Might the Trump show reveal a truth about campaigning?

Maybe, just maybe, this is going to be the year when the mythology about campaign TV ads in major contests collapses. Political TV ads are mostly a scam to make consultants rich. Marketplace ran a good explanation of this last year:

... if you’re running for office, you tend to do what your consultants tell you to do. And consultants like TV. It’s safe. In many cases, it’s what they’ve always done. And then there’s the money.

“Consultants – they have an incentive to sell TV to their candidates,” said Adam Sheingate, who teaches political science at Johns Hopkins University.

Sheingate decided to look into why we’re still seeing so many campaign ads on TV. His conclusion: “It’s the most lucrative part of the business from the consultants’ perspective. It provides the greatest opportunity to make money.”

Here’s how it works, according to Sheingate. A political candidate hires a consultant. The consultant says, let’s blanket the airwaves. The candidate says, OK. The consultant places the ads with TV stations, and takes a commission – 10 to 15 percent of the cost of the ad. That adds up.

However these ads have remarkably little impact, especially when candidates like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton already are known quantities to most people. Political scientist Lynn Vavreck lays out what researchers have learned:

A study estimated that most of the impact of an ad in a presidential election is gone within a day or two of its airing (I am one of the authors of this paper). In governor, congressional and Senate elections, the effects last a bit longer: three or four days. Fleeting effects on campaigns have been shown by various authors in the lab; in Canada; in the 2000 and 2004 general elections; in the 2006 midterm elections; in the 2012 general election; and in field experiments in a Texas governor’s primary in 2006 and a general election in 2014.

But she then goes on to argue that candidates can't skip the air wars because ... well because the minuscule effects that have been documented might add up by November. Well maybe ...

But is TV genuinely essential in big races? Vavreck points out that Trump actually was the subject of a lot of positive TV ads during the primary. But right now, he seems to be broke. Maybe he'll create the experiment that proves the TV is just waste in a presidential cycle with well known candidates.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is blanketing the battleground states in the conventional manner.

Every single 2016 presidential TV ad currently airing in a battleground state is either from Hillary Clinton's campaign or the Democratic outside groups supporting her.

The opposition, by contrast, hasn't spent a dime in these same battlegrounds - whether it's Donald Trump's campaign or Republican-leaning Super PACs

That's a real world test of the conventional wisdom if I ever saw one. Trump must be defeated. But if his campaign revealed that a candidate can bring out his base without the airwaves, citizens spared endless repetitions of nonsense would be grateful. Not that I can imagine that consultants would ever admit this.

Ads about candidates and on subjects about which voters know little may be both informative and effective; but much candidate spending is consultant-theft from gullible clients.

Brexit?

For this (or any) Yank, to comment on the Brexit referendum on continuing membership in the European Union that will happen in Britain on June 23 is foolish. It's too easy to slot the conflicting sides into our own political conflicts, even as there are kinships in the panic over immigration and persistent regional differences, missing the texture and complexity of British realities.

Yet the chance that Britain will try to sever itself from Europe is unsettling. In the 20th century, Europe was the font and exporter of global barbarism. (Yes, our own country is working on winning that title for the 21st century.) With exhaustion and the death of empires, Europe became a region of civilization. Its disaggregation can't be a good sign, can it?

Anthony Barnett is writing a book online at Open Democracy titled Blimey, it could be Brexit! which I have found enlightening. Here's how he describes his project:

And here are some nuggets, not in the order Barnett serves them up, that might be thought provoking for people in the States.

He names the signal failure of Britain's recent rulers; both Labor and Conservative governments have squandered the presumption that they rule in the best interests of the majority.

... Iraq irreparably holed the legitimacy of Britain’s current political caste below the waterline, not because they were mistaken, but because the people warned them they were mistaken. On a matter of war and peace – the highest calling of the state – the people were right and the Westminster political elite were wrong. The fundamental assumption on which rests the unwritten basic code of the UK’s operating system is that those who rule us will get it right. Or, if they get it wrong, as they did with appeasement most notably in 1938, they will provide the man and the judgment to correct their course. ...

With that loss of legitimacy, space has opened up for the strains implicit in an "unwritten constitution" within which whatever party rules in Parliament in Westminster can take the country wherever it chooses without much legal check.

... the referendum is a symptom of the unresolved constitutional agony caused by the failure to overcome Britain’s past.

... Here in Anglo-Britain we do not have a state that is answerable to us, the people. We have governments that can be ejected in elections and to that important if blunt extent are answerable. But the state that they run when elected is the most highly centralised of the western world and its powers are not defined or limited by a constitution that places sovereignty in the hands of the people.

Brits have relied on accreted, uncodified, snippets of law and liberty; the European project, meanwhile, is an attempt to define by diplomacy a written legal framework for many national states, accommodating differences but gradually eroding them.

... A multi-national entity like the United Kingdom [consisting of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland] whose constitution is uncodified is bound to be fundamentally threatened by membership of a larger, multi-national entity that is dedicated to codifying itself. If its membership continues, its constitution will eventually be dissolved by it. The British state’s conventions, informal procedures and lack of defined sovereignty cannot withstand being inside the consolidation of the EU’s processes.

... The European Union, soon to be ten times the size of the UK, by contrast, has a short history of changing its arrangements in as fast and purposive a way as it can, despite its now great size. These are two different constitutional projects. The term sounds odd applied to UK. But it's a mistake to see the British regime, however ancient and pre-democratic it may be, as somehow feudal. On the contrary it emerged from the first modern revolution of 1688, after a regicidal civil war, as a cross-class, capitalist formation committed to development, improvement and money-making, without which it could never have hosted the industrial revolution. Britain remains a purposive country, with an old constitution that seeks to encompass new energies.

This historic Britain, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, cannot preserve its inherited constitutional settlement and culture within the European Union. The two are incompatible. This will be so even if the European Union discards the experiment of the Euro and seeks to become, as the phrase goes, a United Europe of States rather than a United States of Europe, which it will be well advised to do.

Barnett faults "the left" for failing to break out of the apologetic frame within which Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has cast the referendum. Membership in Europe could be positively good not only for Britain's economic health, but even more for equality, diversity, and democracy.

By the left I mean an arc of those who oppose corporate power and its corruptions. It includes some who support Leave ... It stretches from Greens, Lib Dems and liberals (at least those who prefer democracy and liberty to the pure market place) the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru [of Wales], through varieties of socialism, labourism and social democrats... Looked at from the conventional, received point of view this is a heteroclite hodgepodge. This is because the received point of view is in the pocket of the system’s vested interests.

... no third option [beyond to Remain reluctantly or to Leave out of reactionary impulses] has caught the public imagination or been given significant media coverage. The main reason for this is that in their hearts too the Labour party and Labour movement also distrust the EU and do not feel European. They too support Remain for instrumental reasons, as a source of rights and other workers gains they feel too feeble to secure through their own strengths. Jeremy Corbyn says he is "about seven to seven and a half" out of 10 for the EU. It is an honest answer and that distinguishes him from the Prime Minister. But as well as being the opposite of inspiring, in the last fortnight of a momentous campaign it exhibtis precisely a relationship of calculated balance of advantage that is anti-EU in spirit....

... in England voters are being asked to choose between two forms of anti-Europeanism. In effect the question on the ballot paper is asking, ‘How antagonistic are you to the EU, a little or a lot?’ It is not surprising that the referendum has revived anti-Europeanism and a desire to Brexit.

In the last week a young Labour member of Parliament was murdered by someone who is apparently a nativist crazy. Jo Cox did inspire through her work with refugees and for the poor. Brits are still shocked by political murder (are we?). Whether this horror jars the result in the referendum where polls show Leave ahead will be seen on Thursday. Barnett intends to finish his book after the vote is taken; whatever the result, the issues he raises won't go away.

For the record: when the SFPD put Dolores Huerta in the hospital

Dolores Huerta had always been feisty. Alongside Cesar Chavez, she co-founded the movement that became the United Farm Workers union which fought for migrant agricultural workers in California through the 60s and 70s. The UFW was an incubator for Latino organizing in the Golden State, inspiring action far beyond the fields.

Huerta was no stranger to violence. Not only had workers been shot in the course of the UFW's strikes, but she was part of Robert F. Kennedy's party when he was murdered in 1968 in a Los Angeles hotel just hours after winning the California Democratic presidential primary.

In 1988 Huerta was a respected and significant figure in labor, Democratic, and activist politics when she joined a peaceful demonstration in Union Square outside a George H.W. Bush fundraiser. The crowd was noisy, but contained. But San Francisco police chose to charge, using their thrusting batons to fracture Huerta's ribs and rupturing her spleen.

Janice Leber was reporting for radio station KPFA that night and recounted her experiences.

The event was President George Bush's campaign swing through the Golden $tate, and many Bay Area groups were meeting and greeting him San Francisco-style, with nasty signs and slogans. A bunch of union loyalists were carrying "Dukakis for President" signs and chanting, "We Like Mike!" (One fellow started shouting, "We Like Jesse!" which earned him some dirty looks.) ACT-UP was there with their whistles and shouts of "Shame!" A corps of drummers kept up an incessant racket. Food Not Bombs served up wholesome food to all.

In short, it was a typical response to a visit by an incumbent Republican fat cat. [She interviewed Huerta.]

... Then, for some reason I still don't understand, the cops decided it was time to clear the sidewalk. Okay. No problem. 

Oh, except -- problem. There are people in front of me, officer. I'm trying to clear the sidewalk, really I am, but there are people in front of me. And still, more people were pushing against me. The crowd became so compacted I felt I could lift my feet off the ground and I would have remained upright. ...

Eventually I was scraping up against a concrete tree planter. I had nowhere to go, and was still being pushed. As I contemplated my skinned shins I felt a THUD, somebody's elbow HARD in my back. I thought, "Hey man, I know it's crowded but there's no reason to get physical!" I turned to tell the guy behind me just that when I saw that I had been poked hard not by an errant elbow, but by the business end of a billy club.

... The adrenaline rush was still going when I was back home watching the KRON Eleven O'Clock News. Those sneaky bastards. As the cops began their maneuver I had watched them systematically removing TV cameras from the sidewalk area before they began poking the crowd. But Channel 4's cameraman (bless you, dude) snuck back onto the sidewalk while the police were distracted with the crowd. And this one nasty cop got caught on video, doing a number on Dolores Huerta.

And as I watched the news that night, I watched myself. I saw me in my black jacket, with my goofy '88 perm, exactly right next to Dolores Huerta right before she was first struck. I watched myself leaping away in slow-motion as the club descended on her. A lump grew in my throat. That poke on my back …  that cop warmed up on me.

But I was too big, physically. Petite Dolores would be such a better target for one's rage.

Or could it be this guy knew who she was, knew what an effective political fighter she was…?

Regardless of that cop's motives, his actions were inhuman.

As it happens, I was about 10 feet behind Huerta that night and can confirm that the police charge was both unwarranted and seemed intended to injure. Most got away, but some became targets.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Mayor Art Agnos watched the police tapes of the event with Police Chief Frank Jordan:

Dolores Huerta, 58-year-old grandmother and union vice-president, was under sedation and in fair condition at San Francisco General Hospital after doctors removed her spleen and treated two fractured ribs. Family and union officials charged that police attacked Huerta during the demonstration....

"I will not tolerate anything that is not part of authorized crowd control tactics," said Agnos, who paid a bedside visit to Huerta, a longtime political ally and friend. After reviewing police tapes with Chief Jordan, Agnos said he identified Huerta in the crowd that was being moved from the front of the hotel to Geary Street. Agnos said he doubted that the 5-foot-2-inch Huerta who weighs 110 pounds, resisted police. "We could see she was being very cooperative, Agnos said, "We could even read her lips, saying 'I'm moving.'"

So what came of this? Huerta lost her spleen and recovered. The city paid her a judgment of $825,000. Agnos was a one term mayor; he was succeeded in office by the Police Chief, Frank Jordan. I have not been able to find a record of what happened to the officers who gave Huerta a beating. In reporting the settlement, the LA Times reported:

Since then, the police force has changed its rules regarding police discipline and crowd control methods.

The Huerta case prompted three internal police investigations, three criminal grand jury inquiries, three supervisors' hearings and three probes by the Office of Citizen Complaints, the city's civilian police watchdog group.

I have to wonder if the officers who beat Huerta retired with their pensions as so many rogue cops have, before and since.

Posts titled "For the record" will appear here occasionally as long as San Franciscans continue to have to struggle to rein in a police department which has killed five civilians in the last two years in circumstances in which officers' justifications for their use of force strain credulity. Alex Nieto, Amilcar Perez Lopez, Mario Woods, Luis Gongora Pat, and Jessica Williams are dead. No officer has been charged or (as far as we know) disciplined. In fact, since 2000, the SFPD has killed 42 civilians; no officers have been charged. A culture of impunity in the SFPD is not new; in the over 40 years I've lived in this city, new cases involving officers mistreating residents have recurred over and over.

Saturday scenes: San Francisco sidewalks speak

Walking San Francisco has taught me what a strong drive we feel to make our mark on our surroundings. The public sidewalks are prime targets of our itch to get our two cents on record, usually with paint or chalk. But occasionally the opportunity comes along to leave our messages in the concrete itself.

Some messages are upbeat.

Others are merely enduring irritants.

There's a question.

Once upon a time, union concrete finishers left their stamp.

Some leavings are personal ...

... others make a broader appeal.

Underneath our feet, some critters know when the only answer is a nap.

If they want their money, they should clean up their act

Yesterday morning, representatives of community groups working to rein what one activist described as our "racist, rogue, and violent" police department backed up Supervisor John Avalos as he unveiled an ambitious effort to tie dispersal of the agency budget to reforms. Mayor Lee's budget includes $577 million for the cops. A coalition of community groups want to hold back $200 million of that sum pending quarterly reports on better training especially for mental health emergencies, better data collection on use of force incidents, and early intervention to fire officers who use excessive force in their interactions with the public.

If this seems a roundabout way to curb police violence, it is. But the SFPD has lots of friends in high places who count on the cop union, the P.O.A., for political support. Most of our politicians are willing to look the other way when someone else's kid gets shot. It will be a political question whether the backlash from the recent shootings of Alex Nieto, Amilcar Perez Lopez, Mario Woods, Luis Gongora Pat, and Jessica Williams can spur action. Since 2000, the SFPD has killed 40 civilians; no officers have been charged with any crime. San Francisco cops enjoy something close to absolute impunity on the job.

If the Avalos initiative fails to fly, several other reform efforts are also underway, through the Police Commission (the SFPD's supposed -- and usually supine -- oversight board), the D.A.'s office, and several potential amendments to the city charter to bring the department under more control.

Friday cat blogging

I wouldn't say we'd gotten to the peaceable kingdom around here; but both residents have staked out their preferred hidey-holes.

These New Yorkers know what to do about bigots ...

I love NY.https://t.co/AO9mghszP0 pic.twitter.com/lqzPGPURDb

— Rebecca Katz (@RebeccaKKatz) June 13, 2016

***Busy today; perhaps more later.

Obama's broken promise

Political scientists tell us we should listen up, because politicians usually do keep their promises.

But sometimes they don't. Reuters is reporting that the Obama administration is giving up on the President's promise to close the Guantanamo prison before he leaves office.

The Obama administration is not pursuing the use of an executive order to shutter the Guantanamo Bay military prison after officials concluded that it would not be a viable strategy, sources familiar with the deliberations said.

The conclusion, reached by administration officials, narrows the already slim chances that President Barack Obama can fulfill his pledge to close the notorious offshore prison before leaving office in January.

Obama is eager to fulfill his 2008 campaign pledge to close the prison and could still choose to use his commander-in-chief powers, but the option is not being actively pursued, the sources said. ... "It was just deemed too difficult to get through all of the hurdles that they would need to get through, and the level of support they were likely to receive on it was thought to be too low to generate such controversy, particularly at a sensitive (time) in an election cycle," the source said.

Sign observed in a San Francisco window.

Sometimes, as in a speech responding to Donald Trump's bullshit after the Orlando massacre, the Prez sounds like the last person remaining who truly believes this country stands for pluralism, liberty, justice and the rule of law rather than ignorance and violence. Watching him, you can believe that.

But when it comes to closing this symbol of imperial overreach, the last true believer is apparently giving up.

The best the administration can do, sources say, will be to reduce the numbers still locked up in our Cuban gulag.

Will the next President fill the place up again?

Sad!

Fifty queers dead in Orlando (seems the shooter was at least gay-curious), so Donald picks a fight with a newspaper.

Bwwwaaaaa!!!! all of a sudden, real life isn't about him. Poor neglected baby.

Why we hate the U.S. medical "system"

Writing at Vox, Sarah Kliff recently laid out one of the major reasons why even those people who have good affordable health insurance hate the U.S. medical system:

Patients are the health care system's free labor
... ... The American medical system is expensive; that's no surprise. That medicine can be costly is no shock to pretty much anyone who has visited a doctor.

But American medicine demands another scarce resource from patients, and that is their time. The time it takes to check in on the status of a prescription, to wait for a doctor, to take time away from work to sit on hold and hope that, at some point, someone will pick up the phone. ...

... [This is] the burden patients face in managing the health care system: a massive web of doctors, insurers, pharmacies, and other siloed actors that seem intent on not talking with one another. That unenviable task gets left to the patient, the secret glue that holds the system together.

For me, this feels like a part-time job where the pay is lousy, the hours inconvenient, and the stakes incredibly high. It's up to me to ferry medical records between different providers, to track down a pharmacy that can fill my prescription, and to talk to my insurance when a treatment gets denied to find out why.

She has nailed the common patient experience. Read the whole thing.

Too many medical providers seem oblivious to the demands placed on sick people by the incoherent "system" within which they work. And the sick people are seldom in a position to explode about what they are being put through.

Obamacare has increased access to health insurance for 12.7 million people; reduced medical debt, a common cause of bankruptcy; and freed millions from "job lock," being forced to keep a hated job to maintain insurance coverage. But it has scarcely become more popular for all that; a majority still disapprove of "Obamacare."

Might this resistance to the health law be rooted in the reality that it does little to reduce the "patient labor" that Kliff describes? If accessing the services of the doctor remains painfully demanding, not perhaps of so much cash, but still of unavailable time and attention, no wonder people don't feel that their burdens have been eased.

Kliff's article (and a large part of an installment of the Vox podcast "the Weeds") discusses a possible remedy to this mess, what Obamacare calls "accountable care organizations." But these seem few, far between, and at best unproven alternatives to the existing tangle of medical providers.

Times medical commentator Austin Frakt also reports on the medical tangle:

Considering how much we already pay for health care, you have to wonder why doctors, hospitals and insurance providers so often fail to coordinate their patients’ care.

Your primary care doctor, the hospital you visit and the various specialists you are sent to are typically part of different organizations that do not communicate effectively with one another. Balls get dropped and care suffers. In part, it’s a consequence of siloed medical practice.

That’s why the standard advice for patients who are hospitalized or have complex medical conditions is to monitor their own care. This means tracking what each specialist advises and prescribes, ensuring it gets done and informing other doctors about it. Failure to monitor, communicate and coordinate care increases the chance of errors and omissions that can harm health. ... Complicating matters, you may have to coordinate your own care while you are sick, unless you have help from a loved one.

Yet Frakt goes on to question whether the push for accountable care organizations is really working.

To anyone not embedded in the "system," it would be flat out obvious that what we have is crazy. And it is cruel to those who lack the resources or community support that would enable them to work their way through the maze. That's probably most of us. No wonder Obamacare has never earned a great bump in approval: these were the problems as we experience them -- to this the ACA has not provided relief. ***It's easy for me to write this because, through sheer luck, for the last 20 years I've been a patient of what is probably the largest, most successful integrated care organization in the country, Kaiser Permanente. If I get sick, I email my doc. If she thinks I should come in, she indicates my choice of appointments based on the severity of the complaint. She has electronic access to all my medical records. If she thinks I need a test, she (or a support staff member) can schedule it right away. She'll get the electronic test results as soon as they emerge from whatever machine took the measurement. If I need a specialist, I get the appointment on the same visit. If she gives me a prescription, I can pick it up in the same building. Should I be passed on to a hospital, I'm put in a Kaiser facility where my records and meds go with me. If it is October or November, I'm offered my free flu shot in the lobby of the building with no waiting! I am freed from all that work Sarah Kliff describes.

Kaiser is not perfect. Nothing is. But for sheer escape from aggravation when afflicted by ordinary ailments, I doubt of it can be beat. This is the standard that would increase general approval of U.S. healthcare. While patients are expected to do all the coordination work, nothing is going to raise satisfaction.

Enough killing

A youngish man, a neighbor, was in church today. He describes his family background as an almost cartoonish representation of the diversity of the USA: the son of a Persian Muslim father and a Polish Catholic mother, he looks gay. As he says, in the summer, he tans deeply and gets called racist names on the street. He embodies so much, it's crazy-making.

In the wake of the massacre in Orlando, he could barely stop crying. He's frightened. He lives with not knowing which of his identities might get him killed.

Folks in our little parish understand this all too easily. Many are survivors of the AIDS epidemic; they've watched their friends drop and wonder why they are still here. Sometimes they still gather to dance.

None of us can know which of our identities might get us killed at any given moment, though being white and older sure reduces risk in this country.

No private individual needs a military assault-type weapon. Those things are built to kill; they are not toys and no one needs to play with them. If we have to repeal the 2nd Amendment, so be it.

We don't need politicians making it worse. You know who I'm talking about. In these times, we need to take care of each other, not posture and pretend to build walls.

For the record: the SFPD murder of Sheila DeToy

San Franciscans are struggling these days to rein in a police department which has killed five civilians in the last two years in circumstances in which officers' justifications for their use of force strain credulity. Alex Nieto, Amilcar Perez Lopez, Mario Woods, Luis Gongora Pat, and Jessica Williams are dead. No officer has been charged or (as far as we know) disciplined. In fact, since 2000, the SFPD has killed 40 civilians; no officers have been charged. A culture of impunity in the SFPD is not new; in the over 40 years I've lived in this city, new cases involving officers mistreating residents have recurred over and over. Calls for reform seem to achieve little. I plan to write an occasional post "for the record" recalling some of these incidents.

For the story of Sheila DeToy, I'll outsource this to Peter Keane writing in the Chron in 2006:

Seventeen-year-old Sheila Detoy was killed by a San Francisco police officer on May 13, 1998. By all accounts, Sheila was a wonderful young girl. She was still just a child, so she had a child's optimism and dreams.

It is now eight years since she was shot dead by a plainclothes San Francisco police officer as she sat as a passenger in a car pulling out of a driveway. The officer was seeking another passenger in the car, a young man who had not shown up for a court appearance on a drug charge. He fired into the car and the bullet tore through Shiela's neck. She bled to death.

What happened next was horrible in its own right. With a cruelty that defies understanding, a department spokesperson issued an official statement just hours after she was killed. He said: "She was no innocent victim. She was trying to live the hip-hop lifestyle."

This cold, and completely false, characterization of Sheila was repeated in every television, radio and newspaper account of the shooting. It seemed that it was not enough that she was brutally slain. For some reason, her character and reputation had to be massacred along with her. So those who loved Sheila not only had to cope with her ghastly killing, they also had to watch as her memory was publicly trashed.

...Now, eight years after Sheila's death, my prediction is that there will never be a hearing on the charges. When the long, losing route through the courts by the [Police Officers Association] finally plays out and a hearing is ultimately set, the officers involved will simply retire and that will be the end of it. So whatever the truth is about Sheila's killing, it will never be determined by an honest examination of the facts and the evidence.

Keane wrote this eight years after her death. The 1998 District Attorney, Terence Hallinan, quickly exonerated Officer Gregory Breslin who fired the shots. The city paid the DeToy family $505,000 to settle a wrongful death lawsuit. Internal administrative charges against Breslin and other officers involved lumbered along inconclusively for several years, but as far as we know, no cops were disciplined.

What makes the account of Sheila DeToy shooting all the more amazing is that its author, Peter Keane, was not just some reporter, but an appointed Police Commissioner (a member of the board that "oversees" the cops), a nationally recognized legal commentator, and dean of Golden Gate University Law School. Many SFPD officers expect to be exempt from challenge, even by the most "solid citizens." And they apparently are.

Saturday scenery: San Francisco lions

I've mentioned before that the City by the Bay seems to have been overrun by salesmen for ornamental lions. Never would have known that if I hadn't been Walking San Francisco. Here's a small selection:

Nothing is going to get by this fellow.

On the other hand, this one seems to have dozed off.

That's a more plausible pose for a guardian.

No matter how much of pose you strike, it's hard to be imposing when you are the size of a plaster cherub ...

... or a faux gargoyle.

This big cat looks an awful lot like its domestic feline cousins ...

... while this one might benefit from a good scrubbing.

Introducing a "Long Run for the Long Haul"

If anyone thinks the content around here has become a little thin lately, I agree. You see, this month I am beating my tired old body into shape to undertake a 50K (that's 31 mile) run/walk in July along the trails in Marin County from Bolinas Ridge near Pt. Reyes to the Golden Gate Bridge. That's a lot of up and down, at least 5000 feet I think. And though it is beautiful, conditions are not always so perfect as in the picture.

This is a purely personal endeavor: as long as I've known these trails (30 years or more?) I've wanted to do this. I simply have an inner yen for such things. And I figure, at 69, I better get out there now while I can. Hence much trotting up and down hills and somewhat less writing.

And, since I'm doing this anyway, I might as well make it a fundraiser. Twenty years ago, along with Erudite Partner and with the support of individuals and community organizations across the state, I joined with a little band of determined organizers to found Californians for Justice. Now as then, CFJ works statewide to enhance political skills and leadership from among communities at the margins, mostly of color, mostly young people.

Their work deserves support now.

California is a better place than it was twenty years ago when a predominantly white electorate tried, through racist ballot initiatives, to vote away the emerging majority of color. This horrifying 2016 presidential election dominated by a racist demagogue feels much the way the struggles of the 1990s felt in California. California is far from perfect now: racist police departments still kill with impunity, economic inequality continues to crush too many, the state and local governments favor the haves over the have-nots unless we make them do differently. But the state is better and more promising these days. Groups like CFJ have made it so. We can only hope the rest of the country will catch up.

Please support Californians for Justice in its 20th year through this Long Run for the Long Haul.

Friday cat blogging

Morty and Tokyo are achieving something more like wary coexistence than harmony. He remains offended that someone else has appeared in his domain.

Introductory linguistics that delighted this opinionated dummy

For anyone who is looking for a truly educational, truly fascinating, truly understandable long read (18 hours in the less expensive audio edition referenced here) I cannot recommend The Story of Human Language in The Great Courses series too highly. This is a clear yet sophisticated introduction to the discipline of linguistics -- just what I'd hope to get if I took an introductory college course in the subject.

Ever wondered how the world's 6000 or so languages can be so different from each other, yet somehow related? That's here, as is plenty of discussion of what is known about how language groups diffused around the globe. Why do some languages seem intricately complex, while others seem to be radically bare-bones? Linguistics has insights into this conundrum. Do you suspect that how people think is somehow conditioned by the structure of the languages they speak? That hypothesis is discussed here too.

The lecturer for this course, Professor John McWhorter who is affiliated with the Manhattan Institute and teaches at Columbia, is as good at conveying difficult concepts in simple terms as any instructor I've ever listened to. Truth be told, I was lousy at attending lecture classes long ago in college; even the professors who got good reviews as lecturers seemed more interested in entertaining than instruction. McWhorter entertains, but he also communicates substance.

It was healthy for me as a proper, silo-ed left-liberal to find myself delightedly learning from McWhorter. You see, before encountering these lectures, he was known to me as a Black critic of Black Lives Matter, who makes an unsupported leap from condemning police violence against Black people to somehow raising up the parallel horror of Black-on-Black violence. (For what it is worth, I think Jill Leovy provides insight on how the absence of a functioning rule of law results in Black people killing each other in some communities.)

McWhorter categorizes himself as a "cranky liberal" who has found a place at a libertarian think tank. It's possible to catch echoes of a style of argumentation he's honed in the academy listening to these lecturers: he oh-so-carefully and reasonably describes intellectual positions he intends to demolish, then carries the credibility he has earned through rationality to knock over what he disagrees with. On linguistic topics, he may be right. I take him with a lot of salt on politics -- but that only makes it more delightful to have found this series so educational.

For a sample of McWhorter's analysis of language development in the context of the current migration flow into Europe, here's an Atlantic article.

People on the move -- many languages fetch up In USA

I suppose I should have guessed that something like this would be true, but I'm nonetheless a little surprised. Pew Research has a mildly interesting report on the challenges facing the Census Bureau in designing a 2020 questionnaire suitable for use by residents who speak Arabic. The number of Arabic speakers in country is increasing rapidly.

The number of people ages 5 and older who speak Arabic at home has grown by 29% between 2010 and 2014 to 1.1 million, making it the seventh most commonly spoken non-English language in the U.S. Meanwhile, the number who speak Spanish at home has grown only 6% over the same time period.

A list of languages commonly spoken in this country (derived from a 2011 Census report) reads a lot like a list of how long ago the USA Borg invaded or assimilated their previous habitat (with some variation thanks to voluntary migration).

• Spanish: "With 37,579,787 speakers, the number of Spanish-speakers in the US has increased by 210 percent since 1980, with the highest concentrations in Los Angeles, New York, Miami and Chicago." Also, of course, in Puerto Rico where a Spanish speaking population are native born citizens.

• Chinese: "Just about 2,882,497 people speak a Chinese dialect such as Mandarin or Cantonese, an increase of 290 percent!" I've recently learned that linguists insist that Mandarin and Cantonese are separate languages, not dialects. I'll leave that question to that 2,882,497 million of us.

• Tagalog: This Filipino language has 1.6 million speakers. Most of us have probably forgotten the U.S. ruled the Philippines as a colonial possession, but its natives haven't.

• Vietnamese: "With an increase of 510 percent since 1980, Vietnamese is the language with the biggest change." First we invade and fight a war, then we assimilate some lucky or unfortunate fraction of the displaced survivors.

• French: The 1,301,443 French-speakers represent "a 28 percent increase compared to 1980." Fascinating. Are these perhaps West African migrants? Or wandering Quebecois? Somehow I doubt they are European French speakers.

• German: speakers of this European language have declined by 30 percent since 1980.

• Korean: another venue for a war past ...

• And Arabic: "In 1980, there were only 251,409 Arabic speakers on record." It's amazing what empire and war, as well as globalization and people seeking their fortunes, can do.

All those Arabic speakers include embarrassingly few refugees from the mess we've made in such unhappy countries as Iraq, Syria and Yemen, but over time, I'm sure more of them, too, will fetch up in the imperial center.

And that says nothing about the speakers of Central Asian languages -- Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Dari, etc. -- that our military adventures have set on the move.

Nice, tho I don't think they were all bald

made some tiny emoji art to mark this moment pic.twitter.com/Flk5ZT3Xp4

— laura olin (@lauraolin) June 8, 2016

Finally -- California primary

This display of topical piñatas in the Mission seems about right to me.

The crazy in this year's election has everything to do with Barack Obama's presidency. There is some fraction of the electorate that can't get its gut around the fact that for eight years, the president has been a Black man. (A lot of the same ones are probably equally allergic to the idea of a girl president.) And so, Trump.

David Axelrod, Obama's chief political operative, called this out in January.

“The most influential politician in 2008 won’t be on the ballot,” I wrote to Senator Obama in 2006. “His name is George W. Bush.”

... Today, after seven eventful years, attitudes toward President Obama will shape the selection of his successor. ... So who among the Republicans is more the antithesis of Mr. Obama than the trash-talking, authoritarian, give-no-quarter Mr. Trump? His bombast allows no room for nuance or complexity. He proudly extols his intolerance as an assault against “political correctness,” and he vows to bring the world to heel, from Mexico to China to Syria and Iraq. ...

Whenever I get worried that the GOPer's campaign of “ambient viciousness” will overwhelm us all, I drop in at Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium and look at Obama's approval rating at the top of the page. Today he's running at plus 3% -- the best in months. Looking good for November.

And so, finally, this Democratic primary will end today. Bernie has given us a vision of a social democratic future. If we have a decent future, I'm sure it will be a social democratic one; nothing else will work in a time of greed, increasing longevity, and robotics. But the Bern could not, yet, overcome the country's racial divides. Race matters in this country and there is no decent future that does not dismantle structural white supremacy. The rest of the country has not noticed yet, but this has begun to happen in California. Though still deeply troubled, we are a different sort of racial cauldron than in the 1990s when the white electorate hoped it could simply vote away the Black and brown.

I should hesitate to generalize from anecdotes, but I am guessing Hillary Clinton will win in California by a larger margin than expected. Two long time Bernie supporters have confided to me that in view of the "Trump national emergency" they've jumped to Hillary. I could easily be wrong. In any case, she'll clinch tonight.

More and more, I think smart progressives should understand the "Trump national emergency" as a chance to chip away at the state and local levels where Republicans have been winning.

In California, gaining Congressional seats will depend on whether Democrats make it through our asinine, undemocratic (small "d") "top two" primary system. Results to watch include CA-24, an open seat around Santa Barbara where Democrat Lois Capps is retiring and where split Democratic votes might put two Republicans in the November race, locking out the Donkey Party. Likewise CA-21 where a Republican holds a Democratic leaning seat in the Central Valley. In the year of the Trump, if a Dem gets into the final, that seat could be a pick up. Otherwise, California Congressional seats are probably about defending the status quo for both parties.

The nearest Senate contest to California likely to matter in November is in Nevada where Harry Reid is retiring. This one is the only plausible pick up opportunity for the Koch-party, so watch the money fly and hope former Dem Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto can win it.

Meanwhile, today's primary seems to have brought people into the electorate, all to the good here in California. The LA Times reports that California has seen 650,000 new voter registrations for the primary, 74% of them Democrats. That's more than some states have voters! We're big.***Anyone still looking for San Francisco voting advice (I keep getting emails), my take is here.

LGBT realities

It would be tempting to think that legalization of marriage equality and general easing of mainstream recoil from gay people and our lives would mean that our life chances have become more similar to those of everyone else. (We're about 4% of the U.S. population, by the way.)

Not so, according to this data from the Williams Institute at the UCLA Law School:

That last figure doesn't take into account that only between a quarter and a third of us are raising kids, a major impediment to economic success for many people.

What kind of society is this which makes raising the next generation a harm to the parents?

Booktalking

If you missed Erudite Partner speaking about American Nuremberg at the Bay Area Book Fair on Saturday (seen here with co-panelist David Dayen, author of Chain of Title), you can catch her at a benefit for Radio KPFA on June 15. The event is Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, in Berkeley at 7:30pm. More at the link.

After the panel, EP signed books and answered questions from the curious.

The U.S. trashed a promise to the poor ... who cares?

As this endless primary season sputters to a close, I'd be remiss if I didn't call out something that did not happen. There's been a lot of re-litigating the previous Clinton presidency. The Donald, dick-obsessed, seems to think it was about Bill's organ. Bernie and progressive Democrats generally lament the permission given to our finance oligarchs to grow their criminal casino economy.

But, despite occasional mentions, there's been little focus on what was probably the worst domestic crime of that presidency: the 1996 "welfare reform" which ended the federal promise of cash assistance to women and children (AFDC) if they became too poor to survive. The Depression era program was racist from the start, effectively limited "deserving" white mothers who fell on hard times, but was gradually agitators extended its coverage to most women and children who desperately needed a hand up. The "reform" ended the promise with a blizzard of regulations and exclusions and a new state run offering (TANF) which cheapskate (read Republican-governed) states could cut back as they chose. And they did.

You don't have to take my word for it. Here's Robert Pear in the Times.

The welfare law has indisputably achieved one of the goals that Mr. Clinton announced in his first campaign for president, to “end welfare as we know it.” Nationally, the number of people receiving cash assistance has fallen to 4.1 million, from 12.3 million in 1996. In Arizona, the number of cash assistance recipients has plummeted to 20,495, from a monthly average of 155,000 in 1996-97.

The 1996 law reversed six decades of social welfare policy, eliminating the individual entitlement to cash assistance for the nation’s poorest children and giving each state a lump sum of federal money with vast discretion over its use. The amount of the main federal block grant has remained at $16.5 billion annually since the law was adopted, but inflation has shrunk the value of that money about a third.

In addition, the reach of the program has been greatly reduced. In 1996, for every 100 families in poverty, 68 received cash assistance. That fell to 23 for every 100 in 2014. And in a dozen states including Arizona, the number is fewer than 10 in 100.

As Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer have exhaustively documented, for most of the truly destitute, "they just don't give welfare anymore."

Instead, the U.S. responds to the "deep" poverty of 6.6% of us (up from 4.5% before "reform) with bureaucratic fiddling: the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, food stamps (SNAP) etc., all of which benefit people who are less poor more than the very poor!

Both Bernie and Hillary back proposals that would add additional layers of needed support for our poor people. But they've been unwilling to buck the majority of us who hold to the moral notion that those who don't work need not be fed.

That's too bad. There is no reason that a country this rich needs to immiserate poor women, their children, and too far many physically and mentally challenged individuals.

Here's Jonathan Chait back in February bemoaning the cowardice of our Democratic champions:

In 1992, Bill Clinton ran for president promising to “end welfare as we know it.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders should promise to bring welfare back.

Thus far, they are doing no such thing. Neither Clinton nor Sanders has a welfare-reform proposal, despite the raft of options they have floated for helping lower-income families. Neither Clinton nor Sanders brings up welfare when discussing what good they would do for the poor.

Didn't happen.

We know how to combat poverty: poor people need money. Apparently that simple truth is more than anyone in the political arena dares utter.

Champ rehabilitated

Nothing to add to the reminiscences of Muhammad Ali but this: when I was a young person in the Sixties, his willingness to buck the draft and denounce our immoral war and racism at home was inspiring. He was a hero, while mainstream Amerikkka pour hatred on him.

Hence, on a trip through Louisville in 2006, I was stunned to see that this city had embraced the former pariah, naming a main downtown street/shopping mall for its famous resident. Here's the Google Street View:

How views (fashions?) change.

For the families of San Franciscans killed by the SFPD ...

the pain does not end.

Here Refugio Nieto tells the story of his son Alex Nieto, murdered by the SFPD on March 21, 2014. Lorena Melgarejo provided translation.

Fifty-nine bullets were fired into my son, into his body and his head. We had to have his casket closed ...

Two cousins and a brother of Luis Gongoro Pat are in San Francisco from Yucatan, trying to understand why the police shot their homeless relative on April 7th of this year. Lorena again translated:

They say Mexico is a corrupt country -- but here we get no answers. Here it is just sad. How do we get answers? We feel powerless in this country ...

At this listening meeting on Thursday at St. John the Evangelist organized by Faith in Action, Supervisor David Campos described his plan to try to dilute the mayor's monopoly of power over the police department by creating an office of a Public Advocate like the one in New York City. Supervisor John Avalos is proposing that the supervisors place a kind of hold on part of the SFPD budget next year, pending measurable reforms.

Meanwhile, it's still the case that, since 2000, the SFPD has killed 40 civilians; no officers have been charged.

This woman was just convicted of lynching!

How's this for a perversion of the intent of a law? As far as I can figure out, from reading news accounts here and here, in the aftermath of a Black Lives Matter protest, Pasadena police moved to arrest a Black woman for an altercation unrelated to the protest; nearby BLM folks tried to pull the arrestee away; and two days later a BLM leader was charged with "lynching" -- "the taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer" as the California Penal Code puts it.

On this Wednesday, a Pasadena jury found Jasmine Richards guilty of the offense. She faces sentencing on June 7 and could receive as much as four years for the felony. Jamilah King reports:

Richards is the second black female protester to be charged with felony attempted lynching in California in 2016, though she is the first one to be convicted. In April, 20-year-old Maile Hampton was charged in Sacramento with attempted felony lynching when she tried to intervene in the police arrests of activists during a protest near the state Capitol. Those charges were later dropped.

Richards' charges were not. In a statement, Black Lives Matter denounced her conviction. "The perverse nature of this case is stark both because of the law's tragic name but more importantly because police, who have long exercised poor and deadly judgment in cases impacting Black communities, cannot be trusted to make lawful arrests or to guarantee arrestees will make it home alive," the group wrote. "Given that, removing a black person from police custody can be a life-saving action."

King provides historical background on lynching laws.

Lynching has a long history in the United States. In the years following the Civil War, black men and women who were accused of crimes (often falsely) were kidnapped from their homes, courthouses or jails by so-called "lynch mobs," crowds of angry whites who rioted in favor of vigilante justice. Some were hanged from trees or lampposts; others were burned alive or mutilated and tortured to death.

For decades after the Civil War, lynching was used as an act of racial terrorism against African-Americans. Between 1877 and 1950, nearly 4,000 people, most of whom were black, were lynched in the United States. ...

Thanks largely to a decades-long campaign waged by the NAACP, the country's first anti-lynching law was passed in 1922 to help curb the violence. But in more recent decades, law enforcement has used a specific interpretation of the law to crack down on left-wing activists.

Lynching was organized and community-approved white terrorism, torture and murder to enforce white supremacy over black citizens. Police and prosecutors have plenty of options for charging people who interfere with them if they think they must; charging Richards with lynching is obscene. ***Color of Change has a petition ...

Friday cat blogging

Ms. Meow (aka Tokyo) luxuriates in this new bed and breakfast where she is visiting for a season. Morty is not sure about the interloper. But no fur has flown ... yet.

Our occupying army and the community it fails to serve

A police chief is out, but San Francisco still has a police force that, over the last two years, has shot five people of color, (3 Latino men; 1 Black man, 1 Black woman) in circumstances that look like wanton murder. No officers have been brought to trial or even disciplined internally (as far as we are allowed to know -- see below.) In two other, separate, cases, racist text messages between officers have come to light. Something is rotten in the SFPD; the mayor can make promises, but words won't cut it. This militarized force acts like a hostile occupying army, instead of as protectors of the public safety.

And so, citizens have to keep up the pressure. Here Daniel English from Faith in Action and Fr. Richard Smith of Saint John Episcopal Church deliver a banner and signs to the ongoing Wednesday evening vigil outside the Mission police station. Activists and neighbors are demanding that District Attorney George Gascon bring the officers who shot Amilcar Perez Lopez to trial. Despite the autopsy evidence that Amilcar died from six shots in the back, the hope for a trial of the shooters seems a long shot. Since 2000, the SFPD has killed 40 civilians; no officers have been charged.
***Meanwhile family members of the dead, their friends, and their communities are struggling to assert detailed demands for police reform that will have meaningful impact and a chance at success. With five recent victims, multiple political authorities at the city level with some jurisdiction over the police, and calls for outside investigations by both the state Attorney General and the federal Department of Justice, winning policy improvements seems a complex business that will probably proceed by fits and starts, if at all. The Police Officers Association stonewalls reforms. Cops feel under siege; perhaps they might be more secure if policy demanded they de-escalate rather than dominate.
***Meanwhile, at the state level, craven Democrats (and most Republicans, but hey, this is California where Dems run the legislature) deep-sixed a police transparency bill that would have pried information about police encounters with citizens from secretive departments. The pols were scared to buck the police unions in defense of their constituents. It's worth contemplating the sort of information the bill sought to order departments to release -- and which aggrieved Californians are still barred from asking for from law enforcement agencies. Had this become law, citizens might have sought:

(A) A record related to the investigation or assessment of any use of force by a peace officer that is likely to or does cause death or serious bodily injury, including, but not limited to, the discharge of a firearm, use of an electronic control weapon or conducted energy device, and any strike with an impact weapon to a person’s head.

(B) A record related to any finding by a law enforcement agency or oversight agency that a peace officer or custodial officer engaged in sexual assault, an excessive use of force, an unjustified search, detention or arrest, racial or identity profiling, as defined in subdivision (e) of Section 13519.4, discrimination or unequal treatment on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or mental or physical disability, or any other violation of the legal rights of a member of the public.

(C) A record related to any finding by a law enforcement agency of job-related dishonesty by a peace officer or custodial officer, including, but not limited to, perjury, false statements, filing false reports, or destruction or concealment of evidence.

If sworn "peace" officers are going to engage in these practices, it does seem we ought to know about it. In theory, they work for us. But apparently not.

Now for a satisfying factoid ...

According to Priceonomics, impersonating a presidential candidate has not been good for The Donald's hotels:

Bookings at Trump Hotels are down big time: they have decreased 59% compared to the same period last year on Hipmunk. It seems that customers willing to spend $500 a night on a Trump Hotel room may not be fans of Trump the political candidate.

Recent news reports indicate that Trump went begging to the Republican National Committee because his campaign doesn't have the money to go on TV in June and most of July before the GOP convention.

It behooves the rest of us to make the most of the opportunity created by a repulsive and floundering Trump to replace as many sitting Republicans as possible at all levels. Sure, lots of the Democrats we elect will present their own problems. But let's elect as many as we can and then beat them into shape.