"Blow up the bags of sham" – Jean Arp
CNN’s Chris Cillizza reports on recent generic ballot polls for Congress (generics are when no candidate is mentioned) which show that the voting public prefers a Democratic controlled Congress 51% to 40% – an 11-point gap. He notes that in January that gap was 6 points. As someone who studies and writes on polls, Cillizza’s…
When an incident of repression occurs or systematic oppression is revealed, people who were not repressed or do not live with a particular form of oppression are repulsed by what they see. They want to help fight repression and oppression. In recent days, many white people watched the nine-minute clip of George Floyd’s murder by…
I woke Tuesday morning with tears in my eyes. It was a rough night. Popped outside for the dog’s last walk, a little after 8 p.m., after San Francisco’s unnecessary, open-ended curfew. There were a half-dozen people hurrying down the sidewalk, alone, something I’ve gotten used to in the pandemic shutdown. Tucked in doorways, a…
One of the more disturbing reactions to the week’s unrest is the shock that riots are occurring. I’m not talking about shock over why they are happening, but that violent unrest happens. People react as if the violent uprisings in Minneapolis and other cities are unique occurrences in the history of America. They aren’t. Going…
Whenever a police kills a Black or Latinx person, we play by all the rules. We write letters to public officials, we go to community meetings, we dialogue with the police, we work on political campaigns, we vote…and we protest. News reports emphasize “peaceful” as if peaceful protests aren’t the norm. Often the protests are…
Have you ever been in a riot? Never? I have; several. The first one was at the Democratic National Convention in 1984. We went down from Sacramento to San Francisco to see the Dead Kennedys. Mayor Dianne Feinstein had the police create “protest pens,” areas tucked away from the convention, which allowed police to keep…
Please don’t freak over Trump and his recent lashing out about Twitter. It is all impulse and show. He cannot do anything to shut down or police social media. No executive order he issues (if he actually does, he puff ‘n bluffs a lot) will make it through the courts. Read Trump’s hissy fit as…
One of Donald Trump’s most effective tactics is the puff ‘n bluff. He puffs himself up as a tough guy, a know-it-all, or a tough guy know-it-all and starts babbling bullshit. It is a tactic he learned at a young age. When he was an “aspiring developer,” he puff ‘n bluffed his way into city…
Donald Trump has been talking/tweeting a lot about voter fraud. While the latest blasts have been regarding mail-in voting, Trump has been talking about voter fraud since before he was elected. In 2016, shortly after his nomination to run as the Republican candidate for president, Trump was talking about voter fraud and how the general…
Things get stranger and stranger. While a majority of the country still believes that we should follow public health experts’ advice and be very cautious with “reopening,” more and more people are treating the advice as something that they think is totally right on…for everyone else (COVID for thee and not for me me me…