Two plagues: the invisible war zones of HIV/AIDS and opioids

Just about every retrospective on 2017 includes something like this:

Last year, more than 63,600 people died of drug overdoses, up from more than 52,400 in 2015. About two-thirds of overdose deaths — more than 42,200 — were linked to opioids. ... In comparison, ... more than 43,000 died due to HIV/AIDS during that epidemic's peak in 1995...

As a longtime gay San Franciscan, I live with memories of what it was like to live through the HIV plague years -- deaths were all around. When you encountered an acquaintance who looked a little wan, you wondered if he would be the next to go. You'd realize that the house down the block where the neighbors always seemed to be changing was an AIDS residence. Phone poles were covered with flyers for AIDS charity fundraising events. Gay newspapers carried pages of obituaries.

I thought I'd assemble some short notes on the many similarities and the many differences between these two murderous plagues, just to clarify my own thinking.

SimilaritiesIf the current epidemic is intense where you live, I'm sure that you feel as if you are living in a war zone that is invisible to most of your fellow citizens. The gay film historian Vito Russo captured the feeling in 1988:

Living with AIDS is like living through a war which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches. Every time a shell explodes, you look around and you discover that you've lost more of your friends, but nobody else notices. It isn't happening to them. ... No one else seems to be noticing.

Occasionally mainstream media will send a reporter to look into your plight. Each epidemic had archetypal victims whose suffering served as the image of the malady: fags and Haitians with HIV; "left-behind" rural whites today. In each epidemic, there were others, usually poor and dark, caught up in the plague, but a textured human panorama was largely beyond the perceptual capacity of sensational, yet conventional, media. Most of these reporters mean well ... but I would not be surprised if their subjects end up feeling unseen.

In both epidemics, one of the most prominent people who was/is not noticing was/is the president of the United States. Ronald Reagan wouldn't even say "AIDS" for six years as the disease spread, until his buddy, the actor Rock Hudson, succumbed. Donald Trump mentions his epidemic and even appointed a commission to suggest action -- but has done nothing except try to take Obamacare away from people who need treatment for addiction.

And in both epidemics, society at large gawked at the dying and shielded themselves from the horror by believing that the sick people were at fault for their pain. AIDS is a disease, not a sin (we more or less know that now); opioid addiction is a disease (when will we figure that out?)

DifferencesWhen young gay men in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco started dying around 1979, nobody knew what was killing them. Medical researchers rather quickly realized that finding a cause (it turned out to be a retrovirus transmitted through sex and blood products) and inventing a vaccine (they didn't) might win the scientist who could claim success a Nobel prize (it hasn't). An ugly competition ensued between Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Institute of Health and Professor Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in France over who had identified HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) first.

It was not until the mid-1990s, that drug treatments were invented, making AIDs a longterm, chronic disease among affluent populations, though poor and marginalized (colored) people still die disproportionately if infected.

Nobody is wondering today what is making people addicted to opioids (pain pills, heroin, and fentanyl) and frequently to overdose. The trajectory of morphine dependency has been known for over a century. And there's not much fame or honor in treating addiction; doctors and others working in the field are still paid less than other health workers.

Because we do understand addiction, we also know a lot about how to treat it. Addiction changes human physiology; drug dependence is a physical condition with secondary mental, social, and emotional symptoms, not a sin. Like high-blood pressure or depression, there are longterm drug treatments that work. But the stigma of addiction (and the cost of treating "unworthy" patients) keeps these treatments unavailable to most addicts.

People with AIDS and their loved ones in the '80s and '90s sometimes came to their suffering with enough relative class, race and economic privilege so that they could fight for their lives, and by extension the lives of the less privileged. AIDS activism demanded research and treatments from sluggish governments and medical institutions. In particular, people with AIDS and their friends became very good at highlighting "innocent" victims -- hemophiliacs, children born with the virus, health workers exposed to infected blood -- whose very existence showed that this was a disease, not some mysterious curse on bad actors.

It's not yet clear what opioid addiction activism would look like. Being strung out is not conducive to protest, though neither is having a collapsing immune system. It's probably the loved ones, the families burying sons, daughters, husbands, and wives, who may emerge as the activists. But they'll have to get over the shame associated with addiction; many families just don't dare to talk about what hit them. Neither did those ornery fags in the '80s either, until speaking out came to seem a matter of life or death.

Sam Quinones' Dreamland gives hints of how opioid activism might emerge. One of the "gateways" to addiction in the heartland (everywhere?) is high school football; young men strive to overcome almost inevitable injuries and easily and "honorably" end up habituated to pills. A few parents have taken the lead in sounding the alarm after a child died of an overdose. And where did those pills and other drugs come from? Albany County (New York State) is suing big pharmaceutical companies for deceptive marketing of their pain killers. This kind of suit has not yet fared well, but this is the sort of effort for which activism can sometimes create a positive environment.

People caught up in the opioid epidemic need to find their version of Vito Russo's proud harangue:

Someday, the AIDS crisis will be over. Remember that. And when that day comes -- when that day has come and gone, there'll be people alive on this earth -- gay people and straight people, men and women, black and white, who will hear the story that once there was a terrible disease in this country and all over the world, and that a brave group of people stood up and fought and, in some cases, gave their lives, so that other people might live and be free.

***In addition to Dreamland, I would strongly encourage anyone wishing to understand the opioid epidemic to follow the journalism of German Lopez at Vox. Lopez has spent the last year learning and growing into this topic. This post would have come out long ago if I had't stopped to read it all -- and that was well worth my time.

Follow the marijuana light

Today, even before Attorney General Jefferson Davis Sessions relaunched the federal war on grass, Kos offered Democrats political advice.

If Democrats are smart, they will finally nationalize the pot issue, and its impact could spread through the entire map. The more young voters turn out, the bigger the Democratic landslide will be. And a great step toward making that happen would be full-throated Democratic support for full legalization at the federal level. Heck, leave it up to the states to decide for themselves! But the feds need to get out of the business of banning marijuana. And as far as political calculations go, there is little downside to Democrats. The public supports recreational legalization by 2-1 margins, and medicinal legalization by 9-1 margins or even higher. 

Yes. In the recent Alabama election, Doug Jones won under 45 voters by 28 percent. Let's turn 'em out. Thanks Jeff.

Friday cat blogging

Morty likes his carrot. No wonder, it is catnip filled.

This and that: presidents, hating Hillary, and asylum for queers

Oddments that don't warrant a full blog post but on which I will not resist commenting:

Happy New Year! Time to start speculating about 2020.
A Politico article Tuesday morning on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “below-the-radar moves that would put her in prime position to run for president” is just the latest example. Beyond Warren, there’s a lot of conjecture, naturally, on the Democratic side: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former Vice President Joe Biden lead in a hypothetical 2020 field, and have done nothing — as of yet — to quash any suspicions of possible runs.

Vox, January 3

Just stop it NOW! We have an ignorant maniac in power threatening nuclear war, and elections in November that provide our best chance of reining him in, and you want to gossip about potential 2020 candidates?

Besides, although if any of these three win the nomination in 2020 I'll work for them, they should all take themselves out of the running right now and help the Democratic Party accomplish a generational transition. The Silents and the Boomers are done. The future and the country belong younger citizens; we need a younger standard bearer.***
Then there's this from Jonah Goldberg a senior editor of the conservative National Review, who remains an anti-Trumper and tries to explain why most of his conservative peers have been assimilated by the Orange Cheato:

... people did not like Hillary Clinton. They just didn’t like her. And whatever you thought of Bill Clinton—Lord knows I wasn’t a fan—everyone could recognize his political skills. I mean, that guy, you could pull him off an intern, slap him with a flounder, and say, “Give me 45 minutes on intellectual property rights in the Third World,” and he could just go. Hillary Clinton’s idea of extemporaneous speaking was leaping from her prepared remarks to prepared notecards. She’s the lady who says no eating in the library. She was also seen as much more left wing than her husband. Fair or no.

But what Trump doesn’t understand, what Steve Bannon doesn’t understand, is that Donald Trump’s mandate was: Don’t be Hillary Clinton. He accomplished that on Day One. Some part of his brain understands that, which is why I guarantee you that in the last 48 hours, Donald Trump has tweeted something about Hillary Clinton. Sean Hannity has done some raging scandal about Hillary Clinton. Psychologically, one of the things these guys have to do to justify their support for Trump is to remind people constantly, “You could have had Hillary.”

Interview with the Atlantic's other Goldberg, Jan. 2

I've never managed to comprehend the depth and widespread hatred of Hillary Clinton. To me she was just another very imperfect, dangerously bellicose, Democratic politician. Not someone I loved, but not someone to feel serious animus toward. Yet apparently I failed to grasp something so powerful that it is one of the main props of Trump-adulation among Republicans, a force in itself alongside racism and sexism that Goldberg neglects to point out. The phrases I've emphasized highlight the sexist heart of their Hillary hate: she's the despised overbearing mother figure who tried to make them eat their veggies as unbridled little boys. Kind of pathetic actually. ***
And then there was this almost-good news nugget: in reporting for the New Yorker on the terrible tortures of gay people in Chechnya and the brave LGBT Russian network that is trying to help victims flee for their lives, Masha Gessen assembled a list of countries that DO treat physical threats to homosexuals as grounds for asylum.

In general, the U.S. has been one of the half-dozen countries that are reasonably likely to grant asylum to people persecuted on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity—a small subset of the very small number of countries that welcome asylum seekers at all. (Other countries in the select group that grant asylum to L.G.B.T. people include [Canada], South Africa, Belgium, Argentina, the Netherlands, and Sweden). For now, L.G.B.T. asylum seekers are still faring well in the U.S., but the application process takes years, and, with the Trump Administration reshaping this country’s immigration landscape, it’s hard to imagine this country welcoming many Muslim gay men, even when they are fleeing mortal danger.

I guess I'm just a jaded old lesbian. I would not have been surprised if there were no destinations for targets of this persecution.

A prescient warning of national weaknesses

I've occasionally been advised I could not consider myself properly educated if I haven't read some of the theologian and ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was a left-leaning, but anti-Communist, public intellectual who tried to explain this country to itself in the 1940s and '50s. He argued for "political realism" -- Barack Obama claimed Niebuhr's thought as a major influence. Though he's no household name, he left a substantial mark on U.S. culture by writing the Serenity Prayer popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous.

Back at the dawn of American empire, Niebuhr highlighted aspects of our national history and experience which made us suckers for launching dumb wars, a warning that feels completely current as that blustering ignoramus in the White House spouts threats against Korea and Iran.

... the European nations, more accustomed to the tragic vicissitudes of history, still have a measure of ... fear that our "technocratic" tendency to equate the mastery of nature with the mastery of history could tempt us to lose patience with the tortuous course of history. We might be driven to hysteria by its inevitable frustrations. We might be tempted to bring the whole of modern history to a tragic conclusion by one final and mighty effort to overcome its frustrations.

The political term for such an effort is "preventive war." ...

The power of such a temptation to a nation, long accustomed to expanding possibilities and only recently subjected to frustration, is enhanced by the spiritual aberrations which arise in a situation of intense enmity. The certainty of the foe's continued intransigence seems to be the only fixed fact in an uncertain future. Nations find it even more difficult than individuals to preserve sanity when confronted with a resolute and unscrupulous foe.

Hatred disturbs all residual serenity of spirit and vindictiveness muddles every pool of sanity. In the present situation even the sanest of our statesmen have found it convenient to conform their policies to the public temper of fear and hatred which the most vulgar of our politicians have generated or exploited. Our foreign policy is thus threatened with a kind of apoplectic rigidity and inflexibility. Constant proof is required that the foe is hated with sufficient vigor....

Nieubhr had our number, I fear, though some residual impulse toward modesty and sanity kept our rulers from initiating annihilation during the long years of Cold War.

Niebuhr's little volume, The Irony of American History, is available online as a .pdf and probably from every older library in the country. It is worth snagging. I am sure I'll find myself quoting further from it in the future.

When all else fails, clog the ballot

What's a California Republican to do? Their president sits at only 30 percent approval in the state. Most of our Republican Congress members just voted for a tax bill that transfers wealth to rich people at the expense of the working and middle classes, in part by stripping Californians of much of our ability to deduct state taxes from the federal levy. And then there are their statewide candidates: with our primary system which simply advances the top two vote-getters in June to the November vote, it is very likely that we'll see two Democratic candidates for governor and two for Senator in the fall campaign -- and thus no Republicans at all running for the most important offices.

GOPers are in a pickle, so they are resorting to a very Californian expedient: they are trying to change their electoral fortunes with a ballot initiative:

A measure hurtling toward the November 2018 ballot would repeal the 12-cent per gallon gasoline tax increase approved this past legislative session to pay for road repairs, bridge maintenance and some public transit. Granted, no one wants to pay more for gasoline. But potholes don’t fill themselves.

... [House Majority Leader Kevin] McCarthy, a guy who knows politics, dumped $100,000 into the initiative to repeal the gas tax. Rep. Mimi Walters, an Orange County Republican, and Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona, chipped in $50,000 each, recent campaign finance reports show.

... [Early] polling did give some faint hope to Republicans, at least in the short term. The proposed initiative to repeal the gasoline tax hike led with 52 percent of likely voters. That’s narrow, and a campaign against the measure could derail it. But 81 percent of Republicans support repeal. Therein lies an opportunity for McCarthy and Republican consultants to gin up turnout among GOP voters in a year when they could have few other reasons to show up to the polls.

Dan Morain, Sacramento Bee

A broad coalition of business, labor and local government leaders, including some Republicans, support this gas tax because we need the infrastructure work and see no other source from which to pay for it. Nothing about recent Congressional activity suggests California will be getting federal money.

This Republican initiative is not, on its face, likely to win: an initiative that starts with only 52 percent approval can be defeated with a cheap campaign against it -- unless sponsors want to throw millions into TV ads to pass it. It might even fail with all that advertising unless we have a recession. Will GOPers, who will be defending ten or so vulnerable Congressional seats, really want to waste cash on this venture? Not likely.

Gas tax repeal is just more initiative clutter for California voters to slog through.

Happy New Year!

I find myself looking forward, warily but hopefully, to the new year. The year past has been ugly: Trump and his Republican enablers have done their best to make this country less kind, less honest, and more fearful. They have done a lot of damage. I don't need to list it out here. And they will do more, until we the people remove them from power, power they will not surrender without experiencing thorough, widespread repudiation.

Through it all , resistance in 2017 never quit. We even had some notable successes in hamstringing the GOPer majority in Congress and in elections. And we are not going to give up on this country in 2018 either.

This is literally a matter of life and death for those who need healthcare, for immigrants and refugees, for workers, for everyone who is at all "non-standard" or who loves such persons, for women who strive to be whole people, all of us who need peace, justice and equality. That ought to amount to an overwhelming plurality of us all.

So we have to find ways to live in ongoing resistance without becoming overwhelmed or demoralized by a grinding struggle that is sure to contain set backs as well as high points.

Here are some ways I personally intend to weather the new year:

1) I will continue to make myself aware of and available to efforts to protect immigrants and refugees. Several times in the last year, I've joined others to pack immigration court rooms in support of people facing detention and deportation. We've even been part of winning a few reprieves. I will financially support a local nonprofit law firm that represents people in desperate need of assistance through the morass that is immigration law.

2) I will support and work for campaigns by Democrats who can win Congressional seats from Republicans in November. I will not be picky about candidates: we need people who want to win and who will help Democrats organize the House and Senate. (The latter body may be more than we can achieve, but from this moment, let's go for it.) I don't care if these Democrats have been Bernie bros or Hillary devotees. Some may be more to my liking than others, but this isn't a time for indulging our perennial intramural arguments. There will undoubtedly be candidates at other government levels who deserve support too.

3) Speaking up for international peace will matter in the new year. Cornered animals are dangerous and insofar as resistance hobbles the Trump-train, the crook-in-chief is likely to lash out. We know how hard it has been to curb the military enthusiasms of more conventional presidents. Hopefully some of the citizen skepticism and war-weariness left over from those struggles will persist in this dangerous time.

4) Community nurtures and requires nurturing. When collective decency seems under threat and institutions are failing, the connections we form with each other are sometimes our only ballast. This item is hard for me: I am inclined to solitary study and introversion. I am fortunate to belong to multiple communities and I know this year I need to appreciate and tend to all of them as I am able.

Fortunately, in the midst of the 2017 shit-show, I have repeatedly met creative resistance in unexpected quarters.

Just today, I mentioned to football-watching friends my enthusiasm for Stacy Abrams' campaign for governor of Georgia and came away with two checks for this superb politician running for office a continent away. Wow!

Millions of us are hungry for an outlet for our ongoing resistance. Where do you intend to focus your resistance in the coming year?

Goodbye 2017; goodbye Fred Downing

From Fred Downing, I learned that nothing can be cooked properly if it doesn't begin with onions and peppers. I learned that bad puns charmed some people, even if not me. I learned to set up a rudimentary shelter in the rain, dig latrines, chop wood, light fires, hike up mountains --- and, most of all, to organize others to perform these anachronistic skills efficiently enough so they enjoyed the experience. Whatever success I've had as a political and community organizer began with those lessons.

All that was a very long time ago, five decades in fact. Fred died this year at age 100.

He was a New Englander, at various times an executive of the Maine State Employees Association and director of the Vermont Civil Service. He served in the Navy during World War II, emerging a Lieutenant Commander. He was a guidance counselor in several Maine high schools and taught generations of young women at summer camps to live in the outdoors. For several memorable years in the late '60s, he dragged groups of us along on his quest to hike to all the 4000 foot high summits in New Hampshire; some of those were undistinguished little peaks, but I don't remember resenting his obsession. New things to see!

After retirement, Fred needed an outlet, so for seven years he created a program in computer literacy for inmates of the Kennebec County Jail. He took us to visit one time; this was truly Maine, the only jail I've ever seen with no visible black inmates.

After the death of his wife Judy Downing, Fred lived on for 12 years near his daughter in Pittsburgh, PA. He was an enthusiastic tour guide of his adopted home town. In the photo, that's Fred at age 97 pointing out the sights from the city's Mount Washington overlook.

On a visit some years back, I pointed out to him that I was approaching retirement age myself. He was almost indignant: "So what do you want to do with the rest of your life?" The end of particular jobs had never slowed him and he saw no reason it should slow me. Why I might have 30 or so more good years ...

As often before, he'd jarred my thinking. I blurted what came immediately to the top of my mind, "Go outside."

I've done a few other things and intend to do more, but ever since I've made sure to "go outside," whether running ultra-marathon distances, hiking in bucket list places, or walking the pilgrimage, the Camino de Santiago.

Thanks Fred, for all I learned from you. Through whatever pain came, you demonstrated how to live well.

Saturday scenes and scenery: around San Francisco 2017

We have a new skyline. The Salesforce dick towers over all. Read all about it.

The northern approach still runs across one of the world's most beautiful bridges. The Bay Bridge is grand, but this remains the "signature bridge".

I probably shouldn't post this since I treasure its solitary beauty, but barely south of our border, San Bruno Mountain sits alone.

Meanwhile the human environment persists in its quirks. I don't know what this is either. Maybe some kind of demented household god? There it was, perched on a city trash can.

We give ourselves advice, more and less sage, more and less welcome. (This hortatory billboard is no more, to be replaced with yet another glass and steel edifice.)

San Francisco -- still weird and a little wacky, despite our booming role as the tech capital on the Pacific Rim.

Back to watching football

After a season of not watching brilliant athletes risk their brains for my entertainment, the bowl season has drawn me in again. At the college level, these young men are so graceful, so smart in their particular accomplishments ... most of them will never get anything out of football but injuries and proud memories, but I relate to their passion for their peculiar game.

Meanwhile, the current generation of professional black athletes are carrying on proud traditions of standing up for themselves. This video history is well worth a quarter of an hour of your time.

The elephant in our midst

I guess I am one of those despised cosmopolitans that our rightwing nuts aim to purge from our U.S. collective life. It took a graph drawn by a former World Bank economist and explained by a British journalist to ground my understanding of what so many of my fellow citizens are so mad about that they've stuck us with a dangerous, ignorant egomaniac as president. This is what globalization means in our national life, stupid! (Phrasing stolen from James Carville.)

Explaining the impact of globalization on the societies which gave the planet the Industrial Revolution and mature capitalism is the mission of the first third of British journalist Edward Luce's The Retreat of Western Liberalism. The Washington correspondent of the Financial Times, Luce believes the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., and passage of Brexit in his country, demonstrate that Western democracy may have played out its string. Here's the chart that purports to show why:

The global median – the emerging middle classes of China, Vietnam, India and so on – enjoyed income growth of more than 80 per cent in those years. Even the bottom deciles, in Africa and South Asia, saw growth of up to 50 percent.

The key part of the elephant for the Western middle classes is where its trunk slopes downwards – between the seventy-fifth and ninetieth percentiles of the world’s population. These account for the majority of the West’s people. At their mid-point, incomes grew by a grand total of 1 per cent over the last three decades.

...The last part of the elephant is the tip of its trunk, which shoots straight upwards in a suitably celebratory posture. That is the global top 1 per cent. Their incomes have jumped by more than two-thirds over the same period.

For most of the planet's people, life has been getting better for a couple of decades. We should be happy about that; a world where a few enjoy outrageous wealth while masses starve is repugnant. And most people in the U.S. do live unimaginably more comfortably than our grandparents. But our prospects are no longer on an upward trajectory. The losers from globalization are the people who have been the foundation of liberal democracies in the U.S. and Western Europe.

Donald Trump, and his counterparts in Europe, did not cause the crisis of democratic liberalism. They are a symptom. ...The backlash of the West’s middle classes, who are the biggest losers in a global economy that has been rapidly converging, but still has decades to go, has been brewing since the early 1990s. In Britain we call them the ‘left-behinds’. In France, they are the ‘couches moyennes’. In America, they are the ‘squeezed middle’. A better term is the ‘precariat’ – those whose lives are dominated by economic insecurity. Their weight of numbers is growing. So, too, is their impatience. Barrington Moore, the American sociologist, famously said, ‘No bourgeoisie, no democracy.’ In the coming years we will find out if he was right.

... We are taught to think our democracies are held together by values. Our faith in history fuels that myth. But liberal democracy’s strongest glue is economic growth. When groups fight over the fruits of growth, the rules of the political game are relatively easy to uphold. When those fruits disappear, or are monopolised by a fortunate few, things turn nasty. ...We like to believe that our democracies are sustained by a shared commitment to principle. In some respects that is true. But when growth vanishes, our societies reveal a different face. Without higher growth, the return of racial politics looks set to continue.

... We cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination and economic globalisation.

Given the trajectory of the world we live in, that's a dire conclusion. And, as a good Financial Times correspondent, Luce doesn't even address the possibility that economic growth, that engine of relative social peace and heightened well-being for most humans, may be an existential threat to the sustainability of most contemporary life forms on our fragile planet, causing climate change and ecological collapse.

Luce brings historical imagination to our times and the result is not encouraging.

... the parallels between the world today and the world in 1914 should strike us forcefully. Then, as now, the world’s big economies were deeply intertwined. The decades preceding the First World War marked a peak of globalisation that the world economy only regained in the 1990s. Like today, people believed ever-deepening ties of commerce rendered the idea of war irrational. It was thus unthinkable. People had grown complacent after decades of peace.

... Can the West regain its optimism? If the answer is no – and most of the portents are skewing the wrong way – liberal democracy will follow. If the next few years resemble the last, it is questionable whether Western democracy can take the strain. People have lost faith that their systems can deliver. More and more are looking backwards to a golden age that can never be regained. When a culture stops looking to the future, it loses a vital force.

This lucid little book can be read, and understood, in about three hours. It is bracing -- an ice water bath, if you care about democracy and our troubled world. Yet even this determined "realist" can imagine unexpected sources of hope. Before being employed in Washington, he was for several years a correspondent in India. He is convinced, as everyone more observant than Donald Trump must be, that the center of international gravity -- economic and political power -- is shifting to Asia. And much to his surprise, he sees a "natural experiment" taking place on that continent. From personal observation, he is pretty sure that India, though currently lagging China, points to a more encouraging future vision:

So ingrained is India’s culture of noisy dissent and sheer pluralism that I would rate democracy as now safer in India than in parts of the West.

Perhaps both the English language and democracy have their future in the sub-continent. So much for the raj indeed. History is funny that way.

Common ground in Alabama

Joe Trippi is taking a well deserved star turn, basking in deserved applause for having served as the chief media strategist on Democrat Doug Jones' winning campaign for the Senate in Alabama. If the name is familiar, you've probably been attending to politics for awhile. Trippi's prior claim to fame was using the internet (before the prominence of social media at that) to mobilize and fund Howard Dean's anti-Iraq war insurgent campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. You better believe, he's back, all over. (See for example here and here.)

It's always hard to know how much sound campaign management contributes to any election. The fraction of any electorate in any race that can be moved either to vote rather than abstain, or to change sides, is almost always minuscule. Campaigns are playing around the margins in any particular race and probably most of them have very little effect except to line the pockets of TV station ad managers and a few consultants. But any campaign operative who comes out of (relative) anonymity to participate in an unexpected win will spin a fascinating story which may even contain lessons for other contests.

Ezra Klein has delivered a heaping serving of Trippi's elixir on his podcast and, somewhat unusually, published an abridged transcript concurrently. This is high quality political junkie candy (even more so on the full podcast) and legitimately thought provoking.

Trippi has a clear story of what happened in Alabama. According to the campaign's polling, once crackpot Judge Roy Moore won the Republican primary, the race was always close.

The day before the Washington Post story came out, we were behind by 1 point, 46 to 45. And the day before the election, we were ahead in our own survey by 2 points. We ended up winning by 1.8. ...We'll never know if we could've won without the allegations. But we had a dead heat before that, and it was all based on their understanding of who Roy Moore was. Alabama knew who he was. And Doug Jones was the guy who took on the Klan, and wanted justice for everybody, and wanted to find common ground. We were in a dead heat in Alabama the day before the Washington Post story. We ended up winning a dead heat in Alabama on election day.

It wasn't only the accusations of about Moore hitting on teenage girls the turned off Alabamans; the Republican was a known bad actor, a racist, a scofflaw who had robbed a Christian charity to enrich himself. The sex charges and Trump's subsequent endorsement may have made the race more tribal and moved it a little toward Moore according to the Jones polling.

In the interview, Trippi keeps repeating the mantra he thinks was Jones' winning message: Jones' promise to try to (re)create "common ground." Other interviewers translate Trippi's postmortem as suggesting Jones spoke for "bipartisanship" or "compromise" but though those words come close in meaning, Trippi always repeats the language "common ground." I am sure the phrase is poll tested and voter approved. Here's how he says it served Jones' campaign, as well as representing Jones' actual position.

I think the big question mark in our heads as we were arguing for common ground was what do rank-and-file Democrats do when they see this? Do we somehow deenergize those people who really are appalled by what's going on with Trump? Again, we're monitoring everything, and what happened was Republican women started to move to us, younger Republicans started to move to us, and the intensity among Democrats didn't diminish; in fact, over time, it kept building and building.

So what I'm saying is in Alabama, we pulled that off. Trump's creating energy among the Democratic base that wants to come out and wants to make the change and wants to do something to fight back against what's happening. At the same time, he's creating enough chaos and divisiveness and hostility that Republicans who would never ordinarily vote for a Democrat say, "Okay, well I've got all the chaos and hostility I can handle right now. I'll vote for somebody who wants to try to find common ground and get things done for me, even if they're a Democrat." And trust me, a lot of people in Alabama had to do that.

Trippi does point out that Jones didn't have to survive a Democratic primary which might have surfaced divisions among Democrats. Not many nominees will be that lucky. However, a message that the people of this country need to remove obstacles (Trump and Republicans) to search for "common ground" might be more popular than some might think.

In talking with Klein (even more in the audio than in the transcript), Trippi focuses on the turn that voters of all races and genders who are under 45 made to the Dems.

It was African Americans, women, and people under 45. And you want to know how breathtaking that move is? Think about this. Barack Obama, nationwide, won under-45s, I think, by 14 points, 15 points. Hillary Clinton won them by 14. In Alabama, Doug Jones won them by 28 points.

This is vital. We are living through a generational transition among the electorate of which Trump and his tame tribe of GOPers nostalgics for white supremacy are on the shrinking side. Their whole politic consists of yelling "STOP!" to a changing country. They are doing their best to get in the way, but they are also losing their majority inexorably. If Dems can offer a plausible future to an emerging generation, Dems win.

I can think of several points that Trippi does not emphasize that certainly were relevant to Jones' victory. Moore ran a lousy, incoherent campaign. Jones had 10 times as much money. Although TV is having measurably less and less influence on elections, it can't have hurt that Jones pretty much had the airwaves to himself. Trippi does credit the TV ads for raising up Jones' biography in the African American community.

Tripp does not explicitly credit the fact that Democratic Party infrastructure barely exists in Alabama with helping Jones -- but Party weakness probably did contribute to his victory. Ossified Party leaders would often prefer to retain their historic control rather than innovating to win. The Jones campaign acquired its own voter data and forged its own relationships with extra-political party leadership in churches and community organizations. It's pretty clear that these sorts of connections, including through the NAACP and other Black groups, were what drove African American turnout. I'm sure it helped that the Jones campaign had either its own money or friendly donors who could throw some cash to these efforts.

The next round in ongoing efforts by Democrats to wrench the country back comes up in a Congressional district in the Pittsburgh suburbs on March 13. It's not promising territory, but neither was Alabama. Stay tuned.

Image via AL.com

Democracy is happening in Liberia

The African nation of Liberia goes to the polls today to elect a new president, a successor to termed out incumbent Ellen Johnson Sirleaf who brought some measure of peace and honesty to a country trashed by civil war. Liberian-American journalist Helene Cooper's Madame President recounts the improbable history of the woman whose departure from office may -- or may not -- mark this conflicted society's improbable peaceful democratic transition of power.

The election process has not been completely smooth. By law, the new president has to win over 50 percent, so an October voting round cut a large field of candidates down to the two with the most votes. (If this seems strange, this is exactly how California's top-two primary and general election system works; we just don't tend to think about it this way.) One of the eliminated candidates claimed there had been fraud, so Liberia's courts postponed the final vote, originally scheduled for November. But today the election is finally on.

The two candidates are George Weah, a former soccer star who lost twice against Sirleaf and Sirleaf's vice-president Joseph Boakai, who she has not endorsed. It's difficult for remote observers to know what a victory by either candidate would mean.

According to Global News Network Liberia, the U.S. State Department is warning our nationals of possible violence. These days it is hard to judge whether the State Department knows anything much about local conditions, what with the mass attrition among experienced foreign service workers under our current regime. They may be just spewing quasi-racist hot air -- or publicizing an accurate concern. Time will tell.

Last spring the Gallup polling company asked Liberians whether their country could achieve a peaceful election. Liberians where absolutely clear about their expectations: 86% were confident the contest would be peaceful.

The drawdown of the U.N. force and the lack of a tradition of peaceful, democratic transition in the country could have explained uncertainty over the country's elections. However, 86% of Liberians said the elections would be peaceful, and 68% said it would be "somewhat" or "very" unlikely that the vote would plunge the country back into violence. Liberians' optimism proved true for the first round of elections, with only isolated incidents of violence reported.

Let's hope Liberians can pull off the peaceful transition they clearly hope for. I'll update this post when the dust settles in the next few days or weeks.

UPDATE December 30: George Weah won 61.5 of the vote, his opponent conceded, and the country seems likely to achieve a peaceful transition of power.

Christ is born

Utah artist Brian Kershisnik painted "Nativity" in 2006 while teaching at Brigham Young University. The work is 8 feet tall and 17 feet wide.

I love his vision of a "river" of accompanying and observing angels, though I might feel more comfortable if they seemed a bit less "white." Kershisnik spoke with Deseret News:

All the angels in the painting are of varied age, gender and appearance. Some are wondering. Some are interested. Some are weeping. Some are upset. Some are there for protection while others are there to witness the event.

“It occurs to me that even though this event is prophesied, even though everything depends on this, that at the moment when it is actually underway that there would be some anxiety about knowing the stature of this being that has just been compressed into this mortal, human infant,” Kershisnik said.

Joseph is not so "white." And he seems overwhelmed -- blown away by the miracle he's somehow a part of. The two women gazing at the baby are the "midwives," a kindly addition to the story.

Kershisnik also writes:

Only the dog can see the glorious river of angels. The mortals depicted, like us, are understandably and rightly distracted with the quotidian tasks at hand.

... Certainly the epic drama of redemption is far from over, but the message to me is this: He came. He came. Thank God, He came.

And there is still no room at the inn ...

Donald Trump doesn't think much of the United Nations. Like people in so many countries in the world afflicted with terrible governance, citizens of the U.S. need the U.N.'s aspirational human rights framework to ground our efforts to critique and cajole our rulers to uphold a universal vision of a just and peaceful world.

In December, Professor Philip Alston, a feisty Australian human rights lawyer who serves as the current U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights toured this country in December. He couldn't go everywhere, but concluded his visit with a lot to say. San Francisco was one of his stops. Here are some excerpts describing what he saw:

The United States is one of the world’s richest, most powerful and technologically innovative countries; but neither its wealth nor its power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty.

... I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to...

I also saw much that is positive.  I met with State and especially municipal officials who are determined to improve social protection for the poorest 20% of their communities, I saw an energized civil society in many places, I visited a Catholic Church in San Francisco (St Boniface – the Gubbio Project) that opens its pews to the homeless every day between services ...

Successive administrations, including the present one, have determinedly rejected the idea that economic and social rights are full-fledged human rights, despite their clear recognition not only in key treaties that the US has ratified (such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination), and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which the US has long insisted other countries must respect.  But denial does not eliminate responsibility, nor does it negate obligations. 

International human rights law recognizes a right to education, a right to healthcare, a right to social protection for those in need, and a right to an adequate standard of living.  In practice, the United States is alone among developed countries in insisting that while human rights are of fundamental importance, they do not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable healthcare, or growing up in a context of total deprivation. ...

In many cities, homeless persons are effectively criminalized for the situation in which they find themselves.  Sleeping rough, sitting in public places, panhandling, public urination (in cities that provide almost zero public toilets) and myriad other offences have been devised to attack the ‘blight’ of homelessness.  Ever more demanding and intrusive regulations lead to infraction notices, which rapidly turn into misdemeanors, leading to the issuance of warrants, incarceration, the incurring of unpayable fines, and the stigma of a criminal conviction that in turn virtually prevents subsequent employment and access to most housing.  Yet the authorities in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco often encourage this vicious circle. ...

[On combating poverty using "new information technologies"]
... Much more attention needs to be given to the ways in which new technology impacts the human rights of the poorest Americans. This inquiry is of relevance to a much wider group since experience shows that the poor are often a testing ground for practices and policies that may then be applied to others. These are some relevant concerns.

A coordinated entry system (CES) is, in essence, a system set up to match the homeless population with available homeless services. Such systems are gaining in popularity and their human rights impact has not yet been studied extensively. I spoke to a range of civil society organizations and government officials in Los Angeles and San Francisco about CES.

... A homeless service caseworker or volunteer interviews a homeless individual using a survey called the Vulnerability Index-Service Priority Decision Assistance Tool (VI-SPDAT) ... A first, and major, concern is that the VI-SPDAT survey asks homeless individuals to give up the most intimate details of their lives. Among many other questions, the VI-SPDAT survey requires homeless individuals to answer whether they engage in sex work, whether they have ever stolen medications, how often they have been in touch with the police and whether they have “planned activities each day other than just surviving that bring [them] happiness and fulfillment”. One researcher I met with who has interviewed homeless individuals that took the VI-SPDAT survey explained that many feel they are giving up their human right to privacy in return for their human right to housing.

A civil society organization in San Francisco explained that many homeless individuals feel deeply ambivalent about the millions of dollars that are being spent on new technology to funnel them to housing that does not exist. According to some of my interlocutors, only a minority of those homeless individuals being interviewed actually acquire permanent housing, because of the chronic shortage of affordable housing and Section 8 housing vouchers in California. As one participant in a civil society town hall in San Francisco put it: “Computers and technology cannot solve homelessness”.

You can read the whole report at this link. It's only about five pages and easy to understand. Now if only we could do something about its findings.

On this Christmas eve, blessed be all those who suffer from our indifference and all those who strive to overcome that indifference.

Christmas kitsch

This and that from here and there.

The great American Consumption Holiday is upon us.

For the record: what we know right now about Trump/Russia

Amid the rumors that the Great Cheato is about to try to scuttle the Robert Mueller's investigation into his campaign and transition staffs' extra-legal undertakings, it can't hurt to have a succinct summary of what has already leaked out into public knowledge:

Because Mueller is inexorable, the desperation in Trump world is palpable. We know that senior officials in the Trump campaign wanted to collude with the Russians in order to influence the election. (Donald Trump Jr. has admitted meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 to get damaging information on Hillary Clinton.) We know that Russian intelligence had the means to influence the election, hacked from a variety of sources. We know that Trump officials tried to conceal their contacts with the Russians, while seeking policy changes favorable to Russian interests. We know (on the credible testimony of a former FBI director) that President Trump tried to shut the investigation of these matters down. And it is a good bet that Mueller knows far more about all of this than we do.

The source is of this paragraph is Micheal Gerson of the Washington Post, "a top aide to President George W. Bush as assistant to the president for policy and strategic planning." Not exactly the sort of guy who one might expect to be dishing on a Republican president -- any more than the Republican FBI guy Mueller is such a person.

I'm not one who thinks the Mueller investigation is going to bring Trump down; his acts against the interests and desires of the people of the United States are going to do that, sooner or later. But this is what we know now.

Friday cat blogging

Rousing the humans to open cat food cans is hard work. Morty resumes his beauty sleep, blending in with the bed clothes after he has moved the people out of his way.

A GOPer misconception

Republicans who expect their new tax bill to be popular may be in for a surprise. Taxpayers won't really know what hit them -- or didn't -- until tax season 2019. Our 2017 taxes will have to be figured out and paid under the old rules. It's only the following year that the changes will kick in. What will we observe then?

Consider this poll question:

"In general, do you think [tax changes have] increased taxes for most Americans, decreased taxes for most Americans or have they kept taxes the same for most Americans?"

The answer:

• 24 percent of respondents said they INCREASED taxes.
  

• 53 percent said they kept taxes the same

• And 12 percent said taxes were decreased.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of a tax cut there.

The thing is, those were the answers we gave in February 2010 after then-President Obama insisted in his State of the Union speech that 95 percent of working families had received a tax cut by way of the economic stimulus bill.

And he wasn't lying. According to Politifact:

Under the stimulus bill, single workers got $400, and working couples got $800.

Nonetheless, a very substantial majority believed either their taxes had gone up or nothing had happened. We don't like taxes, we don't like to think about them, we find the process of calculating our tax burden impenetrable (and it is), and for many, taxes always feel as if they are to going up, even when they are not.

The Republican tax bill is massively unpopular now, because the only specific that people have understood about it is that it's benefits go mostly to corporations and people who are already very rich. In particular, even though the President says differently, most of us understand it to will funnel millions to the Trump family.

And meanwhile, 73 percent of us still think we ought to be able to see Trump's tax returns. The Cheato still refuses to release them, so there is no reason to believe his claim that this law he wanted so much isn't a big gift to his own bottom line.

Rally for DREAM Act outside Senator Feinstein's office today

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

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