This piece from The Daily Beast is bleak and true

Excerpted from The Daily Beast.  Molly Jong-Fast 9.20.2020

We keep saying it can’t get worse. Now I just wonder, “What’s next?”

As if the world didn’t already look impossibly dark, then came Friday night, when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at 87. While the loss of the feminist icon is incredibly sad, the mess she leaves is incalculably worse.

Growing up, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was one of my favorite books. Huxley wrote the novel in 1931, inspired in part by the economic depression in the U.K. But now confronted by an actual dystopia, it’s significantly less fun and more terrifying than I had hoped. America stands on the brink of the unimaginable. We have a president who toys with fascism on the regular, his allies continue to shop a low-key civil war, our planet is literally burning, and now our highest court hang in the balance. 

When the smoke from the fires on the West Coast started showing up 2,900 miles away outside my window in New York City, that was the moment I realized we are living in an actual dystopia. I’m 42. I have lived through some shit, but nothing like this. Every single element of a dystopia is upon us.

There are the fires, the hurricanes, the uncontrolled pandemic, the financial apocalypse, the looming eviction crisis, the increase in stillbirths. the epidemic of police brutality,  and the autocratic president who happens to be, for good measure, a moron.

And that was before RBG slipped this mortal coil, and thirsty Mitch McConnell started plotting before her body was even cold.

We’re in our ninth month of pandemic with 6.3 million cases. America is literally teeming with the insidious spread of the coronavirus. Instead of finally enacting a federal response (there still hasn’t been a single federal mandate), the president’s political appointees are fucking with the CDC testing guidelines in the middle of the night.

Over the last three years and 242 days, the president has weaponized the federal government, and it’s harder and harder to tell the Trump campaign from the Trump administration. Almost daily, Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany delivers press conferences that would make Kim Jong Un’s press aides blush. The kind of double speak and fake news Kayleigh dishes out on a daily basis sounds like George Orwell on crack.

This week she told a journalist who confronted her with the actual facts that “the U.S. has 4 percent of the global population and 24 percent of the world’s COVID-19 death, how is that a success?” Kayleigh responded, “We use different numbers.” Yes, Americans are dying at about a thousand a day from the virus, and the president is calling it a success because he “uses different numbers.”

And then there’s the coming environmental catastrophe. We can feel the heat at our backs. Actually that’s not a metaphor. There’s actually heat on our backs from the fires in California and Oregon. And you know it’s bad when even Mitch McConnell, the man who’s done the most for oil and gas, says that climate change is man-made.

And let’s talk about police brutality—cops killing or shooting African Americans, sometimes when they’re asleep in bed (Breonna Taylor), sometimes when they’re getting their three kids in the car (Jacob Blake), and sometimes when they’re begging for their mothers (George Floyd). Police brutality has exploded, and the president has delighted in stoking it. It’s a cancer that makes murder hornets and aggressive rats look quaint.

Numerous Republicans tweeted horrible shameful things Friday night, including Ted Cruz. But the worst had to be from Georgia Senate candidate Doug Collins, who tweeted, “RIP to the more than 30 million innocent babies that have been murdered during the decades that Ruth Bader Ginsburg defended pro-abortion laws.

Replacing RBG would mean tipping the scales. It will absolutely mean the overturning of Roe v. Wade. American women could lose control over their uteruses for the next three or possibly four generations. We throw around the idea that this is the most important fight of our life, but this time it really is.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ruth-bader-ginsburgs-death-clinches-it-were-living-in-a-dystopia?ref=scroll

9.20.2020 Every Picture Tells a Story – Ruth Bader Ginsburg edition

Liz Heidhues artwork proudly displayed in remembrance of The Late Notorious RBG – a humanistic fighter for the rights of all people.

In Purple Montana a grieving, distraught and determined crowd turned out to pay Tribute to The Late Notorious RBG.

People are paying attention and will toss out Puppet Master Trump, Mitch the Malevolent and his Band of Trolls on November 3.

The Missoulian 9.19.2020

https://missoulian.com/news/local/hundreds-gather-at-rainy-missoula-vigil-for-ruth-bader-ginsburg/article_753cee96-5e0f-51ce-9657-8e7a8ac8db67.html#utm_source=missoulian.com&utm_campaign=%2Fnewsletter-templates%2Fnews-alert&utm_medium=PostUp&utm_content=75e39b1c77e6ac5614d99dcbf7e64428d7faeb44

The Yom Kippur War 2020.

The wrath of the Notorious RBG is about to descend.

Daily Beast 9.19.2020

There’s a Jewish tradition that someone who dies on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, must have been a tzaddik, a righteous person.

After all, God waited all year to carry out the decree. Perhaps that offers some comfort to those mourning the loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Hebrew name, Yita Ruchel bat Tzirel Leah), who finally succumbed to cancer at the age of 87, after convincing many of us that she was immortal.

But the themes of Rosh Hashanah offer another lesson as well: a warning to those Republican senators pondering whether or not to support Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s unbelievable, shameful, cynical, immoral hypocrisy in pushing to replace Justice Ginsburg just hours after her passing and weeks before a presidential election.

It is a great irony that McConnell’s moral travesty is unfolding just as the Jewish season of reflection, introspection, and atonement gets underway. And from the party of the “moral majority” at that. 

This will be a final power grab by a minority party that knows its grip on power is slackening.

Let’s reflect for a moment on the breathtaking hypocrisy that’s about to unfold on the national stage. Mitch McConnell, who singlehandedly invented the fake rule that Supreme Court nominees should not be considered in an election year, is now going to break that same rule, forcing a vote on whatever right-wing extremist Donald Trump nominates to replace RBG.

Back then, McConnell told ABC News on March 20, 2016, that, “The American people are in the middle of choosing who the next president is going to be. That next president ought to have this appointment.” Now? The opposite.

It gets worse. Justice Scalia died 268 days before the 2016 election. Justice Ginsburg died 46 days before the 2020 election.

Indeed, we’re so close to the election already, this whole sham of a process may have to happen in a lame-duck session, potentially one with both a president and a Senate majority that have been voted out of office.

And between now and then, Republican senators will be twisting themselves in more knots than a troupe of circus contortionists. Senators Lindsey Graham (the judiciary committee chair who has the power to end this circus, if he has the integrity to do so), Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins have all said they wouldn’t confirm an election-year Supreme Court justice. Will they keep their word? Or find a way to weasel out of it? And what about Susan “I’m sure Justice Kavanaugh Will Vote To Protect Abortion Rights” Collins?

The whole spectacle is truly, deeply pathetic, even if “pro-life” voters (who, by the way, seem curiously silent about forced hysterectomies at ICE facilities and mass deaths from COVID-19 at prisons) love it.

But it’s not just pathetic—it’s also unwise.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/therell-be-hell-to-pay-as-republican-hypocrites-race-to-replace-ruth-bader-ginsburg?via=newsletter&source=Weekend

Heartbreaking news on the eve of Rosh ha-Shanah to bring in Jewish year Tishri 5781.

Daily Beast 9.18.2020

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court justice, trailblazing feminist, and the closest thing to a folk hero the high court has ever seen, has died at the age of 87. The Supreme Court announced that she died Friday due to complications from metastatic pancreas cancer.

In a statement dictated to her granddaughter just days before her death, Ginsburg said, “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

Tributes began pouring in instantly. The chief justice, John Roberts, said in a statement that the country had lost “a jurist of historic stature.”

“We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her—a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-the-outsiders-champion-has-died-at-87?ref=home

Vanity Fair 9.18.2020

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the trailblazing Supreme Court justice who advocated passionately for women’s rights, died on Friday, according to NPR. She was 87, and had survived cancer multiple times; the cause of death, according to her family, was complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas.

“She was an unlikely pioneer,“ NPR Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg wrote, “a diminutive and shy woman, whose soft voice and large glasses hid an intellect and attitude that, as one colleague put it, was ‘tough as nails.’”

Ginsburg was appointed to the court by Bill Clinton in 1993; her death leaves an opening on the bench with less than 50 days before voters head to the polls as President Donald Trump seeks reelection, and will almost certainly cause a political battle.

According to NPR, days before her death the Justice dictated a statement to her granddaughter: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

The leader of the court’s liberal wing, Ginsburg had become an icon for left-leaning Americans, subject of a splashy 2018 biopic, an Oscar-nominated documentary, and much fervent discussion. Her antipathy for Trump was evident, and her potential replacement would offer Trump the opportunity to place a third conservative justice on the Court.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, born Joan Ruth Bader in Brooklyn in 1933, was one of just nine women in her class at Harvard Law School, where she enrolled in 1956. As an attorney for the ACLU she argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court in the 1970s, including a case that extended the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution to include women. She was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals in 1980, and was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993, becoming the second woman to serve on the Court. 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/ruth-bader-ginsburg-obituary

Politico 9.18.2020   One hour after the announcement of RBG’s death

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed President Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court will be put to the Senate floor for a vote — setting off a titanic political clash over the high court.

“President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate,” the Kentucky Republican said in a statement.

McConnell’s decision is certain to outrage Democrats, who have already called for McConnell to wait until after the Nov. 3 election — when the control of the White House and the Senate could shift — to put a nominee on the floor.

This is great!!

No sooner does the news College football announce its return than karma backlash scores a Touchdown.

College football is on the way back after being harassed and browbeaten by the soon to be ex-President, bored Alumni and athletes who understandably want to be in the game. I can understand the players frustration.

We are in the midst of a Pandemic. Unfortunately there are few Adults minding the store.

What are the universities who listen to this ignorant clown going to do next?

CNN 9.17.2020

The continuing presence of Neo Nazis in Germany is a threat to that nation’s democracy as the Deutsche Welle report shows.

The abhorrent Nazi philosophy did not disappear with the smashing of Hitler’s regime in 1945. It just went underground. Now, 75 years later its presence is felt throughout Germany.

QAnon is a parallel movement in America. The Trump Administration looks the other way and encourages QAnon by its indifference.

Neo Nazis in Germany and QAnon in America are a danger to democratic institutions.  The difference right now is that the German government is cracking down on  Neo Nazis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 9.16.2020

Twenty-nine German police officers have been suspended and face investigation on suspicion they exchanged far-right propaganda in online chat groups. Police union representatives called the revelation “unbearable.”

Buried in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal  is an op-ed piece which,  in a few words, says what many in the Moveon.org and Progressive movement have been saying for months.
There’s a message here from this bastion of capitalism.

Wall Street Journal 9.14.2020 – Shadi Hamid writing in The Atlantic

‘A loss for Biden . . . would provoke mass disillusion with electoral politics as a means of change.’

As someone who has argued against catastrophism—I don’t believe Donald Trump is a fascist or a dictator in the making, and I don’t believe America is a failed state—I find myself truly worried about only one scenario: that Trump will win reelection and Democrats and others on the left will be unwilling, even unable, to accept the result.

A loss by Joe Biden under these circumstances is the worst case not because Trump will destroy America (he can’t), but because it is the outcome most likely to undermine faith in democracy, resulting in more of the social unrest and street battles that cities . . . have seen in recent months.

For this reason, strictly law-and-order Republicans who have responded in dismay to scenes of rioting and looting have an interest in Biden winning. . . .

In presidential elections, once is a fluke; twice is a pattern. I struggle to imagine how, beyond utter shock, millions of Democrats will process a Trump victory. A loss for Biden, after having been the clear favorite all summer, would provoke mass disillusion with electoral politics as a means of change—at a time when disillusion is already dangerously high.

If Democrats can’t beat a candidate as unpopular as Trump during a devastating pandemic and a massive economic contraction, then are they even capable of winning presidential elections anymore?

Prior to his election to the Board of Supervisors in 2019 Dean Preston was a lead attorney at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. He was also the leader of the statewide advocacy group Tenants Together

Preston is arguably the most aggressive tenants rights attorney in San Francisco.

His ascension to the legislature provides now Supervisor Preston with the opportunity to put his knowledge of housing and his zealous support of tenants  to work in the legislative arena.

Tenants rights groups are thrilled. Landlords are furious.

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 9.15.2020

While San Francisco renters are currently protected from eviction if they can’t pay rent due to a coronavirus-related issue, they are still vulnerable to so-called no-fault evictions — a less common tactic that occurs when a landlord decides to move into the property, do construction or demolish it altogether.

New legislation by Supervisor Dean Preston, which he introduced at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, would change that by barring landlords from executing a no-fault eviction until March 2021, regardless of how the tenant has been affected by the pandemic.

“We will do everything in our power to stop evictions during this pandemic,” Preston said in a statement.

Andrew Zacks, a landlord attorney in San Francisco, said Preston is behaving as if “property owners are not even his constituents.” He added that tenants are “fully protected under state law, and property owners are being completely ignored and their rights are being trampled.”

“Taking ‘no fault’ evictions like these off the table is crucial to making sure tenants have secure and stable homes throughout and after the pandemic,” Brad Hirn, a tenant organizer with the Housing Rights Committee, said in a statement.

No-fault evictions were responsible for about 20% of the 1,442 eviction notices filed between March 2019 and Feb. 2020, according to an August report from the Residential Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Board. That includes 196 evictions for owner move-ins, 87 for capital improvements, 12 for condo conversions, eight for demolitions and one for “substantial rehabilitation.”

Janan New, executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, said this legislation would put a particular hardship on landlords who want to either move into their properties themselves or allow relatives to live there. She said many renters who are no longer tethered to the city because of their jobs are leaving, and San Francisco currently has a 20% vacancy rate.

“A 20% vacancy rate doesn’t warrant this type of legislation,” she said. “If you want to help the rental market, you should try to get more jobs into the city.”

Preston’s proposal is the latest in a string of legislation that attempts to protect tenants as the pandemic causes record unemployment and pushes more people toward poverty. Mayor London Breed, who supports protecting renters against no-fault evictions, first issued an eviction moratorium based on nonpayment of rent in April. That order, which eliminated late fees and interest and gave tenants more time to pay back their rent, is in effect until Sept. 30.

 Preston also passed a law this summer that permanently bars San Francisco landlords from evicting tenants if they could not pay rent due to coronavirus-related issues between April and September.

That legislation was challenged in San Francisco Supreme Court by Zacks, the landlord lawyer, on behalf of a group of real estate trade organizations. The measure was upheld in August. An appeal is pending.

Zacks is also questioning the legality of Preston’s newest proposal based on language in the state law around whether new local ordinances can be enacted before Feb. 2021.

But Preston’s office is confident that they are in the clear. The ordinance is co-sponsored by Supervisors Aaron Peskin, Matt Haney, Shamann Walton, Hillary Ronen and Rafael Mandelman.

On the state level, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a law written by Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, that gives tenants a temporary reprieve on missed rent if they lost income due to the pandemic. If Preston’s legislation passes, it would close a loophole in the state law, which does not cover those facing no-fault evictions.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Proposed-SF-legislation-would-ban-no-fault-15570075.php

Every Picture Tells a Story – Ongoing Series

Street art near a Trader Joe’s store on another day of smoke-filled air in San Francisco.

Photo – Lee Heidhues

Look at the picture and listen to the classic ahead of its time song “Lola” by Britain’s own The Kinks.