It's not density that city people hate; it's housing injustice

The national media is full of stories about how coastal California needs more houses, but -- for reasons pundits treat as either cupidity or stupidity -- we resist efforts to build what we obviously need. The collapse last week of this year's attempt to pass state Senator Scott Wiener's bill set off another predictable round. SB 50's essence was to allow more building near public transit lines, though there were plenty of devilish details. This, from the NY Times, is a representative specimen, irrefutable on big picture analysis, uninformed on the nitty-gritty level where politics plays out:

Over the past eight years, the San Francisco Bay Area has added about 676,000 jobs and 176,000 housing units. The entirely predictable result has been a surge in rents and home prices along with a rising homeless problem that has jetloads of tourists convinced that one of the richest places on earth is actually a dystopia of misery and destitution. Despite its reputation for all things liberal, California has the highest poverty rate in the country — about one in five people — once the cost of shelter is figured in. This is not for lack of jobs or money, but because its cities are so exclusive that they are essentially turning working-class residents into poor people.

... S.B. 50, an ambitious but divisive bill, was shelved until next year. The bill would expand the state’s housing supply by forcing cities to allow apartment buildings in the low-slung bungalow neighborhoods on which the state was built. ...

Each year state legislators go through a Groundhog Day routine in which they introduce dozens of new housing bills that are full of technicalities and minutiae but fall into two basic categories. The first are bills that make it easier to build housing so that the long-term shortage can be rectified. The second are bills that provide more money for subsidized affordable housing and expand tenant protections so that people who already have affordable homes don’t lose them. ...Where does it go? All we can count on for now is that next year will feature a renewed fight over S.B. 50. And dozens of other housing bills. And the housing problem getting worse.

Like a lot of San Franciscans, I'm thoroughly convinced that we need more housing and that means more density. I'd go to bat for a believable plan. Yet I am not at all on board for Wiener's bill; in fact it looks like a con job to me.

• The bill's assumptions about developer behavior are nonsense in the San Francisco context. Roll back local controls and you will merely allow more condos for rich people . Even the Times has figured that out.

  As land costs rise, developers can make more money building at the top end of the market and ignoring the middle.

• Housing developers have to be required to build affordable units, probably at something close to a 50/50 ratio of rich to middle class housing to keep new buildings from just making the situation worse.

• If the state legislature is going to weigh in on urban housing and density, they need to get their feet off city's necks and repeal pre-emption measures that effectively outlaw effective rent control (Costa-Hawkins) and incentivize clearing existing apartment buildings of renters to sell them off as condos (Ellis). They also need to offer more money for public transit if they are going to dump more people into existing systems.

• It's hard to take seriously a commitment to equity when suburbs are incentivized not to develop public transit because to do so would mean they had to house more people.

• It's hard to take seriously a law that's been written to let Marin County off the hook for its density provisions. Look, I love all the green spaces over there, but Marin is the 13th richest county in the country according to the American Community Survey. It could do more to house more people.

• If some sort of grand bargain between localities and the state is going to happen, it probably needs a more trusted broker than Senator Wiener. He's my rep; he's been kicking around San Francisco politics for over a decade -- and he's never seemed to meet a private builder development project that he didn't like.

Tim Redmond who has been observing these housing fights for decades laid out at 48 Hills what it might take to break the logjam on increasing density in the San Francisco Bay Area.

... Imagine the billions of dollars that will pour into the state coffers with the next round of [tech] IPOs. Why isn’t Wiener asking that all of that money go to stabilize and protect existing vulnerable communities – including the construction of a vast amount of (sure, dense) affordable housing, served by new, state-funded transit?

The [San Francisco Board of Supervisors] are asking the right questions. I doubt Wiener would accept the type of amendments that would make his bill acceptable – and if he did, I doubt the Legislature, which is under the thumb of the real-estate industry, would accept them.

For anyone who has read this far: why am I writing this? Housing policy is not one of my regular topics. But irritation with the smug superiority with which national media approach our devastating housing situation has me thoroughly pissed off. If you want to hear from people who work in this arena everyday, let me suggest San Francisco's Housing Rights Committee.

Let's start with a little information

Since our misogynist, Christianist ignoramuses are determined to preserve fetal heartbeats, it's probably worth a short explanation of what this phenomenon is that they hold so dear:

... at six weeks of pregnancy, an ultrasound can detect "a little flutter in the area that will become the future heart of the baby," said Dr. Saima Aftab, medical director of the Fetal Care Center at Nicklaus Children's Hospital in Miami. This flutter happens because the group of cells that will become the future "pacemaker" of the heart gain the capacity to fire electrical signals, she said.

But the heart is far from fully formed at this stage, and the "beat" isn't audible; if doctors put a stethoscope up to a woman's belly this early on in her pregnancy, they would not hear a heartbeat, Aftab told Live Science. (What's more, it isn't until the eighth week of pregnancy that the baby is called a fetus; prior to that, it's still considered an embryo, according to the Cleveland Clinic.)

It's been only in the last few decades that doctors have even been able to detect this flutter at six weeks, thanks to the use of more-sophisticated ultrasound technologies, Aftab said. Previously, the technology wasn't advanced enough to detect the flutter that early on in pregnancy.

LiveScience

It's not about the flutter; it's about keeping women down and punishing those who stick their heads up. It always has been.

Angry women matter.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Redwood Park

San Franciscans: does that name ring a bell? Maybe it's in Marin County or the East Bay hills? Nope. Redwood Park is the name of a private urban oasis at the base of Transamerica Pyramid adjacent to the city's financial district. Its builders even trucked in some actual redwoods from the Santa Cruz mountains.
But mostly they went in for antic delights.

There are bronze jumping frogs ...

bronze jumping children ...

and a memorial plaque for Bummer and Lazarus, dogs who romped about the area in the city's early days.

All encountered while Walking San Francisco.

Media consumption diet: podcasts

I haven't written one of these for awhile, so why not? Anyone who reads here will have noticed that I consume a lot of books in audio form. Of late, I've found myself "reading" quite a few serialized podcasts.

Serialized literature was, after all, what built the emerging magazine culture of the late 19th and early 20th century. Podcasts are another booming new form of media, still finding its potential and consequently still often imaginative. I don't go looking for serials, but the same outfits where I find weekly podcasts seem to be producing them. Obviously, their creators believe the extended format gives them additional tools with which to explore their topics.

Last year I enjoyed FiveThirtyEight's The Gerrymandering Project, which explored and explained this moderately technical subject as six podcasts over six weeks. Anyone looking for a solid explantion of an important political challenge should listen up.

Also last year, I listened to fourteen episodes of The Wilderness from Crooked Media, which offered Jon Favreau and the other Obama boys' take on how the Democratic Party lost its way before and after the 2016 election. Since this has been very much my subject over decades, I found it uneven, though ambitious and more broad than I had expected. It was meant as fodder and encouragement for mobilization for the 2018 elections and probably served its purpose well.

These days I'm on episode three of The Asset from The Moscow Project. It explains "Trump's history with Russia, from his extensive business dealings with Russian oligarchs to his presidential campaign and the investigations that have sent some of his closest associates to prison." Three episodes in, I'm appreciating the orderly narrative structure they are giving to previously reported events and connections. That's vital storytelling.

A miscellany of podcasts I often listen to:

Press the Button: National security from the point of view of people who know that war will not make us safer.

The Weeds: All policy all the time. Matt Yglesias is snotty and jaded, but insightful. Dara Lind is simply the best immigration reporter around. Jane Coaston brings genuine familiarity with right wing opinion.

Ezra Klein Show: Klein has been writing a book on what the hell is going on with our dysfunctional politics; his resulting interviews with all sorts of thinkers including conservatives who aren't mouth-breathers have been fascinating. He's very good at conversation. I don't find him so interesting when his explorations shift to woo-woo stuff, but your mileage may vary.

The Lawfare Podcast: Sometimes stuffy and pretentious, other times a thought-provoking offering from the legal website at the Brookings Institution. They are good at presenting recordings of smartly abridged Congressional testimony -- there are few experiences quite like listening to Michael Cohen while running.

Deep State Radio: Informed, charming, slightly miserable commentators commiserate about the condition our condition is in. David Rothkopf, Rosa Brooks, Kori Schake, and Ed Luce are the core.

Amicus with Dahlia Lithwick: All things Supreme Court. Informative.

Politics Podcast at FiveThirtyEight: Data guru Nate Silver, reporter Clare Malone, and a revolving cast of others kick around what can be discerned about election horseraces. They are usually dispassionate and often accurate.

The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk: A global exploration of "populism" from a European-inflected political science perspective.

Trumpcast: Yascha Mounk is here too, along with journalists Virginia Heffernan and León Krauze. Interviews about all things Trump and US politics and culture with interesting guests. Short, which sometimes entertaining, sometimes encouraging.

On the Media: Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield were in radio before podcasts were cool and these fully produced explorations of whatever catches their left-leaning, often skeptical fancies achieve unmatched journalistic professionalism -- at least in this list.

With Friends Like These: Ana Marie Cox is self-revealing, oh-so-woke -- and sometimes wise, while presenting a diverse cast of guests. I think she benefits from having escaped the nation's media hubs by decamping to Minneapolis.

Friday cat blogging

Time for a little snooze.

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

A diagnosis still on the lookout for a cure

How Democracies Die by Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt is a 2018 book that already feels dated in 2019 -- and not in an encouraging way.

Their introduction describes our situation:

We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. ... Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.

These authors offer a simple list of signs they think should enable us to identify a politician whose rise endangers democracy. Donald Trump exhibits all their markers.

Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian Behavior

1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game
2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents
3. Toleration or encouragement of violence
4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media

Trump showed all of these in 2018 and seems on a rampage this year to surpasses his previous transgressions.

We are no longer in need of diagnosis here -- Trump and his Republican enablers will eradicate democracy in order to keep power if they can get away with it. They can tolerate neither a more just multi-racial society nor demands for an equitable economy; if these advance even a little, they see only loss of their privilege. The question is now, as it has been since November 2016 is, will we, the majority, let them get away with it?

Do these wise social scientists, who have studied the historical and international evidence, have any suggestions for aroused non-elite people who need to preserve as much democratic space as possible?

That's not so clear.

The fundamental problem facing American democracy remains extreme partisan division -- one fueled not just by policy differences but by deeper sources of resentment, including racial and religious differences. America's great polarization preceded the Trump presidency, and it is very likely to endure beyond it.

We -- communities of color, queers, many women, young people who hope for a future -- are the polarization that motivates overthrow of democracy. Our freedom is Republicans' nightmare.

In 2018 we showed we can assemble the numbers to hold the line -- if we pay attention. It won't get easier until it does.

Are we about to get John Bolton's war on Iran?

It's been a little over a year since that old war hawk tucked in as National Security Adviser to an ignorant, impetuous president. Having done their best to break up the alliance agreements that were keeping some uneasy constraint on ever larger conflicts in a dangerous region, now we're getting the sort of headlines we can expect from a rogue regime in Washington bent on catastrophe. "U.S. orders ‘non-emergency’ government employees to leave Iraq". "Skeptical U.S. Allies Resist Trump’s New Claims of Threats From Iran." Here the receding empire goes again ... ginning up a war to distract from our fractures at home.

The world knows better.

But European military allies have questioned whether the threat level against U.S. assets has shifted in recent weeks.

“We haven’t seen anything convincing yet, but tensions are definitely rising,” said one Western diplomat ...

Washington Post

... a senior British military official told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday that he saw no increased risk from Iran or allied militias in Iraq or Syria.

New York Times

Of course, in 2003, the world knew better as well, when the George W. Bush administration was making up "intelligence" to support its Iraq invasion. Fat lot of good that did millions of Iraqis and so many others killed or left with societies torn apart; fat lot of good that did the thousands of US military personnel murdered or maimed in service of monsters like Dick Cheney and John Bolton last time around.

Let's hope some combination of Trump's feral, canny timidity and world opprobrium hold the USofA back this time around.
...In terms of push back for peace coming from people within this big, confused country, the moment feels more like the awful days immediately after the 9/11 attacks than the eve of Iraq. Even then, a few of us knew our ignorant, overconfident government was on the way to making a hash of Afghanistan (how'd that turn out?). Two years later, by the eve of the Iraq war millions rallied across the globe against the disaster. And empire, led by the likes of Bolton, could not be deterred. The mass peace movement infrastructure that was laboriously built in the '00s has atrophied.

Oh sure, small dedicated historic peace organizations carry on honorably as they have for decades. In Congress, Win Without War has labored to reduce US support for the Saudi war on Yemen that is one of the world's current most extreme human atrocities.

But effectual peace agitation has to break into the actual existing political conversation if it is to achieve any mass heft. And that means, at this moment, making sure that aspiring Democratic presidents ALL put themselves on the right side of history, against a US attack on Iran.

Just Security launched a useful initiative yesterday. They reminded us that Democrats have been to this movie before.

Many Democrats still prominent in public political life voted against the [Iraq] war. Dick Durbin voted no. Bernie Sanders voted no. Robert Menendez voted no. Jack Reed voted no. Nancy Pelosi voted no. Ben Cardin voted no. Patrick Leahy voted no. Patty Murray voted no. Debbie Stabenow voted no. Ron Wyden voted no.

Many Democrats still prominent in public life voted for the war. Joe Biden voted yes. Chuck Schumer voted yes. Steny Hoyer voted yes. Eliot Engel voted yes. Adam Smith voted yes. Adam Schiff voted yes.

The Just Security petition aims to pressure these luminaries to get an impending threat of unnecessary, unwinnable war right this time around.

Most importantly, this initiative aims to pressure Joe Biden to get it right this time -- and to disqualify Biden for the Democratic nomination if he fails to oppose yet another US war. We'll see.

Just noting ...

Kevin Drum points out that Trump's "trade war" with China -- dude needed some pseudo-combat somewhere? -- hurts poorer people more than his fellow kleptocrats.

Like everything he and the GOPers favor ...

Life, death, and colliding cultures in the 'hood

Down the block from us, a young man sleeping in a car was shot a couple of weeks ago. According to media reports, the killer pulled up and departed on a bicycle. There are no subsequent reports that anyone has been charged.

A day or so after, Erudite Partner and I checked in with each other: were we scared by this? Not really. Maybe we should be, but this event felt both horrifying and depressingly ordinary. There have long been too many young men with guns and mysterious grudges around here. They exist in their world and we in ours; any threat to us would be an accidental intersection of separate worlds. I worry more that frustrated drivers navigating the congested street will hit a child leaving the school.

After the shooting, as is common around here, friends of the dead man set up a somewhat forlorn memorial in the style of the local young.

And then the neighborhood's underlying tensions kicked in. According to the Examiner,

Less than 24 hours after [Jonathan] Bello’s death, The City received an anonymous complaint requesting the clearing of a memorial erected in his honor — flowers, some 15 candles, a cross, several empty liquor bottles and the words “RIP Dae Dae” scrawled in bright orange and black lettering on the public sidewalk where Bello was targeted.

As of yesterday, the memorial is still standing, but a block resident/neighbor hit with a public nuisance notice from the city expressed his frustrations with some of his current neighbors.

“I think it’s outrageous to demand of us — to be conscripted into taking down a memorial and erasing this tragic event and the suffering of his friends and family as if the residue of a murder is just some kind of blight,” said Ben Rosenfeld, a resident of 115 Bartlett St...

... “There’s already layers of extreme disrespect baked into the dynamics of extremely rich people invading the working class community before you even arrive at the crossroads of asking relatively new neighbors to take down a memorial,” said Rosenfeld, who has lived in the Mission for 15 years and said that a lot of “gentrification issues play out on my doorstep.”

I too wouldn't want to be asked by the city to cross the border between worlds, because that's what a clean-up order in this situation amounts to. Where possible, we have to let each other be. That's no solution, but thoughtless interventions seem likely to make an inequitable reality worse.

#FreeBlackMamas

These women, members of BYP100, raised $4000 to bail out mothers on this day. Awesome work.

Mothers

The proud mother here was my grandmother, Amelia Minerva Roberts Sidway.

The two girls were her third and fourth offspring, as two little boys had died in infancy.

My mother, Martha Roberts Sidway Adams, is the chubby two year old; the more poised child is her sister Margaret.

The year is probably 1910.

I have no explanation for the hat.

San Francisco has always been a boomtown ...

where daring fortune hunters came to make and their leave their mark. Meet William Alexander Leidesdorff, Jr.

The enterprising immigrant from the Caribbean did awfully well for himself and became one of the city's founders.

That story is on a par with today's tech moguls. Today the gentleman has an alley named for him.

I passed Leidesdorff's statue in the financial district while Walking San Francisco.

What to do if you love tigers?

Eve Andrews muses on the new report on how human activity is driving millions of species into extinction.

I have a friend who’s also a huge tiger fan, and he suggests the punishment for poaching should be putting the poacher in a cage fight with a tiger, but (a) I don’t see this getting a lot of political support, and (b) it ignores the fact that solving environmental problems often requires us to care about other justice issues, like poverty. How can you tell a person that they have to stop trying to live off the land around them because the tigers have to live? How would you convince a poacher that it’s fair they’ll be jailed or shot for pursuing a means to feed their family?

And in any event, punitive measures to protect tigers only go so far. Amping up punishment of deforestation or poaching or wood-collecting without doing anything to provide alternatives to the human needs driving those things is ineffective and ethically questionable. Fighting biodiversity die-off likely means also working on social welfare, better fuels, and increased agricultural productivity, Blomqvist says, adding that the benefits “are so much wider than the effects on conservation.”

So what might that look like? Governments and NGOs can invest in productivity-increasing measures for farmers so that they can increase how much they grow without having to expand their land into forested territory. Organizations can invest in getting more and more households onto electrical grids so that they’re not taking wood from the forest.

Additionally, policies that support indigenous land rights in regions where endangered species live can help preserve biodiversity. Indigenous tribes’ knowledge of the natural resources around them spans generations and tends to be stronger than that of government organizations. ...

As Alice Walker once proclaimed at a 1982 anti-nuke service at Grace Cathedral, "only justice can stop a curse."

Friday cat blogging

While most precincts I explore while Walking San Francisco reveal no cats at all, every once in a while I meet a bumper crop. All these animals live in one obscure corner of District 11, far south of the city's downtown.

A challenge: can we learn to value all of us?

“Race isn’t about black people, necessarily,” says Eddie Glaude Jr. “It’s about the way whiteness works to disfigure and distort our democracy, and the ideals that animate our democracy.”

Ezra Klein podcast

The assumptions and material consequences of unconstrained white supremacy are the subject of this 2016 book by a Princeton professor of Religion and African American Studies. Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul is a hell of an indictment of our broken core.

Dr. Glaude spells out why the national financial implosion of 2008 should properly be labeled the "Great Black Depression." Black homeowners were defrauded of the little stake they had in US prosperity though mass foreclosure on mortgages designed to fail -- profitably -- by and for the bankers. He insists this ugly outcome and government's failure to protect black victims arose from the "value gap."

We talk about the achievement gap in education or the wealth gap between white Americans and other groups, but the value gap reflects something more basic: no matter our stated principles or how much progress we think we've made, white people are valued more than others in this country, and that fact continues to shape the life chances of millions of Americans. The value gap is in our national DNA.

One of the debilitating consequences of the value gap is that black public commentators like Professor Glaude learn to modulate what they'll say.

The fear of white fear distorts black political behavior. ... I can't call Bill O'Reilly a dumbass (at least not in public or on television). No matter the horror of the moment, our anger must be overcome ...

The history of blackness in America since the civil rights struggles of the 1960s as Glaude lays it out consists of a series of destructive circumstances by which black people have been muzzled and muzzled themselves -- through hagiography that has neutered Dr. King, through cooptation by Democrats including President Obama, through neglect and destruction of black institutions including colleges and churches.

Yet Glaude comes away from this sad catalogue still hoping for a "revolution of values." The young people who rose up in Ferguson, Missouri when a white police department let Michael Brown's murdered body lie in the sun for four hours, all the Black Lives Matter eruptions, and Rev. William Barber's Forward Together "moral movement" -- these still inspire him.

A revolution of value should change what constitutes success and individual initiative. The value of human beings should never be diminished in the pursuit of profit or in the name of some ideology. ...

... Americans have to live together, in the deepest sense of the phrase -- to make a life together that affords everyone (and I do mean everyone) a real chance. This can happen only when we experience genuine connectedness, when the well-being of African Americans is bound up with any consideration the well-being of the nation. When we are not asked to disappear, and instead have the space to reach for our best selves. ...

We have to say, without qualification, BlackLivesMatter! Obviously, we know we matter. The phrase isn't about asserting our humanity to folks who deny it. The voices of our mighty dead shout back that the price of the ticket has been paid already. No. BlackLivesMatter reminds white people that their lives do not matter more than others. It is a direct challenge to white supremacy.

...In 2019, this reads as a very 2016 book, written to help black people move on from the disappointments of the Obama era into yet more US politics as usual, black erasure as usual, by white supremacy as usual. Some of it reads off center as African Americans found themselves confronting not another neoliberal, but instead a neo-Confederate Attorney General and a neo-Nazi President. (Dr. Glaude discussed some of this in the podcast quoted abve.) But the core holds. The only path forward for American democracy remains eradicating the value gap.

Study points toward a future we can work and hope for

The American Muslim Poll 2019 from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding has been getting some media attention, mostly because of the finding captured in this chart:

This seems to me an important piece of data -- but not really so surprising, merely showing that two communities under the gun in our white nationalist environment recognize affinities and also the location of likely allies. That is, U.S. Muslims and Jews aren't dumb.

But there's lots more to this poll and it seemed like a worthwhile project to comment on some aspects of it:

• I had a hard time locating my tribe in it. The section on methodology describes one of the groups polled as "self-identified Protestants (parsing out white Evangelicals)". Does that cohort include both white mainliners and Black churchgoers? They don't say. Was the sample size just too small to break out; if they had broken out Blacks from whites, would the findings been any different?
  
  In the data summaries, "Protestant" attitudes toward U.S. Muslims seem always to split right down the middle of the distribution between Islamophobia and affirmation of others as is illustrated in the chart above. A similar down-the-middle positioning shows in "Protestant" electoral inclinations and evaluation of the nation's direction. Might my tribe be deeply divided between white Republican nationalist and Democratic inclusivity wings whose attitudes wash out in these statistics? I wonder.

• Political party identification among Muslims shows fissures familiar in our society--except when it comes to age. As Muslims get older, they become more likely to vote Democratic, at least nowadays.

  As with the general public, party alignment varies by race in the Muslim community. White Muslims (25%) are more likely than Asian Muslims (9%) to vote Republican and about six times as likely to vote Republican as Black Muslims (4%). Uniquely, Muslims’ voting pattern diverges from the general public—as they age, the general population leans more Republican whereas Muslim Americans continue to identify as strongly Democratic.

• I found this surprising. Education in comparative religion succeeds in promoting interfaith respect.

  ... it is worth noting that knowing something about Islam is even more powerful a predictor of tolerance toward Muslims than knowing a Muslim personally, suggesting that knowledge of the faith helps dispel generalized tropes about the people even more than knowing one good individual member of that group, who can be dismissed as an exception or “one of the good ones.”

  Maybe interfaith education is more potent than I would have surmised.

• I'm not convinced that this observation is deeply supported in the data, but you got to love it. Participation in #Resistance breaks down barriers and begins healing.

  The majority of all three major racial groups know a Muslim, but Hispanic Americans (63%) are more likely to know Muslims than white Americans. Hispanic Americans (39%) are also more likely to have a close Muslim friend than white Americans (21%). It is important to note that Muslims and Hispanic Americans are both groups that are a target of the current administration’s divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric. Resistance movements that demand “No Ban, No Wall” may have helped bring these two groups together.

The report is highly readable and available online to anyone curious.

She beat the gun lobby -- and they want to take her down

The National Rifle Association has a new president, one Carolyn D. Meadows. Apparently the NRA got tired of that old con man Ollie North; or maybe the mendacous former Marine lieutenant colonel got tired of the NRA's homegrown grifters like Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre. Hard to tell amid the swirl of scandal and accusations of misuse of funds.

Anyway, Carolyn Meadows was up to be named North's replacement as the public face of the NRA.

So, naturally, she explained one of her priorities in her new job was to win back a Georgia congressional seat which the Democrat Lucy McBath had won narrowly last November. Where Newt Gingrich had once sat, McBath must be an unqualified interloper. And Meadows thought she knew why McBath won.

"... we'll get that seat back,” Meadows said. “But it is wrong to say like McBath said, that the reason she won was because of her anti-gun stance. That didn't have anything to do with it — it had to do with being a minority female. And the Democrats really turned out, and that's the problem we have with conservatives — we don't turn out as well.”

Daily Kos

You are missing something, Ms Meadows.

Lucy McBath introduced her campaign with this ad in which she tells the story of losing her son to a man with a gun. Here's how McBath explained her intent to Georgia voters.This short video is still worth your time even though the election is over.

Like all Congresscritters, McBath always needs support to stay in office. Meadows has backtracked, knowing she'd stuck her foot in her mouth -- but the NRA will certainly be coming after McBath in her next election.

Practicing citizenship

It starts young -- perhaps before imagination and delight have been knocked out of us.

H/t Ronni Bennett.

Stumbling toward liberty to find God

Turkish journalist and author Mustafa Akyol's Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty has three parts, all very valuable to an enquiring reader.

The first section -- The Beginnings -- is a highly readable, uncomplicated narrative of the intellectual history of Islam as the faith expanded beyond its Arabian peninsula origins and became a world empire. Akyol explicates a repeated conflict between two Islamic schools of thought, Rationalists and Traditionalists. The former believed that the faith of Muslims was compatible with individual liberty and free will, with objectivity and reason. The latter, who almost always had the support of the political authorities of their day, scorned such theological exploration, insisting on unchanging dogmatism and narrow constructions of the stories of the Prophet which served as glosses on the many subjects not addressed in the Qur'an. All of this is history remains controversial, but Akyol makes the contours of the ongoing struggle quite accessible to non-Muslim readers. (It's not as if historic Christianity has failed to familiarized people from a European tradition with perennial intramural theological and organizational quarrels.)

The second section -- The Modern Era -- traces how these currents played out in the last days of the Ottoman empire in the 19th century and on through its collapse in 1918. Unlike the rest of Islamic Asia, Africa and the Far East, the Ottoman heartland never fell under direct Western rule which afforded both its modernizers and it conservative clerics a freedom to make their own paths toward accommodation with western, Christian, European modernity. Modern Turkey's subsequent rulers continued a pattern of oscillation between military dictatorship, radical secularization, and, sometimes, a search for an Islamic liberalism.

Akyol published this book in 2011, a moment which proved a high water mark for the potential for such an Islamic liberalism. Recep Tayyip Erdogan seemed to be leading Turkey toward intellectual pluralism, democracy, and religious tolerance. In the years since, Erdogan has become one of Donald Trump's favorite autocrats, jailing thousands of opponents and remaking Turkey's political system to protect his power. In this book, Fethullah Gülen was a clerical educator cooperating with Erdogan; today it has been revealed that Erdogan tried to pay Trump's fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to kidnap Gülen from his refuge in Pennsylvania.

Despite the demise of the political space for a different Islam in Turkey, Akyol's third section -- Signposts on the Liberal Road -- remains an interesting catalogue of what Muslim reformers might seek to develop if they have the chance. He tries to lay out for non-technical readers the predicate in Muslim tradition and theology for a religion 1) emancipated from state power; 2) affirming human adulthood by admitting a "freedom to sin" while still condemning wrongdoing; and 3) even allowing for individual freedom of belief including what traditionalists would call criminal apostasy. He sums up with a bold affirmation:

Liberty is, you could ... say, what everyone needs to find God.

These days, Mustafa Akyol is a New York Times opinion writer -- and he's still making the same arguments to his co-religionists for the same evolution of religious understanding on the same basis. Just last month, he responded to the announcement that the Sultanate of Brunei interpreted Islamic law to require stoning of homosexuals with a column headed "The Sultan of Brunei Doesn’t Understand Modern Islam; The Ottoman Empire was more liberal." If you have any interest in humane Islam, I recommend it highly.

San Francisco: tough times in a golden snow globe

For a decade, Cary McClelland was a documentary filmmaker and human rights campaigner in far-flung parts of the world -- Congo, East Timor, Zimbabwe. He came home and has collected oral histories from well over 100 Bay Area residents, shaping these narratives into Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley. From his introduction:

The problem is that the richer the cities get, the more unequal they get. Specifically, the more young, male, and white they get. And their diversity is being squeezed onto the streets and into distant suburbs by ever-rising rents and living costs. San Francisco’s income inequality grew faster than any other American city, making it the most unequal city in the nation in 2015. Salaries in the Bay Area have been on the rise, but the number of people living in poverty has also grown.

... The different cultures representing the city’s past are at risk of being whitewashed away. If you don’t have a role to play, there may not be room for you in the Silicon City.

... The challenge for the Bay Area is not whether it can choose one identity—libertarian tech supercity or state-sponsored liberal utopia—but whether it can find some harmony where the best of each can merge. We can recognize the inherent potential in the Bay Area’s current growth, and also wish that the change felt informed and intentional—not incidental and out of control—that it finds ways to make a future that includes San Franciscans new and old alike, where those who built the city can live alongside those who have just arrived. If it cannot happen there, with the wealth of the nation, its brightest talent, and most open hearts at hand, then where will it?

For any of us living here, this is all too familiar. As McClelland says elsewhere, the tech economy feels to those of us who have been around awhile (46 years in my case) like a "giant earthquake" we can never quite banish from consciousness.

Colin Rule, who founded a dispute resolution company that works with tech enterprises, catches what the new folks often look like to observers:

Some people get very, very panicky and emotional. It doesn’t have to be massive success, Zuckerberg success. But still they feel like, Look, I came here, and I started this company. I made a lot of money. So clearly the way I see the world is the correct way to see the world. Some of them, in reaction, become very . . . aggressive about it.

Caille Millner who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle and was born and raised here, remembers an early period in the tech explosion which felt less disconnected from the culture of this city on the left coast of the possible.

You see it in those early chat rooms, projects like Wikipedia and Craigslist, the guys who created Netscape. Those were Tech 1.0. A lot of those guys weren’t in it for the money. They were in it because that was how they saw the world. They were just too utopian, really. We’re just gonna do some weird, free-wheeling stuff. We’re gonna start this weird company and call it Yahoo! We’re gonna have “surfers” who are gonna look through the net and order things like librarians. No one took it seriously. No one thought like, Oh, this is going to become a serious business. No one thought this little company was going to become an institution.

But Elaine Katzenberger from City Lights bookstore has seen the big money destroy that sensibility.

The story of San Francisco is that it’s a boomtown. And boomtowns are never particularly good places to live. Those of us who came here for an alternative to that, we’re in the minority now.

San Francisco was always—at least rhetorically, and sometimes in action—a kind of community unto itself. Maybe it still is. But if San Francisco no longer represents an idea of humanism and freedom from the treadmill, then where do we fit in? What’s our role? The thing is, we are still here.

Except, of course, for those who are not still here. Mission District and Bayview activist Edwin Lindo is quoted extensively. He told McClelland:

... there is a dual social experience happening now. You have people who come here and work in tech, who live in a condo, maybe been here for about a year, and never meet someone who grew up here. The flip side of that is you have people who work in the local taqueria, or they work as a bus driver. They’re born and raised here, have three kids here, and they’ve never met a tech worker.

[It's] not that we don’t want new faces, but we can’t start displacing permanent residents for temporary ones. Because when they leave, we’ll be left with a gaping hole. It’s easy to turn a blind eye and say, “But look at San Francisco. It’s so beautiful.” But you judge a city not by how it treats those that are doing well. Let’s go into the hood, let’s go to Bayview, Hunters Point, let’s go to the Alemany Projects, let’s go to Double Rock. Why is it that we have twenty thousand homeless students attending schools in the San Francisco Unified School District? There’s an underworld that we’ve built, and that we continue to live in.

An immigrant Uber driver from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Leon Fikiri, points to one possible outcome of San Francisco's cultural divide:

... I have seen this story already: a society that doesn’t value human beings will end, just fail.

On the other hand, Edwin Lindo still loves this fractured city:

The city is something special. It raises people who seek justice. It provides you a sixth sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. And there aren’t many cities like that.

Unhappily, it seems that Edwin Lindo has gone on to struggle for black culture in Seattle.

It's abundantly clear that Cary McClelland wanted to write an uplifting book about this city. But he's an honest historian. His story is neither optimistic nor upbeat. But there are many sides of truth here, so I can thank McClelland for that.

Of popular convulsions and would-be kings

Rally in 2011 in San Francisco in support of the Arab Spring

Erudite Partner surveys a tough neighborhood, where, as in this country, only popular resistance offers hope of a better future.

... there has been a new set of popular uprisings in northern Africa, from Algeria to Morocco, to Sudan. Let’s hope they have more lasting success than Egypt’s Arab Spring.

Read it all here.

Friday cat blogging

Morty gets pretty excited when he tries to help Erudite Partner while she is spinning.

Hey, you caught it! What you gonna do now? She finds these moments less than charming.

The Constitutional crisis we have feared has come

Way back, it seems like forever ago, in the first days of the Trump regime, those of us watching our country's degradation would sometimes respond to the latest violation of democratic norms by asking "Is this the Constitutional crisis?" And cooler legal heads would say "No, not this."

Well, now we're there, with Trump-toady William Barr using the former "Department of Justice" to cover for a criminal president. And apparently the entire Republican party is ready go along for the ride on the wrecking ball, treating lawful investigations and Congressional oversight as an attempted coup.

We should note that this attempt to consummate the coup is the product of the success of resistance. Until we elected a Democratic House of Representatives last November, Republicans could pretend to adhere to norms of law while packing the courts and turning the apparatus of government against much of the people. No longer -- we kicked back and they have to knock over yet more of the remaining facade of Constitutional government to protect what they are making, a corrupt enterprise they hope to make permanent.

I'll turn further description the Constitutional crisis over to an unrolled Twitter thread from David Rothkopf, one of the more enlightened permanent Washington swamp creatures who cares deeply about the country.

I don't think we fully realize the profundity of Barr's assertions yesterday. The idea that a president can determine whether or not he ought to be investigated or that a president is incapable of committing obstruction are not just outrageous assaults on Constitutional values.

Taken in the context of this administration's systematic rejection of the oversight role of Congress and of the law--whether it is the emoluments clause of Constitution or the obligation of the IRS to hand over tax returns to the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee -- what we are seeing is nothing less than a coup, to use a word the president has grown fond of. Trump and Barr are seeking to eliminate the checks and balances that are a hallmark of our system and to effectively render the Congress subservient to the presidency.

Combine this with the efforts of the Senate to load the courts with judicial candidates loyal to the president and the implication of McConnell, Graham & Co. that they will not fulfill their own Constitutional obligations, and you see a devastating picture.

The GOP, in order to achieve narrow political objectives which translate into the further empowerment of a tiny minority who represent America's richest and most powerful individuals, corporations and financial institutions, are seeking changes that will forever change us.

That they are doing this in complicity with foreign enemies, themselves captive to oligarchies whose interests are commingled with those of our ever, rapaciously ascendant ruling class, makes this all the more pernicious. Not only is the power of the few being raised above that of the many who once were the supreme source of authority in our democracy, but our national interests are being compromised to serve those of foreign rulers who wish us ill, or who are actively seeking to destroy us as a nation.

Should Trump, Barr, McConnell and Graham succeed, then those foreign enemies, notably Vladimir Putin, will succeed as well. Our democracy will lay in ruins. Our Constitution will be gutted. The idea that no man is above the law in America will be murdered before our eyes.

That is the effort we saw afoot yesterday... and that we see today as Barr refuses the House's request that he testify...and that we are seeing daily in serial rejections of the authority of the Congress or of the laws, regulations and standards that have governed past presidents.

It may have appeared that Barr was just an incompetent, a bad liar lying badly. But look at his words--from his assertions of presidential authority to his refusal to condemn the most obvious forms of collaboration with a foreign enemy -- and you will recognize the depth, severity and urgency of the crisis we face. Don't discount this as politics as usual. Don't shrug this off as more partisanship in Washington. Read or watch what was said...what is said and done daily.

And then recognize that impeachment of Trump and of Barr, potent challenges to their efforts to grab power and systematic efforts to remove them from office by the ballot box, must be our collective highest priority. The alternative is the final step in the empowerment of an American aristocracy and the cold blooded murder of the ideas and ideals that our founders and every subsequent generation of Americans fought for.

What are we doing about it? It's on us.

Republicans throw in for their thuggish leader

I usually don't do alarmist, but this take on the Barr hearing from Michael Tomasky seems true.

... if we didn’t before, we see now with a new and oddly liberating clarity where this is headed. It’s 18 months until Election Day. They may well be the most consequential and frightening stretch in the history of the country, or at least since Reconstruction.

This racket known as a political party [the GOP] will try to pervert the law in ways we’ve never seen. Reverse the meaning of every word we know. Trump is screaming that he’s the victim of a “coup.” What he is doing, of course, is perpetrating a coup, against the Constitution, with the eager help of Barr and Graham and all the rest of them. Trump is an idiot, but on some intuitive level, he’s a smart man, smart enough to know that to get away with staging a coup, the very first thing you have to do is to accuse your opponents of trying to stage one.

Barr and Graham and Mitch McConnell and everyone else around knows that they’ve thrown in, and having thrown in, they can’t throw out. Survival will require every kind of lie you can imagine, especially and exactly the lie of accusing their foes of that which they are doing themselves. And before this is over, they’re all going to be in on it.

The entire Republican Party has put allegiance to its mob boss ahead of country or common decency.

The prescription remains what it has been since November 2016:

• Create friction in any arena we can, because we don't know what will be efficacious. Who knew that #MeToo could become a force in the context of blatant misogyny unleashed? Who knew that climate crisis could inspire a vision of a Green New Deal?

• Help everyone find the role that suits individual hopes and needs. We don't all have to adopt the same forms of resistance, but we all have to do something. There's no sitting this moment out.

• We have proved that when something closer to everyone votes, we win. We have to keep doing elections, strategically.

• Unity counts. Circular firing squads serve our enemies. Just don't go there.

• Kindness counts. People are being crushed. Leaders are imperfect. Cut individuals some slack ... and keep on on keeping on.

Allah's version

Jack Mills writes books about Scripture that are unlike anything else I know of. He treats the divine person as revealed in what believers hold as sacred writings as a literary character, a Someone with personality, temperament, virtues, and idiosyncrasies. In 1996, Miles applied his technique to the Lord God of the Hebrew bible in God: a biography, which was both an unlikely best seller and a Pulitzer Prize winner. His subsequent epilogue, Christ: a Crisis in the Life of God, seems to have been more controversial, no huge shock. I appreciated its resolute departure from the more vengeful strains of Christian atonement theology.

Last year Miles published his third volume of literary interpretation of the Abrahamic scriptures: God in the Qur'an (God in Three Classic Scriptures).

Miles certainly has the academic chops for his tripartite endeavor in scriptural exploration. He started out as a Jesuit seminarian attending Xavier University in the U.S., moved on to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Hebrew University in Jerusalem and, finally, Harvard. He's been been an editor at the Doubleday publishing house, the executive editor at the University of California Press, and literary book review editor at the Los Angeles Times. Of late he's taught at UC Irvine and edited the Norton Anthology of World Religions. I should add that aside from the Norton volume, I've read them all in audiobook and highly recommend the medium for these exercises in imaginative erudition. You won't get every nuance by ear, but their breadth and audacity come through wonderfully.

I also have to warn readers of this blog post that I'm going to be quoting a lot; it will read more easily on a laptop screen than a phone.

Writing about Allah in the Qur'an, Miles confronts the difficult stumbling block that non-Muslim readers always meet: this scripture admits of no human author, narrator, or intermediary, being the direct speech of Allah via the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad. According to Islamic understanding, it cannot be translated from Arabic. He offers a work-around:

Over the centuries, the view most often taken of the Qur'an by Jews and Christians alike has been the view classically taken by Jews of the New Testament -- namely, "What's true is not new, and what's new is not true." Non-Muslims have disbelieved and dismissed what Muslims believe of the Qur'an -- namely, that it is God's last word to mankind, the crown of revelation, restoring what Jews and Christians had lost from or suppressed in their scriptures by oblivion or corruption.

My invitation here to Jews and Christians and the many others who disbelieve the bold Muslim claim is that, as a modest exercise in literary appreciation, they temporarily suspend their disbelief while together we attempt engagement with God as the central character of the Qur'an, and with the Qur'an as an elusively powerful work of literature.

My invitation to Muslims is that just as they might pray in a mosque on Friday but study its dome as students of architecture on a Tuesday, so they too might play along with this "Tuesday exercise," this literary engagement with just a few selections from the Qur'an read in conjunction with marching passages from the Bible.

As Miles tells it, what Allah is doing through the Qur'an is correcting known stories. Consequently, Allah has no need of linear narratives of episodes in creation history or of stimulating any narrative suspense or uncertainty.

In the Qur'an, when Allah instructs Muhammed about what His Prophet is to say about these biblical subjects, He is clearly speaking to someone who knows this subject matter already in a general way and needs only to have his understanding refreshed, corrected, or completed. ...

What Allah requires of mankind in the Qur'an is, above all, that they should acknowledge His divinity, submitting to him as the one and only God. The Arabic word ’islam means “submission”; the Arabic word muslim ... means one who has submitted. ... As the Qur’an understands religious history, Adam was a muslim in his time; Abraham was another muslim; Joseph a third; and so forth down past the muslim Christ to Muhammad. But a key part of the message of the Qur’an is that the never-changing message of ’islam has been lost or corrupted over the intervening aeons.

... Where the Qur’an coincides with the Bible, then, it unfolds not as a full retelling of the Bible story, as if that story had never been told before, but rather as a set of selective corrections and expansions of an already received account. Where more corrections is called for, Allah has more to say in the Qur’an.

Miles discusses at length the qur'anic account of Adam and Eve and then of humanity's expulsion from the garden of paradise. In Allah's telling, this behavior is not about humanity's permanent fall from a state of innocent grace, but simply the first instance of human disobedience to Allah which has teaches its own remedy.

... True, Adam and his wife [not named] must “descend” from the heavenly garden, but because they have promptly and plainly admitted and repented of their sin, merciful Allah does not condemn them to eternal punishment in hell. In the Qur’an, Adams does not blame his wife the way he does in Genesis. The two of them confess together, neither blaming the other, and neither attempts to blame Satan. Accepting their repentance as sincere, Allah simply precipitates them into earthly existence where, after living a normal human lifetime and dying at its end, they will await His Last Judgment as indeed will all their descendants. They have every prospect, in other words, of eventually ascending to the heavenly garden from which he has sent them down. In effect, he has forgiven them this first sin. True, they must pay a price, but as they begin the life that awaits them down on earth, He has given them a pardon and an immediate second chance.

.... we have all the power we need to resist [Satan’s] deceptions and stay on the “straight path.” If we do succumb, we know that just as Allah gave Adam and Eve their second chance, He will give us ours. Allah is like that: He can be counted on. He is not colorfully or dramatically unpredictable. He is not like you or me nor even, quite, like Yahweh. Agony awaits us if we defy Him, but He is on our side if we let Him be. ...

No wonder Allah is described as "the merciful, the compassionate" in Islamic usage.

This book concludes with a list of how Allah corrects and amends the Jewish and Christian scriptures:

that when God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise, He warned them that Satan would tempt them. (In the Bible, no such warning is given.)

that when they succumbed to temptation but then quickly repented, He forgave them and explained that after a lifetime on Earth, bearing only the trials and tribulations that ordinary human life entails, they could return to Paradise. (No such forgiveness or distant hope is proffered in the Bible.)

that when one of Adam’s sons slew the other, God condemned the murderer but coached him toward compassion by sending a raven whose scratching on the ground prompted the remorseful killer to bury his dead brother. (No such solicitous counsel is offered in the Bible.)

that when God sent a destructive flood, he warned those in its path beforehand and provided an ark on which, had they accepted Prophet Noah’s warning, they could all have floated to safety. (No such warning is given in the Bible.)

that when God chose Abraham as His prophet, he instructed him in monotheism before sending him against Abraham’s idolatrous father and his tribe. (In the Bible, God’s command to Abraham is peremptory and linked to fertility rather than to monotheism.)

that when God sent Moses to Pharaoh with the same prophetic message that He later conveyed to Muhammad, Pharaoh initially scoffed but in the end converted and accepted God as the only god. (In the Bible, God takes control of Pharaoh’s mind and bars the gate against any such conversion.)

that when God send Jesus as a prophet to the Jews and they sought to kill him, God rescued him and took him to Himself. (In the Bible, Jesus dies saying, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?")

Far be it for me to bash the Bible. The Bible is my scripture. The Qur’an is theirs. In writing this little italicized meditation, I hope only that by exercising your imagination this much, you may find it a little easier to trust the Muslim next door ...

That last remark demonstrates Miles' hope in this mind-stretching book. He's clearly appalled by contemporary European/American ignorance and distortions about the beliefs and civilization of our Muslim neighbors. Some of this volume comes off as a slightly heavy-handed apologia, for example in an exhaustive demonstration that Jewish and Christian sacred writings are no less blighted by celebrations of holy carnage as is the Islamic scripture.

Fortunately in this country we enjoy increasing resources for discovering that Islamophobia is unnecessary and just false. Our Muslim neighbors turn out to be quite ordinary humans, like the rest of us. Miles has made his contribution toward our evolution here; we can all do our part.