KJ

Many of you have likely heard that most (maybe all by now) of the SF Bay Area is under a shelter-in-place order. Basically this means "don't leave your house, except for certain essential reasons." The list of what's considered "essential" is longer than you might think. You can read the full text of the San Francisco County order here, and I actually recommend it even if you don't live in SF -- the orders for the other Bay Area counties are nearly identical (I suspect it may be boilerplate from the state Department of Health) and it seems likely that similar rules will come down in other places. I actually found it rather calming. Maybe just because it's nice to have some official rules to follow for awhile, rather than the constantly shifting and sometimes conflicting information from various sources. And there are, as I've mentioned, a number of legitimate reasons for going out, including getting food and exercise (as long as you maintain social distancing). The order is for three weeks, through April 7th, but I wouldn't be surprised if it went longer. I'm going to miss socializing with people, but some plans are already on the books for virtual get-togethers (my Sunday TV nights, for one) and I'm sure more will come along.

If you need me, don't hesitate to ping me. Here, or via email, or on Twitter (iamkj ) are all good places to find me. And I'm going to do my best to post and comment more, because maintaining community during these hard times is one of the most important things we can do.

I spent a fair amount of the evening checking in on Twitter for news about today's election. While not everything went the Democrats' way, getting control of both houses of Virginia's legislature is a pretty huge win. A Democratic trifecta in Virginia has implications for gun control, voting rights, and control of redistricting in the state. On a national level, I've also heard talk that Virginia is now in a position to ratify the Equal Right Amendment, making them the 38th state to do so... and that would put the ERA over the finish line to be an official part of the US Constitution. It's not a guarantee, because when Congress passed the ERA in 1972, they put a seven year limit on ratification. Whether Congress has the right to remove that time limit is a big old open question, so who knows how it would actually play out. A story to watch, anyway.

Also, Kentucky appears to have elected a Democratic governor, although it's super close and likely to go to a recount. But it's harder to see that one as a harbinger for big Democratic gains next year, since every other statewide office went to the GOP by a comfortable margin. The Republican incumbent governor was *wildly* unpopular, in part because he said things about teachers that even his GOP colleagues thought went too far. Still, Mitch McConnell is almost as unpopular, so can we dare to hope? If nothing else I expect the Democrats will make a credible run for his seat next year. Another story to watch.

San Francisco had a municipal election today -- for some unfathomable reason, our citywide officials are all elected in off years, so we get to have an election every single November. Lucky us. Anyway, the most important race is an open seat for District Attorney; because we use ranked choice voting and there are four candidates, all with some shot of winning, we won't know the outcome for awhile. There were also some propositions because of course there are some propositions. The one that's gotten the most buzz was Proposition C, an attempt by Juul to take out a ban on selling vaping products that was passed by our Board of Supervisors last year. It's failing, badly, as expected. One proposition that might pass is a hefty tax on Uber and Lyft -- as of this writing, it's running ahead, at exactly the 66.6% that it needs to pass. My issues with the ride hailing companies are legion, too much to go into right now (but if you want to hear the rant another day, let me know); for now let's just say I'll be very happy if this goes into effect.

What does not make me happy is low voter turnout. I made it to the polls less than an hour before they closed, and according to the voting machine, I was the 27th person to vote in my precinct. A lot of Californians vote by mail -- you're allowed to be a permanent absentee voter here -- but still, that seems pretty shameful. In my wealthy/upper middle class neighborhood, in a state with some of the strongest voting rights laws in the country, the most likely cause of low turnout is apathy, and there's no excuse for that. Let's hope it doesn't persist into 2020.

My friend S needed some work clothes, so she rounded up some folks to hit our preferred local outlets today. We'd also hoped the smoke might be better down there, but not much luck on that account. Still, I picked up some clothing and some kitchen supplies, and got to spend a day with good friends, so overall I'd call the day a success.

Speaking of smoke, it got so much worse today. I was driving over to Oakland to meet up with people before we left on our shopping trip, and it was like driving through significant fog. Very sobering. The entire Bay Area has its air quality classifed as "unhealthy" at best, and there are pockets where it's much worse. Not supposed to let up until Monday at the earliest. I don't even know how people closer to the fires are getting by.

Not much else to say today. Maybe I'll be more inspired tomorrow.

SF City Hall wasn't blue because of the rally to protect the Mueller investigation -- it was almost certainly in celebration of this week's Democratic successes -- but it sure made a nice backdrop.

( Photo behind the cut )

It was probably the smallest Civic Center rally I've ever attended, but for short notice on a weeknight, not too bad.

For pictures of more around the country, Indivisible has this Twitter thread.

Keep shouting. Keep marching. Keep strong. Tuesday was a good day (and the news mostly keeps getting better), but this is all far from over.

I've been trying not to include too many links about the various sexual harassment and assault stories, even those more relevant to politics, because I know that they're triggering for some people, and I wanted to keep my linkspams more accessible. The downside is that I haven't been able to share a number of articles and essays that I really liked, so I'm going to put a bunch of them together here. I'll continue marking them as I go forward. Obviously this does not cover every single scandal that's broken -- I'm focusing on bigger pictures issues where I can.

The name: a few weeks ago, T and I were out walking around a large local construction site. One of the human-door side entrances had "MANGATE" hand-painted over a white signboard; apparently "Man Gate" is the official term for a construction site gate that's not large enough for equipment (not "Person Gate", ahem), but we didn't know that, and it struck us as funny. Then T said "Mangate" should be the official name of the continuing scandal, and I decided he was right.

• Many of the best takes have come, naturally, from journalist Rebecca Traister. I particularly liked this one: "Your Reckoning. And Mine. As stories about abuse, assault, and complicity come flooding out, how do we think about the culprits in our lives? Including, sometimes, ourselves." Rage, she says, is the defining quality of this moment, that and the fear that in the long run, nothing will really change. It's a long read, and very personal, and so worthwhile. I hope Traister writes a book about all this.


• Speaking of rage, Uma Thurman's response when asked about the Hollywood allegations was both chilling and powerful.


• ThinkProgress reports on the long and awful process that a staffer has to go to in order to report sexual abuse or harassment by a member of the US Congress.


• Roy Moore corner: you may have heard that Roy Moore and his wife fabricated a letter of support from a group of fundamentalist Christian pastors. 60 actual pastors struck back with a letter of condemnation.


• Moore has also threatened to sue a number of the publications that ran stories about his predatory behavior, including the Atlanta Media Group, which broke the story about Moore being banned from a shopping mall for creeping on teenagers. The Atlanta Media Group blasted back.


• Meanwhile, guess who has Moore's back? That's right, the President of the United States. Who is surprised.


• Of course, the Onion gets it right.


• Okay, that's enough Roy Moore. The Myth of the Male Bumbler delves into why men claiming they just don't understand how to behave properly is little more than setting themselves up for plausible (not that plausible) deniability. This includes moments like Jon Stewart being shocked, shocked by the allegations against Louis C.K. when he was specifically asked about them a year ago.


• Ellen Page shares a powerful and personal statement about the harassment she's endured in Hollywood.


• Chef Amanda Cohen writes a scathing piece on the restaurant industry, and talks about how men have gotten away with rampant abuse for decades.


• On the uselessness of the grand public apology, especially from men who aren't facing any allegations themselves.


• Jessica Valenti shares thoughts on why conservative women stand up for sexual predators.

There's been a lot of discussion in the last year or so regarding how the world being on fire all the time has affected people's creativity, in most cases not for the better. One of the people articulated the problem particularly well was John Scalzi:

I’m not trying to be mysterious about what it is about 2017 that is different. The answer is obvious: Trump is president, and he’s a peevish bigoted incompetent surrounded by the same, and he’s wreaking havoc on large stretches of the American experience, both in his own person and by the chaos he invites. But to say “well, Trump,” is not really to give an answer with regard to what’s different. We’ve had terrible presidents before — George W. Bush springs to mind — and yet my ability to create work was not notably impacted.... The thing is, the Trump era is a different kind of awful. It is, bluntly, unremitting awfulness. The man has been in office for nine months at this point and there is rarely a week or month where things have not been historically crappy... Maybe other people can focus when Shitty America is large and in charge, but I’m finding it difficult to do.

I don't feel like I can blame my own dwindling productivity entirely on the Trump era, because my slump started a few years earlier, in the latter half of 2013, but it's certainly become more of a problem. For one, I allowed myself too high an expectation that everything would be better when 2016 was over. By that summer, I was just hanging on until November, when the presidential election would happen and be over and we could all get on with our lives. And then November came, and instead of getting the closure I needed, I got a scary new world, and the crushing disappointment of that was difficult to manage. As 2017 went on, the uncertainty continued, and although it hasn't been all bad news, the bad stuff has been unusually terrible, and the good things seem few and far between. Add in an irregular work schedule and my ongoing minor but persistent health issues, and there are days and weeks where I find it almost impossible to concentrate on writing anything, whether it be fiction, reviews, or journal entries.

It's not just writing, though -- it's also reading. I think I've mentioned before that concentrating on long-form reading is also more for me difficult these days. When I'm looking for escapism, it's a lot easier to escape into a tv show, a podcast, or a game. It's no accident that I latched onto Critical Role in 2016 and The Adventure Zone in 2017 -- both audio-based media, long-form storytelling in a rich fantasy world, with hundreds of hours of content. My current binge is the TV series Person of Interest, which I've been watching for about a month (I'm well into the fourth season, and I plan to write a separate post about it once I've finished).

Right now, all I feel I can do about this issue is name it, and own it. I've had difficulty with that second part, largely because I feel unfair doing so. In most respects, I have the social and economic privileges to be sheltered from most of the problems -- white, straight, cisgender, financially secure. How dare I claim to be as deeply affected by this situation as those whose lives are literally endangered? On one level, I know that's silly, but on deeper levels it's a hard feeling to shake. So here I am, attempting to shake it off by stepping forward and saying "yes, I too am having this problem," to remind myself and everyone else that we're all in this crappy situation together. I don't know whether it'll make a difference in the end, but I feel better putting it out in the open.

I spent most of today busy at work and managing not to think about the fact that today was Election Day. Then I got home, around 6pm, and decided I had the courage to check Twitter. Where I was treated with almost uniformly good news.

Not just good news. Great news. WONDERFUL news.

Two Democratic governors. A massive blue wave into the Virginia state legislature -- control is still not yet determined, because five races are too close to call, but no matter what the Republican supermajority has been utterly washed away. The Washington state senate looking to come under Democratic control after a special election, which would mean that every single West Coast state is completely governed by Democrats. Medicaid expanded in Maine. At least two out transgender women elected to office, Danica Roem in VA and Andrea Jenkins to the Minneapolis City Council. So many diverse women running for office and winning.

I had been dreading the big one-year anniversary coming up tomorrow, but I think it will be easier to face now. We are fighting back, and we are winning. This is only a first step, of course -- all of these results are good news for the midterms, but that doesn't mean we can relax and assume it's all in the bag. It took a lot of work to get here, and it'll take even more work to get the rest of the way. But we can still take a moment to breathe, and celebrate, and allow ourselves some hope.

Hope. It's nice to feel that feeling again.

Wow, how did I go almost a month without doing one of these? Clearly I'm not going to catch everything, but here's some highlights/more recent stuff.

• If you read only one thing on this page, make it Ta-Nehisi Coates's excellent "The First White President", a stark appraisal of how Trump's presidency is a direct response to Obama's. This is from almost a month ago, so I hope you've already seen it, but if not, you must.


• One of the hot stories lately has been the escalation of the NFL anti-racism protests (and that is what they are, at their root, not any of this nonsense that people have tried to dig up about patriotism and respect for the troops). One of my favorite responses comes from Bob Costas, of all people, who says some excellent things about sports and the conflation of patriotism with support for the military.


• A New York Times editorial reminds us that protest is almost never popular at the time it happens. NFL fans may be booing now, even as more players and even the owners start getting involved, but history may take a very different view.


• I found this Newsweek article about Trump's history with the NFL to be pretty telling. It's not particularly a secret that Trump has made several attempts to purchase an NFL franchise, but he's been blocked by other owners as well as outbid. What I hadn't realized was that he ran the USFL (a short-lived would-be competitor) into the ground in his desperate attempts to be accepted. The story is pure Trump from beginning to end, and might explain why he's so quick to go after the owners now. If nothing else, make sure you read the letter from another USFL owner to Trump.


• Vox has an interesting and depressing article about psychic numbing and the difficulty of getting people to care about large-scale tragedies.


• The big topic in my newsfeeds a couple of weeks ago was Hillary Clinton's new memoir and the (depressingly predictable) backlash to it. This take from Quartz uses the coincidence of Bernie Sanders introducing his "Medicare for All" bill at around the same time to compare and contrast the way the media talks about Sanders versus how it talks about Clinton. Spoiler alert: sexism is involved.


• Some of the book got leaked in advance, primarily sections where Clinton talks about Sanders and his effect on the race. (Mostly leaked by CNN, and isn't it interesting that these passages, sure to be controversial and re-spark infighting among the left, are the ones they chose? Instead of, say, one of the apparently many passages where she blasted the mainstream media for their terrible and imbalanced coverage? I wonder why THAT might be.) This analysis of the leaked text points out that her critique of Sanders was both balanced and fact based, but who cares about that when you can promote a "lady was mean to a man!" narrative?


• Really excellent BuzzFeed article on private-public spaces built by tech companies and why they're no substitute for a genuinely public commons. It's nice that Apple wants to think of their stores as "town squares", but will that last when someone wants to have a picnic there, or a political protest? Somehow I don't think that's going to fly.


• Another thing I missed was the announcement that DACA will be sunsetting, but that The Occupant is open to signing a DREAM Act-like bill if it passes Congress. (And for once that's not just words; Five Thirty Eight estimates that DACA could likely pass Congress with no trouble, although that doesn't mean it will ever come up for a vote.) Since anti-immigrant sentiment is one of the main issues that got him in the White House, this seems like a contradiction, but I thought Chris Hayes had a good take on why even his most hard-core anti-immigrant supporters might be okay with it: opposition to Obama was never about the policies themselves, but about the fact that a black man was implementing them. White people have taken the power back; as long as that's the case, what happens next doesn't really matter. Racism, my friends. It's the engine that drives so many things.

It was only around 75% totality in my area, but still pretty cool. I'm very glad the sky wasn't obscured by fog, which was sounding entirely possible yesterday morning.

Probably I should have gotten my act together to find a place to see the totality. Maybe in 2024, where the totality is further away but closer to people I might reasonably be able to visit.

Meanwhile, have some tree shadows from the courtyard in front of my office.

July was a busy time for me at work, and then I went on vacation, and as usual political events moved really quickly. It seems like years have passed since the last time I did one of these, although in reality it was just under a month. So it goes when you're on Trump time. But Congress is on its summer recess (mostly -- the Senate pulled a procedural trick to keep the chamber officially in session, so that Trump can't make any recess appointments; this isn't an unusual practice, though), and the big man himself is on a seventeen day vacation (because he's been SO HARD at work these last several months, you know), so maybe things will be a little quieter for a bit, and we can catch up.

It's nice to think so, anyway.

• The big story on Twitter this weekend is an anti-diversity memo making the rounds internally at Google. The full text was leaked to Gizmodo; I'm not going to link to it, since it's 1. easy enough to find and 2. the same tedious MRA/alt-right bullshit we've all seen a million times about how women are too emotional to be good coders and "meritocracy" and why Google's REAL diversity problem is not enough Young Republicans (although Anil Dash's short version is pretty entertaining). However, I will link to this ex-Google employee's response, which is excellent. I also direct you to Dr. Nerdlove's Twitter thread on why "at least it's promoting discussion" is exactly the wrong response.


• The Washington Post examines exit poll data from the last few president elections in search of "Trump Democrats" only to find that they basically don't exist. Most of the voters who switched from Obama to Trump were Republicans who crossed the aisle to vote for Obama. Yet another reason for the Democrats to stop chasing this demographic and focus on pleasing their actual base.


• Speaking of, yet again more nonsense about the DNC/DCCC giving money as support to anti-choice candidates. Stop. Just stop. It's never helped us before and it's certainly not going to help us now. I will never forget how anti-choice Democrat Bart Stupak almost derailed the passage of the ACA by pushing for anti-abortion provisions. I don't believe in ideological purity tests, and I know that not every regions of the country is willing to elect loud and proud abortion activists. Candidates and elected officials can believe whatever they want, and take more moderate positions on the issue. But when it comes down to it, if you are a Democrat, you support reproductive rights. The end.


• That said, I have a huge issue with purity politics in general. Bustle has a good article on why women politicians in particular are hurt by an insistence on ideological purity. I'm really ready to be done with circular firing squads now.


• On the lighter side, sort of, it recently came out that Trump considered buying the San Francisco Giants back in the 1980s. Sports writer Grant Brisbee reacts with the appropriate levels of existential horror.


• On the occasion of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller impanelling a grand jury, Vox presents a really handy explainer of the probe, what Mueller's authority is, and how the investigation might go.


• Hey, remember back when we thought Trump's real endgame for his campaign was to launch his own TV network? Well, would you take a look at that.


• Because of the time gap since my last post, I missed the rapid rise and meteoric fall of never-quite-officially White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci (aka "The Mooch"). He'll be a great trivia answer in about ten years. Anyway, Jay Smooth had a great take on the whole thing.


• The central topic of my last linkspam post was the Senate's continuing attempts to ram through some flavor of ACA repeal; as we all know, that didn't happen, in dramatic eleventh hour fashion. One of my favorite stories about that night comes from Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut, who shared his view from behind the scenes.


• You may recall a senator with cancer who got a lot of attention for his last-minute no vote. I'd rather celebrate Senator Mazie Hirono, who flew to DC from Hawaii right after surgery for Stage 4 cancer, held the line on every vote, and gave a beautiful, impassioned speech.


• Speaking of credit where credit is due, let's not forget two other Republican Senators who have stood firm against ACA repeal, almost unwaveringly from the beginning: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.


• Here's an interesting report on the number of Congressional challengers who have already filed to run in 2018 and comparing them to other elections at this point in the cycle. It's worth reading the whole thing, but the upshot is that, in wave elections like 2006 and 2010, opposition party candidates file early in considerably larger numbers than those from the party in power, usually about twice as many. This year? It's an order of magnitude. (209 Democrats vs 28 Republicans.)


• In the interest of this post not being five million pages long, I'm not even going to get into the whole Donald Trump, Jr., saga, but I was amused in an eye-rolly sort of way by this report from The Hill that Junior is "miserable and can't wait for his dad's presidency to end". Join the club, kid. (Note, autoplay video at that link.). Also, from the BBC, an article on whether this might be the smoking gun, and whether a smoking gun is even enough anymore.


• Finally. this article is a little older, but it's from the man who coined the phrase white fragility, and it is a very good examination of the subject. Every white person should read this essay with an open mind and a willingness to learn.