"Blow up the bags of sham" – Jean Arp
You might not know the name Florence Howe. I wouldn’t had I not spent two decades as a bookseller. I know of Florence Howe because she was a publisher of books, and a very important one. Born in Brooklyn to a mom who was a bookkeeper and a taxi cab-driving dad, as a young adult,…
A stupid but telling Trump lie emerged over the weekend. Looking at tight polls in Florida, Donald Trump claimed that he won the “Bay of Pigs award.” Of course, there is no Bay of Pigs award, a “revelation” that surprises exactly zero readers of the Comment. The reality is: In 2016, Trump got the endorsement…
In August, Trump ordered that the door-to-door census count stop a month earlier than scheduled, interference intended to create an under-count that would benefit the GOP in future elections. On Saturday, a federal judge said, “Wait a second, chump” and told the Census to keep going. Earlier in the summer, Betsy Devos ordered public schools…
In California, August 31 is the last day of the legislative calendar, the last day that the state Senate and Assembly can pass bills. If the deadline falls on or just after a weekend, the legislature crams, working Saturday and Sunday late, often past midnight. The days and nights are a frenzy of negotiation and…
Disclaimer: This Comment gets a bit theoretical. Be patient and plow through. I think it will be helpful. One of the difficulties of discussing politics and violence is that we have a tendency to make it a black and white issue. We ask, “Is political violence good or bad?” Whatever the answer, it spawns disagreement…
If someone asks me what is going to happen with the election, or pretty much anything else, my stock answer is “I don’t know.” I answer “I don’t know,” because I am old enough to realize that there is a hell of a lot I don’t know, especially what the future holds. But I also…
A couple weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Tom Ammiano. For those of you who don’t know who Tom is: Tom was the first teacher to come out in SF back in the 1970s, while teaching and advocating for kids in the Mission (which was not the boutique-y neighborhood it is now)….
Since the pandemic hit, Donald Trump’s callousness and ineptitude has brought about a man-made disaster. The United States has over 170,000 dead, the economy is failing, and every other problem we face seems to have gotten worse. The president’s popularity has sunk to levels enjoyed by “Sitting next to a guy on the bus, who…
This from the introduction to Michael Cohen’s forthcoming book. As a bookseller who specialized in presidential lit, I have to say that the library on Trump will be the sleaziest and strangest ever. “From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union,…
So here we are a week into federal unemployment extensions lapsing and other help stalled, and nothing. The media is still both-sides-ing this thing, a line that is getting repeated on social media. People who should know better complain, “Why don’t the Democrats make a deal? Listen: The Democrats are trying. Pelosi had a deal…