McSally Doesn't Represent Me

Tuesday night was the second rally that I attended this year. The Rally To Stop Trumpcare featured Phoenix-area Congressman Ruben Gallego, who I found to be a good stem-winder speaker. Congressman Gallego stepped out from his own district to come speak in this, Martha McSally's, district. The stated reason was that he had to come here to answer questions for McSally since she is (as caricatured below by a rally attendee) afraid to face Tucson voters.

The rally was held in the auditorium of Rincon High School, which is on the east side of town, about three miles from where I used to live when in the Air Force here. Many times over the last forty years I had caught a distant view of the airplane-hanger-like structure on the north side of the school grounds. But this was the first time inside. I got there early enough to grab an aisle seat only about 1/4 of the way back. Later it looked like the back rows were as packed as those up front, and there were also a lot of people standing along the walls. So I would say attendance was easily 700 or more.

On the way in:

Unfortunately I forget the name of this group of lady singers. They have been a political fixture in Tucson for years. The man who has briefly joined them is Bruce Wheeler. He is an experienced state legislator who announced his candidacy to oppose McSally next year. I spent much of the time in the auditorium admiring his skill and persistence at working the room informally. I was surprised not to see other announced/potential candidates doing the same.

The title of this post is from a sticker that I picked up at the rally, and that is now on my bumper.

Rally For Refugees in Tucson

There have been other resistance rallies in Tucson over the past few weeks, but yesterday's was the first one that I attended. I was happy to see and hear Tucson's RC Bishop Gerald Kicanus speak at the event.

The Bishop's admonition about fear (he was of course preaching to the choir) could have been written by FDR. The other faith-leader speaker at the event was a local rabbi, who can be seen seated in the middle of the back row. To the rabbi's right is a young man who arrived as a refugee from the Middle East about six months ago.

The rally was organized by a local grassroots group called "We The People." They do facebook, which I don't do, so it's fortunate that they also gathered contact information the old-fashioned way. Being the tall guy in back I was among the first to reach the sign up sheets. Many others were in line behind me.

Although the event itself was apolitical, I can't resist some local, national and international political observations. First, there is Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik, who is seen in the top picture standing in the background with hand on hip. He was elected eight years ago as a Republican, benefitting from that party's venomous attack ads against an incumbent for whom I had knocked on a lot of doors in midtown Tucson four years earlier. Since then Steve had a "Road to Damascus" conversion. So technically, his support of the rally was as an Independent. Republican watchers of the Supreme Court might consider Kozachik to be Tucson's David Souter.

Secondly, as a "hanging on by a thread Catholic," I blame the Catholic Church in America for Donald Trump's election. There are a lot of good, strong Catholics like Bishop Kicanas, but they make up minorities: among the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in the pulpits and in the pews. The majority simply tune out the minority, instead chanting the talking points of the church of Fox News and Bannon. The rabbi at yesterday's event, in quoting Jeremiah's faith in God caring about migrants, did not feel he needed to add "but we need to consider other viewpoints."

Still, the situation with the Catholic hierarchy and the news media in the United States is not as dire as in Hungary. Since my grandparents were immigrants from Hungary, I regularly read Hungarian Spectrum, Hungarian Free Press and Budapest Beacon. A priest in Hungary advocating for migrants, in opposition to government propaganda, received a severe admonition from his Bishop. Interestingly it seems that although many people in Hungary who are disenchanted with their government have also lost faith in traditional opposition political parties, there is still spontaneous enthusiasm there about issues. It will be interesting to see if the issue enthusiasms can break through, in Hungary and in the United States.

Coming Spring Wildflowers

Repeated rainfalls this winter (e.g., tonight, more next weekend) could make for abundant spring wildflowers in March. I took this picture out near Kitt Peak when my parents were visiting way back in 1978.

This year since October 24 I've received a little over 3 inches. That total is nothing to get excited about; in most winters most of that would have fallen in just two or three big events. But this year's rain (so far, not counting tonight or next weekend) has been spread across 13 distinct events, each no more than half an inch. Between events there have been many very dewy mornings. Last year up to this point was similar, except for the dewy mornings, and except that last year's three-inch-plus total for the same period was concentrated in just two big events. As I recall last year, unlike this year, there were several windy airmasses that thoroughly dried things out between events. Also last year the rain mostly shut down after early January; between January 7 and March 7 there were only two events, which produced a total of 0.15 inch. This year's mid-to-late January will certainly be better. Just hope the seeds did not all get a false start last year.

Not Four Years

I was wrong (Monessen post in June) expecting that in the kinds of places where I grew up there would be enough wives voting to save the country from a Donald Trump administration.

I agree with Josh Marshall's TPM opinion that the corruption will be endless; all Americans should be afraid of and on watch for that. The Trumps' professions of noble priorities will divert some attentions for a period of time, but the diversions will not remain effective for most people for four years.

Fall Rain

Nice rainbows from about 5:30 - 5:45 PM last evening, near the end of and just after a dump of about half an inch. A faint secondary bow can be seen near the furnace exhaust stack. A short time before this photo, while it was still raining, both bows extended fully off to the northeast.

Tucson airport (misspelled Tuscon at the weather.gov site) has now had 1.29 inches so far in September. (Mine now stands at an even 2 inches.) My post last year discussed the September-plus-October rain for TUS. I won't repeat that, except for a short listing of a few data points already plotted in that post, limited to just the years where the previous winter had been a strong El Niño. The numbers (October Oceanic Niño Index; September plus October Rainfall, inches) are the same as described and plotted in last year's post.

Year	ONI	Rain
1958	0.5	1.42
1973	-1.7	0.00
1983	-0.6	9.26
1992	-0.1	0.97
1998	-1.2	1.34
2016	-0.5	1.29+

This year's October ONI is based on the CPC consensus forecast--currently expecting borderline neutral through the fall and winter. The year 1983 did in fact see a lot of rain in September-October, and it did follow an El Niño winter, but by October of that year the ONI was about where it is now expected to be this year. Nevertheless, it has become a legend about September-October 1983 that it was an El Niño year.
Given that history, it's a bit surprising that so far this fall there have been no Tucson sightings of El Niño laggings. Although it's very unlikely that we could get a significant tropical system over the next ten days, after that there is a period of a few weeks when the potential is high for another tropical system to affect Tucson. If that were to happen, I predict an outbreak of laggings that will quickly escalate into a full epidemic of El Niño year!

Monessen

Though overshadowed by other news yesterday, there was a speech given in Monessen, Pennsylvania. The scene was bizarre, with Donald Trump standing amongst bales of scrap aluminum. I guess that making America great means bundling more scrap. Yesterday's event was held exactly thirty years since steel production in Monessen ended. (If there was a betrayal of workers' loyalty, it happened on Ronald Reagan's watch.) I don't know much about Alumisource, but I do know that the coke plant portion of the old steel mill is operated today by ArcelorMittal, is manned by United Steelworkers, and is fueling steel production (not scrap processing) in Cleveland. The Clinton campaign should counter by pledging continued bipartisan efforts to protect today's steel-producing jobs from foreign dumping.
Long ago I twice belonged to the United Steelworkers union, including a summer at Monessen's coke plant. Some memories about times that will never return:
There were about 14 of us college students hired for that summer. (Probably everyone had some connection. My connection was that my Dad served in the Air Force Reserve with the Human Resources manager for the steel mill.) We were hired to replace about 7 regular workers (including union leaders) who had been dismissed for organizing a work slow-down. I was worried that the year-round workers would resent this. But one of them assured me it was not a problem. An eventual ruling would reinstate the dismissed workers with back pay (he was right about that). In the meantime, they got the summer off, we had jobs, and the union had made the point that more workers were needed to safely satisfy production goals. I'm not sure it wasn't a game that all sides were playing all along.
There was extra pay (about 40 cents per hour) for laboring on top of the coke ovens. Staying cool up there meant moving fast, and I wasn't good at that. But on hot humid days, the older guys would decide that job wasn't worth it. So it passed down to the guy with the lowest seniority. Hot humid days outside here in Tucson feel like those days on top of the coke ovens, except that here there is always air-conditioned comfort to look forward to inside.
I was working the evening that Richard Nixon delivered his resignation speech. We were taking a scheduled break, in a space at the center of the coke-oven batteries. There was a radio. The music stopped, and a news special report was being introduced. One of the regular workers, a younger guy not much older than me at the time, looked at his watch and noted that it was time to get back to work. He was right. But the crew chief saw my disappointment and said, No, this is important. We have to listen to the beginning of this. So we listened to the first few sentences of the speech, and then got back to work.
I imagine that the guy who was looking at his watch may be voting for Trump in November. But his wife will be voting for Hillary.

Will Tucson Get Beyond The Middle?

[Update March 30: Tucson didn't even make it to the middle.] Back at the end of September, I showed a scatterplot of the combined total November through March precipitation at Tucson airport for each of the previous 66 years versus the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI, defined by the Climate Prediction Center) for January, i.e. for the middle of each of those five-month winters. I noted back then that, of the eight previous winters for which the January ONI was greater than +1.0 (i.e., moderate-to-strong El Niños), all eight of those winters were in the upper one-third of the five-month precipitation totals. Below is the same plot, but now with an additional point, labeled 2016 so far.

What can be said for this strong El Niño winter is that at least this year's five-month total won't be in the bottom one-third (assuming that we'll get at least a third of an inch between now and the end of March). [Didn't happen! Only 0.11 inch from mid-February through March.] After the jet breaks under the West Coast ridge near the end of next week, it would not be too crazy to hope for an inch of rain in the last week of February, and then another inch in March. That would put the five-month total just barely above the middle 1/3—comparable to the 1957-1958 El Niño winter, but not even as good as last winter, and nowhere near the 1997-1998 winter that might have been dreamed of.
(The Tucson total precipitation since October 1, 4.59 inches, is still almost an inch above normal. But half of this year's since-October-1-so-far total fell in the month of October.)