The Hero Shot.

Gavin Newsom looks like a president.

He is getting us accustomed to seeing him as the next president.

Of course Gavin Newsom is running for president. The question is whether California is a future the public wants.

He taped an eight minute video saying all the right things in the right way: https://youtu.be/RCKGYFZTgEY?si=nNKDsBLskErrRcHL 

His media people cut this talk into one-minute segments to get airplay on the various places where people scroll and glance at videos: Facebook Reels, TikTok, YouTube. 

I continue to believe that no California politician can win a general election for president in 2028. But Newsom can win the Democratic nomination, and his rivals need to start making bigger moves if they are going to displace him. 

Newsom will have vocal detractors from his home state who say he isn't progressive enough. Democrats have their own silo of true believers, not unlike like Trump's MAGA base.The heart wants what the heart wants. They were Bernie Sanders supporters in 2016 and 2020, and "Democratic Socialist" or "Progressives" now. The activist Democratic base wants a hell-raiser who doesn't communicate "compromise," and Newsom is trapped by his success in California. If he adjusts to win votes in battleground states, he will be acalled a flip-floping, hypocrite, corporate sellout -- and inauthentic. If he doesn't adjust, he is a pie in the sky, big-spending, crazy-woke Californian defending $7 gasoline and unaffordable housing. Lose-lose.

Democrats are looking for the thrill of new possibilities. In the mindset of the people who shape the soul of the Democratic Party -- people who work in a job of political advocacy on climate and the environment, abortion rights, Medicare for All, etc. -- it is all in reach now. They think they learned the "Bernie lesson." Reach higher. Be bolder and give voters something new and great, something to get out the vote of angry, frustrated people who want real change, because Bernie could have won in 2016, and we would have reached the Promised Land if we had only had vision and courage. The secret sauce is to be a change agent, like Trump, except good change, not corrupt change.

Newsom is doing the only possible thing: he is selling himself for what he is, a polished California governor. His brand, and California's, is baked in. Newsom is Hollywood-handsome, a vineyard owner and winemaker, and rich. He has succeeded in California, where taxes are high, home prices are stratospheric, gasoline prices are the nation's highest, and the businesses that California has created are so stupendously great and valuable that they are off-putting. It would be different and better for Newsom had he gotten his way to the top as a working actor, or better yet for winning battleground states, as the owner of a chain of tire stores or something that reads as blue collar and masculine. He could then have images of thick-bellied, male, unionized workers doing something that gets their hands dirty. After all, there are tire shops in both California, where a home in San Jose that costs $1.8 million is the same size and quality as a home in Pennsylvania that costs $300,000. No such luck.

California can brag about being the world's fourth largest economy -- and Newsom does this -- but it is a mixed message. A company like GM or Caterpillar, with factories and shift workers and objects sold at a profit, seem real; billion dollar enterprises. California created trillion-dollar industries created by genius nerds at screens making algorithms that exist as invisible data in metaphoric clouds.

That is Newsom's "California problem."

Newsom is doing what he can do: which is openly, actively selling. He isn't remaking himself. He is getting us accustomed to him as a president, showing himself in settings that look presidential and credible.

Newsom has Democratic rivals who come from battleground states: Mark Kelly, Jon Ossoff, and Josh Shapiro. I think they each have an easier path than Newsom for appealing to voters in battleground states. But a big part of success is showing up. Newsom is showing up and he is selling what he has to sell, that California under his leadership is standing up to Trump and doing so effectively. Trump sells strength and domination. Newsom is doing it, too, and saying he is winning. That is a strong message: a resolute fighter who wins. He is stealing Trump's brand. 

Newsom's problem is that he also needs to persuade Americans that California is a future that they want. 

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Littering as metaphor.

     “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
          ― F. Scott Fitzgerald,  The Great Gatsby, 1925

Writers cite this quotation frequently in this Era of Trump.

Trump is the change-agent a great many Americans wanted, and still want. Change-agents destroy things. They challenge norms. Trump reveals weaknesses in the American system of government and its institutions: Congress, especially, but also our campaign finance system, our law enforcement, our news media, our currency, our trade relationships, our alliances, our immigration system, and our laws regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Trump is often spontaneous and inconsistent in his disruption, which reads as "careless" to observers, which is why we see the quotation at the beginning of this column.

It is unfair to blame littering on Donald Trump. We had careless littering before Trump and we had performative political littering, too. It was celebrated by the political and cultural left as graffiti in opposition to oppression. It was "people's art." It was sticking it to "the man." 

But today's guest post by John Coster makes a fair point. Trump is changing what it means to be a good citizen. He is a reversal of whatever residue there is of JFK's call for patriotic sacrifice, bear any burden, pay any price, ask what you can do. 

Trump's patriotism is each person winning. We are a nation of winners in competition with losers. Trump's norm-breaking behavior includes selling our country and the world on the notion that this is a dog-eat-dog world and always has been, and Trump is just revealing and acting on that simple truth. People and businesses and countries look out for themselves, Trump included. Survival is about power, not some high-minded, noble, rules-based courtesy to entities larger than yourself. Take what you can because that is what everyone else does. Look out for number one. If you can grab a benefit, do it until someone stops you. If you can transfer a duty to someone else, do it until somebody or something stops you. Don't be a sap.

In that mindset, only a sap would bother taking fireworks litter home with them.

John Coster is a technology investor who managed, and now consults to, multimillion-dollar electrical installations for major technology firms. He also does hands-on missionary work among the homeless population on the sidewalks of Seattle.

Guest Post by John Coster

Is the way we live a symbol of who we have become?

I live on Alki Point in Seattle, which is on a remarkable urban beach with both city and mountain scapes. You can Google pictures. It's a beautiful stretch of coastline. The entire three to four miles is blend of sea walls, sandy beaches, boat ramps, ferry docks, fishing piers, shops and restaurants, old shipyards and of course, bike lanes. There is even an underwater city park for scuba diving (where I got PADI-certified). The tide flats during king tides are a marine life lover’s dream. It’s one of the city’s most popular playgrounds. Summer nights mean you’ll see cruisers showing off their custom bikes and classic (and not so classic) custom rods. There are volleyball tournaments all summer, art fairs and street food. 

Yesterday people staked out their spots early on the stretches of beach and park areas. Wall-to-wall canopies, beach chairs, grills and music of every style and ethnicity. 

Last night my wife and I walked down to see if we could catch a glimpse of the big fireworks being held across Eliot Bay. We didn’t need to. The entire stretch of beach was lined with commercial-grade fireworks being fired off by ordinary people along the boardwalk and beach. Just people blowing off serious fireworks in the middle of crowds. The air was thick with smoke as hundreds of mortars shot up and boomed around us. The few police sat in their parked cars with red and blue lights and watched. We watched for a while but decided it was pretty unsafe, especially after a mortar went off on the ground, so we waded through the crowd and walked home. 

I was up early today and walked the beach. It was a mess. Trash everywhere as you might expect, but what shocked me was how much garbage was left from all the illegal fireworks. Everything just left for someone else to clean up. 

I was thinking how maybe that’s appropriately symbolic of who we have become. Or maybe with few exceptions in our nation’s history- we tend to make a lot of noise, blow things up (and even flaunt its illegality) and let someone else deal with the aftermath. Maybe our current administration with its selfish and narcissistic leader is just a mirror of our broader culture (not everyone of course) which is why so many see nothing wrong with his worldview. 

Your Up Close correspondent in Seattle.

 

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Easy Sunday: The Magic Laundry Basket

"Take it easy on yourself
The world will keep turnin'
Without any help"

     Don Williams, "Take it Easy on Yourself," 1998

A 90-second Easy Sunday YouTube video.

Funny. 

It's good to have a day off from politics.

CLICK: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SqQgDwA0BNU

     "I've been doing this since you moved in. I don't know how it happens, is it the house or what, but any dirty clothes you put in this basket. . . ."

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Bicentennial memories

The American Revolution came early in Boston. 

By 1776, the action had moved south from Boston to Philadelphia. 

Boston was the hotbed of anti-tax, revolutionary fervor in the British colonies of North America. Boston was the problem child. Britain had to station troops in Boston, which brought public order while simultaneously exacerbating an angry public mood.  

We can relate. Consider the National Guard troops Trump sent to Minneapolis.

The Revolutionary War events we learned about in school preceded the Declaration of Independence. The Boston Massacre took place in 1770; the Boston Tea Party in 1773; Lexington and Concord's "shot heard round the world" took place in April,1775; George Washington took command of the Continental Army in July, 1775 on Cambridge Common.

I helped organize the celebration of the Bicentennial celebration. It was my first professional job after college and my one year of a Ph.D. program in history at Yale. I decided that the world would not change for the better because of the work of historians. I thought politics was the way to do it. 

My job at Boston's celebration of the bicentennial was a job in politics. I was hired by the office of the mayor of Boston, Kevin White. He hoped that a city in celebration would give him a  national reputation as a can-do, effective big-city mayor and a potential vice presidential pick in the 1976 or 1980 election.

The bicentennial programs avoided "rah-rah" flag-waving. It wasn't the mood. In Washington, D.C. Nixon was caught in the tar pit of his Watergate crimes and cover-up and Boston was experiencing ugly disorder in opposition to court-ordered busing to integrate schools in the racially-segregated neighborhoods of Boston and its nearby suburbs.

We staged a large exhibit in a newly-redeveloped Quincy Market, three huge century-old buildings converting from derelict into a vibrant "festival marketplace" crowded with shops, restaurants, and tourists. The years 1974 and 1975 were at the front end of that process. Our job was to bring people into the free exhibit and make sure they left exhilarated and ready to tell their friends and neighbors about the goings-on in the redeveloping city.

We used a prominently displayed Honeywell computer to tally the votes of people as they confronted several contemporary issues that closely mirrored issues that led to the revolution.

South Boston, October, 1974

-- We showed a brief movie of police attempting to control an unruly crowd, and then asked: Would you be part of, or at least be in agreement with, a crowd throwing rocks and snowballs at troops trying to maintain order? Or did you support the police? That situation depicted student protests five years prior and police trying to restrain crowds at anti-busing protests. Were we doing it today we might have shown anti-ICE demonstrations now. This was analogous to the Boston Massacre, when harassed British soldiers fired into a crowd.  

--  Would you protest a small, lawful tax by participating in a riotous takeover and destruction and looting of private property of merchants trying to obey the law and sell their goods? The exhibit showed then-contemporaneous vandalism. 

Today it might show organized shoplifting looters, feeling righteous anger over Lululemon selling leggings for $99. The looters consider the price ridiculous and unjust; the stores need to be sent a message. We see this on loops on Fox News. Bostonians who threw tea into Boston Harbor felt entitled and righteous, too. 

--  Would you support semi-organized local militias stockpiling guns and ammunition in a suburban warehouse, or would you be happy that lawful authorities travelled to the site to seize these items to protect public safety? That was the issue facing Bostonians surrounding the events at Lexington and Concord.

We showed a half-dozen scenes of then-contemporary controversies. What would YOU do? People marked their ballots, and they received a score: Which of ten prominent Bostonians were their responses most similar to. Sam Adams? John Hancock?  The exhibit was a hit because of the surprise factor and the controversy the exhibit created. Many people who presumed they were "patriots," i.e. on the side of the revolution, found that when the events were translated into contemporary events, they were instead on the side of law and order. 

I left Boston in the fall of 1975 to return to Medford, Oregon, and pursue my own, brief political career. The ethnic politics and endemic racism of Boston baffled me. I was a fish out of water there. 

Forty-five years later, in 2020, I watched rioters storm the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election. It looked like revolution to me; a coup d' état. I sided with the Capitol Police. President Trump called people storming the doors and windows to take direct action to install the government of their choice "patriots."

I think they were traitors to their country. Of course, so was Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hancock, and the rest of the signers of the Declaration.

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Corruption: That was then. This is now.

I was in office in the Post-Watergate Era.

What Trump is doing would have been unthinkable.

I used to be young.

Sometimes I irritated my fellow commissioners

The 1976-1985 era was not some Golden Age of everybody-get-along. There was plenty of controversy. Amid the controversies, the era was characterized by a bend-over-backwards effort to demonstrate that government was free of corruption. It was a reaction to Watergate.

Jimmy Carter was famous for being corruption free. He kept his brother at arms length. He put his peanut business into a blind trust. He asked us for self-sacrifice by turning down our thermostats and driving 55 mph on roads engineered to be driven at 65 and 70. Appointees to the Carter administration were prohibited from doing the revolving door of leaving the administration and then getting a high-paying job in the industries one regulated. 

In the trenches of local government in Medford and Jackson County, Oregon, it mean obeying the Public Meetings Law, first passed in 1973, which involved a complex set of public notices of agendas, public disclosure, and requirements that all meetings among members of a majority of any public body be done in public, with recordings and written minutes  In a three-person governing body like the Jackson County Board of Commissioners, it meant that I could not talk with my colleague in the next office. 

There were reporters out there eager to bust our chops if they thought we did. In those days the news was a watchdog.

I won election in 1980 because I was the "clean government" candidate. My Republican opponent was a civic leader, very tight with the local business, labor, and governmental establishment. They loved him, his ads said. My campaign argued that I stayed clear of the special interests. 

It was an era of full disclosure of conflicts of interest and potential conflicts of interest. The county commission heard land use appeals to zoning and building issues directly, in public. At each hearing I would report in a flat, matter of fact tone, that I had received campaign contributions of $10 from Mr. John Doe, $20 from Mrs. Mary Roe, etc.   

At no point in four years as a commissioner, in which we were making land use and other regulatory decisions with enormous financial consequences for the people involved, did anyone every ask me to have lunch. No one bought me coffee to visit about their case. There was never the hint of a whiff of feeling out whether I was amenable to "giving a break" to someone on a decision. There is enormous latitude of gray area in making zoning decisions. Where land stopped being zoned "rural residential" and developable into five-acre parcels, and where it began being "agricultural open space" — a designation that prohibited parcelization and home building — had life-changing, million-dollar consequences for the landowner.

It wasn't that I communicated prickly ethical character. It was the era. It was the norm. Government was clean. The umpires were straight-arrow fair.

Trump has reversed the polarity of clean government. Corruption and favor-granting is open. Trump gives pardons to campaign contributors who are guilty of major felonies. Trump openly helps political allies and punishes political opponents. Trump awards contracts to friends, campaign contributors, and to family. He holds banquets to recognize people who purchased his crypto coin, a direct payment to Trump. He doesn't pretend a blind eye. He thanks them at a banquet to let them know their tribute is noticed. 

Newsweek

I am hopeful that Republican voters become uncomfortable with what Trump is doing. I see signs of it among some opinion leaders in the media, but not among Republican politicians; they dare not confront Trump. Politicians will change when Republican voters change, and it hasn't happened yet.

I am hopeful that Democrats nominate a leader noteworthy for his or her straight-arrow history. Someone who hasn't traded stocks in Congress. Someone who demonstrated some self-sacrifice and patriotism in his or her personal life. 

I am ready for the pendulum to swing back to clean government. It will happen only if voters demand change because they are offended by what they see right now. I am.

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Corruption beyond parody

"The best things in life are free
But you can keep 'em for the birds and bees
Now give me money (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want)
That's what I want, yeah (that's what I want)
That's what I want"
         Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford, 1959, covered by The Beatles, 1963

He's not hiding the grift. He's bragging about it.

No grift, no self-dealing, no outrage is too much.

I read the news today, oh boy. Trump's financial disclosure, released Tuesday, shows more than $1.4 billion in crypto income for 2025: $635 million from selling his own meme coin, over $594 million from World Liberty Financial, the venture he runs with his sons, and $196 million more from cashing out a stablecoin company. Trump's trusting fans, the investors who bought the meme coin at launch have mostly been wiped out — it peaked near $74 and now trades around $1.68.

Then there's the pardon. Changpeng Zhao, who built Binance into the world's largest crypto exchange, pleaded guilty to money laundering violations, paid a $4 billion fine, and served 
four months. Around the same time, an Abu Dhabi state fund put $2 billion into Binance — paid in a stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's crypto company. Zhao received a full, unconditional pardon from Trump. Republicans in the House and Senate could cry foul. They don't.

 The Wall Street Journal notices

Don Jr. and Eric Trump bought into a shell company that merged with a stake in a tungsten mine in Kazakhstan — a deal that surfaced right after Kazakhstan's president met with their father, backed by $1.6 billion in U.S. government support. Separately, they're behind Powerus, a drone company founded about a year ago that landed a Pentagon contract and is now pitching interceptor drones to Gulf states under fire from Iran.

The Trump Organization has more than twenty foreign developments in the pipeline. In Vietnam, farmers were pushed off their land to clear space for a Trump resort. In Serbia, the government fast-tracked a Trump Tower in Belgrade developed by Jared Kushner using emergency procedures that got the country's culture minister arrested. Licensing fees from the UAE alone topped $20 million in the latest filing. None of this requires imagination. It's in the disclosures.

Qatar gave Trump a Boeing 747-8 worth roughly $400 million, and as of today it's flying as Air Force One. The Constitution has an Emoluments Clause: Foreign governments cannot hand gifts to a sitting president. The administration's answer was to donate it to the Air Force on paper and note that Trump gets to keep it for his library when he's done.

Teapot Dome cost a cabinet secretary his freedom. Nixon's slush fund was a few hundred thousand dollars and the cover-up ended a presidency. Grant's cronies skimmed whiskey tax revenue, and seventh graders learned about this blot on Grant's record in Mr. Graves' history class a century later. This was wrongdoing, disreputable. The public knew it as such, so the men involved tried to hide it. 

What's different now isn't just the size, though the size is staggering. What's different is that nobody is hiding anything. The crypto income is on an official disclosure form. The pardon was announced from the White House. The mine deal, the drone contracts, the foreign towers — reported in real time, defended on camera, shrugged off by a Republican Congress that has decided this is simply how the man does business.

Openness and shamelessness isn't innocence. It is the opposite. It reveals both the brazen corruption of Trump, and the corrupt standards of the people who could put a stop to it by threatening impeachment -- but who are silent. As few as five Republican House members could join Democrats and make an impeachment a reality. Impeachment sends a message to Trump and the public that this is wrong. It is the power Congress has that would get through to Trump that this corruption is wrong, unacceptable, un-American.  And that we are better than this.

But we aren't. There won't be any consequences from Republicans who speak up, and Trump knows it. They are more afraid of him than they are of the damage to the country and the judgment of history.

Schoolchildren are watching and learning.

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Farm irrigation: I love it when things work.

Feel free to skip this post.

It isn't about politics. It isn't even about my vineyard. 

It is about the little problems farmers encounter. And their quiet pleasure when thing work as they should.

It is about the pleasant sounds of an irrigation system. 

Medford, Oregon has a Mediterranean climate. We have cool wet winters. That means that there is a green lushness to the local plants. But then we have a hot, dry summer. The lush plants expect and need water. It takes irrigation.

I liken irrigating to a father bottle-feeding his infant. A farmer is the caretaker for vulnerable plants and I get the same feelings of nurturing that I felt about settling down and feeding my hungry infant. I am a caregiver and nurturer.

Sometimes the baby is fussing for some reason other than hunger. That is why there is a sense of relief when giving the baby a bottle and sucking starts. The baby is happy; problem solved. You don't always know. Sometimes it's something else, something unknown, and the baby stays fussy.

Irrigation systems have many points of potential failure. There could be a lack of water at the water source. The water there could be gritty or have plant material, and when pumped, it fouls  the lines. The foot valve -- the part of the irrigation line in the water -- may have problems being fully submerged when it is in a shallow ditch, and therefore draw air. The pump motor may not start, or keep working when started. There may be leaks at the joints of the distribution line. The sprinkler heads may be stuck in an open or closed position for some reason. The sprinkler heads may be fouled by grit sucked up from the ditch. The spray from the sprinkler heads may not cover the ground needing irrigation.  

And this litany of problems starts with a premise that one has all the water rights and other legal requirements, including the right to pump that water, the right to pump it from the place you want to pump it, the right to access that place, the right to put that water where you want to irrigate, and the ability to measure and report what you are pumping, if required, and the ability to show that that water came from flowing water, which you can use, not ground water, which you cannot. (Those issues are all fine for me, so I ignored them in listing points of failure, but they are big, big deal-killers for lots of farmers.)

Yesterday's irrigation was as good as it gets. My pump is in a good spot, with ample water, and the foot value is secured under water by a rock that holds it down. The water is clear of silt and debris. The distribution lines have little leaks at the joints, but they are minor and unimportant. I am running ten sprinkler heads, which cover the ground I want to irrigate. I moved the pipes 50 feet across the field from where I had irrigated the day prior, and everything moved and reattached easily. My nephew poured ethanol-free gasoline into the tank without incident. He pulled the starter cord exactly once. Once! (I love this Honda pump.) The Honda motor started, making the choked-engine sound as it ran. After two seconds my nephew moved the choke lever from ON to OFF, and the engine sped up and made the everything-running-great humming sound it makes while the pipes fill up. After 30 seconds the line filed up, the seals on the pipe closed, the sprinkler heads started spraying water. There was now pressure against the pump so the pump motor sound adjusted again. This time it made the all-pressured-up-everything-working-routinely sound.

If this always worked so perfectly , there would be no sense of relief. This time everything worked.

I have two short videos, each about seven seconds. The first is what a happy pump sounds like. Hummmmmmmmmmmmm. It is a nice sound, an everything-is-OK sound.  Enjoy.

Click Here: YouTube

The second video captures what sprinkler heads sound like as they go chi, chi, chi, chi, chi, chi. The pump motor is audible faintly about 200 yards away.

Click Here: YouTube

Feeding my infant son was one of the quiet, simple pleasures in my life. That experience is gone, but new ones arise in their place.

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