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Disgraceful Duncan Hunter, amoral disloyalty that transcends Democrat or Republican.

I reserve a singular, unwavering loathing of indicted Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), above and beyond opposition on mere policy grounds. The putrid stench of this grifting, racist, silver-spoon dynasty child must be purged from Congress and sent to court for swift justice. I have donated from my personal funds to the underdog campaign of Ammar Campa-Najjar, and urge you to do the same as your final contribution of the cycle, as not just a partisan gain for Democrats like me, but a strike against amoral sociopaths in both parties.

There are three political failings that I despise in politicians of any party. He has betrayed his family and loyal supporters below him, nakedly lined his pockets with the proceeds of power in pursuit of vapid luxury, and refuses to recognize US-born children of immigrants like me as true full-blooded Americans. Mind you, these three failings aren’t partisan, plenty of honorable Republicans do no such thing, and both Joe Donnelly (D) and David Duke (R) doubt birthright citizenship, for which I hold them in eternal contempt. Rather, these failings indicate a lack of righteousness, humility, and compassion towards their own supporters and the citizens they intend on governing, regardless of political philosophy.

Many politicians snag one or two of these sins. Hunter managed to hit an unholy trinity, compressed into a single man.

Disgraceful Duncan Hunter is under indictment for stealing over a quarter million dollars of campaign money — sure, money from distinctively un-cuddly special interests, but also hard-earned money supporters gave him, friends and family, seniors on fixed income — and wasting it on luxuries to give off the appearance of wealth. Like former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, he was unable to resist the gaudy trappings of a richer life with someone else’s money. His indictment reveals thousands spent on private school tuition, his home garage door, golf, airfare for his pet rabbit, tequila shots, video games, golf, lavish vacations, fancy hotels, and golf. I’m not saying you have to live monk-like on a political salary, forever crashing on cat-piss couches instead of spending $60 on a Motel 6. There is a clear distinction between getting a bit of sightseeing and friend-visiting in on a work trip or a little alcoholic morale boosting for your office, things a normal human being would do, from the vast and flagrant grifting at scale the Hunters did. Not even in service of a shady business conspiracy, this money was spent on nonsense thinly concealed as charity contributions and “golf balls for wounded warriors”. Then, he had the gall to blame his wife and son for stealing money from his loyal supporters.

I maintain lifetime distaste of politicians who have family-destroying affairs with wives of their loyal subordinates (looking at you, Gavin Newsom), undermine and sabotage downticket campaigns, and refuse to pay money owed to vendors. These are the insider petty complaints of a lifelong Democratic operative, for sure, but I have seen all of these firsthand from members of both parties and believe it’s a window into a politician’s soul. Like Hunter’s financial crimes and family betrayal, these failings are the poisoned fruit of the same tree, rooted in an amoral lack of benevolence and goodwill to your supporters and allies. Multimillionaire Carly Fiorina took years to pay her staff from her presidential campaign. How can anyone that treats their own people like this be entrusted with the governance of millions?

Then there is Hunter’s unwavering belief in a white America, a symptom of a toxic force within the Republican Party that continues to drive minority voters to the Democrats. I am less afraid of tiki-torch wielding manbabies cosplaying as Nazis than I am of actual political actors like Duncan Hunter and Stephen Miller, who understand how to achieve their visions of a white America through the political system, laundering their racist filth through electoral campaigns, instead of buying out Home Depot. Hunter has run one of the most vile Islamophobic campaigns against Campa-Najjar in American history, regardless of the fact that Campa-Najjar is an American-born Christian. It shouldn’t even matter that he is a Christian, Islamopobic campaigns are detestable on their own merits, but it is even more infuriating that it isn’t even true.

Year after year, Hunter sponsors a bill to repeal birthright citizenship, an absolutely fundamental cornerstone of American superiority granted in the 19th century after US. v. Wong Kim Ark, an issue that I consider to be an inviolable litmus test for a politician’s sense of duty to their citizens. When former Virginia Senator George Allen torpedoed his political career by calling an Indian-American tracker for Jim Webb’s campaign “macaca”, it unraveled a long history of Allen’s confederate cosplay and naked racism, the kind that is easy and simple to grasp. But the most wounding and lesser-known part of Allen’s remarks came right after — when he pointed to the American-born S.R. Sidarth in the room and said, “Welcome to America, and the real world of Virginia.”

No matter what happens, people like S.R. Sidarth, Ammar Campa-Najjar, and I, born in America, never knowing the land of our ancestors, will always face this question from certain quarters of American politics. We have strange foreign-sounding names, dark hair, and novel skin tone. They don’t think we count despite our birth on American soil.

Hunter asked of immigrants, “Why do you think you deserve to come here? The answer is you don’t. Sorry that you were born in Africa or somewhere bad.”

The Duncan Hunters and Stephen Millers of the world can wrest my United States birth certificate out of my cold, dead hands. I am the son of two immigrants who earned their citizenship and American citizenship is my birthright, full stop, granted to me by the United States Constitution. I am equally as American as any other citizen. They begin by coming after children of the undocumented, but their true objective is to reverse the diversification of America. Their dream is to reverse the effects of the Hart-Celler Act, which lifted per-country immigration quotas and led to millions of Latino and Asian immigrants and their US-born children. We cannot yield a single inch on this issue, not one iota of compromise. Shrinking the scope of citizenship begins a dangerous process.

My American dream is their nightmare. I am the Chinese-American anchor baby they despise, a demographic pollution. I am the descendant of family-reunification visas that some quarters of the Republican Party want to annihilate. They want the world’s best and brightest to come here with no way of bringing their children, parents, brothers, and sisters over. Those with a heart know that the world’s best are loyal to their families and will refuse to leave them behind, choosing another nation to settle in — family reunification is what makes America great, what attracts the doctors, lawyers, scientists, and businesspeople. Duncan Hunter’s family values are detestable. Their dream immigrant is a self-serving lunatic who works for little and asks for nothing, leaving their family in the dust, not family men or women who are loyal to their people.

This deep dehumanization of people of different skin color is also poisoned fruit, grown from the same soil as desperate homophobia and contempt for the poor. It is the same soil that yields naked greed on Wall Street as the law of the land, the same soil that replaces a free and competitive market with oligarchies and monopolies with free bailouts for big companies and bankruptcy for the small businessman.  It is the same moral failing that creates vile transphobic ranting and family separations. It grows an immigration policy that abandons translators who served us to die and revokes promised citizenship to soldiers. It provides feeble and incompetent disaster relief that nihilist members of Congress vote to slash, crumbling inner-city schools waiting to be replaced by for-profit claptrap, and mindless mass incarceration. It is again rooted in an amoral lack of compassion for all the citizens one seeks to govern, in a total lack of belief in a level playing field for anyone who wishes to work, in an obscene picking and choosing of who to serve.

The public servant cannot pick and choose among citizens who they recognize. They must serve all, even if they disagree with some, with at least the dignity of respecting their citizenship. They must give all citizens an equal playing field to compete in the economy, for jobs, and for schooling. But above all else, they cannot pick and choose their citizens.

Disloyal to his supporters, displeased with humble service, and dedicated to a vision of an America for whites and whites only, disgraceful Duncan Hunter is a Constitution-trashing, contribution-stealing, campaign finance report-faking, immigrant-bashing, Social Security-slashing, self-serving, law-breaking snake oil salesman who can’t tell the difference between the truth and a lie. And America deserves better than a leader with no compassion towards his citizenry, no fiduciary duty to his campaign, and no moral compass.

Purge the stench of amorality from Congress and put your country first. Donate to Ammar Campa-Najjar’s campaign today.

And make sure to tell Duncan Hunter there’s no vaping in jail.


Five Trump Cabinet Nominations as Explained by the Simpsons


Rick Perry – Energy

Betsy DeVos – Education

Steve Mnuchin – Treasury

Wilbur Ross – Commerce

Rex Tillerson – State


On Eggplant

Chinese cold eggplant.


Done properly, it’s richly flavored firm, chilled eggplant with soy sauce paste with a hint of spiciness. Eggplant has a nutty flavor that can be coaxed out with care. If you were at the first dinner party where I tried to make this and overcooked the eggplant into mush, I apologize.

Go to your local Ethnic Mart. From the bewildering array of eggplant varieities, select the longest, skinniest Chinese eggplants. The bulbous eggplants are for Eggplant Parm, a dish in its own right, and won’t do well in this application.

I spent a winter break as a teen tromping around Derry, New Hampshire ahead of the Presidential primary as a volunteer. Without a car, I was sent off to canvass snowbound turf with a Texas catastrophe lawyer who never took off his ten-gallon hat and vanished into the next day’s sunset on the way to Logan Airport.

Even more snow was falling as I walked down Broadway when I dragged myself into Rig’ A’ Tony’s and was tipped off to order an Eggplant Parm before I wiped the condensation from my glasses. Facing a certain loss next Tuesday and a winter that even the Derry locals said was the worst they’d seen in years … I can still close my eyes and see the melty cheese. Is there anything it doesn’t improve?

I have never been able to replicate the experience since, it just hasn’t been cold enough.

If you haven’t passed out from this diversion, by now you should be home with your eggplant from the store.


As a child I believed that this was a collapsible hat. It is not

Place the eggplant on a plate and steam the eggplant for about five minutes, until it is soft. If it starts to turn translucent, you’ve overdone it — order pizza.

While it’s steaming, prepare an ice water bath. You might discover that your past self has forgotten to refill the ice tray, possibly because (and I’m not making accusations) one is not the most forward-thinking person when raiding the ice tray for the fourth gin and tonic. Did you ever stop to consider that, Past Kenton, that present Kenton might not check before he puts the eggplant in the steamer that there is no ice?!

Shock the eggplant in the ice water bath (or cold water bath, if you drink too much gin), and refrigerate until chilled.

Prepare the sauce of 2 parts soy sauce paste (a thicker, sweeter form of soy sauce), 1 part soy sauce, 1 part water, some green onions, whatever amount of chili you’d like, and a splash of vinegar (black, rice also work if you forgot to buy any), and a couple drops of sesame oil. I eyeballed these quantities based on a demonstration my mother did for me, like everything else I’ve learned to cook. Mess with it until it tastes fine.

Pour over the eggplant and eat. Don’t forget to fill the ice tray.

Rig A Tony’s
38 W Broadway
Derry, NH 03038
RECOMMENDED: Finish your data entry first, then Eggplant Parm.


The Figure-Ground of Race in Washington, DC

DCRaceFigureGround
This map shows building footprints of Washington, DC, Arlington, VA, and Alexandria, VA, which together cover what used to be the ten miles square of the original District of Columbia. Each census block is colored in by its predominant race. Some of the gray areas are unpopulated office or landmark buildings that you’ll likely recognize, like the Pentagon.

I think of it as a new twist on race dot maps (popularized by Bill Rankin) that are constrained to the actual buildings people might live in. The physical separations of neighborhoods, set by rivers and highways and railroads, show as gaps, along with more subtle divisions: where city grids and blocks  give way to meandering suburbs.

The flaw with this map is that it shows dominance over diversity. Farther out in the suburbs racial neighborhood divisions are less sharp.

For this map I used QGIS, and blended a layer of census blocks colored by race onto publicly available building footprint shapefiles from local governments, a relatively new feature. This was much faster than running a spatial join to create a new shapefile of buildings assigned by block.

Open Data Portals – AlexandriaArlingtonDistrict of Columbia


Southwest Virginia: The Fall of Warner Country

Virginia Senator Mark Warner (D) is the face of a dying breed — the Democrat who could win Southwest Virginia.

Last Tuesday, former Republican National Committee chair Ed Gillespie was unable to take the Senate seat from Warner, but Gillespie was able to wipe out Warner Country.

The signs have been there for over two decades.

Warner3Elections

The course of partisan realignment in Virginia’s last 20 years could be charted through the electoral fortunes of Mark Warner, a Northern Virginia cell phone millionaire that could draw support among working-class whites. In his first Senate race in 1996 against incumbent Senator John Warner (the year of “Mark Not John” bumper stickers), Mark Warner outperformed in rural areas but met his end in vote-rich Fairfax County near Washington, DC, where he lost by over 50,000 votes.

Southwest Virginia’s New Deal coalition was still holding together at the close of the 20th century. Where Democrats relied on rural black voters to narrow the margins in rural areas east of Appalachia, the Scots-Irish of Southwest Virginia celebrated by Senator Jim Webb predominated in the mountains. Every single Democratic candidate for President between 1932 and 2004, with the exception of George McGovern, carried coal-rich Buchanan County, with the help of organized labor. But as the older generation, still loyal to the party of FDR and LBJ, began to pass away, fewer and fewer of their offspring chose to stay in Southwest Virginia, and those that remained did not inherit their partisanship.

In 2001, Mark Warner ran for Governor, airing a minute-long bluegrass campaign jingle imploring the “people of the mountains at the end of their rope” to “vote in this election to keep our children home”.


Mark Warner, the hero of the hills…
Warner won handily in 2001 with a coalition of black voters, middle-class suburbanites, and Southwest Virginia, but the cracks of the New Deal coalition in Southwest Virginia were already showing at other levels. Republicans had taken control of the Virginia House of Delegates in 1999, which allowed them to draw new lines for the 2001 elections. That year, Democrats lost 4 seats from the region in the Virginia House of Delegates — 1 to population loss through redistricting, and 3 to Republican replacements. This was only an intermediate stop in a long, slow decline for Democrats from Roanoke and Martinsville on west.

In 1992, Democrats held 14 of 16 Southwest Virginia seats in the House of Delegates. Today, they hold only 1 of 13, with Delegate Sam Rasoul of Roanoke holding onto the last seat, and a total of three seats gone to the winds of redistricting, pulled out by explosive population growth in the Northern Virginia suburbs, and pushed out by sluggish growth and decline in Southwest. With local offices serving as the bench for the Democratic team, an increasingly urban party is reliant on increasingly urban recruits.

SWVAHouse

One seat, the 4th District, is currently vacant, as Delegate Ben Chafin was promoted to the State Senate, replacing State Sen. Phil Puckett (last seen under investigation for possibly trading a resignation for a job and daughter’s judgeship, a scandal that Mark Warner managed to get entangled in).

Sam Rasoul is not the only one who could begin their bio with “The last Democrat in Southwest Virginia” in their chamber. State Sen. John Edwards is now the last Democrat in Virginia’s upper chamber from the region.

Virginia’s political future has long featured sharp differences between presidential years and off years. As rural strongholds of the FDR coalition are lost, Virginia Democrats are now almost exclusively reliant on strong minority turnout and fickle suburbanities. This strategy of running up the score in urban areas has kept Democrats in control of all 5 statewide offices (Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and both Senate seats) but leads to a structural disadvantage in downticket legislative elections. Thanks to this divide, Virginia can be considered a Democratic-leaning state in Presidential elections, with hollow success downticket.

Inefficiently packed in majority-minority and urban districts that are 60% or 70% Democratic, Democrats are forced to rely on increasingly difficult rural seats. Where you win doesn’t matter in statewide races, but it can tip the balance in single-member district legislatures.

Mark Warner was the last Democratic recruit of his kind, a Northern Virginian who could win big in Southwest Virginia. For Virginia Democrats, the future is bright for urban-based Democratic recruits who can run up the score in urban areas on the way to statewide victory. But as all victories in politics do, it comes with a tradeoff: as voters become better sorted in parties, Democrats in the countryside face increasingly long odds.


The Pilfering Pelicans of Cedar Key

The pelican is a peculiar creature. Cedar Key, Florida, a sleepy vestige of Old Florida on the Gulf of Mexico about an hour southwest of Gainesville, is home to the smartest and stupidest pelicans in the world.

Cedar Key, Florida

The smart pelicans have learned to quietly hover around the fishing docks and wait to be fed, or at least wait until the catch is off the hook before attempting to snatch it. The stupid pelicans snatch at the fish as it is reeled in, swallowing the fish, the hook, and as much fishing line as they can down until they are rescued. Fishermen were then faced with the choice of letting the (stupid) pelicans choke or retrieve the still-intact fish from their throats, unhook it, and then feed it to the poor bastard while the smart pelicans watched.

Cedar Key, Florida

I was in Cedar Key to try the clam chowder at Tony’s Seafood Restaurant, which went to New England and won several chowder competitions. This is a tall claim, not unlike going to Bordeaux and promoting your wine, so I had to see for myself. Few things taste as good as they do in hazy childhood memories like the chowder at Bob’s Clam Hut in Kittery, Maine, slurped up after a long day of digging aimless canal systems in the sands of York Beach (I was a strange child), but memories cannot actually be ladled out in front of you. Bob’s chowder was more of a clam and fish broth than a chowder, where it lacked thickness it gained a buttery richness packed with deliciously briny essence of clam. As someone who adores the flavor of unrestrained clam, I drank it right out of the styrofoam cup with a packet of oyster crackers. Spoons are for wusses.

Cedar Key, Florida

I was only disappointed that I had not gotten the larger size (and that they didn’t have oyster crackers, but hey, hazy memories). Tony’s believes in a thick, creamy chowder that could hold its own as a meal, with a balanced, well-seasoned clam flavor. While they’re famous for their chowder, their other offerings cannot be overlooked. Florida is a land of shrimp and oysters, with clams more prevalent further north. Cedar Key’s clam farms buck this trend.

Cedar Key, Florida

The fried shrimp sandwich may seem to be the most simple, pedestrian fare, but there is a wide gulf between greasy mediocrity drenched in tartar sauce and succulent, perfectly fried shrimp that steam when you bite into them and hold onto their breading. It starts with jumbo shrimp that hold their moisture as they are fried just long enough to be cooked, at a temperature high enough that oil does not seep into them. Breading enhances shrimp’s natural sweetness, a flavor note that comes only when they are fresh enough. The breading should be thin, a protective layer of seasoning between the oil and the meat, not a massive wall that envelops and overwhelms the shrimp. This sandwich passed all tests.

Cedar Key, Florida

The railroad that terminated at Cedar Key is long gone, destroyed by Union forces during the Civil War. The Florida Railroad once ran as the first cross-Florida line between Cedar Key and Fernandina Beach, another quaint island beach town on Florida’s other shore that I lived in for the 2012 cycle. The pelicans run the show now.

Cedar Key, Florida


Christie at the Bridge, a poem.

The outlook was quite brilliant for the Jersey Rs that day,
The polls stood two to one with barely six weeks left to play
But Chris Christie came to town and asked for an embrace,
A sickly silence fell upon the Fort Lee’s mayor’s face.

And now vindictive rage came hurtling through the air,
And Christie’s staff looked at their phones in haughty grandeur where
With fury in their fingers and vengenace in their eyes,
“Traffic problems in Fort Lee!” went out the hue and cry.

There was ease in Christie’s manner as the road closed lane by lane,
There was pride in Christie’s swagger as he deflected all the blame.
And when, responding to the cheers, he blustered to the press,
No stranger in the crowd doubted that he could clean this mess.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore.
“He did it! Christie did it!” accused press from their stands;
But few would dare believe him, then Christie raised his hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Christie’s visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; the rumors he bemoaned;
And yet the rumors swirled, and the feds came to take a look;
But Christie still ignored it, Chris Christie is no crook.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land, the sun is shining bright
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout.
But there’s no joy in Trenton–mighty Christie has struck out.

Casey at the Bat