A Tocqueville effect: the legitimizing force of public opinion

Monday it became possible for my lesbian cousin in New Jersey to get married to her long time partner. They've been campaigning for the right and they have two kids, so I imagine they'll get legally hitched soon. Nine million more U.S. citizens live in a state where gay marriage is legal as of today -- the advancing tide of marriage equality sweeps onward.

The recent on-rushing advance of gay marriage equality feels a bit of a mystery to me. The arc of the universe may bend toward justice, but this development seems more like an avalanche of good news than the sort of painful steady progress that has marked other struggles. It took literally hundreds of years for European societies to repudiate human slavery and we're still struggling with the institution's progeny: discrimination, extreme inequality and unequal access to law and justice. Struggles over gay rights aren't over these days, but the direction of things seems unmistakable; it is the hold-outs who will be on the defensive for the next few years, not the LGBT people. How very strange and wonderful this feels!

Not surprisingly Andrew Sullivan pointed to a fascinating observation on the subject from one of his conservative friends, Jonathan Rauch. Consider what Rauch calls the Tocqueville effect:

Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman whose observations of America in the 1830s remain shrewdly relevant, famously remarked on Americans’ deference to majority opinion: “As long as the majority is still undecided, discussion is carried on; but as soon as its decision is irrevocably pronounced, everyone is silent, and the friends as well as the opponents of the measure unite in assenting to its propriety.” Although he exaggerates, the broad point remains true: the legitimising effect of public opinion is such that, other things being equal, majority support tends to amplify itself. Even if I have doubts about gay marriage, the fact that most of my countrymen are on the other side weakens my resolve and impels me to acknowledge the legitimacy of their view. The difference between support at, say, 55 per cent versus 45 per cent — that is, the different between majority and minority standing — is one of kind, not merely of degree. That is not to say that opposition evaporates or crawls under a rock when it loses majority standing. But its power and relevance are greatly reduced.

… Not all Americans, of course, have come to see homosexuality as mundane or benign. But not all needed to. What mattered is the “swing vote”, the moderates who were never deeply attached to an anti-gay agenda on ideological or religious grounds, but who had not in the past been comfortable with the idea of homosexuality. Their crossing over has been the engine of rapid recent change; and it has been the personal, more than the political, which has led them across.

This rings true to me -- Rauch's "Tocqueville effect" seems a useful descriptor of what we're living through in regard to LGBT marriage.

It is then interesting to look at other matters of contention and see whether a Tocqueville effect, the accumulating force of majority public opinion that delegitimizes continued opposition, has been or could be operative.

In regard to U.S. racism, it is not hard to say "yes" … or "no." It is no longer publicly acceptable in most of the country to express the most stereotypical personal racial prejudices -- to use the "N word" for example. Public opinion against verbal bigotry has jelled. But the Trayvon Martin and Jonathan Farrell killings indicate that African American males can be shot based on radicalized suspicions with relative impunity for the shooters.

Perhaps even more problematically, 83 percent of non-Hispanic whites believe that the reason African Americans have worse jobs, incomes and housing than whites is "something else" rather than discrimination. So I might conclude that in the case of persistent systemic racism, the Tocqueville effect has changed what public opinion allows most people to believe, but fails to confront the reality of extreme economic divergence between blacks and whites.

Let's look at full equality for women. The changes in public opinion about the roles and rights of women in my lifetime have been extraordinary. Young women strive for education and expect to work in jobs no worse than those of men. Majority public opinion affirms these realities and even has led to some infrastructure that supports these expectations. We recognize that women sometimes need protection from the men in their lives; hence women's shelters and stringent reporting requirements for police departments (sometimes even complied with.) We have considerable anti-discrimination law, though we never won an Equal Rights Amendment.

Yet women still routinely make less money than equivalently qualified males, do most child rearing and house work, and run into ceilings on our advancement. Majority public opinion has never quite affirmed a strong right of all women to control our own sexuality and reproductive capacity, hence abortion decisions, sex education, and even access to contraception remain contested.

Clearly in the arenas of race and gender equality, there has been something like a Tocqueville effect. At the same time, what can be won through changed public opinion can only carry a group that has been excluded so far. Gay people are definitely on a roll toward legal recognition of gay marriage. But where will we run into the limits of the changes that can be institutionalized through widespread changes in public opinion?

Will gay advances hit a limit when we seek to be included in employment discrimination law? Maybe. Or will our limit come over gender presentation, the fact that we are "queer" and some of us simply can't fit ourselves into conventional gender boxes? California may have a test of the latter limit in 2014 -- the anti-gay marriage forces have turned their attention to our new law, the School Success and Opportunity Act , which protects the rights of transgender students. They are currently shopping a ballot initiative to repeal these protections.

Will we ever achieve a Tocqueville effect for the idea that voting on the rights of minorities is not acceptable democratic conduct? Now that would be a breakthrough ...

What comes after searching for an ass to kick

Remember that country where a U.S. invasion in 2003 and subsequent occupation touched off a vicious civil war -- and from which we departed tails between legs in 2011? Oh yes, Iraq.

Marc Lynch, who used to write useful journalism about Middle Eastern media as Abu Aardvark, points out that Iraq is currently boiling.

Iraq is facing a rising death toll, with more than 5,000 recorded deaths from a horrific wave of car bombs, and attacks by a reinvigorated insurgency driven by Syria's war and by [Prime Minister] Maliki's obstinately sectarian and autocratic politics.

Lynch thinks Maliki can be persuaded to reduce Shiite domination of his government and to bring disaffected Sunnis back into some power within his state. It's hard to see why he thinks this can be accomplished. Maliki's incentive to maintain Shiite rule not likely to go away -- it is the source of his own authoritarian regime

Or so reading Nir Rosen's mammoth Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World would lead me to believe. Rosen, alone among U.S. journalists that I've read, was able to pass unnoticed through the dangerous streets and towns of Iraq for most of the last decade, to meet and befriend (male) Iraqis from all camps including some close to al-Qaeda, and tell their stories. His book is long and intricate and absolutely worth the effort to learn what it was we did in that unhappy country.

And it certainly reveals the absurdity of thinking that Maliki's upcoming visit to Washington is going to change much of anything.***Will Bunch at Attytood reminds us of the "real reason" the U.S. chose to invade Iraq, set off events that killed at least 500000 people, and destabilize an already unstable region:

A senior official from former President George W. Bush's administration is quoted in “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House” [by journalist Peter Baker] saying American troops went into Iraq because the U.S. was looking for a fight.

"The only reason we went into Iraq, I tell people now, is we were looking for somebody’s ass to kick. Afghanistan was too easy," the anonymous official said, according to Politico.

Whoopee! Oakland is hosting a gun show and war games

Facing Urban Shield Day of Action
Friday, October 25, 11:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Oakland Marriott City Center, 1001 Broadway, Oakland, CA
Press conference at 11am
Rally at 5pm
Local organizers explain:

On the anniversary of the disastrous police response to Occupy Oakland, Urban Shield - a trade show and training exercise for SWAT teams will convene on October 25th, 2013. It will be marketing military-style weapons, equipment and training to local public safety agencies. Urban Shield will be held at the Marriott Hotel, downtown Oakland, bringing together more than 150 local, state, federal, international, and private sector partners and military contractors.

To add insult to injury, the contractor in charge of planing and producing Urban Shield, SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) has a history of fraudulent practices and has been successful indicted by N.Y. City for $500 million, and by New Mexico for over $11 million for their criminal activity!

Is this what we want in our community? Are these the people we want leading our cities and counties? Will this kind of activity help protect us?

None of the Urban Shield methods have served as an effective deterrent to crime in Oakland or anywhere else. Some of these methods are directly imported techniques used by special forces in Israel in occupied Palestine against civilian populations.

Shockingly, when confronted with protests by community members, city and county officials were unaware that this event was taking place in their own community.

The East Bay Express noted “the whole show ­ it's as much theater as it is practical exercise" ­ and is sponsored by major weapons manufacturing companies like ATK, which makes everything from small caliber bullets to depleted uranium ammunition.”

Urban Shield militarizes our police with combat style weapons and a military mentality that views community members as potential adversaries and threats to public security. This has translated into increased harm to African-American, Latino, Arab-American and Muslim communities, as well as people exercising their right to public protest.

Homeland Security is funding this ‘War on Terror’ circus to the tune of $7.5 million through the County Sheriff’s office, with the requirement that exercises focus on 'anti-terrorism' scenarios, including how to surveil the Muslim community and how to confront Occupy protestors or others exercising their right of dissent.

We demand accountability and transparency in the use of public monies for activities that, in the name of fighting terrorism, actually make us less secure and more vulnerable to racial profiling, false arrest, police harassment, criminalization of our youth, and violations of our constitutional rights.

Public funds are sorely needed to create healthy neighborhoods and community-building alternatives to heavy policing. We need violence prevention and mental health programs directed toward stopping domestic violence, sexual abuse and dealing with addiction. We need properly funded public schools and living wage jobs. These are the real ‘shields’ that will reduce the level of violence, create greater social responsibility and community accountability, and as a consequence, will make us all safer and more secure.

In a city that has a 'no gun show' policy, Urban Shield sends the wrong message.

Or perhaps it delivers the true message of a domestic police apparatus run amok: we're arming to squash all of you.

Sponsoring organizations represent a wide swath of the community: Allen Temple Baptist Church, Oscar Grant Foundation, Malcolm x Grassroots Movement, Cop Watch-Berkeley, International Socialist Organization, Bay Area Catalyst Project, Bay Area Intifada, Tristan Anderson Campaign, Palestine Youth Movement, Metta Center for NonViolence, Liberate/Occupy Oakland, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Interfaith Council of Contra Costa County, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Islamic Labor Caucus, Shomer Shalom Network for Jewish Nonviolence, Beyt Tikkun, Facing Tear Gas Campaign of the War Resisters League, American Friends Service Committee, Global Exchange, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, National Lawyer’s Guild (SF), Coalition for Safe Berkeley, East Bay Alliance for a Safe Economy (EBASE) Queer Insurrection

Friday critter blogging

This little fellow observed the Mission march against evictions from the safe perch in his person's back pack.

WTF? Now what?

I don't know about anyone else, but the Republican climb down from trashing our democratic polity leaves me simply wrung out.

The good news seems to be that rather than falling apart this time, the center held -- barely.

The bad news is what the Prez said today:

"You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election."

He's right. And that means that if we don't want these assholes doing it again, we have to beat them, drive them out of office. And it means working on elections not only where we're comfortable, but on their turf as well. I have friends who are working on North Carolina. I have friends working on Texas. There are a couple of plausible Republican House targets in California (Gary Miller, CA-31; Jeff Denham, CA-10) who should be replaced with someone who'll vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker.

If we don't want to go through this crap over and over again, we've got work to do. This kind of work, mostly finding people who've been pushed out of the process and bringing them in, is long and hard, but we have to do it.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan says something similar, far more eloquently:

What the Tea Party represents, in stark contrast to conservatism, is a radical attack on the very framework of our governing system. It is not right or left within our democratic system. It is a form of secession from it and a de facto abandonment of the notion of one country under one rule of law. It is about sabotage rather than opposition. It is bad enough when one party will seek to sabotage the law of the land – by attempting to rally the public to spurn the new healthcare law, in the hopes of causing it to collapse. But when the dominant faction of one party is bent on sabotaging our democracy, it must not simply be tolerated or appeased the way John Boehner shamefully did. It must be defeated. Anything less is a form of appeasement of forces and ideas that are truly antithetical to the democratic way of life and to constitutional governance.

Yes, in my view, the situation is that grim. If the Republican right’s fanaticism still blinds them to the error of their ways after they nearly destroyed the global economy (and brutally damaged the American one), it becomes clear that only a total collapse of the American government and economy could truly teach them the futility of their deluded aspirations. The rest of us cannot and must not tolerate that. We must draw a line. That line, for those who still believe in the regular order of our democracy, is November 2014.

It may take a little longer than that, but that's where we start.

Football is also beautiful

Last night I gave over nearly two hours to watching the POV/Frontline documentary League of Denial: the NFL's concussion crisis. The film is based on the research for Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada's book of the same name, just published. The show is slow, excruciatingly documented, and convincing in its core assertion that the NFL has consistently valued maintaining its brand and profits at the risk of the lives of football players, amateur and professional. This is not a pretty picture of the sport I delight to watch. (I never played, though I have an ex who played rugby and sometimes came home concussed.)

Critics of the Frontline documentary have pointed out that it ignores the complicity of the NFLPA, the player's union, in organized football's long campaign of silence about the dangers of the sport.

Accompanying the main film are additional filmed interviews with some of the talking heads in the film. San Franciscans -- and anyone who cares about the sport -- will appreciate the comments of retired 49er quarterback and current commentator Steve Young. Here's a sample of this intelligent man's appreciation of his sport.

You described the game as violent. I know that there are really tough hits, but the game itself, there are rules about it that really -- and I think the NFL is trying more and more to try to hone those down -- but I have always looked at it as a gentleman's game.

I know that people outside would say: "Oh, that Young, you're crazy. You don't know what you're talking about." But the guys that played it really well and played it for a long time, we were connected. Reggie White, Bruce Smith, some of my biggest adversaries or my best friends would knock me down and [say], "Steve, how you doing?" And I'd say: "Well, I'm not doing so good right now. Could you avoid this again?" I mean, we would have back-and-forth. ...

I'm not going to say it was just another day at the office, because it takes all of you. The demands of excellent NFL quarterbacking I always said took every piece of me, emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually. It was like it just took it all, and I think that was what was so energizing about it and unreplicable. ...

My life is more sublime now. It's wonderful. It's better in many ways, but you can't say, "Oh, I'm going to find that somewhere else." You just can't.

I believe Young here. The reporters who made League of Denial again and again assert that fans watch the game to enjoy the brutality of it all. That feels completely false to my sort of fan appreciation. Sure, seeing guys beat each other up is integral to football, but anyone who has watched with me knows that I'm likely to exclaim "did you see that??!!" when an onrushing defender manages to pull up in full stride and avoid smashing into an opponent who is already down. Some of the greatest athleticism of the game happens in those intentionally avoided hits.

This year with the current officiating emphasis on requiring players not to hit with their heads, I'm seeing men do amazing contortions with their bodies that are foreign to everything they learned in ten years of amateur football in pre-concussion awareness times. The skill is in contorting their bodies at full speed to tackle in the manner prescribed by the rules and still stopping the ball carrier. This sort of magnificent athletic accomplishment is what I watch football for.

Current rule changes are not the first time the sport has been reinvented to try to make it less lethal. The forward pass was legalized in 1906 because the tight scrum for running the ball was killing men. If the league takes the dangers seriously, perhaps they can accomplish another successful modification. I hope we don't as a society decide this sport is simply too inherently damaging. It is also beautiful.

Warming Wednesdays: climate change puts humanity on the move

People have always been on the move to some extent. The fossil record tells us our species spread out from a small troupe of ancestors in the Rift Valley in Africa to cover the globe. Presumably people have always moved about for the same reasons we do today: better opportunity (more to eat, more water), to escape competing or hostile humans, or following some spirit of exploration.

Scientists predict the effects of climate change will put millions more on the move. Alex Randall of the UK Climate and Migration Coalition argues that we should avoid adopting simplistic pictures of "climate refugees."

...People facing the prospect of moving hope that they will have some choice in the timing and circumstances of their movement and that when they arrive they will find work and become active members of their new communities. Their hope is that they will move with dignity.

... Apart from people's own rejection of the "climate refugee" term there are also several other problems. It's clear that there are connections between climate change and the movement of people, but the connections are not as clear as the "climate refugee" narrative suggests. The phrase conjures images of large numbers of people moving en masse over long distances and crossing international borders and possibly continents. It seems unlikely that climate change will produce this kind of human movement.

What seems more likely is that climate change might reinforce existing trends in short-term, short distance migration. For example, as subsistence farmers find it increasingly difficult to make a living in rural areas they may move to nearby cities to find work. Whole towns or villages will not move together: in fact, families may not even move together. Far more likely is that one or two household members will move, find work elsewhere and send money home to their community.

That sounds more like the European movement that populated the Americas with white people than what we've seen of displacement in the contemporary wars of the Middle East -- or in the wholesale transfer of people in the European wars of the 20th century.

Many countries including Australia treat the advancing movement of people as a security threat. Latin Americans take a more nuanced view.

The Environmental Justice Foundation, a UK non-profit working internationally and the makers of the video that heads this post, think the world needs a United Nations special rapporteur on climate change and human rights -- somebody whose business it is look out for how nations are treating climate migrants.

International negotiations on climate change have so far failed to adequately address the humanitarian and human rights impacts of climate change.

It is now time for the Human Rights Council to take positive action to safeguard these rights under threat and support the governments of the first and worst affected countries.

“Climate change is related not only to environmental factors but also to poverty, discrimination and inequalities – this is why climate change is a human rights issue.” Kyung-wha Kang, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights ...

The [special raporteur's] mandate should [be to] take stock of impacts of climate change, mitigation, adaptation on human rights and provide inputs to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process.

It could include identification and awareness raising awareness of best practices and make recommendations to governments and the international community about how we can best safeguard human rights in our changing world.

It seems a weak response, but until problems are named and described, they will not be acted on. Sign EJF's petition here.

This is an international Blog Action Day post, raising up issues of human rights for all.

Offline today, abruptly

Morty failed to protect my laptop from a sneak thief who apparently slipped in an unlocked door while we slept and grabbed the one obvious thing of value.

This post is evidence that I'm very well backed up, but the experience of night intrusion is scary and disconcerting. It may take a few days to resume normal communication.

"Everyone knew there weren't any chemical weapons ..."

Kudos to the New York Times and reporter Marlise Simons for using the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons as an occasion to revisit a particularly noxious aspect of the Bush/Chaney regime's invasion of Iraq under cover of lies.

The Brazilian diplomat José Bustani was the founding director general of the U.N. chemical weapons monitoring agency. In late 2001, Washington saw the agency as an impediment to their plan for invading Iraq -- what if Saddam Hussein agreed to international inspections and showed, as proved to be true, that he had no chemical weapons?

So they had to remove the organization's leadership.

… John R. Bolton marched into the office of [the organization's] boss to inform him that he would be fired.

“He told me I had 24 hours to resign,” said José Bustani, who was director general of the agency, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. “And if I didn’t I would have to face the consequences.”

… As Mr. Bustani tells the story, the campaign against him began in late 2001, after Iraq and Libya had indicated that they wanted to join the Chemical Weapons Convention, the international treaty that the watchdog agency oversees. To join, countries have to provide a list of stockpiles and agree to the inspection and destruction of weapons, as Syria did last month after applying. Inspectors from the agency were making plans to visit Iraq in late January 2002, he said.

“We had a lot of discussions because we knew it would be difficult,” Mr. Bustani, who is now Brazil’s ambassador to France, said Friday in his embassy office in Paris. The plans, which he had conveyed to a number of countries, “caused an uproar in Washington,” he said. Soon, he was receiving warnings from American and other diplomats.

… “By the end of December 2001, it became evident that the Americans were serious about getting rid of me,” he said. “People were telling me, ‘They want your head.’ ”

… Mr. Bustani and some senior officials, both in Brazil and the United States, say Washington acted because it believed that the organization under Mr. Bustani threatened to become an obstacle to the administration’s plans to invade Iraq. As justification, Washington was claiming that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, possessed chemical weapons, but Mr. Bustani said his own experts had told him that those weapons were destroyed in the 1990s, after the Persian Gulf war.

“Everybody knew there weren’t any,” he said. “An inspection would make it obvious there were no weapons to destroy. This would completely nullify the decision to invade.”

Mr. Bustani points out that Syria has been allowed to do what Iraq was not: join the convention against chemical weapons, make disclosure, and avoid bombing or invasion. Guess that is how international agencies are supposed to work, when rampaging empires let them do their job.

Graphic via Wikipedia.

No more evictions! No mas desalojos!

The people of eastern (lower) 24th Street in San Francisco were out Saturday, marching and dancing in our latest protest against Mission gentrification.


The current tech boom is wreaking its creative destruction here. Google, Facebook, etc. are using San Francisco, and particularly the Mission's relativity low rents and cultural excitement, as a bedroom community for its squadrons of young workers. Every morning, the Google buses, private buses to Silicon Vally, haul these new residents south.


Compared with the the people who've been the core of the place since World War II -- Latino families, white lefties, artists -- this wave of newcomers can pay the moon for housing and entertainment. Naturally there are speculators who want to cash in on them. These speculators are evicting people and small businesses as fast as they can, making a quick buck while trashing the cultural stew that is the Mission's attraction.

The Mission still gives a good parade. Some of the people most vulnerable to the current wave of displacements are our most honored artists like Rene Yanez and Yolanda Lopez whose creative work, including building the annual Dia de Los Muertos celebration, helped make the Mission the attraction it is.


The Mission has been more resistant to successive waves of gentrification than many areas of San Francisco. The late '90s tech boom crashed before swamping the local scene. Latino families have tended to hang on to the houses their grandparents bought from the Irish in the middle of the last century, providing a distinctive anchor amidst what outsiders saw as an urban dumping ground.


Its hard not to fear this wave of prosperous newcomers will swamp the present culture. This billboard hangs outside La Galeria de la Raza …


... while another wave of neighborhood organizers mobilize for self-preservation.

Saturday scenes and scenery: hints of autumn

The trees on Martha's Vineyard are more likely to turn yellow or brown than red as the days grow shorter, but there are exceptions.

Nice winter coat is coming here. Maybe someone will knit a sweater from it next year?

Ivy (poison?) thrives among the beach plum.

 

Friday cat blogging

Morty has welcomed me home to San Francisco. This morning he sat on the printer and helped me write.

There is a solution to homelessness

That solution is homes!

Norman is part of our parish community -- nearly every time we talk, he tells me how happy he is to have his apartment.

The solutions to some problems are too simple for bureaucracies and experts!

Scene from the government shutdown

Jim DeMint of the Heritage Foundation -- an alpha specimen of a Washington DC "wacko bird," -- describes the partial shutdown his Republican House pals have inflicted on the country as merely a "temporary slowdown in government operations."

Don't try to tell that to the old gentleman we met yesterday outside the local Social Security Administration office. He was gaping at this sign taped to the glass door.

He spoke only halting English. Since Spanish translation didn't seem to aid communication, I suspected he was of Filipino origin.

"They are supposed to be open." He kept trying to see some activity behind the glass.

The suggestion that a computer might answer his question might as well have been words in Chinese or Russian.

We all eventually wandered off.

A naive slog through MSNBC's evening line-up

I simply don't watch television -- except for football. I often feel out of touch with my culture, but the medium doesn't grab me. But I sometimes feel I ought to have a better idea what others are seeing. So yesterday, on a cross-country flight -- trapped in a middle seat over which the overhead light had burned out, without wifi and with a computer out of juice -- I pacified myself by watching the entire MSNBC evening line-up for the first time, ever.

MSNBC is touted/despised as the liberal answer to Fox News. I don't see Fox either, so I can't judge the accuracy of that comparison. I have friends who I respect, as well as bloggers I like to read, who seem to get a lot out MSNBC's night time shows. Can't say I'm going to join them anytime soon.

Here are some barely informed impressions:

• The Ed Show: Ed Schultz is fun, a fine, bombastic, populist newsertainer. If you like this kind of shtick, you'll probably like Ed. I did, though I can't imagine watching in any other circumstances.

• Politics Nation with Al Sharpton: I've enjoyed Sharpton since he injected himself in Democratic presidential debates in 2004, speaking then-unspeakable truths for many of us. I know -- as well as being a legitimate fighter for human rights, he's also been a bit of a huckster, doing well by Al while doing good. But at least he's never been boring -- until this TV show. Maybe I just caught an off episode, but Tuesday night, in the middle of what I think is a U.S. Constitutional crisis, Politics Nation was a yawner.

• Hardball with Chris Matthews: What a weird dude Matthews is! Obviously he has been around DC forever, knows everyone, has (very loosely) liberal sympathies, and sometimes substitutes emotions for where brains ought to be. This last can lead to insights -- and bathos. I read him for years when he wrote politics for the now defunct San Francisco Examiner. The TV persona seems an amped up version of what he seemed to me then: a political wannabe who couldn't quite make it to the big time.

• All In with Chris Hayes: I respect Hayes' book, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, though I have questioned some of his prescriptions for a way forward. That volume introduced me to a tough thinker. And I'd heard that his TV shows provide a venue for new, younger, more diverse and more imaginative thinkers to intrude on the usual punditry. The one episode I just saw was nothing like that. It was a pastiche of extremely brief episodes that hit obvious liberal themes -- no imagination and no meat. Maybe TV is not this guy's best venue? I know others differ on this.

• The Rachel Maddow Show: In my world, Rachel is an icon; she's family, a lesbian who gets to pontificate with the most prominent personalities around. Seeing one of your own doing a big boy's job is not something to be taken lightly. I've never watched a whole show, but I've seen clips on which she was brilliant. But Tuesday night's show was nothing special. She tried hard, but that blow-hard old white guy, Ed Shultz, seemed to me to do a better job at coming to terms with the debt limit crisis. TV must be a hard medium to ace. I had hoped for more than this episode offered.

• The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell: I don't remember hearing of O'Donnell before seeing this show. I found I liked it the best of the MSNBC lot. It was pure hard-hitting, aggressive, liberal punditry, naming names and calling out bullshit -- in this case on Republican House Speaker John Boehner. The segments moved along briskly, but unlike those on Chris Hayes' show, they had crisp content. If you are going to do political hit pieces, this strikes me as how to do it -- ultimately more honest than any attempt at nuance. If this show were on at a reasonable hour -- it is not -- I might look in on O'Donnell when not trapped at 30,000 feet in an over-heated plastic box.

So do I have any conclusions? Not really. Doing gripping TV with substantive content is clearly difficult. Some very smart people who I might often agree with are struggling on MSNBC. Television may be a declining medium, but engaging visual presentation of information and opinion is something our culture needs.

I'm not going to do this again. When will the airlines put in electric outlets and wifi? Please save me soon!

A good gesture

It's nice to be in San Francisco. My friend who took this picture reports that someone had painted swastikas on fixtures in a park. Someone else had painted them over -- and apparently wanted to be sure that no one came away smudged ...

Warming Wednesdays: rising seas, one small hospital and planning conundrums

I've written before about concerns that the new Martha's Vineyard Hospital might prove vulnerable as warming leads to more violent storms. At the Living Local Harvest Festival last week I had chance to speak with a coastal planner from the Martha's Vineyard Commission, a regional planning body.

She readily pointed out that, not only does the main road from the town of Vineyard Haven to the hospital cross a low-lying harbor causeway, but also the rear approach comes through a wetland.

I suggested that a likely future scenario was a damaging storm during which most of the island was cut off from hospital access, followed by a wrenching local political decision to undertake the expense and controversy of building a sustainable road to the facility.

She agreed this might happen, but expanded on the political problems. The moment at which Vineyarders realize that they must do something to ensure they can reach their quite excellent small hospital in an emergency will very likely be the same time when Boston and its coastal communities discover they need to strengthen their defenses against rising seas. There are a lot more people in those urban areas than on the island; the more populated areas will certainly have first claim on whatever funds can be found for sustainability projects. The Island has some people with serious money, but not enough residents to have much state-level political clout.

This reality means that present planning amounts to trying to create circumstances that will make mitigation measures cheaper when a series of crunches come. Specifically, in the case of the hospital, it means discouraging development in the adjacent flats that will become wetlands as seas rise. It was politically impossible to persuade the hospital to relocate from its vulnerable location when it modernized, but at least its some of the approaches can be kept as open to future improvements as possible.

Here's a picture of the hospital area I snapped yesterday when taking the small plane to Boston. The harbor causeway comes in from the right; the hospital is the slightly reddish building in the center.

Travel day today

I'll be flying out of here in one of these -- about 10 seats with luggage. Then to a standard size jet, then home.

Further posting will depend on how long I'm in airports with what kind of wifi. Travel is better when the former is brief and the latter is easy and free.

For what it is worth, it looks as if the FAA is considering retiring that iconic phrase, "Turn off your electronic devices." Good. I need all the distraction I can get while jammed in a plastic cylinder and translated across the country.

Are Republicans really just racists?

So is the current Constitutional crisis -- the refusal of an irresponsible Republican House of Representatives to pass a budget and pay the country's bills -- really happening because a residue of southern and rural whites remain unable to accept that a Black man has twice been elected our President?

The Washington Post's longtime District-oriented opinion writer Colbert King had a piece that appeared over the weekend that described our circumstances like this:

Today there is a New Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government.

…The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.

… Hold on to that Confederate money, y’all. Jim Crow just might rise again. … don’t go looking for a group by the name of New Confederacy. They earned that handle from me because of their visceral animosity toward the federal government and their aversion to compassion for those unlike themselves. They respond, however, to the label “tea party.” By thought, word and deed, they must be making Jefferson Davis proud today.

Yet curiously (at least to me) in the midst of this extended historical analogy, Mr. King says:

I stress there is no evidence that the New shares the racist views of the Old.

On that I call BULLSHIT! Unhappily, there is abundant evidence that for many citizens who make up a sizable part of the Republican base constituency, the President is simply -- irretrievably -- the Other, not a "real American."

Democracy Corps' Inside the GOP report (available in .pdf at the link) aims to share what came out in focus groups with subsets of Republicans. Here's a bit about their methodology:

We selected these three groups (Evangelicals, non-Evangelical Tea Party adherents, [together more than 50 percent] and moderates [about 25 percent]) because combined they represent almost all of today’s Republican partisans.

… While our methodology is for groups to be homogenous to encourage free discussion, we discovered here that the focus group became the opportunity to express opinions they feel on the defensive about in real life. … But for the first time for me, it felt like we were creating a safe space where Republican voters could express feelings freely—and they did.

A few words about focus groups: as the pollsters who did this report make clear, these groups are not science, any kind of statistically valid survey. Focus groups are closer to art -- applied opinion research based on smart and imaginative efforts to recruit and encourage representative collections of people to express themselves truthfully, as if they were around a table at a community supper or a water cooler -- somewhere they feel safe. Focus group facilitation is a high end skill; most of us are socialized to be a little reticent about our beliefs in groups of strangers. But well-run focus groups can take on a life of their own: someone steps out with a controversial stance and, if this hits a chord with others, the whole group will run off down a vein that they might ordinarily keep private. The Democracy Corps groups seem to have been very effective at releasing the emotional underpinning of their Republican participants thoughts; the best political focus group research does just that -- and often the results seem a little shocking to the sort of people who commission such studies, especially liberals. Are our fellow citizens really nursing such stigmatized opinions? Yes.

Some of the findings about racial attitudes:

… while few explicitly talk about Obama in racial terms, the base supporters are very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities. Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities. Race remains very much alive in the politics of the Republican Party.

… We expected that in this comfortable setting or in their private written notes, some would make a racial reference or racist slur when talking about the African American President. None did. They know that is deeply non-PC and are conscious about how they are perceived. But focusing on that misses how central is race to the worldview of Republican voters. They have an acute sense that they are white in a country that is becoming increasingly “minority,” and their party is getting whooped by a Democratic Party that uses big government programs that benefit mostly minorities, create dependency and a new electoral majority.

This word cloud captures the weights of the various descriptive words that Republicans used about the President Obama.

‘Liar’ is virtually the first association in all the groups – from Tea Party to moderates. That is a visceral separation and reason to not listen to him. But in the context of a re-elected president getting his way, it is an expression of deep frustration with the country and people who believe him. … They talk about him as though he is a manufactured object, created by great political operatives.

I can only read this to mean exactly what Republicans were unwilling to say: Obama uses their language well, the language of U.S. liberty and democracy, but he applies it to people who, in their guts, they consider non-people. And he can't be that smart all on his own. Yes -- that's garden-variety racism.

Awful reading as this report makes, there are glimpses of hope. Democracy Corps' "Moderate" Republicans come through as frightened of their own party. The women, in particular, want a much more realistic accommodation to U.S. realities than either Evangelicals or the TP folk.

And, afflicted with the lurch from Republican obstructionist crisis to the next manufactured crisis, it's hard to remember, but these Republican dead-enders are themselves a dwindling minority. President Obama only received about 39 percent of white people's votes in 2012 -- but 56 percent of his votes came from whites! The pool of non-white voters has become larger in national contests. But Obama was still elected with a lot of votes from white people. We aren't all terrified reactionaries. There are a substantial number of white people who are more and more ready to live in a country in which no ethnicity is an absolute majority and we all have to get along. White people can work to get us there more rapidly and peacefully, if we chose to.

Remember that war in Afghanistan?

An Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier assigned to the Mobile Strike Force Kandak prepares to fire a RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher during a live-fire exercise supervised by the Marines with the Mobile Strike Force Advisor Team on Camp Shorabak, Helmand province, Afghanistan, May 20, 2013. Photo ISAFmedia Flickr photo stream

Looks like the United States may be drawing down more thoroughly than our imperial leaders had projected. It turns out, Afghans don't want armed U.S. forces wandering their country after the main force drawdown. According to the New York Times. President Karzai is unwilling to sign an agreement allowing our military to operate in the Afghan countryside after the end of 2014.

Ultimately, though, the issue is one of sovereignty, Mr. Faizi said. American-led forces have killed civilians in dozens of attacks, he said, and Afghanistan has concluded that foreigners cannot be trusted with the lives of innocent Afghans.

“After 2014, will any foreign military be free to go where it pleases and operate the way it pleases in Afghanistan?” Mr. Faizi said. “The answer is no.”

They think its their country. Since we're not willing to fight to occupy it in perpetuity (why would we?), they'll take it back, thank you very much.

This is what happened in the end in Iraq as well. The Iraqis took Iraq back. This country has had its fill of occupying other people's territories, however effective we've been at killing, maiming and displacing when we did blunder about them.

The government shutdown hits the U.S. military

Photo by Victoria Pickering, Flickr

The invaluable Thomas Ricks blogging at the hydra-headed site Foreign Policy has invited his correspondents in and around the military to share what a government shut down means to them.

Bruce Fleming wrote from Annapolis:

The halls of the English department at the U.S. Naval Academy, where I am in my 27th year as a civilian professor, were almost free of midshipmen students on Tuesday, Oct. l, when I had to go in to sign my official furlough letter, the one informing me that I was out of work until and unless the government shutdown ends. The students weren't there because most of their classes had been cancelled for the foreseeable future. …

In my plebe Rhetoric and Introduction to Literature class, we'd reached Act II of Othello. It's a play I find essential for a military academy, about Othello's inability to switch from his "guy" world of the military, where he has served "in the tented field" since the age of seven(!), to the new world of Venice, city manners, and women that, hired by the Venetian senators as a mercenary admiral, he is suddenly thrust into. Now he's gone and married Desdemona, but his trusted warrior subordinate Iago tells him she's unfaithful. Othello is insecure (he's old and dark-skinned) and he believes in the band of brothers rather than his wife. The result is tragedy for all. Females and too great a reliance on the bros -- what can be more timely for USNA, racked by sexual assault scandals and toxic SAPR training?

Go read the rest. It's a fascinating peak inside a military academy in our dysfunctional empire.

Then there's Capt. Brad Hardy, U.S. Army, who is angry about what he sees happening -- and worse, seriously disquieted about its implications:

The desk next to me is vacant, the end result of the current government shutdown. My counterpart, a government civilian, is furloughed until further notice. This is the second time this year he has been sent home without pay.

I wonder why him and not me. I am an active-duty servicemember. Congress and the president have made a special allowance in the absence of a continuing resolution so that I may be paid regularly. ... But again, what makes me special while my civilian colleague draws the short stick? Where do we draw the line and force the military, as a piece of the federal government team, to shoulder at least some of the shutdown burden?

The reason may be that the military, for a number of theories, is a beatified, protected sect among American society. As such, not funding military pay checks is bad politics. Few in Washington want to be considered as anti-military, non-flag waving, unpatriotic, or overly inquisitive of how the military conducts its business. In general terms, supporting the military, at least financially, is the undeniable solution even if one finds the policy objectives murky or the actual conduct of war unnecessary or ham-fisted.

And again, I'm not complaining about my continued compensation. Money is good. So are groceries. But by holding our place in society to a higher order than those who serve with commensurate dedication and vigor we may damage the very nature of what American uniformed service means. Furlough equity should be considered a part of professional military service. ...

Now there's a bold suggestion. I doubt Capt. Hardy could make it if he really believed that most of what the bloated institution in which he is a loyal professional cog is doing was truly essential to the well-being of the nation. That recognition is what scares me about our military. What if many of them got sick of incompetent civilians placing them in fruitless, sometimes even idiotic, missions? If their labor and dedication seemed to be serving no purpose? Could they obediently continue to "serve"? Perhaps the regular branches might put up with this, but what about the ever-growing spook sectors, not to mention their profiteering suppliers? All this seems worth worrying about.

Update: It seems Secretary of War (Defense) Hagel is trying to recall civilian employees of the military despite the continuing government shutdown. It will be worth watching how this develops. Could an administration so inclined militarize the entire federal government, thereby rendering Congressional assent irrelevant? Unlikely, but expedients invented as work-arounds for extreme cases sometimes leak into everyday practice.

Saturday scenes and scenery: details from the Alhambra

The dismal events in Washington over the last week have left me eager to recall the beauties we saw last summer. The Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain was meant to offer the emirs of the Nazrid Moorish dynasty in the 14th century a glimpse of the heavenly paradise obedient servants of God might expect to win.

The details are exquisite.

 

Another time; such a different imperial sensibility...

Elizabeth Warren speaks for me on the shutdown

... we're not a nation of quitters … this democracy has already rejected your views…a political minority that hates government begged for this shutdown. Their day will pass; we will return to the tasks that we have chosen to do together ...

Okay, I'm an old white lady too, so maybe I'm just identifying with one of my own kind. She's not elegant or fancy. She is, however, really smart and really articulate. The Massachusetts Senator is a keeper, a politician who can explain what most of this country wants in words we can understand.

Friday cat blogging: Mr. Emerson is visiting

He's an elegant beast.

He likes a good roll on the patio.

Baby steps forward ...

In a time of such widespread angry belligerence and not-a-little fear inspired by the latest wacko mass shooting at a DC Navy yard, it has been interesting to see where voices are being raised against the death penalty for guys whose acts inspire no sympathy at all.

Would you believe that during the penalty deliberations over the fate of Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood mass killer, the Dallas Morning News argued he should not be sentenced to death? That's in Texas, argued about a Muslim who murdered soldiers!

It's not that they had gone soft on terrorists -- it's that they have long arrived at the opinion that the death penalty does not render justice as effectively a sentence of life without parole.

Even with the heinousness of Hasan’s crimes, this newspaper stands by its opposition to the death penalty. Tempting though it might be to argue for an exception for an Army major and psychiatrist who plotted to kill U.S. troops in cold blood, lethal injection would give this jihadist exactly what he wants. …As his minimal defense proves, he still believes he can die a hero to fellow jihadists overseas by taking the needle. Why reward him?

Although he survived his shootout, a bullet struck his spine and left him paralyzed from the chest down. He relies on others for basic hygienic and therapeutic needs. It would not be a stretch to presume he sees life on this planet as intolerable. His body has become a burden.

Why grant him relief, while family members of those he killed and those who survived will never truly get theirs? Why give the killer an easy out?

The military jury didn't agree -- Hasan has since been sentenced to death. But as the Washington Post reported, that doesn't mean he will meet a quick end:

… legal experts said it will probably be many years, if ever, before the sentence will be carried out. Hasan will be flown shortly to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he will join five other inmates on military death row, officials said.

In military cases, there are several mandatory appeal stages and a military death sentence requires final approval by the president, as commander in chief.

Meanwhile, last week the Boston Globe urged Attorney General Eric Holder to take the death penalty off the table in the case of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The state of Massachusetts has not had a death penalty since U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s required states to rewrite their statutes for greater fairness. But Tsarnaev is being tried under federal terrorism laws, so the Attorney General gets to decide what sort of case will be made.

The Globe explained last week:

The death penalty is a deeply contentious issue, and individual viewpoints often spring from strongly held ethical and religious beliefs. To many, executions are never justified. Yet even ardent supporters of capital punishment should recognize that in this case, it would be a mistake for Holder to pursue the death penalty against Tsarnaev.

In addition to the extra cost of capital prosecutions — cases can exceed $10 million — death penalty cases drag on for years, through numerous appeals. Such lengthy proceedings would ensure that the Marathon bombing case lingers in the spotlight, compounding the sense of injury to victims. Many people would feel compelled to defend Tsarnaev on the basis of his youth, lack of past offenses, and being under the influence of his older brother — all factors that would mitigate against a death sentence. Years of proceedings, and their potential culmination in a death sentence, would also give Tsarnaev what he and his brother apparently sought: publicity and notoriety. Much better to let Tsarnaev slip into obscurity in a federal prison cell, and stay there.

In this, apparently the paper is echoing the views of Boston area residents. A Globe sponsored poll in September showed that

… 57 percent of respondents support a life sentence for Tsarnaev, compared with 33 percent who favor the death penalty. …

Preference for life without parole extended across political leanings, although Democrats overwhelmingly supported that option, 61 to 28 percent, while Republicans narrowly backed a life sentence, 49 to 46 percent. Life without parole was endorsed by men and women, across all education levels, and among white, black, and Hispanic respondents.

It's an ill-wind that blows NO good ..

A KKK rally at Gettysburg battleground is canceled because of the government shutdown. So far, this is the only positive news I've seen about the Republican attempt at minority nullification of U.S. democracy.

Meanwhile, if you don't like what Republicans are doing, take a look at New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza's map of where what he calls the "suicide caucus" resides. These people live in an old, rural, white United States that is representative of only 18 percent of us. Those of us who live somewhere else need to identify anywhere in this hinterland where we can shake some people up and put our shoulders to wheel. We can't afford, literally, to just wait til these people die off.

Warming Wednesdays: scientists have moved on beyond all doubt

There was something much more important in this week's news than the Republican wrecking crew shutting down much of the U.S. government, dramatic as that assault on democracy seems. It's a terrible commentary on the failure of our current political, social and economic system that the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report barely caused a ripple of notice.

Advancing climate devastation is the existential issue of our time. Only massive of use of nuclear weapons comes even close as a threat to human and other planetary life. For the moment, the latter danger seems to have receded. But our rulers continue to fixate on "terrorism" -- a small scale if dramatic calamity -- and the antics of the Grumpy Old (white) People's party.

I'll outsource explication of the latest IPPC report to Dr. Jeff Masters at the weather site, Wunderground. He's striving for an analogy to help us appreciate the danger and found a timely one.

I was struck by how the IPCC report reads like lab results from a sick hospital patient. The natural systems that civilization depends upon to thrive have been profoundly disturbed, and the forecast for the future reads like a medical diagnosis for an overweight smoker with a heart condition: unless the patient makes major lifestyle changes, the illness will grow far worse, with severe debilitation or death distinct possibilities.

We can and we must make the huge effort to turn things around. Oil and natural gas are the energy technologies of the 20th century. Coal is the energy technology of the 19th century. We have countless innovative and dedicated people ready to move us to the energy technology of the 21st century; I heard three of them speak last night at the Climate Week event I am at, and they really gave me some needed hope that we can turn things around. We must elect new leaders and pressure our existing leaders to take the strong actions needed to advance us into a new, 21st century energy economy. You can all help make it so!

Master is terrific at describing just what the scientific data mean about how weather will be changed as carbon pollution climbs. Read it all.

Happy Obamacare launch and government lock-out day!

The Grumpy Old (White) People's party (GOP) is throwing a temper tantrum. Like their ancestors in pre-Civil War "Slave Power," they've decided it is "rule or ruin" time. Odd that it was a founder of the Republican Party who came up with that descriptive phrase, but it is certainly an apt description of the current GOP.

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

I'm a sucker for white board videos that explain complex concepts. Here's a good one explaining the Affordable Care Act that the GOP is so upset about, in case you need another go at this. Pass it on.
Over decade ago, a good friend with one of the best shit detectors I've ever known, crowed to me about how wonderful her "independent" Governor was in her home state of Maine. "That Angus -- he's a real one!"

Angus King is now an "independent" U.S. Senator (he caucuses with the Dems) and he has a story to tell Republicans who are urging young people to refuse the option of health insurance coverage created by Obamacare. Brian Beutler reports the story in Salon.

“That’s a scandal — those people are guilty of murder in my opinion,” Sen. Angus King, a Maine Independent who caucuses with Democrats, told me in a Friday interview. “Some of those people they persuade are going to end up dying because they don’t have health insurance. For people who do that to other people in the name of some obscure political ideology is one of the grossest violations of our humanity I can think of. This absolutely drives me crazy.”

King has good personal reasons to value health insurance for the young and apparently healthy. Read all about it at the link.