Stephen Jaffe is Running for Congress in San Francisco vs. Rep. Nancy Pelosi

If you want to take out corporate Democrats, look no further than your backyard, San Franciscans. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is the embodiment of a political machine that values winning – and the money that helps folks win regardless of values – above all.

That’s why I’m working with Stephen Jaffe, a 46-year career civil rights attorney and first-time candidate who stands for progressive values:

• Restrain U.S. military adventures
• Pass single payer health care
• Women’s health and right to choose
• End the school to prison pipeline
• Protect cities from gentrification
• Police brutality
• Fight global warming
• No more dirty energy subsidies
• Stop dirty corporate money
• Campaign finance reform
• $15 minimum wage
• End homelessness
• Decriminalize mental illness
• Abolish mandatory arbitration
• Ensure integrity of the courts
• Protect religious rights, and the right to no religion
• Protect animal rights
• End superdelegates
• Fund the Arts
• Free and open internet

San Francisco, let’s help this Berniecrat see Adachi/Gonzalez style support in taking on the legacy of the Brown-Burton machine before it gets another generation.

 

Tonight’s Debate Winner? Jim Lehrer

I was trying to figure out what happened to the audience. Since I missed the first three-four minutes, I now see that Lehrer chided them to keep it quiet. And they listened. Then he chided the candidates to talk to each other and not the camera. Then he stayed out of the way, asking good solid questions and keeping the candidates in line. One weak question – right as I was tweeting about his mad skills – How likely do you think we are to have another 911? … It’s nice to have a debate where we aren’t left talking about the moderator. Lehrer is one of the few newsmen out there who is about the news and the facts without wanting it to be all about him, and it really showed after so many of the poorly moderated debates this cycle. All in all, we didn’t really learn anything new about our candidates, and their performance was tame compared to the drama on Capitol Hill (Paulson on one knee before Pelosi, really?). But shout out to Lehrer, tonight’s MVP.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial

On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi became the highest-ranking U.S. official to ever visit the A-bomb Memorial in Hiroshima. I am intensely proud of Speaker Pelosi – sad only that a sitting U.S. president has never made that visit, and hopeful that one soon will. … I visited the memorial in early 2002. The visit was a crucial element in my rebirth as a peacenik in the months leading to the Iraq war. … The memorial’s themed exhibit while I was there was in remembrance of the “Mobilized Youth,” the children who were working on war projects in Hiroshima when the bomb fell. The image above is a child’s uniform pieced together from scraps left in the blast zone. … The memorial was full of letters writen by the parents of these children who were working for their country far from their homes, many of whom lived a short time before succumbing to the effects of the radiation:

“Five or six of us pulled a large cart to take Naomi’s body back home. All the way back I was speechless, stricken by the horrible change wrought on her.

“Having fought many battles in China for four years, I thought I had seen the extremes of human misery. However, the heartrending sight of noncombatant women and children suffering tragic deaths was simply unbearable. The next day, in the midst of all the turmoil, we held a hurried funeral for Naomi in a crematory.

“We must swear in our hearts never to repeat such a tragic and pitiful war again.”

On one wall inside an exhibit was this poem, “Flower of Summer,” by A-bomb survivor Tamiki Hara (1905-1951):

“This is a human being.

Look how the atom bomb changed it.

Flesh swells fearfully.

All men and women take one shape.

The voice that trickles from swollen lips

on the festering charred-black face

whispers the thin words,

‘Please help me.’

This, this is a human being.

This is the face of a human being.”

Never again.