Dan Ancona's Blog, page 2

OK, that makes sense.

OK, that makes sense. And it’s not so far off from a scenario I could imagine happening if a couple of states passed Public Options, then combined them into one big risk pool. (which would also be a way to transition to a Medicare for All-ish system, a bit at a time) And yes, completely agree that a firm regulatory hand would be required for this to be remotely workable.

Why is Every Single Republican Healthcare Idea So Horrendously Awful?

Listening to the coverage of Trumpcare yesterday, something hit me: every single dang idea the Republicans are basing their backwards health care system reform on are truly, awfully terrible. A lot of the arguments they are making are completely awful, too. It’s such a cavalcade of hideously bad ideas that it seems almost weird.

Think about it. This is quite a run:

High risk pools. These are particularly egregiously terrible, because they go against the whole point of insurance, which is to taking the burden of the risk of getting hurt or sick that ALL of us face, then spreading that burden around to everyone. Taking anyone with a pre-existing condition and sticking them in a separate group (and then underfunding that!) is simply evil.

HSAs and high deductible plans. We have one of these. It’s awful. When our kid needed expensive dental work that wasn’t covered, we burned through the savings nearly instantly just in the diagnosis phase, then had to pay for the work out of pocket. It took us two years to pay it off. If either my wife or I had lost our jobs during that time, who knows what would have happened. And this wasn’t even a hugely expensive procedure. I realize the idea is that if people shop around that could bring down costs, but were we really going to try to find the cheapest, cut-rate dentist we could… for our kid?

Obamacare. I know, I know. I’m glad Obamacare exists. Don’t get me wrong. It’s helped a lot of people, including a friend of mine that was diagnosed with brain cancer and given a year to live. The support he was able to get from Obamacare let him live that year, rather than spending it doing battle with the health care system. I’m grateful to President Obama and the Democrats for passing it.

But. It’s also helpful every once in a while to take step back from the debate and think about the big picture: the fundamental reason insurance companies are so awful is that (for most of them, at least — Kaiser is to some degree an exception to this) the entirety of their financial incentives are a) for you to be sick and/or medicated, so they can sell you things and then b) to do anything they can to avoid paying you, or sticking with you with fees.

Keep in mind that Obamacare was based very largely on ideas the very conservative Heritage Foundation was peddling in 1993. It was an improvement on those ideas, no question. But at it’s heart, it was a conservative plan. One of the big things Obamacare fixed was around some of the terrible incentives insurance companies have to avoid paying you, by requiring what they called “Essential Health Benefits.” If you remove them, guess what you get? A subsidy machine for scams. (No wonder Trump likes this plan.)

So even though it was an improvement, because the Heritage/Obamacare plan did nothing to even start to address the problem of insurance companies sitting between us and our health care and absorbing money (like a public option, for example), I’m including it on this list.

Buying insurance across state lines. It’s bad enough dealing with an in-state insurance company. Why would I want to deal with some company that’s relocated to Delaware (or whatever state winds up with the most lenient laws) that doesn’t even have an office here? And how would this possibly be anything less than an unregulated race to the bottom?

Tort reform. Another idea that always gets thrown around is tort reform. This doesn’t seem to have even made it into Trumpcare, at least, which is good, because the savings from it don’t exist. It sounds good to blame lawyers for stuff though!

Cuts, cuts, cuts — particularly to the most vulnerable. From TPM:

…the bill would allow states to no longer be required to consider schools as Medicaid-eligible providers, a New York Times report found. That means the $4 billion in Medicaid reimbursements schools are said to receive — much of it going to caring for children with special education needs — would be vulnerable to cuts.

I’m actually a little speechless at that. If anyone sees Republicans defending that, I’d love to see what their arguments are.

Speaking of the arguments. Oh, the arguments.

Here’s a smattering of the worst of the lot:

“Sick people don’t deserve care.” Rep Mo Brooks, of Alabama, actually said exactly as much. This one probably doesn’t requiremuch of a rebuttal either. But thanks for going off-message and letting us know what you’re really thinking, Congressman! Maybe that’s why he feels ok cutting budgets for taking care of special needs kids?

“You don’t get healthcare with MY money.” I don’t know if Paul Ryan or Trump have said anything along these lines, but it’s definitely been a big hit with conservative activists on Twitter:

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Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn't obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else's health care.

 — @WalshFreedom

This is one of those crappy arguments that seems sort of right, and clearly plugs into and amplifies their worldview, but is actually soulless and horrible if you follow it to its logical conclusion. Luckily, some old guy from Vermont came up with a pretty solid response:

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People who can't afford health care do not deserve to die. I don't know how we can make it any clearer than that.

 — @BernieSanders

“Don’t Let Washington Bureaucrats Make Decisions For Us.” This one has been a line of argument the leadership has used. It’s ridiculous, condescending and insulting to suggest we don’t understand those Darn Washington Bureaucrats are all that’s standing between us and the Giant Insurance Company Bureaucrats raiding us for everything we’ve got. The thread below this tweet is an elegant explanation of how this works, and an unfortunate example of how “fact-checking” in corporate media enables it:

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It just lets private insurance companies do that, which they will, because they have. This is sophistry. https://t.co/G4hXO5UD1l

 — @davidklion

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Unless the bill specifically says companies can't classify complications from rape as pre-existing conditions, then that's what will happen

 — @davidklion

Just flat out lying. Republicans are making up whole categories of lies to keep this thing afloat. Here’s a list of five whoppers. They’re not just individual lies, but really whole categories of falsehoods they are using to tell a story around this thing. And the big insurance companies have been getting in on the making shit up fun, too!

This one weird thing all these ideas happen to have in common

It’s weird that ALL of these ideas are so bad, right? You’d think they’d at least have a couple ideas that might work. Lying is hard, and even in American democracy, it catches up with you eventually! Even the Heritage/Obamacare plan may have had shaky fundamentals, but it made a lot of significant improvements in the details and how it was implemented. So why is this so bad?

What all these mysteriously awful ideas have in common is that they are uniformly great for these guys:

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence!

Obamacare was clearly pretty good for those guys too. So why is the GOP even doing this?

And yet, the insurance market hasn’t exactly been pummeled since Obamacare passed. In fact, their profits are up. Way up. Even the arch-conservative faux-populists over at the Weekly Standard reported this:

In 2008, the year that Barack Obama was elected as president, the combined annual profits of America’s ten largest health insurance companies were $8 billion. Under Obamacare, the ten largest health insurers’ annual profits have risen to $15 billion.

When Obamacare happened, it was puzzling that the right didn’t call it a vindication of their ideas and spin it at as the win that it was. But the unmitigated greed of the guys in that picture, and more importantly, the temptation to use it to fan the racist backlash against Obama, proved too tempting.

Bernie recently caused a hubub for suggesting that the GOP base wasn’t racist. Clearly, this is a ridiculous claim. Some Republicans are more racist and some are less so. As are many Democrats! But the problem isn’t that their base has a bunch of racists in it. The problem is that Republican leaders, particularly lately, have had no problem in fanning white racial resentment to advance their agenda. Democratic leaders don’t do this.(usually, anyway: Bill Clinton’s welfare reform was a shameful exception to this). Republicans have based a good amount of their argument on it ever since Nixon framed his backlash to the Great Society as benefits to the undeserving poor. Before Trump, they used code words and “dog-whistle” politics. Since Trump, they’ve quit bothering with the whistles and are just straight-up calling the dog.

The worst part is that, at least in the short run, this strategy totally worked.

But even if it worked this time, at some point they’re going to pay for this. Right?

In the short run (2018), it might cost them the house, and it might not. In the long run, it’s likely that it will.

I wish this was the part where I could say “the midterms are coming and we’re for sure going to kick their butts.” But no one really knows what’s going to happen. The GOP is very good at politics, and Dems have a huge midterm turnout problem. Even wrecking Obamacare might not be enough to turn that around.

I’ve been seeing quite a few ads online singing Trumpcare’s praises:

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Seeing lots of pro #Trumpcare marketing today, like this. Outrage from our side but not a lot of coherent arguments.

 — @DanAncona

But not much of a response, at least so far, from the left. If somebody accidentally put me in charge of ad strategy at the DCCC, I would have had an anti-Trumpcare online/TV campaign in the can ready to go for the moment it passed. But that doesn’t seem to have happened.

There are lots of lines of attack on Trumpcare. This could totally work:

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This is the brutal attack ad that awaits any Republican who votes for Trumpcare https://t.co/h38z265Fc2

 — @koronet

But the question is: will Dems have the intestinal fortitude to execute on any of these myriad lines of attack? The ad strategy I’ve seen most candidates taking so far in the special elections has been a “play it safe, don’t get into anything substantive” kind of approach. (I won’t name names, but my favorite online video example of this year had a theme of “standing up for what we believe in,” but also managed to avoid mentioning anything the candidate actually believed in. Takes some real skill to pull that off.)

In the long run, conservative ideas fail. And when either the electorate either gets too diverse or wises up to the resentment game they are playing, or both, their political strategy fails too. The analogy is California, post Prop 187. It passed, was found to be unimplementable and unconstitutional, and the GOP has been essentially decimated since then. (Schwarzenegger’s eight years as Governor were the exception.)

Conservatives are basically junkies: they’re hooked on the cheap electoral highs of corporate dough, vote suppression and playing white resentment like a fiddle, rather than delivering ideas that work for ordinary people. At some point, climate change, inequality and the growing realization that they’ve been duping people will catch up with them. But Dems won’t get those voters unless they start making arguments that their ideas are better and they deserve to run the country.

The good news is: there is something you can do!

Not about the midterms, oh no. Unless you’re deciding message for a congressional candidate, there’s not a whole lot you can do about this. We’re good and doomed! (I’m kidding! Keep reading.)

However, you can read my book, and at least you’ll have a few hours of feeling what it feels like to really win, while seeing crappy conservative market-fundamentalist ideas getting stomped into oblivion:

Venus Shrugged: Part 1

I personally guarantee it will make you feel better about things (at least briefly), or I will give you a full refund of your $4.

If you’re hard up for the four bucks or your reading list is already overflowing, I get it. You can join my new very low-volume but illuminating email list, Imagination Battle. As soon as Part 2 of the book is ready to go, you’ll both be the first to know.

And I’m kidding about the election, of course, too. There are lots of groups doing amazing things. You should join them. Including joining your local Democratic Party, as shocking as that sounds. This will be the topic of my next post!

Yep, economics has a component of being a confidence game.

Yep, economics has a component of being a confidence game. The bigger (although interrelated) problem is that people whose primary objective is transferring more wealth to the rich have had their thumbs on the scales since before I was born. If the uncertainty and overconfidence cut both ways it would be less of a problem, but as it is, they’ve been incredibly successful in exploiting economic uncertainty and fears to lock this system in place. A few groups are starting to fight back on this, my two favorites are INET and Roosevelt.

https://www.ineteconomics.org/
http://rooseveltinstitute.org/

In a way I feel like this piece does a bit of a disservice to your readers by leaving all this out. Economists do know stuff. The big problem is that a lot of them have had structural incentives to obscure those things.

Yeah Vincent, just go to the site and click on “Get Local” in the menu and sign up.

Yeah Vincent, just go to the site and click on “Get Local” in the menu and sign up. We’re piloting the first local group in the East Bay starting next week (after the marching this weekend) and will be in touch very soon!

Don’t just resist: #AlwaysForward.

Quick summary: check out and share alwaysforwardus.com, a new multi-issue organizing hub for research, meeting with elected representatives, and replacing the ones that refuse to act on climate, strengthening the safety net, fair economics, gun safety, privacy, and other issues. Read on for more details!

How This All Started

Two summers ago, I had one of those conversations that leaves you with an idea you can’t quite get out of your head…

“You know what would really scare Congress to move on climate? If ordinary people started showing up at their offices to talk about it, not just activists.”

The idea came from Bruce Buckheit, a former top EPA lawyer with a long history of speaking truth to power. He’d been at EPA for decades until the negligence of the GW Bush Administration forced him out. This was a big enough deal at the time that 60 minutes did a story on it. Bruce’s wife had a similarly long career working in Senator John Glenn’s DC office, so this was genuine distilled expertise on how this stuff works.

Bruce described to me the process he’d seen representatives use to make decisions again and again: they had strong incentives to take what the activists and lobbyists are saying on their sides of an issue, set them aside, and figure out what ordinary people in the district do or do not care about. Which in most cases means exactly what you think: the lobbyists win.

I recall having a stack of objections to this particular idea, mostly around the generalized level of apathy being too great to overcome. “But the only people who care enough to say something are the activists!” I think I said.

Then on a dark Tuesday in early November of 2016, that all changed.

Trump’s election has put a great many things in process, but one of them has been a remarkable easing of the challenge of getting more engaged in the processes of American democracy. My wife Jenifer and I are long time activists; we first got involved in the run up to the second Gulf War, an idea that exactly 2 national Democrats were opposed to when we first got involved. She’s been professionally involved since then, I’ve dipped in and out of professional work but have never been able to quit all the way.

That whole time, we have been praying for more Americans to get interested in and involved in politics.

This wasn’t exactly what we had in mind. Yet another reminder to be careful what you pray for! But whatever. We’ll take it!

So I Built a Thing

Late last summer, I started playing around with another iteration of Bruce’s idea. My case for Hillary partially involved that I thought her presidency was going to require a strengthened progressive movement, maybe even one that could deliver her a better Congress in 2018. So I wanted to start tracking who in Congress was good and who was rotten on certain issues. I put together a little spreadsheet based on data from the Reflective Democracy Campaign and start recruiting friends to help do the research.

At the time, people’s reaction to this idea was along the lines of “sure, seems like it’s worth trying.” Since the election, most reactions have been more like, “YES WE NEED THIS YESTERDAY HOW CAN I HELP??”

Over the holidays I put together a very quick demo site based on this idea and the data we’ve collected so far. It’s very much a work in progress, but here are some screenshots, and please visit the Always Forward site and have a look around:

Screenshots from the first version of the Always Forward site: the Congress Grid, the representative detail page, and a first take on What We Want. And yeah, purple and bright green. I don’t know. I kind of like it!

The rough outline of the strategy we have in mind so far has three stages:

Research into where representatives are on issues and ideasMeetings with those representatives, andElections, where we are going to drive as much support as we can to replacing representatives of both parties who are not with us and defending those who are

Our first focus is on supporting efforts to drive local meetings with staff of Congressional Representatives and Senators around the issues coming at us fast, like the repeal of Obamacare.

We’re non-partisan: we’re convinced it’s helpful to talk to leaders that are with us (so they know we’re here, and because a lot of them are probably as scared about where things are going as we are!) as well as ones that disagree with us. But we are unabashedly pro-partisan. My wife and I were deeply involved in local Democratic party politics when we met in Southern California, and it was an absolutely incredible experience. You meet the BEST people, you understand your community in a completely different way, and you’d be surprised at how easy it is to build relationships and have a big impact if you keep showing up.

And yet, since moving to the Bay Area, we’ve noticed that with kids and day jobs and long commutes, it’s a LOT harder to rally at night to make it out to all the meetings. On principle, we believe deeper engagement shouldn’t be limited just to people who can make it to these things. We’re already talking to one of the architects of the Bernie campaign that built a large, effective organization without meetings. We’re going to try lots of creative tactics. The best of movements for justice have always included art at their core, so that will be a big part of it.

We don’t have funding or a legal organization. At this point it’s just me building the site, a small group of friends helping me cook the strategy and a larger group helping out with the research. I’m not sure it even needs funding or legal organization. As a Lean Organizing true believer, I’d like to see how far we can get without lawyers and money. But I’m not putting limits on it, either. If white nationalists can raise $8–10M for a PAC, maybe we’ll need a PAC too.

This is Already Working

There’s at least one other group working on a similar strategy, around the Indivisible Guide. We’re in conversation with them, we love what they’re doing, and it’s clearly working like gangbusters given the crowds showing up at representatives’ offices already. We certainly expect (and hope!) thatthere will be other groups pursuing similar strategies. It’s all part of the patchwork quilt strategy that Jesse Jackson laid out so eloquently in 1998. And the research we’ve done has already proven super interesting. We’ll have more to say about this soon.

Someone’s probably going to ask if going on offense on our ideas is a good idea in this moment. The honest answer is that we have no idea. My hunch is that we have to keep an eye on the real prize here, which is getting the Congress and Senate back in 2018 or 2020, even though it’s going to be bloody difficult. While there are clearly a lot of immediate policies it’s important to just stop, when it comes to elections, it’s tough to beat somethin’ with nuthin’. There are already some very strong case for how this is a crucial to making the case to both Trump voters and the gargantuan numbers of eligible Americans who either don’t vote at all, or who only vote in presidential year elections.

What you can do right now

The very first thing you can do, of course, is to share either this post or the site.

(Maybe you’re not the kind of person who shares political things. We get it, but if you care about what’s happening in this country, it might be time to re-evaluate that decision. And if you still don’t feel comfortable sharing this, we’d love to know why — or better yet ,what your ideas are for campaigns that you would share.)

The next thing you can do is start thinking about the communities you can reach out to. We understand the risk involved in this. Before the election, my wife and I put together a list of parents from our kids’ elementary school and asked them to get involved with GOTV. It was a little scary reaching out to people whose politics we could only guess at! But that’s the kind of thing we’re all going to need to be doing more of.

The other thing you can do is help with is the data collection. Use the Get Local link on the site to get involved, or you can reach out to us any time at facebook.com/AlwaysForwardUS, on the Twitters at @AlwaysForwardUS (or use the #AlwaysForward hashtag), or by email, or carrier pigeons, or, hey, drop some stone tablets or papyrus scrolls and we’ll figure something out. If your reps are being awful — or if they’re being great — we want to hear about it and keep track of it. Also, if you’ve got a good argument for or against any of the issues listed on What We Want, let us know that too. Over time, we’re going to be building the best, most persuasive arguments to arm activists with.

What’s it going to take?

Since the election there have been a lot of “easy things you can do a for a few minutes a day” type sites. Maybe that’s a good start, but my hunch is saying we’re going to need more than that: we are going to need a lot of people making a deeper, soul-level commitment to improving our democracy. My wife and I made that decision 15 years ago almost in spite of ourselves. Once you get in, it can be a little hard to get out. Being this involved has definitely had its ups and downs; I won’t lie, I wasn’t prepared for the effect seeing millions of people vote for someone like Trump was going to have on me, let alone his victory.

But I’m convinced that being part of democracy needs to be part of our lives right now. It’s part of engaging fully with reality. One of the long-term challenges the US left honestly hasn’t made much progress on is how to make starting out on the path to deeper engagement easier and more clear. It’s still vague, but our hope is that the strategy that’s emerging right now, from Always Forward and the other groups springing up, are going to solve that problem. But if something isn’t working for you, please, let us know.

Maybe in our lifetimes we’ll see politics get boring again. But it certainly isn’t right now. We know it’s daunting at the outset, but the only way to solve that problem is by connecting with allies and working together. We have a lot of fun, challenging and interesting work to do. The future isn’t going to build itself. Always forward!

p.s. Make sure you don’t miss wee dumpster fire mode and emoji mode !

The Substantive and Polite Case Against Donald Trump

Dear family members that are still considering voting for Trump,

Please, think twice about this.

I’m going to try to politely and substantively make the case here as to why you shouldn’t. I apologize up front if I fail to be either substantive or polite. I know you don’t trust mainstream/corporate media — and you’re not wrong to be skeptical — so I’ve tried to link to conservative sources on these stories wherever I can.

I understand if you can’t bring yourself to vote for Clinton. You can vote for Evan McMullin, or for Gary Johnson. I’ve heard of a number of folks in Southern California are writing in Vin Scully, who just retired after calling ballgames for approximately 217 years. You could leave it blank if you want. The point is, you can not vote for Trump and still not vote for Clinton. I think she’s terrific and I’m proud to be voting for her, but I am focusing here on Trump.

The first reason not to vote for Trump is because racism and sexism are absolutely poisonous to democracy.

Every shred of my experience in politics has strengthened my belief that confronting racism and sexism is the biggest challenge in building a better democracy in this country. I’ve seen this at the local level repeatedly, and it’s true at the national level too.

I realize you probably feel like the world is changing too quickly around you. I don’t disagree. But some of the change, a lot of it, really, is good. The things Trump says that used to be OK things to say are not OK things to say now, and the fact that there are ramifications to saying things like this now is a good thing. He’s said things that would not be remotely OK for someone to say at work. If at my last job someone said “The sales team, it’s full of rapists, although some of them are probably good people” that person would have been fired on the spot.

The things he’s said should be completely and utterly disqualifying. This isn’t about “political correctness,” and it’s not even just about basic politeness. Whether we can integrate diverse voices is a fundamental question in determining whether our big, diverse, wonderful experiment in democracy is going to continue to survive and prosper.

But I realize that argument may not work for you, for whatever reason. Maybe you’re still stuck on thinking it’s “just political correctness” and that really doesn’t matter. Maybe you don’t believe the dozen women now coming forward about their experiences being assaulted by Trump. Maybe his behavior is just not the most important thing to you. Maybe you disagree with his behavior, but agree with him generally about women’s roles in society. Or maybe deep down you agree with him about whether it’s better for America to be a white country or a diverse country.

I hope to continue this conversation with you because it’s really important. But if his racism and abusive attitude towards women isn’t going to convince you, there are lots of other reasons.

If you’re unconvinced that racism and sexism are poisonous to democracy, there are other reasons not to vote for him.The first one is that his ideas lead to bad outcomes.

Democracies run on ideas. This is the most important thing about any election. The media has a tendency to focus on stories about everything other than what matters the most, because that’s whats gives them the best ratings. But the ideas are what matter the most.

Trump’s ideas — with one significant exception, that I will get to — will lead to very bad outcomes.

Republicans have had eight years since GW Bush’s presidency to come up with different economic and foreign policy ideas than the disastrous ones Bush governed with. For reasons that genuinely mystify me, they’ve made no such effort to even start on this project. All they are promising are giant tax cuts for the rich, trickle down for everyone else, militarizing our borders, a bombing-first foreign policy (although Trump alternates between this and saying he’ll be an isolationist, which is baffling), ongoing denial of climate damage and repealing Obamacare with no clue how to replace it. Somehow, that’s still all they’ve got.

The Bush ideas made Americans less safe, less free and less rich than the ones that Obama governed with. Obama ideas were far from perfect: we still have a long way to go towards building a secure economy that works for everyone. (and I wish Democratic candidates, including Clinton, would acknowledge that more frequently) But by nearly every measure, albeit with a few significant exceptions, most Americans are better off today than they were eight years ago.

There’s one substantive area where Trump has broken with most Republicans, which is trade policy. He and Bernie Sanders are both correct that a) the economy is in lousy shape for too many people and b) NAFTA and the TPP are great deals for the rich and lousy for nearly everyone else. I’m grateful that Trump has helped make this an issue. But now that Sec Clinton is on board with opposing this (only President Obama still supports it, and there’s going to be a heck of a fight over it in the lame duck session, with only a few Dems and a very few Republicans opposing it), this one issue isn’t worth supporting Trump for, compared to everything else.

I’m not going to get into all the issues that Trump is wrong on. I’m just going to single out one: he is super wrong on what we should do about pollution and climate damage. I don’t agree with Clinton on issues like fracking, and ordinary citizens are going to have to fight her administration on that issue if she wins. But Trump is vastly worse. He seems to genuinely still believe climate damage is a conspiracy by China, which is a bizarre thing to think since China is taking big steps towards reducing their pollution too.

Having a six year old has made this issue even more urgent for me. Maybe you don’t understand the science of it, or you don’t think it matters, or you think we’ll figure it out somehow. But are you really willing to pass along a ruined planet to our kids, with more wars and more refugee crises and food shortages and who knows what else, just so oil companies can keep making money and taxes can stay low on rich people? A vote for Trump is a guaranteed vote to delay any national effort on renewable energy or repairing climate damage for as long as he’s President. We can’t take that chance.

Even if you disagree about his ideas, there are lots of other important reasons.

This isn’t all of them, but I’m going to start with the arguments I’ve seen the most.

Trump is NOT a successful businessman. It’s hard to say for sure how successful he is, since unlike every single other candidate for President over the past forty years, he has refused to release his taxes. The very conservative National Review made a convincing case that Paris Hilton is a better businessperson than Trump last year. He’s gone bankrupt six times and has an incredible history of stiffing little guys: Trump related businesses have been sued more than 3500 times for not paying their bills. Fortune Magazine estimated that his net worth would have been $13B (vastly larger than then several hundred million he is estimated to be worth) if he’d just taken all his money, invested it in index funds and taken off on a yacht. That isn’t success.

Trump has shown evidence of serious personality issues. Again, I think this is less important than the ideas he has promised to run the country on, but he’s so far outside the bounds of normal adult behavior that in this case, it’s a real factor. His third debate performance was the most telling: nearly every answer was about himself. He gets upset about tweets and gets up at 3am to write angry tweets, which even worried Newt Gingrich. This is the only time I’m citing the New York Times, but it’s not an opinion piece — they just made a list of all his insults:

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Donald Trump's Twitter insults: The complete list, printed in today's paper https://t.co/zQCa5LnbBj

 — @nytimes

This is not someone who should have access to the US nuclear arsenal:

https://medium.com/media/74787e1427ce0b4a30dbc0560d877ac9/href

Trump has secretive, authoritarian and anti-Semetic tendencies. His relationship to the Russians is troubling: he’s said numerous nice things about Putin but then denied knowing him. He almost certainly owes them money, although since he hasn’t released his taxes, we can’t know if there’s something going on there or not. (Trump’s son said in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”) He has openly proclaimed that he wouldn’t accept the results of the election, threatening the American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power that has been intact since the Civil War. He’s also hired staff with deep anti-Semetic ties.

His refusal to release his taxes should really make you ask questions. The current theories are that he’s not nearly as rich as he claims to be and gives far less to charity than he claims. But no one knows what else he’s hiding.

Trump is incredibly dishonest on a good day, and a bullshitter at his worst. Trump lies relentlessly. He lies even when he doesn’t have to, or when something is easily checked. After the first debate he lied about saying something he’d said only an hour earlier. Politifact certainly has its issues and a lot of these are arguable, but they have caught Trump in nearly five times as many lies as Clinton: 160 False & Pants on Fire for Trump vs 35 for Clinton. (I know you’re thinking: Clinton lies too! But

I agree the increasing focus on amateur creatives is problematic, but when I really think about it…

I agree the increasing focus on amateur creatives is problematic, but when I really think about it buying a Surface vs plunking down for one of these, the Mac value proposition for professionals still goes pretty deep. I’m a professional developer and writer, a semi-pro DJ and I take the occasional picture. I was skeptical about the touch bar initially but, while I fully admit I might be a fuddy duddy and I will look back at this statement five years from now and laugh, for the vast majority of what I sit in front of a computer for, I don’t *like* touching the main screen. I have to look at it all the time, and I don’t like smudges. DJing is the only exception and the toolbar could be a fairly elegant solution; it seems like it might at least have a shot at replacing the old iPad I drag to gigs to use as my multi-touch DJ controller. But the main thing is, when I think about switching to the Microsoft developer world, it gives me a sad. I really love having unix under the hood and it makes my life as a web developer vastly easier. I can see how for someone who has upgraded recently, this is a bit of a limp noodle. I’m not in that category: I’m running a 2009 15" MBP that I recently stuck an SSD in. It’s delightfully fast now, but I imagine the age of that machine puts me in the three-sigma part of the curve of Mac cheapskates. But between the folks like me and the vastly larger group of people who just buy the latest whatever, because oo shiny, I bet they’re going to sell a pile of these things. Seems to me even with Apple clearly focusing less on it, the value proposition is still there for a lot of professionals whether they like it or not.

Loving Bernie, Voting for Hillary

He’s been great news for the progressive movement. She could be even better.

I vigorously endorse both Bernie and Hillary. I love both of them, and I love their supporters. But it’s time to vote. I was genuinely undecided until the argument here clicked for me this weekend. And as angry as the AP “calling” this for Hillary makes me, tomorrow morning I will deliver my ballot with the arrow next to Hillary Rodham Clinton filled in.

First off, I have a mountain of gratitude for Bernie and for my friends and everyone else who has worked so hard on his campaign. Bernie and his campaign have done more to challenge the forces of capital and enlarge the sense of possibility in American politics than any other campaign of my lifetime. I’m tempted to vote for him simply out of that gratitude. And this, and this. And this:

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Look at all this contraband that #Bernie supporters tried to smuggle into the rally.pic.twitter.com/L6TM3TALUP

 — @ekai

And so many other things.

However, along the way of being completely awesome about so many things, he has also repeatedly tapped into and amplified a strain of virulent antipartisanship in his supporters. If you agree the goal is building a progressive movement with strong outside and inside game, you’re probably also dreading the fallout from this miscalculation that we’re going to be cleaning up for years. This is not a remotely “esoteric” question, as Bernie recently put it. It goes to a fundamental strategic question for enacting long-term change. It is possible to build strong connections between movements and electoral and governing institutions while defending core principles. The successful execution of this strategy has been one of the linchpins of conservative dominance. I get why people are frustrated with the Democratic Party: it’s been complicit in all sorts of horribleness over the past twenty years. But rebuilding it — along with building networks and organizations and experiments outside the electoral realm— is the only path forward, and it’s not going to fix itself.

Clinton hasn’t been much better on this score. Her efforts at party building have been largely limited to utilizing state parties as a fundraising passthrough, which is perfectly legal but does essentially nothing for long-term and local organizing efforts.

And, as Bill Scher recently documented so clearly, many of Clinton’s political reflexes are going to be misaligned for this moment. Big wins and losses are what shape the strategic vision of politicians and activists. Her biggest loss was the 1993 health care reform effort. Unfortunately the lesson she took away from that was not that we need a stronger progressive movement and stronger party to build change. It was that change only comes from appeasing conservative hegemony and working at the margins.

This approach is, unfortunately, uniquely ill-suited to the current set of big challenges. Conservatives and the GOP have had eight years to develop answers on climate change, the changes to the economy coming from automation and globalization, on militarization and on wealth inequality. Instead, they’re putting up Racist Reality TV Show Guy.

Despite this, I see a path forward where a Clinton presidency becomes a very good thing for this country. I have no doubt there’s a degree of sexism in public perceptions of her. The supposed opportunism that people decry in her could just as easily be cast as Obama-esque pragmatic flexibility, and it is exactly that pragmatic flexibility that is the opening for the progressive movement. While it’s going to be hard to knock the guy running hard for Con Man in Chief off the number one spot this cycle, Hillary Clinton could be the second best recruiter for the movement available this season. Not because she’s going to be a movement leader — that’s a job she hasn’t auditioned for and clearly doesn’t want — but precisely due to her squishiness on solutions to the biggest problems we’re facing.

For a counterexample, look at the recent history of how grassroots and electoral energies have waxed and waned. Dean and then Kerry’s losses in 2004, painful as they were, were both terrific, medium-term boosters for the grassroots. We got Dean in as chair, the 50 strategy was happening. This wasn’t the only factor that led to Obama managing to edge out Hillary in ’08, but it certainly was a factor.

But once Obama got in, a lot of activists relaxed. At least a little bit. Tim Kaine became chair, then DWS, and no one really cared too much because hey, Obama is President! I think my story is uncommon: I worked so hard in 2008 that when I finally finished my last round of knock and drag four minutes before the polls closed and stumbled over to our election night party, I was so tired I could barely talk or remain upright. I’d basically been working every minute of every day for the previous three months. I kept working at electoral politics professionally for the next couple of years, but when my political startup crashed, I wandered off and did other things. Fine, one of those things was to write a political novel that will be out soon, but things just didn’t seem as dire, so when I moved from Santa Barbara to the Bay Area, I didn’t stay involved locally. (I’m working on fixing this!) And at the institutional level, although I went to some early organizing meetings for OFA, when it was clear it was going to just be an appendage of the White House, that drained a lot of the interest around it.

The problem then was that while Obama sounded plenty progressive he’s had relatively few moments of substantial progressivism. This was in some small part due to his approach, but in very large part due to utterly unprecedented obstruction he faced. Some of this was racially charged and some of it was ideological, but the GOP has in recent years been fusing racial animus and ideology to the point that it’s hard to pull the two apart. But with Obama there at the top saying the right things, local organizing simply hasn’t seemed as urgent.

The exact same situation could easily arise with Bernie. He could get in, Congress will still be screwed up, and he would have no choice but to work at the margins. He would sound good, and we’d be happy he was in there saying nice things, and a few good things would happen, but ultimately I’m not sure that’s more likely to lead to the Big Shift. So imagine this instead.

Hillary’s not going to be a movement leader. She’s part of the oligarchy, and oligarchs gonna oligarch. But think about what she’s really like, at her best. As us Bay Area type hippies like to say, what’s her higher self like. Think about the entire arc of her career, the dimensions of her character. Her heart and her aspirations are in the right place, even if the conditioned response of her career means she’s going to have accommodationist impulses that will be frustrating to watch at times.

But if we make it possible for her to do the right things, she’s going to do the right things. The opportunity is there. The argument for the logical necessity of a vibrant progressive movement has never been stronger. Eight years of President Hillary Clinton would require it. Oligarchs gonna oligarch, but movements gonna move.

Change over the next eight years, should she be elected, is going to be a lot of work. And of course, please don’t take any of this to suggest we can get ahead of ourselves and look past this election. Even though things seem to be going well this week, getting her past Con Man Donald is going to involve piloting this thing through a really disturbing amount of unknown unknowns.

Really, it was never going to be easy. Any sense that it was is illusion. And it was never going to come from the top. No one was ever going to do this for us. New Bernie supporters who just registered for the first time, this may be sobering news for you. There is no calvary. You’re it. No one is going to do it for you. Us fogies who have been at it since the early 2000s (or longer) can confirm this. And I won’t speak for the rest of my middle aged activist cohort but I for one am for damn sure glad you’re here.

We’ll know in a couple weeks what the rough contours of this race look like. If Mr. Lack of Impulse Control’s numbers come up, which who knows, they might, we need to settle in a for a long fight for the top of the ticket. But if they keep dropping and Hillary’s numbers rise as her supporters consolidate… this decision is going to be made way above my pay grade, but I hope we see a real effort mounted to try and take back not just the Senate but the Congress too.

Excerpt from 2063: Project Weedpatch, Chapter 3.

“Yeah, so about that. How’s it going.” Julietta was quiet. “The Sludge thing is a little intense. You doing ok?”

“Oh, you know.” She stared out the window. “Fuck that guy, seriously. But I do keep thinking about it. What he said, not so much. But the death threats and the bullshit tidal wave we are getting online has been rough at times. The staff is doing a great job insulating me from it and cleaning it up, but I’ve looked at the raw feeds myself a couple of times. I’ve even been in this situation before, and I still don’t get it.”

“I do,” said Ayala.

“You do? What do you think is going on?”

“I think you’re a bigger threat to the order of things than you realize. Or at least you’re perceived that way.”

Julietta considered this. “It’s so strange to me. We’re hardly proposing anything radical. Probably the most challenging thing we are doing is defending the role of government at all, in terms of our message.”

“It’s not about your message, it’s about your identity, and your family. Me, to some degree.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to see that. But I still don’t get it. I can understand why the 1% types are funding Sludge, or Fox or whatever. It’s a bottom line thing for them: if we defend government that can only mean their taxes going up. But deep down I just don’t get how easy it is for them to whip up everyone else. Including a lot of people who really depend on government.”

She grabbed her love’s hand that felt so at home resting on her thigh. “Anyway. I’m sorry for dragging you into it. And for going on about it.”

Ayala said, “Hardly! We all made the decision for you to run together. I was on board then and I still am. We all are.”

Julietta looked over at her again, “I could just not possibly be more grateful for you. So where the heck are we going?”

Ayala grinned, trying not to give away her secret but wondering if she had a tell. “Just for a hike! Up in Redwood.”

They talked campaign details for the rest of the drive, parked and headed up into the canyon. Ayala managed to casually guide them towards Dakota’s set up. When they got to the cairn, Ayala said, “What a sweet little cairn, I wonder what’s up this path?”

Now Julietta was finally a bit suspicious, “What are you up to here?” But Ayayla just smiled and took her hand and pulled her gently up the hill.

Unfortunately there was no old growth forest in this part of the Bay. It had all been logged in the 19th century. But this must have been second growth; Dakota had managed to find some of the tallest redwoods around, and built a tiny camp. The mattress was on the ground in the center of the ring and covered with a down comforter and a bunch of pillows, leaning up against one of the trees. The deep red cloth draped between the trees gave it almost a sense of it being an outside room or a little private temple. It was ethereally silent, the only noise being a slight rustle of leaves in the breeze far above them, sunlight filtering down and dappling the ground.

Julietta gasped. “You! And Dakota, I’m guessing.”

“Yup!”

“You two! Unreal.” A worried look clouded her face. “I don’t know what you have in mind here, but you know I’m running for Congress, right? We’re not going to do anything that would make Ami’s life difficult or end up on another icky website, right?”

Ayala got a slightly fiendish look. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. Don’t worry, we’re not going to get caught,” then took Julietta’s hand over her protests about being only a mile from a bunch of houses, then led her over to next to the mattress and stood in front of her. Eyes meeting, then both of them looking down, then Ayala kissing her slowly, backing away and running her hands over Julietta’s shoulders and her chest and her heart, slowly, and down along her sides to under her tank top…

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Excerpt from 2063: Project Weedpatch

Please enjoy the beginning of chapter 1 of my new novel, 2063: Project Weedpatch , a story about systemic, transformative change that’s kind of a diverse, sexy, grassroots West Wing. This excerpt is the first third or so of the chapter; you can get the rest in PDF, iBooks and Kindle formats at read2063.com . And do let me know what you think, my contact information is on the site. Thanks, and enjoy!

Julietta Collins laughed.

Their ramshackle campaign office normally had a bustle to it, but it broke through to a new level of haywire as half the desk & cell phones seemed to ring at once. Julietta had already spent too long on the phone with an unexpectedly thoughtful elderly supporter who’d sent them a check for $25 the day before.

Her donor went on, “Oh yes, I’m fine with this talk of reparations. Never thought I’d see the day. And I just think this democratic capitalism you’re talking about is exactly what we need.” Then she heard the din through the phone and asked, “What is all that, dear?”

“I’m sorry, Ms Evans. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you, but there’s some kind of campaign mayhem occurring and I should probably look into it.” Her tone remained charming as her brows scrunched together and she swept her dark brown hair off her shoulder behind the phone. Years of organizing had refined her intuition and was now crunching hard on something she couldn’t identify, and that left her with a strong and unmistakable sense that something was coming at them. Their primary so far against Steve Powell hadn’t been particularly contentious: it was more like a conversation between two old friends that enjoyed talking political smack and had been at it for a long time. Not surprising, since that’s exactly what Julietta and Steve were.

So maybe this was the shift, or maybe it was something else entirely. A negative story in the news, or maybe worse: something exploding on social media, or even just some kind of event planning or scheduling failure, or any of the million other details that a campaign was built out of. As Julietta’s mind wheeled through all the options, Ms Evans politely shooed her off the phone, clucking about kids these days.

Julietta had on her usual look, what her husband Dakota once dubbed “organizer chic”: a ruffled, funky skirt and a loose white blouse with a clockwork mechanism brooch. It was all locally made by a vendor she’d found on vacation at a hot springs a few hours north of Oakland a few years earlier. She noticed she was barefoot. She had tall boots next to her desk, which was empty except for a battered laptop, this morning’s coffee cup and one of the two dozen fancy phones they’d rented. She slipped on her flip flops instead and stuck her head out of her office and around the corner.

The din seemed cheerful, even faintly ridiculous, and the happy chaos contrasted with the view out the 7th floor plate glass windows and the Oakland hills sitting placidly in the late summer clarity. The interior of the office was comprised entirely of donated objects. Old computers and laptops of every lineage sat perched on a mixture of desks, mostly fashioned from repurposed office doors held together with sawhorses. A few cocktail tables had been repurposed as standing desks. Her diverse staff of a dozen or so women and a few men was crowded around them, talking to each other as much as they were focused on the machines. When they’d narrowed down their choices of headquarters, the staffer who had gone to investigate described this one as “amazing view, smell not bad, carpets horrifying, plumbing seems functional.” A slightly moldy tinge had never quite left the air, even after Julietta rented a steam cleaner one night before they moved in and pressed Dakota into service to help her scrub it down, who in turn took the project over and managed to somehow recruit Elijah (their six year old) into helping while Padma crawled around, hopefully improving her year-old immune system with whatever awfulness wound up in her mouth. The posters and historic campaign paraphernalia they’d covered the walls with didn’t completely cover the crumbling drywall. In a few places the wood frames of the walls and wiring was visible. Julietta’s office itself barely had room for her desk, the nicest of the donated couches, and a conference table they could barely get six people around. It would only be home for them for a few months, but it was homey enough.

Julietta’s mood darkened when she noticed Amarika at her desk along the wall outside Julietta’s office, underneath a sign that said simply, “CHANGE” with a small rising sun Obama logo — Julietta’s framed crowd sign from the 2008 Democratic Convention. Her beloved old friend and now campaign chief had a ferocious intellect coupled with a smile that could warm a small northern city in January. But at the moment she was listening silently to a phone and boring a hole into her laptop screen with her stare.

Julietta got up, walked around the corner and stationed herself quietly behind Amarika, peeking over her shoulder at the screen. She was scrolling down through the Sludge Report; not a site that had taken much of an interest in their race so far. Pacific coast urban Democratic primaries were often the front lines of the battle between grassroots, racially diverse and more progressive Democrats and corporate establishment forces. As critical as they were for setting the direction of the party overall, they didn’t tend to garner much interest in the more extremist corners of the conservative media universe. Amarika noticed Julietta behind her and tried to shoo her away too, but when Julietta wouldn’t budge, Amarika clicked on the snarky headline anyway: “Bay Area Democrat ‘Family Values’… Shocking New Photographs.”

Julietta mumbled “Oh, this can’t be good,” to no one in particular but hoping it’d land somewhere in Amarika’s direction, who kept ignoring her. Amarika didn’t budge or look up as she scrolled down the page past pictures of Julietta that she recognized from a party. They were old, maybe eight or ten years ago. Lovely shots that a friend of hers took, standing in front a glittery sign that said the name of the party they were at, “Sea of Kinky Dreams”. There were a few pictures of her and Ayala, and then some pictures of her and Ayala and Kiyana, all in sheer lacey robes. Then a picture of her and Ayala smooching, then a picture of her and Kiyana smooching, then the three of them surrounding a sublimely happy looking Dakota. Julietta’s lips were pursed, sending the camera a little kiss, her brown hair longer then and up and messy behind her, while Ayala had a slightly goofy big smile, her huge brown eyes looking out from under a dark, almost-black tangle of curly bed-head. Kiyana was between the two, somehow both smoldering and approachable, with dark skin, a big frizzy afro and a smile more deep than broad that radiated some kind of secret knowledge. Julietta had started dating Dakota just a few months earlier, and the two of them had had their first date with Ayala maybe a week before this. Then the three of them went to the party together, where they met Kiyana for the first time.

The actual visual content of the pictures wasn’t that shocking, but she could see how the impression they transmitted — the clear, unmistakable sense that these were three dangerously empowered women — might have been, at least to certain audiences. If Sludge thought this was shocking, what happened the rest of the night would probably have required fainting couches for their entire newsroom. Julietta’s happy memories collided with her shock at being so exposed. She felt a wave of nausea.

Amarika finally hung up and looked up, and most of the tension was gone from her eyes. “No big deal, we knew this one was coming. Although…”

Julietta nodded, wanting her friend to go on.

“I don’t know Julietta. I warned you, least. The whole thing about making things more difficult for yourself, right? This is it.”

Julietta sighed. “I know, but what can I do?”

The campaign had made a deliberate decision not to try to do a thorough social media scrub for Julietta. She had planned early on her career on never running for office. It wasn’t that she’d never wanted to be out front or had some preference for working in the trenches. It was simply that growing up mostly poor with a single mom, nothing much beyond that had seemed possible.

So her social media footprint and trail of images was simply too large to deal with. When she’d decided running might actually be an option, her team reasoned that the times had changed, particularly in this district, and it would be at most a minor liability. So they did what they could: quietly tidied up the easy stuff, so at least someone would have to really put together an oppo file and spend some money to find anything, then written up an outline of a contingency plan as part of the campaign plan and hoped they wouldn’t need it. Now, six weeks out until voting started, they needed it.

The chaos bumped up another notch with a new round of ringing phones. One of the new, young staffers came over and handed her a cell phone and said, “I don’t know what this is, but I think it might be a death threat.” The young woman gulped and held the phone out. It radiated awfulness.

As their eyes met Julietta saw how scared the young staffer was: not shaking with it, but she was definitely affected. Julietta felt a brief moment of guilt at not being able to remember her name, but touched her arm and said “Don’t worry. Thank you.” She put the phone up to her ear. The voice was loud and scratchy and indistinct, ranting and crackling in the little device’s speaker. She didn’t talk, just listened as it kept going. There was a lot of “fucking” and “slut” that she could barely make out. Then some graphic descriptions of what the caller wanted to do to her and Ayala. At that she recoiled, the phone falling out of her hand as she jumped back. Her stomach knotted and flipped.

“Ami, ah, we need to get the police and possibly the FBI on the phone. Let’s go through the procedure.”

Amarika went to her desk and flipped through a notebook that they’d prepared…

Thanks for reading so far! You can download the rest at read2063.com .