Author Archives: Fe Bongolan

About Fe Bongolan

Planet Waves writer Fe Bongolan lives in Oakland, California. Her column, "Fe-911," has been featured on Planet Waves since 2008. As an actor and dramaturge, Fe is a core member of Cultural Odyssey's "The Medea Project -- Theater for Incarcerated Women," producing work that empowers the voices of all women in trouble, from ex-offenders, women with HIV-AIDS, to young girls and women at risk. A Planet Waves fan from almost the beginning of Eric's astrology career, Fe is a public sector employee who describes herself as a "mystical public servant." When it comes to art, culture and politics, she loves reading between the lines.

(R)evolution

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I am going to be up front right now: I am voting for Hillary Clinton for president. She wasn’t my first choice. Neither was Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley.

My first choice for President was Elizabeth Warren.

Warren got my notice because she was wonky enough to be smart and savvy about regulating the big banks, and put away the investment schemers who profited by betting on people’s failure to pay ballooning mortgage debt from subprime loans. She created an agency of the federal government — the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau, which is an FDR-and-Teddy-Roosevelt-type of government watchdog invented to protect us from further financial malfeasance by banks and predatory loaners.

In the highest compliment I can give her, Elizabeth Warren is a brilliant public servant. A policy wonk. Competent. Cool-headed. Compassionate. Thoughtful. These are my prerequisites for presidents, Congresspeople, community leaders, bosses and colleagues in my professional life — we who work in the underbelly of The Beast, aka government. She is an effective leader with vision and goals who knows how to accomplish them; and if she doesn’t know, she will learn all she can to attain her goals.

If she ever decides to run, now or in the future, I would be an early adopter for Warren. When Warren indicated she would not run last year, and Bernie Sanders took up her political mantle, I gave a listen. After a few months I decided that neither Clinton nor Sanders would get me to commit time, money, energy and even more hours sitting on my butt blogging on political websites. I am in enough exercise hell right now working to burn off the blog butt developed over a year-and-a-half of blogging for Kerry, and another two years blogging for Obama. In 2016 I decided it was time to let the candidates come to me.

I remember the “inevitable” Hillary at the second Daily Kos 2007 convention in Chicago. She didn’t interest me. By then, Barack Obama was the thing — savvy, personable and smart as a whip. From that day forward, I was the model of the early adopter. And the thought of electing the first African American president in my lifetime was a political holy grail.

Eight years later, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge. I am not disillusioned with Obama the way so many liberals and progressives are. I came to my senses after the Tea Party takeover of Congress in 2010, realizing the Office of the President is only a third of what it takes to move the government Beast. When Obama took office, there were environmental, economic and social Superfund sites created by eight years of predatory business practices, corrupted office holders in state and local offices, and a White House damaged from the abuse of power by the Bush-Cheney years. Massive problems had to be corrected. Obama could not sail our ship fast enough towards the change he promised. That ship was run deeply aground.

Bernie Sanders had my heart for getting the issues plaguing us diagnosed — the vast income and wealth disparity that is dissolving the middle class at the edges — but how would he implement that change? With an obstreperous Congress and Senate refusing to govern, let alone change how we govern? What steps would he take under those circumstances?

As much as I am casting an ambivalent vote for Clinton — and am very wary of support by the 1% of her candidacy — on social issues, education, health and welfare she and Sanders are closely the same. She can handle the crossbows the Republicans will aim at her. She’s taken those arrows for years already.

The optics of Bernie’s campaign prior to the New York primary last week were heart-breaking and sobering: a very bad interview with the New York Daily News the week before April 19; his dismissal of Southern states and their African American majorities that went for Hillary; his still predominately white demographic among his supporters as evidenced from the results of the New York primary; and campaign manager Jeff Weaver’s plan to dissuade superdelegates from going for Clinton at the convention, even though Clinton has exceeded Sanders in the popular vote. These are all quite disconcerting. You need people of color — the backbone of the Democratic Party — to turn out and vote for you if you plan to run for President.

I would vote for either Sanders or Clinton before I vote for a Trump or a Cruz. But the likelihood of Sanders reaching the nomination look far slimmer after New York, and Clinton is polling well in the next primary states coming up. What are progressives who support Sanders’ message going to do? Should they stay home in November?

Earlier this week, Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos wrote that he wished Bernie and Hillary could mash up together as one candidate. One with vision to set the course to lead our ship, and one with the experience to move with determination through our Byzantine political system, to get needed legislation through that changes all our lives for the better.

Many progressives want the change we need to come faster. Which is what a revolution does. But there’s a catch: how do you dismantle a system so enormous and plugged into the many interests that sustain government yet are corrosive to democracy? Is it a cold-turkey withdrawal? Is it a strategic take-down of intrinsic elements? And then, what happens to the most vulnerable in the meantime?

Along with the lobbyists for corporate interests such as oil, coal, hedge funds and the military industrial complex, there are lobbyists for the environment, education, organic farming, sustainable energy, women’s reproductive freedom, fair minimum wage and equal pay. Who will stay? Who will go?

Watching how our government works right now is like looking at time-lapse photography documenting the transformation of a normal person to a meth addict. Not a pretty progression. With this current do-nothing Congress it gets uglier by the minute. A government that does not function is useless. Social Security checks need to be cut and sent. National parks need to be maintained. Roads needs to be repaired. Public safety employees, such as in FEMA, need to be paid.

That means elected representatives need to make and pass laws and approve budgets, not put up yet another vote to make abortion illegal or repeal Obamacare. They need to confirm the replacement for the vacancy on the Supreme Court. They need to re-evaluate our gun laws so more innocent lives are spared. If there’s anything that needs to change first, it’s that government needs to function well again for the people who need it most.

That leads me to the mashup word of (R)evolution. This goes beyond the presidential election of this year, and leads us through to the coming time when Pluto begins its slide out of Capricorn and into Aquarius. Then the real fun begins. This current government took close to 250 years to create, and it’s still re-creating itself. As we can all agree, it’s also still in a pickle.

But it’s going to take consistent participation in voting our interests not only now and two years from now, but another two years after that and then some to make the changes we need. That’s exactly what the Republicans did starting with the day Nixon resigned in 1974. Elections should not stop at the office of POTUS. One President cannot change everything. We need a hero/ine in the office of president, but more so we need to be heroes and she-roes ourselves. Locally, statewide and nationally.

Bernie may lose the nomination, but his message needs to be foremost for the Democratic Party’s platform and all the way down the line. Keeping Sanders’ vision alive in the Democratic Party platform is my priority. Even though I will be voting for Clinton in the general election, we need to get her ship to move more left. And we most definitely need to focus on down-ticket races to create a Congress that will move progressive ideas through, that will pressure the Oval Office to do more, and that will get their fellows across the aisle to DO THEIR FREAKING JOBS. We’ve got to fill that vacancy in the Supreme Court.

The Spring Reading is now published. Order all 12 signs here or choose your individual signs here for immediate access. You may listen to a free audio introduction here.

The Spring Reading is now published. You may order all 12 signs here or choose your individual signs here for immediate access. You may listen to a free audio introduction here now.

These seem like small, incremental changes, but like Citizens United, one ruling can change all our lives, for better or worse, and for years to come. We need the ‘little’ changes that add up to the big change and we need to keep our eye on the ultimate revolution — the Big Change — of a nation governed by us and for us: a truly representative democracy.

It’s a founding concept of the union. In reality, it’s a theory that’s nearly 250 years old. Time to update it to meet the 21st century’s technological standards, and our world’s massively larger population and needs.

Whether you like your transition with an “R” for Revolution or an “E” for Evolution, the results will be the same, and as the old spiritual says: “When the lord gets ready — you gotta move!” We need to inculcate in our culture from kindergarten on up that voting is a privilege. One to be enjoyed as a healthy habit, like eating more carrots or hopping on the spin bike for 35 minutes.

We’re all going to need us to vote now, two years from now in down-ticket races, and more — for school boards, governors, state legislators and local councils and boards. We need to do this for a future we can create together, for the health of our nation and our democracy. Beyond Sanders and Clinton, we need to put a face on our collective future. That face is ours.

See you in the comments below.

Touching the Wound

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I finally got some real down time and recouped sleep lost during two solid months of theatrical production. The dinner I planned for Brandon and his housemates, as I mentioned last week in “Too Close to Home,” went beautifully. I even cleaned out my refrigerator and I’m starting work on the closets.

This week has given me a chance to reflect, not only on Brandon’s recent episode with police, but also on how other parts of Brandon’s life will now be altered because of his recent experience.

Then I began to think about what happens silently, secretly, behind the closed doors of our homes and in the confines of family, starting from the very beginning of our lives. I began thinking on various forms of trauma experienced in this country by most at various stages in our lives and in various forms.

As dramaturg for the Medea Project, I have had experiences that were both challenging and deeply rewarding. Getting someone to write about what happened to them is hard enough. Getting them to write on “The History of My Body” is another.

“The History of My Body” is the recurring theme of our last big production — “Birthright?” — in collaboration with Planned Parenthood, which opened for a two-week run in 2015. The stories ranged from drug abuse and running away from home as a child, to swallowing and burying the experience of severe child abuse. This is what Cassandra, a core member of our company who we met through University of California San Francisco’s Women’s HIV clinic, wrote:

I don’t have a lot of memories from my childhood which I am thankful for, but the ones I do have are painful — flashbacks of my body being touched without my permission. Why were these men and my own brother doing this to me? Where was everyone? Where was my mother?

I was afraid. I thought this was all my fault. I thought I must have done something to encourage this. Was it really an attack because I knew them? Was it actually rape since they were my parents’ friends and my brother?

As a result, I became pregnant when I was 12, and had to have an abortion. My head was spinning and I was physically sick. My mind could not comprehend this. In order to cope, I blocked it out as if it never happened. I shut down completely and decided I would never tell anyone about it. I could feel my body and myself and they were not the same.

I found with the rape that my body healed, but my thought process and inner core were deeply damaged. I blamed myself. I hated myself. I became severely drug addicted. Physical wounds were just the beginning of my struggle. I have emotional scars I’m not sure will ever go away. I try to heal the inner wounds, but new ones are always opened in the process.

Questions that could never be answered hung over my head. I questioned things that I did in order to be put in that situation. As a survivor of child abuse, rape, domestic violence, with an adulthood overcoming drug addiction and living with HIV, I don’t think I will ever escape the emotional scars earned from a childhood of physical abuse. To this day, I will never understand why they did what they did. All I know is that on that night in that moment, they forever changed who I am and how I view the world.

I could feel my body and myself, and they were not the same.

It took a long time for me to get to where I am today. I now know that there was nothing I said or did that caused them to rape me. No matter how well I knew him, or what our prior history was, they were the ones who made the decision. Not me.

From what I have seen in twenty-five years working with at-risk women, the cyclic pattern of abuse/self-abuse is connected — not only for the victim, but also for the perpetrators. What happened to someone that caused them to do something so heinous as to rape a child?

Find out what the Mars retrograde will mean for you in Eric’s 2016 Spring Reading. You may pre-order all 12 signs here for less than $40. Includes video readings!

For her own reasons, Cassandra did not do her piece for our “Birthright?” show in 2015. Since then she has mastered herself, and performed this piece recently in a short show we did last weekend under the theme “How I Cheated Death.”

Cassandra will also be doing it for our next show on trauma, the working title of which is “When Did Your Hands Become a Weapon?” She feels ready to exorcise this demon on stage. I am glad we’re there to provide her the safety net to do so.

Broadly speaking, there is the social trauma Americans are coping with from their treatment by the criminal justice system, and there’s the physical-psychological trauma that happens to young people of both sexes — including children and infants — in the home. I pose this question to you, our Planet Waves community: how far do you think the ramifications of trauma plays in our society, and ultimately out in the world? I think war and its havoc is not to be ruled out in this discussion.

I am asking this in the name of research for our next show, and to lay down some context based on Hexagram 37 from the I Ching — The Family, of which it is written: “The Family shows the laws operative within the household that, transferred to outside life, keep the state and the world in order.” Looking at our world today through the lens of experiencing trauma, how true is that? See you in the comments section.

Too Close to Home

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I digress from writing on national politics and the heat of the primary races to talk about matters close to home.

It was our last dress rehearsal for my recent show at Southside Theater in San Francisco’s Fort Mason. As we were putting costumes and cast refreshments away, I got a phone call from my downstairs neighbor, Brandon. His voice was quaking.

Brandon is a young, bright African-American scholar who is an assistant professor in queer literature at UC Berkeley. He was one of the first people I met when I moved into the apartment above him in our sunny duplex Edwardian home in the Elmwood District. Elmwood is an affluent neighborhood on the border between North Oakland and South Berkeley. It’s close to College Avenue and the Rockridge District. Elmwood is the district you want to live in due to its close proximity to BART (public transportation), grocery stores and trendy shops.

Grad students like Brandon flock here because it’s quiet. It’s a neighborhood of older African-American homeowners, young white professionals and their families, and students transitioning from grad school into the workplace.

Brandon and I adopted each other. Both my niece and nephew have moved on to their jobs and are building their adult lives. I have become Brandon’s surrogate mom, and have gotten to know his other roommates well. I’ve taught Brandon how to cook oxtails and paella, and we’ve baked apple pies together. Always making a bit too much for myself — I found Brandon and his roommates a welcome audience for my cooking and companionship. I think they like the steadying influence of a strong maternal energy nearby. My place is another home for them. They are good kids who I feel safe with knowing they’re around.

When I got a call from Brandon at 10:30 pm on a Thursday night, my heart tightened. The quivering in his voice asking me “if I knew what happened” filled my heart with a faint feeling of dread. I sat down on the steps outside the theater, girding myself to listen.

“I was in the bathroom, and I heard a pounding on the door. Then a crashing of glass from the front door. I could hear a group of people breaking into the house. I thought, ‘they’re breaking in and they’re going to kill me.’ I locked the bathroom door and crawled out the window to escape. Luckily I found the pipes running down the side of the building that gave me some footing. I held onto them as long as I could, then fell onto the easement.”

He continued, a tremble in his voice. “There were eight police in the house, they found me and pinned me down with a foot on my back. I could not move. I had to keep breathing to stay calm, as my parents instructed me to do. Two had clubs and another a gun pointed at me. I thought I was going to die right then and there.”

The police asked him about a former roommate whose girlfriend was implicated in a sting operation aimed towards a third — an illicit dealer in pot. Just before they left, they finally gave Brandon the warrant. Knowing both of those young women, I couldn’t imagine how this could get so far and go so violently.

When I got home, I invited Brandon up to my place, which was untouched thanks to his clearing me from having any knowledge of the alleged “illegal” activity. I had no idea what was going on. I took out two shot glasses and my three-quarters full bottle of gold tequila and we sat down to debrief.

He seemed calmer, and I was glad that I was there. It took three tequila shots to get him to completely relax and able to get to sleep. It took two shots for me to calm down myself. He recounted everything that happened, and with his literary mind the description was harrowing.

Face down on the ground, he was surrounded by cops who — with just the right amount of hair-trigger motivation and the thrill of a “collar” from a big bust — could have ended his life right then and there. Neighbors who we all knew were watching. And apparently the police were watching this house — our house — for months.

Fortunately one of our neighbors — the owner of the apartment building next door — called our landlady to tell her what was going on. She came in due time, attesting to Brandon’s legal tenancy, thus corroborating his story. Being a smart lady from Boston and a former head of the building inspection department, she started assessing the damage caused to her property, mulling the bill she would present to the city, and perhaps other actions stemming from racially motivated police brutality.

Brandon experienced what happened to professor Henry Louis Gates in 2009 while trying to enter his own home in Boston: harassment by police. Thank God it did not escalate to where he could have been dead due to a series of blunders caused by utter stupidity, hot-headed thinking, the adrenaline-driven rush of having so much weaponry at your fingertips, and an alarming willingness to jump on anything and anyone suspicious. Particularly if that someone is black.

Find out what the Mars retrograde will mean for you in Eric’s 2016 Spring Reading, which we'll publish in mid-April. You may pre-order all 12 signs here.

Find out what the Mars retrograde will mean for you in Eric’s 2016 Spring Reading. You may pre-order all 12 signs here for less than $40. Includes video readings!

It was another moment in time for Black Lives Matter and it happened at my home. My heart still aches because of it. But it reminded me of how important it is to be open to your neighbors, to establish community and care about what happens to you and around you.

Talking over the fence with the apartment owner next door, I thanked him for giving our landlady the heads up. I promised him that if I see similar bullshit happening to him next door that we’d be just as aware and involved as he was for Brandon.

The downstairs front door is still boarded up and our landlady is putting time into the carpentry repairs for damage that a gang of eight police officers can inflict on a home.

This weekend, I’ve set aside some time to make dinner for Brandon and two of his other roommates. It’s been my promise to him long before the police break-in. I’m going to put every last bit of love that I can into this meal, making it something to enjoy, savor and remember, hopefully blotting out the stain of violence that disrupted our lives last month. Time is precious. So is life and living it. For some of us in this country, the wolves so often meander too close to home.

You Can’t Look Away

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I love this presidential campaign season — especially on the Republican side — in the way that one loves watching dogs fucking. I’m horrified as in “Ewww,” and “Oh-My-God!” and yet simultaneously, utterly fascinated. You can’t bring yourself to look away or even say “Stop It!” while it’s happening. Because the fucking serves a purpose. And, well, the dogs are having fun.

In Ted Cruz’s case, he’s allegedly having fun. Lots and lots of fun. A purported total of five mistresses have been involved and three have been identified in a scandal that took over the news cycle last Friday.

This scandal involves the staff of Cruz’s rivals which include two of Trump’s campaign staff: spokesperson Katrina Pierson; online communications staffer Amanda Carpenter, and Carly Fiorina’s employee Sarah Isgur Flores.

Granted, this news comes from The National Enquirer, a tabloid you pick up at the grocery store checkout line. So we always look with bemused skepticism at their covers because, let’s face it, a picture of another politician caught in an adultery scandal with a side article on a UFO alien abduction does not lend credence that you’re looking at serious journalism.

However, The National Enquirer does tend to get its adultery scandals right: Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, John Edwards — all notable politicians with a “woman problem” who were big scoops on the Enquirer’s colorful pages, and they made the mainstream media within weeks. The Cruz story has been hot on the news feed since Friday, surpassing the threshold of a 24-hour news cycle; so, therefore, it looks as if the story’s got legs.

For those of you in our international readership, let me break this down. This all started the week after the solar eclipse, a week before the March 22nd Utah primary when an anti-Trump political action committee — in hot pursuit to take down Trump’s march to nomination inevitability — posted a nude picture of Melania Trump on Twitter.

Trump retaliated by posting side-by-side comparison shots of Heidi Cruz at her worst, and Melania looking every bit a Vogue model. Cruz fired back, saying Trump had insulted “the love of his life.” A Twitter war ensued.

Then last week, the Enquirer published what we now know has been old news on the campaign news circuit: Mr. Cruz apparently liked doing his staffers. Both Pierson and Carpenter were formerly on Cruz’s staff before joining Trump’s campaign. Cruz immediately suspected Trump, whose friend is editor of the National Enquirer.

Not to be outdone in this scandal clusterfuck, Pierson, acting as Trump’s spokesperson, went on a “defensive offense”, accusing Heidi Cruz of being a Bush operative. So now everyone of note running for the Republican Presidential nomination is in on this war of accusations: Jeb, Donald, and Ted.

Find out what the Mars retrograde will mean for you in Eric’s forthcoming 2016 Spring Reading, which we’ll publish in mid-April. You may pre-order all 12 signs here for under $40.

But it gets even better. Today, Cruz’s five alleged mistresses accused Marco Rubio — one of the Republican candidates who recently suspended his campaign after losing his home state of Florida to Trump — of planting the story.

So, now, we have everyone-and-their-mama accusing each other in a five-way shootout in the tabloids: the four principal nominees and the group of five mistresses. The icing on the cake is that Ted Cruz is a hard line Dominionist who believes in the sanctity of marriage (between a man and a woman, of course), that contraception of any kind is an “abortifacient,” and even victims of rape and incest don’t have the right to terminate a pregnancy resulting from it.

Regardless of who planted the story, the lack of a response from Reince Priebus, the Chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), speaks volumes, and does so rather loudly. As of today, there is no response to the Cruz mistress scandal story, which is still hot after four days.

What does this mean? I speculate it means that a fifth player, Ohio Governor John Kasich, is being set up to run against Trump by the RNC. Kasich is more moderate than Cruz. And everyone in Washington — even his own party leaders — hates Cruz.

Kasich is an acceptable alternative now that Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush — the former RNC crown princes — have dropped out. Kasich could run as the establishment candidate against Trump, who the Republican fear will crater their party, causing massive political damage in congressional races.

Are you following this so far? If not, let me know in the comments and I will clarify.

Beyond all this scandal du jour from your trusty gossip columnist Fe-911, and beside relishing the doggie joyride I’ve had following this story, the moral underpinnings of the right wing are coming unglued right before our eyes, and their chief proponents exposed as hypocrites. And it really is a beautiful and massive clusterfuck of dogs. You just can’t look away from the splendor of it all. But the moral of this story really is: don’t start shit the week between eclipses. There’s hell to pay, especially for dogs of the homo sapiens variety. Isn’t that right, Ted?

Help Wanted

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In the fall of the 2008 US Presidential election campaign, some of our European friends emailed to ask if they should come to California to help do phone banking for Obama.

It was an amazing and touching communication to receive, and so much in the spirit of Jimmy Carter’s global democracy project, which monitors freely held elections in countries around the world. After eight years of Cheney-Bush, the rest of the world — not only the US — needed change. They helped so that we could do the right thing and kick out the neo-conservatives who ruined the country and de-stabilized the world.

Therefore, in 2016 I politely ask that if you are interested in saving America from itself, can you come over and do this again? I am sure there are a lot of sensible Americans willing to put you up, in thanks for the help. Me included.

I am not certain that we are capable of having a reasonable debate in 2016 as to who will replace President Obama and sit in the catbird’s seat of the free world. Not while the center-left and far-left of this country are in a raging battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, and the far-right is battling to sell the soul of the entire nation to the devil.

I’d say we’ve qualified as bat shit crazy right now, before the nominees are even selected. Even reporters from Breitbart.com — a conservative news website — are being attacked at Trump rallies. In Chicago, protesters forced the Trump campaign to cancel its event. At a Trump rally in Kansas, a young Muslim student was assaulted by Trump supporters.

We are not helped by the fact that Trump’s chief rival, Ted Cruz, is only slightly less worse. Although his rallies lack the Nazi book-burning fervor of Trump’s, Ted Cruz is the 21st century’s Tomas de Torquemada. A real Bible-thumping Dominionist. And he is so despised by his own party that some of his Senate Republican colleagues stated off the record they would vote for Clinton if Cruz was the nominee.

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Once the primary process is done and the nominees from both parties are clearly identified, the steep path towards the convention and the general election will be fraught. How do you reason on political issues when your opposition is willing to come at you with pepper spray, racist taunts or a pair of fists?

This seems more like the 1816 general election instead of 2016, and with more advanced crowd control and surveillance devices. And I think the 1816 election — still so close to the Era of the Enlightenment — was far more civilized, or so history books claim.

But what this plea for help really is about is a call for us to remember what we’re doing, as we look through the lens of history. What are we becoming in this phase of our development? How do we respond to our country’s social and economic crisis, as well as the crisis in our relationship with the rest of the world? How did we lose our way, and when will we find our way back?

If you have any thoughts on getting us out of the dark woods we find ourselves in, please write, email or give us a call.

What If…?

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Let’s take this column with a grain of salt. But — and this is a big but — what if Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton put Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on the ticket as her Vice-President? This is a possibility I read about this morning on Talking Points Memo — the website published by Washington insider Josh Marshall, a credible expert on American politics.

The idea of a Hillary-Bernie ticket could be construed as speculation at this stage — called a weather balloon in politics — but it’s a high floating one, and its intent is quite visible to the naked eye: the idea was floated by Tad Devine, the Sanders’ campaign chief spokesperson.

You might say Devine’s suggestion is “desperation politics” and you might be right. After Super Tuesday, Clinton’s delegate lead looked insurmountable, 200 or more ahead of Sanders by conservative count. Even with Sanders’ wins yesterday, it still is. In order to surpass Clinton, Sanders would have to do better than 60% in the upcoming primaries. That is no small task.

Bernie seems to do well in states with mostly white populations, and his hold on the less populated states in the Northeast and Midwest is steady. He won New Hampshire, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Vermont and Maine. But Hillary has won Iowa (close tie), Nevada (close tie), Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Massachusetts, and Virginia; and her delegate lead, assuming her super-delegates stay steady, puts her firmly in front.

The March 8 primaries include Michigan and Mississippi, states with heavily African-American populations. This is a demographic where Hillary is the strongest, and Sanders is having a hard time convincing this demographic of his sincerity. African-Americans form a principal backbone of the Democratic Party.

Conversely, Hillary has a problem convincing educated and progressive whites and young people, particularly Millennials, of her sincerity. Her ties to the banking industry, her 1% donors, and — let’s face it — her Neptunian proclivity to obfuscate instead of clarify her responsibility for her mistakes all leave her open to attack by her opponents. In short: emails.

Yet none, including the vicious Republican Benghazi Committee in Congress have been able to penetrate Clinton’s resolve. In the words of one panel member after her grueling hearing in October of last year: “She is formidable.” Most pundits, including Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, project that by March 15, the Democratic candidate will be clearly identified. At this point that would be Mrs. Clinton.

Which begs us to peruse Mr. Devine’s “suggestion.”

1) The Supreme Court vacancy due to the death of Justice Antonin Scalia is THE fulcrum upon which the future direction of the country — extreme right of center or progressively leftward — hangs in the balance. In the event that President Obama cannot place his nominee on the bench because of GOP obstruction in the Senate, Democrats must win the White House AND a majority in the Senate. To confirm a SCOTUS justice who would tilt the court towards a more favorable climate for women’s reproductive freedom and towards separation of church and state, and ultimately overturn Citizen’s United, Democrats will need a Senate majority.

2) Like it or not, Hillary’s foreign policy experience matters. People in this Cancerian country like to feel safe, with a strongman/woman at the helm. There is still a large swath of our population suffering under the hangover of 9-11, and ISIS is the new (manufactured) enemy.

3) Bernie as a senator would be fine, but if his is an isolated voice in the Senate with no chance of a Democratic majority to give him back up, he would remain isolated. HOWEVER, as Vice-President in charge of presiding over a Senate with a Democratic majority or a tie because of “coattails” — the momentum to elect Democrats for congressional seats from a strong top ticket — his could be the deciding vote that would overcome a senate stalemate. There are currently 24 Senators up for re-election this year.

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4) Given the calculus of demographics favoring each candidate, the joint ticket would unite north and south, east and west of the country. The enthusiasm from young and old, people of color and whites could be tremendous.

5) As Eric pointed out to me, “Hillary needs guidance and a high-quality leash” to keep her in check. With Bernie’s populist message and the hopes of young people who would rather stay home than vote if he isn’t on the ticket, that could be a deciding factor in Hillary’s veep selection.

And, frankly, Bill should stay out of her ear as much as possible.

BUT, in order to win, as Moulitsas says, “all Democrats have to vote.” So we’re not off the hook. Mr. Devine’s “suggestion” does have merit — less so for keeping Sanders’ candidacy alive but more so for keeping the Democratic Party intact. Bravo.

Obama and Clinton laid down the hatchet and worked together to unite the party after a grueling and vicious primary season in 2008. Who’s to say that can’t happen again? But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s see what tomorrow’s primaries bring in the states of Michigan and Mississippi on the day of a massive eclipse. A lot can happen in the next 24 hours. Cross your fingers and breathe.

Must Be the Season of the Fish

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It’s always a pleasure to see how astrology works in the realm of popular culture, be it sports, politics or the arts. We know this quite well here at Planet Waves. Thanks to the wonder of the Aquarian Internet, we can marvel first-hand at how the Sun and the planets work in our day-to-day lives at any given moment.

For those of you who aren’t into sports, here in the San Francisco Bay Area is an athlete by the name of Stephen Curry. He plays the position of point guard for our basketball team, the Golden State Warriors.

To say Steph is an athlete is like saying the Dreadnoughtus schrani is a lizard. Mr. Curry, who is six feet tall and 180 pounds, leads a four-man front nicknamed “the Death Squad,” which no major contending team in the National Basketball Association has been able to beat. Witness Curry’s shot in last Saturday’s game against the Oklahoma City Thunder — Golden State’s biggest league rival and a playoff contender.

At the last three seconds of the game, he calmly lobbed a perfect arc of a shot from field goal range — thirty-five feet away from the basket — breaking a tie at the last ten seconds of a game already in overtime, earning three points. When the ball fell gracefully into the net like a hot, crispy biscuit, the Warriors won a game they were previously losing all night. Did I mention Curry is a Pisces? He’s a Pisces with Mars near conjunct Pluto in Capricorn, but a Pisces nonetheless.

Fish know no boundaries. In fact, they dissolve them. Previous sports records don’t matter. What the elder statesmen of the NBA say to discount his achievements on Twitter doesn’t matter. Even his own season record of 288 nearly impossible three-point shots — which surpasses his previous death-defying, heart-stopping tally of game-winning shots in the last two seasons — doesn’t seem to matter at all. Here is an example of how our suppositions about demure and unassuming Pisceans are shattered. Curry is a reality-dissolving magician.

The Sun in Pisces also seemed to help Scorpio Hillary Clinton take the state of South Carolina convincingly. As much as I still have deep reservations about the possibility of her winning the Democratic Party nomination for the Presidency, she was at once maternal, strong and in command at her victory speech Saturday.

I felt watching her that she made a strong case for herself as a person who simultaneously cares and can take command. We know this to be true of Hillary regardless of this victory — which is probably why she appears as such a threat to the male-dominated power base that has had the stranglehold on the country for three centuries. She was doing that as First Lady while Bill was President, which is why Republicans continue to despise her to this day.

They will throw more stuff at her no doubt; but for Pete’s sake, the woman is a freaking Scorpio. You know, the kind of water that bears down hard and hot on ragged rocks, wearing them smooth. She also — as we in government here in San Francisco describe it — has 657 sharp knives waiting in her coat pockets that she can use on you at any given moment, as was the case in the congressional Benghazi hearings held October of last year.

And of course, what better way to end this paean to the season of Pisces — the fishes — than to focus on the Oscars: the annual awards in the US for the best illusions created for our national and international consciousness. A winning day for another Scorpio — this time it was Leonardo di Caprio — for his performance in The Revenant.

I have to hand it to Aquarian Chris Rock for taking and running with the #oscarssowhite meme that hung over the Academy of Motion Pictures all night. In fact, I heard the show was peppered with uncomfortable moments for its mostly white and affluent audience of stars, starlets, producers and directors.

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I am sure the Academy knew they had to take their lumps, on the next-to-last day of Black History Month no less. The optics of the awards ceremony were not looking too good. The absence of black nominees in performance and production was remarkable.

Rock saved their Academy’s collective asses by his ribbing. Maybe because of this, well-done and earnest films like Creed and Straight Out of Compton won’t be passed over. One can hope they pay attention to what they did, and to what just happened, and will do something about it.

Film is a fluid art form, flowing with the ease of the waters that Pisces swim in so effortlessly. What better medium to begin changing minds and hearts? Let that water flow.

Super Tuesday is coming tomorrow, so you can count on Judith Gayle and me to lend a hand in analyzing the next big wave that’s about to move over us. Stay tuned and chime in. See you in the comments below.

Of Heroes, Sheroes and Choices Before Us

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We are six days from the South Carolina Democratic primary. Bernie Sanders took New Hampshire, and Hillary Clinton won Nevada. Both are at a virtual tie in Iowa. Super Tuesday — with 12 primaries in varying southern states, as well as Massachusetts and Minnesota — looms before us.

I still haven’t made a decision on who to vote for. But before we discuss voting preferences on the Democratic side in 2016, I want to go over the last time we faced such a period of social momentum: the 1960s.

I have been lucky enough to witness five Democratic presidents in office. During the last Uranus-Pluto aspect of the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was the social spur in the side of the establishment. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, or LBJ, strong-armed congressmen and senators to yield to vote for legislation creating the Great Society. Under his administration civil rights was signed into law banning racial discrimination in housing, public facilities, interstate commerce and the workplace. Republicans weren’t as rabid as they are now, and Democrats were far more conservative then.

Under Johnson, public broadcasting, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, the arts, urban and rural development, public services, and the “War on Poverty” was started. The Voting Rights Act banned certain requirements in southern states used to disenfranchise African Americans. With passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, immigration was reformed, removing all racial origin quotas and replacing them with national origin quotas.

From today’s lens, it was a miracle that a former senator from Texas (a southern state) was able to move legislation to bring about the Civil Rights Act and Medicare. But the miracle had to have public pressure from below to make the rafters of Congress shake and make progress. Johnson was strongly supported by his own party and was assisted in part by the growing economy fueled by World War II and the Cold War.

The world LBJ created with his legislation became the third rail — an integral fixture of American government along with Social Security. This is the foundation that the Republican Party — slowly and from the ground up — has been working to dismantle. It started with the tax revolt that paved the way for the Reagan Era, the chipping away of voting rights, and even disabling a progressive agency started by the Nixon Administration — the EPA.

At every turn, Republicans took advantage of their time in the White House and Congress to nominate Supreme Court Justices who reflected their conservative aspirations. With each appointment, they achieved greater mainstream viability for their views and agenda — while us poor, dirty hippies and black and brown folks faded into the background, or were sent to prison.

Which brings us to today, 2016, with all of us pushed against the wall. Even with a Democratic President in his last year in office, we have a Republican majority in Congress — and now, with Scalia’s death, a deadlocked Supreme Court. This is a structure not built to last; instability is imminent. If the push is not from the inside, the outside will do the work. Therefore, the use of the word “revolution” as used by the Sanders campaign is something we cannot take lightly.

Not with the forces we are pushing out against. The conservative movement started slowly, assembling after Nixon’s resignation to prevent that from ever happening to a Republican president again. That movement is now a powerful, established base that has not only gerrymandered congressional districts — with the aid of a conservative Supreme Court — but infiltrated school districts, governor’s offices, city councils, libraries, commissions, as well as local and regional courts.

Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 was a coup d’etat that Republicans hope to repeat again in 2016 with Hillary’s emails and Benghazi brouhaha. With Sanders, all they have to do is touch a filament on this spider web they have woven with the message of “socialist” to keep the whisper campaign against him hot, scaring the bejeezus out of gun-toting, Bible-beating conservatives in small towns across the US.

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There is a reason why the current Democratic leadership — the Democratic National Committee (DNC) — is as wary of Sanders as the nominee as the Republican National Committee is of Donald Trump. Trump has the charisma and money to buy the election and screw the base that Republicans took decades to build. There is a Republican majority in Congress to support him.

Sanders followers are highly wary of the DNC because they represent the corrupt establishment. Yet it is there the foundation of a Democratic agenda and platform, built by Howard Dean, can take place in congressional, senate, regional and local elections. Ground up. It is there that a necessary congressional majority can be built for either Democratic nominee. Will the Democrats be as splintered as the Republicans are becoming? Time will tell.

A revolution needs everything. From sewing needles to yard signs, weekly organizing meetings to coffee, cookies and pizza for phone bankers to make things happen. And not just for presidential elections, but for midterms, governor’s races, city councils, and government commissions. Not just this year but next. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and enthusiasm can get it started; but persistence must sustain it if we want to see the changes we yearn for now.

So my choice today is to see what happens in South Carolina and the rest of the states next Tuesday. My choice is to see who remains standing so that together we can start a long march down the road of sanity to bring this nation and planet to the future we all deserve.