LA is a small price to pay

Trump said it. 

The cost of the war with Iran might include Iran destroying Los Angeles and San Diego. 

The Nebraska crowd cheered.

Trump:

It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay and it's going to be over very soon. It's essentially almost over with, and they might keep going a little long, you know? They always say they have a big threshold for pain. They need it, let me tell you, they need it. But it's going to end very soon. It will end one way or another.

Trump knows Americans are unhappy. Gasoline is up 25 percent, and inflation is running about 3.5 percent a year. That may cost him one or both chambers of Congress. Call it what it is: a form of regime change. Meanwhile, Iranians have endured the sudden death of their top leaders, the destruction of military sites, schoolgirls killed, shortages of food and fuel, and hyperinflation. Yet their new government remains secure in office. Moreover, their bombed-out military is somehow driving our forces from their bases and our aircraft carriers out of the region. This week they even chased American B-1 bombers out of the United Kingdom. Like the old Timex watch, Iran can take a licking and keep on ticking. Not us.

I am accustomed to this from Trump. It means nothing.

More interesting is the crowd's response. The cheering started at the names of the cities. That didn't surprise me. Trump has twice been elected president by dividing the country. There are friends and there are enemies. Trump doesn't express respect for the "loyal opposition." He rewards his friends and destroys his enemies. He moved U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama, and he didn't bother with a pretext. He said he did it because Colorado votes by mail and Alabama does not.

This partisan notion of reward and punishment has drifted out into the zeitgeist. It isn't just Republican leaders and voters. MSNBC interviews Iowa farmers who voted for Trump and are now in distress from his tariffs. Social media passes around memes of MAGA voters hoist on their own petard. There is joy in the misfortune of foolish people whose votes backfired.

The country has changed in the past 25 years. When planes struck the World Trade Center, we all became New Yorkers. It was an attack on us.

At a 2015 campaign rally in Alabama, Trump spoke of Muslims celebrating:

Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.

What he described did not happen. There is no record of anything remotely like it. It was a lie Trump wanted to tell. 

Trump was finding an audience and shaping it: There are enemies among us. They hate us, so we can hate them. Trump did not create this zeitgeist out of nothing. People have wished ill on their enemies forever. But Trump trades in this emotion, inflames it, and profits politically from describing internal enemies. It secures his base. It is part of what historians will examine when they write about the Trump era in American politics.

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Someone needs to lead.

"Presidential power is the power to persuade."
          Presidential scholar Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power, 1960

Better a bad leader than no leader.

Trump fills a void.

When I look for the next Democratic leader, I will be looking for someone articulate, charismatic, bold, decisive, and willing to confront and disagree with people in his or her own party. A president needs to be a salesman willing to sell.

Democrats shake their heads in wonderment that the country, including Republicans who otherwise seem to be good, reasonable people of decent character, voted for and continues to support Donald Trump. How can they tolerate in a president a person they would not use as a trustee of their estate, a business partner, the manager of a cash business, or the executive director of a tiny nonprofit, or trust to drive a teenage daughter home from babysitting?

Gallup polling supplies some of the answer. We are at a time of profound skepticism about the institutions of our society. In the public's eye, they are all more or less flawed. Corrupt. Incompetent.

"Small business" partially survives the skeptical mood because it is not an institution. It is different people and organizations competing with each other for business.

Democrats are playing with weak cards when they insist that President Trump follow the Constitution and respect congressional prerogatives and power. Congress should write the tariff law? Congress should exercise the power to go to war? Congress should write immigration policy? Congress cannot agree on important matters, and it is as conflicted and corrupted by special interests as is Trump.

Do we trust the military? Yes and no. My own feeling of support for the U.S. military took a deep dive in 1968, when it promulgated a policy of winning the Vietnam War through attrition and comparative body counts. That was me, the potential trade. My respect has grown back in recent years, rooted in the military's own culture of honor and duty, when Trump considered using it to back his effort to stay in office after the 2020 election. It refused him. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is openly replacing military institutionalists with Trump loyalists. Are they trustworthy now? I don't know.

The Supreme Court's switch on Roe v. Wade revealed that the court is a lagging-indicator political body, now reflecting America's turn from Warren Court equality in various spheres to MAGA backlash against that. It is making controversial social policy because Congress fails to do it. Its decision to give presidents immunity from following the law destroyed its credibility with Democrats and will destroy it with Republicans the next time there is a willful Democratic scofflaw president.

President Trump holds power by process of elimination. No other governing institution is willing to stop him from doing anything he really wants to do. He exercises the fundamental power of the presidency: persuading Republican officeholders that what he is doing is in America's interest, and, moreover, that challenging Trump would cost them personally. 

Throughout Biden's presidency I bemoaned his incapacity to communicate to Americans the value of what he was doing. Behind the scenes, he carried out an Elizabeth Warren set of policies. Those policies needed to be explained, defended, and sold. The effort to sell them would have brought its own self-correction. If you cannot sell it, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in a democracy. Biden couldn't sell. That set up Trump to be a change agent.

Trump filled the void.

I blame Republican voters and officeholders for tolerating such a morally defective leader, but they are not wrong to say that Democrats gave them a weak choice in the 2024 election. Kamala Harris positioned herself as Biden's successor. She didn't lead.

Trump's depravity and dishonesty leaves a moral leadership void. His destruction of our trade networks and military alliances leave a strategic void. Trump represents the "destructive" phase of progress by creative destruction. It is not clear to me that Republicans are exhausted by his destruction. 

Democrats seem ready to repair and rebuild. They don't need a policy wonk to do this. They need a salesman who tells us what he is doing, and why it makes America great.

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Artificial Intelligence ethics

Google's Gemini artificial intelligence program stopped my experiment.

I was seeing what it would allow in a political ad.

My first prompt asked Gemini to create a photorealistic image of a pile of U.S. currency and told it to label it: "Campaign contributions." It made this in a few seconds. 

That assured me that someone could, indeed, use AI to make a campaign ad. The image looked pretty good to me, and I was amazed that a few typed words from me would generate a usable image. 

Next, I wanted to see if it would insert an image of a real person into this image. I moved my photo into the prompt box and told it to label it "Earned every penny himself." Gemini complied immediately: 

Then I wanted to see if it would replace the image of me with an image of Republican state Senate candidate Brad Hicks, and insert new text. I took this photo from Hicks' campaign website. I prompted it to change the label to "Republican PAC money." I told it to put in smaller type below that label, "Source, Oregon Secretary of State, ORESTAR, October 5, 2026." 

I had to remind Gemini what, exactly, it was replacing: Swap out me; put in Hicks.

Gemini responded with this:

I cannot fulfill this request. I am unable to modify or generate images that place real people, public figures, or political candidates into misleading or unverified contexts, such as depicting them surrounded by cash with political labels.

When a request involves combining a real person's likeness with specific political commentary or text overlays (like" Republican PAC money") it raises several critical safety ad policy considerations:

It listed concerns over "Misinformation or Deception," "Defamation Risks," and "Ethics and Public Trust." It said it could generate an entirely fictional, generic illustration depicting political fundraising and campaign financing, but without using a specific person's name or likeness.

Good for Gemini. I am happy that Gemini's creators have some restraints. 

An image of Hicks, happily sitting chest-deep in cash, attributes personality and emotions to him that move him from the original context of the photo (a staged conversation with a voter) into him sitting in a pool of money. A partisan might justify that as "true in spirit." A partisan might justify it by saying that Hicks is doing the same thing to his opponent, Democrat Denise Krause, placing her photo next to Governor Tina Kotek, placing her in a new context of making a speech at the state capitol; plus, he asserts without evidence that she would be a rubber stamp for Democrats. Her being a rubber stamp is a presumption, not a fact. (Of course, it is a guess, a presumption, that Hicks would  be a puppet in Trump's Republican Party.) So turnabout is fair play, right? If Hicks or Krause dishes out partisan disinformation, each deserves the same in return. Right?

Not right to me. Better to be literally true than "metaphorically true." I realize that a text in this blog describing the hundreds of thousands of dollars of Republican PAC money funding the Hicks campaign, does not have the emotional power of seeing Hicks smiling chest-deep in PAC dollars. The image is fake, but memorable. It is a blunt statement. This blog is a different medium, with limitations and strengths. My thought is that I am trying to be in the truth business, not the "metaphorically true" business. The simple truth reported by the secretary of state is persuasive intellectually, if not emotionally. My hope is that there is a slow drift from rational thought into emotional gut feel. People sometimes check their guts. Data matters. Truth exists. And people who have data may punch above their weight in influencing others. That is the thought.

Go to the Oregon Secretary of State's official record of contributions. Click the "Campaign Finance Transactions" tab on the left, and enter the Hicks Campaign ID, 24485, in the box at the top. To see who Hicks' Chamber PAC supported over the years, enter Campaign ID 5067. To see who is funding Krause, enter ID 22966.

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Easy Sunday: Explaining the Oregon Senate District Three campaign.

The simple message:

"Brad Hicks is Donald Trump." 

"Denise Krause is Tina Kotek."

I overthink political messaging in this blog. I don't think political messages are devilishly complex and thought out. I think political brands are a matter of unconscious impression. It's is the unconsidered things that need consideration.

Someone is the good guy; someone the bad guy. We make these decisions mostly based on gut feelings of first impression and unconscious preferences. Certain things are turnoffs. Someone is "too Portland." Or "too corporate." Or "too woke." Or "too MAGA." Negative ads probe those potential turnoffs to move our votes. 

There is no dispositive proof that Hicks really is a mini-Trump, but he did lead a relentlessly partisan Chamber of Commerce with its own PAC to support Republicans, only Republicans. There is no dispositive proof that Krause would be a Democratic rubber-stamp for Kotek, but her website's policy proposals seem conventionally Democratic in every respect. 

It is smart for Hicks to link Krase to Kotek. Kotek is relatively weak in this senate district, and likely a drag on Krause. Kotek ran behind the Democratic winner, Jeff Golden, when he won in 2022. In the 2022 matchup, between Kotek and Republican Christine Drazan, Kotek won by only 2.6 percent: 47.3 to 44.7 among voters in that district. Kamala Harris, a relatively weak candidate, defeated Trump 54.3 to 42.3 percent, a 12.1 percent margin in 2024. The presidential race result is why I call this a light-blue district in its general political lean. 

Likewise, it is smart for Krause to tell people that Hicks is a loyal Republican and link him to Trump, since Trump does less well than baseline Republicans in this district. I presume some marginal voters are turned off by Trump, especially this year. Trump has strong opinions on Oregon issues, and Trump conspicuously pressures state officeholders to follow his demands. All state-level Republicans have a trustworthiness problem when they seek votes from people outside the Trump base. We heard Trump pressure Brad Raffensperger, a Georgia state election official, "I just want to find 11,170 votes." It could be Hicks getting that call. Hicks was a loyal Republican for two decades at the Chamber. He is getting a million dollars in GOP money for his campaign. 

As the campaign gets down to final arguments I expect them to become simpler and more direct because it is a shorthand way to brand the candidates alongside a weak party leader. Both Tina Kotek and Donald Trump are measurably weak candidates in this district.

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The melons and grapes know what time it is

"Does anybody really know what time it is?
(Care) Does anybody really care?
(About time) You know, I can't imagine why
(Oh no, no) we've all got time enough to cry"
         Robert Lamm, "Does Anybody Know What Time it is," released by Chicago, 1970

Both the melons and the grapes know the end is near, so they are sprinting toward ripeness. The plants have a retirement-age/senior-citizen look to them, the equivalent of a  healthy people in their late 60s. 

For melons, it means the vines have lost their vibrant green color and turned matte. 

A melon like this one is known in Spanish-speaking countries as a Piel de Sapo and is sold in farmers' markets in the U.S. as Santa Claus melons. It is the classic late-season melon, with little crack marks on the skin, analogous to the wrinkled face of a 60-something year old who has been in the sun a lot. This will be a superb melon when I cut it, but it isn't beautiful. The melon plant knew the season was ending and it rushed this to ripeness.

The grapes are in their late-60s-equivalent, too. The pumice soil at my farm does too good a job of letting grape roots find water even without my irrigating, so I have a rapidly-growing canopy that persisted until Labor Day this year. The Malbec and Cabernet Sauvignon finally stopped putting out new tendrils, and the vines went from growing leaves to ripening fruit. The Pinot Noirs, for some reason, have a few spotty instances of continued growth. I look down a row of Cabernet and Malbec vines and notice what I do not see on vines that have been untended for a month: new growth out the sides and top:

Cabernets on the left; Malbecs on the right

Leaves are dying back a little, more visibly on the Malbecs:

Not every Pinot Noir vine got the message, but most did.

Last year the Pinots were the only variety that was ready for a trial harvest from young vines. We picked on October 6. This year the plants have been slower to ripen. Now that we are getting hot, dry Indian summer days with temperatures in the 90s, I expect the ripening to accelerate. On September 24, eight days ago, juice squeezed from a random sample of Pinots measured a brix of 18.8. (Brix is a measure of sweetness.) It was two, maybe three, weeks away from being ready for harvest, when they would measure a brix of 22 to 24.

We often have a two week period of dry, hot weather in early October, so the forecast for the next 10 days doesn't surprise me. It does thrill me.

Heat will ripen the grapes. I probably will not water the grapes even a little, although I could do so easily with a controlled drip. At this point, I am managing for sweetness so I can get the grapes up to the brix that Valley View Vineyards wants. Water will slow or reverse the ripening trend and dilute the grape juice. Rain wets the grape clusters, which risks moisture lingering inside the clusters, which can bring rot and mold. As we get into October, rain is almost inevitable. This is a critical 10 days for getting the grapes ripe, harvested, and out of harm's way.

I try to understand the season with instruments measuring temperature, moisture, sweetness, acidity, time of day, and a calendar. The melons and grapes know what time it is on their own.

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Ugly photos

The Brad Hicks/Denise Krause race has gotten to the ugly-photo stage.

I wish they would stop this, but neither will.

Both campaigns followed the same messaging strategy. Each started out with get-to-know-the-candidate ads.

Then, a week ago, that ended. Now they want you to get to know the other candidate. And by that, they want you to fear the opponent, dislike them, and hold them in contempt as sold-out puppets of the rival team.

The early Hicks ads presented him as Mr. Nice Guy: bipartisan, a reach-across-the-aisle type, someone people other than MAGA Trump-supporting Republicans could feel comfortable with.

This is Hicks as he presents himself. He is a healthy-looking man in late middle age with a normal complexion. This is the opening photo on his website, so I presume it is how he wants to be seen: wearing an SOU-branded hoodie, talking earnestly with what appears to be a student.

Hicks represented his work at the Chamber of Commerce as bipartisan. That is thoroughly dishonest, as the Chamber PAC's behavior shows. But it is a welcome aspiration, a promise of new and different behavior in a new role, and it is possible that he both believes it and would behave that way in office.

Denise Krause's campaign started with the same get-to-know-her approach. Her meta-message was that she is a warm, relatable woman who has overcome problems. Photographs established her as a mother. She described a cancer diagnosis, a fight with her insurance company to get the treatment that worked, and her 30-something years of sobriety. There is a photo of her holding a hen at her home.

Like Hicks, Krause appears to be in late middle age, and, like him, she has a normal complexion in her own self-presentation:

Both campaigns have gone negative -- ugly negative. There is a common theme. Hicks characterizes Krause as a rubber stamp for Democrats and depicts her in unflattering, grainy black and white:

Although Krause does not hold office in Salem, Hicks pictures her here speaking with the Oregon State Capitol in the background. The implication: if you want to throw out the Salem incumbents, defeat Krause. It is dishonest in being misleading, but it meets the minimum standard of campaigns: it is not literally false, since it does not directly say she is speaking as an incumbent legislator. I wish he didn't do that.

Krause does the same thing to Brad Hicks. In Krause's ads, Hicks is dark and deeply wrinkled:

She says Hicks's claims of bipartisanship and political independence are pretend and that he is a cynical buddy of powerful special interests that fund his campaign: insurance companies, drug companies, and big tobacco:

She repeatedly calls him "Republican Brad Hicks." There is no evidence that Hicks is anything other than a good, loyal Trump-supporting Republican, so she empathizes that label. Being a Republican is probably a net-negative for Hicks this year in Senate District 3, which covers purple Medford and blue Ashland.

This "Hicks is squeezing you" ad makes a misleading characterization, taking four words Hicks used in 2021, "Just go to work," putting them in the present tense about the current economic environment, implying that he is scolding working people who are complaining about high insurance and gas prices today. That is the same standard of truthfulness that Hicks used in putting Krause at the State Capitol: Misleading for sure, but not literally false. I urged her not to run it, and I wish she hadn't.

The characterization each candidate makes of the other -- that each is a puppet rubber stamp for the team that funds them -- is unkind and overstated, but probably not completely wrong. I expect Krause to vote like a Democrat. I expect Hicks to vote like a Republican. Hicks is funded by corporate PACs and giant Republican interest groups. Krause is impoverished in comparison, but she has ads up, many paid for by unions. I presume both candidates are genuinely and sincerely politically aligned with the people who fund them. It isn't necessary to characterize one another as corrupt and cynical.

The negative ads erode the public's belief in representative government. I would prefer a different approach.

-- I wish Krause's campaign ads would present and sell the Democratic-oriented policies she would advance. She is a Democrat: sell that. After all, it is how I expect her to vote. And if she disagrees with Governor Kotek on some things, spell them out clearly. 

-- I wish Hicks's campaign ads would present and sell the Republican-oriented policies he would advance. He is a Republican: sell that. After all, it is how I expect him to vote. And if he disagrees with President Trump on some things, spell them out clearly.

Otherwise, this is a contest over whom voters dislike and fear more: Governor Kotek and her corrupt puppet, or President Trump and his corrupt puppet. 

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Trump Campaign Ads, paid for by the U.S. government

Trump Campaign Ads, Paid for by the U.S. Government

It's come to this. Observe it. Reflect on the moment.

We are at a hinge point in American history.

Trump is testing us. He is asserting a position in a negotiation. He is running campaign commercials paid for by the government. If we consent to this, then we have made a tacit agreement: Trump is the state.

Here is one of the ads, titled "Final Battle."

Click: 30 Seconds

Here is a transcript, but it doesn't communicate the tone of menace in the ad, nor the message that Trump is the warrior/avatar taking charge of the country at a time of peril. Best to watch the ad.

Trump's voice: "This is the final battle with you at my side. We will demolish the deep state, expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all."

Here is another ad. Less menacing. Stranger. Almost pathetic in its frenetic flash of words and images, while background music repeats the phrase "love me, love me." A voice praises Trump: "He is the most resilient person I have ever met, and nothing is going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves."

Click: 30 Seconds

There are two ways to evaluate the fact that the Department of Homeland Security diverted $20 million appropriated for other purposes to pay for these ads. The first -- my initial instinct -- is that this is an act of desperation. Trump knows his approval ratings are down, and this is his Hail Mary pass, the throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-hope-something-sticks move. This is the end of the Trump era.

There is a second alternative. Trump is sitting on tens of millions of dollars of his own campaign money, which could have paid for these ads legally, without putting GOP candidates in the position of defending an illegal, indefensible act. Is there any constituency that thinks this is a great use of taxpayer money? In this alternative, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He is motivated not by thrift or desperation but by a strategy to preserve power if, as expected, the midterms go poorly for him. He is asserting that he is above the law, and doing so flagrantly, setting himself up as the sole legitimate locus of power. The president is the state -- not Congress, not the branches of government sharing power. The tagline "Paid for by the U.S. Government" is the point.

If Congress, conservative media, the courts, and the general public do not rise up to denounce this -- and they probably won't, because they are distracted by the election and it is "only" $20 million -- then a new norm has been adopted by neglectful consent. President Trump can use taxpayer money to create pro-Trump political messaging, i.e., propaganda, and he can do so because Trump's messages are the country's messages. Trump can control the information the public receives; he can write it. Trump is not retreating. He is using the problems he has exacerbated, at home and abroad, to seize new power. Only he can fix things. He is the state.

I suspect history will show the second alternative to be the correct one.

[Note: I have a happier subject for tomorrow.  Maybe, coming out of this era, the country will experience a new burst of patriotic renewal. The country is ready for this.]

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