Passing the torch

 

Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post passes along a letter from some of the surviving luminaries of the 1963 March on Washington to the leaders of today's Get Your Knee Off My Neck March on the capitol mall. Here's a long excerpt:

We in the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960s held countless mass meetings in churches and community halls in Black communities throughout the Jim Crow South. On August 28, 1963, for the first and only time, we gathered before the Lincoln Memorial for a mass meeting on a national scale, joined and witnessed by the entire country. We called this mass meeting “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom”. 

We feel obligated to accurately recall the true story of our nonviolent movement to transform our country. We affirm the direct lineage from the Black Freedom Movement of the 20th century, in which we were immersed, and the Black Lives Matter Movement and renewed Poor People’s Campaign of the 21st century which we profoundly admire, and wholeheartedly endorse and support. 

For decades America portrayed the 1963 March on Washington as a symbolic apotheosis of peaceful social change, racial harmony and reconciliation. Yes, the March was a uniquely powerful demonstration of the struggle for racial justice. But this struggle continues, as systemic racial injustice persists 

... On August 28, 1963, we marched to demand enforcement of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution by reducing congressional representation from States that disenfranchise citizens. We renew the demand that our Constitution be enforced in the face of widespread voter suppression today. ... 

... Before Dr. King shared his dream of the future, John Lewis demanded that we wake up to the national nightmare of the present. “We must say: ‘Wake up America!'" 

... We applaud and support the urgent work of next generation voting rights defenders and organizers including the M4BL Electoral Justice Project, the Black Voters Matter Fund, and the student activists of the Andrew Goodman Foundation. Together these young leaders are fighting to secure our Constitutional rights and mobilize the vote in Black and other communities of color throughout the United States. We honor them, support them, and follow them. ... 

Today, in 2020, the killings of Tanisha Anderson, Ahmaud Arbery, Philando Castile, Dominique Clayton, George Floyd, Eric Garner, Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson, Eric Reason, Breonna Taylor and countless others demonstrate the tragic reality that Black Americans remain the victim of unspeakable horrors of police brutality. When will it stop? 

... Even at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, young BLM leaders achieved results far beyond what Dr. King and the civil rights movement of the 1960s were able to accomplish: bringing somewhere between 15 million to 26 million Americans of all races and generations into the streets for the largest nonviolent protest movement in the history of the United States. 

With admiration and gratitude, we pass [Reverend Martin Luther King's] torch to the activist youth in the Black Lives Matter, March for our Lives, and climate justice movements. 

We know that their marvelous new nonviolent militancy will lead us to the Promised Land. 

Our obligation on this day is to follow their leadership. 

We urge all Americans to join our courageous nonviolent young activists in the hard work of building a just and free society in which we shall overcome.

In this strange year in which a couple of old white men compete for the presidency (and who wins matters desperately), would that all of us from these elder's generation could find it in our hearts to look for leadership in our movement successors. Who could not be thrilled by the intellectual and physical audacity of today's leaders? It's their time.

Friday cat blogging: Janeway tries out a new spot

 

Such a lovely cat-sized hollow here. 

Perhaps I'll take a bath. That's what they do in this room.

 

Or maybe I need a nap

A Biden victory could be a break for Central America

By way of the Central American human rights organization Cristosal comes an extraordinarily optimistic article from Devex,  which bills itself as "the media platform for the global development community." Journalist Teresa Welsh asks "Would Biden 'rebuild the old program' to reduce Northern Triangle migration?"

It seems ages ago now, but as recently as 2016 ,U.S. policy toward Central American migration was at least nominally to try to improve the quality of life in the sending countries so as to encourage desperate people to stay home. That's not to say that our governments haven't historically made life harder for the people of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. We've propped up a long string of dictators and oligarchs in those suffering countries. But in the middle of the last decade, the U.S. did commit funds to healthier development and to supporting domestic human rights movements.

All that disappeared under Trump. U.S. policy today is to indiscriminately deport migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees and pretend these corrupt governments will deal with the reality of hungry people.

Joe Biden promises that he

"will immediately do away with the Trump Administration’s draconian immigration policies and galvanize international action to address the poverty and insecurity driving migrants from the Northern Triangle to the United States. ... The people of the region understand that addressing these challenges in a sustainable way demands systemic change and reforms across many sectors of society in the Northern Triangle–and that sort of change requires a serious investment of political will and resources at every level."

More substantively, he calls for

    •    Developing a comprehensive four-year, $4 billion regional strategy to address factors driving migration from Central America;
    •    Mobilizing private investment in the region;
    •    Improving security and rule of law;
    •    Addressing endemic corruption;
    •    Prioritizing poverty reduction and economic development.

Just words? Maybe. It wouldn't be the first time in the U.S. relationship with these countries. But Central America needs the northern colossus to at the very least pretend to do the right thing.

And according to Welsh, Biden has a good history with Central America in his previous role.

"Biden met multiple times with the presidents of the three countries, traveling to Central America, chairing meetings, and using personal diplomacy to lobby for an agreement that included pledges to reduce the corruption that has long been endemic in the region.

 "The vice president’s personal engagement was key to getting El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to agree to serious reforms, as well as to significant financial contributions of their own, according to Mark Feierstein, who served during the Obama administration as assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean at the U.S. Agency for International Development."

Fernando Cutz, who worked in the National Security Council under both Trump and Obama, thinks there's hope for a return to a sensible, even helpful, policy after Trump.

“But … in Central America, I do think that — more than almost any other foreign policy area that I can think of — we probably can, in many ways, just rebuild the old program.”

Central America could use some breaks.

A catalogue of religious deplorables

I've written in the past about how an earnest white evangelical historian sought to understand how his co-religionists could be so enamored of such an ungodly charlatan as Donald Trump. John Fea found fear. Sarah Posner is an investigative journalist who has long explored the intersection of religion and politics; her historical portrait of this catalogue of deplorables is not nearly so charitable.

Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump is a story about the raw hunger for power that animates the leaders of white evangelical Christianity. According to Posner: 

"... as a 'Christian,' Trump was a work in progress. But God had a plan. Trump was a strong leader, a rich man, a successful real estate mogul. Trump might still be a 'baby Christian' in the eyes of some evangelical leaders who decided to back him, but he was nonetheless anointed for this time and place. ... Trump was the strongman the Christian right had long been waiting for. 

"... Trump did not just deliver policy, in a quid pro quo with a voting bloc that fueled his election. He delivered power. ... For the Christian right, Trump is no ordinary politician and no ordinary president. He is anointed, chosen, and sanctified by the movement as a divine leader, sent by God to save America."

White evangelical leaders have spent decades whining among themselves in a self-imposed cultural wilderness, their moral pedestals challenged by the country's fitful and as yet incomplete embrace of racial and gender justice. Even our incomplete progress looked to them like mortal danger to their positions. So they went looking for friends -- and found a lot of unsavory characters. They hooked up comfortably with racist right wing "intellectuals" who glossed bigotry as "conservatism," with direct mail grifters and talkradio shouters, and nowadays with eastern Europe's "illiberal," anti-Semitic, autocrats. They come across as both con artists preying on their sheep and suckers themselves, marks for an array of unethical swindlers. Their partnership with Donald Trump is a perfect match.

Posner's book makes this unappetizing crew more interesting than I would have thought possible (if no more attractive) because there is hardly a major Christian right leader with whom she has not sat down for an amicable professional interview over tea or a lunch. These people are talkers and they've talked to her.

She balances these personal portraits with deep research into the history and web of connections between little magazines with forgettable titles, institutes, think tanks, pseudo-academic foundations and other components of right wing infrastructure that have come together behind Donald Trump. 

 

It's hard to write about these people without sounding as if you have become a conspiracy theorist: their networks are a roiling mixture of enduring racism and nationalism with ephemeral jealousies and intramural squabbles, all outside the ken of mainstream society. The good people at Political Research Associates struggle with this constantly. Posner does a creditable job of describing this unattractive stew.

 

And she has a warning: even if we evict Donald Trump in November, these people have dug into positions of power over decades and aren't going away. The impeachment moment early this year only reaffirmed their devotion to their strongman.

"However his presidency ends, the fundamental damage it has inflicted on our democracy will not be healed overnight. His 'base' is not an accident of his unconventional foray into politics, or a quirk of this particular political moment. The vast majority of white evangelicals are all in with Trump because he has given them political power and allowed them to carry out a Christian supremacist agenda, inextricably intertwined with his administration's white nationalist agenda."

Thoughts (from others) as the GOPers raise up their mad king

This does seem to require explanation. Why are Republicans so willing to rush along like metaphorical lemmings off any cliff toward which the Orange Cheeto points them? It doesn't seem like a good bet, at least for those of them with sane constituents. Yes, some have constituents more rabid than they are; but not all of them.

Jonathan Chait has an intriguing theory:

"Why would the party, and its candidates running for office at every level, define themselves so thoroughly with a president who has never even briefly held the support of half the country? 

"It is probably because Trump is so deeply and historically unpopular that his party has embraced him so tightly. The Republican Party elite harbors quiet doubts about the president’s basic competence, morality, and fitness for office. As a result, Trump feels the need to force them to make public commitments of loyalty, to place their reputations in his hands so that no escape is possible. 

"And they go along to get along. ..."

Or maybe the moral rot is even more insidious. At present, GOPers led by Trump are claiming Democrats dropped the words "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance at their convention. This is BS. There's video evidence this invocation of a Deity was repeated four times, once each day. That is, the Republicans are talking nonsense. Fred Clark thinks he knows why Trump wants Republicans endorsing his fabrication.

This isn’t a lie. He’s not trying to deceive anyone. He’s testing their loyalty by making them choose between him and their own two eyes. This is Trump asking his followers to recite a different kind of Pledge of Allegiance — a loyalty oath to him, personally, above all else, even what they know to be true. He is not trying to misinform them. He is requiring them to prefer loyalty to him above loyalty to information.

This is how contemporary autocratic populists routinely undermine their people's ability to discern what is true. Vladimir Putin's regime is rooted in this strategy, according to historian Timothy Snyder and journalist Peter Pomerantsev.

All this is not say that the Orange Cheeto is a brilliant political strategist. He's not. I think I agree with the Washington Post's Philip Bump that Trump may likely be performing a take-down on himself.

Trump’s campaign strategy in 2016 was to present everything as terrible and himself as the best solution. That meant accepting his unpopularity but emphasizing Clinton’s. It meant casting the country as teetering. 

His strategy now, weirdly, is the same. Attacks on Biden as horrifying and socialist and anarchic and doddering, all at once. Paint a picture of a nation more precarious than the one he criticized four years ago. Yet offer himself, again, as the solution. 

All of this plays into Biden’s framing. ...

The Democratic Convention was designed to remind us that our lives did not have to be in the miserable condition they are. Until Trump came along, unmasking race hate while refusing masks in a pandemic and leaving millions without jobs, the country was imperfect, but it had room for hope, and striving, and community. Heck of a job, Donnie.

One more thing to do to defeat Trump

Looking for an easy, automated way to pass on small amounts of cash to Black led organizations working to get out the vote. Try this?

Every time Trump tweets, we donate to swing state organizers working to ensure he doesn’t get reelected. #DefeatByTweet https://t.co/f5cGT2ft6n

— janinsanfran (@janinsanfran) August 24, 2020

Wrong the first time and still wrong now

The LA Times reports: 

The Justice Department will seek to reinstate a death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the man who was convicted of carrying out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Atty. Gen. William Barr said Thursday.

... “We will do whatever’s necessary,” Barr said. “We will take it up to the Supreme Court, and we will continue to pursue the death penalty.”

This isn't about a finding of innocence. Tsarnaev is the surviving Boston Marathon bomber; he did it; he's a murderer. But this overturns his death sentence, unless Barr wins a different verdict from a higher court.

The appellate court didn't question the local federal judge's ruling that Tsarnaev could get a fair trial in Boston in 2015 -- although residents of that city had endured being locked in their homes while police chased the killers. The appellate court saw nothing wrong with the trial judge vigorously excluding from the jury anyone who had qualms about the death penalty. (This is considered proper law; such a panel is called "death-qualified.")

No, the decision to throw out the death penalty assessed by the 2015 jury turned on the trial judge's feeble questioning of potential jurors for bias. His inquiries had not been adequate to assess their "impartiality." It turned out the woman who became the jury foreman had called Tsarnaev "a piece of garbage" on social media. And the judge learned that before the trial took place.

So Barr's Justice Department wants to go back to court to be allowed to kill Tsarnaev.

This is crazy. 

The only reason Tsarnaev was tried in a federal court in the first place was that Massachusetts doesn't have a death penalty. Murder is ordinarily tried in state courts. The usual course of action, even for so hideous a crime as the Boston Marathon bombing, would have been to let the state's justice system do its job. 

But Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department thought the Marathon terrorist should die. And didn't think a Boston jury would opt to kill him. Polling at the time of the trial showed that a majority of the people in the region didn't support execution.They don't equate state killing with justice.

A remarkable report in the NY Times at the time of the verdict captured the local sentiment: 

“I was shocked,” said Scott Larson, 47, a records manager who works near the finish line. “The death penalty — for Boston.”

To many, the death sentence almost feels like a blot on the city’s collective consciousness.

 ... Neil Maher, who spent his teenage years in Boston and returned this weekend for his class reunion at Boston College High School, said the verdict had surprised and disappointed him.

“They ought to demonstrate a little humanity,” said Mr. Maher, 66, who lives in Frederick, Md. “Killing a teenager’s not going to do anything. I think it’s just a kind of visceral revenge. I think that in three years, the people of Boston and the people on the jury will feel bad about this decision.”

I am not aware that anyone is polling now to find out. 

New Yorker journalist Masha Gessen wrote a book about the crimes of the Central Asian teenager who became a terrorist. She reminds us:

... “Just to be crystal clear,” [appellate Judge] Thompson wrote, “Dzhokhar will remain confined to prison for the rest of his life, with the only question remaining being whether the government will end his life by executing him.”

Tsarnaev is held in solitary confinement under what are called “special administrative measures,” which include a ban on communicating with anyone whom Tsarnaev didn’t know before he was jailed and in any language other than English. This is, in all likelihood, how he will spend the rest of his life. ...

Enough.

Saturday scenery: mailboxes

After a week of intense attention to the US Post Office, I thought I'd share a small sampling of the mailboxes I've run across while Walking San Francisco.

 As is true of many other domestic details, San Franciscans express their creativity through the boxes outside their residences.

Some designs may seem visually transgressive ...

while others are homey ...

others might be considered pretentious ...

or perhaps snobbish?

This being San Francisco, mail receptacles come with messages ...

This, my favorite, is the only image here not from San Francisco, down the road from where we stay on Martha's Vineyard island.

DNC roundup

Barack and Michelle Obama told it like it is. Kamala Kamala'd. We were offered short bits with the primary aspirants who didn't make it -- this reminded me how I enjoyed the early stages of the primary when the herd was trying to show us visions that were new and attractive. And then Joe Biden promised decency ... and caring ... and order ... and competence. And since we're suffering from a complete lack of all those qualities, the speech was surprisingly effective.

 

But this young man's testimony broke through for me. He stutters. Joe Biden grew up with a stutter and according to 13-year old Brayden Harrington was able to assist and inspire him to speak publicly.

 

My father shuttered. Mostly, as an adult, he'd learned to avoid triggers. But every once in a while, a gap between his thoughts and his ability to utter them would seem to entrap him. All that would come out of him at those moments were sounds without form. Then he'd get hold and speak what felt a flattened version of what he meant to say. 

I think concern that his disability might take hold made him the frequently remote man he was. 

I like the idea of a president whose life is a support to people with this challenge. It's not everything, but it is something.

Friday cat blogging

Janeway has been enjoying the Democratic National Convention. The broadcast provides hours of opportunity to tangle computer cords and unplug the laptop.

Are we Californians wearing our masks?

The Los Angeles Times decided to take a count:

What they concluded:

"To reduce the spread of the coronavirus, all Californians are required to wear a mask in crowded outdoor spaces. Failure to do so is a misdemeanor under an order issued in June by Gov. Gavin Newsom. ... Most people don’t follow the rules.

"Only 42% of the people we tracked were wearing masks correctly, 10% were wearing masks incorrectly and 47% were not wearing masks at all."

The newspaper shared its tally sheet and invited readers to conduct the same experiment. I spent an hour logging passersby out the front window of my residential San Francisco Mission District block. Here's what I found:

We're doing better than Venice, Long Beach, and Huntington Beach, but probably barely well enough to reduce spread of the coronavirus. I did not replicate the part of the LA Times count that recorded perceived ethnicity and gender, but I noticed no obvious disparities of compliance in my tiny sample. 

The Mission neighborhood is one of the epicenters here; 51 percent of people who've caught COVID in this city are Latinx. The community makes up 15 percent of our total population.

Just wow!

 

A cabinet shake-up in Canada is making Chrystia Freeland the new finance minister, "the first woman in Canadian history to hold the job federally."

"She has shown competence and capacity in her past portfolios, including foreign affairs, international trade and intergovernmental relations. But what remains to be seen is her plan for managing the pandemic now and recovering from it later — and whether she can get the prime minister to sign on. 

"On Tuesday at a news conference with Trudeau, Freeland noted, “I think all Canadians understand that the restart of our economy needs to be green.” She also pointed out that the economic consequences of the pandemic have been borne disproportionately by women."

Back when the new finance minister was a journalist, she wrote what I consider the most approachable book out there on the horrors of a world economy organized by and for the greedy, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. 

Maybe she's been corrupted by deciding to go for political power via the Canadian Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau -- or maybe the pandemic and US withdrawal from the world gives her a chance to go for it. 

Bravo to Canadians!

Is it time for a slightly used politician?

This year's presidential campaign reminds me yet again that California seems to have lived decades ago through much of what the whole country is going through in Trumptime -- and set a model for a relatively graceful escape from a dead end.

During the decade of the 1990s, freak out among the white electorate about losing their majority status in the state led to a series of racist ballot measures -- anything to keep the dark people in their place, even if it deformed California's prized university system, filled the prisons with Black and Latino men, and forced immigrant workers into an exploitative underground economy. Plus the state government was a mess -- hamstrung by anti-tax Republicans and their anti-tax legislative rules. In the beginning of the '00s, we elected a cartoon character, a Terminator named Schwarzenegger, as our governor, because people were just fed up with it all.

Unlike that man occupying our White House today, fortunately, Gov. Arnold proved to have some interest the job he won -- in more than smoking cigars in a tent outside the Capitol. He even did the state a favor by pushing for a nonpartisan redistricting commission. But mostly, gridlock continued and the Great Recession brought the state low.

Enter Jerry Brown in 2010. He was a used governor, having served from 1975 to 1983 beginning as a 37 year old, before reaching his term limit. He stormed back into office in 2011, at 73, and we got another 8 years out of him.

I canvassed a little for Jerry in the northern Central Valley in 2010. I had learned something about the area -- burgeoning bedroom communities for the East Bay -- while working to flip a Congressional seat there to an anti-Iraq war Dem in 2006. By 2010 the new communities were trashed, marked by unfinished housing developments and neighborhoods emptied by foreclosures. There was a Tea Party headquarters and not much else. This was a union canvas, mostly directed at state workers grimly holding on to newly precarious jobs. Those who would talk with us were utterly unenthusiastic about Brown, but I became sure that, if they turned out, they'd vote for Jerry.

Well they did, as did the cities. And it's not crazy to feel that old white guy Jerry was a good governor for a state that needed to get over conflicts which had been amplified by demographic and economic change and lost its way. He fought to enable the state to raise enough tax money to do its job and established a rainy day fund which California is now finding helpful. He was cheap about dribbling the new money out to new programs, but over this tenure parts of the progressive wish list got done including sanctuary legislation for undocumented immigrants, a right to die law for the terminally ill, and continued efforts to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels (though he never banned fracking). He shrank the state prison system by sending low level offenders to local jails.

My friend Tom Ammiano is tough on Jerry Brown's penny-pinching budget choices:

"It's a class thing with him."

Often it was hard to applaud Brown as governor; he frustrated the dreams of his most progressive citizens. Nonetheless, California emerged from its second Brown era less divided and somewhat more just than it had been for decades. Trump's race-bating appeals can't get 30% here. We made the inevitable demographic transition and no "race" or ethnicity is a majority of us. (Now we have to figure out how to curb the plutocrats.)

So might Joe Biden be offering a similar kind of transition leadership to the nation? The two men are personally very dissimilar. Brown is a proud idiosyncratic loner; Biden is a glad-hander (too much so?) well suited to environments which require collective agreement, like the Senate and the Democratic Party. But they both offered anxious constituents unrivaled experience in government. Lots of pols claim experience, but what these guys knew and know is not just puffery.

Brown never lacked for guts, even when bucking his friends. Biden is going to need guts and decisiveness, facing a country trashed by corruption and the pandemic -- in the midst of a reckoning with its heritage of white supremacy, gender inequality, and a baking climate.

One of my favorite journalists, Walter Shapiro, who has been covering Washington pols since 1969 thinks Biden might just have what it takes.

"Biden grasps the necessity for boldness in a crisis—while also intuiting the political risks of going too far too fast."

That just might be a national winning formula for this awful moment, much as something similar was for Brown in California. 

We sure need some formula and it's likely to get worse before it gets better ...

This really is about who lives and who dies

Michelle Obama was the keynote speaker for last night's virtual Democratic Convention. The world seems to agree that she hit the softball which is our unfit pseudo-president out of the park. As we could trust that Michelle Obama would. View her speech here or read the transcript if that's your way.

What got to me was Kristin Urquiza:

"My dad was a healthy 65 year old. His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump. And for that he paid with his life."

 

Racist rats recur

Writing in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern denounces the cesspool of pseudo-intellectual racism from which the latest birther lies about Senator Kamala Harris' citizenship derive.

Why, then, do outlets like Newsweek and the Washington Post keep publishing articles that promote this lie? A coterie of racists based at the Claremont Institute hope that if they repeat it enough, they can leave the door open for a mass expatriation of second-generation Americans, most of them minorities. Indeed, there are few if any supporters of this falsehood who lack connections to the Claremont Institute. [John] Eastman is a senior fellow at Claremont and the founding director of its Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. Josh Hammer, the Newsweek editor who commissioned the piece, is a former fellow at the institute. Michael Anton, who manipulated the text of a quote from the Senate debate over the 14th Amendment in a Washington Post op-ed to make this lie seem more credible, is a senior fellow there. (Anton may be best known as the author of “The Flight 93 Election,” published in the Claremont Review of Books, which condemned “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners.”) Claremont “scholar” Edward J. Erler wrote a book arguing that the American-born children of Mexican immigrants have no right to U.S. citizenship, giving the idea greater exposure.

The Claremont Institute masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right. It even granted a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, who helped promote the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Claremont’s resident bigots offer deranged fantasies of violently expelling Americans from their home country because of their ethnic backgrounds. Their work deserves the intellectual weight given to that of David Duke and his Nazi-loving fellow travelers.

The Claremont Institute has been at its dirty work for a long time. According to the L.A. Times, it was the breeding ground in 1996 for Prop. 209, California's ban on considering race in state college admissions and state contracting.

The measure began as an exercise by two academics, Glynn Custred and Tom Wood, encouraged by the conservative Claremont Institute think tank.

As a consequence of their ballot measure, the state has been unable to assure that Californians of all races and genders have equal opportunity. 

Presumably these con men will be active again, making up lies, during the fall campaign to pass Prop. 16 which repeal their handiwork. 

 

Check your voter registration NOW!

A couple of days ago, in what seemed just a random conversation on Facebook among friends of friends, I suggested that everyone should check whether they were really registered. I didn't expect much reaction -- these were (apparently) employed, tech-functional people, the kind who always vote. Most of them remembered voting in the various state spring primaries.

To my astonishment, and to several of theirs, out of a couple of dozen, two found they were not recorded as registered. Even though they had voted within the last year.

So -- it looks as if everyone who cares about the upcoming election had better check, probably repeatedly until they have their mail-in ballot in hand or have voted in one of the in-person methods, to make sure they are on the rolls.

Voting methods, rules, and procedures are set by each of the states, sometimes with additional variations by county. Fortunately, there are at least two national websites which enable everyone, anywhere, to find out if they are registered. These get their information for the 50 state offices usually called Secretary of State. Try one or the other right now:

vote.org

voteamerica.com

If you want more in depth information about state deadlines, such as for registration,  mail-in ballot applications, changes to early voting dates and locations, FiveThirtyEight is doing its best to provide. That link leads to a live map (the picture here is NOT live) where you can click on your state to learn about voting rules.

Looks as if every one of us is going to have to fight voter suppression this year by learning the ropes and spreading the word to everyone we know.

A California take on Joe Biden's selection of Kamala Harris

Don't get me wrong -- I am thrilled to see an accomplished woman who identifies with her Black and Indian American ancestry, who comes from an immigrant family, right at the center of this life-and-death election. I've never been a particular Harris fan, but damn right, I'm happy for what her rise means: Democrats cannot take the changing face of the country for granted. Somehow Dems have to find a way to hold together a majority coalition that is far more complicated and inclusive and far more forthrightly on the side of those who are newly seizing their rightful power. This goes way beyond Obama in 2008.

Once again, many media and pundit reactions reveal ignorance of California. They instinctively describe Harris as "liberal," making reference to her Senate votes. Nonsense. She's a dead center California Democrat. This is what a contemporary Democrat who juggles all our coalition pieces looks like. Donors like her and she knows what to say to those of us who have less money and power. These are baseline requirements for statewide success here.

I suspect some of the pundits of racial preconceptions. Harris is Black. They assume she must be from the left. Nope.

Harris went to college at Howard University, an honorable, formative choice. That woman is sharp -- I feel sure she could have gone to Stanford or UC Berkeley, but she didn't choose to. Interesting.

East Coast-oriented pundits also attribute to Harris a level of electoral savvy and dynamism that I suspect is misplaced. For example, here's Perry Bacon from FiveThirtyEight:

"Harris is a good politician based on these facts alone: She was elected senator in the nation’s most populous state and in a country with a lot of race and gender discrimination ..."

Actually, she barely squeaked through her only tough race (in 2010 for state Attorney General) and otherwise has enjoyed pretty smooth sailing in the contests she has chosen. Her brief exploration of a Presidential bid was sadly disorganized and lacked a galvanizing message.

A Politico profile captures something I find most hopeful in Harris' ascent: she's from a NorCal political background.

“... there’s a reason so many successful statewide elected officials have come out of the Bay Area, and that’s because Bay Area politics is a contact sport,” [Brian] Brokaw said. “San Francisco is not California. Most of the population is Democratic and the fights are between the progressives and the ‘moderates,’ and I say that in quotes. The battles are mostly civil wars, but you have to be able to navigate that sort of dynamic.” ... 

“San Francisco is a tough town for a politician, and to make it through San Francisco, you have to have thick skin and the ability to move forward after disagreements,” said Shawnda Westly, former executive director of the California Democratic Party ...

We toughen up 'em up around here. They learn they have to engage with in-their-face constituents whose backing they may someday need. They sometimes take progressive positions because this is simply the water they swim in -- and when they move up the political ladder, they then carry those positions with them. And they don't entirely shed this positive baggage in the next round. Harris' semi-Medicare for All Maybe in the primary is a perfect example. She knows where the issue is moving; she only learned in the primary process how treacherous health care plans might be outside California.

I liked Ronald Brownstein's observation about the Harris nomination:

... whether Biden wins or loses in November, her nomination may be remembered as a moment when the pinnacle of Democratic Party leadership came to more closely resemble the base of voters that elects it to power. Even as the GOP at every level remains dominated by white men—starting with Trump and Pence—the Democrats haven’t nominated a presidential ticket of two white men since 2004. It’s difficult to imagine when they ever will again.

We don't have to love her -- San Franciscans are hard on our pols. I know there's plenty of bad baggage as well as good baggage. Elections are about winning what you can, not falling in love. And then, getting into position to go back for more.

Friday cat blogging

   

This charming feline demon who has come to run our household is long. Here Janeway uses her full extension to impede making the bed.

Just retire them

The COVID epidemic is wearing us all out. This morning's headline reads: Nearly 1,500 U.S. coronavirus deaths mark deadliest day of summer. We are still cursed with a president and his regime flailing about, thinking denial can somehow offer him a route to re-election.

What follows is an edited excerpt from a Twitter thread by Andy Slavitt, the Obama-era tech guru and health policy wonk, on the progress of the pandemic and our descent into hell. He's mad and he's right to be. Let's stay mad.

COVID Update August 13: It's long past time our government stopped learning on the job.

We’re 7 months and a lot of learnings into how COVID works & in so many places, every lesson must be relearned. May, June, and July were months spent training southern governors on things they should have learned from April from NY. Confident & ignorant are a bad combination. ...

The governor of TX at first didn’t think masks were needed. Was sure businesses could open. Wouldn’t take input. Then he learned on the job. It took a while so Abbott started to pull back a bit. Things flattened out a little.

But he stopped enforcing mask orders. Ignored the border. Bragged about how well businesses are doing. Now, TX has over 500,000 cases, 1400 deaths this week & almost 10,000 overall, high positive tests, high hospitalizations. Limited access to tests.

Yet he’s gung-ho to open the schools. Why? Because he’s studied the data. Oh I make myself laugh.

Ah, no. Because he’s literal. And he hasn’t seen a problem in a schools yet.

Georgia school districts that opened under order are already closing. 100,000 kids were infected the last weeks of July & studies now show that asymptomatic people shed the virus equally. [Texas Governor] Abbott has to learn himself. ...
 
Yet in the White House and a number of states eager for quick fixes, they are talking not so quietly about why people don’t need to worry about strong NPIs [nonpharmaceutical interventions] like masks.

Because of this thing they don’t actually understand. ... Policymakers don’t get hired to gamble with our lives. ... The cost of being wrong is high. The benefit is being right is almost none (unless you count bragging on Twitter which is no small thing) ...

People who run for office do it with a variety of motivations. Not enough of them thought through whether they would like to manage a global pandemic on their sure stepping stone to the presidency. Turns out not all can.
 
Politicians who don’t believe in government are a particular joy in a crisis. ... A belief that government can’t do anything right is #CancelGovernment. Cancel regulations, cut taxes, stop enforcing consumer protections, invest in nothing.

It’s quite a premise to run for office on. But what if you actually have to do something. ... When there’s a situation like a global pandemic and so many aren’t up for the job, I propose letting these leaders out of their jobs. At the first sign of insufficient attention to human life. Or inability to muster a basic response. Maybe when we vote in the future, we’ll put competency, accountability, decency & a commitment to making government work higher on the list.

Working around some of these people is getting old. Retiring them will be better.

There are just 82 days until the election -- and however many anxious days after it will require to enforce the popular repudiation these Republican ghouls are bringing down on themselves. I bet on the sanity of the people. Let's make sure we are heard.

An appointment

No, not Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's V.P. I'll get to that I'm sure.

Rather, it's seems worth noting that the Trump regime has moved that nasty old cold warrior Elliott Abrams from its project of overthrowing Venezuela's government to its project of overthrowing Iran's government. 

Abrams should feel right at home working with and against Iran. In the late 1980's he was knee deep in the Reagan Administration's illegal plot to trade arms to Iran in return for cash to pay a right wing force to attack Nicaragua's then-leftist elected government. (Confusingly, Nicaragua now has an oppressive regime headed by the same tinpot caudillo, but that was then and this is now and Nicaragua remains on the USA's enemy list.) Abrams was convicted for lying to Congress; this country used to penalize its crooks. The crackpot Iran-Contra scheme was a foreshadowing of the private dealing and grifting that Republicans substitute for government when they get the power to do so.

Jason Rezaian of the Washington Post who knows more than a thing or two about Iran, having been held hostage in Iranian prisons for a couple of years during the Obama administration. He has a conclusion about U.S. policy toward Iran under Trump -- and also some suggestions should the world be so fortunate as to win a Biden administration. 

After decades of punitive measures directed at Iran under the still unfulfilled promise of defanging the Islamic Republic, the Iranian people deserve better from the U.S. government. And so do Americans. ... [Trump's last envoy] managed to play a role in worsening the lives of average Iranians, in part by promoting measures such as indiscriminate economic sanctions and travel bans. ...

If former vice president Joe Biden wins in November, he will have a chance to alter our current collision course with Iran. Biden would inherit a situation in which the United States enjoys significant leverage over Tehran, and he will have foreign policy advisers with years of experience working on these issues. He should take advantage of both, conditioning any concessions on real change that improves the lots of average Iranians. After all the harm we have caused them with nothing positive to show for it, the United States owes that to the Iranian people. ...

Not surprisingly, Rezaian also thinks a better U.S. government could do better at aiding any of our citizens so unfortunate as to be imprisoned in Iran.