Election oddments from watching Virginia

There were hints from the outset that this could be a Democratic night. From Claire Malone:

Just taking a quick look at the exit polls that are coming out of Virginia and some interesting things here. Northam is outperforming Clinton among a couple of different demographics. He’s winning women by 59 percent; Clinton won them by 56 percent. He’s winning 40 percent of white voters, compared with Clinton’s 35 percent. But he’s not outpacing her among black voters: He has 86 percent compared with her 88 percent. His margins with voters 18- to 29-year-olds are pretty large, though: Northam’s winning 66 percent, compared with Clinton’s 54 percent.

Via several tweets from New York Times/Upshot's Nate Cohn:

I see some commentary on why Gillespie lost that seems disconnected from what just happened. He did really well in white rural Virginia! He's going to outperform Romney, [Cuccinelli -- GOP Governor nominee in 2013] in all sorts of areas. He was *annihilated* in the suburbs.

Turnout in precincts where Hispanic *or* Asian voters represent at least 20% of the population is 15 percent higher than our pre-election estimates.

Turnout surge included black voters, as well. In majority black precincts, turnout is running 7% of [over?] our pre-election estimates, v. 8% elsewhere.

If anyone thought '16 was the floor for GOP in well-educated areas, they're going to have to rethink.

Tellingly, from David Wasserman at FiveThirtyEight:

One final note: It’s hard not to conclude the August events in Charlottesville had a galvanizing effect on Democrats in that area. Across the state, raw votes cast were up 16 percent over 2013. But in the city of Charlottesville, raw votes cast were up 31 percent. Northam took 84 percent of the vote there.

There's a new and different Democratic party struggling into being.***A scary thought: an election night like this (coupled with the church gun massacre in Texas) takes the national focus off Donald Trump. What awful thing will the man do to try to recapture our undivided attention?***This was the first time since 2008 that I've been able to feel unalloyed delight in an election outcome. (In 2012 many good results happened, but the campaign I was working on lost.) The emerging majority needs more like this; we get them by working for them.

Another happy election result

Sikh American Ravi Bhalla won his race for mayor of Hoboken, NJ. Wow, this is AMAZING. Love trumps hate AGAIN. 😭❤️✊🏽 pic.twitter.com/QPzlfb00P8

— Linda Sarsour (@lsarsour) November 8, 2017

This is our country, not Trump's country.

News that does the heart good

Danica Roem (D) has defeated Bob Marshall (R) in HD13. She will be America's first transgender state legislator.

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) November 8, 2017

That's in northern Virginia for those who are not political junkies. Somebody always has to be the first.

Democrats are firing away vigorously -- at each other

Maybe Democrat Ralph Northam will win the Virginia governor's race today and significant numbers of Democrats will breathe a little easier. And then again, maybe he won't. And Dems won't stop to catch their breath, determined to continue their intra-party hissy fit.

As anyone who has been paying attention knows, people who do these kinds of things have been re-litigating the 2016 primary. Professional Dem operative Donna Brazile has dropped some bombshells (or at least firecrackers) about the Clinton campaign's control of the Democratic National Committee. People who insist that "Bernie would have won" (and was somehow robbed because Clinton accumulated more primary votes) are again raging.

Come on, folks -- grow up. We have work to do and an aspiring authoritarian in office who has announced he'd like nothing better than to use the machinery of government to hound and punish his political opponents. Do we want to replicate the fate of Social Democrats and Communists in the Germany of the 1930s who were too busy fighting out their very real disagreements with each other to combine to stop the Nazis? They had the majority, but they couldn't focus on the essential threat. We also have the majority, but we have to hold our coalition together if we want to win power. No one faction can do it alone.

Charles Blow accurately describes the national Democratic Party as a "dinosaur of bureaucratic machinery." I have tolerant feelings toward many of the people who make up the party apparatus; sure, there are plenty of self-important, power-hungry jackasses, but there are more grunt workers who do the boring work of attending interminable meetings, keeping up data bases, and scratching out local fundraisers. They aren't very ideological usually; they just know which side they are on. A lot of them are people of color.

But Blow is also right: in this moment when so much is required of us, the tired old Democratic party shows potential for a new life.

The Resistance isn’t part of the old Democratic Party; The Resistance is the new Democratic Party, or at least its future.

We are stuck with a two party system, so we need the Dems or something like them in some form. But we don't have to keep fighting old fights. Progressive impulses are mostly winning within the Dems. If we can forge majorities in more and more areas, progressive values will carry us forward. We need a little confidence in ourselves, not better backroom brawling.

A few days after the 2016 election gave us the Orange Cheato, I warned that, come whatever, resistance would require unity.

Don't play circular firing squad.... The various elements of our big tent coalition do not easily get along with each other. Whites will act racist, men will behave like pigs, more conventional people will look askance at gender queers. But when we rub each other wrong, we have to ease up.

That is no less true a year into the Trump regime. Circular firing squads empower the authoritarian. Even the "winners" lose when we can't build a big tent.

Rising temperatures and sea levels

If you are like me, you probably saw a headline like this one the other day: U.S. Report Says Humans Cause Climate Change, Contradicting Top Trump Officials

And if you are like me, you may not have read the story. How could I stand absorbing yet another hopeless attempt by scientists to get through to the fossil-fuel deluded numbskulls who control climate policy? Besides, understanding the science is hard; I trust the scientists and usually stick to thinking about the politics, more in my line of expertise.

But while searching weather reports, I came across a succinct description of the National Climate Assessment by Bob Henson: Humans Likely Responsible For Virtually All Global Warming Since 1950s. It seems worthwhile to share some of the main points.

On temperatures:

• Warmest in more than a thousand years. A major paleoclimate study has shown that for each of the world’s seven major continental regions, the average temperature for 1971-2000 was the highest in more than 1300 years. There is significant uncertainty around these estimates, but a separate study found that temperate North America as a whole (including most of the contiguous U.S.) is having its warmest 30-year periods in at least 1500 years.

• It’s going to get a lot warmer in the coming decades. Temperatures across the contiguous U.S. have risen about 1.8°F (1.0°C) over the period 1901-2016. “Surface and satellite data are consistent in their depiction of rapid warming since 1979,” the report notes. By the period 2070-2100 (when today’s infants will be elders), U.S. temperatures may be 2.8 to 7.3°F warmer than the 1976-2005 average if greenhouse-gas emissions are reined in strongly—or 5.8 to 11.9°F warmer if emissions continue to grow at the pace of recent decades.

On sea levels:

• U.S. coasts will experience more than the global average sea level rise from Antarctica Ice Sheet melt, and less than the global average from Greenland Ice Sheet melt. These results are both produced by what’s called static-equilibrium effects—basically, how the planet’s gravity and rotation are affected by moving huge volumes of water from polar ice sheets into the global oceans.

• The Northeast U.S. coast is expected to see additional sea level rise because of a gradually weakening Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which helps power the Gulf Stream. Much as the polar jet stream separates air masses of different densities, the Gulf Stream separates warmer, less-dense water and higher sea levels on its southwest side from denser, cooler water and a lower sea level on its northwest side, toward the Northeast U.S. coast. Any long-term weakening of the Gulf Stream would be associated with a reduced sea-level gradient, and that would mean a drop in sea level toward the southeast and a rise toward the northwest (on top of any global-scale changes, of course).

• Regional sea level rise is being exacerbated by withdrawals of groundwater off the Atlantic coast, and withdrawals of both fossil fuels and groundwater off the Gulf Coast. If these continue, so will the regional effects.

And that's just a sampling. Read it all. Our only hope of interrupting greed and stupidity depends on daring to face the violence our species is doing to our only home.

After a morning of wet snow ...

an evening of this on San Juan Island. Definitely worth the slightly anxious driving.

It's snowing in central Washington state

Here's sight I haven't seen for awhile. It's not romantic snow, just wet. Doesn't look likely to stick, for which I am thankful.

On the road ...

but not away from the struggles of the moment. This was on the door of the country store where we stopped for provisions. Click to see in larger size.

Saturday scenery: strange birds and a magic terrace

This critter hung at the Selva Negra coffee plantation and ecolodge in Matagalpa, Nicaragua.

This bird stood down a back road near Albion on the northern California coast where I've been running the last few days.

This remarkable garden is hidden away on the San Francisco peninsula.

Another thought on the Attorney-General

The fix is in. They set up Sessions to take the fall. After he is gone, a new acting AG fires Mueller. https://t.co/7O7X7TIiC9

— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) November 3, 2017

Again, seeing Sessions in the mix as clowns in the Trump campaign discuss hooking up with Russia's ruler seems the most significant revelation of this week. He's not just a racist, sexist, homophobic crank, he seems willing to play footsie with enemies of his country. Also, like everyone who plays with Trump, a useful idiot.

Painter was chief White House ethics lawyer for Pres. George W. Bush from '05 to '07.

Friday cat blogging

What are you doing walking around my neighborhood?

Guess I'll have to investigate the stranger.

Encountered in St. Mary's Park while Walking San Francisco.

All Souls Day

In the Anglican Christian tradition, November 2 is All Souls Days, a signal to remember those who have died while trusting that death has been trampled down and has no permanent dominion (whatever that may mean.)

This year I'm remembering two of my first cousins, Stefanie Stevens who left this world in September and James Kent Averill Jr. who died over a decade ago. Here they are as a couple of attractive babies in 1937. So young, so innocent. I look at this picture and realize the Second World War had not yet begun. James' father, a Navy officer, was killed in the Pacific in that war.

I didn't really know either of them -- I was ten or more years younger and so out of sync with their lives. Thinking about them reminds me that we are all part of a procession of sparks, some flaming longer than others, none burning forever unless in some sense beyond our grasp.

My most telling take-away from the Mueller investigation

This image, once tweeted by the Cheato himself, puts current Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the room with Trump's "foreign policy team" -- the motley crew apparently charged with cutting some kind of deal for help from Vladimir Putin during the campaign.

Yes, Sessions has recused himself from the probe. But what the hell was our highest law enforcement officer doing mucking around with plotters working to subvert the U.S. electoral process?

Inspiration from an unlikely source

In 2015, Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi was published with many pages blacked-out to satisfy his jailers. Slahi had been viciously tortured for months because U.S. authorities thought they'd captured a key al-Qaida operative. In fact, Slahi seems to have merely been a well traveled, cosmopolitan young Mauritanian who passed through a series of places that turned out to have been wrong locations at wrong times. The U.S. military prosecutor assigned to take him to trial was so disgusted by his mistreatment that he quit; in 2011, a federal judge ordered Slahi released, but the government stalled until 2016 at the end of the Obama administration. He was held 14 years by the U.S. without ever being charged or convicted of a crime. But now he is free.

And once he arrived home in Mauritania, he could see for the first time what U.S. authorities had done to the descriptions of his internment he had written way back in 2005. That truncated memoir made the New York Times bestseller list. Now, with his editor Larry Siems, Slahi has issued a new edition with the redacted material replaced as Guantánamo Diary: Restored.

He described what return to freedom felt like for the ACLU.

When I wrote the manuscript that became Guantánamo Diary in 2005, I had all but disappeared. I was in an isolation hut, the same one I had been dragged into two years before during my months-long torture. For four years, the U.S. government had shut me up and done the talking for both of us. It told the public false stories connecting me to terrorist plots, and it kept the public from hearing anything from me about my life and how I had been treated.

Writing became a way of fighting the U.S. government’s narrative. I wanted to bring my case directly to the people. I wasn’t sure if the pages I was writing and giving to my lawyers would ever become a book. But I believed in books, and in the people who read them; I always had, since I held my first book as a child. I thought of what it would mean if someone outside that prison was holding a book I had written.

Now, incredibly, I was holding that book myself — though in a censored, broken form. And I was meeting many people who had read it. The first thing many of them asked me was when they would be able to read the book in an uncensored version. ...

Restoring this broken text has been about seeing things that someone wanted hidden. Sometimes that someone was me. When I received the photocopy of my book in Guantánamo I stayed up all night reading it, afraid I had written something I would regret. And yes, there were things that embarrassed me. I was especially ashamed of my habit, when I was young, of making up sarcastic nicknames for people I met. The Jordanian intelligence agent who oversaw my rendition operation was not “Satan,” as I named him in the original manuscript; he is a human being, with a full life and a family. That kind of name-calling is someone I was, not someone I am now.

In that sense, reading what I wrote 12 years ago really is like reading an old diary. Sometimes I’d laugh, and sometimes I got very upset. But mostly I just smiled at my own silliness and learned more about who I was, and who I am.

Amazingly, Slahi is a gentle, even inspiring, writer and his narrative of the U.S. Gulag in Cuba is a strangely uplifting story. If you missed the first, censored, edition, do try this new one. Contrary to what you might expect, you'll come away with more faith in humanity than you brought to reading it.

Prosecutorial discretion: cheer, but also watch closely

Robert Mueller is giving the nation a tutorial in how a smart prosecutor builds a case, pulling out threads and putting pressure on associated players in order to entrap the biggest offenders. "Go Mueller!" cheer those of us who, appropriately, want the truth about what the Cheato and his cast of sleazy grifters did and are still doing to our country.

But we shouldn't forget that prosecutorial discretion -- the power to decide who is charged and how people are funneled through the courts -- is at the core of how people of color and all poor people lose the theoretical protections which the constitutional legal system claims to provide. The "presumption of innocence" doesn't mean much up against an elected prosecutor who wants to prove how "tough on crime" he can be.

Angela J. Davis (another younger Davis if the name sets off a bell) is the editor of Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution and Imprisonment. She lays out the reality for most people caught up in the "justice" system.

... what goes on in the criminal justice system every day with black and brown people is police officers' incredible power and discretion on the streets to stop people, to search them, et cetera. But police officers can only bring people to the courthouse door.

It is the prosecutor who decides whether they may remain entrenched there. ... Prosecutors can decide to charge a person or not. ... that charging power, which belongs solely to the prosecutor, combined with the plea bargaining power, which also totally belongs to prosecutors, really allows them to control the criminal justice system.

Especially when you think about the fact that 95% of all cases are resolved by way of a guilty plea, right? ... the prosecutor holds all the cards. They decide whether there's gonna be a plea offer, what the plea offer's going to be, and those two powers together really give them control of this criminal justice system. ... And they make those decisions behind closed doors with absolutely no transparency. We don't know how they're making the decisions.

Those of us in San Francisco who have been seeking justice for recent victims of some of our police officers' trigger-happy habits are all too well aware that our elected prosecutor holds all the cards. George Gascon has refused to charge the police killers of Alex Nieto, Amilcar Perez-Lopez, Luis Gongora Pat, Mario Woods or Jessica Williams. His office is therefore the sole judge and jury for whether those deaths were justified; the prosecutor's version of the "facts" becomes the unquestionable truth, however implausible it may seem to the community.

So -- let's cheer Robert Mueller. May he bring these corrupt conmen who've occupied the heights of power to justice. He might preserve our democratic chance to fight another day. But also, let's remember that from the streets, prosecutors need to be watched closely. Unlike in the federal system, many local prosecutors are elected officials. Putting them on notice that they are watched can be a significant move in the long struggle for more justice in communities without privilege.

Halloween horrors

In San Francisco, decorations for this day seem to vacillate between the notion this is a some kind of harvest festival -- or a commercial holiday for distributing candy.

Or, very occasionally, something scary ...

or creative ...

or just charming.

All out-takes from Walking San Francisco.

Yet another reason to despise this administration

If you are hoping to enjoy this view (from Olmstead Point on California Rte. 120 looking toward Half Dome in Yosemite), Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke wants it to cost you more than twice as much next summer, $70 instead of $30 to drive a vehicle into the park.

The man who is working to open public lands to oil and mineral extraction thinks parks should pay more for their upkeep. Congress has been underfunding the National Park Service for years; the parks have a $12 billion maintenance backlog -- broken bathrooms, aging campgrounds, and roads pitted with potholes. The Trump budget proposal aims for a $300 million cut in their operating budget.

So the administration is proposing "surge pricing" -- jacking up the prices at the 17 most popular NPS destinations during their high seasons, mostly from May through October. You know, let's run our parks like Uber, squeezing the highest dollar out of "customers."

But park users are not "customers". We, collectively, are owners. There are many who protest the Zinke plan:

“For some Americans to be priced out of our national parks, I don’t think that’s the right message,” said David Lamfrom, a Barstow resident and staff member at the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association. “We need to make sure that these places that are owned by all Americans are accessible to all Americans.”

The Mercury News (San Jose) denounces the new charges and promotes an alternative:

Leave it to the Trump administration to come up with the worst possible remedy for a system Wallace Stegner famously called America’s best idea....[This] could be America’s worst idea. It will make the parks unaffordable to low-income Americans who already struggle to save money to visit our coveted national treasures. It could even give some middle income Americans pause.

Even while gouging visitors, the plan would only raise around $70 million, far less than the deferred maintenance and backlog requires.

A bipartisan bill introduced in March by Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, offers a far better solution. The senators report that congressional financial support for national park maintenance has decreased by 40 percent over the past decade — a national embarrassment. They propose that $500 million a year be allocated to the National Park Service from “existing revenues the government receives for oil and natural gas royalties every year, until 2047.” ...

As President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “There is nothing so American as our national parks. … The fundamental idea behind the parks … is that the country belongs to the people.”

Don’t raise entrance fees and make America’s national parks only accessible for the richest of us to enjoy.

Fossil fuels should stay in the ground if we want any hope of mitigating climate change. But at the very least, the current government take from mining and drilling could be used for the benefit of us all.

The National Park Service has opened up a website for citizen comments on the park price increases which will remain open until November 23.
***And for citizens and residents over 62, the Interagency Senior Pass (Lifetime) at $80 is still a very good deal!

People must demand prevention of nuclear war, again

Erudite Partner writes about growing up under the threat of the bomb -- and how, despite the terror, we must do everything we can to make sure our nightmares never become reality.

Our fingers are far removed from the levers of power, while the tiny digits of the man occupying the “adult day care center” we call the White House hover dangerously close to what people my age used to call “the Button.” Nevertheless, I think there may still be time to put our collective foot on the brakes ...

Read it all at The Nation.

When nations come apart ...

Despite having traveled for a month in Spain this fall, I don't have any very clear idea what I think about Catalan independence.

My friends in Spain, good lefties who live in Madrid and despise the corrupt right-wing government of premier Mariano Rajoy, nonetheless dismiss Catalan separatism as petulant and unrealistic. What do I know? I've learned to look at the English version of El Pais, a social-democratic paper that is the country's top selling daily. El Pais tilts hard against Catalan secession, treating the effort as anti-democratic and nativist.

With this background, I found Washington Post correspondent Ishaan Tharoor making points that seem highly relevant:

Catalan aspirations are deep-seated, anchored in the region's distinct history and cultural identity. But the momentum for independence catalyzed only in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, as Catalans saw their robust region being dragged down by a cratering Spanish economy. Catalan officials say the region still pays about $12 billion more in taxes each year to Madrid than it gets back.

These frustrations are not exclusive to Catalonia. A number of fledgling secessionist or autonomy movements in other parts of Europe, from Lombardy in Italy to Flanders in Belgium to Scotland or even London in Britain, are grounded in the belief that their regional interests are not being served by the national politicians who call the shots. Over the past year, we've tended to think of nationalism in the West in the context of angry, right-wing populist movements, fueled by disaffection with elites and hostility to immigrants.

But another trend to watch ought to be the impatient regionalism of more metropolitan parts of Europe, frustrated by the backward politics of their nation-states.

Tharoor points to a Guardian column by Paul Mason which makes a thought-provoking argument:

... the positive factor driving progressive nationalisms, from Scotland to Catalonia, is technological change. Information-rich societies reward the development of human capital; so the ability to study in your first language, to participate in a rich national culture, to create unique local selling points for incoming foreign investment is more important than ever. If the regions, peoples and nations currently demanding more freedom seem to be driven by “cultural nationalism”, that in turn is driven by technological change plus global competition.

The second impact of these forces is the emergence of successful big cities and devastated small towns. In large cities with dense networks of information and culture, you can survive globalisation. In small towns it is harder. So the logical economic strategy is to create a “region” or small nation focused on one big city, and develop the suburban and rural economy in synergy with that city, not the bigger unitary state. If Barcelona were not a massive global success story, the impetus behind Catalan nationalism would be smaller.

This should not seem foreign to us in the United States. One of the most mind-boggling aspects of last year's presidential election, according to Mark Muro and Sifan Liu was that:

The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015. By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output—just a little more than one-third of the nation’s economic activity.

... with the exceptions of the Phoenix and Fort Worth areas and a big chunk of Long Island, Clinton won every large-sized county economy in the country.

Another way of saying this is that California (Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas), New York (the city and environs), and Illinois (Chicago metro area) are thriving; meanwhile vast areas of the United States are accumulating grievances that Republicans exploit. Historically, more prosperous regions have been the tail that wagged the dog. It seems unlikely that the converse will endure for long.

Technology, globalization and cosmopolitanism, and mass migration aren't going to stop (however much the Trumpies want to stop the world so they can jump off). These forces are re-making our society; rote application of leftwing dichotomies derived from a different economy don't adequately capture contemporary conflicts. Eugene Robinson tries to name what this means for Democrats trying to assemble a majority:

Today’s key fault lines may be between metropolitan areas and the exurbs and small towns strung along the interstates; between those who have gone to college and those who have not; between families who have benefited from the globalized economy and those who have not; and between an anxious, shrinking white majority and the minority groups that within a couple of decades will constitute more than half the population.

He thinks Democrats need to convincingly project themselves as the "opportunity" party. That's sounds a bit over-technocratic to me; wasn't that what Hillary Clinton was offering? Winning Democrats will inspire hope that all of us, together, can enjoy the better future that prosperous areas glimpse even now.

Congress: "a breeding ground for a hostile work environment"

Congresswoman Jackie Speier has proved herself to be a good one since that long ago day when, accompanying her boss Rep. Leo Ryan, she was shot on a runway by cult members from Jim Jones' Jonestown. She joined the hazardous trip which left Ryan and four others dead because:

“Back in 1978, there were not many women in high-ranking positions in Congress," said Speier, who was legislative counsel for Ryan at the time. "I felt if I didn’t go, it would be a step back for women holding these high positions. I thought, 'I can’t not go.'”