Fiorina's Face

I still remember how rejecting I was when Donald Trump criticized Carley Fiorina's face. That was about a month ago. Trump is without a doubt a racist, motormouthed blowhard and a pouting flabby sexist--but what if he was onto something? What a strange thought to have. 

To be honest, Fiorina's face has the look of a madwoman. She's brilliant, vicious and loony, radiating rage, defiantly living in an alternate reality in which her obvious lies are truths. She has the wet look of someone like Ted Cruz, someone about to pop. Cruz,  you may have noticed, is neckless, his head screwed directly onto his shoulders. Something went wrong there and twisted his lips. But Fiorina is even more off-kilter. This losing competition could end badly for her.

Funding Crackpots

My brother bent over to pick up a handout he found on the sidewalk in Santa Rosa, which is how I found out how bigots make money. The handout was the usual hate brochure about gay people.  It complained that gofundme, the website where ordinary people can fund one another with small contributions, had closed down a funding operation by a pair of "Christian" bakers after the site had raised over a hundred grand in a few hours to help these crackpot bakers out.  Gofundme tries not to fund nutters who discriminate.

Do you see the scam? You refuse to serve gay people, then go on the 'net asking for financial backing and a few days later "Christians" will have made you rich. (Note: there is nothing in the Bible about not baking cakes for gay couples.)

Black and White

It's taken me too long to recognize how smart Joy Reid is, perhaps because she speaks without flash. At the moment I suspect that she is the most insightful commentator on MSNBC. Reid has a book out. I haven't managed to get a copy yet, but I saw her interviewed for an hour, much of it on the differences between what she called "white liberals" and "black liberals."

My notion of her view oversimplifies it, but here goes. The white left works to improve the lives of all poor people, including African Americans, through support for measures like raising the minimum wage. The black left supports raising the minimum wage but is much more focused on challenging the New Jim Crow that kills African Americans or stunts their opportunities.  That's the divide. Think Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter.

Both sides are right. It's obvious that some in the white left think the black left is right, and some in the black left think the white left is right. There is a war of words going on in magazines and journals and on the  'net. We can hope that some people will be able to span the gap and pull the two groups together. 


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Women in Combat

Should women in the military serve in combat?  That's a major question before the Obama administration today. The answer, of course, is that they already do, but never mind facts. As a former sergeant, I want to make it clear that I endorsed women's liberation and stood ready to relinquish my place to a woman if it came to combat. My preferred duty was in San Francisco repairing messkits. 

The Politics of Respectability

You may have seen African American intellectual leaders on television who oppose something called "the politics of respectability."  I'm thinking of Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris Perry and Ta Nehisi Coates, three professors. The first two have earned doctorates, and all three are as groomed and as handsome as President Obama, who happens to be the epitome of the politics of respectability. The denouncers of respectability are themselves respectable.

Now I reckon that there have long been movements in the black community for and against respectability. Think of MLK and the Black Panthers. The arguments for respectability were (1) if African Americans are solidly respectable, others will begin to grasp that they are human and (2) fewer respectable African Americans will be lynched or left to die.

The argument against respectability is that it doesn't work.

The politics of respectability works to a degree, right? Many black people now vote. They play major league baseball. A black woman became a senator from Illinois. A black man became secretary of state. But today unarmed African American men are being shot down by the police at a rate of about one a week. Millions of black lives are stunted by underfunded educational systems, closed economic doors and so on. That's why certain respectable African Americans argue against respectability and in favor of a different approach that will lead to solutions. That's what Black Lives Matter is about, rejecting respectable behavior.  But what exactly is the movement's strategy?

 The Black Panthers had a strategy that ranged from programs to feed children to armed defiance.  The strategy failed, but it was a strategy. Rudeness to old people, the hallmark of Black Lives Matter so far, is not a plan but an adolescent reaction.

How the larger African American community divides on this issue, I don't know. Coates, Perry and Dyson are powerful intellectual thinkers. In some sense they straddle the issues, opposed to respectability while safely living deeply respectable lives. I'm counting on them to explain a new strategy, which I hope to support.

aesthetics

In its editorial today, our local daily newspaper gave Donald Trump a low grade, which he earned for his KKK-like racism. For emphasis, the final sentence of the editorial reads, "His eye-rolling and name-calling is getting old."  I want to congratulate the editorial board members, who decided to reinforce  their point about Trump's vulgarity by expressing it in substandard language.  The style mimics the message, and that is a powerful stroke we seldom see employed these days. Or maybe the paper should hire a grammarian. 


 

Our Latest Ethnic Cleansing

Donald Trump's first attempts at ethnic cleansing were absurd, almost comical. I'm not sure that his many years of claiming President Obama was an impostor from another country counts as ethnic cleansing. It was moronic, but no one with her own brain bought into it. It was stupid, like a sit com farce. Then Trump went after Latinos, calling them rapists and so on, committing political suicide. Latinos are part of the deep fabric of America, a large and potent ethnicity capable of defending themselves. Attacking Latinos is so absurd you marvel at it the way you marvel at The Three Stooges. But at Trump's news conference today, he fielded questions from some paranoid asking him to ethnically cleanse Muslims (and their imaginary military training camps) from the United States. Trump's response was that he'd be looking into it. Muslims in America are a tiny vulnerable minority without political clout. Now we have entered KKK territory.

And yesterday we saw a scholarly 14-year-old boy, Ahmed Mohamed, arrested because he brought a clock he'd made to school to show to his teachers. No one in his school did the right thing.  The police covered their butts by charging the boy, who wants to study engineering, with making a fake bomb, then dropped the charge.

It's time to return Trump to the Real Estate turkey cages where gobblers belong.

I Blame Mr. Nobody

This morning I turned on my TV and caught the end of an interview with a Republican senator. He said, and I quote exactly, "I don't blame anyone. I blame Obama." (This is the unconscious racism Mark Twain mocked in HUCKLEBERRY FINN.)

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Who the Hell Is Ben Carson?

A year ago I had never heard of Ben Carson, now running second for the Republican nomination for President. About six months ago I learned that he had been a successful surgeon, which led me to assume that exceptional eye-hand dexterity is what we are looking for in political leaders.  Maybe the Democrats should nominate Stephen Curry when he gets old enough. 

But I was misled. Ben Carson is not a doctor who came out of nowhere. He has long been well-known, just not in mainstream circles.  Carson has spent 20 years giving balmy talks to America's evangelical nutters. He had a head start that people like me knew nothing about. This is a huge country, and much of it is not covered by big media.

The End-Of-Life Option

Healdsburg is a small, charming town well down the road to becoming wholly owned by the swanky.  Our progressive state senator (Mike McGuire) and our progressive assembly member (Jim Wood) hail from Healdsburg, while ably representing much larger districts. I got to know them when they first ran for the Healdsburg city council, and they are why it makes sense to participate in our badly flawed political system. 

I read in the paper today that the California assembly has passed a right-to-die bill. It should get through the senate easily.  Then it will be up to Gov. Jerry Brown, who does the right thing once in a while.

I just want to thank Mike and Jim for this bill. I'm 80, which means I have watched people I love deeply go through long difficult painful and pointless struggles to die. 

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Shameless

Faced with a difficult political choice, the safest ways a politician can vote are (1) vote yes on a motion that loses and (2) vote no on a motion that passes. No matter what happens after that, it's not your fault. That's why Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin waited until the last minute to announce he opposed the Iran nuclear agreement.  He waited until his vote wasn't needed by his party. Now his party can't be too mad at him. Now he can go back to the Israel lobby and tell them he was with them all the way. The same applies to Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.  She waited until the last minute and then voted to reject reality, pleasing her backers. Manchin and Collins knew they were doing the wrong thing to placate awful people, but, what the heck, nothing matters as much as re-election. 

The Republicans had no counter-proposal to the Iran agreement. If they had prevailed, Iran would have been nuclear within a year. But they were utterly shameless. People who knew better--John Boehner and Mitch McConnell--endorsed big empty folly because they are utterly without shame.  They are contemptible moral degenerates who put themselves first and the nation last. They empower, on a daily basis, the evil lights shining in Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz and Scott Walker.

The Cheneys

Today Dick Cheney met with his followers to denounce the nuclear agreement with Iran. "This is a man who's lost his mind," one Republican military analyst said afterwards. Yet he still has an audience. He's more paranoid than Richard Nixon. He's more paranoid than Oliver Stone on a crack pipe. Still, Cheney has a following of nutters. The number of these nutters grows smaller day by day, but some are rich and powerful. It seems safe to say, though, that this crackpot's night has begun to fall. His daughter Liz, his main disciple, remains faithful to his lunacy.

I'm not sure what's true about the political leader of Israel, who came here and got involved with our American politics on the losing side of the Iran agreement.  The tail set out to wag the dog. He wore out his welcome. Israelis need new voices to speak for their nation. 

Hillary on TV

Today presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was interviewed at length on television by Andrea Mitchell. Much of the interview consisted of questions about a fictional email-server scandal, dreamed up in right wing think tanks. This imaginary problem has been eagerly promoted by news people because they don't like Clinton any more than I do.  What struck my wife, though, was Hillary's answer to a simple question. Should we be taking in more Syrian refugees?

Andrea got the standard Hillary answer. It was a boring ten minute digression that covered the duties of the United Nations, the slow response to Syrian refugees by Asia, the need for discussion and unity,  and blah blah blah blah blah. Our probable next President never said whether we should be taking in more refugees.  Message discipline is her middle name. 

Why say anything? If you take a position, some voters might disagree. Just blah blah and smile with cool self-control. Nothing human there. (If Hillary wins the nomination, she'll get my vote, because that's the system we have in these parts. It will be her vs. a Republican flesh-eating virus.)
 

Killing Random Officers

In my work as a college teacher, I came into contact with maybe a hundred police officers over the years. One of two or them were nuts and very dangerous. The rest struck me as intelligent, careful, interesting and engaging people. Like me these individual human beings, who had spouses and children, had been born into the working class, and like me they had gone into public service because it offered solid jobs. The current epidemic of murdering police officers is beyond vile.

Today's chasm of mistrust between many police departments and minority communities is genuine and earned. An entirely new relationship needs to be worked out. There is something wrong with the structure of our nation when unarmed black men die in the streets and random police officers get shot in the back. We need a major overhaul.