Rally for DREAM Act outside Senator Feinstein's office today

DREAMERS and allies led the mobilization. The senator's local staff say she wants to help, but she is not willing to shut down the government. Yet since Democrats are outnumbered in both House and Senate, drastic action is the only way to pass a remedy for President Trump's decision to kill the temporary legal status created for young undocumented persons who have grown up here.

Every day, people who did nothing wrong are being ripped from the only lives they have known.

GOPer feeding frenzy

When Republicans won the trifecta (House, Senate and White House) in November 2016, I expected that they would enact a standard GOPer program: "cut taxes for the very rich and make the poor and middle classes pay for the giveaway ..." I also opined that "rampant corruption will be the order of the day. The new President is a classic con man ... and so are his cohorts. They will steal all they can while in power."

What I did not entirely expect was that legislative Republicans would so completely model their policy disinterest and self-interested ethical pliancy on the Great Leader down at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The tax bill Republicans have muscled through Congress is quite simply theft from the people of this country, designed to pay off rich GOP donors and enrich legislators themselves. It's come to that. Elections this fall in New Jersey, Virginia and even Alabama show that majorities are onto the rip off. The pigs may be about to lose their place at the trough so they are seizing their chance.

Take it from better-placed observers than I:

Republicans are behaving as if they see what everyone else sees coming. They’re just hightailing it with the cash instead of trying to avert it.

Brian Beutler, Crooked Media

Tax cuts are the driving force of elite Republican politics. The lack of a bill was demoralizing the donor class, driving down contributions. 2018 looks bad but with literally no major legislative accomplishments to show, maybe it gets even worse. So you need to pass something. Where do you get the votes? Sell them. Every man and woman for himself. Everybody take a few appliances out of the store before we burn it down. That’s the story of this bill. It doesn’t even add up in conservative policy terms. It’s really just a heist. Organized looting.

Joshua Marshall, TPM

Or take it from a Republican who once knew better, but now has gone in on the plunder.

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) May 3, 2016

H/t to Matt Yglesias for the Graham tweet.

Let the voters pick the politicians, not the pols pick their voters

Yesterday an organization that calls itself Voters Not Politicians submitted 430,000+ signatures to Michigan's Secretary of State for an initiative to reform the process through which legislative and Congressional boundaries will be drawn after the 2020 Census. They want an Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission of registered Michigan voters to draw districts using guidelines that ensure fairness, instead of just enshrining the power of whatever partisan legislators happen to be in office when the lines are drawn.

Gerrymandering -- jiggering district lines to get a desired result -- used to be a quite primitive process involving a fair amount of guesswork about which neighborhoods could be counted on to vote in what way. Sure, it often worked, but it was crude. Today election software makes it easy to use histories and the demographic characteristics of voters to lump us into groups whose leanings predict which party and even what sort of candidate will win in any set of boundaries. Just about the only way such gerrymandered districts change their partisan leanings is when people move in and out. Most elections just ratify the status quo rather than reflecting voter opinions.

Though Republicans were widely successful in drawing favorable Congressional districts for themselves in 2010 (because they had just won many state legislative contests), some of what they did was extreme enough so it is being challenged in court -- because effectively a well done gerrymander disenfranchises people whose votes can never count for a winning candidate. Federal courts have intervened repeatedly in North Carolina where gerrymandering reduced the effective power of Black voters. The Supreme Court is considering a Wisconsin case in which Republicans had managed to draw lines that yielded them 60 of the 99 seats in the Wisconsin Assembly despite winning only 48.6% of the two-party state-wide vote. The outcome of the case is uncertain; courts don't want to get into the job of examining the fairness of district boundaries because judges fear they'd be inundated with hard cases. And unless they can come up with unusually clear standards, that's almost certainly true.

Michigan voters are proposing to take the line drawing away from the politicians.

As a Californian, I've seen this in action. The Congressional lines drawn here after the 2000 census amounted to another kind of gerrymander: an incumbent protection plan. Sitting Congresspeople and legislators avoided a fight by drawing boundaries that tended to keep them in office, regardless of party. This worked fine for the politicians. In 2004, just three of the 53 districts were won with less than a 60 percent majority. Only one Congressional seat changed party during that decade!

Significant numbers of California voters felt disenfranchised, so we passed Prop. 11 in 2008 followed by Prop. 20 in 2010, giving responsibility for reapportionment to a Citizens Redistricting Commission. The result was a significant shakeup among Congressmembers; some members retired after losing their safe districts while quite a few seats became more competitive. Both political parties hate losing their chance to draw their own seats, but we probably have somewhat more competent and attractive politicians among the new crop. So far, this electoral gimmick seems to work for more representative governance.

California currently elects 39 Democrats and 14 Republicans to Congress -- not an unreasonable split given the partisan lean of state voters. Democrats hope to win even more Congressional races in 2018 since seven districts currently held by Republicans voted for Clinton in 2016. Republicans are targeting at least one highly competitive seat they hope to flip. When districts are reasonably fairly drawn, such changes become possible.

Michigan has 14 Congressmembers, currently divided 9 Republican and 5 Democratic. None of the incumbents had less than a 12 percent margin of victory in 2016 -- that is, none of the seats was competitive between the parties. Yet the state as a whole could hardly be more competitive. Donald Trump won Michigan with 47.50 percent of the vote to Clinton's 47.27. It seems very likely that a non-partisan redistricting commission could provide more fairness to the choices that are offered to Michigan voters. Voters Not Politicians collected their initiative signatures with volunteers hardly any support from established political players! This effort has the feel of a movement.

When war was made illegal

As it happens, I was raised to mock the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 as the ultimate in callow idealism. My mother studied international relations briefly at the Zimmern School in Geneva, Switzerland that year; what she took from the faculty and distinguished lecturers like John Maynard Keynes was that the statesmen from 63 nations who signed the Paris Peace Pact, outlawing war as an instrument of national policy, were either naive or hypocritical. The subsequent Japanese invasion of Manchuria, ascendancy of the Nazis in Germany, Italian conquest of Ethiopia, collapse of the League of Nations, and eventually World War II absolutely confirmed her conclusion. And she was not alone; the Peace Pact dropped out of most historical reckoning.

Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, a couple of Yale Law School professors, seek to rehabilitate the treaty in The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World. To my surprise, they make a convincing argument that this apparently fruitless project signaled a fundamental shift in the ways nations understood of relating to each, a New World Order within which we still live, however imperiled from multiple directions it may seem.

The Old World Order, the international legal regime these authors attribute to the Dutch defender of early mercantilism Hugo Grotius, relied upon war between states as "a legitimate means of righting wrongs."

Resorting to arms did not signal a failure in the system: It was how the system worked. War was an instrument of justice. Might makes Right.

But it was not just that the Old World Order sanctioned war. It relied on it and rewarded it. All states had the right of conquest: Any state that claimed it had been wronged by another state, and whose demands for reparations were ignored, could retaliate with force and capture territory as compensation. The conquering state thereby became the new sovereign of the captured territory ... Nearly every border in the world today bears witness of some such past battle -- including that of the United States.

That comes off as barbarous, doesn't it? Our recoil is evidence that during the 20th century, most nations actually did come to concur on a New World Order in which war was intrinsically illegitimate, to be avoided if at all possible. This book describes how the authors think we got from a world in which war between states was simply a fact to one in which war and conquest are widely looked at as culpable tears in the global fabric.

They make their argument by highlighting a series of individuals: Grotius who formulated early international law; a corporate lawyer Salmon O. Levinson from Chicago whose movement advocacy helped build the popular demand for a new international order after World War I and the German Carl Schmitt who created a Third Reich intellectual edifice against these peace forces; and Hersch Lauterpacht and Judge Henry Jackson who forged the legal description of an outlawed war used to convict Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. In general, I prefer my history not to consist of a catalogue of the deeds of "great men" but in this instance the authors make legal abstractions approachable through the device.

Above all, Hathaway and Shapiro insist the New World Order heralded by the Paris Peace Pact and made close to universal in the wake of World War II is a reality under which we've now lived for 75 years. Consider:

In the New World Order, aggressive wars are illegal. And because aggressive wars are illegal, states no longer have the right to conquer other states; waging an aggressive war is a grave crime; gunboat diplomacy is no longer legitimate; and economic sanctions are not only legal, but the standard way in which international law is enforced.

Yes, the law is still sometimes violated -- think Russia in Crimea and, without territorial seizure, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But they argue quite convincingly that the economic sanctions which have become the primary enforcement tools for this order do have coercive force, even if that force is not so dramatic as dropping bombs. Certainly that argument is strong enough to be worth mulling. Isolation from international structures is simply not a feasible national survival strategy in a globalized world, North Korea notwithstanding. I think they might insist the rest of the world has simply not sanctioned the Kims vigorously enough to prove this out.

Economic sanctions seem less likely to deter a true international hegemon, but the rise of China and India suggests that the world is entering a period when there isn't one. Multipolarity ahead perhaps?

These authors demand that we take seriously that the history of how we think about war is a species of material reality.

... ideas matter and people with ideas matter. In that respect, the book is both a history of ideas about war and a history of how ideas emerged, clashed and evolved. It is a story, too, of how ideas became embedded in institutions that restructured human relations, and in the process reshaped the world.

I'm enough of a materialist that I react skeptically. We can't think ourselves to a peaceful world. Yet since reading The Internationalists I've found myself digesting rumors of war in a new frame. Take this, for example, from that old conservative war horse George Will. He's understandably appalled that we have a President who might thoughtlessly launch nuclear war. But catch how he describes, for purposes of denunciation, Donald Trump's thinking:

Trump’s foreign policy thinking (“In the old days, when you won a war, you won a war. You kept the country”; we should “bomb the s--t out of [the Islamic State]”) is short on nuance but of Metternichian subtlety compared with his thoughts on nuclear matters: “I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.”

... It would be interesting to hear the president distinguish a preventive war against North Korea from a war of aggression. The first two counts in the indictments at the 1946 Nuremberg trials concerned waging “aggressive war.”

In Hathaway and Shapiro's terms, Will is condemning Trump for bringing Old World Order concepts to a New World Order environment. In the former, it was fine, even laudable, to "take the oil." In a survivable world, it is unthinkable. The New World Order is under assault for illiberal authoritarians wherever they rise up, but I find it convincing that it is realism, not folly, to continue to elaborate, defend, and strengthen this emerging framework.

Chanukah: not "Jewish Christmas" but a liberation struggle recollected

Last night we were privileged to join with a group of long time women friends, most of whom are Jews, in the annual ritual of lighting Chanukah candles. The group's practice is for everyone to bring their household menorahs, the nine-branched candelabras used to mark the holiday, sing more or less tunelessly, and eat latkes (potato pancakes). This last has to do with the enduring qualities of cooking oil which figures in the common mythology of the holiday.

But there's another -- a "non-mythologized" -- story of the celebration. Tikkun Magazine offered a synopsis in 2009: after the death of the Greek conqueror Alexander the Great at the end of the 4th century BCE, the Jewish state of Judea in ancient Palestine became a pawn in the wars of Greek, Egyptian and Persian empires. Urban elites accommodated themselves to their various foreign Hellenistic overlords, letting go of their fiercely monotheistic tribal understanding of the one and only God. But country people suffered inordinate taxes for imperial wars and held on to their historic deity. In the name of that God, they rebelled.

... the [Judean] Maccabees and their followers used guerrilla tactics to win the first national liberation struggle in recorded history. In 165 BCE they retook Jerusalem [from their Seluccid imperial overlords], purified and rededicated the Temple (chanukah means dedication) and rekindled the eternal light that was to glow therein. The fighting continued many years more, but eventually the Maccabees and their descendants (called Hashmona’im) set up an independent Jewish state.

Unfortunately, that state degenerated as the Hashmona’im tried to become a nation like all other nations, adopting the same perversions of state power that other nations adopted, and becoming "realistic" and hence spiritually and morally corrupt. ...

Read much more at the link.

Liberation struggles retain a certain force even when immediate exhilaration fades or even is betrayed. We know in our deepest beings that we long for freedom, even if we don't have a very clear picture of what that means. God is in that longing somewhere. Happy Chanukah.

A peacemaker, R.I.P.

The Rev. Alden Besse, a priest in The Episcopal Church, died last week at the age of 93 on Martha's Vineyard. Most summers for the last 15 years we'd encounter him at the annual Hiroshima Day sunrise vigil at Gay Head.

Bruce Nevin of the Martha's Vineyard Peace Council described this gentle man's faithful witness in an email.

Alden was the inspirational heart of the Martha's Vineyard Peace Council. He was an essential participant in every meeting, and served for many years as its President until he declined re-election. He was at every Peace Council vigil and rally, rain, shine, or snow, at every lecture and presentation that we sponsored, at the Hiroshima Day vigil at 6 on the 6th of August, and in the Peace Council contingent in every Fourth of July parade until the most recent. For many years he organized a Peace Council table at the Tisbury Street Fair.

Before every meeting and sponsored event of the Peace Council, he made phone calls to each of the people on his colorful, decades-accumulated list of names and numbers, legible only by him. Many of you receiving this note will remember those personal reminders from Alden. He was always a stalwart supporter of the Embarking Peacemaker awards given by the Peace Council each year to graduating seniors, and served on the scholarship committee reading and evaluating all the applications and essays.

Besse appeared more frail year after year, but his devotion to working for peace with justice never seemed to diminish.

Good news and bad news amid rumors of war

Let's recognize the good news first: the odd pronouncement on October 13 from President Trump that he was "decertifying" the international "deal" which restricts Iran's production of nuclear material did NOT mean that the U.S. was ceasing to abide by the agreement. Trump's (almost certainly false) determination that Iran was not compliant merely started the clock for Congress to have 60 days to restart economic sanctions. Heard any rumors of such an action two months later? Nope, crickets. The Israeli press is reporting on this, but the U.S. press has barely mentioned that the clock ran out without action. Joshua Keating at Slate predicts we'll probably get another round of Trump blustering against Iran followed by Congressional inaction starting in January, but he concludes

... Trump [is] fulfilling campaign promises, not accomplishing any real-world goal. It’s domestic politics, not foreign policy.

If that is somewhat reassuring -- though insane and dangerous -- the bad news is utterly dire: here's Daniel W. Drezner writing in the Washington Post about how the Trump people are pushing toward preventive war on North Korea:

I have spent the past week talking to people who are closely connected to the East Asia folks within this administration, however, and now I am seriously fazed. The message I heard was clear. Trump officials working on North Korea have developed the odd consensus that Pyongyang will use its nuclear arsenal to attempt a forcible reunification with South Korea. And if that is the goal, then time is running out for military options that would stop that from happening. ... The Trump national security team seems convinced that North Korea cannot be deterred, and war is the inevitable outcome.

What is equally disturbing is the lack of public debate on this question. Say what you will about Operation Iraqi Freedom, but the Bush administration took seven months between talking about it and doing it. In that time, administration officials secured congressional authorization and tried to do the same at the United Nations Security Council. There was also a vigorous public debate on the question. With North Korea right now, there is a lot of chatter but no visible debate. Indeed, if the Trump team is leaning toward a preventive attack, a debate is the last thing officials want, for tactical reasons. It is impossible to have a public debate about a surprise military strike.

... Maybe Trump’s national security team is trying to bluff its way into getting North Korea to back down. But having seen this White House shoot itself in the foot repeatedly, I now worry that Trump, Kelly and McMaster actually think there is a military solution.

Drezner was a supporter of the Iraq war, so it's not difficult to doubt his policy judgment, not to mention his good will toward humankind. But he's got the essence of this right. We are being led toward a catastrophic, unfathomably cruel, and unnecessary war in violation of international law by foolish men. Insofar as this is a democracy, we will own this crime.

Friday cat blogging

If I can't occupy your lap, I'll distract you from the wastebasket.

Heart-lifing signs for a winter day

Seen in the bowels of public transit this morning. The HMO where I am lucky enough to have insurance is doing the right thing for itself and others, again.

And why was this retiree out early on BART? I was on my way to join others at immigration court to support a bail hearing for one of the many snatched up by ICE (Trump's "deportation force"). But so many people turned out, I didn't get in. There was no more room in the court room or waiting room for all the well-wishers. That's what defending as many as possible should look like. A good morning, indeed.

Resistance to the Trump/Republican drive to deport our neighbors is remarkably broad and strong. According to a Public Policy institute of California survey issued today:

An overwhelming majority of Californians (86%) say there should be a way for undocumented immigrants to stay in the United States legally if certain requirements are met -- only 12 percent say they should not be allowed to stay in the US legally. Findings were similar in January (85% should be a way to stay, 13% should not be allowed to stay), and in PPIC surveys since January 2016 more than eight in ten have said there should be a way for undocumented immigrants to stay legally. Strong majorities across parties say un documented immigrants should be allowed to stay, including 93 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Republicans. Ninety four percent of Latinos agree, as do overwhelming majorities of African Americans (90%), Asian Americans (89%), and whites (81%). At least eight in ten across region al, age, education, and income groups say undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country legally if certain requirements are met.

An admonishion

Blogging on numerous topics will resume when I've thought some more. Busy today.

Yes, I know I've headlined an mispelling ... goes with the pic.

Jones victory afterthoughts

It's fun when we win, isn't it? Alabama friends are beside themselves with delight.

David Wasserman summed up how it happened succinctly:

No doubt about it: Major, metro Alabama and the Black Belt came through for Jones. Voters in rural white counties didn’t move much towards Jones, but they utterly failed to turn out for Moore.

As someone observed, if a state election gave the same disproportionate weight to rural areas as the Electoral College does in presidential contests, Roy Moore would be a Senator. But, so far, that's not how it works; majorities win.

Perry Bacon made a pertinent observation:

One of the important features of the Jones-Moore campaign is that even though the Democrat was running in a heavily Republican state, he was not forced to take any stands that really differ from Democratic orthodoxy. He made no specific commitments to back any part of Trump’s agenda. He is likely to be the 49th “no” vote on most Trump initiatives.

That's important. Democrats from very conservative states, like West Virginia's Joe Manchin, sometimes awkwardly try to shore up their elect-ability by adopting a few conservative positions. Jones didn't do that in the campaign, actually running as pro-choice, so he's not likely to do it in office either. (Except maybe on guns ...)

After all the discussion about how evangelical voters were sticking with the alleged-pedophile, Bacon also put out this chart (using PRRI data) showing the current national religious breakdown. Self-identified evangelical Christians make a lot of noise (and the label certainly fits most Alabama Republicans.) But the actual picture is more varied and getting more nuanced every year.

We're a much more religiously diverse country than it sometimes seems.

That's right!

Thank you ALABAMA!!

— Doug Jones (@GDouglasJones) December 13, 2017

Democrats gearing up for 2018

I'm not going to venture a prediction about the Alabama Senate election today; if Democrat Doug Jones somehow pulls it out, it will be a heck of a statement about the Heart of Dixie state not wanting to be embarrassed in the rest of the country.

But the chart above points to a different and better trend nationwide for November 2018. Democratic House candidates are coming out of the woodwork -- and raising significant money.

I checked in on the nearest contested seat to San Francisco, District 10 in California's Central Valley; at this time Ballotpedia lists eight aspiring Democratic candidates -- and one who has already fallen by the way side. The district voted for Hillary Clinton by a margin of 2.9% in 2016; the incumbent Republican Congressman, Jeff Denham, voted for repeal of Obamacare last spring. Confronted by constituents who pointed out the large number of MediCal (Medicaid) enrollees in the district who would be hurt, he resorted to weaseling, insisting the repeal would be bipartisan. This kind of willful deception will certainly be a feature of the contest next fall.

According to Politico's Target Book, several of the Democratic challengers are well funded, including Josh Harder and TJ Cox. Two of the aspiring Congresspeople are nurses: Dotty Nygard and Sue Zwahlen. The California primary election which will decide which of this crowd gets to run against Denham in November is June 5. Let's hope the losers will put national necessity above personal ambition and throw their weight behind whoever wins. At that point, outsiders can meaningfully throw ourselves into electing the choice of the people in the district.

Dems have lots of reasons to be hopeful as we approach the 2018 vote. Amy Walter of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report sees plenty of signs of a wave election, an outpouring of Democratic support that sweeps up many contested seats.

I am having a nagging sense of deja vu - a feeling like I've been here and heard these same arguments before. Way back in 2006, my boss Charlie Cook was warning that the year was shaping up to be a wave year. I argued that unlike the last wave election of 1994, the party holding the White House was much better prepared. Republicans in 2006 had significant financial advantages. They had structural advantages. And, Democrats couldn’t sneak up on Republicans as Republicans had to Democrats in 1994. Obviously, my theory was wrong and Charlie was right.

... Getting a tax bill across the finish line isn’t going to be enough to change the mood of the country. It is going to take something much more significant to do that. A good economy is helpful to the GOP as it can cut down on some of the headwinds coming at them right now. But, it’s not clear to me that it’s enough to fundamentally alter the way voters see Congress, the GOP and the President.

... Democrats have a narrow path to 24 seats - even with a big wave or tailwind. But, do not ignore what’s right in front of us. A wave is building. If I were a Republican running for Congress, I’d be taking that more seriously than ever.

This is a good outcome we all can help make happen.

GOPers love the "poorly uneducated"

You probably know this, but clear communication counts. The fact checking site Snopes rates this as true.

The 2017 tax reform bill eliminates personal deductions for state and local taxes (primary sources of public school funding), while offering tax breaks for parents who send their children to private schools.

They haven't actually passed this monstrosity yet. If you've got a Republican Senator or Congresscritter or know someone who does, NOW is the time to make a stink.

The headline refers to the President's characterization of his voters after the Nevada primary in 2016.

Slouching toward apocalypse

We can take it as a given that, in order to encourage his white evangelical Christian supporters to turn out for aspiring-Senator Pedophile in Alabama, President Predator decided to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the U.S. embassy there. For his evangelical Christian base, this was even more attractive candy than anti-abortion federal judges. Ever since the Israelis occupied the city fifty years ago, the U.S. and Europe have been refusing to confer this mark of legitimacy on that conquest. The "peace process" between expansionist Israel and their subject Palestinian population has long been a sham and the U.S. claim to be an "honest broker" nothing but hegemonic flimflam. Still Trump was ready to roil multiple unstable countries and get some number of protesting Palestinians killed for domestic political gain.

Harry Enten at 538 lays out Trump's political math:

Today, Israel is a voting priority for many evangelicals. A 2015 poll noted that 64 percent of evangelical Christian Republicans say that a candidate’s stance on Israel matters “a lot,” compared with 33 percent of non-evangelical Republicans and 26 percent of all Americans.

And evangelical Christian voters, unlike Jews, represent a significant percentage of Republican voters. Some 26 percent of the electorate identified in the 2016 elections as born-again or evangelical Christian, and 81 percent of them voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton. Capturing evangelical support is essential for Republican candidates; as of 2014, evangelical and born-again voters represented the plurality (45 percent) of voters who are Republican or who lean Republican.

Those of us who are not part of this particular Christian subtribe, "dispensational pre-millennialists," may not realize why advancing Israel's power matters so much to these people. They believe that they are seeing Biblical prophecies of end-times being played out right now, that Jesus will return only when the Jews retake Jerusalem, destroy the Islamic holy mosque which has occupied what was the Temple Mount for centuries, and then rebuild King David's temple. Bloody battles will ensue (no kidding!) and the Jews will accept Christ and all will be hunky-dory for a 1000 years. This is the lovely fable which some 50 million Americans absorbed from such texts as The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series. They believe it with all their hearts and unhappy souls. And they believe that a serial liar and sexual predator can serve as God's instrument to make it all happen.

Diana Butler Bass, a scholar who writes on U.S. culture and religion, grew up in this tradition though she long ago left it. She's good at conveying how it feels:

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I attended a "Bible church," a nondenominational congregation that prided itself on a singular devotion to scripture. We read the Bible all the time: in personal Bible study and evening Bible classes. We listened to hourlong Sunday morning sermons. For us, the Bible was not just a guide to piety. It also revealed God's plan for history. Through it, we learned how God had worked in the past and what God would do in the future.

Central to that plan was Jerusalem, the city of peace, and the dwelling place of God. It was special to the Jews because it was the home of Abraham and David. It was special to us because it was where Jesus had died and risen. We believed that ultimately, Christ would return to Jerusalem to rule as its king. We longed for this outcome -- and we prayed that human history would help bring about this biblical conclusion.

Jerusalem was our prophetic bellwether. God's plan hung on its fate. Whenever Israel gained more political territory, whenever Israel extended its boundaries, it was God's will, the end-times unfolding on the evening news. Jerusalem, as the spiritual heart of Israel, mattered. Jerusalem was God's holy city, of the ancient past, in its conflicted present, and for the biblical future.

Almost a decade ago, the documentary Waiting for Armageddon followed an evangelical pastor on a congregational bus tour through holy sites in Palestine; various teachers make sure the tourists understand they are seeing arenas of fortunate future carnage.

"There will be an ultimate final battle and it will be a lot of fun to watch ..."

"Christ will come back with a sword at this side ... we're going to be behind him with swords in our hands ... we're going to be his army ... the blood from this battle will be as high as a horse's bridle..."

When not anticipating such jubilant slaughter, this chilling film shows the group belting out the "Star Spangled Banner" under a U.S. and an Israeli flag while riding on a boat on the Sea of Galilee.

Though some references show when it was made (in the film, rumors of war look to Babylon in Iraq, not Gaza and Sana'a), the documentary holds up frighteningly well. Many (most?) evangelicals still believe this ugly stuff; they still want to make it happen; and now they have a friend in the White House.

Here's the trailer. The entire film is available on YouTube and well worth watching.

Rerun

Take it from somebody who has seen this play out:

... the Republican Party has not learned from the mistakes of the Catholic bishops. True, some Republicans are appalled by Moore’s candidacy, but the leader of the party and its national committee have publicly endorsed Moore.

Moore supporters are operating out of the same playbook as the bishops did before they wised up and changed their policies. The accusations are denied. The credibility of the victims is challenged. “Why did they not come forward earlier? Why did they wait so long?” Then the actual offense is minimized. “She was consenting.”

Bishops, because of the shortage of clergy, were often persuaded to keep a priest in ministry because there was no one to take his place. Likewise, the Republicans faced with a narrow majority in the Senate are willing to compromise their ethics in order to maintain their power.

Jesuit Father Thomas Reese, Religious News Service

I didn't need this

It's time to start trying to get in shape again after months of travel and too little exercise. So I headed off this week to run over the delightful little mountain just south of San Francisco: 5 or more trail miles and 1000 vertical feet. It's a pretty isolated place; often I don't see anyone else on my usual circuit.

So I encounter this posted by the parks department:

Apparently this guy has been molesting women who run these trails. Two attacks were reported in October and November. There's no indication the authorities have caught the perp.

Yes, I decided to run my usual circuit anyway. And all was well. But I am mightily annoyed that I have to carry this anxiety. I am not willing to let this guy keep me away from one of my favorite routes. So far, he's done nothing worse than grope; my calculation would almost certainly be different if he'd been violent. Am I crazy?

Sweet!

Motivated by seeing our elections hijacked by some combination of the Koch brothers, Putin, Donald Trump and a bunch of rightwing knuckle draggers, unexpected candidates are joining the fray all over this year. David Ermold is running against Kim Davis to be the county clerk in Rowan, Ky. The long serving incumbent refused to issue a marriage license to Ermold and his male partner in 2015, defying the Supreme Court decision legalizing same sex marriage. I have no idea if the challenger has a chance, but it's a gutsy move.

Friday cat blogging

Reflections almost hide this noble creature surveying the street. Does the animal know she's nearly invisible?

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

A reckoning is coming ...

And that reckoning has become partisan. That's a good thing. In order for a social change to take root, at least one of our major political parties has to adopt it. Change doesn't emerge from political position papers; it bubbles up among constituencies. Parties take up formerly unthinkable causes -- think racial integration, or transgender rights, or sensible gun control, or even what I think are crackpot nods to "religious liberty" -- when the change has already percolated through parts of their base. Leaders find they have no choice and "evolve." After awhile, the novelty becomes just part of what we expect from Democrats (somewhat frequently) or Republicans (less frequently -- who needs novelty when you have plutocrats?).

So John Conyers had to go despite his record as the longest serving Congressman and Black Caucus groundbreaker. Al Franken has to go, despite being a pretty darn good Senator with a sense of humor. I would expect Congressman Kihuen to go soon enough. Men who think it their right to impose their sexual desires on women will discover such conduct is an impediment for career advancement among Democrats. Women who want to work in politics will be more likely to be believed when one of these guys violates their limits. Given the deep, deep extent of male certainty that men are entitled to women's attractiveness and availability, there will be back-sliding, awkwardness and actual transgressions. But gradually, we'll all learn the new dance. It's worth demanding that Democrats get serious about this because after this amazing moment, it can happen.

Meanwhile Republicans are yoked to President Predator and (most likely) Senator Pedophile. They are in no position to respond to this social change, even if they wanted to, and even when it bubbles up from some of their base, as it certainly must. In this moment of change, GOPers may still be able to win elections. But having the Democrats draw the contrast to their newfound principles will still help peel off some doubters.

But, but, Republicans sputter, what about that last Democratic predator president, Bill Clinton? Sorry guys, but the electorate is outgrowing its anchor in the Clinton era. Here's Ronald Brownstein explaining the transition we're living through:

The baby-boom generation, which has voted reliably Republican in recent years, has been the largest generation of eligible voters since 1978. But in 2018, for the first time, slightly more Millennials than baby boomers will be eligible to vote, according to forecasts from the Center for American Progress’s States of Change project. Higher turnout rates among baby boomers will preserve their advantage among actual voters for a while. But sometime around 2024, Millennials will likely surpass them. The post-Millennials, Americans born after 2000 who’ll enter the electorate starting in 2020, will widen the advantage. This generational shift will trigger a profound racial change: While about 80 percent of the baby boom is white, over two-fifths of Millennials and nearly half of the post-Millennials are not.

Where boomer women of all colors thought aggression from powerful men was just something you had to put up with, younger cohorts are learning higher expectations. They can certainly sometimes be cowed or silenced, but they have far more peer and social support for "silence breaking."

Meanwhile, a few conservatives even realize they have their own ancient skeleton in their closets; read Jay Kaganoff calling on Justice Clarence Thomas to resign. Change is happening at a most unexpected moment.

The bill is too damn high: the medical market fails us

Why didn't the Affordable Care Act (ACA) -- that's Obamacare -- rapidly earn more fans when it managed to add 20 million people to the number covered by some kind of health insurance? Because, from the point of view of many (most?) of us who have tried to access medical care whether or not on Obamacare, that necessary good still cost an arm and leg -- or at least too damn much!

Elisabeth L. Rosenthal's An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back dissects the grim truth:

In the past quarter century, the American medical system has stopped focusing on health or even science. Instead it attends more or less single-mindedly to its own profits.

Rosenthal is a physician with a degree from Harvard Medical School and and journalist with twenty-two years experience working for the New York Times on a variety of beats including Beijing, bird flu, and environmental degradation. Back in New York, she covered adoption of the ACA and moved on to researching the cost of U.S. medicine. (She's now editor-in-chief at Kaiser Health News.)

In this utterly readable volume, Rosenthal lays out through anecdote and expertise what has gone wrong in the delivery of medicine. Separate chapters explain how all facets of the system have organized themselves over the last 25 years to extract maximum cash from largely defenseless patient/consumers. We're being ripped off every which way -- by insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, drug makers, medical device vendors, lab testing and other ancillary service contractors, and increasingly by monopolistic health conglomerates.

The second half of the book is as deep and detailed as Rosenthal's description of the problem. She is full of ideas about how to fix this foul cesspool of exploitation of human helplessness. She explains what individual patients should question and what they should protest; she even provides sample letters. She makes suggestions for how play various parts of the system off against each other, such as insurance companies, doctors, and pharmacists; make 'em work for your business. She has solid suggestions for collective political remedies, particularly in the area of strengthening and making responsive the various state-level insurance commissioners. (This caught my attention because California made this an elected position by initiative in 1988 and some subsequent occupants been quite useful to patients.) There are numerous state and regional regulatory tweaks that could help some.

But ultimately the federal government is going to have to root out the greed that defines the healthcare system. Obviously with the party representing the One Percent in power, that's not currently happening. But we can and will demand better; it is our lives at stake. Rosenthal reminds us, patients do have allies within the system:

There are many great doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others working their hearts out, even in these troubled and troubling times. Even as the healthcare sector faces a future of great financial uncertainty and humiliating bureaucracy, many of the best and brightest students are flocking to medical school. They're doing it because they want to take care of patients ... We have to remind everyone who has entered our healthcare system in the past quarter century for profit rather than patients that 'affordable patient-centered, evidence-based care' is more than a marketing pitch or a campaign slogan. ... When the medical industry presents us with the false choice of your money or your life, it's time for us all to take a stand for the latter.

Here are Rosenthal's Rules for understanding the U.S. medical system to ponder; click to enlarge:

***Want to think about how serious this is? We understand what is happening. Today in a discussion of how Republican tax cuts aim to undermine Medicare, one elder offered a suggestion:

I was discussing this legislation with my younger sister, and pointed out the obvious, which is that I probably will not survive long since I am facing a 9K copay on my cancer drug alone when I go on Medicare in a couple of months (this is not hyperbole). She suggested that when the time comes to expire, maybe I could plant myself near an entrance to the Senate chamber. I know the timing would be difficult, but I am intrigued by the idea. Could be my last act as a public educator.

Rosenthal would recognize this sentiment and this determination.

As Southern California burns, remembering a friend

These apocalyptic scenes from the fire near Ventura last night put me in mind of my friend Hattie who succumbed to metastasizing cancer last month.

Optimism was not her thing.

We are obviously a species that has outsmarted itself.

Hattie was well read, well educated, well traveled, kind, and thoughtful. She made her art, raised orchids, struggled with the League of Women Voters newsletter, and loved her friends, family and her husband.

She raged at the damage that people she unhesitatingly labelled "foolish" and "greedy" were doing to her country.

Sure people are terrified, I understand that, but thinking that not protecting others will save them is foolish. The worst consequences of capitulating are to the soul as even I, an atheist, understand.

OK. I guess I have to out myself as a person who knows a lot about stuff.  I studied the history of the rise of the Third Reich during the Weimar period, and I studied the history of the Third Reich and the aftermath of WW II in Germany.  My Masters' thesis was about the way young Germans experienced the period.  ...

A few day later in November 2016:

I am giving a lot of credit to myself and all the people of goodwill who are the backbone of this country, the real people of substance. We can be proud. And we will prevail, ultimately, as we have already done in our personal lives. People like me have fought against fascist tendencies all our lives, including within our families, in schools, at work. We are not done yet. We have a lot of strategies and most of the brainpower in the country and most of material assets,too. We are not going to flee, since there is nowhere to go;  we will stay here and save our country. So, although we do have to mourn, this is not a time to despair.
In fact, when I think about my fortunate life, I am filled with gratitude today. I can feel, I can reason. I don't believe stupid things.

Living on a knife edge between between hope and despair is hard. Hattie chose to balance there.

We only met twice, but we stayed aware of each other through our blogs for many years. I miss her and can only imagine what her absence means to her family and friends for whom she a vibrant presence.

Called to choose a side

Bishop Gene Robinson (retired bishop of New Hampshire and the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion) preached at our little San Francisco parish of St. John the Evangelist yesterday. This photo of the Bishop giving communion to two of our current crop of little girls is cribbed from my friend Susan Hansen. What a wise, brave man the Bishop is!

After the service, Robinson answered questions from quite a crowd of parishioners. He admonished those of us LGBT people living in the protected environment of this city to remember that in 29 states we queers may have a constitutional right to get married -- but we can be fired the next day for our sexual orientation. Here's a current map showing the state of employment discrimination law:

In all those gray states we have no protection at all; only the deep purple states offer wide protection to queers of (most?) flavors. From Fortuynist at Wikipedia.

He was asked where is the Church in these dire times. Like so many of us, he's mighty unhappy with attacks on poor and marginalized people from the President and the Republican Congress.

But he hastened to add gently that he was sure there were Republicans among us ... I'm not so sure about that in this congregation. We're a pretty radical bunch even in a radical city.

And I do wonder about how people claiming to be followers of Jesus can also be followers of Trump, Pence, Ryan and McConnell. There is little about which the Bible is more clear than this: "... do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another." Zechariah 7:10.

Denouncing oppression is not something to be carefully polite about.

I think that wonderful escaped evangelical the Slacktivist has it right about how faithful people and churches must orient themselves toward our current regime; he takes direction from the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in calling out blasphemy.

“Blasphemy” is not hyperbole there. It is a term of acute theological precision. It is the correct and apt and necessary term. It is the word we need to be using now, today, to describe the blasphemous champions of oppressors with their so-called piety ...

... Many white churches support white nationalism and Trumpism.

Other white churches allow the option of not supporting it. But it is only that — an option, one that is permitted and tolerated, but never demanded.

This, too, is blasphemy.

After the Steinle verdict: the decent, the losers, and the winners

Kate Steinle is still tragically dead. The 32 year old woman was just walking on the Embarcadero with her father in July 2015 when a bullet punctured her heart. The apparently dim-witted homeless man who randomly fired a found weapon was acquitted of responsibility for her killing by a San Francisco jury on Thursday, though held guilty of being a felon in possession of a gun.

And much of the country is up in arms. Rightwing Twitter wants a boycott of the City by the Bay. I kind of suspect they weren't coming here anyway, and wouldn't enjoy the place if they did, so that's not so worrisome. President Cheato is raving that this has something to do with San Francisco's welcome to immigrants and we should build his wall. Just as in the 2016 campaign, he's using other people's pain for his gain and inflaming racial fears.

I don't have any special knowledge of the case beyond what I read in the papers, but I have observations that I haven't seen brought together in most sources.

Devastated and decent
The Steinle family. The Chronicle recorded a short video, Mending the Heart, in which Steinle's father conveys his dignified determination not to participate in a blaming circus. He tries very hard to keep focus on the real harm, his daughter's death. And he stays away from vengeance-filled vituperation against the shooter or the city. (Kate's brother isn't so measured, but her father is the main spokesman.) Watch this soon at the link and weep; Chronicle links aren't always durable.

Losers

District Attorney George Gascon. Gascon's job is to decide who is to be charged with what crime in this city. He routinely throws the book at very young men rounded up on drug charges. He routinely exonerates police officers who shoot unarmed suspects. Presumably feeling political pressure to appear tough, he charged Jose Ines Garcia Zarate with intent to kill, including first degree murder. No wonder the charged didn't stick; the evidence showed Steinle was hit by a ricochet and Garcia Zarate seemed to lack both motive and capacity. If Gascon had dared to charge what the facts as found by the jury seemed to indicate, he might have gotten a conviction on some level of accidental manslaughter. But by going for broke, he chose to make a weak case unsustainable. (See Tim Redmond's devastating description of Gascon's failure here.)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It gets lost in the fog, but Garcia Zarate was on the street that fatal day because ICE neglected to get a warrant to pick him up from San Francisco County custody. San Francisco's "sanctuary" status means we don't just turn over inmates because someone at the Feds calls the jail and asks for a prisoner. Our law enforcement officers are required to follow the rules. In this country, it takes (or should take) a legal warrant to hand someone into custody. ICE didn't do its job and get the right judicial order; the SF Sheriff's Department merely followed the rules. Garcia Zarate became yet another homeless San Franciscan.

Winners

Matt Gonzalez. Gonzalez's past political career didn't make me a fan; a guy who would run as Ralph Nader's VP choice in the 2008 election demonstrated a complete lack of seriousness about U.S. politics. But in his role as lead public defender in this case, he did his job masterfully, enabling the jury to get beyond the noise and stick to the evidence. And his subsequent warning to the Cheato and company was timely:

“For those who might be critical of this verdict, there are a number of people that have commented on this case in the last couple of years — the attorney general of the United States, the president and vice president of the United States — let me just remind them that they are themselves are under investigation by a special prosecutor in Washington, D.C.,” Gonzalez said outside court.

“They may themselves soon avail themselves of the presumption of innocence and beyond a reasonable doubt standard,” Gonzalez said. “And I would ask them to reflect on that before they comment or disparage the result in this case.”

SFGate

The jury. Mostly criminal cases never get as far as being heard by a jury of fellow/sister citizens (much less a jury of their peers.) In 2012, 94 percent of state cases never reached trial. Most charges end in a plea deal with the defendant agreeing to guilt for some offense in order to receive a lesser sentence. But in the rare cases in which defendants do face a jury, ordinary people can prove thoughtful and discerning as I've written here from personal experience. Jurors often end up taking the momentous task they've been stuck with very conscientiously. Somehow it doesn't surprise me that a San Francisco jury made up of people who've likely seen quite a few individuals like Garcia Zarate on their streets needed more evidence than raw prejudice to make the man a deliberate murderer.

I have jury behavior on my mind as I'm on the hook for such service myself next week. I'm confident that nothing will come of it, as no attorney on either side would put me on a panel, but going through the motions is a welcome citizenship task.

Game change? or not?

Washington pundits are agog that Robert Mueller's investigation has flipped President Trump's former National Security advisor Michael Flynn. The crew at 538 thought Flynn's guilty plea merited a special podcast. #NeverTrump Republican Jennifer Rubin writes "Flynn could deliver a knockout blow to Trump." Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have blaring stories.

I'm not feeling it. Flynn is pleading guilty to something we've known since last February: he talked with the Russian ambassador during the transition about sanctions and lied about it to the FBI. For an Intelligence guy he's not too bright; didn't he know that the U.S. almost certainly would be listening in on the Russian?

And as for Flynn's boss, the Orange Cheato, he publicly solicited help from a hostile foreign power (that would be Putin's Russia) during the campaign. I heard it myself when trapped in front of a cable news feed on a ferry in late July 2016. We know that. I happen to think Trump's behavior was (and is) treasonous; his disavowal and destruction of the more decent elements of our polity give aid and comfort to our enemies. But a sizeable minority of us -- well distributed -- thought not and put him in the White House.

Mueller can prove Trump's misdeeds -- mostly done in the full light of day -- and still achieve nothing unless Republicans decide the con man has outlived his usefulness and impeach him. Perhaps they might get around to that when they've given their rich donors their tax cut? We'll see.

What happened to give us the opioid epidemic?

These days you'd have to live under a rock not to know that the U.S. has a raging opioid addiction crisis. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse,

Every day, more than 90 Americans die after overdosing on opioids.

Over half a million U.S. residents are hooked on heroin and a couple of million more are hooked on prescription pills.

(For anyone curious, as I was, about terminology: heroin and morphine are derived from the opium poppy and thus are opiates. However pharmaceutical industry chemists have come up with synthetic compounds that act on the same receptors in our bodies, the opioid receptors, including hydrocodone [Vicodin], oxycodone [OxyContin, Percocet], and fentanyl. These drugs, as well as the opiates, are termed "opioids.")

Sam Quinones' Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic is a vivid journalistic account of what got us into this sorry situation. The emphasis here is on "what happened" -- he's not attempting to answer "why" so many people might have been vulnerable, though the book is a catalogue of hints. But we can't try to make sense of the "why" without a firm grip on "what happened" -- who, where, and when -- this is terrific reporting in that vein.

Quinones relates how by the 1990s doctors came to believe they ought to prescribe more drugs to relieve pain, how pharma companies, especially Perdue which invented Oxycontin, marketed to maximize profit from that worthy medical impulse, and how other unscrupulous doctors set up pill mills and made fortunes dispensing vast quantities of opioids to addicts who had started on prescriptions. Ordinary capitalist greed teed a plague up to explode.

During the '00s, public health authorities and cops gradually realized something had gone terribly wrong and that the ready availability of addictive medicines had to be curbed. New regulations reduced over-prescription. But as Quinones puts it, the change only meant that decade was "a great time to be a heroin dealer." A brilliantly organized entrepreneurial illicit drug distribution system out of the town of Xalisco in the Mexican state of Nayarit was ready, willing, and able to import their black tar heroin into areas where Oxy and fentanyl had created a plentiful supply of buyers. Their story, culled from interviews with imprisoned and/or deported drug distribution peons, is where Quinones' reporting really shines; heroin came to the heartland not through the Mafia, Central American gangs, or violent drug cartels, but by way of enterprising small businessmen originally united by family ties who thrived on offering reliability and practicing customer cultivation.

Quinones concludes with stories of what came after addiction mushroomed: of children who overdosed, of parents who retreated into shamed silence, and of other parents who became evangelists warning of the danger of drugs. And he shares stories of cops, judges and communities which fought back, which began to treat addicts as sufferers from a disease that required treatment and rehabilitation, and where some pride of place began to return.

Quinones writes a blog where he continues, beyond the Dreamland reportage, to try to explore what this plague means in our national life. He's acutely aware that the addiction epidemic is haunting our national debates, even when it's not in the foreground for many of us.

Politicians would do well to better understand the deep well of pain and anxiety surrounding, and thus the political power within, this issue. It’s not something expressed easily in polls. People aren’t likely to admit to a pollster on a phone that a loved one is an addict.

But it’s there and dims the view of the future of so many people, the prospects of so many towns and counties, the economies of so many regions, and thus is of paramount importance to them. Right up there with jobs – connected inextricably with jobs, in fact. In so many depressed areas, huge numbers of folks can’t pass an employer’s drug test.

Nor does it take many addicts for that foreboding to spread. A few cases in a small town, I think, are all that’s needed. People see it hit almost anyone and seemingly at random – like a plague – including families who before had no connection to the drug world or the criminal justice system. Soon everyone’s view of the future turns negative.

***The opioid addiction crisis is treated in our public life as peculiarly a contemporary "heartland" phenomenon. Certainly that's the story Quinones tells. But it doesn't seem so far away to this city dweller.

I have friends who came back from being drafted into the Vietnam war who have never overcome drug using habits acquired in that imperial folly. And I have seen a friend get so hooked on opioids prescribed by a high end pain doctor that, whenever she checked into a hospital for treatment of ongoing injuries, she was in danger of suffering through withdrawal because medical personnel would not believe she actually could tolerate the volume of drugs she was habituated to.

Addiction is not solely the story of sad white people in Ohio -- we are an addiction-prone society in which we are taught to hope we can get happiness from a bottle or a pill. It's always worth asking, who benefits when drugs are the available answer to fear, disappointment, and pain?

Friday cat blogging

Meeting Jack through this snapshot, you might think he's a pensive, even dignified, gentleman.

But then, you might encounter this.