Greetings from the far left coast where I will be even older in a few weeks! Yes, it is the birthday month, and a season for mood swings. Coming into August the Phillies are in a tailspin, losing eleven out of fifteen games since sweeping the hated Dodgers just before the All Star break. The season is long, there will always be ups and downs, and this team is too good not to come out of it, but still, it is rough going at present.
Nota bene: I have lived and often died with the Phillies since 1961, the summer I turned nine, when they set a record that still stands by losing twenty-three games in a row. Even at that tender age I was drawn to the underdog. Is it any wonder I grew up to be a socialist, Marxist, liberal man of the left, as the MAGA crowd would have it?
With the remarkable, startling really, turn in the presidential race comes a swing to hope and possibility. Kamala Harris hit the ground running in impressive fashion. Democrats coalesced around her instead of assembling the customary circular firing squad. Maybe we can do this.
What lies ahead is uncertain. The enthusiasm, near giddiness, that characterized the Harris campaign’s first ten days will have to hold up against ferocious attacks that will seize on every misstep she has ever taken and when that is not enough her opponents will make stuff up.
The country is deeply divided. I am concerned about what Republicans might do to disrupt the election and what they might do if the outcome is not to their liking.
Nonetheless, I am hopeful.
Charlie Sykes writes that most of the Never Trump movement also seems to be cohering around support for Harris. “For most Never Trump Republicans, the 2024 election is not primarily about the divide between the left and the right; it’s about preserving our liberal constitutional order.”
For Never Trumpers who have been in the political wilderness for nearly a decade now, this is not the time to quibble over tax rates, the Green New Deal, fracking, or pronouns.
Harris is far from their first choice, but when your kitchen is in flames, you reach for whatever extinguisher is at hand. You can worry later about washing the dishes or whether you need a new garbage disposal. Put the fire out now. (Charlie Sykes, The Never Trumpers Are Clear on Their Goal, The Atlantic, July 29, 2024)
Also of interest: Republican mayor from border state explains why he just endorsed Harris for president, PBS NewsHour, July 30, 2024.
Yesterday I woke to reports that Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran. Israel is widely assumed to have carried out the attack but has not acknowledged responsibility.
Leave aside for now questions about whether the assassination was justified. Was it prudent at that time and in that place? Was it a deliberate provocation? It has seemed to me for some time that Netanyahu would like to draw the US into war with Iran. The assassination of Haniyeh, coming on the heels of the assassination of a Hezbollah leader in Beirut, does nothing to change that.
The daughter of Palestinian immigrants, with family in the West Bank, Rashida Tlaib is understandably and rightly passionate about the plight of Palestinians. This passion sometimes gives rise to intemperate rhetoric and acts that fail to serve her cause well.
Last week Tlaib attended Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress wearing a keffiyeh scarf and registered her protest by holdup up a sign that read “war criminal” on one side and “guilty of genocide” on the other. She put the sign away without fuss when a Capitol staff member approached and said something to her. I have been critical of Tlaib in the past. At that moment I am moved by her quiet dignity.
The view from here is that Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich should be standing shoulder to shoulder with Yahya Sinwar and other Hamas leaders in shackles in the dock at the International Criminal Court.
I welcome Kamala Harris’s commitment that she will not be silent about Gaza. Also welcome is her condemnation of the “despicable acts” and “dangerous hate-fueled rhetoric” on display from individuals who associated themselves with Hamas, burned an American flag, and clashed with police during protests against Netanyahu’s appearance. Netanyahu was right about one thing: the pro-Hamas protesters are useful idiots. By giving him an opening to discredit peaceful protesters who are by no means pro-Hamas, they could not be more useful to Netanyahu if they were on his payroll.
Myah Ward, ‘Despicable acts': Harris condemns Netanyahu protesters who defaced area around Union Station, Politico, July 25, 2024
Amna Nawaz spoke with Washington Post investigative reporter Carol Leonnig following the resignation of Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle. Leonnig told Nawaz that people inside the agency defended Cheatle the night of the assassination attempt, saying it “was a security failure, no question about it, but it can't be totally on her head,” but soon “changed their tune” when she bungled handling of the fallout afterward.
In essence, she didn't want to answer questions. She had not made herself available for press, a press conference, or anybody from the Secret Service that would be available at a press conference the night of the first assassination attempt on a Secret Service protectee in more than 30 years, and that some of her public statements, Amna, were also embarrassing to the agency.
Further along in the interview Leonnig spoke of a long-standing challenge faced by both Cheatle and the service’s new acting director:
[T]his is a agency with less than $3 billion in its budget, limited hiring caps, and an increasingly expanding mission. They're stretched too thin, something we wrote about 10 years ago, Amna, and something that the Secret Service identified itself and that a blue-ribbon panel identified 10 years ago and that a House Oversight Committee identified 10 years ago.
Responsibility for this may not lie solely with Republicans, and criticism following the failed assassination attempt came from both sides of the aisle, but it fits the Republican pattern of underfunding agencies, then demanding that heads roll when they fail to fulfill their missions.
Amna Nawaz, Secret Service director resigns in wake of criticism for Trump rally security failure, PBS NewsHour, July 23, 2024
Politico interviewed Jeff James, who worked for the Secret Service for twenty-two years before resigning in 2018. James believes that while someone should be held accountable for the security failure in Butler, Pennsylvania, Cheatle’s resignation was premature. He said that he “would have rather seen the results of the FBI investigation before any heads were put on the chopping block.”
James spoke from experience about the incredible difficulty of securing large, outdoor rallies and made a point I had not seen brought up before:
When your site has thousands of yards of sight-line and trees and buildings—that’s the other thing. This little map they keep showing on TV of the building where the shooter was—if you were to expand that out on Google Maps, you’d see there are dozens of buildings. So people were saying, “Oh, the snipers just had one job to watch this one building.” No, they had dozens of buildings to look at.
Ankush Khardori, ‘Heightened Threat’: Kamala Harris and the Huge New Pressure on the Secret Service, Politico, July 25, 2024
I am not inclined to make too much of J.D. Vance’s sophomoric crack about childless cat ladies beyond applauding the ridicule it richly deserves (I have been known to make a sophomoric crack or several from time to time). I am childless. Have not transitioned to cat lady and do not anticipate doing so. Does that make a difference?
Claims that people without children do not have a direct stake in the future of the country, the Democratic Party is “anti-family and anti-child,” and so on are another matter. So too is the proposal that parents should be given a greater voice in government by giving votes to children but control of those votes to their parents.
This isn’t just “weird,” per the new and wildly successful Harris label for the Trump-Vance tandem. There is also a real and disturbing ugliness at the heart of this story. And, especially given Vance’s shockingly bad public relations skills, it probably isn’t going away anytime soon. (Young, JD Vance’s Dog Whistles)
Rachel Looker, JD Vance defends 'childless cat ladies' comment after backlash, BBC News, July 26, 2024
Anna Rascouët-Paz, Fact Check: JD Vance Truly Said Parents Should Have Bigger Say in Democracy Than Non-Parents. Here's the Context, Snopes, July 22, 2024
Rachel Treisman, JD Vance went viral for ‘cat lady’ comments. The centuries-old trope has a long tail, NPR, July 29, 2024
Cathy Young, JD Vance’s Dog Whistles About Cat Ladies, The Bulwark, July 31, 2024
I am not keen on age or term limits for elected officials. (A projected essay on age and civic virtue is presently rattling around.) Judicial appointments are different. They should be for a specified duration, not a lifetime. I tend to think in terms of fifteen to twenty years, so President Biden’s proposal for an eighteen-year term limit for Supreme Court justices seems reasonable. How to go about transitioning to term limits for the court is not so clear. There is plenty of time for debate about that since the proposal will go nowhere in the House and faces Republican filibuster in the Senate. Opening it up for conversation is a start.
Ankush Khadori, Democrats May Have a Real Chance to Reform the Supreme Court, Politico, July 29, 2024
I occasionally refer to the activist group Indivisible Oregon with which I have been loosely affiliated since 2018. The group’s focus at present is getting out the vote in November to elect Kamala Harris and Democrats up and and down the ballot. In 2020 Portland Monthly published a nice profile of Smitha Chadaga, former chair and founding member of Indivisible Oregon.
Eden Dawn, This Local Internist Is a Doctor by Day, Activist by Night, Portland Monthly, June 2020
Memo from the Cinema Desk. Seules les bêtes (Only the Animals). 2019. Dir. by Dominik Moll, with Denis Ménochet, Laure Calamy, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Guy Roger “Bibisse” N'Drin, Bastien Bouillon, Damien Bonnard. Trailer.
Seules les bêtes is a slow-paced yet intense crime drama set in a remote, mountainous region of isolated farms in France and in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. The nonlinear narrative revolves around the disappearance of a woman whose car is found abandoned by the highway outside a small village and an array of characters linked to her.
The film opens with a young man named Armand (N’Drin) bicycling through Abidjan with a goat tied to his back on his way to visit the mysterious Papa Sanou before cutting to the snow-covered countryside where Alice (Calamy) is driving to visit Joseph (Bonnard) with papers for insurance coverage on his farm. He is quiet, distant. She makes small talk before reaching across the table to take his hand and kiss it. Next thing you know she is on his lap in a chair for some fully clothed sex, she into it, he not so much.
Alice returns home to the farm where she, husband Michel (Ménochet), and her cranky father live. Michel is distant, quiet, always it seems at his computer looking over their accounts. The account occupying him turns out to be an internet affair with Amandine, a sexy seductress created by the scammer Armand. It soon becomes evident that the two men in Alice’s life, Michel and Joseph, are both out where the buses don’t run, as the late Kinky Friedman used to put it. She is the film’s most sympathetic character, somewhat lost and quite befuddled, trying to figure out what the heck is going on with Michel and Joseph. And who shot Joseph’s dog?
Next up are Evelyne (Tedeschi), the disappeared woman, and Marion (Tereszkiewicz), a young waitress at a restaurant in the village. We meet them as Marion is handing Evelyne her check. Marion makes small talk, eye contact. Next thing you know they are back at Evelyne’s place for a bout of enthusiastic lesbian sex that I did not see coming. For Evelyne it is a pleasant diversion during her solitary stay at the mountain getaway owned by her husband, a wealthy businessman who has affairs of his own and does not care what she does. For Marion it is far, far more.
Armand strikes paydirt when Michel sends money to help Amadine out of one jam after another only to soon blow it all in riotous living. He runs afoul of the spirits when he neglects to pay Papa Sanou for summoning them to make Michel susceptible to Amadine’s wiles. In the meantime, Armand learns that the mother of his daughter is living in an upscale apartment provided by a wealthy French businessman who visits her when business brings him to town.
I am reminded of my former office colleague and film festival pal Brenda’s remark that not many movies are too short. At 117 minutes Seules les bêtes could have benefited from judicious edits. The narrative plays out in a fugue of chance, obsession, mistaken identity, and madness with multiple storylines that do not so much intersect as tumble over upon one another. A mess but an intriguing mess that repeatedly had me thinking, well, this little twist, that turn, was kind of interesting. I rate this one pretty good.
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt