Fair and Unbalanced

Democrats Need To Take More Swings

2025-02-03T16:33:00.000-08:00

"They want to flood the zone with outrage. But we can’t chase every outrage. One of the reasons that [Aaron Judge] is a great hitter is that he does not swing at every pitch. He waits for the right one.” -- Hakeem Jeffries

Imposing tariffs. Pardoning all the insurrectionists and purging federal law enforcement agencies of those who worked on January 6 cases. Firing inspectors general. Attempting to halt federal funding and grants. Giving Elon Musk unfettered access to the Treasury Department's data. Blaming people of color and women for a tragic air crash. Indiscriminately deporting undocumented immigrants and revoking protection for many who are here legally. Declaring an end to birthright citizenship. Attacking transgender Americans. Freezing foreign aid and humanitarian assistance around the globe. Each of these is treated by the Democrats (and the mainstream media) as isolated events. They need to be discussed, analyzed, and attacked as an interconnected assault on our Democracy.

It is critically important to make sense of the chaos and to understand that what we are witnessing is a true and immediate constitutional crisis; indeed, an actual coup. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains that what is happening comes right out of the classic authoritarian playbook: "There is always an 'inner sanctum' that really runs the show, with its mix of family members and cronies, some with histories of working with or for foreign powers. And there is almost always a purge of the federal bureaucracy." Sound familiar?

Heather Cox Richardson describes three different factions "whose only shared ideology [is] a determination to destroy the federal government": (1) the group "gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold [Trump] accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality"; (2) the MAGA crowd that embraces Project 2025, pushing "discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy;" and (3) Musk and his tech bros, who, among other things, seek to slash government regulations, gut the safety net, and decimate civil service.

Asha Rangappa also organizes Trump's actions into three buckets: (1) "purging of civil servants and 'hollowing out' of democratic institutions, in order to eliminate and/or privatize large swaths of government, or to create space from them to be filled with loyalists; (2) "An attempt to create the infrastructure to assert police and military authority over people within the United States"; and (3) "the apparent takeover by Elon Musk ... of the Office of Personnel Management and, it seems the sensitive payments systems at the Treasury Department, which gives him single-handed control over the financial levels of our government, as well as the personal data of millions of Americans."

As Ben-Ghiat puts it: "All of these individuals and groups want to rearrange government around an extremist ideological project of Christian nationalism and white Supremacy, and most of them want to enact neoliberal deregulation and privatization measures."

Rather than appearing to be too alarmist, the Democrats cautiously search for the right poll-driven messaging, seek to compromise where they can, and oppose only the most egregious actions. So we get deer-in-the-headlights silence followed by de-contextualized retorts, like this one from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: "You’re worried about tomato prices. Wait till Trump’s Mexico tariffs raise your tomato prices." Chuck, what I'm worried about is that you have outlasted your shelf life.

Then there's Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, who ignores the big picture. Rather, he preaches message discipline and warns against "chas[ing] every outrage," explaining that like Aaron Judge, Democrats need to wait for the right pitch to swing at. Now I'm all for baseball analogies, but when Judge does swing he often hits home runs. Democrats are more likely to take the walk. And when they do swing, they talk about the price of tomatoes. Democrats need to take more -- and better -- swings. Credit to Connecticut Senator Christopher Murphy, who pushed back: “right now, you have to swing at every pitch,” and "[i]f you let some of these egregious acts of his early days on pass without real protest, it normalizes the behavior...Trump floods the zone, every hour of every day. We have to do the same thing.”

Today was more encouraging. You had Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz put a hold on all of Trump's State Department nominees to protest efforts to shut down the the U.S. Agency for International Development, which also drew protests from progressive Democrats who attempted to enter the agency's headquarters. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, described Musk's role as a “five alarm fire,” a “grave threat to national security,” and "a plutocratic coup." Rep. Ilhan Omar said, “[w]e are witnessing a constitutional crisis,” and that "[t]his is what the beginning of dictatorship looks like. When you gut the constitution and you install yourself as the sole power, that is how dictators are made.” Meanwhile, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren demanded answers from new Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, for his role in allowing Musk’s team access to the Department's payment system.

More swings like this, please.

Speaking Truth To Power

2025-01-23T14:13:00.000-08:00

“Was anyone going to say anything about the turn the country’s taking?” -- Bishop Mariann E. Budde

In 2006, at the height of George W. Bush's popularity, Stephen Colbert was invited to speak at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Staying in his Colbert Report character, he literally spoke truth (or "truthiness") to power, courageously and hilariously skewering the President and mocking the all-too-compliant national press (e.g., "I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.") And the beauty was that it was done in such a deadpan manner that a clueless Bush didn't get that he was the joke and lamely laughed along while the reporters squirmed uncomfortably.

But not even a dotard like Donald Trump could miss that he was being called out by Bishop Budde, the spiritual leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, while he slumped in the front row at the Washington National Cathedral this week. Here's how she closed her sermon:

Let me make one final plea. Mr. President, millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants, and work the night shifts in hospitals, they — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara and temples.
I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people, the good of all people in this nation and the world.

Calling out the President of the United States, especially when he is sitting right in front of you, is not for the faint of heart. And when that President is as vindictive and emotionally fragile as the current one, and has just pardoned the entire swath of Brownshirts, doing so is particularly fraught. But Bishop Budde felt compelled to appeal to the President to show mercy and compassion to those who are vulnerable rather than demonize broad categories of people. Now, I can't imagine she thought this would spur some spark of humanity and change his rancid mind. She was speaking to all of us. She was reminding us how important it is to not acquiesce, to not normalize, to rebut the false narratives that Trump and his cult are so adept at creating.

Indeed, in these early days of the regime it is especially critical to push back on the notion that Trump's narrowly-won election victory created a mandate for his Nazi-inspired agenda. Speaking truth to power shows that the opposition does not believe in the autocrat's invincibility or infallibility. But, unfortunately, the Democratic leadership has decided that voters care more about decorum and bipartisanship, and that it is better to sip tea with the President-elect than sound the fucking alarm.

In November 2016, M. Gessen wrote a remarkably prescient piece entitled "Autocracy: Rules for Survival." Gessen criticized Democratic leaders for their far too conciliatory post-election reactions that pretended Trump was a "normal" politician to be given the benefit of the doubt. Gessen sharply observed that their magnanimous responses may have been meant to ensure a peaceful transfer of power but effectively closed off any alternative to despair and acquiescence by implying that there was no daylight between acceptable, indeed necessary, peaceful protest and a violent insurgency.

And here we are again. Nothing has been as dispiriting as the defeatist attitude of the Democratic Party while Trump enriches himself and his family, shreds the Constitution, pardons seditionists, undermines civil and human rights, and destroys that administrative state. With rare exceptions, such as AOC (who the geriatrics of the Party stubbornly denied a leadership position) and Bernie Sanders (who isn't even a Democrat), the Silent Minority says nothing and does nothing, except when it comes to going along with a MAGA-inspired immigration bill.

This is not a time for compromise; it is a time for outrage. The Democrats should be railing every day about the pardons, the corruption, and the myriad abuses of power. Move for censure or, dare I say, impeachment. Force votes. Call for investigations into Trump's corruption and his apparently impulsive decision to pardon violent and non-violent January 6 rioters alike. Act with a sense of urgency regardless of the likelihood of success. Show the American People that the alarmist rhetoric about Project 2025 and Trump's fascism was not simply a campaign tactic.

If a 65-year old grandmother and spiritual leader can speak truth to power, can't the Democrats?

Either Or Both

2024-11-13T16:53:00.000-08:00

A law school classmate -- who remains one of my most cherished friends 40 years later -- was asked one of those typical law school questions in our first year contracts class that had no clear answer. His response, "either or both" was funny at the time but also probably the most appropriate response. Some questions can't be answered with a clear choice between two options. And Occam's razor notwithstanding, the simplest answer is not always the right one.

Polling, focus groups, and other studies suggest that a majority of Americans favor Democratic policies, particularly if they don't know they are Democratic policies -- including protecting reproductive rights, combatting climate change, raising the minimum wage, and increasing, not cutting, taxes for the wealthy. Even with regard to immigration, while there is widespread support for border safety, there is no desire for the kind of mass deportation that Trump and his neo-Nazi compatriots promise.

So why couldn't the Democrats convince voters that they were best positioned to pursue policies that most Americans want. Sure, there's been a backlash against incumbency internationally in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic damage and psychological trauma. But there's more to it. The Democratic brand is badly damaged and far too many Americans seem to believe the Democrats are truly nothing more than a bunch of woke elitists who don't care to help struggling Americans. That is the case despite the fact that the Biden Administration actually did a remarkable job in tamping down inflation and rescuing the economy from much of the damage Trump caused the last time he stank up the White House (just like Obama did after Bush II).

A huge reason for the disconnect is the radically changed media landscape that the Democrats have been so slow to recognize. As Joyce Vance notes, polling data shows that "People who are in possession of truthful, accurate information voted overwhelmingly for Harris. In other words, if you believed violent crime in major American cities was at an all-time high—which is not true—you were far more likely to vote Republican."

As Dan Pfeiffer explains: "Because of Fox News and other Right Wing outlets, Republicans have long had an asymmetric media advantage. However, in recent years, Right Wing messaging has come to dominate non-political online spaces centered on topics like comedy, gaming, gambling, and wellness." Thus, from Fox propaganda to Musk's transformation of Twitter into a right-wing megaphone to oligarch-owned networks to Joe Rogan's podcasts, Americans have been marinating in a toxic stew of alternative facts in which cities are crime-ridden dystopias, migrants are raping and pillaging law-abiding citizens and eating their pets, January 6th was a peaceful protest, pro-choice moms want to be able to kill their newborns, and kids are getting sex change operations at school. Who better to protect them than Donald J. Trump?

Sure there is an all-too-sizable group of, dare I say, "deplorable" Americans who embrace Trump's lawlessness, misogyny, and racism, and have no problem with his lies, corruption, and authoritarianism. But there are many others -- enough to sway an election -- who think he did an admirable job last time and actually cares about them, and that this time he will keep them safe while using tariffs to lower prices and get them higher wages. A large reason they believe this is because of the media environment to which they've been overexposed.

But this doesn't absolve Democrats of their inability to break through and make the case for why they should have remained in power. Biden may have done some great things but the dude could not convey in any compelling way how his policies helped ordinary Americans. And while the Democrats controlled the Senate they failed to use it to expose a myriad of issues that would have highlighted the disconnect between Americans' needs and Republican values. Why Jared Kushner received billions from the Saudis would have been a good one. Or the seeming never-ending gifts received by Clarence Thomas and the lack of ethical standards at the Supreme Court. Or how about hearings on how Trump politicized the FDA and botched the response to the COVID pandemic? Maybe that would have reminded those with amnesia about how the Trump years weren't so awesome. The point would have been not simply to show that Republicans are corrupt and incompetent but that they put their own greed and political gain above the needs of the People.

The passivity that permeates the Democratic Party, particularly the old guys who have failed to reckon with the fact that the halcyon days of Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan are long over, is absolutely infuriating. And don't get me started on Merrick Garland's beyond methodical approach to indicting Trump but it is worth thinking about why Biden felt it was necessary to appoint someone of such a moderate, relatively apolitical tenor for Attorney General in the first place.

It is understandable that Americans believe the political system is broken and our institutions are ill designed to help them. But Democrats could have addressed this by focusing, for example, on the post-Citizens United landscape in which a handful of oligarchs can fund and influence political campaigns. Susan Glasser's piece in The New Yorker explained how Trump courted the country's wealthiest donors and what they might expect in return. But not only have Democrats been mostly silent about the need to reign in campaign spending and for greater transparency as to who is funding whom, they too have become adept at courting big donors, making it somewhat difficult to throw stones.

The Democrats have lost the ability to speak to their base and address their concerns. It is remarkable that Harris seems to have lost not because more people voted for Trump but because less people identified as Democrats voted at all. The Party needs to figure out how to reach those folks again and I don't think the answer is to pal around with Liz Cheney.

So before we descend into the madness and chaos of the next term, it is worth asking, did Harris lose because she and her Party failed to make a compelling case or because their case was drowned out by the the right wing media machine? The answer is: either or both.

Not Great, Bob!

2024-11-06T13:16:00.000-08:00

“This campaign was run on the explicit promise to inflict maximal suffering on a lot of disfavored and marginalized people. I trust them to keep that promise. Try to keep your heart soft because that will be the work. Take care of yourself because you will do that work again.” -- Dahlia Lithwick

He will overplay his hand as his rapid cognitive decline causes him to be even more erratic. His disorganized thinking might slow down his authoritarian impulses. Resistance will grow. If the Democrats can take the House that would be huge and thwart much of his agenda. Governors in Blue States and local governments will be critical too. Midterms are only two years away.

In the meantime, the federal cases against him will go away and I’m not sure if the Georgia case still has legs (but DA Fani Willis was re-elected). That means his incitement of a violent insurrection and his stealing and likely distribution of highly classified information will go untried and unpunished. Hopefully the fruits of the special counsel’s investigations will see the light of day.

Because we lost the Senate, more MAGA judges will be appointed throughout the country unless Senate Democrats can put salt in the gears and slow things down — which they aren’t good at — and we may see Thomas and Alito retire and be replaced by younger extremists. No way to sugarcoat that or the demise of civil service or the dangers to public health and women’s health. Or what may happen internationally, to name just a few areas of grave concern.

I’m disoriented and nauseated and sad and angry. I want to blame most of all Merrick Garland for his slothful approach to holding Trump accountable, as well as Senate Dems for failing to use their power as the majority party to hold hearings in order to highlight Trump’s corruption, from Egyptian bribes to Covid-related malfeasance. And I’m incensed at the mainstream press for failing to give Biden credit for how he resurrected the economy (Biden’s inability to convey this didn’t help) and for normalizing for so long Trump’s lawlessness, misogyny and racism — not to mention his wholesale inability to form a coherent thought or discuss policy with even a modicum of sense.

The enormous influence of our oligarchs, especially Elon Musk, in bolstering Trump’s campaign shouldn’t be underestimated. And the ratfucking and the bomb threats from Russia (especially in light of Trump’s and Musk’s Putin connections) shouldn’t be ignored.

Kamala Harris ran an inspired campaign given the burden of incumbency and how quickly she had to pivot when it became clear Biden was compromised. I wonder if the focus on swaying old school Republicans was the right approach but what do I know. I do know that we shouldn’t underestimate the reluctance of many American voters to elect a woman — not to mention a woman of color. Indeed I can’t get my head around the fact that a majority of the American people who bothered to vote chose to ignore — or embrace — the myriad of cruel, ignorant, vengeful, racist, and misogynist qualities of this malignant narcissistic fascist. But I need to remind myself that they don't represent all of us -- not by a long shot.

I want to conclude by talking reassuringly about hope, love, and community, and about how we cannot allow ourselves to become demoralized and complacent -- because that's how they win. But I can’t quite find the words yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Requiem For An Amazin' Season

2024-10-22T16:37:00.000-07:00

There I was, a 65-year-old attorney at law, respected member of my community, and father of two adult children, wearing Met socks I refused to wash because I had worn them the game before when the Mets had won. The Met Hawaiian shirt that worked so well when we defeated the Phillies in the NLDS had lost its magic in the NLCS, so I switched to a Lindor shirt, and then, in desperation, to a black Met jersey. Alas, in the end, my sartorial choices couldn't overcome the lack of reliable bullpen arms or the dearth of clutch hitting.

The Mets needed to win just two more games to reach the World Series when their season ended. But this was unlike other years where we came up painfully short of a championship, seasons which mostly left a bitter taste. See, e.g, 1988 (the end of a dynasty that never was); 1999 (losing to the Braves with Kenny Rogers walking in the winning run); 2000 (a rageful, steroid-fueled Roger Clemens throwing a broken bat remnant at Mike Piazza); 2006 (Carlos Beltran's strikeout with the bases loaded); 2015 (Matt Harvey pitching just a little too long and Lucas Duda throwing just a little too wild); and 2022 (a dispiriting team-wide end-of-the-season fade).

This year was in many ways sui generis, but for me the most analogous Met season is 1973. That was the year of "Ya Gotta Believe," with beloved players from the 1969 squad and widely popular additions sprinkled in such as Rusty Staub, John "The Hammer" Milner, and Felix Millan and, of course, a last hurrah from Willie Mays. That team, like this one had low expectations. Indeed, they were in last place with a month left in the season and barely won more games than they lost. But they came within one poor managerial decision (i.e., pitching Tom Seaver on short rest in Game #6 -- no, I'm still not over it) from winning the World Series against the Mighty A's. For me, the two championship years (1969 and 1986) and 1973 are my three favorite Met seasons.

I can now add a fourth. This season was as fun as any I can remember. It was a rollercoaster to be sure, with a horrible start and some really disheartening play until late June, when the Mets began to play inspired ball that lasted for the duration of the season -- and beyond.

The 2024 Mets played with unbridled joy that resonated from the dugout through Citi Field and reached fans like me watching nearly every game from across the country. It has become a cliché to refer to team chemistry but this team had it -- the love and trust among the players was palpable. There was the silliness of the rally pimp and the Grimace and OMG. But there was also the remarkably steady leadership of their new manager, and some compelling story lines, from the incredible out-of-nowhere brilliance of Jose Iglesias to the budding stardom of Mark Vientos to the unexpected pitching from reclamation projects, Sean Manaea and Luis Severino. And then there was Francisco Lindor, who emerged as a true superstar with a season as good as any Met position player ever had (with all due respect to David Wright and Carlos Beltran).

And that wasn't all. Lindor's homer to beat the Braves on the last day of the season, Pete Alonso's 9th inning homer to beat the Brewer's in the first round of the playoffs, and Lindor's grand slam to crush the Phillies in the next round will be cherished by Met fans forever. In the end, they ran out of gas and out of magic. They simply didn't have the depth of talent as did the Dodgers, their opponent in the NLCS, who won the series in 6 games and will now face the other powerhouse from the Bronx.

But that's OK. Really. This was a season for the ages, an incredibly fun, exciting journey with so many magical moments that is only slightly marred by the final result. And it doesn't really feel like an ending. Although some of the key players that comprised this special group won't be with the team next year, it feels like the beginning of a new Met narrative. Perhaps we are no longer lovable losers but, dare I say, lovable winners?

OMG, there are only about 100 days until spring training 2025.

Tis Better To Have Loved And Lost ...

2024-09-23T08:17:00.000-07:00

You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. -- Jimmy Breslin, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?

This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. -- Roger Angell, The Summer Game

In 1962, the Mets' first year of existence, they lost 120 games against 40 wins, the worst record of baseball's modern era. (The Cleveland Spiders were 20-134 in 1899.) It has remained the gold standard for baseball futility almost my entire life. (I was 3 years old in 1962.) But no longer. The 2024 Chicago White Sox, with their 120th loss (and six games left) will hold the ignominious distinction of playing worse than the 1962 Mets. I imagine for White Sox fans, this has been a season to forget. There has been nothing entertaining about that miserable team as illustrated by woeful attendance figures. But, while admittedly my knowledge of the inaugural Met squad is a priori, by all accounts, Met fans found the 1962 team to be fun, engaging, and loveable. We still embrace 1962, even those, like me, who were too young to remember it. This new reality is disorienting. (I'm not going to talk about the other new reality -- the exhilarating 2024 Mets -- kinehora!)

As poorly as they played -- and they really sucked in every aspect of the game -- the 1962 Mets were beloved. Fans of the Dodgers (like my dad) and the Giants -- teams that left for the West Coast five years earlier -- could not abide by the Yankees and were thrilled by having a new National League team to root for. The Mets honored those fans with the team colors of the former residents -- Dodger Blue and Giant Orange -- and fielded more than a few well-worn stalwarts from those teams' glory years, such as Gil Hodges and Duke Snider. As the great and ever-prescient Roger Angell put it during spring training that year, the Mets were "an attractive team, full of echoes and overtones" with "former headliners whose mistakes will be forgiven and whose accomplishments will win sentimental affection."

And then there is Mets' lore, all those quirky, bizarre, and sometimes charming anecdotes that endeared the '62 team to their fans forever. Like all the crazy shit that their colorful manager Casey Stengel said (e.g., explaining why the Mets chose journeyman catcher Hobie Landrith as their first pick in the expansion draft: "You gotta have a catcher or you're gonna have a lot of passed balls." And describing another nondescript catcher, Greg Goossen: "he's only twenty and in ten years he has a chance to be thirty.") Their very first game was rained out, which was just as well since several of the players were stuck in the hotel elevator before the game. They had two pitchers named Bob Miller, one lefty and one righty. The ironically nicknamed Marvelous Marv Throneberry, their inept first baseman, famously hit a triple but was called out because he missed first base. When Stengel came out to argue, the umpire told him not to bother because Throneberry missed second base too. Joe Pignatano, back up catcher (and later a Met coach who grew a vegetable garden in the bullpen) hit into a triple play in the last game of the year and last at bat of his career.

And there's the story that gave the band Yo La Tengo their name. After center fielder Richie Ashburn and shortstop Elio Chacón collided in the outfield when they both tried to catch a fly ball, Chacón, who did not speak English, taught Ashburn to yell "Yo la tengo," which means "I got it" in Spanish. When Ashburn later attempted to catch a shallow fly ball, he called out "Yo la tengo," only to be run over by the left fielder, Frank Thomas, who spoke no Spanish.

The Mets were terrible for the next several years too, finishing last or second-to-last every year from 1963 to1968. And then 1969 happened. The Miracle Mets won the World Series. And this is what makes 1962 so iconic for Met fans -- that this team of misfits went from being historically horrible to champions. It is this improbable arc that is so miraculous -- without the depths of 1962, the heights of 1969 would not feel as magical. (Although, given that the Mets have only captured one championship since then, it would still be pretty fucking special, to be honest.)

Now, instead of Marvelous Marv and Hot Rod Kanehl and Choo-Choo Coleman, the worst team in history consists of players like Gavin Sheets, Nicky Lopez, and Andrew Benintendi, players of whom South Side fans don't seem quite as enamored. But I suppose it doesn't really matter. For Met fans like me, there will always be a great fondness the team that Stengel dubbed the "Amazin' Mets." For our whole lives, the 1962 Mets were a touchstone -- a core part of who the Mets are and who we are as Met fans. As always, we embrace the loveable losers and, every season, hope we can become loveable winners.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Kamala

2024-07-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

"Before I was elected vice-president, before I was elected United States senator, I was elected attorney general of the state of California, and I was a courtroom prosecutor before then. And in those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type" -- Kamala Harris

During the 2020 primaries, when January 6th was just another winter day, Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, and Joe Biden was in his seventies, I struggled with Kamala Harris' candidacy. (See Kamala's People) I had experienced her tenure as California's Attorney General with great frustration, where her approach to death penalty challenges was same as it ever was for that office, vigorously defending every death sentence no matter how questionable. And I couldn't overcome my general dislike for prosecutors who, by and large, see the criminal justice system as fair and just -- despite the built-in bias against the poor and people of color -- and view the way to solve society's ills through the prism of that system.

But as President Biden became increasingly unable to effectively prosecute, as it were, the case against Trump, much less make the case for his own candidacy, it became clear that he had to step down. And it also became clear that his Vice President was the only one who could succeed him without alienating key Democratic constituencies and forfeiting critical resources and campaign infrastructure.

Shockingly, the usually self-destructive Democrats did the right thing, and the transition has not only been seamless but joyful, with a wholehearted embrace of her candidacy that speaks to the widespread pent-up energy for a candidate who can go on the offense with vigor and use complete, fluid sentences.

As it turns out Kamala Harris is the right person for this moment. She is perfectly positioned to speak to what I believe are the three key issues that will excite and mobilize voters: reproductive rights, climate change, and Trump's authoritarianism and disdain for the law.

She has long been an authentic, powerful voice on abortion rights. (Remember how she grilled then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh: “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?”) She has embraced her role in leading the Biden Administration's response to Dobbs, speaking passionately about reproductive freedom and Republican extremism at rallies and on college campuses, and making meaningful appearances at abortion clinics. As Jill Filipovic said in The Atlantic: "it is her voice, not Biden’s, that’s been loudest in objecting to abortion bans and conservative efforts to curtail IVF and contraception."

Harris has long been out front on combatting climate change. As the Times put it: "She pursued polluters as attorney general in California and later staked out bold positions as a senator, including sponsorship of the Green New Deal." According to the Washington Post, "Environmentalists have long praised Harris’s commitment to climate and environmental issues, beginning when she was a local elected official in California."

And perhaps most importantly, there's her ability to use her prosecutorial chops to filet Trump's putrid character and lay bare his lawlessness. Importantly, her law enforcement background provides a stunning contrast to a candidate who has not only been convicted of 34 felonies, but has been indicted for many more, and has been found liable for fraud and sexual assault. (While as a former criminal defense lawyer, I am somewhat uncomfortable with stigmatizing someone merely because of their status as a felon, I have decidedly less qualms when that person has used his privilege and power in such a corrupt manner -- and whose criminal intent remains a clear and present danger to democracy.)

The euphoria will wear off. There will be missteps. The opposition will perhaps tone down their racism and misogyny (perhaps), and mount more effective attacks against her. But we have a powerful case to make about the future of this country and why Trump Redux would be catastrophic. And we have a candidate remarkably well equipped to make it.

Trump v. The United States: An Opportunity To Recharge The Election

2024-07-01T11:48:00.000-07:00

“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune … In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” Trump v. United States (Sotomayor, J., dissenting)

The most remarkable thing about our politics has been the willful blindness to Trump and his Party's plan -- in plain sight -- to destroy the pillars of democracy and create a white Christian nationalist state. There remains, somehow, an overarching belief that our institutions are strong enough to withstand the inevitable constitutional crisis. Proof of this, apparently, is that court delays notwithstanding, Trump's attempts to remain in power after losing the last election were unsuccessful, and his efforts to steal highly classified documents were stymied. See, the system worked.

Last month, the New York Times (finally) published a frightening report on Project 2025, stating:

Donald Trump and his closest allies are preparing a radical reshaping of American government if he regains the White House. Here are some of his plans for cracking down on immigration, directing the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries, increasing presidential power, upending America’s economic policies, retreating militarily from Europe and unilaterally deploying troops to Democratic-run cities.

But this effort to centralize power in the executive branch -- what would essentially be a fascist takeover of government -- is treated as just one issue among many to be discussed and debated on the Sunday morning talk shows, rather than a hair-on-fire moment for the country.

As I wrote a few months ago, the Democrats – with their fetish for bipartisanship and compulsion to stay above the fray -- have completely abdicated from exposing and highlighting Trump’s past perfidies as well as the existential danger he poses if he returns to power. As always, they have ceded the narrative to the Republicans. Which is just fine with the mainstream press, which has yet to grapple with how to cover politics where one of the two candidates is a demented fascist, and one of the two political parties is facilitating a Christian theocracy. It maddeningly continues to focus on the odds, not the stakes, ignoring Trump’s incoherent rambling and his all-too-coherent plan for mass deportations, the replacement of civil servants with loyalists, and taking revenge on his political enemies.

And now, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled (after unconscionably delaying the case to prevent a pre-election trial) not only that many of Trump's actions to remain in power may well be immune from prosecution, but that if he returns to power, he will be able to achieve many of those things he has been threatening as long as they are cloaked in official duties -- from weaponizing the Justice Department to prosecute his perceived enemies to using the military to suppress domestic protests, and much, much more. It is not hyperbole to say that he truly could become dictator on Day One.

The Court's ruling has crystallized the key issue in this election. There are no longer any guardrails to protect us from dictatorship. Trump already controls one our two political parties, and now he has received a free pass -- a get out of jail card, as it were -- from the highest court in the Land.

The election is no longer about Biden v. Trump, it is, as the caption of the Supreme Court's decision unwittingly states: Trump v. The United States. But that only highlights the importance of determining whether Biden is up for prosecuting the case for Democracy and against Trump. He completely failed to do so during the debate, and it isn't at all clear whether he can do it now.

Biden may very well have been an excellent president but he is an awful campaigner -- and between now and November we need a candidate who can deftly and aggressively prosecute the case against Trump and for Democracy. If he isn't up for it -- and sadly, I don't think he is -- he needs to step down and pass the torch to his successor. (I strongly believe that it would be disastrous and demoralizing for the Party's key constituencies (i.e., black and women voters) if the Vice President is bypassed. I've never been much of a fan of Kamala Harris (see Kamala's People), but she is a brilliant communicator and is well suited to make the case against Trump. She has also been a powerful voice on another critical issue -- reproductive rights. And, not insignificantly, as VP, she's the only potential candidate who can gain access to Biden's campaign war chest.)

The Supreme Court's immunity decision has given Democrats a golden opportunity to focus this election on the dangers of a Trump presidency. They better seize it.

New York Pizza Journeys

2024-07-01T09:20:00.000-07:00

(Revised; originally published in 2014)

Although I've moved to California in the early 1980s, according to a New York Times test, I still talk like a New Yorker. I have also held fast to a couple of New York obsessions. As readers of this blog well know, I remain painfully devoted to the baseball team of my youth. The other one -- less easily satisfied with a cable TV subscription -- is pizza. For that, I have to wait for my occasional visits to New York, when I venture out to as many of the legendary pizzerias as my family will tolerate.

There was wonderful pizza in Great Neck, Long Island, where I grew up. I preferred La Tosca, but a plausible argument could be made -- and often was -- that Scotto's was its equal. We took great pizza for granted and it was hard to imagine it could taste any better. But everything is better in the City, and back then the consensus was the best pizzeria in Manhattan was Ray's. Yes, but which Ray's?

Ray's, Famous Ray's, Original Ray's or Famous Original Ray's?

Well, the first Ray's was on Prince Street in Little Italy, opened by Ralph Cuomo in 1959. Ray's closed in 2011, after a legal dispute among Cuomo's heirs. (This is now the site of Prince Street Pizza, where the long line misleadingly suggests a stellar slice. I found it to be just ok, with a crust had the consistency of cardboard.) Cuomo had opened a second location on First Avenue at 59th Street, which he sold in the early 1960s to Rosolino Mangano, and which became the first of several "Famous Original Ray's." For me, the go-to Ray's was Famous Ray's on 6th Avenue and 11th Street, opened by Mario Di Rienzo in 1973. Famous Ray's closed in 2011, but Mario reopened in 2012, as Famous Roio's Pizza. In the fall of 2012, I went to Famous Roio's with that wide, thin, greasy slice still embedded in my memory. I was deeply disappointed. Too thick with too much cheese, and nothing at all like I recalled. Others must have felt the same. Famous Roio's closed its doors in 2013.

Coal Brick Ovens

Then there are the storied coal brick oven pizzerias, beginning with Lombardi's at Spring Street and Mott, which, as the plaque says, is the "First Pizzeria in the United States."  Opened by Gennaro Lombardi in 1905, the pizza at Lombardi's is truly excellent, but the restaurant -- geared for tourists -- sorely lacks atmosphere.

Lombardi, himself, trained the next generation of pizza makers, including Antonio (Totonno) Pero, who opened Totonno's at Coney Island, John Sasso of John's of Bleecker Street, and Patsy Lancieri of Patsy's in East Harlem. Patsy's nephew, Patsy Grimaldi, opened Grimaldi's in Brooklyn.

These successors to Lombardi's form the pantheon of the great coal-fired brick oven pizzerias. The ovens give the pizza a crispness and smoky flavor that cannot be duplicated -- literally. New coal ovens are not permitted because they fail to meet New York's environmental laws, but the old ovens, having been grandfathered in, can still be used.

In 2015, we were in NYC for Father's Day and my family asked where I wanted to go for dinner. Without hesitation, I said Patsy's, which has been serving up pies in East Harlem since 1933 (although the Lancieri family sold the restaurant in the early 1990s).  With Sinatra watching us approvingly, we wolfed down pizza that was as close to perfection as you can get -- thin crust, slightly sweet sauce, just the right amount of cheese.

Totonno's might be even better.  It is unassuming and more down-to-earth as befits its Coney Island location, and has the feel of a family-run operation -- as it should since Totonno's grandchildren operate the place.  John's of Bleeker Street, with its wood booths and "no slices" reminder, is fabulous too.

The walk over the Brooklyn Bridge to Grimaldi's feels like the true pilgrimage that it is. Once you brave the line outside, the red and white checkered tablecloths, photographs of New York glitterati on the wall, and -- of course -- Sinatra on the sound system transport you back in time. The pizza, crisp and piping hot out of the brick oven is not marred, in my view, by the fact that Patsy Grimaldi sold his interest in the restaurant in the late 1990s. (He operates Juliana's in Grimaldi's original location a couple of doors away.)

The Old Masters

There are not too many things more sacred than personally receiving a pizza from one of the Old Masters. Sal & Carmine's is indistinguishable on the outside (or inside for that matter) from any other hole-in-the-wall pizza joint, but this hallowed place opened in 1959 on the upper West Side -- Broadway at 102nd Street -- is no run-of-the-mill pizzeria. Sadly, Sal passed away in 2009, but his brother Carmine is still behind the counter, and served up one of the best slices I've ever had.  A bit light on sauce but with a memorable, chewy crust that is not as floppy thin as a traditional NY slice (not that there's anything wrong with that).

I dragged my family to Avenue J in the Midwood section of Brooklyn for a pie at Di Fara, which is often rated the "Best Pizza in NY."  Di Fara has been run by Dom DeMarco since 1964, and he still makes every pie personally. Yes, every pie. As a result, service is slow and the line outside the door is long.  When we got there in the late afternoon, DeMarco's friendly but very protective daughter came out to say they were going to close for an hour because her father needed a break. We didn't mind the wait, and were ultimately rewarded when DeMarco, himself, took our pie out of the oven, ceremoniously cut fresh basil leaves over the top, and handed it over. (DeMarco passed away in 2022.)

My favorite slice in the City is from Joe's Pizza on Carmine Street in the West Village. Joe's was opened in 1975, by Joe Pozzuoli, who still runs the business.  This is THE classic thin, wide, greasy New York slice.

Staten Island

The ferry to Staten Island is free. Who knew? It's a fun trip and takes you a short bus or cab ride away from Deninos, a pizzeria established in 1937. The slices were pretty close to perfect -- bit of a salty sauce with a slightly crispy crust.  The other classic pizza place on Staten Island is Joe and Pat's. I haven't made it there. But I have been to Rubirosa in the Village, run by the son of Giuseppe Pappalardo, who is the "Joe" of Joe and Pat's. The pizza is very thin, very crisp and the slices are very small. The pizza is very, very good.

More Modern

I usually like to go for the plain (cheese) pie or, if I'm feeling adventurous, I might add some anchovies or maybe olives or mushrooms. At Motorino on 1st Avenue in the East Village, I had one with cherry stone clams and another with brussel sprouts. Great choices.

On the other hand, at Paulie Gee's in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, I should have stuck with the plain. This place comes with a lot of hype and a pun-filled menu (e.g., Ricotta Be Kiddn' Me). We went for the Brian De Parma (essentially a margherita) and the Greenpointer (with a salad's worth of arugula on top). Mostly enjoyed the former, not the latter.

Speaking of Brooklyn, Roberta's in Bushwick appears to be just another hipster joint, which it is, but its pizza is serious -- truly up there with the best pizza in New York. I see now why the New York Times features a recipe for how to make its pizza dough -- aptly described as "delicate, extraordinarily flavorful." Wow.

Back to the City. The individual pies at Keste Pizza & Vino on Bleeker, and its cousin, Don Antonio by Starlita on 50th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, are also quite good, if not up to Roberta's impossibly high standards. Don Antonio apparently features a fried pizza, which I neglected to try. Next time.

So Much For A Cliche'

I have been known to say that a slice on any random corner of New York is better than the best pizza elsewhere. Unfortunately, I went to the wrong corner. Finding myself around Times Square recently, I walked into Patzeria Perfect Pizza on W 46th Street and ordered a couple of slices. A long way from perfect. The right corner, as I later discovered, is at 8th Avenue and 31st Street, where you can get a great slice at Pizza Suprema. And if you find yourself on the Upper East Side, go to 92nd and Second Avenue where Delizia 92 (and I would assume its other branch on 73rd Street, Delizia 73) serves a classic slice that is just about as good as it gets.
.

New Favorites

Scarr's Pizza, on the Lower East Side, has gotten a lot of hype. In 2023, a New Yorker article entitled "Is Scarr's The Best Pizza In New York?" essentially answered the question in the affirmative. I may have to agree. The crust was light and chewy without being floppy, the sauce had a pleasant tang, and the cheese -- for me, the highlight -- had a smoky, burnt-tasting je ne sais quoi that made the pie extraordinary.

The best thing about the long line to get into Mama's Too, the West Village outpost of the original at Broadway and 106th Street is that it wasn't nearly as long as the line around the corner for the West Village outpost of the Brooklyn-based L'industrie Pizzeria. I'm not normally a square pizza guy but the Sicilian slice at Mama's Too was extraordinary, with a perfect balance of crust, cheese and sauce. The Neapolitan slice was pretty great too.

To Be Continued

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

2024-03-04T09:51:00.000-08:00

It’s been pretty easy to take our democracy and its constitutionally-guaranteed rights for granted. Unlike our Western allies, we have never seriously been threatened or occupied by a foreign power. So, there’s a sense of security -- invincibility, really -- that other countries don’t share. Moreover, we, as a nation, have long bought into the myth that we really are the land of the free and home of the brave. We have never come to grips with our wholesale denial of human rights, much less civil rights, to wide swaths of our population for most of our existence. Obviously, and most egregiously, is the utter resistance to a meaningful reckoning -- through a truth & reconciliation commission or any genuine consideration of reparations -- with the genocide of native peoples and the fact that our country’s wealth and power were built -- literally -- on the backs of enslaved people, whose descendants continued to be brutalized and denied equal rights. There was the imprisonment of anti-war protestors during World War I. There was the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. There was McCarthyism. There was the FBI’s infiltration of the civil rights and anti-war movements. There was the widespread wiretapping after 9/11. The list goes on. But when our government has overreached, we routinely refuse to ensure accountability. The assumption has always been that there’s no need -- that our constitutional democracy is resilient enough to be pulled back from the brink. So, Ford pardoned Nixon. Bush I pardoned those responsible for Iran Contra. Obama determined not to hold Bush II accountable for torture and the aforementioned wire-tapping.

And so here we are. We keep hoping that somehow, this time will be different. It feels different. Trump’s unrelenting malfeasance has been so blatant, so utterly indefensible. Unjust enrichment. Financial fraud. Rape. Insurrection. Stealing classified documents. Surely, in a democratic nation such as ours justice will be done.

Yet despite multiple indictments, it looks increasingly likely that Trump will be able to hold off going to trial on most of the cases against him until after an election that, if he wins, will empower him to make it all go away. We can thank the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court. But also, there’s Biden’s ill-fated appointment of the ponderous Merrick Garland as Attorney General, who predictably slow walked the investigation of January 6. There are, of course, Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party, who rely on minority rule, and therefore believe they must cling to his coattails to stay in power.

And, critically, there are the Democrats – with their fetish for bipartisanship and compulsion to stay above the fray, who have completely abdicated from exposing and highlighting Trump’s past perfidies as well as the existential danger he poses if he returns to power. As always, they have ceded the narrative to the Republicans. Which is just fine with the mainstream press, which has yet to grapple with how to cover politics where one of the two candidates is a demented fascist, and one of the two political parties is facilitating a Christian theocracy. It maddeningly continues to focus on the odds, not the stakes, obsessing about Biden’s age, while ignoring Trump’s incoherent rambling and his all-too-coherent plan for mass deportations, the replacement of civil servants with loyalists, and taking revenge on his political enemies.

It is long past time to recognize that our democracy has always been fleeting and fragile, and that Trump and his Party are eager to sweep it all away.

It Can Happen Here -- It Is Happening Here

2023-07-18T13:39:00.001-07:00

Why, America's the only free nation on earth. Besides! Country's too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn't happen here! -- Sinclair Lewis

Whether or not you approve of President Biden, he is not going to destroy the pillars of democracy. Say whatever you want about him, he is not a fascist. Yes, it's a low bar, but this is why he must be re-elected. Republican Party officials are through with democracy. From voter suppression to gutting fundamental rights, they are all in on or (to give some the benefit of the doubt) are afraid to oppose a white, Christian, patriarchal society controlled from the top. They keep telling us this. But we continue to treat them as a legitimate political party merely with different policy goals. This is how democracies die.

This is why it is so dangerous to entertain third party candidates who (as we have seen before) can help Republicans win office. This is why the mainstream media must eschew both reflexive bothsidesism and the compulsion to view Republican proposals through the prism of "the horserace" rather than report on their disastrous impact. And, most importantly, this is why the Democratic Party needs to make clear to voters -- every day -- what kind of government the Republican Party envisions for this country.

The United States has been a stable democracy that has withstood a civil war, constitutional crises, and, most recently, an insurrection. We take for granted that we will always be a democracy with three co-equal branches of government, even as we see the Supreme Court going rogue, the House being taken over by MAGA extremists, and Trump's first term (and attempted coup) not that far in the rearview mirror. But what will happen if Trump (or some reasonable facsimile) wins in 2024? We don't have to guess.

As Masha Gessen wrote in November 2016, "Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won." In her remarkably prescient piece, "Autocracy: Rules for Survival," Gessen gave us a set of rules necessary to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which this country is based. The first rule: "Believe the Autocrat." As we are now all too familiar, Trump relentlessly spews ignorant and malevolent nonsense that one would not expect from any rational human being, much less the purported leader of the free world. Gessen stressed back then that while it is human nature to assume he was exaggerating and to reach for a rationalization, it was critical to believe that he meant what he said. We barely survived one term.

And here we go again. Trump and members of his Republican Party keep telling us what they plan to do if they seize control of the executive branch. They publicly extoll as their model for electoral success and governance none other than Hungary's Victor Orban. As Heather Cox Richardson describes it, Republicans have disavowed the fundamental tenets of democracy -- "equality before the law, free speech, academic freedom, a market-based economy, immigration," which they believe "weaken a nation by destroying a 'traditional' society based in patriarchy and Christianity." Instead, they prefer Orban's "“illiberal” or “Christian” democracy, which uses the government to enforce their beliefs in a Christian, patriarchal order." This is not a secret.

Then there's DeSantis, Trump's competition, who is experimenting with his own version of a mini-fascist state in Florida. He recently announced the activation of a State Guard, purportedly to aid in disaster relief, but which is apparently being trained as a heavily militarized force. And, as Cox Richardson reminds us, "DeSantis has pushed through laws that ban abortion after six weeks, before most people know they’re pregnant; banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity (the “Don’t Say Gay” law); prevented recognition of transgender individuals; made it easier to sentence someone to death; allowed people to carry guns without training or permits; banned colleges and businesses from conversations about race; exerted control over state universities; made it harder for his opponents to vote, and tried to punish Disney World for speaking out against the Don’t Say Gay law. After rounding up migrants and sending them to other states, DeSantis recently has called for using “deadly force” on migrants crossing unlawfully." This is not a secret.

An explosive article in the New York Times this week (with a typically tepid headline: Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025) essentially describes Trump's plan to become dictator if he wins the next election (or is otherwise able to seize power). It is beyond alarming. It describes Trump's plan to “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House." Again, this is not a secret.

The plan couldn't be more clear: (1) bring independent agencies (like the FTC and FCC) under direct presidential control; (2) revive the practice of “impounding” funds (i.e., refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress) -- which was banned after Nixon abused; (3) strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to the Trump agenda and remove officials from intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the defense bureaucracies who, according to Trump, "hate our country." Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House says of the plan: "what we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”

Yes, it can happen here.

Investigate, Prosecute, "Lock Him Up"

2020-11-06T09:35:00.000-08:00

For years I've regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.” -- Hunter S. Thompson (on Richard Nixon)

When President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for "all offenses against the United States," he stated that it was out of concern for the "immediate future of this great country." Next came Iran-Contra, which culminated in the pardon by the first President Bush (with the support of then-Attorney General Barr) of several key participants who had been indicted and whose trials would likely have dispelled the notion that Bush was, as he claimed, "out of the loop." More recently, President Obama refused to seek any investigation of Bush II's "War on Terror," despite substantial evidence that wiretapping laws were broken and torture was authorized at the highest levels. Much like President Ford, Obama claimed that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

And now that the end is nigh for the malevolent orange shit-gibbon, there are the frustratingly familiar calls for abstaining from investigating and prosecuting the myriad acts of abuse of power and corruption that have marked this horrid presidency from Day One. The argument goes that we should be grateful that we are rid of this "mentally deranged U.S. dotard," as dear leader Kim Jong-un calls his dear friend -- that, in the words of President Ford, "our long national nightmare is over."

Accordingly, we are supposed to maintain our democratic cred by not engaging in political retribution against those who have lost power. Further, given the immediate attention needed to address the economic, environmental and, most urgently, public health, disasters that will have been left in the disastrous wake of this disastrous presidency, we must, as President Obama said about his predecessor, "look forward as opposed to looking backwards."

In The Atlantic, my old high school classmate (and favorite Republican), Paul Rosenzweig, gamely tried to thread the needle, arguing that any investigation and prosecution of Trump should be limited to his conduct before and after his presidency, and that declining to pursue him for his actions as president is "the price we pay for the routine peaceful transition of power." In Rosenzweig's view, going after Trump for his acts as president would result in an "ever-escalating cycle of retribution," with each administration prosecuting its opponents -- that "indicting one former president risks making a habit of doing so, and reducing America to little more than a revolving-door banana republic." As Rosenzweig put it, if we think "lock her up" is wrong to say about Hillary Clinton, then "lock him up" is equally improper.

First, the notion that Democrats should not launch legitimate investigations into the most corrupt administration in history out of fear that Republicans would respond in kind once they are again in control of the White House assumes, wrongly, that the GOP is not a nihilistic, anti-majoritarian cabal. The modern Republican Party is not constrained by civility or norms or any notion of decency. As Mitch McConnell made clear in completing his theft of the Supreme Court, the GOP will always put party over country and wield whatever power they can, while they still can. Indeed, if they manage to hold onto the Senate, stay tuned for their shameless obstruction of Biden's efforts to restore the economy or deal responsibly with COVID or climate change, their refusal to pass any meaningful legislation or confirm judicial and executive nominees, and their bogus investigations of Hunter Biden and others in order to sabotage the new Administration. The Pelosi/Schumer/Feinstein non-confrontational approach (e.g., limited investigations, narrowly-drawn impeachment, docile SCOTUS confirmation opposition) does nothing but embolden Republicans, who know that Democrats default to compromise and appeasement.

Second, there is a world of difference between fevered cult-inspired cries at Trump rallies for locking up Hillary Clinton, who was never found to have committed any criminal wrongdoing, with the reasonable investigation and pursuit of justice in response to the unprecedented level of corruption committed by, what Sarah Kendzior so aptly calls, "a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government."

Rosenzweig agrees that the tax and mortgage fraud, campaign finance violations, and sexual assaults that occurred pre-presidency are all fair game. But he would stop there, although he concedes that "the discretionary policy of not prosecuting an ex-president for acts committed while in office ... would have to yield in extreme cases." But if this isn't an extreme case, I'm hard pressed to imagine what would be. Trump's pervasive malfeasance as president has been far more egregious and has posed a far greater threat to our nation than anything he did before he slithered into office.

Under normal circumstances it is certainly not ideal to go after a leader who has been justly defeated in a popular election. BUT THESE ARE NOT NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES. There has never been a more corrupt president and the bill of particulars grows larger every day. Indeed, we have only recently learned about Trump's interference with a criminal case against a state-owned Turkish bank at the urging of Turkey's authoritarian leader and presumably so as not to jeopardize Trump business interests there. More details are emerging about Trump's unfettered self-enrichment while in office and reports of millions of dollars that taxpayers have paid to Trump-owned entities. He appears to have worked with Russian disinformation operations to taint his opponent, used the resources of the government in his reelection campaign and undermined the efficacy of the Post Office to thwart the timely arrival of mail-in ballots. And he's got a couple of months to do even more damage.

There has been a disturbing pattern of Republican Administrations, beginning with Nixon, to engage in abuse of power, violate of the Constitution and federal law, and break formerly-sacrosanct norms. Each time we are persuaded it would be unseemly and undemocratic to hold them accountable. This has led us to this moment and to this presidency.

And as Kendzior recently lamented:

The current American crisis is in part due to those officials who refused to curb Mr. Trump’s worst behaviour. When organized crime hijacks government, officials must act aggressively, transparently, and immediately. They cannot waste time like Robert Mueller did with his plodding, placating probe. They cannot “impeach at the ballot box,” which Nancy Pelosi – a staunch opponent of impeachment until she buckled to pressure from her colleagues and the public – suggested throughout 2019. They cannot go by the book when the book is burning.

We need to hold Trump, his family and his cronies accountable because their brazen wrongdoing demands it. But we also have to come to grips with how easy it was for this "fascist carnival barker" to undermine our system of government. All it took was a political party willing to follow him in lock step and a compliant media that normalized his pathology. And so, a full accounting of all the ways our institutions have been corrupted is essential so we can figure out how to better protect the nation from the next wannabe kleptocrat -- one who may not be as clownish and incompetent as this one.

Remembering Tom Seaver

2020-09-02T17:30:00.000-07:00

"There is actually a good argument that Tom Seaver should be regarded as the greatest pitcher of all time ... Seaver pitched for eight losing teams, several of them really terrible, and four other teams which had losing records except when Seaver was on the mound." —Bill James, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, 2001

Tom Seaver passed away today. 2020 keeps getting worse. This piece was written in March 2019, when it was announced that Tom was suffering from dementia. RIP to my childhood hero.

For Met fans of a certain vintage -- those old enough to have rejoiced in the first of (only) two Met championships -- Tom Seaver will forever hold a special place in our hearts. We love everyone from that team -- from the key players (Cleon Jones, Tommie Agree, Donn Clendenon, Jerry Koosman) to the more obscure (Rod Gaspar, Duffy Dyer, Jim McAndrew). But Tom Seaver was on a different level altogether.

He wasn't just a great Met. He was one of the greatest pitchers in Major League history. And he was ours.  His pitching form was a thing of beauty -- both powerful and graceful.  He was called "The Franchise" because of how he transformed the Mets' identity, from a joke -- albeit a lovable one -- to World Series winner (until they became a less lovable joke once again). He did it with his brilliant pitching and with his no-nonsense, brash professionalism.

I treasured pretty much every start in those years -- watching on a black & white TV or listening on the radio or, occasionally, getting to see him live at Shea. I would check out the box score in the paper the next day and diligently recalculate his E.R.A. after every game he pitched.

We all have our favorite Tom Seaver memory. For many it is his near perfect game against the Cubs in 1969 or the 10-inning complete game victory in Game #4 of the 69 Series or any of the over 60 shutouts in which he simply dominated opposing hitters. My favorite memory is being at Shea Stadium on April 22, 1970, when he tied what was then a record of 19 strikeouts in a game and set a record for striking out the last 10 hapless Padres hitters in a row. Simply epic.

Yes, he changed the perception of the Mets, but even with the miraculous World Series win in 1969, they remained a feeble-hitting team (some things never change), and Seaver had to consistently pitch flawlessly to keep his team in games, often losing heartbreakers 2-1 or 1-0.  (Jake deGrom can relate -- but try doing it for a decade.) Typical was 1971, when he led the league in ERA (1.76) and strikeouts (289 in 286 innings), pitched 21 complete games and still lost 10 games, going 20-10.   Had Seaver played with a decent team for the bulk of his career, his remarkable numbers would be off the charts.

And as a recent New York Time article pointed out, in stark contrast to the current game, where starting pitchers rarely go more than six or seven innings, Seaver excelled in finishing what he started, getting even better as the game wore on. His lifetime ERA in the last three innings was 2.75, and in 1969, he pitched in the ninth inning 17 times without giving up a run.

Seaver continued to pitch brilliantly for a mostly awful team, and then, on June 15, 1977, came the "Midnight Massacre" -- the worst in a very long list of dismal management decisions.  The penurious Mets refused to renegotiate Seaver's contract and shipped him off to the Cincinnati Reds for a collection of mediocre players. I attended his return to New York, where, looking positively surreal in a Reds' uniform, he faced off against his old teammate and fan favorite, Jerry Koosman. Along with the rest of the crowd, I was cheering for Seaver, who beat the Mets that day.

Seaver continued his great career as a Red, including the strike-shortened season in 1981, when he led the league with 14 wins and came in second in the Cy Young voting. And then came some measure of redemption. Seaver was traded back to the Mets for the 1983 season. It was indescribable to see him pitch a shutout on Opening Day. But at 38 years old, it didn't seem he had much left.  He didn't have a great year -- and neither did the Mets -- but with Seaver wearing his familiar number 41, the Mets seemed like a team on the rise, with promising young pitchers, a Rookie of the Year in Darryl Strawberry, and the acquisition of Keith Hernandez.

But it was not to be. The Mets would have to rise without Seaver. Incredibly, before the 1984 season began, the Mets left the 40-year old Seaver off the protected list, assuming no other team would want him. The White Sox quickly scooped him up, leaving Met fans distraught once again. Seaver won 15 games for the White Sox in 1984 and 16 in 1985, including his 300th. In 1986, he finished an injury-plagued season with the Red Sox. (A bad knee prevented him from playing against the Mets in the World Series.)

The Mets tried to atone once more, hoping to bring Seaver back to the Big Apple to finish his storied career where it began. But after pitching a few exhibition games in June 1987, Seaver realized he had nothing left and announced his retirement.

3 Cy Young Awards -- and deserving of at least another in 1971, 311 wins, 61 shutouts, 3,640 strikeouts and a 2.86 E.R.A. In 1992, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. A career of remarkable moments and incredible milestones marred only by stupid, short-sighted management decisions -- including, more recently, the failure to honor Seaver with a statue at Citi Field.

In devastating news, it was announced yesterday that Tom Seaver is suffering from dementia. His family announced he will no longer make public appearances. As the Mets gear up for the 50th anniversary of the 1969 team, his out-sized presence as a Met icon, a baseball legend, and a childhood hero to so many of us will be felt even more deeply and the memories he's given us will be held even more tightly.

Kamala's People

2020-08-11T13:30:00.000-07:00

Originally posted Jan. 29, 2019

I met Kamala Harris about 15 years ago and she was very impressive. I was on the board of an anti-death penalty organization that gave her an award when she was the San Francisco D.A. for courageously refusing to seek the death penalty in a cop-killing case despite intense political pressure (Sen. Feinstein pushed for the death penalty at the officer's funeral!) She was not only extremely personally engaging but she also gave a powerful speech about how the resources spent on death penalty cases could be better spent to ensure public safety.

But as California's Attorney General she was a disappointment. As did her predecessors (including Jerry Brown), Harris essentially deferred to the deputy AGs in the death penalty unit, who vigorously defended every death penalty case, no matter how suspect. Under Harris's watch, the AG's office used every procedural technicality to prevent the courts from considering the underlying merits of cases, defended truly egregious cases of prosecutorial misconduct, refused to acknowledge cases of actual innocence, and vigorously appealed a federal court decision that found the death penalty law unconstitutional. Harris also refused to support California ballot propositions that sought to reform the criminal justice and replace the death penalty with life without parole.

Harris claims to have been a progressive prosecutor, but that phrase is really something of an oxymoron. In my three decades as a defender of death row inmates, I admit to a long-standing bias against prosecutors who, generally, seem to care more about securing convictions than doing justice. Even the more thoughtful or "progressive" ones still by and large see the criminal justice system as fair and just -- despite the overwhelming disparity in resources between the government and the defendant, and despite the built in bias against the poor and people of color. And they view the way to solve society's ills through the prism of the criminal justice system, as Harris's history of threatening parents with prosecution for their children's truancy when she was D.A. suggests.

By using the slogan "Kamala Harris for the People" for her presidential campaign, Harris is explicitly linking her history as a prosecutor to her strengths as a candidate. But the phrase "for the People" is a fraught one, as least from a criminal defender perspective -- after all, my clients were people too. A prosecutor really represents an agency within the government. But invoking the phrase "for the People' implies something different; it misleadingly suggests that the community at large wholly supports the prosecution of a given defendant, providing an unfair rhetorical advantage from the get go.

So, I don't buy the progressive prosecutor thing. But at the same time, I find Harris to be an extraordinarily compelling candidate. She is brilliant, a dynamic presence and a compelling speaker. She is fearless and has put her prosecutorial skills to great use on the Judiciary Committee, where she skewered Trump nominees, from Jeff Sessions to Brett Kavanaugh. She is unabashedly and consistently taking progressive positions on health care, climate change, immigration, equality and even criminal justice reform. And the zeitgeist calls for a woman -- and a woman of color -- to run for president against an incumbent and a political party that have fully succumbed to misogyny and white nationalism. And, at least according to Nate Silver, she appeals to the widest coalition of Democratic voters at this point.

I'm not sure how to reconcile Harris's history and her candidacy -- but I'm not sure I have to. After all, there is not a candidate seeking or thinking about seeking the presidency who isn't flawed. Indeed, our search for ideological purity last time is no small reason why we are where we are. So although I'm wary of the embrace of a prosecutor's perspective as Harris's slogan suggests, I will support whoever has the best chance to take back the White House. It's early, but it very well might be Kamala Harris.

Super Tuesday Post Mortem

2020-03-04T18:00:00.003-08:00

So if you leave with only one thing, it must be this: Choose to fight only righteous fights, because then when things get tough — and they will — you will know that there is only one option ahead of you. Nevertheless, you must persist. -- Elizabeth Warren, March 5, 2020

With the notable exception of Barack Obama, no one I've supported to win the Democratic primary has ever won it (except for George McGovern when I was 12 -- and that didn't turn out so well). And here I am again. Elizabeth Warren is/was my candidate -- and Barack included, I have never felt more passionate about a candidate or believed more strongly about their strength, brilliance, competence and sincerity -- ever. I think she not only could have crushed the malevolent orange shit-gibbon in the general election (like she unmercifully fileted Bloomberg), but would have gone on to be a great president. (See Why Elizabeth Warren Would Be The Best President)

As Rebecca Solnit put it: "Perhaps Warren's greatest strength is her commitment to listening and listening to many constituencies; she is a candidate speeding up the journey of ideas by making space to hear and plans that respond to what she heard. By shortening the distance between the grassroots and the center of power." Jodi Jacobson is right: Warren is "once in a lifetime. She not only knows how to wield power, she is unafraid of doing so. She knows how government works and has worked it to our advantage. She has moral clarity. She has the best plans for addressing debt, bank corruption, corporate corruption, government corruption, climate crises, race and class analyses, the goddamn coronavirus epidemic and everything else you can imagine. SHE GETS SHIT DONE."

Despite all this Warren couldn't seem to gain traction, particularly on what should be the most compelling issue facing the country -- corruption and the erosion of democracy in the Age of Trump. I wholeheartedly agree with her that we can't address other critical issues from climate change to gun control until we deal with the corrosive effects of corruption in Washington and the corrupting power of wealth. But, alas, it is not to be. There were perhaps some strategic missteps, but I think it was a combination of a whole lot of misogyny, a panic-stricken electorate fleeing to the perceived safety of the center, an "establishment" -- in the media and the Party -- that reinforced the nonsensical (and misogynist) concept of "electability," and the mainstream media's incomprehensible erasure of her that doomed her candidacy.

Charles Pierce nails it: "This is not a country that is ready for what she called, endlessly, 'big, structural change.' This is a country fearful of any kind of change at all, a country longing for a simpler time—which, these days, does not mean the flush 1950s or the pastoral 1850s, but 2015. The election of Donald Trump has lodged in so many minds a longing for the status quo ante that there’s no room for intelligent experimentation." As Pierce says, "we have been rendered such a timorous people that even someone as open and lively and welcoming as Elizabeth Warren was considered too much of a risk." She will, of course, remain a formidable leader and critical progressive voice, but I will always feel an enormous sense of loss for what could and should have been.

I've liked Bernie since he was first elected mayor when I was a senior in college in Burlington, VT. I wrote admirably about him on this blog ten years ago. (See Vermont's Finest) He has an inspiring, compelling message about inequality that should resonate across multiple demographics. But as Tuesday demonstrated, he doesn't seem able to expand his base to include African Americans -- the most critical of Democratic voters (although he has impressively garnered support from Latinx communities) -- and his key strategy of energizing new, young voters seems to be flailing. And, yes, his abusive, divisive supporters, including those who have official positions high in the campaign, are dangerously alienating wide swaths of progressive-minded people.

But that leaves Biden -- who I still can't believe has parlayed Jim Clyburn's South Carolina endorsement into front-runner status. The dude can rarely complete a coherent thought, much less a sentence. How bizarre that all those debates I suffered through in which he seemed so tired and lost didn't matter. (I want those hours back.) He barely campaigned, instead relying on Obama's coattails (notwithstanding Obama's silence) -- and it's fucking working. I think he's an awful candidate who is not only cognitively compromised but has never really reckoned with much of his record, in particular, his unforgivable performance as chair of the Judiciary Committee that humiliated Anita Hill and put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. (See Joe Biden's "Apology" To Anita Hill Is Too Little, Too Late And Too Lame). I believe he is dangerously naive when it comes to the perfidy of the Republican Party, which is baffling given he was Obama's Vice President when Merrick Garland was denied a confirmation vote, not to mention their continued bad-faith Ukraine investigation.

I feel that those who are certain that Biden is the most electable candidate were also sure that Hillary Clinton would win, as would John Kerry and Al Gore. Are we really going to do this again? Are we really going to choose our nominee based on fear. It shows a remarkable lack of imagination, a failure to understand that we are living in a far different world than we were living in even four years ago. We need someone who can capture the zeitgeist, energize voters and articulate why Trump is such a danger to our survival. I seriously doubt that person is Joe Biden, who just wants to return us an imagined normalcy -- to the halcyon days of bipartisanship and smoked-filled rooms. Maybe it could be Bernie Sanders, but he still hasn't shown the ability to embrace a wider constituency. But what the fuck do I know?

I do know that it is critical that the nominee, whoever it is, must pick a running mate who can actually capture the zeitgeist -- someone who can begin to transform the Party away from one that is still led by old white men. It needs to be a woman. It needs to be a person of color. It needs to be someone who is brilliant and vibrant and progressive. Stacey Abrams seems the obvious choice. I could get excited about that. I'm sure there are others.

At bottom, we need to enthusiastically support whoever the candidate is, no matter how flawed. No more of this purity bullshit. (See #NeverNader: A Reminder About The Perils Of Purity) Yes, I love Elizabeth Warren. I do not love Bernie or Biden. But it doesn't matter. It's time to retire that tired old cliche about how Democrats fall in love, but Republicans fall in line. We don't have to love them. We have to get in line and do whatever we can to win in November.

The Democratic Presidential Candidates Need To Unite Behind Common Principles

2019-08-05T09:04:00.001-07:00

Viewers watching the recent network-sponsored debates, with the focus on spectacle and conflict, could be forgiven for failing to absorb a key point missing from most of the coverage: The Democrats generally agree on the goals for the United States that align with the majority of Americans, although they may not fully agree on how to reach them. But it is the Republican Party and their leader who are dangerously out of touch. It is they who are embracing white nationalism, condoning the separation of families at the border, reversing efforts to combat climate change and failing to reckon with the Russian attack on our elections.

There is plenty of time for the Democratic candidates to highlight their differences and challenge each other's policies and vision. But not now. These are not normal times and this is not a normal election. We are facing an existential crisis and the Democrats need to unite to demonstrate, collectively, what is at stake. They should sign a statement of common principles in order to illustrate the stark differences between the two parties on fundamental principles that often get muddied in the daily discourse. Such a document would demonstrate why the 2020 election is so critical.

Perhaps something like this:

1. We condemn white nationalism, and Trump's rhetoric that has emboldened a white nationalist movement. We support common sense gun control reform, including mandatory background checks and banning assault-style weapons.

2. We believe in the urgency of addressing global climate change and the irrefutable science that warns of the dire consequences of inaction. We support rejoining the Paris Climate Accords immediately, and taking meaningful and substantial steps to reduce fossil fuel consumption in the United States.

3. We are horrified by the cruelty of Trump's immigration policies which have led -- and continue to lead -- to the needless and tragic separation of families at our southern border, and have imposed extreme hardship and trauma on those seeking escape from violence and injustice in their home countries. We support immigration reform that will protect our borders while ensuring that those seeking political asylum and refugee status are provided with a safe, fair and timely process.

4. We believe in a woman's right to decide what to do with her own body, including the right to have an abortion. We strongly oppose efforts by Republican lawmakers at the state and federal level to undermine Roe v. Wade, and place obstacles in the way of women -- particularly poor women -- seeking abortions. We will pursue policies to ensure full access to abortion rights and reproductive health for all women.

5. We may differ on the details, but we believe that health care is a human right and oppose Republican attempts to sabotage Obamacare, including their pursuit of a federal lawsuit that would eliminate insurance for pre-existing conditions. We all believe in policies aimed at expanding, not reducing, health care coverage for all Americans.

6. United States intelligence agencies and the Mueller investigation have documented Russia's interference in our elections, which we consider an attack on our country. Special Counsel Mueller has warned in his recent testimony that this remains a serious threat for 2020. Yet, the president refuses to acknowledge it and the Senate Majority Leader refuses to allow bills on election integrity and security to come to the Senate floor for a vote. We believe it is urgent to safeguard democracy by implementing immediately the measures that passed the House of Representatives. In addition, we support efforts to stop voter suppression schemes, gerrymandering, and the proliferation of dark money that have undermined the time-honored principle of one person, one vote.

7. The President of the United States has committed several documented instances of obstruction of justice that impeded the Special Counsel's investigation into Russia's interference with the 2016 election. He was not indicted because of a Department of Justice policy that bars indictment of a sitting president. That policy must be re-examined. He also has refused to release his tax returns or divest from his many business entanglements with private and foreign interests. He and his administration are stone-walling legitimate attempts at Congressional oversight. Trump's conduct is rife with conflicts of interest and he has lied to the American people over 10,000 times, according to a study by the Washington Post. There has never been a more corrupt president and we believe it is far past time to restore dignity and the rule of law to the presidency.

Abandoning The Dog Whistle

2019-07-31T14:23:00.001-07:00

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Ni***r, ni***r, ni***r." By 1968, you can't say "ni***r" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Ni***r, ni***r." -- Lee Atwater, 1981

Turns out St. Ronnie was a racist. A new audio that has been obtained of a conversation between then-Governor Reagan and another racist Republican, President Nixon, gives up the game. To wit:

The day after the United Nations voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China, then–California Governor Ronald Reagan phoned President Richard Nixon at the White House and vented his frustration at the delegates who had sided against the United States. “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said. “Yeah,” Nixon interjected. Reagan forged ahead with his complaint: “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Nixon gave a huge laugh.

But what was key to St. Ronnie's political success and that of his Party was that he kept his more overt racism on the down low. He was, instead, the ultimate master of dog whistle politics. Recall he launched his first presidential campaign in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a place notorious for the 1964 slaying of three civil rights workers, and gave a speech about states' rights: "I believe in states' rights.... I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment." What Reagan was really signaling by talking about states' rights in that particular venue was that he was squarely on the side of White America. It presaged his unceasing hostility to civil rights and voting rights, and his opposition to entitlements for the poor, particularly, African Americans, who he famously disparaged with classic dog whistles -- the "Cadillac-driving welfare queen" and the "strapping young buck" buying T-bone steaks with food stamps.

And ever since Republican politicians have become expert at using coded language to tap into anxiety of white middle and lower class Americans about losing ground culturally and economically to African Americans and immigrants. Could there be a more perfect segue than from Reagan's presidency to Bush I's famous Willie Horton campaign ad? Support for states' rights, calls for curbing federal assistance programs, blaming poverty on a "culture problem," referring to "illegal aliens," expressing fear of the spread of Shariah law, and framing opposition to LGBT rights as "religious liberty" all get the message across without sounding overtly racist, bigoted, xenophobic or homophobic. The references to "Barack Hussein Obama" and relentless questions about Obama's birth certificate -- pioneered by one Donald J. Trump, of course -- tapped into the code as well.

But Donald Trump discarded the dog whistle during his campaign in 2016. He referred to Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and rapists. He argued for discriminatory treatment of Muslims. He asserted that the judge presiding over the Trump University fraud cases, born in Indiana but of Mexican heritage, must be biased against him in light of Trump's proposal to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

And then he won the presidency, anyway -- or, more likely, because of it. And after that, he brought white nationalists into the White House to be key advisors and installed them in his cabinet. He sought to impose a travel ban on Muslims. He redirected a counter-terrorism program to focus solely on "radical Islamic extremism" and no longer target white supremacists. And when white nationalists armed with torches and Nazi flags felt emboldened by him to rally in Charlottesville, he talked about the fine people on both sides.

And it has only gotten worse, most recently with unhinged racist attacks on members of Congress. With such hate-filled vitriol aimed at people and communities of color being tweeted out almost daily, it is getting harder for Trump's fellow Republicans to defend him. But they keep trying. They have to because if they admit that Trump is racist, then they will have to concede that Trump policies that the Republican Party stands behind -- most notably his unconscionable border policies -- stem from racism and a white nationalist agenda rather than simply hard-line pragmatism. In other words, Trump's racist rants have proven -- as if we really needed more proof -- that his efforts to thwart asylum seekers and radically reduce the number of refugees isn't about national security, border safety or providing a more fair and orderly process -- it's about keeping black and brown people out of the country.

Now that the truth is undeniable -- 51% in a recent poll believe Trump is racist -- Trump and his Republican enablers may hope that his unmitigated racism will energize a base that is otherwise low energy because it has not benefited from his purported economic miracle. But it looks like there actually may be a whole lot fewer deplorables than Trump thinks there are. Suburban voters, particularly white women, appear to be recoiling from Trump's white nationalism. It seems that abandoning the dog whistle may very well backfire. Maybe Trump should have tried to be more subtle like St. Ronnie.

The Mets: Amazing Then, Appalling Now

2019-06-28T12:10:00.001-07:00

The Mets are really bad at honoring their history. Given that the franchise is younger than me with only two World Series wins and a handful (or two) of iconic players, it shouldn't be that hard to celebrate our modest amount of glory. But their stadium, Citi Field, completed in 2009 and patterned after old Ebbetts Field, was more of an homage to the Brooklyn Dodgers -- unless (with all due respect to Jackie Robinson) the big number 42 in the rotunda was meant to honor Butch Huskey or perhaps Ron Hodges. Only two players' numbers have been retired. There are no statues of their stars as at other stadiums, much less a Monument Park like they have in the Bronx.

But with this being the 50th Anniversary of the magical, miraculous season of 1969, it seems that management has been shamed into doing the right thing. They finally commissioned a statue for their greatest player, Tom Seaver, and also renamed the stadium's address 41 Seaver Way. This weekend there are a host of festivities scheduled with commemorative giveaways and tributes, and many former players will be in attendance. It should be a sweet, sentimental ride.

But painful too. Painful because of the stark difference between the joyful highs of the 1969 season and the agonizing lows halfway through 2019.

I'm reminded of the 10th Anniversary. The Mets honored the 1969 team at an Old Timers' Day game on July 14, 1979. As the Met announcer, the great Bob Murphy, introduced members of the 69 squad, they each came out of the dugout and onto the field in their old uniforms -- a little tighter to be sure, but only ten years out, most of old Mets still looked more or less like ballplayers. The fans went wild, boisterously cheering their beloved heroes, which included most of the heart of the team: Tommie Agee, Cleon Jones, Donn Clendenon, Jerry Grote, Art Shamsky, Ron Swoboda and several others. Ed Kranepool, who was still on the Mets, joined his former mates. They played a couple of innings against a team of aging stars from an earlier era, including several former Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants. Gary Gentry started for the Mets (since the aces, Seaver and Jerry Koosman, were still active and playing elsewhere). It wasn't too hard -- especially if you were in the upper deck -- to imagine having been transported back in time -- Agee pounded his glove before smoothly catching a fly ball, Cleon Jones crushed a double (albeit against a much older Ralph Branca) and Swoboda, swinging from his heels, smashed a ball against the outfield wall that was just foul. I was there with my best pal, Michael, and we couldn't have been happier, lapping up the nostalgia.

And then it was time for the real game. The 1979 version took the field with the likes of Willie Montanez, Richie Hebner and the detritus from the brutally painful Tom Seaver trade two years earlier. We left before game began. We simply couldn't bear the contrast with our cherished 1969 team. (Indeed, the Mets would lose 99 games that year for a last place finish, although I looked it up and they actually won that day, with Tom Hausman outpitching the Giants' Vida Blue for one of his 15 career victories, aided by RBIs from the aforementioned detritus, Doug Flynn and Steve Henderson.)

Which brings us to today. The Mets have again become unwatchable. A poorly constructed roster assembled by their new general manager, baffling moves by their deer-in-the-headlights field manager, dysfunction throughout the organization and the bizarre mishandling of injuries, has undermined what looked to be an exciting season and a promising future. True, unlike the 79 team, there is some hope thanks to a core of exciting young players who have yet to be beaten down by the team's toxicity -- particularly, Pete Alonso, Jeff McNeil and Michael Conforto (and maybe Amed Rosario and the now-injured Brandon Nimmo). And last year's Cy Young Award winner, Jacob DeGrom, is a true star. But their starting pitching is wildly inconsistent, their defense is atrocious and their bullpen is a nightmare (more blown saves than saves!) Every day seems to bring another gut-wrenching loss caused by a late inning defensive miscue and/or a bullpen meltdown. And there is talk about trading once-promising players at the trading deadline for prospects, in other words, conceding that's its time to rebuild, again.

Every year Met fans hope that somehow everything will fall into place and we will become champions once more. Such optimism (some would say delusional thinking) is surely due to our formative Met experience in 1969, which has led us to believe that a miracle can happen again. And then every year, sometime in June or July, it becomes clear that this isn't going to be the year for a miracle.

And that's where we are. There's nothing to do but enjoy the festivities, revel in the nostalgia for the 1969 team, and then go home.

This Shit Is Getting Real

2019-05-24T11:20:00.002-07:00

The press is the enemy of the people and can be prosecuted for espionage if they publish leaked national security information. Federal law enforcement officials are traitors who can be tried for treason for investigating a foreign power's efforts to interfere with U.S. elections if it leads to all (or some) of the president's men. Moreover, the president's de facto personal attorney, formerly known as the Attorney General of the United States, has been given sweeping powers to declassify any intelligence from any agency regarding the impetus of that investigation and, as his prior conduct suggests, will selectively provide that information to the public in a way that favors the president and undermines the investigation.

Meanwhile, the president has instructed his staff -- past and present -- to ignore Congressional subpoenas and has refused to cooperate with any attempts at legitimate oversight by the Democratic-led House of Representatives. Instead, he is relying on incendiary rhetoric and court challenges. As to the latter, perhaps not fast enough to serve his purposes, he is stocking the federal judiciary at an unprecedented rate -- already over 100 judges and two Supreme Court justices -- in the hope that this will provide a bulwark against challenges to his authoritarianism.

This shit is getting real.

The Democrats in Congress sound the alarm on the one hand, but go back to business as usual on the other. They rail about Trump's authoritarianism, corruption and unfitness for office, but believe it is more important to pass poll-tested bills in the House that the Senate will not even take up. As Democrats act calmly, rationally and reasonably in the face of rampant abuses of power, they not only betray weakness and political calculation, but are nevertheless tarred as partisan enemies of the people.

The cautious, disjointed response by the Democratic leadership since the Mueller Report was released that focuses on process, not substance, has allowed Trump, AG Barr and the GOP to create a false narrative that exonerates the president. Sure it is outrageous that Barr is withholding the unredacted report and the administration is refusing to honor subpoenas -- and this must be challenged -- but we can't lose sight of the fact that there is already plenty in the redacted version, in the public record, and in Trump's continued authoritarian moves that warrant an impeachment inquiry -- an inquiry that could more easily obtain this information.

Democrats' avoidance of the "I" word signals that they don't believe there is enough to go forward. If there isn't enough now -- if there isn't at least a prima facie case of high crimes and misdemeanors --what would it take, FFS? Does Trump really have to stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot someone? Shall we take another poll to find out if it would be worth it then?

While Democrats dither, Trump's latest move of aggressively investigating the investigation will now put Democrats on the defensive, where holding impeachment hearings would have the opposite effect.

Once an impeachment inquiry is launched, a committee would subpoena documents and call witnesses (with heightened powers to compel) and weigh the evidence before proposing specific articles of impeachment to be considered by the House. If the House votes to impeach, then the proceedings would move to the Senate where, after a trial, it would take two-thirds of the Senate to remove him. While it is virtually impossible at this point to envision the Senate Republicans putting country over party, they should be required to stand up in the face of what is sure to be overwhelming evidence and explain to the American people why they continue to support this palpably unfit miscreant. And even if the Senate fails to convict, the process itself will impede Trump's ability to pursue his destructive agenda as well as cause him deep and lasting political damage.

Michelle Goldberg concludes in her recent New York Times op-ed:

The point of impeachment is not to remove Trump before the 2020 election. It is to make clear, in the starkest possible way, why Democrats believe he should be removed. The remainder of his term should be consumed by a formal, televised presentation of all the ways he’s disgraced his office. It’s true that were Trump to be re-elected after such a reckoning, he might be even further unleashed. But were Trump to be re-elected in the absence of impeachment, it would still be seen as a vindication for him, and would leave Democrats humiliated by their excess of caution.

Teach Your Children: The Essential Films

2019-05-22T10:45:00.007-07:00

It is incumbent upon parents to teach their children core values: love, kindness, self-respect and respect for others, fairness and justice, family culture/tradition and tolerance for those of others, appreciation of nature and the need to protect the planet, openness to the spiritual or magical, cultivation of healthful habits and self-sufficiency, the power of literature and music, the importance of baseball, and how to eat a slice of pizza.

Then there are the movies -- those essential 20th Century American films that our kids should be familiar with before moving on into the world. These are not necessarily the ones you would see in a film class (although several you might) but those iconic gems that say something fundamental about ourselves and our culture. Here's my initial attempt at a list that probably says more about me:

1. Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, Animal Crackers

2. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

3. Sullivan's Travels

4. The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Treasure of Sierra Madre

5. Double Indemnity

6. Harvey

7. Singin' in the Rain

8. Rear Window, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Notorious

9. On the Waterfront

10. The Searchers
11. Bridge on the River Kwai

12. 12 Angry Men

13. Some Like It Hot, The Apartment

14. Lawrence of Arabia

15. The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, The Train

16. To Kill A Mockingbird

17. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

18. The Guns of Navarone

19. Stalag 17, The Great Escape, Von Ryan's Express

20. Dr. Strangelove

21. The Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark

22. The Graduate

23. In The Heat of the Night

24. Planet of the Apes

25. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

26. Midnight Cowboy
27. Little Big Man
28. Harold and Maude

29. Fiddler on the Roof

30. The Godfather & The Godfather II

31. Jeremiah Johnson

32. The Heartbreak Kid

33. Young Frankenstein
34. Chinatown
35. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

36. Three Days of the Condor

37. The Outlaw Josey Wales

38. Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters

39. The Last Waltz

40. Apocalypse Now
41. Airplane

42. This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman

43. Stranger Than Paradise

44. Bull Durham, A League of Their Own, Eight Men Out

45. Midnight Run
46. Do The Right Thing

47. My Cousin Vinny

48. Groundhog Day

49. Pulp Fiction

50. The Big Lebowski, Fargo

The Frog And The Shit-Gibbon

2019-05-02T16:55:00.001-07:00

With the daily onslaught of lies, corruption and abuse of power from the Trump Administration, it is not possible to maintain a meaningful perspective on the scope and magnitude of its horror. The latest outrage is dutifully reported while the traditional media and the political establishment mostly give a collective shrug because it simply confirms the already baked-in view that the president is a lying, corrupt scoundrel. And we move on to the next outrage the following day, one that would be a massive scandal in any other Administration. There is no sense of urgency from Democratic leadership -- no sense that we are in a true national emergency -- no sense that without immediate, drastic action, the Administration will: (1) stall, obstruct and distract to avoid accountability for this term, and (2) use corrupt means (e.g., doubling down on voter suppression and foreign interference while investigating its political opponents) to remain in office for another term.

But never mind. After all, it's Infrastructure Week (again). So the Democratic leadership dutifully meets with Trump with a plan for a compromise infrastructure bill in its never-ending quest to appear reasonable and responsible in the face of insanity. Couldn't they have slipped him a subpoena while they were there? Sure, Nancy Pelosi, the House Majority Leader, says Trump's conduct is "worse than Nixon's," but she and her fellow Democrats don't act as if he is anything like Nixon. They continue to argue about whether opening an impeachment inquiry would be politically prudent while dithering over requests for testimony and documents from Trump officials. 'OK,' they say, 'this is your last chance to appear voluntarily and if you don't, we will ... mock you by eating buckets of fried chicken.' Maybe next week they will issue subpoenas or contempt citations. Or maybe the week after that -- and if that doesn't work, maybe then they might revisit the impeachment question, but only after checking the polls. Or, they'll just wait to see what happens in November 2020, as if that won't embolden Trump to turn up the malfeasance meter to 11.

Meanwhile, Trump dangerously promotes an egregious lie about Democrats relishing the execution of newborns, proposes new rules to create even greater hardship for political asylum seekers, and provides cover to racists by re-framing Charlottesville as nothing more than a good-faith dispute over a Civil War statue. Trump's 10,000th lie milestone was greeted mostly with jokes from late night comedians rather than any kind of shock or outrage. Indeed, the numbers no longer mean anything. Neither it seems do facts. He lies so often and so brazenly that he has successfully created an alternative universe for his base that cannot be penetrated by reason or logic.

And speaking of his base, Trump continues to encourage white nationalist-inspired violence -- not only in his speeches and rhetoric that give legitimacy and comfort to white supremacists and anti-semites, but in defunding and disbanding the Dept. of Homeland Security's branch that had previously focused on domestic terrorism. Imagine the scandal that would have ensued if there had been spike in domestic terrorism during the Obama Administration after funding for domestic terrorism had been cut to assuage Obama's constituency. For Trump, in the wake of more shootings by white supremacists, it is barely a one-day news story.

How about this frightening statistic: the Senate has just confirmed Trump's 100th nominee to the federal bench, virtually all of whom are extremely young and extremely conservative, having been incubated in Federalist Society dogma. These are lifetime appointments, jammed through the Judiciary Committee without meaningful hearings. Along with stealing a Supreme Court majority, the Republicans are successfully skewing the entire federal judiciary for a generation or more. The consequences are dire. But the lack of any urgency to win back the Senate is demonstrated by the number of potentially formidable Democratic senatorial candidates deciding they are better off running for president. This is madness.

Not surprisingly, the Mueller Report, augmented by AG Barr's creative interpretation of it, failed to fulfill the always unrealistic hope that our thoughts and prayers would be answered -- that there would finally be a definitive determination of Trump's perfidy that would inexorably lead to his removal. Although the report itself provides incriminating bombshells and a tantalizing roadmap for further investigation -- indeed, impeachment -- by Congress, Barr did what he was undoubtedly appointed to do. He provided -- and continues to provide -- the necessary sound bites and obfuscation for Trump to claim vindication. It is plain, after Barr's remarkably disingenuous testimony, that Trump will not only use Barr and the DOJ as a shield to avoid any Congressional oversight, but -- like any good dictator -- as a sword to go after the investigators and Trump's political opponents. Get ready for bogus but overly-reported "scandals" involving whichever Democratic presidential hopeful appears to be gaining traction. First up: Joe Biden and the Ukraine.

This is all like the fable about the slow boiling of a frog -- where we, as the frog, fail to notice our doom because of the gradual heat being brought to bear. The daily lies and reports of corruption and abuse of power slowly add up. The drip, drip, drip of disclosures about Russia simply don't have the dramatic impact of having learned about all of it at once. Had we been dropped in boiling water -- confronted with the sum total of Trump's malevolence -- we surely would have collectively jumped. That's where impeachment hearings would come in handy -- putting it all in one scalding pot.

There's another frog story -- the one about the frog and the scorpion, where the scorpion, after promising not to sting the frog if it carries the scorpion across the water, does so anyway, even though it meant that both the frog and scorpion would drown. When the frog protests, the scorpion helplessly replies, "I can't help it, it's in my nature."

It is in Trump's nature to be willfully ignorant, to be cruel and to degrade and corrupt everything he touches. It is in his nature to not just lie but to make the truth meaningless. It is in his nature to use threats, lawsuits and the levels of power at his disposal to avoid accountability. And it is in his nature to to be an authoritarian bully. The key is that we recognize the danger, amplify it and fight against it -- and to do so expeditiously -- and not allow ourselves to go down with him.

Joe Biden's "Apology" To Anita Hill Is Too Little, Too Late And Too Lame

2019-04-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

This piece was originally written in 2017, but is unfortunately more relevant than ever. Biden's inability -- still -- to come to grips with his responsibility, not only for the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, but for the rigged process he agreed to that isolated and humiliated Anita Hill, is deeply troubling as he trots out the Aw Shucks Kindly Uncle Joe routine on the campaign trail. With both his non-apology to Anita Hill about how she was treated and his statements about not intending to creep out the women whose shoulders he rubbed and hair he sniffed, Biden repeatedly fails to distinguish between his purportedly benign intent and the far-from-benign impact. In my view, this is a disqualifying blind spot.

Joe Biden was the chair of the Senate's Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearings in 1991. In contrast to his more recent incarnation as the beloved elder statesman and erstwhile sidekick to Barack Obama, Biden played a singular role in delivering Anita Hill into a lion's den of misogyny and ensuring that her testimony that Thomas sexually harassed her when she was in his employ at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would be ridiculed.

Biden was a well-ensconced member of the Old Boys' Network aka The United States Senate, and did his level best to be a neutral arbiter, which allowed the more aggressive, overtly-sexist Republicans to control the proceedings. (Sound familiar?) In his efforts to be unstintingly fair to Thomas -- to the detriment of Thomas' victims -- he repeatedly assured him that "you have the benefit of the doubt," despite the lack of any legal justification for such an assurance. This was not a judicial proceeding, it was a confirmation hearing.

Biden had the power to permit expert testimony on sexual harassment but he refused. He had the power to restrain the insulting and humiliating questioning of Hill but failed to do so -- and got into the act himself (asking Hill about how she felt during an alleged sexually-charged interaction with Thomas, “Were you uncomfortable, were you embarrassed, did it not concern you?”) And, worst of all, he reached a private compromise with Republican senators -- a classic back room deal -- not to call witnesses who would have corroborated Hill, most importantly, Angela Wright, another former employee of Thomas at the EEOC who also claimed to have been sexually harassed by him.

Thomas was confirmed by a painfully slim margin, 52–48, with the help of 11 Democrats. Although Biden voted against Thomas, his shameful performance as Judiciary Chair is directly responsible for one of the most reactionary Supreme Court justices in U.S. history.

Now that we are seemingly at a watershed moment in which sexual misconduct by men in power is coming under scrutiny, questions about Clarence Thomas and how the sexual harassment allegations against him were addressed are getting a well-needed second look.

In an interview with Teen Vogue, Joe Biden was asked about his role in hearings. He focused on his inability to control his "Republican friends," stating "my one regret is that I wasn’t able to tone down the attacks on her by some of my Republican friends. I mean, they really went after her. As much as I tried to intervene, I did not have the power to gavel them out of order. I tried to be like a judge and only allow a question that would be relevant to ask."

I'm gonna call bullshit. First, Biden was not a judge, he was the chairman of the committee and certainly had the power to "gavel" the unwarranted attacks on Anita Hill as out of order. But what Biden conveniently elides is his pivotal role ahead of the proceedings in rigging things in favor of the nominee in a way that would undermine the credibility of Anita Hill -- failing to set parameters for questions and failing to allow corroborating testimony.

Anita Hill recently told the Washington Post that she believes that Biden still doesn't get it -- that he fails to “take ownership of his role in what happened.” As she said: "he also doesn’t understand that it wasn’t just that I felt it was not fair. It was that women were looking to the Senate Judiciary Committee and his leadership to really open the way to have these kinds of hearings. They should have been using best practices to show leadership on this issue on behalf of women’s equality. And they did just the opposite.”

Biden concludes in his Teen Vogue interview: "I wish I had been able to do more for Anita Hill. I owe her an apology." You sure do, Joe.

Follow Fair and Unbalanced on Twitter @FairUnbalanced1 and on Facebook

Time Begins On Opening Day

2019-03-21T13:50:00.000-07:00

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time. -- Jim Bouton

Thomas Boswell, the long-time sportswriter for the Washington Post, wrote a timeless piece collected in a book of the same name, Why Time Begins On Opening Day, published in 1984. Boswell muses on the "resolute grasp" that baseball maintains for so many of us" and why our "affection for the game has held steady for decades, maybe even grown with age." He asks what baseball is doing among our other "first-rate passions." And, indeed, when one looks over the posts on this blog, it could seem incongruous to have baseball pieces interrupting the rants on politics and pleas for social justice.

Boswell explains that "in contrast to the unwieldy world which we hold in common, baseball offers a kingdom built to human scale. Its problems and questions are exactly our size. Here we may come when we feel a need for a rooted point of reference." It is not that baseball is an escape from reality, "it's merely one of our many refuges within the real where we try to create a sense of order on our own terms."

This refuge has never seemed more urgent than this season. What Boswell wrote more than thirty years ago speaks volumes today:  "Born to an age where horror has become commonplace, where tragedy has, by its monotonous repetition, become a parody of sorrow, we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket."

Yet there are a growing number of naysayers. There are those, including the current MLB Commissioner, who are determined to use various gimmicks and quick-fixes to address three purported problems with the game: 1) the umpires blow too many calls; 2) the pace of play is too torpid; and 3) pitchers are too dominant.

With regard to the first perceived problem, the solution appears to be not only more reliance on instant replay, but also an automated strike zone. What's next? Robot umpires? The original instant replay rule, designed to review home runs, made some sense.  New-fangled ballparks with unusual angles and idiosyncratic seating make it much more difficult to discern with the naked eye when a ball is actually hit out of the park.  But the success of the original rule has led to the inevitable slippery slope -- expanded replay into many more areas of the game. And now, the possibility of replacing home plate umpires with an electronic strike zone. Instant replay already upsets the flow of the game at pivotal moments. But more significantly, it attempts to eliminate chance and human error, which are woven into the game's history where the best team doesn't always win. There is the bad hop eluding a fielder that should have been an easy out, a bloop hit on a check-swing despite the pitch badly fooling the hitter, and, inevitably, the missed call from the umpire. These are essential parts of the game and those who insist on perfection are missing the point.

The game is slow, but not TOO slow. As Roger Angell puts it, "each inning of baseball's slow, searching time span, each game of its long season is essential to the disclosure of its truths." But, fine, I'm willing to compromise -- shorter commercial breaks between innings, hitters staying in the batters box between pitches, a pitch clock, and restrictions on the number of mound visits the catcher can make. But did we really need to do away with the intentional walk? The geniuses running Major League Baseball keep trying to remove its idiosyncratic charms under the guise of speeding its pace. They need to slow down.

Fifty years ago, after the "Year of the Pitcher," the mound was lowered from a height of 15 inches to 10 inches to give pitchers less of an edge. There is talk of lowering it further. Or worse, moving the mound back, which arguably would help hitters, but probably would cause injuries to pitcher's arms. One of the delightful, remarkable things about baseball is that for generations, the sacred measurements between bases (90 feet) and between the pitching rubber and home plate (60 feet, six inches) have remained the same no matter how players have grown in size and strength. You can't mess with this.   Another proposal, apparently going into affect next year, is requiring relief pitchers to pitch to at least three batters or until the end of an inning. This would prevent managers from using three or four relief specialists in an inning, which not only dampens the offense but does, admittedly, slow down the game in the late innings considerably. I'm OK with this. Just don't move the mound.
.
Behind many of these proposals seems to be an effort to accommodate purportedly impatient, distractible millennials who love basketball and football, but are bored by baseball. But these fixes will not magically bring more fans to the ballpark. Making the game more robotic and removing the game's traditional quirks are self-defeating. (MLB should pour funds into youth baseball -- and fairly compensate minor leaguers -- if it truly wants to have a long-term impact.) A few tweaks here and there are acceptable, but we need to have faith that baseball is just fine the way it is. The arc of the baseball universe is long. As Yogi or Casey or (actually) Bob Veale said, "good pitching will always stop good hitting and vice versa." Sure, right now pitchers have the upper hand, there are more strikeouts, and fewer balls in play. Eventually hitters will adjust, and the balance of power (literally) will shift.

Boswell reminds us how baseball "offers us pleasure and insight at so many levels and in so many forms." There is history -- an "annual chapter each year since 1869." At the ballpark itself there is "living theater and physical poetry." And perhaps, "baseball gives us more pleasure, more gentle unobtrusive sustenance, away from the park than it does inside it," pouring over box scores, crunching statistics, debating players and teams with our cohorts, and watching games and highlights on TV. "The ways that baseball insinuates itself into the empty corner, cheering up the odd hour, are almost too ingrained to notice." Let's not fuck it up.

The Moratorium On California's Death Penalty Should Be Celebrated, But It Comes Too Late For Some

2019-03-13T10:18:00.003-07:00

Thank you Gavin Newsom for imposing a moratorium on the death penalty in California. And thank you to all my friends, colleagues, comrades who worked so hard for so long to create the political space for him to make this happen. My thoughts go to the 13 men who were executed under this discriminatory, arbitrary and barbaric system that, at least for now, has been ground to a halt -- especially Tom. This piece was originally titled The Arbitrary Execution of Tom Thompson, and was written on December 18, 2015.

*          *          *          *

I knew if I wanted to see Tom one last time I had to leave for the prison soon. It was already late in the afternoon and at 6:00 pm, he would be taken from the visiting area to the death watch cell for his last meal. There he would remain until 25 minutes before midnight when he would be led to the execution chamber next door. There wasn’t anything left for me to do anyway, so I left my San Francisco office and drove over the Golden Gate Bridge to San Quentin State Prison.

The parking lot to the East Gate of the prison is just a few yards from the San Francisco Bay. Even after countless visits the contrast between the sweeping vista of the coastline and the grim reality inside the prison’s peach colored concrete walls is striking. I passed through security and walked slowly down the long path leading to the Main Visiting Room. I was let in through the two sets of heavy doors, and saw Tom, surrounded by family and close friends, presiding over a gathering that could only be described as surreal. Tom had been on death row for fourteen years, and the prison guards who knew him well seemed as traumatized as everyone else. They were overly solicitous, awkward, almost apologetic. Instead of the usual vending machine fare there was a platter of cold cuts for sandwiches and sodas on a long table. Although in a matter of hours he was going to be strapped to a gurney and lethally injected with poison, it was Tom who was trying to keep things light, with the corny jokes and over-the-top impersonations – Steve Martin as the “Wild and Crazy Guy” and Mike Myers as Austin Powers – with which I had become all too familiar.

Behind his silliness, Tom was thoroughly depleted from being the center of a spectacle that surrounded him as the fifth man about to be executed in California since the death penalty was re-instituted in 1977. A physically healthy 43 year old was going through the process of dying, and it was disorienting and unbearably stressful. He had been enduring emotionally-charged visits from his friends and loved ones, for whom he felt the need to constantly perform. He met often with me and other members of the legal team to approve a list of execution witnesses (he was entitled to five) and to be kept abreast of last minute developments – of which there were few. He had been under 24 hour surveillance from guards for the past five days, making sleep impossible. In accordance with prison rules, he had been stripped of his “non-legal property.” He had no reading or writing material. He was denied his art supplies, which he had used for surprisingly impressive paintings over the years, including a portrait of Billy Idol he had given me a few months earlier.

We had been preparing for this moment for far too long, having gone through a similar process one year earlier when, despite a stay of execution, prison personnel proceeded methodically with its execution protocol until, with six hours to spare, they were finally assured that the Supreme Court would not disturb the stay. There was not much left to say. Tom, although hampered by waist chains, enveloped me as best he could in a big bear hug, and thanked me for all I had done. He told me that I should feel proud about putting up such a good and righteous fight. I replied that it had been an honor to have worked with him. I exchanged tearful goodbyes with his sister and mother. I walked out of the prison and returned to my office where I continued to file court papers with little chance of success and railed to reporters about injustice. All to no avail. Six minutes after midnight on July 14, 1998, Tom Thompson was dead.

*          *          *          *

Tom Thompson had no criminal record or history of violence when he was tried for the murder of Ginger Fleischli in 1984. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death based largely on the false testimony of jailhouse snitches and the failure of his trial lawyer to challenge the bogus evidence of rape invented by the prosecutor. (The rape special-circumstance provided the basis for the death penalty.)

An explosive scandal involving the Orange County D.A.'s office has only recently shed light on the extent of the unethical behavior routinely engaged in by its prosecutors to secure death sentences. And Michael Jacobs -- the prosecutor in Tom's case -- has been revealed to be one of the more notorious. Jacobs was fired in 2001 for insubordination and dishonesty.  The litany of his misconduct over several cases includes presenting false testimony, using unreliable informants, and hiding exculpatory evidence -- all of which he did in Tom's case. And there was more. Jacobs used contradictory evidence and arguments in two separate trials to convict first Tom and then Tom's roommate, David Leitch -- the victim's former boyfriend and a man with a violent past -- on inconsistent theories. The reliability of many other Orange County cases has been called into question since the D.A. scandal broke -- and one murder conviction based on the false testimony of one of the very same snitches who testified against Tom has been reversed. Of course, this all comes too late for Tom.

There are approximately 750 men and women on death row in California. Tom Thompson is one of 13 who have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated 40 years ago. While others sentenced to death around the same time languished on death row (several of whom continue to languish), his case jumped to the head of the class for no discernible reason. And then a series of safeguards designed to ensure that the death penalty is fairly and reliably imposed -- state and federal appellate review and clemency -- completely and utterly failed.

All death sentences in California are automatically reviewed by the California Supreme Court.  Tom's appeal was heard in 1988, two years after three liberal justices were recalled by the voters and replaced by an ultra-conservative governor with ultra-conservative justices. The Court was thereby transformed almost overnight from one that was appropriately open to reversing cases based on meritorious claims to one that essentially rubber-stamped death penalty cases by finding virtually every error alleged in virtually every case to be harmless. Accordingly, Tom's conviction and sentence were affirmed.

The case then moved to federal court, where in 1995, Tom's death sentence and rape-related charges were reversed based on a finding of ineffective assistance of trial counsel for counsel's inexcusable failure to adequately rebut the snitch testimony and other evidence that purported to establish rape. The state appealed this decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the composition of the randomly drawn three-judge panel in the federal appellate courts is the most important factor in determining the life and death of a condemned inmate. If at least two of the judges on the panel are essentially liberal, the death penalty will likely be reversed; if they are conservative it usually will be upheld. It is simply luck of the draw and, unfortunately, Tom got a very, very bad draw. Despite what at the time was a majority of liberal judges on the Ninth Circuit, all three judges on Tom’s panel were extremely conservative Reagan appointees. It was therefore not surprising -- but wholly arbitrary -- when the panel reversed the district court's ruling in 1996.

To mitigate such arbitrariness is another important safeguard -- en banc review, in which an 11-judge Ninth Circuit panel has the option to review a 3-judge panel's ruling. Court papers were filed requesting rehearing en banc, which can only be granted after one of the active judges who sits on the Ninth Circuit calls for a vote and a majority of those judges then vote in favor of rehearing. Given the number of liberal judges on the Ninth Circuit at that time it would be unusual for there not to at least be one judge calling for a vote in a death penalty case. However, on March 6, 1997, an order issued stating that the request for en banc review was denied because not one judge asked for a vote to rehear the case. After the U.S. Supreme Court denied review, an execution date was set for August 5, 1997.

In the months that followed, evidence surfaced that corroborated Tom's long-standing version of events -- that he and the victim had consensual sex on the night of her death. This included a statement from Tom's roommate, David Leitch, that was never turned over to the defense. Such evidence completely undermined the prosecutor's rape-murder theory and called into question the credibility and integrity of the prosecutor's entire case.   Unfortunately, presenting this new evidence was severely hampered by a federal law that had just been enacted in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 ("AEDPA") was designed to thwart "frivolous appeals" but it cast far too wide a net and created virtually insurmountable hurdles to presenting new claims in federal court. Another problem was that the federal judge who had originally granted relief had passed away and the case was assigned to a far more conservative judge who was completely unreceptive to this new evidence and rejected the claim.

Another purported safeguard is clemency, a process in which the governor is empowered to act when the judicial system breaks down. No California governor since Ronald Reagan, however, has seen fit to grant clemency in a capital case, and in Tom's case, Governor Pete Wilson proved no exception. Despite powerful and emotional pleas from family and loved ones, the lack of any prior criminal history, testimonials from prison guards about Tom's exemplary conduct at San Quentin, and serious doubts raised regarding the fairness of the trial and the subsequent judicial proceedings, Wilson denied clemency.  He ultimately based his decision on nothing more than a determination that Tom could not prove his innocence ("But at the end of it all, I am absolutely confident that he raped and murdered Ginger Fleischli").

On August 3, 1997, one night before Tom's execution was scheduled to take place, an 11-judge en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit issued a dramatic order. The court explained that it was taking the highly unusual step of ruling after its earlier denial of review because of “exceptional circumstances” caused by a malfunction in the court’s review process -- a glitch in the court's communication system that resulted in the failure of any judge voting to review the case en banc the first time -- and because “we are convinced that the panel committed fundamental errors of law that would result in a manifest injustice.” The Ninth Circuit then vacated the three-judge panel opinion, and reversed the death sentence, holding that trial counsel's ineffectiveness was prejudicial and that the prosecutor’s use of fundamentally inconsistent theories at Tom and David’s separate trials was fundamentally unfair.

The state sought review in the U.S. Supreme Court, while the prison proceeded with its execution protocol. With six hours to spare, the Supreme Court refused the state's invitation to summarily reverse the Ninth Circuit and allow the execution to go forward. But it did agree to hear the state's appeal on December 9, 1997.

The grand stairway of 53 steps, the massive Corinthian marble columns, the grandeur of the Great Hall, and all the pomp and circumstance attending the Supreme Court are surely designed to give lawyers a sense of awe and wonder as they go through the red-curtained entrance into the courtroom and sit just a few short feet from the nine justices. One comes completely down to earth, however, as it becomes clear that at least a majority of those justices intend to make sure one’s client is executed. This seemed like a foregone conclusion in Tom’s case. When the high court decides to intervene in a Ninth Circuit case that has reversed a death sentence it is usually not to approve its ruling. And thus, another safeguard proved ephemeral. On April 29, 1998, by a bare 5-to-4 majority, the Court reversed the Ninth Circuit and ordered it to reinstate Tom's death sentence. Justice Kennedy (a former Ninth Circuit judge, himself) wrote the majority opinion, finding a “grave abuse of discretion” in the Ninth Circuit’s handling of the case, and stressed the importance of “finality” of state judgments. Thus, even though Tom was not at fault, the Court rejected Tom’s claims on the technicality that the Ninth Circuit had waited too long to grant en banc review. The Court never even addressed the validity of Tom’s substantive claims. A new execution date was set for July 14, 1998.

The last hope was the separate appeal of the federal judge's rejection of the newly discovered evidence of innocence.  The case was heard by the same en banc panel that had granted relief earlier, but the court was no longer receptive.  It seemed chastened by the lashing it had received by the Supreme Court and shackled by the barriers to relief imposed by AEDPA.  At 11:00 p.m., on July 11, 1998, the court denied relief. Tom was executed two nights later.

*          *          *          *

Tom Thompson was represented by a trial lawyer who failed to take the steps required to afford minimally competent representation in a capital case. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a county where a cynical prosecutor could pick and choose among jail inmates who were willing and able to manufacture evidence to support the prosecution’s theory of the case. His death sentence was affirmed by a state court that at the time refused to meaningfully review death penalty cases. Relief in federal court was first denied because he unluckily drew a conservative panel and later because of legal technicalities that had nothing to do with the merits of his claims. Despite obtaining new evidence that suggested he was innocent, Tom was precluded from obtaining a new trial because of insurmountable legal procedures and the paramount importance of closure.

Twenty years later, poor defense lawyers, unsavory prosecutors, disinterested courts and impenetrable procedural hurdles remain all too common elements in capital cases. They are inherent aspects of an irreparably broken system.  Apart from the barbarity of the death penalty, the absence of meaningful safeguards to ensure that death sentences are not unreliably and arbitrarily imposed and carried out should be deeply disturbing to anyone who cares about fairness and justice.

(Originally published on December 18, 2015; here are other pieces on Tom Thompson -- My Opposite and Final Hours)

Why Elizabeth Warren Would Be The Best President

2019-02-25T08:17:00.001-08:00

It remains to be seen who will be the best candidate to take on the malevolent orange shit-gibbon in the general election. All those who have declared or are likely to declare have baggage of one kind or another -- and even if they didn't, the Republican attack machine would invent some. What is clear is that a whole lot of crazy shit has transpired since 2016, and the zeitgeist calls for a sharp break from politics as usual -- it isn't the time for an old white man who has previously run for the office; it isn't the time for a traditional campaign that calls for moderation, pragmatism and a move towards the political center. With both our democracy and the planet in dire straits -- a true national emergency, for fuck sake -- we need a candidate who can articulate how broken things are, how corrupt and destructive Donald Trump has been, and how to start putting the country back together -- in short, how to Make America Sane Again.

Some of the candidates probably meet this criteria while a few clearly don't. (That said, it should go without saying that we must unite behind whoever the Democratic candidate ultimately is; that the candidates themselves must not tear each other or the Party down during the primaries and beyond -- I'm looking at you, Bernie.)

But beyond who might be the best candidate, a separate but related question is who would be the best president. I think the answer overwhelmingly is Elizabeth Warren.

From a policy perspective, no one has better chops. As a brilliant Harvard law professor, she argued for a new agency to protect consumers before the 2008 financial crisis hit. She chaired the Congressional Oversight Panel tasked with investigating the bank bailout, where she took on the financial giants as well as the government. She essentially created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which, before it was gutted by Trump, provided real relief for consumers against predatory practices by financial institutions and credit card companies.

Warren has already released a number of well-developed policy positions that address systemic economic inequality and would wrest a measure of economic control from corporations and the super wealthy while shifting some of their massive resources to workers, consumers and communities.

This includes Universal Child Care, which would guarantee child care for every child up to 5-years-old with families paying no more than 7% percent of their income in fees. The cost would be paid for by another of Warren's proposed policies -- the Ultra-Millionaire Tax -- which would impose a 2% tax on wealth above $50 million and a 3% tax on wealth above $1 billion. This proposal would raise about $2.75 trillion over 10 years.

And there's Warren's Accountability Capitalism Act, which provides a powerful contrast to the Republican tax bill -- and, as she puts it, seeks to "help eliminate skewed market incentives and return to the era when American corporations and American workers did well together." It "aims to reverse the harmful trends over the last thirty years that have led to record corporate profits and rising worker productivity but stagnant wages." It would require that: (1) corporations with over $1 billion in revenue must obtain a federal charter requiring its directors to “consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders” beyond shareholders, including employees, customers and communities; and (2) workers of large corporations would elect 40% of the board of directors.

These aren't your typical wonky proposals from liberals addressing piecemeal issues, but are bold, game-changing policies. Together with the Green New Deal and some variation of Medicare for All -- that Warren and most of the other Democratic candidates support -- they should not only have wide appeal for voters during the campaign, but would provide an essential new direction for the next administration.

A critical, overarching issue for both the campaign and the next administration is race -- particularly how institutional racism continues to impact every aspect of American society while the Republican Party has become the unapologetic party of white nationalism. This is one reason (among many) why Democratic candidates of color -- Kamala Harris and Corey Booker -- are such compelling candidates. They not only have the potential to energize African American voters who are key to a Democratic victory, but they bring necessary perspectives on race and racism drawn from their personal experiences and family histories.

Warren comes at racism from a more academic perspective. But she understands, as she stated in her commencement address at Morgan State, a historically black college, “[w]e need to stop pretending the same doors open for everyone.” She points to "generations of discrimination” as the reason for economic inequality between white and black households. At Morgan State, she acknowledged that “rules matter, and our government — not just individuals within the government, but the government itself — has systematically discriminated against black people in this country,” with “two sets of rules: One for white families, and one for everyone else.”

A recent New York Times article described Warren's and Kamala Harris's "morally driven policy goals" as reflective of a "shift in the importance of race and identity issues in the Democratic Party." Warren told the Times that "[w]e must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country that has had many consequences, including undermining the ability of black families to build wealth in America for generations.” She explained that “[w]e need systemic, structural changes to address that." And it isn't just talk. In addition to her childcare proposal which, as the Times notes, "could particularly affect black and Latino communities, where informal child-care arrangements are more common," Warren also supports the government provision of special home-buying assistance to residents of communities that were historically subject to redlining, i.e., discriminatory mortgage practices.

Of course, no Democratic proposal has any chance of passing the Senate -- even if Democrats win back the majority -- unless Republicans are stripped of their ability to obstruct everything. That means we must take back the Senate and Democrats must eliminate the filibuster if they take over. Unfortunately, most of the other Democratic candidates, particularly Warren's fellow Senators, are skittish about messing with Senate rules. They fundamentally fail to grasp how the Republicans have destroyed traditional norms in their pursuit of unfettered Republican control over the government. Warren understands this. She has declared with regard to eliminating the filibuster, “Everything stays on the table. You keep it all on the table. Don’t take anything off the table,”

And, finally, a President Warren is not likely to pull an Obama and insist on "looking forward" while refusing to go after the malfeasance of her predecessor. While several other candidates seem to be determined to ignore the orange elephant in the room and focus solely on Democratic issues, Warren shows that she can walk and chew gum at the same time, outlining policy proposals while calling out Trump's lies, racism and corruption. With a lifetime of experience devoted to going after the rich and powerful, there is no one better positioned to take on Trump's abuse of power. As she said recently on the campaign trail, “by the time we get to 2020, Donald Trump may not even be president. In fact, he may not even be a free person.” But if he is still free, you can be sure that Warren will seek accountability.

Unfortunately, the press has already shown that it has learned nothing from the 2016 debacle and will continue to treat a Democrat's relatively minor gaffes and missteps as equivalent to Trump's mind-blowing number of impeachment-worthy scandals. They will continue to buy into Trump's framing and distort the issues surrounding Warren's claim of Native American ancestry, making some voters skittish about her electability. Hopefully, as the campaigns get going, there will be more focus on substance. If that happens, Warren could prove to be a formidable candidate. She would certainly be a formidable president.