Donald Trump is a loser

We simply don't trust him to do the work we think a president ought to do. 

Note that these poll results are "among U.S. adults." The only way Donald Trump can overcome this level of disapproval is if many, many qualified people don't vote -- if the subset of us who do vote is not the same as a majority of all adults. 

Our job, from now until Election Day, is to make sure that all these people who want to see the last of a failed president are able to vote and do cast a ballot.

Give me a holler at janinsanfran@gmail.com and I'll help you find ways to help make this happen. We can even phonebank together on Zoom. What a world we find ourselves in!

This year, they want to vote

Don't let anyone tell you there's no enthusiasm for the approaching election. Those of us phonebanking to turn out voters may feel like tiny irritants nudging an oblivious mountain, struggling to be noticed at all. But for all the brush-offs, there are data showing that a lot of people think voting matters, even if they are not sure exactly how or whether they are sold on the candidates.

Granted, this is from California, but it nonetheless amazing to those of us who've felt that getting people to take up elections was like pulling teeth. From CalMatters: 

More Californians have registered to vote in the November election than in any other presidential election year for the last 20 years, with more than 83% of eligible voters registered as of July, according to recent findings from the Public Policy Institute of California and California Secretary of State.

And look at what these registrations suggest about their political leanings:  

    •    In 2000, 47% of Democrats identified as “liberal,” compared to 57% in 2020.
    •    In 2000, 59% of Republicans identified as “conservative,” compared to 73% in 2020.  

Here’s a look at California’s voter breakdown this year so far:
    •    46.3% Democrat (up from 45.1% in 2016)
    •    24% Republican (down from 27.1% in 2016)
    •    24% independent (up from 23.3% in 2016)

In the last few days, I've been calling with the hotel workers' union into Florida. Despite misgivings, people are up to vote -- but there's a maze of rules and procedures they need to overcome to make it happen. That's what we do on the phones, help people make a plan to get it done.

Contact me <janinsanfranatgmail> if you are trying to figure out how to get involved; the work is national and not so bad, really.

Image: Erlinda was proud of her first vote in Reno in 2018.

Friday cat blogging

Some cats shun their carriers, associating the boxes with being hauled to the vet. Janeway loves hers, treating it as a special hideaway where she can chew her bird toy undisturbed. Not that I'd dare to try to take that bird away. I have enough evidence on my arms of her lack of understanding that humans and claws don't mix well.

Might 2020 be another "year of the woman"? And a Davids and a Davis

In 2018, more women ran for office than ever before and the percentage of Congress that is female increased from 20 to 24 percent in the aftermath. Most of these were Democrats; in the House there are 88 women Democratic representatives and just 13 Republicans. Forty-eight of the 127 women serving in Congress (includes Senators) in 2020 are women of color: 22 are Black, 13 Latina, 8 Asian American/Pacific Islander,  2 Native American, 2 Middle Eastern/North African, and 1 multiracial.

Back in July, 538 took a look at why Democratic women seem be doing so much better than Republicans.

... Democratic women ... tend to be better positioned to run for office than Republican women, who are often more absent from traditional political pipelines, like state legislatures. Plus, historically speaking, there have simply been more organizations geared toward recruiting Democratic women and elite networks willing to finance Democratic women’s campaigns than there are groups that do the same for Republican women. Finally, it doesn’t hurt that the vast majority of Democratic voters agree that there are too few women in political office, whereas just 33 percent of Republicans think so. ...

But there are plenty of Republican women who feel left out by a progressive, feminist political vision.

“[M]any GOP women felt that those women in those movements do not speak for them,” said [Washington College political science professor Melissa] Deckman, citing both the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement as events that may have sparked more GOP women to run, telling me that some Republicans may be running to “put out a counternarrative of what women’s interests actually entail.”

Now that the primary season is nearly over, 538 has revisited the prospects of women aspirants for Congress in 2020. It looks as if we'll have more women Democrats in Congress next year -- and Republicans not so much so.

... based on data from primaries that were decided by Aug. 25, we found that more Republican women are getting nominated this year than in the last election cycle, while Democratic women are also improving on their impressive 2018 performance. As a result, the GOP won’t eclipse Democrats as the party of women anytime soon.

... The main reason Democratic women were more likely to win the nomination is that they were incredibly successful in primaries without an incumbent. Women made up 40 percent (224 out of 565) of all the candidates who ran in Democratic primaries with no incumbent, but a whopping 57 percent (126 out of 221) of candidates who advanced to the general election in those races.

... Now for the bad news for the GOP: A lot of those 77 female nominees might not win their general elections. Only six of them won primaries in seats that election handicapper Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates as “Safe Republican.” By contrast, 49 Republican women are running in “Safe Democratic” seats  ..

Sharice Davids is an incumbent Democrat from the 3rd District in Kansas. She's a former professional mixed martial artist, a lawyer, and an enrolled member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin.

Wendy Davis is former Texas state senator who is challenging a Republican incumbent in TX-21, a strangely shaped district north of San Antonio which takes in some of Austin.

You can't always get what you want

... and what you want may be changing. From the very beginning of the shelter-in-place season, I've been watching with fascination how a disrupted commercial supply chain is changing our lives.

First there was the great toilet paper panic, now largely abated as far as I can tell. Certainly I had no trouble picking up a new package at the chain pharmacy and sundries vendor around the corner.

I don't know whether barren grocery store shelves have returned to normal as I haven't been in a supermarket since COVID came our way. I use staples from Costco via Instacart (one of the great exploitative rip offs of all time; TIP these workers!!). And for living food, I duck into the local fruit and vegetable market. But I'm lucky in my surroundings; this works in the Mission.

According to a Washington Post overview, grocery stores are responding to shoppers' haste to get in and out by reducing the variety of products they carry.

... the number of items offered in U.S. supermarkets went from 9,000 in 1975 to a staggering 40,000 to 50,000 by the beginning of 2020. The pandemic has not only halted that growth, it’s reversed it.

Food manufacturers are focused on producing more of the top-selling varieties of a particular product, pushing off the launch of different flavors or spinoffs until sample stations can return. Giants like General Mills, Conagra, Kellogg’s and Campbell’s, seeing a rise in sales of their dominant brands, are making more of those at the expense of new products. 

Meanwhile, budget-minded shoppers have embraced more-affordable private-label store brands, squeezing out shelf space for independent and rookie brands.

Online shopping only reinforces this trend. Sellers keep it simple so you can navigate your choices; the algorithms send you back to what you bought last time. Browsing just isn't happening when we can't/won't wander stores comfortably.

Changes are also afoot in Big Box stores -- places like Lowes and Home Depot. Fred Clark works in one in a Pennsylvania suburban setting; his job is to stock shelves.

Big chains like the Big Box stress uniformity. The cleaning supplies shelves in our location are supposed to look exactly like those shelves in every other location. Small tweaks might be permitted, but any major changes in the master plan were forbidden. That’s all gone out the window during this pandemic. Now we’ll get random boxes of whatever the buyers can scrounge (they’re quite good at scrounging) and I spend an hour or two every night pulling price tags off the shelves to shove ’em in wherever I can. 

Our shelves are full, and I think they look OK, but it’s all improvisation and these days no two stores in our chain will have identical offerings or displays. 

For example, our store hasn’t had a designated “home” for our paper goods since all this started. The shelves where we used to sell Bounty are now full of an ever-changing lineup of hand sanitizers, contractor-grade disinfectants, disposable masks, bleach, and spray bottles. When we get a pallet of name-brand paper goods,* we still just unwrap it and set it down somewhere up by the registers, then replace it with another the next day (if we can).

I find it interesting that new models of commodity retail supply apparently both result in variations between locations that used to thrive on their uniformity and, concurrently, reduce choice. We don't know yet what any of this will mean.

Trump is losing the support of U.S. soldiers

Or at least of the professional class within the U.S. military.

According to a report of a poll by Military Times done in cooperation with the Institute for Veterans and Military Families, Trump's support is waning among the troops, notably older service members.

About 40 percent of troops surveyed identified as Republican or Libertarian, 16 percent Democrats, and 44 percent independent or another party. 

“It’s fair to say that Trump is not as popular as Republican nominees have been in the past among this group,” said Peter Feaver, a White House adviser to former President George W. Bush who now works as a political science professor at Duke University. “The bottom line is that in 2020, Trump can’t be claiming to have overwhelming support in the military.” 

... Feaver said the poll “is a good sample of the career-oriented military members’ views, which may be different from the junior enlisted view of things.”  

... The splits between officer and enlisted views within the poll are notable. More than 59 percent of officers said they have a poor view of the president, with more than half saying they strongly disapprove. 

Among enlisted respondents, 47 percent said they have an unfavorable view, and nearly 39 percent a favorable view. Enlisted views of Trump’s performance in office have consistently been more favorable than those of officers in the poll over the last four years.

 

The polling found discontent with Trump's failure to object to Russia offering to pay bounties for dead U.S. servicemembers in Afghanistan. And 74 percent didn't want to be used to put down unrest in U.S. cities. That's not a role they understand as their duty or profession. On common domestic poltical issues, only 21 percent were worried about immigration, but 48 percent saw white nationalists as a concern.

Apparently older service people aren't that different from the rest of us. They don't like chaos, corruption, and incompetence in a leader either.

H/t the essential Digby.

There's still a Census to complete

 

I met this enthusiastic canvasser in the still-smoky Bayview neighborhood today while making deliveries for the Mission Food Hub. He wasn't having an easy time -- lots of unanswered doors. But he was mighty good humored about it all.

Don't forget to fill out your Census form. Give these workers a break.

So the Orange Cheeto intends to afflict Kenosha further ...

Donald Trump is a weak, terrified man -- a coward who hopes enough of us will kill each other in anger that we'll forget that hundreds of thousands of us are dying from a preventable disease. On his watch. He's never risen to any difficult task in a life of opulent ease and cheating. He's losing among the people, so he flails and incites violence. He knows he can't win a free and fair election. We, collectively, want better.

Even proto-monarchical  presidents have known better. 

Busy today. More later perhaps.

Angela Davis: we have to do the work as if change were possible

With the Trump DC shitshow behind us, protesters killed by a vigilante in Wisconsin, and a violent clash between right wing thugs and activists leading to a death in Portland streets, I have encountered a pervasive hesitation and foreboding among friends in several of our ubiquitous zoom meetings. Certainly these are scary times. And it would be wonderful if we could all just crawl under our beds and the threat would go away. But it won't. The next 65 days til the election and most probably the three months after will be anxious times. That simply is where we find ourselves.

In such times, it seems worthwhile to listen to the reflections of someone who has been through a lifetime of struggle with this country's demons. The filmmaker Ava Duvernay (Selma, 13th, When They See Us) interviewed lifelong justice warrior Angela Davis for Vanity Fair. Her thoughts:

Duvernay: ... How does it feel for a woman born into segregation to see this moment? What lessons have you gleaned about struggle?

That’s a really big question. Perhaps I can answer it by saying that we have to have a kind of optimism. One way or another I’ve been involved in movements from the time I was very, very young, and I can remember that my mother never failed to emphasize that as bad as things were in our segregated world, change was possible. That the world would change. I learned how to live under those circumstances while also inhabiting an imagined world, recognizing that one day things would be different. I’m really fortunate that my mother was an activist who had experience in movements against racism, the movement to defend, for example, the Scottsboro Nine.

I’ve always recognized my own role as an activist as helping to create conditions of possibility for change. And that means to expand and deepen public consciousness of the nature of racism, of heteropatriarchy, pollution of the planet, and their relationship to global capitalism. This is the work that I’ve always done, and I’ve always known that it would make a difference. Not my work as an individual, but my work with communities who have struggled. I believe that this is how the world changes. It always changes as a result of the pressure that masses of people, ordinary people, exert on the existing state of affairs. I feel very fortunate that I am still alive today to witness this.

And I’m so glad that someone like John Lewis was able to experience this and see this before he passed away, because oftentimes we don’t get to actually witness the fruits of our labor. They may materialize, but it may be 50 years later, it may be 100 years later. But I’ve always emphasized that we have to do the work as if change were possible and as if this change were to happen sooner rather than later. It may not; we may not get to witness it. But if we don’t do the work, no one will ever witness it.

My emphasis.

Saturday scenery: mythical monster alert

The centaur is a creature of Greek myth, half-human, half horse. Traditionally, we assume it is male. Sometimes an image of a centaur boasts a beard. After all, the monster is an image of power. Laura Kimpton's 2017 welded metal statue projects another kind of power, still awesome, fearsome -- but beyond gender.

This installation is in San Francisco's new Dogpatch neighborhood. Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

Passing the torch

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our obligation on this day is to follow their leadership. 

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

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

Friday cat blogging: Janeway tries out a new spot

 

Such a lovely cat-sized hollow here. 

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

 

Or maybe I need a nap

A Biden victory could be a break for Central America

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

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

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

Joe Biden promises that he

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

More substantively, he calls for

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Central America could use some breaks.

A catalogue of religious deplorables

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Chait has an intriguing theory:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One more thing to do to defeat Trump

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

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

— janinsanfran (@janinsanfran) August 24, 2020

Wrong the first time and still wrong now

The LA Times reports: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is crazy. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enough.

Saturday scenery: mailboxes

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

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

Some designs may seem visually transgressive ...

while others are homey ...

others might be considered pretentious ...

or perhaps snobbish?

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

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

DNC roundup

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Friday cat blogging

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