Friday, July 13, 2018

Weekend Reading: Before a Hiatus Edition

I'm sending this out on my lunch break instead of after work because I have a science camp expo to go watch soon, and am going to be mostly offline this afternoon and evening. Even so, it has already been an eventful news day. I'm not going to include links to analysis about the latest round of indictments. But here's a thread that pulls out some particularly interesting parts. Note the one about the Congressional candidate.




My "if you read only one thing" pick this week is actually a recommendation for something to listen to. Ezra Klein had another chat with Susan Hennessey about the Russia investigation, Mueller, and the general state of play right now and it is once again very useful.

Some things to read:

I've seen many arguments that Democrats must not match Republican hardball tactics or we risk destroying our Republic. Jamelle Bouie essentially argues the opposite, and I find his argument the most convincing one yet for abandoning what I've seen called "normcore" politics. Here's an earlier Matt Yglesias essay on the same topic. (For what it's worth, I don't think statehood for DC is all that radical, and nor is statehood for Puerto Rico. I support those suggestions right now. No taxation without representation, right? Court-packing schemes seem far more radical to me, and I'm not at all convinced on those yet.)

If you're uncomfortable with the arguments for Democrats to change to hardball tactics, you might find it helpful to think about what happens if they don't, and we enter an era of persistent minority-rule by the Republicans. This short article by Seth Masket outlines three ways a minority party can govern. The Republicans have essentially done all three at this point. Look around and notice the mounting legitimacy crisis. How long do you think our government will continue to be seen as legitimate by the majority? What happens when the majority no longer sees a government as legitimate? 




We're in a scary place right now. I know I keep saying it, but the 2018 midterms are the most important elections of my lifetime. Please vote. Please think hard about all the implications of your vote this year. If you're as worried as I am, please try to find a way to get involved in the effort to turn things around.

I'm thinking of adding gubernatorial races to my list of races to consider sending money to:


Some good news: my state has met our greenhouse gas emission reduction goals for 2020 two years early. We'll have a much harder time meeting our 2030 goals, but I think we're up to the challenge. 

And here is a good thread about stories that are actually climate change stories:



This made me smile:


And so did this:


Bunny!


I'm going to be absent from this blog for a couple of weeks. I don't want this just to be a weekly list of links, but when I've sat down to write something more, it hasn't worked out. I am going to take a short break to try to get my writing mojo back.

Have a good couple of weeks, everyone! I hope to be back writing actual posts soon.
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Friday, July 06, 2018

Weekend Reading: The Summer Is Here Edition

We're having our first summer heat wave, which is nothing compared to the heat wave other parts of the US has been having but is making Mr. Snarky feel pretty good about having got a whole house fan installed on Monday. So summer is here.

Mr. Snarky and I both had yesterday off. Both kids still had camp, and both kids are loving their camps this week so there was no question of them skipping. This means that Mr. Snarky and I got a day off with just the two of us! We went for a long walk on the beach and had lunch at a favorite old spot in Mission Beach (a restaurant called Guava Beach, for anyone who's curious: they have delicious guava-ritas and a coconut crusted chicken sandwich that is quite good).

I had to work today, but Mr. Snarky still had the day off (his company shuts down for the week of July 4), so we're taking advantage of the fact that he will be home to head out for some Friday evening summer fun with the kids, too.

This is my new strategy for not getting despondent over the mess in our country right now: Lots of summer fun to distract me. (Don't worry, I'm still writing postcards and supporting campaigns, too.)

Anyway, let's have some links.

You may not have heard about this amidst all the other news this week, but the House once again failed to pass any sort of immigration bill. I think there is no path to a bill that involves the Freedom Caucus, and since the moderate Republicans don't seem to want to work with the Democrats (who I think would compromise with them)... we're stuck. This Vox piece has a good explanation of the sad recent history of attempts to fix our immigration system.

Vox's The Weeds podcast did an episode on open borders (and the fact that despite what Trump and other immigration hard liners keep saying, no elected Democrat is actually pushing for open borders). It is a good and interesting episode, but like many The Weeds episodes, I was unsatisfied at the end because they didn't talk about one specific thing I think should be discussed - namely, that if our interest is in ending illegal immigration, whatever system we move to must have a legal and realistic path for low skill immigration. Otherwise, the combination of our really long border and the large number of low skill jobs that employers struggle to find Americans to fill will continue to pull people in without documentation. Maybe in some future immigration episode....

Still on immigration: This story about the informal, migrant-run system to keep track of whose turn it is to go and seek asylum is really upsetting to me. We are being so callous.

An independent journalist (who seems really well-respected in the online law/national security circles) wrote about deciding to become an FBI informant and the risk that puts her in right now.

Josh Marshall on the whether the calls to abolish ICE will backfire on Democrats. (My opinion on this one is that I don't know, but that we're not going to stop the calls for it at this point, so I guess we'll find out.) Jamelle Bouie wrote about the same topic, and argues that Democrats shouldn't worry about "swing voters" because they increasingly don't exist.

Josh Marshall also had a good podcast episode about some of the outrageous stuff that is going on and that a Democratic House might be inclined to investigate.

Matt Yglesias on our period of Constitutional hardball and what that means for the next time Democrats have power.

San Diego's current approach to homelessness got a favorable write up in Mother Jones. A lot of local homeless advocates are less positive on this approach. I don't know what I think about it yet, other than that we need to build more housing.

This is really interesting: The Texas Observer republished Molly Ivins' piece from when the Roe v. Wade was made.

Truth:


This is wonderful. Let's build the monuments these kids suggest.



This is cool:



Bunnies!



Have a good weekend, everyone!
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Monday, July 02, 2018

That Sense of Impending Doom

I've been feeling really unsettled lately, like I'm slightly off-balance. At first I thought it was because I'm still figuring out the new job. It involves working with a lot of different people, so each new project I pick up is an adjustment as I learn the work styles of the new team.

But I don't think that's the problem. I realized when Justice Kennedy announced his retirement that what I'm feeling is a sense of impending doom about the state of the country. On the second day after the 2016 election, I wrote a post about what I thought might happen next. I knew then that the Supreme Court would swing more Conservative, and that this swing would mean the loss of some rulings a lot of people rely on. I have not been surprised by the policy coming out of the EPA, even if I have been surprised by the astounding corruption of Scott Pruitt. I knew immigration policy was going to get bad, but I confess I didn't expect we'd get to "ripping young children from their parents' arms and putting them in cages."

The Kennedy retirement jolted me because I realized that one of the worst things I thought would happen is now happening... and yet, it is not the worst thing that is happening now.  I think that perhaps I got an expanded sense of just how bad it is likely to get, and that gave me the perception to recognize what my subconscious has been telling me for quite a while.

So now I can name the feeling in the pit of my stomach: It is a sense of impending doom. It isn't just due to the fact that so many of my fellow Americans are enthusiastically on board with Trump's dehumanizing language about immigrants and cruel immigration policy. I think I'd already accepted that fact. It is also the fact that quite a lot of other Americans are sort of sleepwalking through this, rationalizing away the sort of language and behavior that in the past has taken countries to really terrible places. I know so many people who aren't really doing anything differently. They'll vote, but that is the extent of their involvement. I'm glad they'll vote and I hope that the rest of us can make that be enough to stop our slide.

I am hoping that once I really accept that there are going to be a lot of bystanders in this fight the feeling in the pit of my stomach will go away, or at least lessen. Or maybe I just need to learn some new techniques to let the fear and worry go for short periods of time, so that I can rest and recharge.

There are things giving me hope right now. Perhaps I need to focus more on those. I have been encouraged by all the people showing up to fight for the families separated at the border. I have been encouraged by all the different faith leaders who spoke out against that policy. I am encouraged to see the Indivisible groups mobilizing to fight against another Heritage Foundation endorsed Supreme Court justice. I suspect we'll lose this fight, but I thought we'd lose the ACA fight and we haven't yet, not completely. So maybe in fighting we can get a judge who is more moderate and more representative of what the majority of people in this country actually believe. Anyway, it is worth a try.

I am also encouraged in a weird way to remember that the Court has usually been a small c-conservative institution, and that the period I've grown up in is actually an anomaly. I hope the fact that many of the rights-expanding decisions will be overturned will focus people's attention on spending more effort on state level elections. Here is a good thread about that:





I worry about what the next court will do to voting rights. I think we're going to have to work really, really hard to overcome structural disadvantages, both the ones that are enshrined in our system (e.g., the way the Senate and the Electoral College over-represent the people living in small states) and the ones that we've allowed to accrue because we weren't paying enough attention to the anti-voting moves going on in some states (e.g., voter ID laws, voting roll purges, extreme gerrymandering). I think we're in for a hard fight to win this at the ballot box, but I think we can still win it. I think we can turn the tide.

And so I keep working towards that goal, trying to push myself to do more to achieve it. I doubt that sense of impending doom I have will go away anytime soon, so I just have to learn how to work through it.
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Friday, June 22, 2018

Weekend Reading: Teetering on the Brink Edition

I underslept last night. This has been happening a lot: I wake up before 6 and can't go back to sleep so I end up getting up and starting my day, but I'm terribly tired. I don't know what's going on here. I'm trying to get to bed earlier to accommodate this, but that cuts into the time I have to hang out with Mr. Snarky. It is frustrating.

Anyway, I'm a little fuzzy-headed, but let's get to the links.

There was a lot of news about immigration policy this week. I am still struggling to keep up without drowning in despair, but I do have some links for you.

Zack Beauchamp's article at Vox about what the "turnaround" in Trump policy means gets at something that is really scary about this situation and about our situation in the US right now in general: A large number of people were OK with the policy of separating children from their families and detaining them in cages or in tents. He also points out that because this policy didn't last long (although I'm not sure it is really gone... more on that in a bit), opinions didn't have time to solidify around partisan lines. So depressingly, it is likely to get worse.

I can't argue with this quote, and that chills me:

"It’s simply a fact that Trump’s racial politics are popular with millions of white Americans; even a policy as vicious as the family separations attracted significant amounts of support. It’s also a demonstrable fact that the strength of GOP partisanship means that, in theory, Republican presidents should be able to attract the support of the party base and, as a result, its political establishment. Those two facts mean that Trump will pretty much always be able to get them to back his attacks on members of minority groups, given time and effort."

Here's another article about partisan identity and how it divides us right now, from Scientific American.

I still have friends who are conservative. I'm not sure if they still identify as Republican: I haven't asked. I value these friendships and maintain them because I like my friends and our policy differences are mostly around tax policy and government regulations. These things matter, but they are at the level of "reasonable people can disagree" in my book.

I am also friends with people who want many fewer immigrants to come to the US and want to change to a system that makes it harder for immigrants to sponsor other family members. I don't agree with those views, but this is also a case where I think reasonable people can disagree.

But I cannot be friends with someone who thinks some of my other friends should be deported because they are Muslim. I cannot be friends with someone who is OK with our immigration policy being implemented in a way that dehumanizes immigrants. Stricter laws could still be implemented in a way that respects the humanity of the people attempting to come here.

And I have to be honest: I am not particularly interested in being friends with people who call people with my political views "libtards." I am not generally friends with people who don't treat me with respect.

OK, back to the immigration issues:

I don't consider the family separation policy over because the children are not reunited with their parents, and it looks like no one had any plan for how to do that. I find that horrifying.

It also looks like the plan is to detain the kids with their families and then use the fact that this is illegal after 20 days to justify separating them again.

I hope continued outcry will make the administration rethink that plan, especially since there are alternatives to detention that have been shown to be effective and much, much cheaper. Given this reality, I struggle to find a rationale for detaining these families during their asylum proceedings other than to deter people from exercising their legal right to request asylum... which is a rationale administration officials have actually admitted to.

This made me lolsob a bit, particularly because a lot of people keep forgetting that Democrats have repeatedly tried to make deals on immigration only to have them fall apart due to Republican hardliners.




And here is my "if you read only one thing" pick for this week. Please read this thread:


We are in a very dangerous place as a country right now. Things are happening that could well turn out to be the initial steps to something very, very bad. This thread is a message from Germans of the 1930s, but present day Germans (who, unlike Americans, learn the full truth about the worst of their history in school) have also been trying to warn us. I hope enough of us listen to allow us to change course. 

I have said many times that I think the 2018 elections are the most important of my life. I am pushing myself to do more to fight for the outcome I think we need to remain a democracy on the path to living up to our ideals. I truly think we have this election and maybe the 2020 election to choose that outcome. If we don't swing at least the house in 2018 and we re-elect Trump in 2020, I think we are leaving the fate of our democracy in the hands of a man who looks up to dictators and the people who have deluded themselves into thinking they can use him to achieve their aims and do not realize that it will actually be the other way around. I do not have high hopes for that situation ending well. So: Let's fight now to avoid the darkest timeline.

Here's a political ad that made me donate to someone in a district that is solidly red. I am directing most of my donations to swing districts, but I want to help the candidates fighting the good fight in the more difficult districts, too.

 

In other news:

I found this Slate article speculating about why Elena Kagan is siding with conservative justices more frequently now to be really interesting, and persuasive. I think this is Kagan's way of fighting to prevent the darkest timeline.

Leaving politics altogether: Here is a good right up from Derek Lowe of a really interesting finding in Alzheimer's research.

Derek Lowe also wrote a good post about the risks of right to try.

Jia Tolentino will make you want to see Coco if you haven't already.

This is cool:




And this made me smile:


Floofy bunny!




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Monday, June 18, 2018

What I Am Doing Now

In my Weekend Reading post, I mentioned that I was pulling back from reading all the stories about the humanitarian crisis our government has created on our southern border because I found it made me despondent, and that made it harder for me to fight for change. I got an email from a reader asking me what I was doing to fight for change right now. I used to post my weekly actions to Twitter every Wednesday morning, but since going back to a regular full time job, I haven't been doing that. I have been trying to take action, though.

First of all, I haven't stated why I am so upset by this. I am horrified by this policy, and the administration statements indicating they are using this policy as a bargaining chip to get a wall or stop the diversity lottery in our immigration system are just disgusting. Their statements indicating they hope this will be a deterrent are also disgusting. What we are doing to those children is cruel and inhumane. Whatever you think of their parents' decision to seek asylum, inflicting suffering on children is abhorrent. That they are doing this in my name makes me ashamed.

Beyond the immediate crisis, though, I worry about the path we are on. We have ICE agents who are willing to rip a breastfeeding baby away from his or her mother. We have agents who can make jokes about the sound of crying children who are distraught about being separated from their families. Frankly, I am not sure what these agents will not do at this point. I do not say that lightly. It is terrifying to think about where this path could go, particularly since ICE agents have authority within 100 miles of the border. I live within 100 miles of the border. So do two-thirds of all Americans.

So what am I doing?

I have contacted my Senators and my Representative. All have already spoken out against the policy. Dianne Feinstein has authored legislation to stop it, and Kamala Harris was an early co-sponsor. But I contacted them anyway to add my voice in support of their position.

Next, we will be donating to one of the organizations listed here. I want to donate more than my personal "blow on whatever I want" fund supports, so I need to sit down with my husband and decide who we'll donate to and how much. We'll do that this week.

More generally, I am fighting to make Republicans lose wherever I can. That is much more starkly partisan than I usually am, but I think it is warranted right now. Even 3 of the 4 the Never Trump conservatives interviewed in that article I posted on Friday are hoping that the Democrats will take at least the House. I think it is clear that the Republicans aren't going to provide any check on Trump. If they do, they will be primaried (evidence: Mark Sanford's loss in South Carolina).

I also think it is clear that the Republican party has been captured by its more racist wing. Steve King retweeted an open Nazi sympathizer and not one Republican politician calls him on it. Corey Stewart has won the Republican nomination for Senate in Virginia.

And of course, there is the influence of Stephen Miller on immigration policy.

I think the least painful way we break this fever is to make the Republicans start losing for their support of the policies and their embrace of these people. If we fail to do that, I am genuinely fearful about what it will take to turn things around. So I am focusing my efforts to turn things around at the ballot box.

I continue to write for Postcards to Voters.

I have also decided that every paycheck between now and November, I will pick three congressional races to donate to. I started this week. I looked at the Cook Political Report on competitive races, and this week I decided to donate to Josh Harder (CA-10) and Amy McGrath (KY-6). Both races are listed as toss ups. I also sent money to Beto O'Rourke. He is a bit of a long shot, but he's been very outspoken on the policy to separate children from their families at the border, and gosh, I'd love to see Ted Cruz lose.

My husband and I may also send some more money to Let America Vote, Vote Riders, Mi Familia Vota, or some other organization working to expand and protect voting rights.

So that's what I'm doing to fight back right now. Tell us what you're doing in the comments if you'd like!
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