Something More Productive than BooFriggingHoo

My impulse is to say "cry me a river" to business leaders worried that they might not be able to speak their minds under a Trump presidency:

That style, including his opaque personal financial dealings and his sudden shots at certain companies, has helped unnerve a corporate America that traditionally craves stability. Some business leaders and economists have worried whether executives can speak their minds about the president-elect or his policies without fear of facing Trump’s rage.

But after taking a deep breath or two, I'm wondering...are there alliances that progressive leaders can build with the business community under this Administration? Is there a way to find common ground pushing back on policymaking that is based on personal interest/vendetta?

Needy Chicago Organizations

Torrey Barrett, The CEO of K.L.E.O., an amazing community center in the South Side, provided me with the names of a few great organizations that serve African-Americans in Chicago.

Brightstar Community Outreach - Christopher Harris
Growing Power - Erika Allen
Greater Englewood CDC - Glen Fulton
Phalanx Family Services - Tina Sanders


Please consider donating your time and/or money to K.L.E.O. or these other worthwhile organizations. 

Pre-Action Prep: Leaning on Dems on ACA and Medicare

I read this little columnfrom Talking Points Memo yesterday on how badly the GOP will want some Dems to join them in ACA repeal and Medicare privatization votes and it struck me that this is definitely something to mobilize around. We need to pressure our more conservative party-members like Manchin and McCaskill to stick with the party on this and not provide the GOP any political cover for stripping millions of people of health care coverage.

 From what I'm reading, the prospect of actually taking health insurance away from millions of constituents is giving some GOP voters and officials serious second thoughts. Obviously, my biggest hope is that we can stop any repeal of the ACA and privatization of Medicare from happening and I think that keeping up pressure on Dems will help since GOPers know that making these moves unilaterally would hurt them in the polls. Aside from targeting our Senators and Reps, what can we do to pressure conservative Dems?

Sassy Action: Hold Rauner Accountable

IL Peeps: Gov Rauner is doing Facebook Live at 7:30pm tonight. Tweet him questions at @GovRauner or post on FB. Among other things ask him why he vetoed automatic voter registration based on specious fraud concerns. Make your voice heard!

Race for the DNC

A follow up post to Bridget's about the new Chair for the Democratic National Committee.  Ilyse Hogue, who I mentioned in a comment to that post is the current head of NARAL, is throwing her hat into the ring.  Daily Kos just endorsed her and linked to her platform.

Ilyse would be taking this on as a full-time position, not part-time like current members of Congress. I think that is super important and, though I like Ellison a lot (he hasn't released a platform yet but he just did another interview with more on his approach), I just don't think he can dedicate the time and energy that revitalizing our party needs.

Some of what I like about Ilyse's platform:

• Co-opting the "system is rigged" messaging with a focus on voter suppression, gerrymandering etc.  

• A focus on local politics, party and policy as a way to create a pipeline for federal elections but to also build momentum and support for the party.

• Creating a more inclusive, strategic and equitable primary process. 

• Starting all messages with values that are shared across the culture.  Repugs do this annoyingly well.  

Interested in your thoughts on other candidates and whether there are ways we can get involved in this process.

Sassy Action: Call IL Reps TODAY to save Motor Voter Law

Got this from Daily Kos and reposting in full.  Please call today!  Given all the restrictions on voting we need to keep up momentum with state Motor Voter laws.

Ilsa, on Tuesday, November 29, the Illinois House of Representatives is expected to hold a vote on whether to override Gov. Bruce Rauner’s August veto of a bill that would automatically register nearly every resident of Illinois to vote.

By automatically registering every resident of the state to vote "every time they visit a Department of Motor Vehicles, office of Human Services, office of Healthcare and Family Services, the Secretary of State’s office, or an Employment Security office," the bill--SB250--is expected to add two million more voters to the rolls.

There are enough votes to override the veto. We just need to make sure everyone shows up.

Please, click here to find the name and phone number of your member of the Illinois House of Representatives. Once you have the phone number, please call ASAP and tell your Representative to show up and vote to override Gov. Rauner's veto of the automatic voter registration bill. Here is a sample script you can use:

Hi, my name is Ilsa and I am calling from Chicago. I am calling to ask you to support improving our democracy by voting to override Gov. Rauner's veto of the automatic voter registration bill. Thank you.

Here is the full background:

Bipartisan majorities in the Illinois legislature adopted automatic voter registration earlier in the summer. (The bill is SB250.) If the bill becomes law, Illinois would follow six other states that have adopted automatic voting registration in the past two years.

Governor Scott Rauner vetoed the bill. The Democratic state Senate overrode the veto on Wednesday, November 16. Now it’s up to the state House to override the veto as well.

86 state Representatives supported the bill in May; 14 of them were Republican. Details can be found here (PDF).

We need 71 votes to override Rauner’s veto, so we should have what we need to pass this bill into law. However, there are concerns about whether Republicans stay on board and whether all Democrats show up to the veto session.

The vote is expected tomorrow, Tuesday, November 29. All residents of Illinois should contact their state Representatives, urging them to be present throughout the special session and to support overriding the veto of SB250, the automatic voting registration bill.

Cecile Richards at UC Law School

Cecile Richards, the President of Planned Parenthood, is speaking at UC Law School on Tuesday, November 29, 4:00-5:30. 

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/events/2016-11-29-schwartz-memorial-lecture-cecile-richards

Persistence of Fake News

The other day I was reading about Alex Jones, the awful man who has called Sandy Hook a hoax.  Apparently, Jones has Trump's attention, and family members of victims have decried this relationship.

The rise of fake news is disturbing.  Fake news is not news and it is not new; conspiracy theorists have been around for ages.  I have no idea how we rid the system of this stuff, but Google is not necessarily helping.  In my decision making class, we discuss confirmation bias.  Confirmation bias, broadly speaking, is the tendency to look for evidence that is consistent with (or confirms) some hypothesized belief.  It is also the tendency to weigh confirmatory evidence more favorably than disconfirmatory evidence.

The blog below asks, "Is Google making us less rational?"

Suppose that you wake up from a Rip Van Winkle sleep and hear that we have a President named Barack Obama and that he was born in Kenya.  You might respond two ways: "That's interesting.  I wonder if it is true?"  "That's crazy.  I bet that's not true!"  Those different reactions will lead to different Google queries, e.g., "Obama born in Kenya" or "Obama born in US".  Here's what you get when you do these two queries:

The first link for "Obama born in Kenya" is a Youtube link, "Barack Obama Admits he was born in Kenya Speech."  In contrast, the query "Obama born in US" brings up a very official looking informational box containing birth details, followed by a Wikipedia entry, and a bunch of entries from Huffington Post, WAPO, USA Today, etc.

So, the persistence of Fake News may be due to the silos and echo chambers which divide America.  But Google's algorithm for searches plus confirmation bias may also contribute to the problem.

business as usual?

One of George's colleagues makes some interesting points here. I have issues with several aspects of his argument (umm, the protests are not sour grapes about the election outcome, they're substantive responses to key elements of Trump's racist, sexist, xenophobic platform) (also too: evidence of corruption [e.g., Trump U, the "blind trust"] does not fall under the rubric of "personality" and is always, always relevant). But some of this analysis strikes me as right on. I'm persuaded that for the most part we've got to stick to the issues, including putting pressure on him to come through on the ones we agree on. Bizarrely enough, treating him like a normal politician could be his undoing.

Sassy Action: Fight the Kleptocracy

Rep. Cummings, the ranking Democratic on the House Oversight Committee, has requested that the committee quickly review DJT for potential (hah!) conflicts of interest related to his business.  I think this is super important and is something that Congress needs to know the public is paying attention to.

An easy action we can all take now is to send some version of the attached letter to Rep. Chaffetz, the Committee chair. (yes, the same guy trying to impeach the IRS Commissioner. Sigh.)  This letter was drafted by one of the folks on the lawyer's FB group I'm a part of and I edited it a bit.  I can also turn it into talking points if you'd rather just call. 

A good article about this emerging kleptocracy is at WaPo, here are some highlights:

• Ivanka, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. are on the executive committee of Trump’s transition team, helping decide who gets hired for key positions and what the administration’s initial focus will be.

• During the Trump presidency, they will be running the Trump corporation on their father’s behalf, but the money it makes will still be his money. His main business is brand licensing, and it’s a business that is particularly amenable to enriching himself while he’s president.

• Multiple sources tell NBC News Trump received his first briefing on Tuesday and designated both Kushner and Ret. Gen. Michael Flynn as his staff-level companions for the briefings going forward.

Here is an example of how this might play out, again from WaPo:

"Well, imagine this scenario. Ivanka and Donny Jr. go to some country — let’s say Russia, for no particular reason — and arrange a meeting with a developer. They suggest a deal that the Trump corporation has carried out in places all over the world, in which the local developer builds a hotel or resort, then slaps the Trump name on it and pays the Trumps millions of dollars in licensing fees for the privilege. And let’s say that developer just happens to have ties, publicly known or otherwise, to the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin. And let’s say he offers the Trump corporation very favorable terms — which, being savvy businesspeople, Ivanka and Donny accept. You’d then have a situation in which the Russian dictator has, through a proxy, deposited millions or even tens of millions of dollars into the bank account of the president of the United States."

post-truth

Post-truth word of the year
I worry a lot about a post-truth society, community, workplace, school, home ...
Remember anti-intellectualism???

Next DNC Chair

Slowly...very slowly, I am starting to let political news back into my life. What have I missed?

Anyway, we talked a bit on Saturday about who should lead the DNC going forward. Slate's Michelle Goldberg makes a compelling case for Ellison as the next DNC chair. I'm particularly swayed by her argument that Ellison will be a more credible voice and leader for the people most threatened by this presidency.

But...Dean does have a successful track record in the role and this election broke my faith in my own political instincts. So I really don't know which would be the best choice right now. What do you all think?

#ReportHate

A Muslim woman I know from my childhood neighborhood posted today about being harassed. It's hard to tell if it happened recently or in the past but she felt inclined to use her example to encourage people to report incidents. She included a link to the Southern Poverty Law Center's form for reporting hateful intimidation and harassment. I think we should all keep this resource in mind but also do our very best to not stand idly by if we witness something. It's a terrifying thing to consider but important. It's easy to avoid getting involved--I know that's my reflex reaction to difficult situations--but I will remind myself that people being harassed do not want to be involved either, they just have no choice.

Organizations to Support, Local Version

Great new list from Chicagoist of groups to donate to in Chicago on a wide range of issues from supporting Muslims and gays to protecting the environment to books for prisoners.  Good stuff.

Organizations to Support

In addition to newspapers and other investigative journalism outlets (see below), I know we are all looking for non-profits and other organizations that we can support to help push back against the expected Trump administration overreach and to help populations most likely to be impacted. Jezebel posted this list a few days ago. Be sure to follow Bridget's advice and check out the comments, too, where people have listed other good organizations. Let's do this!

Four vital years for WAPO, NYT, and the MSM

The business model for traditional media outlets like the The New York TImes and The Washington Post has been fragile for years.  The next four years adds this additional challenge of a bully President who is tweeting about "the very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the Trump phenomena." This is from a man who famously wrote in The Art of the Deal: "The funny thing is that even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business."  He also wrote:

Outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post have to do what they have done forever: keep us all informed with excellent thorough reporting.  (How to get people away from the terrors of "fake news" is a different issue.)  And I'll say the obvious to myself and to everyone else: we have to read these pieces, whatever the message.

The Washington Post is offering 6 months of free coverage for Amazon Prime subscribers and an unlimited digital subscription for .EDU, .GOV, or .MIL email addresses.  That's great!  Thanks Jeff Bezos!  But if we want these outlets to do what they are doing, we need to subscribe to media outlets that are doing their job.  The industry is stable for now, but we all know that it is a financially precarious industry -- and an extremely precarious institution in other ways as a result of what happened this week.

Let's Do This

Welp, we're turning the electricity back on in Salon Sassy.  As you may recall, this blog was started in 2008 so that me and my friends had a place to pour out all of our excitement and anxiety around the Obama v McCain presidential election.  Remember the halcyon days of mocking silly Sarah Palin? The excruciating joy that was election night in Grant Park?  The last 8 years have been great fun and we have seen America expand in such beautiful ways: gay marriage, universal health care, two women added to the supreme court, the Paris agreement, and Hamilton!

Unfortunately, the times have changed and this blog is now meant to serve a much different purpose. We will be meeting here to transmute our anger and fear into action and change and love and peace, in particular to be allies for those most vulnerable to what is coming, to what is already here.

Roll up your sleeves, folks. Post volunteer opportunities, share organizations that need donations, analyze smart reporting on our new world, and bring your own new and crazy ideas and insights and inspiration.

I'll meet you in the arena.

Voting in Chicago

Hillary Clinton won 84% of the Chicago vote in Tuesday's election. There has been a lot of conversation in the media about whether and how Latinos and Blacks voted.

I will try to shed light on the "how" question with some data.  Chicago is remarkably evenly divided among Whites, Blacks, and Latinos. In the 2010 census, out of a total of 2,695,598 residents, there were 872,286 Whites, 854,717 Blacks, and 778,862 Latinos. The next largest group were Asians at 144,903.

To get a rough idea of voting tendencies by race, I looked at the vote counts for all of Chicago's 77 communities. For example, in my community of Hyde Park, 91.94% of residents voted for Clinton and 3.88% of residents for Trump. Hyde Park is also 46.7% White, 30.4% Black, and 6.3% Latino. Hillary Clinton, in contrast, garnered 49.4% of the vote in Edison Park, which has the highest percentage of whites (88.4%) of any community in Chicago and only 0.3% Blacks and 7.8% Latinos.  At the other extreme, 97.3% of the vote in Auburn Gresham, which has the highest percentage of Blacks at 97.8% of any Chicago community (and 0.3% Whites and 0.9% Latinos).

I ran a regression to estimate voting by race in Chicago. I ran separate regressions to predict Clinton votes, Trump votes, and other votes, regressing share against the percentages of Whites, Black, and Latinos in each community. (For the geeks, I included squared terms for racial shares.) The obvious shortcoming of this analysis is that it assumes that groups vote equally. They do not for many reasons.

The regression says that

• 51.4% of Whites voted for Clinton, compared to 96.7% of Blacks, and 90.0% of Latinos. 
• 43.5% of Whites voted for Trump, compared to 2.0% of Blacks, and 6.3% of Latinos. 
• 5.2% of Whites voted for another candidate, compared to 1.3% of Blacks and 3.7% of Latinos.

It is also interesting to identify the communities which over- and under-voted Clinton according to the model.  The biggest pro-Clinton outlier is Lakeview, which came in at 82.8%.  With a population of 80.4% White, 3.8% Black, and 7.6% Latino, my regression preidcted Lakeview to vote 62.9% Clinton.  On the other side, the biggest pro-Trump outlier is Mount Greenwood, which went 36.2% Clinton.  The model predicts Mount Greenwood to have voted 60.5% Clinton, due to its composition of 80.4% White, 3.9% Black, and 7.6% Latino.

The graph below shows predictions and actual voting for Clinton for all 77 communities.  To keep the graph from being too cluttered, I've only labelled the extreme residuals on one side or the other.