"Blow up the bags of sham" – Jean Arp
In the very early hours of Friday morning, the White House announced that Donald and Melania Trump tested positive for COVID. The immediate response by many was something a little short of schadenfreude. People were not quite taking pleasure in Trump’s bad news. The response was more like satisfactory scorn. After listening to ten-month long…
Today’s Washington Post has a wonderful article on postal workers responding to Trump’s attempt to sabotage USPS with some quiet civil disobedience. In a strange twist on protest, postal workers are showing their dissent by doing their job, something Trump does not want them to do. Mechanics in New York drew out the dismantling and…
There are thousands of people like Carter Williams out there, people who change people’s lives for the better, but most of us never have heard of. We know and pay attention to the deaths of a John Lewis or RBG, as we should, but folks like Williams pass on and get little attention, unless one…
Polls do not predict things. They measure the answers to specific questions. about certain topics, usually how someone feels about someone or something (candidate, policy, breakfast cereal) and what their intentions are (vote, not vote, buy, not buy). A pollster quantifies the answers are quantified. There is no soothsaying in what is quantified. Polls are…
This week saw a revival of concern about Trump “refusing to leave office†if he loses the election. The concern is based on a series of articles, starting with a piece in the Atlantic by Barton Gellman, and Trump’s own refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. In the past, I’ve attacked the…
On Friday, around 5 p.m. Pacific time, my phone started buzzing. Every text said the same thing, “RBG died.†I turned to my friend Julian and told him. “Are you sure?†he asked. I went to my Washington Post app and the news covered the screen. I held the screen for Julian to see, “Yup. 
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…