Refs are back!

In much of this country's life, our oligarchs have schemed to erase and succeeded in discounting any skills or expertise their lower paid workers bring to their jobs. Evidently the tycoons of the NFL thought their mass entertainment industry could be run like a fast food restaurant. It couldn't.

How do we force the one percent to honor the inescapable reality that the quality of life for all of depends on honoring (and paying for) the contributions of all?

T-shirts speak

Drowning in presidential polls? Here's another way of looking at this endless election. Since last January I've been capturing snap shots of this graphic from Cafe Press, showing the distribution of T-shirt orders among the candidates.


Obama looked strong in January, as did Ron Paul among the Republicans. In February, Obama had moved up a bit, while Mitt Romney had sunk deeper among the also-rans.


By June, Romney had won the nomination, but that wasn't doing much for him in t-shirt race. He did finally get a bump however before his nominating convention.


Unhappily for the challenger, the President's Party convention rapidly erased that lead. Today, Obama's t-shirt standing is close to identical to his standing in the more orthodox, and predictive, opinion polls.

Friday cat blogging: meet the neighbors

Outside a rear window, there's a mewing … someone shows himself..


Moments later, another curious visitor.


Down the street, surveying the passing scene ...

This couldn't happen to a more deserving guy

A liberal lesbian, Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, appears to be on her way to beating former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson in a race for an open U.S. Senate seat.

A recently released video shows Thompson making a revealing suggestion:

Republican Senate candidate Tommy G. Thompson told a tea party group in June that he wants to “do away with the Medicare and Medicaid”…

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Coming from Thompson, the suggestion to kill off programs providing health care for the old and poor seems plausible. After all, the guy has a record. It's time to remember it.

In his heyday, Thompson was the innovator who pioneered "welfare reform," the vicious (and often bi-partisan) effort in the 1990s to push poor mothers of very young children into low and no wage jobs, saving the state governments and the feds the expense of keeping these families alive. In the expanding economy of the late 1990s, the "reform" didn't reveal its full horrors; some states chose, and could afford to fund, versions of its welfare-to-work mandate that did help poor families. These more generous states treated adult education as a form of work and subsidized childcare for women who took low wage jobs and lost their benefits. But then the economy blew up after 2007. Jobs were gone and so was welfare. It's no wonder that the 2010 Census showed that of all the children in America age six or younger, one in four now live in poverty. That's a unimaginable well of misery living unseen among us.

In 2000, my partner wrote a study of "welfare reform" for the Applied Research Center based on surveys taken from people who were struggling to keep their heads above water in what was left of the safety net. Some findings:

• Welfare reform has more than halved the welfare rolls, but it has done little to lift people out of poverty. 

• The new law did away with existing federal guarantees of childcare and transportation subsidies for people whose benefits end when they get jobs.

• Many people’s medical benefits have mistakenly been terminated when they stopped receiving welfare cash benefits.

•  In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, respondents reported working in "training" programs counting hangers at thrift stores or flipping burgers – for considerably less than minimum wage.

• One woman in six had experienced sexual harassment in her "work activity."

• There was a significant language barrier for 62% of those whose first language is not English.

Recommendations:
Judge the states’ performance by whether they end poverty, not just reduce welfare rolls.

The politician most prominently associated with judging the states by whether their welfare rolls had fallen rather that by what happened to the people was Governor Tommy Thompson.

You go, future Senator Baldwin!

Equality Maine ...

has some of the best ads around.

They also have posted this highly authentic example of the best of what happens when you canvass for something you believe in: a conversation -- give and take -- follows.

Enjoy these short clips and perhaps throw the campaign for marriage equality some spare change.

Rejecting faith while affirming reverence ...

A couple of years ago, a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey surprised some by declaring that

atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.

I don't consider that an unexpected finding; after all, if we think somebody is out to get us, it is only logical to try to get a handle on what they are up to. All the more informed groups have, at some times, experienced ostracism or even persecution from the less informed folks in the United States.

Now atheists have a book -- Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton -- addressed to increasing their knowledge of the beneficial aspects of religious practice without trying to convert them to theism. I'm in the theist camp myself, inclined to Christian belief, but I very much enjoyed de Botton's thoughts about the milieu I share with other believers. The guy is a charming writer of the hyper-clever and articulate sort that Britain seems to produce far more often than we do.

Here is a sample describing what he finds in the Catholic mass:

A Catholic Mass is not, to be sure, the ideal habitat for an atheist. Much of the dialogue is either offensive to reason or simply incomprehensible. It goes on for a long time and rarely overrides a temptation to fall asleep. Nevertheless, the ceremony is replete with elements which subtly strengthen congregants' bonds of affection, and which atheists would do well to study and on occasion learn to appropriate for reuse in the secular realm.

Catholicism starts to create a sense of community with a setting. It marks off a piece of the earth, puts walls up around it and declares that within their parameters there will reign values utterly unlike those which hold sway in the world beyond, in the offices, gyms and living rooms of the city. … a church, with its massive timber doors and 300 stone angels carved around its porch, gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane.

The composition of the congregation feels significant. Those in attendance tend not to be uniformly of the same age, race, profession or educational or income level; they are a random sampling of souls united only by their shared commitment to certain values. The Mass actively breaks down the economic and status subgroups within which we normally operate, casting us into a wider sea of humanity.

… the Church asks us to leave behind all attachments to earthly status. It is the inner values of love and charity rather than the outer attributes of power and money that are now venerated. … Appreciating the reasons why we try to acquire status in the first place, the Church establishes conditions under which we can willingly surrender our attachment to class and titles. It seems to know that we strive to be powerful chiefly because we are afraid of what will happen to us without high rank: we risk being stripped of dignity, being patronized, lacking friends and having to spend our days in coarse and dispiriting surroundings. It is the genius of the Mass to correct each of these fears in turn.

… We may start to feel that we could work a little less feverishly, because we see that the respect and security we hope to gain through our careers is already available to us in a warm and impressive community which imposes no worldly requirements on us for its welcome. If there are so many references in the Mass to poverty, sadness, failure and loss, it is because the Church views the ill, the frail of mind, the desperate and the elderly as representing aspects of humanity and (even more meaningfully) of ourselves which we are tempted to deny, but which bring us, when we can acknowledge them, closer to our need for one another.

… If we have managed to remain awake to (and for) the lessons of the Mass, it should by its dose have succeeded in shifting us at least fractionally off our accustomed egocentric axes.

That is probably the rosiest, most optimistic, description of a Eucharist I've ever read. In real life, most church communities replicate the divisions of class (and race) that pervade their societies. But I like to think he has gotten to some essence of what our practice is meant to be about. He goes on to propose a nutty idea for an "Agape Restaurant," an imitation of church that he thinks would overcome some major social ills.

Thanks to the Agape Restaurant, our fear of strangers would recede. The poor would eat with the rich, the black with the white, the orthodox with the secular, the bipolar with the balanced, workers with managers, scientists with artists. The claustrophobic pressure to derive all of our satisfactions from our existing relationships would ease, as would our desire to gain status by accessing so-called elite circles.

Gosh, the guy sometimes reads like Paul of Tarsus: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one …" He just leaves out the "in Christ Jesus" part.

I have no idea what this book would mean to an atheist, but as a Christian I found it challenging and affirming of our better aspirations. If the atheists were to follow de Botton's suggestion that they "steal" the best of religion, we'd all be better off.

As voting begins … campaign tidbits

But wait a minute .. aren't there still 43 days until election day? Well yes, but half the states have begun collecting absentee ballots and a few have begun in-person voting.

Though I'm plenty busy with the campaign I'm working on, I quickly scan a lot of campaign journalism and punditry, looking for choice observations. As the polls have swung toward President Obama, lots of people have lots of ideas about what's going on, some insightful, many merely amusing. What follows are a few I'd like to either highlight or comment on.

As we all know, Mitt Romney has been beating the bushes for more money, hoping to find enough cash to bury Obama with nasty TV ads. And when he goes out to beg, he gets an earful.

Video of a high-dollar Mitt Romney fundraiser posted by Mother Jones reveals that even Romney’s most ardent supporters — the ones who attend $50,000 per plate dinners to help him get elected — are anxious that he’s just not a likable candidate. In the video, recorded at a May event, the donors can be seen confronting Romney about how he relates to the public, and begging him to improve.

… Donors are not political strategists, but some pay the hefty price to get close to a candidate so they can pretend they are. Any fundraising event undoubtedly features unsolicited advice about what ad to run or what rhetoric to use.

TPM

This describes one of the afflictions of fundraising in all campaigns. People who can give money expect to be able to tell the professionals how to win -- and they are probably even more likely to have wacky ideas about how to do that than the average voter on the street. By definition, the donor class lives in a different world than the average voter, but the average, disinterested voter is the person the campaign needs to connect with.

The conventional wisdom has been that the Koch brothers and a bevy of self-interested conservative billionaires will ensure that Romney has a considerable financial advantage over Obama. Well, yes, all those Citizens United Super PACs are cleaning up, but a remaining fragment of campaign finance regulation still helps level the playing field. Candidates themselves are legally assured "the lowest unit charge" for their ads, while all those outside guys have to pay whatever jacked up prices a crowded market makes inevitable. Capitalism at work makes Karl Rove's millions stretch less far than the aggregated sum of the President's small donors. Read all about it from Walter Shapiro in the Columbia Journalism Review.

So in the end, all the fluff and furor will come down to the opinions and whims of actual voters. As most people know, Republicans have little confidence they can sell their version of lonely individual self-sufficiency to a majority, so they've set about trying to alter the composition of the electorate in their favor by excluding people who might have other ideas.

… the current voting rights issue is ... a coordinated attempt by a political party to fix the result of a presidential election by restricting the opportunities of members of the opposition party’s constituency—most notably blacks—to exercise a Constitutional right.

This is the worst thing that has happened to our democratic election system since the late nineteenth century, when legislatures in southern states systematically negated the voting rights blacks had won in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Elizabeth Drew, NYRB

Drew has covered politics for a generation, usually as a moderate voice of reason, so this is strong stuff.

Political scientists have been studying undecided voters and learning that there aren't very many of them, really. Anyone who actually talks with voters could tell you that. In fact, when phoning for a candidate or initiative, it rapidly becomes clear in which direction most people you talk with will jump, even if they don't know yet themselves. You have to listen to them. I suspect I annoy my co-workers when I get off a call and say "she'll vote with us …" or "that one will never change." It comes of doing this for a long time.

These researchers discovered that 94 percent of us knew how we would vote in the presidential election in December 2011. The parties are fighting over the remaining tiny fraction who happen to live in contested states:

Voters who are undecided initially and those moving to uncertainty after expressing an initial preference look similar: They are less interested in politics than voters who have made up their minds; they know less about politics; they are more likely to be moderates or unaware of their political ideology; and they are less likely to have a party identification.

So, when the underlying division in the electorate is quite even, our elections are decided by the least engaged segment of the population.

Or, just maybe they needn't stay disengaged, at least in local contests. A report from San Antonia points out that, on a small scale, the conventional wisdom can be changed by direct invitations to vote.

In local elections, though, the crass conventional wisdom that I often heard from political professionals was simply, “Latinos don’t vote.” But uncritical adherence to this conventional wisdom often results in a self-fulfilling prophecy: young Latinos are ignored in local races because of their prior voting record, which ensures similarly low turnout in future elections. In 2011, as an inexperienced campaign manager for a young, Latino city council candidate on the south side of San Antonio – a heavily Latino area – I faced this conventional wisdom directly.

He made sure his candidate canvassed young Latinos and their votes elected him. More of that, all over the country, does change the electorate and hence results.

What every candidate and initiative is up against in the contemporary United States is that there are no universally trusted sources of information. None. Gallup has recently documented that overall distrust of the mainstream media has hit a new high.

Americans are clearly down on the news media this election year, with a record-high six in 10 expressing little or no trust in the mass media's ability to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. …On a broad level, Americans' high level of distrust in the media poses a challenge to democracy and to creating a fully engaged citizenry.

This creates a terrible challenge to those of us who are trying to convey messages based on facts that are not easily intuited. And then we also have one political party that has responded to public distrust by concluding it has no obligation to stick to generally agreed facts in its assertions. Steve Benen describes what he sees coming from the Republicans in horror:

I was always taught that campaigns can spin, slice, fudge, and distort the truth, but they couldn't literally make stuff up. The political fabric of our democracy tolerates a generous amount of duplicity -- so long as there's at least a kernel of truth in the claim somewhere -- but demonstrable lies are unacceptable.

Not so, apparently for Mitt Romney's media advisers.

Yet barring some unexpected turnaround, all the intentional distortions of both facts and the electorate are not working for the Republicans. Mitt Romney hasn't found a way to run a plausible campaign. I'll leave the last word about that to the wise Ed Kilgore.

… the Romney campaign is so locked down on tactical day-to-day maneuvering that it’s lost sight of any coherent strategy or rationale-for-candidacy, as the days quickly pass.

***Let's give yet another last word here to President Obama's campaign manager who knows what it will take to get from here to a successful election.

Jim Messina, President Obama’s campaign manager, spoke by conference call to more than 100 members of his Virginia staff last Sunday night to ask whether they’re meeting their door-knocking, phone-calling and voter-registering goals — and to urge them: “Now is the time to push even harder.”

The next night, the call was to Colorado. On Wednesday, he met privately with Senate Democrats on Capitol Hill to deliver a similar message. And on Saturday, he traveled to Wisconsin to meet with field organizers, neighborhood team leaders and other volunteers there.

“Ignore the polls,” Messina said on the call to Virginia, he recalled. “There are always going to be polls showing us up. There are always going to be polls showing us down. None of that matters. What matters is your voter contacts in your state.”

Washington Post, Sept. 22, 2012

San Francisco Democratic Party headquarters opened yesterday

The best moment was when Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed into the seats to greet party stalwart Jane Morrison.


As Morrison pushes into her 90s, she still shows at hearings and throws fundraisers for local candidates.


Our YES on Prop. 34 signs were in good company in the front windows.

Saturday scenes and scenery: BART turns 40

This weekend the Bay Area Rapid Transit system that I ride every day celebrates its 40th year of operation. Naturally there's a slick corporate logo for the occasion.

Actually BART as part of Bay Area life is a lot older than 40. It was being built during all the years I was in college ('65-'69) but not opened for several more years. Central Berkeley was all torn up because the city had decided, and taxed itself, to put the tracks underground for fear an overground route would function as a barrier between mostly African American flat lands and the mostly white and collegiate Berkeley of the university. Rising housing prices probably did more to break down that barrier (and drive out former poor Berkeley residents) than putting the tracks underground. But the choice eventually made Berkeley a more pleasant city. Meanwhile we stepped over the construction on the way to the campus.


The official 40th anniversary celebration includes a giveaway of stickers (she's wearing one) that might get their wearers singled out for prizes from the sponsors.


But the piece of the party that caught my attention was this homegrown display at my stop, one of the more down at the heels stations in the system. Looks like our local BART employees really care about their workplace. It made me smile.

A dreadful anniversary turned toward life

One year ago, the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis who died still proclaiming his innocence.

Well, first of all I'd like to address the MacPhail family. I'd like to let you all know, despite the situation -- I know all of you are still convinced that I'm the person that killed your father, your son and your brother, but I am innocent. The incident that happened that night was not my fault. I did not have a gun that night. I did not shoot your family member. But I am so sorry for your loss. I really am -- sincerely. All I can ask is that each of you look deeper into this case, so that you really will finally see the truth. I ask my family and friends that you all continue to pray, that you all continue to forgive. Continue to fight this fight. For those about to take my life, may God have mercy on all of your souls. God bless you all.

The pleas for his life of millions of people around the world who insisted there was "too much doubt" went unheard. As long as we continue to employ the death penalty, we can never know we did not execute an innocent person.

They only win if we can't vote

If you thought I was stretching when I tied Mitt Romney's contempt for 47% of us to Republican efforts to suppress the vote -- here's a Pennsylvania Republican, State Rep Daryl Metcalfe, telling you all about it.

I don’t believe any legitimate voter that actually wants to exercise that right and takes on the according responsibility that goes with that right to secure their photo ID will be disenfranchised.

As Mitt Romney said, 47% of the people that are living off the public dole, living off their neighbors’ hard work, and we have a lot of people out there that are too lazy to get up and get out there and get the ID they need. If individuals are too lazy, the state can’t fix that.

Pennsylvania Republicans enacted one of the most restrictive voter suppression laws in the country.

H/t TPM

Mitt Romney’s Boca Moment*

You've probably seen it, but here it is.

So Mitt Romney has been caught out peddling "a country-club fantasy" to dimwitted donors. (So says David Brooks who I've always thought probably felt right at home in such venues.) These folks, Romney's base, just know that the "little people" (so described by the unlamented, tax-hating hotel magnate Leona Helmsley) are parasites or worse. Certainly the moochers are not worthy of a say in the direction of their country. No wonder these donors fund a political party whose current strategy for surviving changing demographic tides is to suppress the votes of people who aren't like them.

Somehow I doubt that it helps Mr. Romney's electoral chances to express contempt for 47 percent of potential voters.

Most mornings, I read the psalm(s) appointed for Morning Prayer. The morning after the video of the Boca Moment came out, I encountered this:

… though wealth increase, set not your heart upon it. Psalm 62

Apparently that bit of ancient wisdom never got through to Mitt. I think I understand him a little; as I've written previously. We're exactly the same age and I came up in an environment enough like his to catch more than a glimpse of men like Mitt. The years of our youth -- the 1950s and early '60s -- were the apogee of United States power, militarily and economically. It was easy for the more fortunate among us to believe that endless comfort and prosperity were our natural lot, to expect a rosy, an ever-more felicitous, future.

Most of us eventually were jarred out of our complacency. We ran up against the brutal U.S. Vietnam adventure, the broad struggles for full democratic rights launched by people of color that spread to women and gays, the reality that our economic arrangements didn't offer a fair chance to everyone. We stopped living in a comfortable '50s bubble of capitalist self-satisfaction.

But none of those things ever happened in Mitt's world. He prospered without ever encountering the United States that most of us live in. Wealth increased and he seems to have "set his heart upon it," never learning that there is so much more he can't even see. His rich donors may not spring from quite Mitt's comfort, but he's evidently an admirable figure to them, perhaps the oblivious, almost innocent, patriarch they wish wealth would enable them to pass for.

Today another verse from a psalm put me in mind of Mitt. Psalm 72 asks God's blessing on the good King the deity has given Israel.

He shall defend the needy among the people; he shall rescue the poor and crush the oppressor.

Mitt wants to be King, but somehow he missed the part about the King's job description.***I'm not the only religious person in whom Mitt inspires pained reflection. Joanna Brooks is a faithful Mormon who tries to explain her tradition to those of us who find the Latter Day Saints a curiosity, writing at Religion Dispatches. Mitt's Boca Moment clearly leaves her gasping.

You’ve got to love the people you serve.

It’s a saying I’ve heard time and again within the precincts of Mormonism.

You’ve got to love the people you serve. At least in the abstract. …

… now it’s hard to shake the sense he doesn’t like us very much. Us being the public. The ones he is presumably running to serve. …

So, let’s say it again: anyone who thinks Mormonism will play some unusual or outsized behind-the-scenes influence on Romney’s campaign need only roll the Boca Raton fundraising dinner video.

You’ve got to love the people you serve. At least in the abstract.

And that love—Romney saves it for the donors behind closed doors.

I feel Brooks' pain here. Any adherent to any faith who has to endure the public failings of politicians who claim the same faith can recognize the emotion.

But you do begin to wonder whether there is something really wrong with Mitt Romney.

*H/t Ed Kilgore.

Yes we will

There is something we can do about the Republicans contempt for 47% of us. These folks have an idea.
Nice.

What is it with Republicans and the idea of "47 percent"?

This 1972 ad for another Republican, that one a sitting President, accuses Democrats of intending to create a parasitic class of welfare cheats.

Also notable is the ad's depiction of a white construction worker. We've beefed up since then. In modern visuals, that guy's appearance would signal deprivation, that he was underfed.

H/t TPM.

Flag alert: bosses just want total control

I'm not watching as much pro football as I might if this were not a hot and heavy election season. But when I do catch a snippet, I find myself asking who are these guys in the striped shirts? What happened to Ed Hochuli's biceps, not mention his decisive explanations of what the players just did to each other? Why do the refs sometimes look bewildered? Very occasionally, commentators remark that these guys are "replacements" that is, SCABS. The owners have locked out the regular refs to force them to accept a new contract.

These replacement refs come from lower level college and high school leagues. There are more experienced and accomplished officials who work high level college games such as in the PAC 12 and the SEC, but they won't step into these replacement spots because they are already in the NFL pipeline. As with the players, the big schools serve as farm teams for the pro league.

And what is the labor dispute about about? Well, refs want pension benefits that would cost the league about $16.5 million a year or $500,000 per team. Sounds like a lot, until you discover that NFL revenues are around $9.3 billion a year and soaring toward $14 billion. The $500,000 annual figure per team is less than half of the median salary for one athlete, currently $770,000. Source.

So in the scale of NFL money, this is piddly stuff. What's the fight really about? Here's the explanation from the New York Times' sports columnist Judy Battista:

Unlike last year’s lockout of players, which was largely about creating the economic structure for the league for the next decade,  this dispute is a relatively simple one over compensation and benefits. Current officials want to retain a traditional pension program; the league, pointing out that even many full-time league and team employees do not get traditional pensions anymore, wants to move the part-time officials into a 401(k). The league is also pushing to hire additional officials who would serve as a bench, ready to replace those the N.F.L. determines are underperforming, though some of the locked-out officials doubt the seriousness of that proposal and believe it is a negotiating tactic. It would seem to be a standoff without much of a gap, certainly not one yawning enough that a few phone calls and calm conversations could not bridge it.

But the tone of this lockout has been much sharper and more personal even than the one with players. Repeatedly the league has made the same point ... officials have convinced themselves they are an irreplaceable part of the game, and the league will not make what it deems a bad, potentially precedent-setting deal because of it. …

“I see those meetings as that last-minute warning to us that, ‘We’re serious; it’s time for you to fold,’ ” said [an] official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We haven’t seen any change in their goal: crush us and show us who’s boss, so we will never again act up.”

The lockout is about a bunch of rich owners saying "it's our football and we'll do what we want."

It is telling that the sticking point is about maintaining what used to be thought a proper pension plan -- a so-called "defined contribution" plan in which the league invests money and promises it will be there for retirees when they need it. No more -- business won't take that responsibility. Instead, as in the rest of U.S. industry, the owners' aim is to toss their employees out to fend for themselves in the big Wall Street casino.

It wouldn't take a lot of money (by NFL standards) to get the guys who know what they are doing back on the field. But no -- the playboys in the owners' boxes have to make their point, regardless of what harm they do to their product and to players who need pros to officiate this violent game.***UPDATE: I don't have time for frills like postgame shows, so I didn't get to see Steve Young rip the league for sticking with the scab refs. But you can see it here:

“The owners don’t care. They don’t care about player safety. They care about breaking the union and they view the refs (labor) as a commodity and you can just throw anyone out there to officiate.”

H/t Balloon Juice.

Happy Anniversary, Occupy Wall Street

It's been a full year since the understanding that it is most all of us versus the one percent took the nation by storm. However little they may like it, the presidential hopefuls and political parties are punching it out inside a country and a world that knows that. What a difference a year can make! There's an insight worth recalling.

NAACP's Jealous points to lessons from the history of struggle

Bishop Yvette Flunder welcomes NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous to City of Refuge United Church of Christ, San Francisco.
The President of the NAACP spoke yesterday against the current rash of Republican-originated voter ID laws that aim to take the right to vote away from poorer citizens who may find it expensive or difficult to obtain the required documentation. Jealous reminded his audiences of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing forty nine years ago in Birmingham, AL which killed four young girls. The church was dynamited by white segregationists in retaliation for its role as a center of the movement for African American civil and voting rights. He posed a challenge:

We must pass on our history to new generations not as nostalgia, but as instruction.

From the ongoing struggle to protect voting rights, Jealous moved on to call for the passage of Propostion 34, recalling the execution of Troy Davis by the state of Georgia last September, despite serious doubts about Davis' guilt in the shooting death of a white police man. Only replacing the death sentences of life without parole will ensure that a fallible judicial system does not risk killing an innocent person.***It was a privilege to follow Ben Jealous to a series of churches handing out information about Prop. 34 yesterday, but three religious services in a day leave me pooped. Blogging will resume when I recharge.

"The death penalty in California is a farce…."

If anyone who comes by here is still wondering why I am working to pass Prop. 34 -- the California initiative to replace the death penalty with life in prison without parole -- they don't have to believe me. Just take a look at the five part series that ran last week in the Sacramento Bee newspaper, culminating in this editorial endorsement:

Voters should approve Prop. 34, for all the reasons we've laid out in editorials this week.

The death penalty in California is a farce. It isn't being carried out with any consistency or equal application across counties. Proponents have spent decades trying to speed up executions, including creating a Habeas Corpus Resource Center in 1998.

Even so, California has executed only 13 condemned murderers since 1992, when executions resumed after the reinstatement of the death penalty. During that time, 84 inmates have died on death row, leaving 729 awaiting an execution that, for most them, is sure to never come.

Even if California could somehow speed up executions, there is no evidence nationally that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to violent crime. There is evidence, however, that judges and juries have occasionally convicted the wrong person of a capital crime, resulting in an innocent person being sent to death row and even executed. ...

The whole series is worth reading; the Bee had supported capital punishment for 155 years prior to this re-examination.

The Bee illustrated its series with this cartoon, perhaps the most cogent presentation of what the Prop. 34 campaign is trying to replace that I've seen anywhere:

Saturday scenes and scenery: Sweaters for sign posts?

Someone on 24th Street thinks these posts need them.




Obviously there are knitters at work.

What a difference eight years can make

This moonscape outside Albuquerque echoed my mood -- chilly and barren -- the morning after the 2004 election. George W. Bush had carried the nation, and, of more immediate interest to me, also the electoral votes of New Mexico where I had been working. He had prevailed in the state by barely 5000 votes, a tough reminder that turning out your voters (in this case his Republican ones who were worked by white evangelicals) can make a difference.

Republican Congresswoman Heather Wilson of Albuquerque was also re-elected quite easily even though Kerry narrowly carried her district. She seemed an unbeatable fixture. And she proved herself a survivor by winning again in 2006, a Democratic wave election that swept out most Republicans in slightly Blue districts like hers.

But now, the former Congresswoman is running in a statewide New Mexico race for a U.S. Senate seat against Martin Heinrich, the Democrat who knocked her out of Congress in 2008.

And now just about everyone seems to agree that Heinrich is a shoe-in to win, the contest not really competitive. First the national Republicans withdrew their money for TV ads, then the Dems followed suit. The emerging Latino fraction of the New Mexico electorate has turned the state Blue.

As we go into the end of a campaign season in which pundits will bloviate on about how, once again, the election only comes down to a handful of the same old swing states, it is worth remembering that change does happen. New Mexico has shifted pretty definitively to the Democratic column, at least in national elections. Nevada seems to be moving the same way. In 2008, Obama made Colorado and Virginia competitive for Dems; they remain so this year. Ohio and Florida remain perennial swing states but there is real movement elsewhere.

Let's turn out those voters!