What it is really like to work on a campaign: wide and also deep?

A nugget from Erudite Partner's article about organizing in the UniteHERE-sponsored election campaign in Reno this fall:

Organizing absolutely requires talking to people who’d rather be left alone, about things they’d probably rather not think about. But I’d probably state it differently: organizing requires skillful conversations that help people to consider carefully what they do want and that show them how they can work with other people to get it. Organizing is not so much a practice of convincing people to act against their own interests and desires as it is one of motivating people to identify those interests and desires – and to go for them.

Read it all here.

History, politics, elections and getting from here to there

Jill Lepore is a Harvard historian and New Yorker magazine writer whose new book, These Truths: A History of the United States, is receiving a lot of current attention. This post is not about that one. I'll get to it soon enough: I'm currently sitting at request number #109 for 62 copies at the San Francisco Public Library.

But today I want to muse on a short introductory passage from an earlier Lepore volume. In The Story of America: Essays on Origins she writes:

Politics involves elections and votes and money and power, but the heart of politics is describing how things came to be the way they are in such a way that you know how to make things the way they ought to be.

This is curious, and worth pondering, because it reveals how much politics has in common with history. Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationship between the past and the present. It's what history and politics share -- a vantage on the past -- that makes writing the history of politics fraught. And it's what they don't share that makes the study of history vital. Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence.

I find myself asking: is this true? and if not entirely true, what parts are true?

Actually working in our current partisan tribal politics does little to confirm the idea that politics is about successfully describing how we might get from where we are to a potentially better future. The broad mass of voters who don't focus on politics, elections, and government on a daily basis, neither have a very firm sense of where we sit now nor any articulated thoughts on where we ought to go. I'm not saying they are dumb. Rather their knowledge does not consist of information so much as feelings. They mostly can't tell you who their Congressperson is nor what a Governor does. But, if listened to, they can tell you whether they feel good about their lives as they are and, sometimes but not always, who they blame for the impediments to good lives they experience. Grievance comes relatively easily, but does not automatically lead to much of a sense of what might be more desirable. Nor does it lead to action to move somewhere else. Most people, especially most infrequent voters, don't understand themselves as part of, or actors within, a story that leads from somewhere in the past to some future which they are contributing to shaping.

That said, I agree with Lepore that democratic (small "d") politics is about people adopting a picture of their own past that might imply the possibility of a desired future. But experience makes me skeptical that this has much to do with "opinion" (or information.) It seems rather to be about feelings whose potency waxes and wanes -- and which politicians and other political actors strive to bend to their purposes, whether purely selfish or less so.

That "history is accountable to evidence" is the precept I try to live by. It's very demanding. All our impressions of what went before are shaped by the times and currents within which we live. To take the obvious contemporary example which is causing some consternation and often panic among white people in the United States, as we become a "majority minority" (absurd locution) country, we are forced to notice that our history consists in great part of conquering white tribes inflicting death and exploitation on people of color within our expanding boundaries. We also, gradually and haltingly, have pursued a vision that all people were created equal. But faithfulness to evidence requires that we stare at our exclusion of and indifference to laboring people, most women, and people that whites have defined as "different" by race throughout that history.

Faithfulness to evidence when looking at the past can hurt. It can also inspire. Each era creates its own unstable balance....Lepore's Essays on Origins are fun. She skewers campaign biographies, tries to resurrect the anti-slavery influence of what we read as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's insipid patriotic verse, and gives us a glimpse of Thomas Paine's radical essence which has confined him to the status of a "lesser Founder." Of particular delight to me is the essay "Rock, Paper, Scissor" which explores the tumultuous history of election mechanics and voting in the 19th century. All highly recommended.

This still amazes: we just wasted 'em

Must be noted: more vet suicides than Iraq deaths since 2003:

The latest Pentagon statistics on suicides in all service branches, combined with previously-released data compiled by the San Antonio Express-News, brought the total to 4,839 for the years 2003 through 2015. In the same period, 4,496 American were lost serving in Iraq.

Via Thomas Ricks. This is not new news, but it still shocks.

If not "rides to the polls," perhaps try "ballot harvesting"?

In a post here about "rides to the polls" as a means to increase turnout among infrequent voters, I wondered how this would work when most, or all, voting moved to vote by mail. It would be hard to replicate the immediacy and convenience of just coaxing the hesitant or reluctant voter into the car and driving to the polling place.

California GOPer election consultants, smarting from losing seven Congressional seats in the state to energized Democrats, think the Dems have figured this out.

Some Republicans have cast a skeptical eye on Democrats’ use of “ballot harvesting” to boost their support. The idea’s backers say it’s just one of several steps California has taken to enable more people to vote.

Few people noticed when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the changes in AB1921 into law two years ago. In the past, California allowed only relatives or people living in the same household to drop off mail ballots for another voter. The new law allowed anyone, even a paid political campaign worker, to collect and return ballots — “harvesting” them, in political slang.

... For Democrats, the ballot harvesting was all part of a greater effort to get out the vote from their supporters, particularly from occasional voters.

“We beat Republicans on the ground, fair and square,” said Katie Merrill, a Democratic consultant deeply involved in November campaigns. “Many of the field plans included (ballot harvesting) as an option to deliver voters or their ballots” to the polls.

John Wildermuth and Tal Kopan, SF Chronicle

This account leaves me with all sorts of questions. In California, voters still have to ask, opt in, to vote by mail. Does this tactic require a first contact to encourage the infrequent voter to do that first step? Then, do county registrars post lists of who has been sent a vote-by-mail ballot so campaigns can track down who hasn't cast that mail ballot? (Probably yes, but how fast and how accurately may be an issue.) Then can canvassers achieve contact with the target voter in order to encourage her to mark her ballot? Can that voter find the ballot that turned up along with her junk mail? Will the voter be willing to turn over her ballot to some campaign to mail? (Probably quite a few will; the willingness of people to do this even in Nevada where vote-by-mail is rare surprises me.)

Republicans seem to attribute the deluge of late vote-by-mail ballots that turned many contests toward Dems to campaigns turning in "harvested" ballots late. But why would campaigns hold these until the last minute? It would seem to make more sense to just get them in as they were collected -- to drop them off at the country registrar office if that would be the only way to turn them in.

Any readers who were active in California campaigns -- can you comment on whether you collected mail ballots or were at least were instructed to try to do so? How did the mechanics work?

Friday cat blogging

Panther is probably pleased that his human servant is home from the hospital. But like most self-respecting cats, he doesn't let on much, merely performing his job by being beautiful.

A vote counting anachronism

So, as the SF Chronicle puts it, "Dem rout of CA GOP nearly complete ..." Challenger T.J. Cox is claiming victory in CA-21, the central San Joaquin Valley congressional seat that has long tantalized Democrats. The Dems have enjoyed a 17 point advantage in party registrations, yet couldn't close the deal until now. The incumbent GOPer David Valadao ran up a several thousand vote lead on election day, but has now fallen what is thought to be impossibly far behind in votes still being counted.

So why does it take California so long to finish counting the ballots?

Partly this is because state law encourages us to vote by mail and allows ballots postmarked by election day to be included in the tally. State law also encourages voters who encounter to questions about their ballots to cast a "provisional" vote -- and these too must be checked out by county registrars to complete the count. And so the painstaking process can take a few weeks ... all that seems a good thing.

But I find myself wondering about whether a significant social change may be eroding a main means by which ballots in these long counts are verified. The League of Women Voters explains:

Your signature must match the signature on your voter registration application form.

And there's the question: Who in our contemporary world is accustomed to using a replicable, readily recognizable signature?

I had to "sign" a receipt and a medical release form yesterday, both times on a tablet. One result looked like this:

This actually does vaguely resemble what I suspect is on my 1993 voter reg form: it clearly has two parts and, just maybe, the initial letter is a "J". But by the standards of previous times, it is hardly a "signature." When my mother first introduced me to having a tiny bank account (high school I think), I was taught to write a careful cursive signature -- after all, the bank would be verifying checks. Does anyone teach that these day? I doubt it. Why should they? A squiggle will do for nearly all transactions requiring a "signature".

Verifying voters through signatures is becoming a dying -- almost dead -- means of validating votes. I wonder what the California Secretary of State has in mind for updating this. There has to be a better way.

A righteous call-out

I wasn't sure this was real, but best I can discover, it is. The United Methodist Building is the only non-governmental structure on Capital Hill in DC. An earlier iteration of the sign read "I was a stranger and you ripped my child from me ... wait a second ..." according to The Hill.

I finally know the name of my kind

It turn out there's a label for how I, and a lot of other San Franciscans, go through life in our multi-lingual city. I'm a receptive multilingualist. That is, I understand a very substantial amount of Spanish and often hold conversations in which the other party speaks Spanish and I communicate in English. I'd feel better about myself if I could manage to actually speak Spanish, but I'm happy I can often get by pretty effectively, as the Spanish speakers I interact with also seem to be.

Can't say I have any of that capacity in any of the Asian and other languages spoken here, but it's not rare at all to come across Asian-language natives who understand Spanish as well as English.

If curious about how this works, read about an Australian island where nine different languages are spoken and widely understood, but no one is giving up their own tongue to talk with speakers of other languages. We're an amazing species generating amazing cultures.

When San Franciscans take to the streets ...

When I went looking for an image appropriate to musing on the George Moscone/Harvey Milk murders that took place 40 years ago today, this photo from "Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images" grabbed my attention. It shows San Franciscans expressing their horror and grief marching down Market St. from the Castro district to City Hall.

I don't remember where I was when I learned that someone, rapidly revealed to be ex-cop and ex-Supervisor Dan White, had killed the progressive mayor and the flamboyantly gay and populist legislator. I do remember that the murders came about a week after the Jonestown atrocity -- the murder/suicide of some 400, mostly poor and black people, from the Bay Area under the orders of cult leader Jim Jones. That horror I learned about from overhearing a radio broadcast in Thriftown, the still-extant Mission Street source of winter clothing in a chilly November. The enormity of what had gone down left everyone stunned.

I don't remember whether I was a part of that doleful march after the assassinations. Both dead politicians had been symbols of hope for better days for many. Moscone represented the city's long immigrant labor tradition which had made the place a union stronghold through the 1930s and 40s. Yet he'd made common cause with the city's newer populations -- Blacks migrated from the South, immigrants, and the upstart gay community. He came out of the city's tradition of Catholic social justice activism; he intervened for the Martin de Porres Catholic Worker community when the health department wanted to shut down our anarchic feeding operation. (Nancy Pelosi still carries a whiff of that San Francisco tradition.) Milk was, of course, the gay leader who had personified resistance to a mean-spirited California ballot initiative to bar gays and lesbians from teaching and our friends among educators from even putting in a good word about us. (We won that round.)

And so, people responded to the Moscone/Milk murders by taking to streets. If I wasn't at the pictured march, I certainly was at several in days after. I know I was there for what came to be called the "White Night Riots" in May 1979 when thousands besieged City Hall after a jury failed to convict Dan White for murder. Marchers torched police cars and police smashed up a bar in the Castro that night.

Thinking back on those days, I realize how deeply taking to the streets in moments of horror is part of the culture of this city. We took to the streets when President Reagan feinted at military intervention against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. We marched night after night against George H.W. Bush's Gulf War for Kuwaiti oil sheiks. We marched for days after the cops who beat Rodney King were acquitted; San Francisco was placed under a state of emergency and curfew.

More recent marches, against Bush II's Iraq invasion for example, were usually more structured events, implicitly if not directly permitted by city leaders. The great immigrants marches of 2006 also had that quality, but involved new participants. The culture of taking to the streets without permission to cry out at injustice and acquiescence in horrors still lives here, under a more regulated surface. In recent years, bits of it have shown up in response to killings by the SFPD.

And most notably, San Franciscans, mostly young, mostly not veterans of those previous outpourings, marched night after night in response to Donald Trump's election in 2016.

So what? People march a lot. Big deal. But think about it: all these eruptions presaged political organizing which has changed society (queers are just well-integrated 'Murricans these days), the empire can no longer conduct wars that lead to US casualties, Latinx power is growing -- and agonized people managed to goose the Democratic Party into a force which just yielded a blue wave. Let's keep marching and keep organizing San Francisco. That's how to remember George and Harvey.

Migration is what people do when just slogging on becomes intolerable

U.S. juries have agreed our authorities can shoot people through the Mexican border.

In our outrage about Trump's Border Patrol teargassing rowdy asylum seekers near San Diego, this should not get lost:

PHOENIX -- An Arizona jury [last week] acquitted a U.S. Border Patrol agent of manslaughter in the shooting of a Mexican teen through a border fence, sparking a protest in downtown Tucson following the second loss for federal prosecutors in the second trial over the 2012 killing. Jurors in Tucson found Lonnie Swartz not guilty of involuntary manslaughter but didn't come to a decision on voluntary manslaughter.

The verdict comes months after Swartz was acquitted of second-degree murder by another jury that had deadlocked on manslaughter charges, allowing prosecutors to pursue the case again.

Border Patrol agents are rarely criminally charged for using force. But the killing of 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez sparked outrage on both sides of the border and came at a time when the agency was increasingly scrutinized for its use of force.

NBC news

So long as intolerable conditions persist in Central America, people will keep on coming. Any of us would if our loved ones were being murdered and simply living was no longer possible. The tiny chance that we might luck into asylum would look better than sticking around to be slaughtered. Without more law and more justice in Central America, the flow of desperate people isn't going to stop.

Another residue of World War One

This Sunday is a hinge in the Christian calendar, the end of the long season of "ordinary time," all those Sundays "after Pentecost" that stretch on through summer and fall (in the northern hemisphere.) The Sunday that precedes the new year and season of Advent is labeled "Christ the King."

I don't remember encountering Christ the King Sunday in the very Protestant Episcopal American-nationalist congregation I was raised in during the 1950s. Maybe our clerics didn't truck with no monarchs, proud that their insurrectionist forebears had dispensed with the English king -- this despite a strong undercurrent of Anglophilia. Or perhaps they thought the feast was just a Roman Catholic innovation. In the latter, they were right.

Christ the King Sunday entered the calendar as a papal response to the horrors of World War I in Europe and its aftermath. Chris Gehrz explains.

... the 20th century notion of dedicating one Sunday each autumn to Christ the King emerged out of the Catholic Church’s ongoing wrestling with the worst war to that point in European history.

... One month into that war, Benedict XV began his papacy. Protestant leaders in England and Germany didn’t shy away from the language of holy war, but the new pope — spiritual leader of millions on both sides — was horrified ...

That pope's successor, Pius XI, remained horrified, perhaps more attuned than leaders of Northern Europe to the reality that in Central Europe the carnage didn't end.

In the midst of a “dense fog of mutual hatreds and grievances,” Pius declared the aim of his papacy to be “the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Christ by peace in Christ.” In the 1925 encyclical Quas Primas, he reiterated that “as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations. Men must look for the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ…”

Hence the need for “a special feast in honor of the Kingship of Christ.”

Emphasizing the royal attributes of Jesus was a telling choice for the decade after WWI. When better to reflect on a kingdom “that shall never be destroyed, and shall stand for ever” (Dan 2:44) than in the aftermath of a war that toppled four royal dynasties? But by the same token, placing special emphasis on the kingship of Jesus also suggested the nervousness of a religious hierarchy that had long relied on earthly kings to hold back forces of secularization.

... Pius thought that the new feast would “provide an excellent remedy for the plague which now infects society. We refer to the plague of anti-clericalism…” Most notably, the world war sparked a revolution in Russia that replaced a devoutly Christian monarch with the “Red nightmare” of the “atheistic and bolshevistic Communism” that Pius later warned “aims at upsetting the social order and at undermining the very foundations of Christian civilization.” But 1917 also saw Mexico adopt a new constitution containing several articles directly aimed at limiting the influence of the Catholic Church. (Seven years earlier, the overthrow of Portugal’s monarchy had ushered in a similar wave of anticlerical reforms.)

Instituting Christ the King Sunday didn't discernibly turn back the tide of popular repudiation of ancient hierarchies. But putting it in the Church calendar does offer sophisticated preachers a chance to reflect on the central Christian paradox of a God who willingly gives up dominion in order to participate in the suffering of God's creation -- as our new priest-in-charge at Saint John the Evangelist ably did this morning.

Dems in disarray for today ...

Another day, another article reporting that that the newcomers in the Dem Congressional caucus are making some other pols nervous.

The great threat? These newbies might break a terrible taboo.

Nothing, though, puts the unity of the Democratic caucus at risk as much as a recent pledge from Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib to primary other members of Congress. ...

This -- trying forcefully to bring colleagues into line with progressive policies -- is what President Obama at the height of his powers in 2008 refused to do. Sailing into office with a popular movement at his back (anyone remember Organizing For Obama?) the new president refused to turn activists loose on members of his own party who stood in the way of progressive policies on health care, climate change, and labor rights.

Obama began his term forgetting that his power derived from aroused people. He flunked the politics of his situation. Many bad things followed, including demobilized people, the 2010 wipe out in state elections, and collapse of local Democratic Party organizations.

Can contemporary Democratic leaders learn to tolerate creative intra-party friction that keeps people engaged? The lesson of the moment is that when more people get mobilized, more of them then vote. When more people vote, progressive advocates win. I fear efforts to reimpose a stable "politics as usual," more than I fear continued ferment. Insurrectionists better not be assholes, but so far, that's not what is happening.

Do something: this is about paying our blessings forward

The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

Leviticus 19:34 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Over this weekend of Thanksgiving -- our holiday of gratitude for good fortune -- I received urgent appeals from three organizations that I think we can take as representing offspring of the Abrahamic family tree (though I'm sure each would insist on the non-sectarian character of their public services.) CAIR-Bay Area, Jewish Community and Family Services-East Bay, and Faith in Action-Bay Area weren't asking for money (though I am sure any and all of them can use a little cash.)

They were asking me to utilize the privilege and obligation of citizenship to oppose a new policy of further cruelty toward immigrants. Our white nationalist rulers cannot implement their latest moral outrage without soliciting public comments. We are urged to make those comments, even if we doubt they'll do any good.

FiF-BA explained succinctly what the administration is up to:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently issued a proposed rule changing the definition of what it means to be a “public charge.” Under the proposed rewrite of “public charge,” DHS could deny a green card or even initiate deportation for anyone “who is likely at any time to use or receive one or more public benefits.”  This proposal would otherize green card applicants and their dependents. It doesn’t just include a laundry list of new possible benefits received (from Medicaid, SNAP, nutrition assistance, and Housing benefits) but even includes benefits applied for. 

An expanded unnecessary change in the public charge definition means that many immigrant families will be forced to choose between using essential public assistance needed to keep their family healthy, or the opportunity to receive or maintain their legal immigration status.  Many immigrants are already unenrolling from vitally needed services out of fear of this proposed rule.  This change in public charge could affect 20 million people.

Get it? This definition change is something the administration wants to do to immiserate and impoverish people who did "play by the rules" and are within the process for establishing legal residency in this country. This isn't about scoff laws -- it is about criminalizing daily life for all immigrants.

CAIR-BA draws out the implications of what our rulers want to do:

This policy places an undue burden on the working-class immigrants that form the backbone of our economy and puts the wealthy at the front of the line. In doing so, it constitutes a complete abandonment of the "American Dream," the fundamental premise of which holds that the United States is a place for those seeking a better life, not just those already living one.

This Muslim community responding to ongoing attacks has a clearer grasp of the aspirations that are the only excuse for this country than so many of us who might think of ourselves as "real Americans.

All these agencies provide links to sites that allow citizens to write short comments expressing their horror at this attempt to increase the insecurity of the some of the most stressed people among us. I found this site the most accessible. JCFS-EB offered sensible advice about writing your comment:

Your comment does not have to be technical; it can simply express your own concern for the health and well-being of our country’s immigrants.

Here's what I wrote:

The proposed regulation expanding the definition of "public charge" creates barriers for legal residents and their citizen children who are seeking to better themselves and this country. Legal immigrants pay taxes; they should not be excluded from benefits like healthy food and secure housing. This move screams of racial bigotry; the future of this country depends on our moving away from racial entitlements and toward broad equality of opportunity.

Your comment doesn't have to be brilliant. We just all need to weigh in. This isn't sexy like going off to campaign for Democrats in Congress (yeah team!) but these struggles must be part of what #resistance looks like over the next two years.

Comments are due by December 10, but do it today.

Sign encountered while Walking San Francisco.

Friday cat blogging

Through smoke and a dirty window, this animal surveys his domain.

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

Happy Turkey Day

Let's all enjoy a short breathing space before we return to the fight. And be grateful for new learnings and whatever successes we can claim.

Madame Speaker

I've been surprised by how pleased I've felt watching my Congresswoman swat away the ambitious Lilliputians who want to displace her.

Understand, I'm not particularly a Pelosi fan. I've been known to write downright nasty posts about the once and future Speaker. My city -- her constituents -- has often yearned for policies far to the left of what she stomachs.

And Democrats in Congress do need a new and different generation of leaders. As soon as possible.

But grassroots activists didn't just set aside our many differing wishes and needs to work our butts off to win a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives so that a few ambitious guys (mostly white and "moderate" at that) can fulfill their leadership fantasies. A lot of us feel we're fighting for our lives here in GOPer-USA, forced to work though the medium of other people's political ambitions to win a small measure of protection from engulfing hate. We sent Democrats to Congress do a vital job for us. They should stop acting like a high school drama queens quarreling over who should be student body president.

Pelosi is good at the job of leading Dems in Congress. That (plus her gender) is why the Republicans hate her. She should be willing to plan transition to new leaders. But in this moment, I am enjoying watching her remind her detractors who is the boss.

Explanation of the Brexit process through the medium of cake

LEAVER: I want an omelette.
REMAINER: Right. It’s just we haven’t got any eggs.
LEAVER: Yes, we have. There they are. [HE POINTS AT A CAKE]
REMAINER: They’re in the cake.
LEAVER: Yes, get them out of the cake, please.
REMAINER: But we voted in 1974 to put them into a cake.
LEAVER: Yes, but that cake has got icing on it. Nobody said there was going to be icing on it.
REMAINER: Icing is good.
LEAVER: And there are raisins in it. I don’t like raisins. Nobody mentioned raisins. I demand another vote.

DAVID CAMERON ENTERS.
DAVID CAMERON: OK.
DAVID CAMERON SCARPERS.
LEAVER: Right, where’s my omelette?
REMAINER: I told you, the eggs are in the cake.
LEAVER: Well, get them out.

EU: It’s our cake.

JEREMY CORBYN: Yes, get them out now.
REMAINER: I have absolutely no idea how to get them out. Don’t you know how to get them out?
LEAVER: Yes! You just get them out and then you make an omelette.
REMAINER: But how?! Didn’t you give this any thought?
LEAVER: Saboteur! You’re talking eggs down. We could make omelettes before the eggs went into the cake, so there’s no reason why we can’t make them now.

THERESA MAY: It’s OK, I can do it.
REMAINER: How?
THERESA MAY: There was a vote to remove the eggs from the cake, and so the eggs will be removed from the cake.
REMAINER: Yeah, but…
LEAVER: Hang on, if we take the eggs out of the cake, does that mean we don’t have any cake? I didn’t say I didn’t want the cake, just the bits I don’t like.

EU: It’s our cake.

REMAINER: But you can’t take the eggs out of the cake and then still have a cake.
LEAVER: You can. I saw the latest Bake Off and you can definitely make cakes without eggs in them. It’s just that they’re horrible.
REMAINER: Fine. Take the eggs out. See what happens.
LEAVER: It’s not my responsibility to take the eggs out. Get on with it.
REMAINER: Why should I have to come up with some long-winded incredibly difficult chemical process to extract eggs that have bonded at the molecular level to the cake, while somehow still having the cake?
LEAVER: You lost, get over it.

THERESA MAY: By the way, I’ve started the clock on this.
REMAINER: So I assume you have a plan?
THERESA MAY: Actually, back in a bit. Just having another election.

REMAINER: Jeremy, are you going to sort this out?
JEREMY CORBYN: Yes. No. Maybe.

EU: It’s our cake.

LEAVER: Where’s my omelette? I voted for an omelette.
REMAINER: This is ridiculous. This is never going to work. We should have another vote, or at least stop what we’re doing until we know how to get the eggs out of the cake while keeping the bits of the cake that we all like.

LEAVER/MAY/CORBYN: WE HAD A VOTE. STOP SABOTAGING THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE. EGGSIT MEANS EGGSIT.

REMAINER: Fine, I’m moving to France. The cakes are nicer there.
LEAVER: You can’t. We’ve taken your freedom of movement.

Friends were passing this around on Facebook, attributing it to Drew Collier. I liked it. I assume Mr. Collier launched it into the world to be passed around.

Lessons from Reno: thoughts on "rides to the polls"

When I've been a campaign organizer, I've always been a "rides to the polls" skeptic. Campaigns routinely offer to help supporters with transportation on Election Day. Campaign volunteers love to offer to drive voters who need a ride; perhaps this sounds easier and more satisfying than doing what campaigns want everyone to do: talk with mostly unwilling citizens. But in real life, very few voters avail themselves of the offer. Ride-offering volunteers sit around on standby. Yet conventional campaign wisdom says you must make provision for rides.

Working on the UniteHERE campaign in Reno has given me a lens for rethinking "rides." Nevada offers exceptional opportunities for this rethinking because it uses 14 days of in-person, in-neighborhood early voting before the usual election day on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The voting locations are truly local in malls and grocery stores as well as county buildings. For practical purposes fifteen days are Election Day -- this year nearly 57 percent of all votes in Nevada were cast in the early voting period.

In this context "rides to the polls"takes on a different meaning than under more limited voting schedules. It means immediate voting. During the early vote period canvassers can offer anyone they can convince to vote for their candidate an instant chance to do the deed. This is particularly attractive to infrequent and first-time voters who are hesitant about how to do it, who need to have the process made to feel less daunting. "Rides to the polls" becomes not about overcoming disabilities of body or transport, but more about breaking through unease about interacting with government and dispelling apathy. Reno UniteHERE canvassers competed with each other and themselves at facilitating early voter "rides." This helped build momentum around voting in neighborhoods where voting is not currently a natural seeming part of life.

Obviously the state of Nevada helps make this campaign tactic work by offering easy in-person voting -- and giving out the certificates to "first time" voters which the young man displays above.

But it seems worth thinking through how emphasis on facilitating immediate voting by unlikely voters might help campaigns to increase turnout, especially turnout among low-income working people and communities of color. The National Conference of State Legislatures provides a clear summary of the early voting rules in the thirty-seven jurisdictions that allow for in-person early voting. New Mexico probably is the state most like Nevada in providing neighborhood early voting -- and I observed this as long lines outside grocery stores in Albuquerque in 2004. I don't know whether New Mexico campaigns use "rides" as incentive to immediate voting as we did Reno.

Many jurisdictions allow in-person voting outside of official offices at the discretion of county authorities. How many such locations, open for how long, on which days can be highly contested; see also North Carolina. In general. more and longer are better for turnout among infrequent voters (as the GOP fears).

A hybrid tactic that offers some of the immediacy of early "rides to the polls" are rallies and marches to early voting sites. Sometimes that means marches from churches, so-called "souls to the polls." The Houston affiliate of the Women's March organized an ambition slate of "mini-marches" to local voting places during this past election. I remember organizers of homeless voters putting on such a march in San Francisco one year -- since I try to be elsewhere during elections, I don't know whether that's a repeated, regular event.

It seems worth observing that while universal voting by mail, which is the practice in Washington state, Oregon, and Colorado, undoubtedly increases relative turnout (especially when combined with near universal voter registration), it diffuses the immediacy of the voting experience. Mail balloting provides convenience, but what does it do to the experience of democratic participation? Who uses snail mail for anything anymore? Certainly not young people or those who live in precarious circumstances. I suspect that progressives may come to regret our current enthusiasm for mail voting; it makes voting more like individual consumer choice on Amazon and less like a common civic experience. I could see us in a few years campaigning for increased, staffed, ballot drop off points to restore some immediacy to the experience of voting.

Meanwhile -- I'm now an advocate of "rides to the polls" early and often; I've seen it work in communities that don't have the voting habit. We need those communities participating if democracy (small "d") is to have a chance to make this a better country.

Reality check: this is what climate action looks like

We think the advent of fleets of driverless cars in US cities would be radical. Spian's got a much more far reaching idea. Here's what a democratic socialist government is proposing:

Spanish government planning to ban sale of gasoline, diesel cars from 2040
... Transportation in Spain – and in most of the European Union – is the straggler when it comes to the fight against climate change. While the use of renewable energy continues to grow in the power sector – with a realistic target of 100% of electricity coming from clean sources in the future – road transportation is not progressing at the same speed in the fight against climate change.

Just over a quarter of all greenhouse gases emitted in Spain are from the transportation sector, and most of those come from the roads. Forecasts from the government suggest that if measures are not taken, these emissions will grow 15% from here to 2030.

In the draft text presented on Tuesday, the 2040 ban on “passenger and light commercial vehicles with direct emissions of carbon dioxide” would also mean an end to the sale of hybrids, which also burn gasoline or diesel. This kind of veto has already been announced in other EU countries, such as the United Kingdom and France, which have also set a target date of 2040, and Denmark, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands, which have set a date of 2030.

El Pais, 11/13/18

The new plan would also ban fracking and end licenses for exploiting carbon fuels (oil and coal) by 2040. The aim is to expand current wind and solar energy production to provide 100 percent of the country's electricity needs by 2050.

Spain's government is a cobbled together coalition in which socialists are dependent on anti-austerity and left populist parties. It's almost certainly fragile. But it seems noteworthy that there is enough social consensus that climate change is a vital emergency that the governing party believes a serious de-carbonization plan can be negotiated.

Will Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto remember her roots?

UniteHERE president D. Taylor exhorts campaign workers.

Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto was named head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) this past week. The job entails leading the charge to win enough Senate seats in 2020 to flip the upper chamber.

According to the Nevada Independent, the freshman Senator (elected in 2016) was eager to take the job.

Cortez Masto said that she was courted to take over the DSCC, but also showed interest in taking the role. Typically the Senate Democratic leader has to beg and plead for a member to take the position because of the intense travel and fundraising duties it entails.

... Cortez Masto is the first Latina elected to the Senate and is only the second woman to be DSCC chair.

She's an interesting choice. In the past when Democrats were in the minority, they tended to choose Senators who were well-connected fundraisers: from 2003 through 2011, the post was occupied by Jon Corzine (D-NJ, Goldman Sachs), Chuck Schumer (D-NY, Wall Street) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ, personal graft). Like any sitting Senator, Cortez Masto has raised millions of political dollars, but according to the campaign finance watchdog Open Secrets, her big donors are Emily's List, the League of Conservation Voters, and J Street. These are all fine Democratic-leaning organizations, but not where the big bucks are located.

Cortez Masto has another attribute unmentioned in the news coverage: as much as any member of the Senate, she certainly knows that she owes her election to the work of the labor movement, to the Culinary Workers in Las Vegas and in Reno (UniteHERE). Democrats win in Nevada when this powerful union turns out low wage workers, many of them Latinx, who are not habitual voters. Culinary just did this again for a new Democratic Senator, Jackie Rosen, and a new Democratic Governor, Steve Sisolak. There are plenty of other worthy civil society organizing groups and a state Democratic party in Nevada, but the Silver State's elections are turned by the Culinary Workers. Because the union allocates its members' money toward these fights, it doesn't have to chase fickle donors and is largely free to follow its own model of campaigning through door to door canvassing in what is (somewhat surprisingly) one of the most urbanized of states.

So that's the background Cortez Masto brings to the DSCC. Will her experience of the power of labor and of canvassing-based campaigns affect her approach to assisting Democratic Senate campaigns? One certainly hopes so. There's a healthy potential partnership in that mix.

Full disclosure that will not be news to most of my readers: I worked for two months on the UniteHERE campaign in Reno this fall.