's one of the first presidents who . . . speaks from a worker's point of view who actually understands what workers think and feel."

My sense is that Trumka is right: Obama does seem to grasp how people who work for a living feel. And that in itself feels novel.

But can labor take Obama's empathy to mean that he'll fight for the actual interests of workers? Empathy is nice; delivering the goods is way better. Since the AFL-CIO has signed on in support of the public option as part of health care "reform," they've got an immediate test case.

Trumka is no slouch. He dares to speak frankly, a refreshing quality in a public figure. Here he is talking to Steelworkers about race during last year's campaign:


Putting Trumka at the helm has to be a hopeful sign for the often arthritic labor movement.

Honesty and realism from Rev. Flunder

Last spring I heard the Rev. Dr. Yvette Flunder speak at a forum on same-gender marriage. She is the longtime pastor at City of Refuge United Church of Christ in San Francisco, a teacher, preacher and theologian, and one very impressive woman.

So I picked up her little book, Where the Edge Gathers: Building a Community of Radical Inclusion. There's a lot there. I recommend it. I want to highlight here a few of her themes.

Flunder brings her African-American Pentecostal heritage (she calls herself "Metho-Bapti-Costal") to engaging with all kinds of outsiders. The Bible is important to her tradition, but she teaches wrestling with it.

A woman minister, a SGL [same-gender-loving] person, the progeny of slaves cannot be a biblical literalist. ...My position is best explained by a response from an unnamed slave who, when she was told that the Bible said she was to be a slave, answered, "Not my Bible; I tore dat page out!"

And here's a tidbit that casts a different light on the struggles within churches over marrying same gender couples.

How should the church respond to families that do not fit the acceptable social norms? ...The Christian church had a similar dilemma two hundred years ago when it sought to determine how to justify the inclusion of slave families that did not fit... The issue was how could the church receive them "in good standing" when some of the married slaves had both their current spouses and another spouse and often other children on another plantation. This was due in large part to the ability of the slave master to sell slaves away at will. ...How could the church make their marriages sacred and make them accountable to their vows if their master could force them in and out of their marriages? One church, the Welsh Neck Baptist Church of South Carolina, decided that to grant membership to the slave couples was "less evil" than excommunicating them. ...

Flunder calls this "forward-looking." I think I'd call this caring realism, an instance of upholding human connection and compassion over legalism. The real question is why does this seem unexpected good sense to find in a church?

Flunder knows that for folks on the edge, relating to churches risks further marginalization. Here's her advice:

People seeking community support should go where that support is evident. Vote with your feet. Abuse is free on the street; there is no point seeking it out and joining it. We join faith communities to be strengthened and nurtured and to have an opportunity to serve. When this goals are no longer attainable, we should look elsewhere.

And Flunder unflinchingly demands that churches in her tradition cop to the complexities of gender identities.

It is disingenuous when the African American faith community perpetuates the cycle of oppression and particularly gender oppression by marginalizing the transgender community. The trans community makes us tell the truth about the blurred gender lines that have always existed ... We have always had manly women and womanly men in our community who often did not identify as SGL [same gender loving] people.

...There were roles in the church for "softer" men, such as the usher board, the choir, the pulpit, or working with small children. These men often adored their wives while some wives spent most of their time with another female friend. There were roles for stronger women such as jail ministers, foreign missionaries, and trustees. People found their way into roles that complemented their gender identification. For some men and women, sex, gender, and sexual orientation came together in a male or female package, but for most there were points of identification on both sides of the gender line and in real life most people cross back and forth with great fluidity.

You don't have to have belonged to Flunder's tradition to make that observation; any experience of a broad community is likely to have included similar realities, if we'd only look at them. She makes me wonder how much of our belief that gender roles reflect solid actualities requires willfully choosing not to look at what is located right in front of us.

Health care reform shorts: Monday Night Football edition

The national health care bruhaha has reached into ads on MNF.

The following bit of corporate image burnishing from IBM [:31] boasts of potential data efficiencies that reformers believe would drive down costs.


In a radio interview with NPR's Terry Gross, I recently heard T. R. Reid, author of The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, patiently explain that the French universal coverage system already incorporates these technological marvels, in addition to covering everyone for less than half the cost of our system. The French all carry a card with an embedded chip that allows any doctor to access their complete medical history and update it with any new diagnosis or treatments. Obviously this is cheaper and simpler than our tangle of records that don't mesh to each other.

And very likely, many people in the United States, after years of living in terror that insurance companies would raise their rates or cancel them because they got sick, would object mightily to implementing such a system. Proposals for integrated medical records would raise cries of "socialism" or maybe "fascism." Or, in the present style, both.

Another MNF ad urged patients to visit a Health and Human Services website to learn what sort of questions they should ask their doctors in order to get better medical care.


I thought this ad (and there are other variants) was rather well done. Unfortunately the website to which it directs people, here, is not up to the sophistication of the ad -- and confusing. If you actually wanted to know what you should ask you doctor, the HHS list is here.

The Taliban on their own turf

Journalist Stephen Farrell, along with his Afghan colleague Sultan M. Munadi, was captured by Taliban fighters on September 4 while collecting accounts of a NATO airstrike that killed civilian scavengers in remote Kunduz province. Four days later, paratroopers rescued the Western reporter in an operation that killed Munadi, some number of other Afghans and one British soldier.

On the New York Times blog, At War, Farrell has described his captivity. This was an awful way to get the story, but Farrell is able to provide a glimpse of who the local Taliban are.

Once away from immediate pursuit, they transferred me to a waiting car and drove into the dusty back roads of Char Dara District at high speed. "Russian?" one asked me, a question that seemed so out of recent historical context that it made my heart sink. ...

They delighted in showing off, at one point driving within 500 meters of what they said were government and NATO watchtowers -- gleeful at their daring, at others they drove with headlights full on at night as they moved us from house to house, at least three different buildings a day.

It became a tour of a Taliban-controlled district of Afghanistan, and that control appeared total. At no point did we see a single NATO soldier, Afghan policeman, soldier or any check to the Taliban's ability to move at will. ...It felt like a military embed with the American military, except at gunpoint. "You spend enough time with the Americans, you should spend some time with us," one of the Taliban said, making the comparison explicit. ...

There was no doubting the absolute force of their writ in the area southwest of Kunduz, which we traversed time and again, in an area of cornfields, rice plantations, mud brick villages, waterways and other farmlands, measuring perhaps eight miles long by three or four miles wide. They drove down lanes, through villages, stopping at will and talking to residents, boasting about how the people provided a willing intelligence service to them. The extent of volition was impossible to determine, but the Taliban were the only armed presence I saw there for four days.

Interestingly, they paid when they needed gas for the car, instead of just commandeering it, which they could have easily done. Some villagers appeared very friendly, others more wary and formally polite. Motorists unfailingly gave way as soon as they saw a Taliban car coming in the other direction, and snapped to a smile and an Islamic greeting.

The Taliban may or may not be popular, but they are not foreign occupiers. It is impossible to believe that continued U.S. application of force will subdue people who simply fight the invader, distinguishing little between one sort of infidel intruder and the next.

What was it the U.S. is trying to accomplish in Afghanistan?

The teabagger rally on the DC mall

It's easy to scorn these folks, but mocking them does no good. In fact, a lifetime of feeling mocked by supercilious elites is what makes them prey to right wing demagoguery.

The majority can probably only cure (or modify) their ills by creating a more vibrant economy of which they get a piece, delivering health care security, and avoiding put downs. Ameliorating the real problems and letting his opponents live with the consequences seems to be the Obama tack -- trouble is, they may not let him do it.

Will he fight for his devastatingly effective program for social peace? We still don't know.***
There's always a quarrel about numbers at these things. I've been to plenty of peace, women's and gay demonstrations. Some were genuinely large -- a million or more. Many were in the 100s of thousands. All thought they had more than some lowball police estimate. Just being with a lot of people who agree with you can feel like a lot.

These folks, claiming millions, seem to be right in step with the norm for demonstrators. The DC police say there were some 50-70 thousand. Not a lot for a DC rally of progressives; lots for rightwingers who aren't used to doing this.

Tahoe postscript

This is for any of my elderblogger friends who may think me mad for trudging around on mountains. This morning we pampered our stiff legs with a short walk on a trail that led to a public beach on Lake Tahoe.

On our way there, we were passed by this woman running, her long white braid swinging behind her.

When we got to the shore, there she was in three feet of cold water, walking repeats of about 100 yards, back and forth, against the resistance of the lake.

She responded with a laugh when we applauded her grit.

On this 9/11, time out for a mountain

Yesterday we hiked to the summit of 9700 foot Mount Tallac adjacent to Lake Tahoe.


The lower flanks of the mountain are dotted with tiny crystalline lakes that reflect the mountain above.


But much of the hike was an unrelenting slog across fields of slag rock, up and up, 3300 vertical feet over 4.6 miles. And it was hot; in the 80s.


The views from the summit were superb. That's Lake Tahoe with Emerald Bay stretching inland and a corner of Fallen Leaf Lake.


To the west runs the crest of the Sierra Nevada range, only a bit higher at this point.

Today we rest. Regular blogging will resume tomorrow.

Health care reform shorts: The gaping hole in "universal" coverage

Congressman Joe Wilson's outburst during Obama's health reform speech -- calling the President a liar -- drew a response [1:13] from Rinku Sen of Colorlines magazine that wasn't what either man had in mind.

See also this from Tracy Kronzak.

Health care reform shorts:The President's big speech

The promise to hold him to:

But I will not back down on the basic principle that if Americans can't find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice.

The framing that sets Obama apart:

There are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single-payer system like Canada's, where we would severely restrict the private insurance market and have the government provide coverage for everyone. On the right, there are those who argue that we should end the employer-based system and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.

I have to say that there are arguments to be made for both approaches.

This guy legitimates that there is a left that has something to say, that is within the discussion of possible options. Pathetically, this is an advance. Someday, if we organize, the powers that be will have to listen.

The pronouncement that gladdens my heart:

We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it.

Enough with quaking in paralyzed fear ...

Waiting for the Prez to speak

So those of us hoping for health care reform will be listening to the big speech tonight. (I'll be trying to listen on a car radio while driving to the mountains -- yeah! -- and may have to catch up later.) The talking heads say there is a lot riding on it.

That wonderful writer Anne Lamott, whose schtick is being a decent Everywoman, caught the mood of the President's supporters last week:

...After eight years of Bush, and then the Palin nomination, we were battered and anguished and punch-drunk. But in rallying behind you, we came back to life, like in Ezekiel when the prophet breathes the spirit of bearing witness and caring onto the dry bones, and those bones come back to life, become living people again, cherished and tended to.

We did not know exactly how you would proceed to restore our beloved Constitution. It seemed beyond redemption, like my kitchen floor did briefly last week after my dog, Bodhi, accidentally ate 24 corn bread muffins. You said you would push back your sleeves and begin, that it would take all of us working harder than we ever had before, but that you would lead. While acknowledging the financial and moral devastation of the last eight years, you said you would start by giving your people healthcare. You would do battle with the conservatives and insurance companies. You said in your beautiful way many times that this was the overarching moral and spiritual issue of our times, and we understood this to mean that you took this to be your Selma, your Little Rock. ...

Los Angeles Times, August 27, 2009

Much of the punditocracy smirks at Obama supporters' naivete -- why they actually believe a politician; how sweet! There is something peculiarly morally foul about mocking innocent hope -- the in-crowd is stinking from its own decay these days.

Ed Kilgore is a realistic Democratic party operative with a decent side. He has tried to put the speech in reasonable perspective:

...it's not some desperate measure to work political magic, but an effort to frame the endgame of the health debate, to deal with the lies that are out there about what he's trying to do, and to rally the troops he already has, which, after all, clearly include over half the people in Congress. He might be able to produce some positive movement in the polls as well, but even if he doesn't, he's likely to get a bump when health reform is enacted and the sky doesn't fall on people with insurance, while people without it (or in danger of losing it) will be pretty happy.

So the speech doesn't have to produce miracles, and if someone tells you it must, they probably don't think health reform is a particularly good idea to begin with.

Okay -- that sounds more like what we can expect.

The most vociferous of us are being softened up to accept "the good" and to give up our attachment to "the perfect," again. The message of the week is that the Dems have to give something to Republican Olympia Snowe and some conservatives in their own party. So we can't have a public option plan that cuts out the insurance profiteers from some small fraction of their captive business, but we might be allowed "triggers" that would start a public plan if the insurers failed to perform. We the untrusting think that's a sell-out. Untrusting seems a reasonable posture to me.

What I continue to wonder, awaiting the President's inauguration of the autumn push for reform, is why smart observers seem so confident that whatever we do get will be good for Democrats? If they make everyone buy insurance but don't control insurance company greed, they are just to going to have a lot of pissed off people who perceive themselves as being forced to shell out for something they can't afford to use. If the much talked about subsidies don't really offset the costs, more pissed off people. And none of this looks like cost control -- nothing to ease the administrative burden that comes from having some many different insurance scams to track, nothing to limit profiteering by those medical entities that thrive on driving up payments to themselves.

And apparently whatever they do won't really kick in until 2013. That is, the Dems are putting us through the trauma of an incomplete, probably feeble, partial redesign of health care -- but don't dare run on people's experience of it until after the next Presidential election cycle. That could backfire. Supposing something passes and nothing happens -- will people start asking "where's my health care reform?" I can imagine that. They are currently asking "where's my stimulus?"

President Obama -- you've got a big task. You do great political theater. But when it comes to health care, we're all of necessity part of the cast; none of us can be just the audience this time.

Season creep, again

Observed the day after Labor Day. That strikes me as more extreme than this.

Reading Obama through Nixonland

Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America is a magnificent recounting of the dramatic, exhilarating, painful madness those who lived it and those who are glad to have come after it call "the Sixties." The book's 881-page length suggests something of the scale of Perlstein's project.

Here's the author's summation:

I have written of the rise of two American identities, two groups of Americans, staring at each other from behind a common divide, each equally convinced of its own righteousness, each equally convinced that the other was defined by its evil. ... I have written of the rise, between the years 1965 and 1972, of a nation that believed itself to be at consensus instead becoming one of incommensurate visions of apocalypse; two loosely defined congeries of Americans, each convinced that should the other triumph, everything decent and true and worth preserving would end.

Those days were part of my political youth. I was present or near some of the book's high and low points.

Perlstein brought back to me what I had forgotten (repressed?) -- just how very violent that period was. A housemate of mine who was beaten and jailed for trying to hitch hike through Wyoming with long hair was no rarity. A fellow running next to me was shot with police birdshot during one of Ronald Reagan's demonstrative repressions of University of California students. Yet this very ordinary violence against white "hippies" was nothing on what went on in communities of color. Perlstein resurrects the long buried history of the repressive forces of the state reveling in random murder in the Newark black ghetto -- and of the media's complicity in teaching us these crimes were the prototypical "urban riot." The other side (my side of the divide) could be destructive also, though did not usually have the weaponry and social sanction to do as much physical damage to our opponents -- at worst, my folks usually burned property, not people.

I don't know whether our oh-so-forward looking President has read Nixonland, but I have no doubt that his "bipartisanship" twaddle is about hoping to move beyond the divide chronicled by Perlstein.

To some extent, Obama's election suggests we have moved to a new social configuration, new dividing lines. Communities of color make up more of us and are more part of the political class than in Nixon's time. (Perlstein is nowhere near as good a chronicler of those communities as he is the doings of mostly white, insider political participants, but they are not really his subject.) What's left of the labor movement, especially its leadership, works to make common cause with the progressives. (White "creative" progressives are not so good at making common cause in return, but we're working on it.) Except when scared to death, very few of us have much tolerance for far-flung wars. (That's a problem for a Democrat trying to look tough.) The momentary circumstances of the 2008 election -- financial collapse and a monumentally failed Republican incumbent -- helped paper over the remaining Nixonlandian gulf.

And obviously this summer's eruption of birthers, tea-baggers, and townhall screamers shows how close fear of apolcalypse remains.

If Obama wants to govern, rather than simply endure the next three years as a punching bag, he is going to have to defeat reaction before he can try to heal our Sixties-era brokeness. Has he got it in him? This is what the health care fight will show.

And it will also show whether the potential emerging progressive coalition yet has it in it to take charge. I initially thought Obama's run was too early -- that the forces that might put him in office were not yet ready to coalesce. We're in for a nasty time if that proves correct now that he faces legislative hurdles. The risk of a bad health care reform is that progressives will get tagged with being unable to deliver for yet more years.
***As great a piece of work as I think Perlstein's Nixonland is, I am not sure I agree with two of its central premises.

• In my memory and anaecdotal experience, the 50s and early 60s consensus was nowhere near so firm as he seems to posit.

• I have to wonder whether Nixon's personal demons were so central to cementing the divide. Absent this particular damaged man, wouldn't other political figures have exploited genuine social conflict? I tend to think so.

But those are topics for other times. Nixonland is such a rich text, I'll be mulling it for years.

The photo is from a pro-health care reform demonstration last week. Some of us old timers are still at it.

Labor Day gratitude

I've been writing a lot lately about health care reform -- but I haven't told my own health care story as current campaign organizing orthodoxy demands. It's a happy story. You see, thanks to the confluence of two popular movements -- labor and gay rights, both made up of workers though that is sometimes forgotten -- as of this September 1, I have the cheapest and most broadly inclusive health insurance coverage I've had since I launched out as an independent contractor in 1999.

In 1989, I worked on the political campaign to defend San Francisco's shiny new domestic partnership law from a referendum funded by Republicans and the Catholic Church. Reaction won; LGBT people and friends lost. That law didn't even aspire to any such pipedream as extending health benefits to partners -- we just wanted to be sure partners could visit their dying loved ones in hospitals! Domestic partnerships came back to the ballot (put on as an initiative by LGBT folks) the next year and passed. In San Francisco, it only took a little more education to move the measure, though the reactionaries did make us fight a ballot repeal the following year. Other jurisdictions began to recognize the longterm but unmarried partnerships of LGBT folks and sometimes heterosexuals as well. In 1999, California passed a state domestic partnership registry.

But it took the clout of the labor movement to enable domestic partners to share their health benefits. At first, employers excused themselves by saying they couldn't get insurers to write such policies. LGBT activists in the 90s publicized lists of good corporations that recognized our couples. But eventually public employee unions took the lead, using combined political and labor pressure to win benefit extensions for their domestic partner members. And once insurers began writing policies for cities and states that recognized partnerships, corporate excuses no longer held up.

That's not to say the battle is won. Some state laws against gay marriage, such as the one in Michigan, outlaw extending benefits to same sex partners. And thanks to discrepancies between state laws, and the federal statute against same sex marriage, people can lose their health insurance when they move between states. An acquaintance, Rob Ryan, felt he needed to move to the country to overcome the lingering terrors of escaping the World Trade Center on 9/11. In New Jersey, his domestic partner had been able to include him on his health insurance. But on relocation to Idaho, his partner's employer, Konica Minolta, cut off Rob's health insurance since they couldn't be recognized as partners under that state's restrictive laws. This stuff happens daily.

Meanwhile, here in San Francisco, I have just begun to have remarkably cheap health insurance because my partner has a good union at her job. It's not even what many would consider a very good job: she's a part-time faculty member at a private university, hired on semester contracts. But adjunct teachers there are covered by a contract won by an affiliate of the California Faculty Association that establishes a seniority system for the part-timers -- and extends to many of them partially university-paid health insurance with partner benefits. So for the first time in our 30 years together, I'm on her health insurance.

I haven't had such good rates in years ... thanks to LGBT activists and a union. Everyone should have access to affordable healthcare. As the worker's sign at the head of this post says: "Health care should not be the privilege of a few, but a right for everyone."

A scalp for the right wing:Van Jones resigns from White House job

From Think Progress:

On July 23rd, Glenn Beck began his crusade against Van Jones, calling him "a communist-anarchist radical." He went on to rail against Jones approximately 20 times on Fox News in the past couple of months. Last Friday, Beck cited "former black nationalist, avowed communist Van Jones" as an example of "the true danger" of Obama's "czars." Prior to joining the administration, Jones had co-founded Color of Change, an organization that successfully convinced 57 advertisers to drop Beck’s program in just a matter of weeks after Beck called Obama a "racist."

An obvious response from folks who think there is something wrong with the Obama administration being deprived of one of the smartest, most conciliatory, and most imaginative of contemporary social activists is to ramp up the Color of Change campaign against right wing demagoguery.

But also, those of us from the activist community need to look at the structural weakness of Van's position that meant that he would probably be forced out in a storm.

His history is an example of a common trajectory among progressive social activists: horror and disaffection on encountering racism, police lawlessness, wars without end, planetary destruction. Where Van is different from many has been his series of creative efforts to find answers, not just stew and reject. And as a consequence, his resume is littered with stuff that didn't go very far, but that provides ammunition to his enemies. And those experiences of loose ends and dead ends are what make him such a powerful advocate for practical solutions to poverty and environmental degradation with social conciliation.

But can a person with a life trajectory so vulnerable to right wing smears survive in the public arena? Possibly -- but only if he can show he has an electoral base. When you get out in public because some subset of the people voted to put you there, a progressive activist's past can become an asset, even though enemies will still smear it.

Two examples come to mind: Tom Hayden who rose to the top of the California State legislature after prominent leadership in the anti-Vietnam war movement and current Assemblyman Tom Ammiano who won nearly universal health care for San Franciscans after starting in politics known as a screaming queen gay comedian and school teacher. People with unconventional pasts can work their way into positions of power and influence -- but they have to come in through the voters. They can't derive their positions from appointment by others -- it's too easy for opponents to make them a dispensable political liability.

Unfortunately, progressives in Van's generation -- folks whose youthful experience of politics was Ronald Reagan's plastic hypocrisy -- usually didn't think going to the voters offered much hope of change. The fact that our current President did do so is one of his unique attributes, along with his threading a path around the additional hurdle he had to jump to be attractive across racial lines.

The lesson I draw from watching Van Jones pushed out is that progressives who want power not only have to organize vigorously from the sidelines (we do), but also get in deeper, winning solid electoral power bases.

(My photo of Van Jones above is 10 years old, but I've always liked it.)

Bodies laid out by the side of the road again...

Amid the tributes to Senator Kennedy last week, I don't think I saw anything about this speech he delivered April 6, 1972 in response to President Richard Nixon's escalation of bombing of North Vietnam for the purpose of propping up a feeble South Vietnamese government while "training" its army -- at least until Nixon could get re-elected. Kennedy was outraged.

... the simple truth is that the test of this Vietnamization, with or without American support, is a wholly immoral and unjustifiable test, because it is a test that is being carried out with the lives of men, women and children. Those dead and dying bodies stretched out beside the road across our television screens last night are the bodies of human beings. We do not have the right -- no one has the right -- to demand a test like that.

quoted in Rick Perlstein's Nixonland

Today this was the Afghanistan news, according to the Associated Press.

NATO jets bomb hijacked fuel tankers; 70 killed including civilians, Afghans say

Sep 04, 2009 15:02 EST A U.S. jet dropped 500-pound bombs on two tanker trucks hijacked by the Taliban before dawn Friday, triggering a huge explosion that Afghan officials said killed more than 70 people, including insurgents and some civilians who had swarmed around the vehicles to siphon off fuel. ...

Germany said about 50 fighters were killed and no civilians were believed in the area at the time. NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, however, acknowledged some civilians may have died, and the U.S.-led coalition and the Afghan government announced a joint investigation.

Local government spokesman Mohammad Yawar said police found pieces of dozens of weapons scattered around the site. He estimated that more than 70 people were killed, at least 45 of them militants. Investigators were trying to account for the others, he said.

Bodies laid out by the side of the road again. Should civilians have drawn a death sentence for scrounging in a war zone -- a 30 year war zone?

We get less of this on TV these days. Our military does its best to ensure that what we see and hear about our wars is as sanitized as they can make it.

Today AP broke the implicit rules of imperial adventuring and sent out a photo of a U.S. Marine receiving the wound that killed him in Afghanistan's Helmand Province on August 14. Secretary of Defense (War) Gates is outraged by their distributing the image. (You can see it here. It is not gory, just real.)

The Wheeling, West Virginia News-Register thinks the war in Afghanistan is necessary. But they published the photo. According to an editorial:

Part of our role as a newspaper is to present the truth of events such as war, not to sugar-coat the news. We believe we owe it to our readers to report the full truth about the war, even if that means publishing unpleasant photographs such as the one of Lance Cpl. Bernard.

War is about killing. Killing for no attainable purpose except to win time to think of a purpose, or to avoid being thought weak, or to shore up one's political position, was immoral in 1972 and it is immoral now. As Kennedy knew but this country seems to have forgotten, we do not have the right, any of us ...

Friday critter blogging

Observed among the orchids. Where'd he come from?

Elders rally for health care reform

Polls say older people don't want the current health care reform. Baloney -- certainly not all of us. Take a look at these folks who were some of the anchors of yesterday's broad coalition rally for reform in San Francisco.

They know: Without health care reform, slashing Medicare benefits will be Congress’s next step.

See also the new Truth Squad badge on the blog side bar.


You wouldn't want to get into a tussle with this guy.


They've got firm opinions about what forces are in the way of reform.




And they've even got clear ideas about how to get there.


This woman's signs ask that Congress protect Medicare AND allow states the chance to try health care reform experiments. That's not surprising in San Francisco. A municipal public health plan (limited to the city) has managed to cover nearly everyone and 94 percent of recipients like it! Meanwhile, the state legislature has voted for a statewide single payer system twice, only to have it vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger.

Not all elders are part of the opposition to affordable, efficient health care for all. We know that even continuing Medicare depends on it.

Wrong then, wrong now

Nice to see the Democratic National Committee taking off after Dick Cheney in this ad [:31] (H/t The Plumline.)



Also nice to see the DNC willing to say, even if through the medium of John McCain, that torture doesn't work and perhaps is even just wrong, like the former Vice President himself.

According to The Swamp, the DNC plans to run this on cable TV, in Washington and nationally. Can't hurt; might help.

Meanwhile, the historical account of the 1970s milieu in which Cheney got his start, Nixonland, provides what is probably an exact description of the mentality that lives on in the former Vice President.

"he believed that ... behind the earnest humanitarian face of liberalism lay irredeemable evil ... he realized that ... to fight according to the normal procedures of democratic politics would have been ... a surrender."

Rick Perlstein's description is of the ham-handed Watergate spook E. Howard Hunt. But it suits Cheney perfectly. He's fighting "evil," evil that looks to the rest of us like law and common sense. The attraction of seemingly limitless power not only corrupts, it also makes mad.

Afghanistan FUBAR

Afghanistan is beyond "disintegrating." It is "Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition" -- that is the polite version of that phrase.

Here are snippets of the many Afghanistan articles I perused today in horrified grief.

From the Los Angeles Times: The August 20 nationwide election isn't convincing anyone that any kind of democracy has arrived.

Kabul, Afghanistan - In a low-slung building tucked behind concrete blast barriers on the edge of the Afghan capital, the plain brown envelopes are opened one by one, and the complaint forms inside smoothed out and scrutinized by weary-eyed workers. ...

Nearly two weeks after Afghanistan's troubled presidential election, the task of sorting out allegations of fraud and intimidation has swelled. More than 2,000 complaints have poured into the Electoral Complaints Commission, a U.N.-backed body given the responsibility of determining the validity of claims of election misconduct. ...

"Whichever one they say has won -- how can I believe it?" said Ishtiaq Mohammed, a bicycle mechanic in Kabul, the capital. "Maybe we will have to do this thing all over again. And it was so hard the first time."

Insofar as they've managed to come up with a vote count, incumbent President Karzai is running just under the 50 percent figure he'd need to a avoid a run-off vote. We can't even be sure there's no fraud in hotly contested U.S. elections. Why would anyone have thought an Afghan election could be run cleanly enough in the middle of a failed state at war to produce a legitimate winner?

But it gets worse. A deeply disgruntled, and knowledgeable, former Bush administration staffer explains in Foreign Policy just who our show election will put in office.

The real winner of Afghanistan's presidential election will not be Hamid Karzai or his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah. It's a man named Mohammad Qasim Fahim. He is Afghanistan's senior-most military commander, with the lifetime rank of marshal, and was Karzai's running mate during the campaign. Whether Karzai or one of his opponents wins, Fahim will hold and exercise extraordinary influence over the country's military and security apparatus -- more so than the elected president.

This means the real loser of Afghanistan's presidential election -- besides the Afghan people -- will be the United States' long-standing ambition to train and equip enough Afghan forces to allow for an eventual withdrawal of the U.S. military. Building up the Afghan military and police is at the heart of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's latest assessment for Washington of what needs to be done in Afghanistan. But McChrystal's forces will be training Afghan soldiers and police to work for Fahim: a human-rights-abusing, drug-trafficking warlord who might also have had a role in al Qaeda's assassination of his political godfather, Tajik warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, on Sept. 9, 2001 -- an operation widely viewed in retrospect as a precursor to the terrorist attacks in the United States two days later.

The story of Fahim underscores the implausibility of U.S. President Barack Obama's plans for the "Afghanization" of the conflict -- the shifting of security responsibility to Afghans, the only exit strategy that either the Obama administration or the George W. Bush administration before it has ever put forward. ...

There's that problem again: Washington is throwing money and lives at Afghanistan without an exit strategy or goals that can be accomplished. But hey, it's got a mobster vice-president elected -- maybe.

Okay -- the problems of the election and government legitimacy ultimately are the Afghans' problems. But we aren't helping in the arenas we ought to be able to control. This is just sickening, from Mother Jones' blog.

Drunken brawls, prostitutes, hazing and humiliation, taking vodka shots out of buttcracks— no, the perpetrators of these Animal House-like antics aren't some depraved frat brothers. They are the private security contractors guarding Camp Sullivan, otherwise known as the US Embassy in Kabul.

Naturally the State Department has renewed the contract to keep these dangerous clowns. They are employed by ArmorGroup North America (a subsidiary of Wackenhut, which is in turn owned by the security behemoth G4S). Just wait til they kill some Afghans ...

Meanwhile, foreign troops fight and die and kill and try to make sense out of the war that their governments have given them responsibility for. Michael Yon is a freelance reporter and photographer who has been chronicling the war from enlisted mens' point of view. Go read and absorb his post on the election (what election?) and surviving (mostly) on the ground. Just click and go.

Disintegrating Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan is a mess. U.S. troops are dying at a newly elevated rate; NATO troops are dying; Taliban are dying; and Afghan and Pakistani civilians are dying. There is no evidence that much is coming of all this killing except more killing.

The Afghans held an election, but no one believes it was honest or fair. No one is likely to think whatever "government" comes of it, if any, amounts to more than a corrupt cabal either.

The latest U.S. General who is supposed to sort this out is on the verge of sharing his assessment with the President. The usual pre-release leaks tell us that the situation is bad, but more of something (lives and treasure usually) will somehow make it better. Meanwhile for the first time since 2001, polls suggest that a slim majority of people in this country don't think this war is worth the costs. The usual prattlers say the President would be "brave" to defy the people, the people who chose him in part because he knew there were such things as "wrong wars." And nobody can tell anybody what the goal of the dying might be or how we could measure that goal's achievement.

Into this mess, the International Crisis Group -- a sort of talk and research shop for wiser globalizing "statesmen" usually from less powerful countries -- has pointed out another, not yet recognized, reality that further complicates the Afghanistan situation. It turns out that when you carry campaigns of death and destruction to the far regions of a dispersed countryside, people start moving around to get out of harm's way. How obvious ...

So, as we have seen in Iraq, war in Afghanistan is leading to refugee flows that further complicate life in a country that has been fought over continually for 30 years.

With the rural areas increasingly insecure, many returning Afghans have migrated to towns and cities, causing rapid urbanisation that is contributing to rising poverty, unemployment and criminality. Kabul's population has tripled in just seven years. Since young, displaced and unemployed men are particularly vulnerable to recruitment to the insurgency, the needs of a fast-growing poor and largely marginalised population must be urgently addressed. Moreover, as Afghans attempt to resettle in their home provinces or migrate to the country's more secure and economically productive zones, land disputes risk sparking deep-rooted tribal, ethnic or sectarian violence.

Afghan mobility should not be perceived solely as a source of conflict and instability. Internal and regional mobility has enabled families to diversify their sources of income. Remittances are essential to the economy, and households that are able to provide for themselves are a blessing for a state struggling to ensure security and provide basic services. ...

The country's institutions are ill-equipped to meet the needs of repatriating families, overcome obstacles to resettlement, and tackle the continued refugee presence in neighbouring countries. The government's inability to provide for and protect its returning citizens by ensuring nationwide basic services and the rule of law has led to an increasing questioning of its legitimacy. These shortcomings compel many Afghans to rely on informal networks and other parallel structures based on patron-client relations that undercut the establishment of a durable state-citizen relationship.

Yes -- we have here the familiar recipe for the exploitation, speculation, graft and warlordism that follow in the wake of outside cash flowing in and people being wrenched from stable communities.

In Iraq, these destabilizing conditions played out as ethnic cleansing carried out on Islamic sectarian lines, Sunnis and Shi'as striving for territorial power. In Afghanistan, Derrick Crowe at Return Good for Evil has published two maps that show how the war is cutting up Afghanistan on "tribal" or linguistic lines. Here's the map showing the language groups (via the CIA.)


And here are the areas of conflict and of peace and quiet on the date of the recent election, according to the BBC.


Distressingly similar, aren't they? The Pashtuns (shades of green in the first map) are the largest population group. Afghan President Karzai is a Pashtun, though not from the most important branch. So are most of the Taliban. Note which areas on the election map are red and pink conflict zones, areas where the Taliban rule far more than the "government".

The forces the U.S. used to overthrow the Taliban in 2001 come from smaller ethno-linguistic groups, mostly shown in browns and oranges on the first map. Note where the peaceful gray areas are. Those maps look awfully similar.

Now more and more people uprooted by high tech combat and guerrilla resistance are floating around this smashed country, grasping whatever safety and security they can find. Around them ethnic groups are grabbing whatever power they can get in this chaotic mess. Has the United States imposed itself in the middle of another violent internal civil power struggle? Has this occupation also unleashed ethnic cleansing, this time on linguistic and tribal lines? We shouldn't be surprised if the answer is yes.

And meanwhile, what was the U.S. goal in the Afghan war, again?