A happy campaign insight

Look at those two representations of polling data. They don't look so different, do they? Both the odious Mr. Trump and the charming Bernie are attracting about one-third of the members of their own party to their campaigns for President.

More of us identify as Democrats than Republicans (even though Dems are somewhat less likely to vote regularly.) That means that our democratic socialist Senator actually probably has more professed supporters than the blustering proto-fascist billionaire.

For Bernie, in what is functionally a two candidate field, having 30 percent plus support amounts to losing badly to Hillary's 66 percent. For Trump in an over-crowded clown car, having the support of one third of Republicans might create a path to the nomination and general election.

But think what this means for the nation's future, if we have one. I'll turn this over to Matthew Yglesias whose charts and thoughts I'm appropriating here:

... in terms of analyzing broad trends in American life, the Sanders phenomenon is probably more significant than Trumpism.

Trump's supporters, after all, are older than the average Republican, while Sanders's are younger than the average Democrat. The Trump movement is benefiting from an exceptionally chaotic situation among mainstream Republicans, while Sanders is up against the strongest non-incumbent frontrunner in American political history.

In the short term, that all means that Trump is more relevant to 2016. But the values that Sanders reflects are likely to grow stronger in future cycles, while Trumpism is likely to grow weaker.

Something to hold on to in dark times.

Something happening here?

I have no idea whether the "climate deal" is a good "deal". It will take awhile to know whether anything comes of the international agreement in Paris. Or whether anything comes of the international popular outpouring we can see in the video.

350.org says:

This deal represents important progress — but progress alone is not our goal. Our goal is a just and livable planet.

It's striking to me that this demonstration -- an effort to highlight the desperate trajectory of human life on earth -- looks like a mass celebration. Most of the great peace and justice marches I've attended have felt like that. When thousands come together for the common good, there's something that feels like a release of joy.

And there is always the question whether joy has any power. But joy does continue to assert itself; that is the wonder.

Saturday scenes: harvest and other wreaths

When I was growing up, a "wreath" meant a ring of evergreen cuttings, perhaps decorated with a red bow, that hung at Christmas on the front door. Not any more. I think this one contains artichokes, but maybe I'm wrong. These days, door decorations seem to appear for all seasons. Here are a few spotted while Walking San Francisco this autumn.

Leaves are certainly colorful.

I'm not sure small pumpkins work so well.

On the other hand, these gourds are artfully arranged.

I suspect this pair of being made of bromeliads; I'm sure someone who is better at plants will correct me if I'm wrong.

Now there is a wreath for the true fan. This wasn't the Giants' year, but there have been enough World Series seasons lately to make this understandable.

While we were all obsessing over Donald Trump ...

... something may have been happening in Paris on climate change. Or not. I've thought several times over the last few days, perhaps the rampant insanity on this side of the Atlantic since Colorado Springs and San Bernardino, by taking the climate summit out of the headlines, might be facilitating international progress we otherwise couldn't reach.

If so, this only highlights the political challenge of our era: can popular democracy survive when majorities know they lack the scientific chops to make vital choices for our future -- and concurrently have learned through hard experience not to trust "leaders" to make those choices for us? Does preserving any semblance of a democratic polity require an almost superhuman quality of leadership rooted in democratic values? There's nothing much in our inequitable "meritocratic" capitalism that inspires such values. (Translation: Bill Gates may be acting the good guy in Paris, but do we want him for dictator?) Where would such leaders be found? And would we want them if they presented themselves?

I'm serious here.

Change we once believed in -- and mustn't let be washed away

Once upon a time, I remember hearing frequently from anarchist-leaning friends:

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

Apparently contemporary Republicans agree. Since 2010, 21 GOP-controlled states have enacted measures to make voting less accessible, more difficult.

And once upon a time, Black people in the U.S. thought the right to vote was so valuable that people were willing to risk their lives to win it.

Ari Berman's Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America is a narrative history of the Voting Rights Act (VRA); it was first passed in 1965, extended largely intact as recently as 2006, and now is in the process of being rendered void by the right-wing majority on John Roberts' Supreme Court.

Berman anchors his tale through the life story of Georgia Congressman John R. Lewis, who was beaten bloody marching for voting rights 50 years ago, struggled through the difficult process getting southern Blacks registered and then defeating the various subterfuges states used to nullify their voting strength, and has survived in Congress to watch Republican-appointed judges enable Republican legislatures to hue away much of what a lifetime of campaigning had won.

This is a richly detailed history. Most of it was familiar; after all, I've worked in elections trying to increase turnout among people of color for a long time. But by plumbing archives, court cases and legislative battles, Berman brings tidbits to the fore that I never knew. Who'd have thought that Republican Congressman Henry Hyde (of the infamous Hyde amendment that prohibits the feds from paying for women's legal abortions) would have been convinced by personal testimony from Black voters that they were still being denied voting rights fifteen years after the VRA was first passed? Hyde was instrumental in the improbable 25-year extension won in the first year of Ronald Reagan's presidency, otherwise a bleak period for civil rights.

One detail that Berman brings forward should be a cautionary tale for progressives if we ever win anything important again. Lyndon Johnson insisted that when the VRA was first passed, his Justice Department should hit the ground running, bringing registrars into recalcitrant counties and filing lawsuits within days.

It was imperative, given the high stakes of the law, that the rollout go as smoothly as possible. "Doing everything so quickly sent a signal that there would be no temporizing with the new law, said [Justice Department attorney John] Doar's first assistant, Stephen Pollak. "On every front, it was important to be out of the box right away because that was the best way to foster voluntary compliance."

The Obama administration could have used that lesson when it succeeded in passing the Accessible Care Act.

Berman makes one unequivocal claim which demonstrates why Republicans hate the VRA so much: the electoral result of Black voting was what kept right-wing nut-job Robert Bork from being installed on the Supreme Court by Reagan in 1987.

In 1965, sixteen of twenty-two southern senators opposed the VRA. Twenty-three years later, sixteen of twenty-two southern senators voted against Bork.

Southern senators in office in the 1980s needed some Black votes. What's changed since and what makes the South so solidly hostile to racial and other progress is that Democrats no longer win any significant share of the white vote. In 1987, southern whites were still split between the parties and there was room to manuever. No longer.

And so, as Republicans have won complete control of state governments since 2010, they have implemented a Second Reconstruction, a torrent of measures like shorter voting periods, more difficult registration processes and requirements for expensive IDs that aim to reduce voting. And activists are once again out there, struggling to help very poor and marginalized, mostly Black, southerners to become part of the electorate.

Berman quotes Harvard historian of voting rights Alexander Keyssar:

... the right to vote can be as fragile as it is fundamental.

I guess some people fear that if we can all vote, we might just change something.

Friday cat blogging

When Morty adopts this pose, I am prone to speculations about co-evolution. Have cats learned that humans are suckers for their imitations of human infants? Do they do this when they don't have people around to manipulate? Does he really find this comfortable? I don't know.

San Franciscans demand justice for Mario Woods

Residents of the Bayview neighborhood where the SFPD killed Mario Woods last week took to the steps of City Hall on Wednesday night before a meeting of the Police Commission. Their prominent banner testifies to the sad truth of the displacement of Black San Francisco under the tsunami of gentrification.

Several hundred people supported neighborhood speakers demanding justice for Woods.

Later many protesters trooped inside to shout out "Fire Chief Suhr!"

Widely distributed videos of Wood's killing show a small man limping slowly away from a circle of cops with drawn guns. The Police Chief and police union defend officers' use of force.

Some hide torture, some like it (for others), some fight it

As a consequence of Erudite Partner's writings against torture, I maintain several standing web alerts that tip me off to any flurry of activity about this dreary topic. Monday was the anniversary of the Senate report which confirmed the shameful story of the Bush administration's enthusiasm for vicious and unlawful treatment of its prisoners.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that torture apologists have trotted out a researcher from the conservative Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford to explain that really the report was a lousy piece of work. Ms. Zegart faults the Feinstein committee's, enumerating her complaints:

"It was not bipartisan, took too long to write, made little effort to generate public support along the way and produced a declassified version that constituted a tiny portion of the full study..."

That's actually not a bad list -- and every one of those limitations derived from Republican obstruction. On torture, the GOP is the party of cover up, delay, and accountability denied. (The Prez hasn't been so good on that last item either.)

Unfortunately Zegart's silly tripe is being reported as if she were saying something. Reporters can be credulous beasts.

Not surprisingly all the Republican presidential hopefuls are eager for more torture, especially in the context of the current national panic. It's not just Trump; it's all of them. The Donald says he

would support torturing detainees – even “if it doesn’t work” in producing valuable intelligence – simply because he thinks it’s a worthwhile thing to do.

I'm not going to try to explain that pathology.***

The same web alert that brought me this dreck also brought me a biographical piece on Vilma Núñez de Escorcia who has headed the Centro Nicaragüense de Derechos Humanos (Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights) for the past quarter of a century. Born into rejection because her mother was not married to her father, tortured herself under the dictatorial Somoza regime, she was made a judge of the country's Supreme Court during the revolutionary 1980s. When that regime ended, she turned to non-governmental work against torture:

Today, Vilma’s concern is about the limits of torture’s characterization, in particular with the forms of torture that do not leave visible traces, but still affect individuals and families.

... As crime has increased in recent years, especially in the countryside, people have been tortured for being considered supporters or accomplices of politically motivated armed groups when in fact these peasants were forced to feed guerilleros, Vilma explains.

... Vilma, who has held leading positions in international or regional human rights NGOs ... admits that it is hard to say that thanks to her work torture has diminished.  On the contrary, there seems to be more torture in Nicaragua today. But at least people now know they have the right not to be tortured.
 
“For us our greatest success is that people have now understood the concept, and that it is a human rights violation,” she says.

***The World Organization Against Torture is profiling 10 international human rights defenders in the run up to December 10, United Nations Human Rights Day. Several in addition to the Nunez piece are available at the link.

Guns and the no-fly list

On Sunday night the Prez suggested that

"Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun. What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon? This is a matter of national security."

I have to admit that I momentarily enjoyed the politics behind the suggestion. When Republicans are pissing in their pants at the idea of admitting desperate escapees from the Syrian war and ISIS, they refuse to vote to prevent people designated as dangerous from acquiring guns? That's low.

But hey, I was once told I was on the no fly list which was always a crock. Certainly I was never any danger to aviation or much of anything else. And much as the spooks like to tout their "success" at preventing terrorism, people who actually know something about security have long thought watch lists were mere "theater."

So I don't mind that that Jamelle Bouie has reminded anyone inclined to enjoy the Prez's thrust against gun lovers' hypocrisy that we're putting ourselves on the wrong side of rights we normally care about.

... civil libertarians—and liberals, at least during the Bush administration—think [the terrorist watch list] is constitutionally dubious. They’re right. “The list contains the names of people who the government thinks are a threat to civil aviation—terrorists,” writes University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner for Slate. “These people are denied passage. … Yet the government does not have proof that these people have committed crimes nor, since it can’t see into the future, that they will commit crimes.” If you’re on these lists, you’re presumed guilty until proven innocent, with no due process and little recourse.

The list is conceptually flawed, and using it to deny gun ownership is wrong on its face. Add racial and religious profiling to the mix—the people on the list, including Americans, are disproportionately Arab or from Muslim countries—and you have an anti-gun measure with deep disparate impact.

He's right; my politically convenient pleasure is wrong. Schadenfreude at Republican discomfiture is no excuse.

National id squawking

Okay, so we know Mr. Bad Hair can't go too far for some of our fellow citizens. He's our representative asshole. He's good at the part.

So I don't pay much attention to most of his squawks. But this one momentarily caught my attention.

Trump said he didn't believe the shooter's sister, Saira Khan, when she said she couldn't fathom how her brother Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik could've committed the mass shooting. "I probably don't believe the sister," Trump said. "I would go after a lot of people and find out whether or not they knew. ..."

Of course he doesn't believe Ms.Khan. She's apparently not an asshole. In fact, she's said one of the more wise things anyone has said about the San Bernardino massacre. From an interview at the New York Times:

... the sisters said they were baffled by what had happened. Their brother had seemed happy with his wife and 6-month-old baby, they said. Asked if she felt shame, Ms. Farook said: “I am not ashamed to be Muslim. I am not ashamed to be American either, and I am not ashamed to be Pakistani either. I think shame is for people who feel guilty about something.”

“We’re trying to be helpful with the investigation,” Ms. Farook said. “People want answers and we do as well.”

This part bears repeating: "... shame is for people who feel guilty about something." There's no shame in being who we are. Shame accrues for what we do. As far as anyone knows, Syed Farouk's sisters didn't do anything they should not have. They are among his victims. Kudos to the Times for the interview.***And yes, we're all more than a little baffled. Whether our spooks can ever discern what was going on with the San Bernardino couple will be a great test of whether the NSA's universal internet dragnet is worthwhile. I'm not counting on it in.***In another article, the Times buried what should be the lede in all discussions of terrorism.

... the massacre may presage a bitter new reality. “It’ll gradually dawn on people,” said Bruce Jones, a former United Nations official and the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, “that we’ll be living for a long time with the possibility of low-level attacks that can never be predicted and can rarely be prevented.”

Nobody likes this, but adults will get used to it. They can't destroy our country; we can only do that to ourselves.

Muslim Americans are "us"

Right wingers want the Prez to intone "radical Islam" with every breath. I'm annoyed with him because he didn't dare last night to include the words I've added in bold type to the text of his speech about "keeping the American people safe."

... it is the responsibility of all Americans — of every faith — to reject discrimination. It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It’s our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently. Because when we travel down that road, we lose. That kind of divisiveness, that betrayal of our values plays into the hands of groups like ISIL. Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes, ... Muslim-Americans are us. 

It is time we stop talking about Muslim Americans as strange creatures apart from the rest of "us", the real citizens of the United States. Mr. President, Muslim Americans are "us" just as much as any of us are "us."

Do doctors have feelings?

How could I not be intrigued by a doctor's attempt to share the emotional ups and downs of her profession? After all, most of us only encounter docs when we're in the grip of our own ups and downs, usually the latter. So what goes on within those usually authoritative even if genial people wearing the white coats? Dr. Danielle Ofri offers some answers in What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine.

I was easily inclined to like Ofri: she draws upon her experience practicing at Bellevue Hospital (New York City's enormous charity facility) among Spanish-speaking patients. Many years ago, I collected all too much experience transporting and assisting indigent and desperate residents of the then-impoverished Lower East Side to the very ER where she learned medicine. I was a patient there myself at least once. The docs always seemed to do the best they could -- respectfully at that -- amid the chaos.

Ofri is at her most interesting when she tries to discern what it is about the training of doctors that measurably encourages newly minted professionals to shut down their own feelings in response to their patients' troubles. Stress, insane work hours, heavy responsibility, and the need to slough off repeated exposure to ugly human realities are obvious factors. She cites studies of the nature of empathy and reports a definition I find clarifying:

... sympathy is an emotion, actually feeling the patient’s feelings. Empathy is a cognition, a thought process that allows you to understand the patient’s feelings while not necessarily feeling them yourself. In fact, maintaining your own sense of self is a key part of empathy. The empathy definition might thus be reworded as the ability to stand in another’s shoes without actually leaving your own shoes.

She describes a pilot program in which inexperienced medical personnel discussed feelings so as to learn to use the empathy they felt for patients' benefit without succumbing to overload and cynicism. She evaluates it as has having some success.

Her topics include what doctors do with the grief that conscientious ones feel when patients die. Here's Ofri describing her own feelings about forming new medical relationships after the death of a sympathetic long time patient.

I didn’t want to start again — meeting someone I would likely lose, forming one more memory ... — but of course I had to. I knew that. I recalled what a colleague once told me as I was contemplating having a second child. My first child occupied every ounce of my love and my energy, and finding emotional space for another seemed impossible. My colleague — a wise physician and a father of three — reassured me. “Your capacity simply expands,” he told me. “Your heart grows bigger and there is enough room to love more.”

... In some ways, grief is an aspect of love, a reflection of the ability to connect. As the heart can grow bigger to allow more love, it can also do so for grief. I don’t want any more of my patients to die, but I know that they will. And although I don’t want more grief in my life, I know that the connections that permit grief to occur are the connections that keep us — doctors and patients — alive. ...

Attractive and self-revealing as Dr. Ofri's descriptions of her own feelings make her, I was surprised by how little I could sympathize with her distress about being sued by former patients, something that she documents that 99 percent of doctors will experience during their careers. I just can't be surprised that this happens, even to very good doctors. Patients feel so little power in their relationships with the medical profession that it is almost inevitable that some will turn to the courts to reassert their autonomy, even if they don't have a case. Ofri says most of these lawsuits eventually go away without judgement. But she complains:

Nearly every doctor feels both her competence and her identity as a doctor challenged, even if the suit is entirely frivolous. The sense of being judged on the essence of who you are can override the facts of a given case. ...

... the assault on integrity was all-encompassing. Not a single accused doctor emerged unscathed. Even those who knew they had done nothing wrong, even those who were vindicated, suffered wrenching anguish. If it were just bad doctors who were being sued, doctors who practiced substandard medicine or who were arrogant, unfeeling, and uncommunicative, it would be one thing. But just as many suits involved doctors who had long-term, trusting relationships with their patients. Good communication and trust might decrease the number of lawsuits, but it certainly didn’t prevent them. Plenty of good and caring doctors found themselves in receipt of one of those dreaded certified letters.

I can only attribute what I read as the doctors' exaggerated whining in response to litigious patients (and families) as evidence that they just don't get it: as patients, we're scared, feel helpless, and profoundly disempowered. Some of us, if we have the chance -- if our maladies don't kill us or leave us witless -- will strike out at the available authority. We will strike out at the very people who saved our lives.

If doctors hadn't cauterized their human feelings, they might understand that. Not a good state of affairs all around, but there it is.

Montenegro joins NATO

Enormous cruise ship arrives off the Montenegrin town of Kotor

Media response to the announcement that the tiny Balkan country of Montenegro would be taken into NATO has run to snark. Here's the FiveThirtyEight newsletter write up:

NATO announced Wednesday it will invite Montenegro, a nation of roughly 600,000, to join its ranks, a move that’s delighting Montenegrins, infuriating Russians, and confusing Americans who are just learning that there is a country called Montenegro. Welcome to NATO, Montenegro, we hope you enjoy the North Atlantic trade.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones is equally dismissive.

... it used to be part of Yugoslavia, which was a Soviet ally back in the day. So this requires Vladimir Putin to stamp his feet and claim that Russia's heritage is being attacked by the West, blah blah blah. You may safely ignore it.

As a rare U.S. citizens who has recently traveled within the new NATO member state, all this strikes me as off base. My trip was completely apolitical, mostly hiking in remote mountain areas, but that doesn't mean that I didn't look around.

My sample (tourism workers and cabdrivers) is certainly small and biased, but I think I can say that Montenegrins want to be included in Europe. They want the life they see Europeans living, comfortable and modern compared to their past as hardscrabble peasants trapped in a backwater. Whether that means they want a military alliance may be another matter. I did not inquire, naturally.

Icon over the ancient town gate at Budva

But ties of affection to Russia are real. Most are Russian Orthodox Christians. They look east to the Moscow patriarchate for religious leadership, unlike the neighboring Croats and Slovenes who are mainly Roman Catholics, looking to the pope in Rome.

Budva yacht harbor

Because Montenegro has been outside of NATO and of the European Union (and still not part of the latter) its gorgeous Adriatic Coast has served as a playground for elite Russians barred by economic sanctions from vacationing in other Mediterranean resorts. The medieval towns of Kotor and Budva are aping Monte Carlo, mostly for Russian oligarchs. Their outskirts are covered with high-rise condos and casinos while cruise ships and yachts fill their tiny harbors. The language of the tourist trade included English, but Russian was much more prominent.

Will accession to the Western military alliance change this? Most likely economic sanctions will bite. Will Montenegrins be happy with this? I talked to at least one articulate English speaker who hated how his government was selling off the national coast to Central Asian oil barons. On the other hand, there are a lot of Montenegrins whose well being has depended on the country's offering to well-heeled Russians a bit of almost-Europe. There were protests arising from these tensions in October.

Old Budva town is a maze of tourist shops.

Snark seems complacently patronizing. Montenegrins are struggling to find a future they can live with; this is seldom easy.

She flies

Today my friend Tara takes off in Lillehammer (Norway) in the first competition of this year's World Cup. She reported yesterday that "it felt great to start off the 2015-2016 season with a nice long jump of 91m." That's almost 300 feet for those who, like most of us in the U.S., are metric system illiterates.

Tara Geraghty-Moats is a working class kid from rural Vermont who has fought through injury and lack of funds to represent the United States among the best women ski jumpers in the world.

Learn more about that struggle in this short video.

Here is how it works for young U.S. athletes: instead of paying for their training and support as many countries do, our system teaches them to fundraise. So they do. Tara's World Cup page is here, with much more about her accomplishments and her plans.

In addition to her insistence on flying off ramps, Tara is a remarkable, mature, thoughtful person who I am lucky to have watched grow into herself.

UPDATE: Tara finished 17th in today's event, the top U.S.jumper. Not bad for someone who spent her summer working at a vegetable farm.

Friday cat blogging

Emerson scans the room to be sure the dogs aren't threatening. They aren't.

Who cares if the man had a record? Definitely the SFPD.

Looks a lot like target practice, doesn't it?

The San Francisco Police Department has given a name to the man they shot in the Bayview yesterday.

He was Mario Woods, 26, a resident of the city. And he's dead because 10 cops couldn't think of anything to do on finding him but shoot him.

And as naturally as night follows day, they've released everything they've got that would make him out to be a bad dude, someone who deserved to be surrounded by drawn guns and executed by a firing squad. I find their story a little thin, but here it is.

According to the Chron:

Man killed by S.F. police had criminal history The 26-year-old man shot to death Wednesday by San Francisco police in a street confrontation in the Bayview had spent nearly all his adult life in prison.

In March 2008, at age 19, Mario Woods — then a suspected member of the Oakdale Mob street gang — was arrested after he fled from a botched robbery at a pool hall in the city’s Crocker-Amazon district, police and prosecutors say.

The cops nailed him for that one, got him labelled a "gang member," and he served about four years. He got out in 2014. The lawyer in that proceeding described him as "never aggressive." A Bayview neighbor described the man he knew:

Cedric Smith, a 47-year-old real estate entrepreneur who lives near where the shooting took place, said he saw Woods around the neighborhood frequently and the type of threatening behavior described by police did not fit his personality.

“He wasn’t a big guy, definitely not a trouble maker,” Smith said. “You’d see him around drinking a beer or smoking a cigarette, but he walked real slow and might’ve had a disability. He wasn’t a threat to nobody.

Okay, so opinions about Woods differ. But he's still dead by police shooting. Officers decided he had to go -- and he's gone.

Another venue for opinion journalism

When assembling that list of commentators I follow the other day, I decided to leave off the sports writers. After all, our commercial sports are corrupt, exploitative of the athletes, sexist, racist and bellicose. And yes, I'm still addicted to enjoying them, especially football.

But then I run across chewy morsels in the sports columns, as I did today. And I realize, again, that writers in that entertainment genre sometimes have leeway to inject social commentary where it is little expected in a setting where it may not be appreciated by either its subjects or the audience.

Item: here's a nugget that Peter King of Monday Morning Quarterback and Sports Illustrated dropped in between NFL playoff speculation and an interview with running back Adrian Peterson:

“I’m heartbroken that we are in this situation again, and again, and again. And I cry out with you and ask, ‘Why?’”
—Rev. Amanda Henderson of the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado, at yet another service for mourning the victims of senseless gun violence, this time in Colorado Springs, when a disturbed drifter brought an AK-47 into a Planned Parenthood clinic and murdered three people, including a police officer, and wounded nine others, including five police officers.

Nothing will be done—nothing whatsoever—unless we as Americans take this issue as a true crisis instead of shaking our heads and saying, “Nothing we can do.”

... We lose too many good people to idiots who have no business carrying AK-47s, in a country without the fortitude to do something about those carrying the AK-47s, or the AK-47s themselves.

Item: and here's Gregg Easterbrook, straying from the foibles and follies of coaches to school pompous academics and authorities about what's coming at them.

Those Kids Today. As graying pundits wring their hands regarding campus protests, it is well to bear in mind that at least as far back as Plato, each aging generation has believed the young are out of whack. When today’s graying pundits were at college, parents were shocked by campus protests. Everything worked out fine, and colleges became better as a result. Most likely this round of protests will improve colleges, too.

Of course some of the complaints seem overwrought — can it really be that science and math professors at magnificent Amherst College refuse to listen to correct answers from black students? Protesters at Amherst, Claremont McKenna, Ithaca, Yale and other colleges may be overselling their complaints but also are warning of genuine problems that require solutions.

Consider the notion of “microaggression.” This term is much-mocked. On the other hand, minority students know that racial judgmentalism often is expressed in code. At college even the children of privilege are attuned to slight expressions of praise or disdain. If white students who never deal with coded racial affronts can easily be upset in the super-sensitive college milieu, and they can, it’s worse for minority students.

Microaggression does not have to be intentional. This Peyton Manning commercial for DirecTV includes “really high voice” Peyton singing “Camptown Races” in a barbershop quartet. To many viewers the scene is just silly fun. An African-American viewer would know that what’s being performed is a minstrel song originally titled “Gwine to Run All Night, or De Camptown Races.” In the original, blackface performers mocked slaves for saying “gwine” instead of “going,” “dis” rather than “this” and so on. The song is historically significant — college groups should perform it. But an African-American might wince on seeing this song in a Fortune 500 commercial (AT&T owns DirecTV), while a white American would be unlikely to have that reaction.

Minority students complaining on campuses today will be among the leaders of the nation in a couple of decades. Society needs to learn to respect their judgment.

Sometimes sport writers can show us ourselves at least as well as more conventionally authoritative journalists.

Video of execution by SFPD firing squad

Tonight I was talking with a friend about how, though the San Francisco Police Department has a bad history of shooting Black men, lately they'd been knocking off more Latinos, including Mission District residents Amilcar Perez-Lopez and Alex Nieto.

But then I came home to see this. African-Americans are only 3 percent of the city's people, but still get shot here mighty easily. This happened in the Bayview this afternoon. Yes, the man is dead.

A video posted by HotRod (@daniggahot) on Dec 2, 2015 at 4:59pm PST

How can the cops claim to have felt threatened by one small, wobbly man who was surrounded by six or more officers with drawn guns? I can't tell from the video whether he was really holding a knife, but that hardly matters. He didn't have magical powers. The threat was in their heads, not in his hands.

Yes, the man is dead and I suppose, along with being told that the officers here acted lawfully, we might someday be told his name.

More media insights: privatizing the news

Here is a scary and fascinating aspect of the media moment we're in. We hear a lot about the collapse of the newspaper and mainstream media business model. The internet broke the monopoly that newspapers and local TV enjoyed when there was no other way for local and even national businesses to put themselves in front of masses of potential consumers. Along came the creative destruction. Sites like Craigslist siphoned off profitable classified advertising. Display ad revenue fell precipitously. So the business of news gathering, especially print publications, shed reporters in droves. They closed their satellite bureaus, notably in state capitals, where much of their expertise resided. And in-depth reporting, digging for the story behind the news, became an endangered anachronism. It became impossible to imagine that there was a future role for young reporters. Journalism had been killed.

Or maybe not.

Via the Atlantic, John Heltman passes on his surprising discovery:

... I analyzed the Congressional Directory from the 101st Congress (1989-1991) through the 113th Congress (2013-2015), counted how many reporters were listed in each bureau, and categorized each bureau as either a newspaper, newswire, trade publication, foreign bureau, or online publication.

What I found was that there are roughly the same number of accredited reporters in Washington today as there were 25 years ago, but that more of them are working for trade publications and fewer are working for newspapers and newswires.

There are still droves of reporters digging into the doings of the federal government, writing their findings up, and earning a living, despite what we all know about the newspaper business. What's going on?


Heltman, who writes for the Water Policy Report, a division of Inside EPA news wire, explains:

... According to a 2009 study by the Pew Research Center, the number of newspapers with bureaus in Washington fell by more than half from the mid-1980s to 2008. The number of newspaper reporters accredited to cover Congress fell by 30 percent between 1997 and 2009. The center is currently working on research to update those numbers.

Political reporting, however, has not declined at all—quite the contrary. Campaigns, scandals, and fights within and between the parties are covered today with an alacrity that borders on obsession. Growing partisanship and divided government have made the stakes of each day’s political news seem immense, as anyone can see by watching the endless flow of scooplets from Politico and Talking Points Memo, or who watch hour after hour of commentary on Fox News or MSNBC.

But while political news is everywhere, coverage of the day-to-day inner workings of government—the slow, steady development of policy in Congress, in the administration, and in the independent regulatory agencies, and how those policies are implemented—has become increasingly scarce in the media that average citizens historically have relied upon.

The opposite, however, is true of the “paywall press”—that is, high-subscription, insider-oriented news organizations ... This sector of the Fourth Estate is booming, and its coverage of government has never been more robust. Trade outlets are steadily adding to their staffs in Washington. ...The irony is that policy journalism in Washington is thriving. It’s just not being written for you, and you’re probably never going to read it.

Who is buying the "paywall press"?

... One of the big reasons for the trade-paper explosion is the massive increase in lobbying over the past few decades. In 1975, according to David C. Johnston’s book, Free Lunch, Washington lobbyists together made less than $100 million a year in fees. Thirty years later, they were raking in $2.5 billion, a growth rate ten times faster than the economy as a whole. Opensecrets.org, a website operated by the Center for Responsive Politics that tracks lobbying spending, estimated the size of the lobbying market at $3.24 billion last year, and that’s not counting the money many of the largest industry trade groups spent on advertising and public-relations consultation.

It’s not just lobbyists who are willing to pay for that insider info. The amount of money spent on federal contracting more than doubled in less than a decade, from $206 billion in fiscal year 2000 to $537 billion in 2011. Another big customer base—one more squarely in the targets of populist outrage—is Wall Street trading. The sector’s growth in the 1990s and 2000s meant that there was a considerably bigger pool of potential readers willing to pay for reporting on the latest information on, say, regulatory filings by the Federal Communications Commission—intelligence that might enable them to make smarter trades on communication company stocks.

Heltman describes this media environment in classic "one the one hand ... on the other hand" fashion. Paywall reporters for trade publications are not captives of the consumers of their product, so he insists. Since their product is not available to the non-paying public, it is impossible for ordinary mortals to evaluate that assessment. Big stories uncovered by these niche journalists do eventually see the light in the public press -- except when they don't. Hellman could have used an editor who excised or tightened some of this rambling, but perhaps editors in general access publications are becoming as scarce as reporters?

Yet he's on to something. The profession of news gathering still apparently exists and profitably at that. But, like everything else, its more significant expressions are becoming the exclusive preserve of the One Percent. Democracy needs what media gadfly Jay Rosen calls a "public service press." Going, going, gone ...?

Navigating the media landscape, part two

Over on Facebook, a friend asked in response to the previous post: "where's your list [of interesting opinion writers]?"

Some of the essential ones I mention here often:

• Charles Blow at the NYT;

• Josh Marshall at TPM when he's wearing his historian hat;

• Ed Kilgore on U.S. politics, especially the view from the U.S. South and religiosity ;

• Paul Waldman at The Week; also at the Washington Post but they paywall.

And here are some that may be a little less obvious:

• David Niewert, spyhopping the Right;

• J.J. Goldberg at the Jewish Daily Forward;

• Echidne of the Snakes because 51 percent of us are women;

• Jamelle Bouie on politics and especially on correcting the history;

• Felix Salmon who used to report on business and finance for Reuters and now writes on what interests him at Fusion;

• the Rev. Canon Giles Fraser at the Guardian;

• David Roberts, on climate, formerly of Grist, now on Vox;

• Sarah Posner, on politics and religion.

Understand, I don't necessarily agree with these people, but I find I can learn from them. The list strikes me as particularly weak on women. I imagine this is at least in part because women opinion writers still don't have equal access to gigs that pay them to write regularly.

 I could go on with about 15 more, but I'm camped in an airport, preparing to board ... Enough for now. Who do readers look to for informative opinion?  

UPDATE: In honor of Giving Tuesday, may I suggest working on the paucity of women's voices by supporting Echoing Ida? I did.