Monthly Archives: November 2013

Seven score and ten years ago

November 25, 2013 – 12:16 pm

A democracy — that is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people

— Theodore Parker, “The American Idea” (1850)
(Parker was a correspondent of Lincoln’s law partner Bill Herndon)

This week’s featured post: “6 American Problems Republicans Aren’t Trying to Solve“.

This week everybody was talking about anniversaries

Tuesday was the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. The NYT’s Disunion blog has been following the Civil War “as it happened” with a 150 year time lag. Its coverage of the Gettysburg Address emphasized how the speech’s meaning has changed through the decades.

At first, the world really did “little note nor long remember” what Lincoln said.

By the 1890s, however, when the Gettysburg Address finally entered America’s secular gospel, most people conveniently forgot what Lincoln actually attempted to convey in his brief remarks.

During that early-Jim-Crow era, the address was interpreted as a generically patriotic honoring of the war dead. The “new birth of freedom” was played down, and the speech was read at Blue/Gray veterans’ reunions commemorating the heroism of soldiers on both sides.

It would take several decades before the modern civil rights revolution compelled most white Americans to reacquaint themselves with the ideological aspects of the Civil War. In so doing, they would come to rediscover a speech that was first forgotten, then remembered and finally, a century after its delivery, understood.

Friday was the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. For many people in my generation, JFK’s assassination is the first news story we remember.

I was in second grade, and my grandfather had died just a few days before. The assassination happened on Friday. Sunday after church my family gathered at my grandparents’ house to discuss what my grandmother should do next. The grown-ups had their serious conversation in the kitchen, and they parked me in front of the TV in the living room, where I watched Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald.

When I ran back to the kitchen to tell people what had happened, no one believed me. I was confused, they explained. Oswald had killed Kennedy; no one had killed Oswald.

Culturally, the assassination marked the real beginning of “the Sixties”, a period of generational rebellion when all received wisdom had to be re-examined. For me personally, the lesson came through loud and clear that first weekend: You have to trust what you’ve seen with your own eyes, and not what your elders tell you.

and a deal about Iran’s nuclear program

Saturday, an interim deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program was announced. Slate’s Fred Kaplan assesses it as

a triumph. It contains nothing that any American, Israeli, or Arab skeptic could reasonably protest. Had George W. Bush negotiated this deal, Republicans would be hailing his diplomatic prowess, and rightly so.

It’s a six-month agreement in which western nations unfreeze some of Iran’s assets and Iran takes certain steps to make its uranium stockpile less threatening. During those six months, the nations hope to negotiate a permanent deal. If they don’t, the agreement expires. Kaplan says it’s

a first step. In a year’s time, it may be seen as a small step and a brief, naive step at that. But for now it’s a step rife with historic possibilities; it’s a step that should be taken with caution but also with hope and gusto.

and the Senate’s metaphorical nuclear option

The ongoing abuse of the filibuster should not be news to Sift readers. I’ve covered it here and here, as well as considering the larger issue of how we are slowly losing the cultural norms that make our republic work.

Thursday the Democratic majority in the Senate finally did something about it: eliminated the filibuster on nominations other than the Supreme Court. After Senate Republicans blocked all three of President Obama’s nominees to the D. C. Court of Appeals on the grounds that they didn’t want that Court’s current balance between Republican and Democratic appointees to change, Democrats really had no choice. As Salon’s Brian Beutler explained:

It would be an act of political negligence, and of negligence to the constitution, for [Majority Leader Harry Reid] to allow the minority to nullify vacant seats on the judiciary, simply to deny the president his right to leave an ideological imprint on a court. The logical extension of the GOP position — that “there is no reason to upset the current makeup of the court” — is a semi-permanent suspension of all appellate and Supreme Court confirmations.

So rather than asking why Reid finally did what he’s been threatening for years now, the better question is: Why did Minority Leader Mitch McConnell push him over the edge? Republicans probably could have gotten away with continuing to nudge Obama’s nominees further to the right. (They’re already pretty moderate now. None represents a radical revisioning of the Constitution comparable to Bush nominees like Janice Rogers Brown.) But simply revoking Obama’s constitutional prerogative to appoint judges was an obvious slap in the face, just one step away from the Birther position that Obama isn’t really president. Obviously Democrats couldn’t let that stand; so why do it?

Beutler believes that the recent ObamaCare-rollout-related dip in the Democrats’ favorability has encouraged Republicans to believe that they’ll retake the Senate in 2014.

Getting Democratic fingerprints on the nuclear rule-change precedent, will provide Republicans the cover they’ll need to eliminate the filibuster altogether in January 2015.

Even if that turns out to be the case, the filibuster needs to go. It has become part of the larger conservative strategy of minority rule (outlined here), which has been undermining the foundation of the American republic. If Republicans gain short-term power by winning elections, so be it. In the long run, they are trying to hold back the tide, which they can only do by ruling from the minority with tactics like the filibuster.

Let’s give Ezra Klein the last word:

Today, the political system changed its rules to work more smoothly in an age of sharply polarized parties. If American politics is to avoid collapsing into complete dysfunction in the years to come, more changes like this one will likely be needed.

Mitch McConnell’s response to the nuclear option showcased the new Republican style of argument: Every point ends “because ObamaCare”, no matter how stretched the connection might be. It’s like Cato’s “Carthage must be destroyed.”

McConnell argued against the nuclear option like this:

Let me be clear: The Democratic playbook of double standards, broken promises, and raw power is the same playbook that got us Obamacare.

Similarly, Eric Cantor invoked ObamaCare to explain why the House won’t vote on the Senate’s immigration reform bill:

We don’t want a repeat of what’s going on now with Obamacare. That bill, constructed as it is by the Senate, last-minute-ditch effort to get it across the finish line … let’s be mindful, Madam Speaker, of what happens when you put together a bill like Obamacare and the real consequences to millions of Americans right now, scared that they’re not going to even have health care insurance that they have today come January 1.

And Senator Cornyn dismissed the Iran nuclear deal (discussed above) as a distraction from ObamaCare.

Speaking of minority rule, that’s what’s behind this crazy idea that is popular among conservatives, but flying below the radar of the general public: repealing the 17th Amendment, the one that lets the people elect senators rather than having them chosen by state legislatures, as they were until 1913.

ALEC, the corporate shadow government behind recent moves to suppress the vote, break the public employee unions and pass stand-your-ground laws, hasn’t gotten fully behind a repeal, but wants to chip away at the 17th Amendment by allowing legislatures to add nominees to the ballot, circumventing state primaries.

Whether you want to repeal or just sandbag the 17th Amendment, the point is to gerrymander the Senate. The reason Republicans control the House isn’t because the voters want them to. (Democratic House candidates got 1.3 million more votes than Republicans in 2012.) It’s because Republican legislatures in many key states (like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) have drawn House districts to segregate Democrats into a few districts. Similarly, the districts of state legislators can be gerrymandered, which is probably how a blue state like Michigan can have large Republican majorities in its legislature.

So if the 17th Amendment were repealed, a gerrymandered legislature could pick the state’s senators. So long, Democratic senators like Carl Levin (re-elected in 2008 with 63% of the vote) and Debbie Stabenow (59% in 2012).

and George Zimmerman

I feel vaguely ashamed of my interest in the further adventures of George Zimmerman. The important issues are racial bias in the justice system (I outlined the evidence of it here) and laws that encourage citizens to shoot each other (Ohio‘s House just passed one Wednesday by a 62-27 vote), not what kind of guy Zimmerman is.

But here’s why I find Zimmerman’s run-ins with the law so hard to ignore: During the trial that acquitted him for killing Trayvon Martin, the right-wing and left-wing media painted two very different pictures of Zimmerman. Right-wingers presented Zimmerman as a public-spirited man who just wanted to keep his neighborhood safe. Left-wingers (like me) saw him as a violent man who went out looking for trouble and found it.

We were right.

Monday, police arrested Zimmerman in a domestic violence incident, the second such run-in (with two different women) since his acquittal. He has been charged with assault.

What’s striking are the two 911 calls, one by his girlfriend to get the police to come, and the other by Zimmerman after the police arrive but before he lets them into the house “because I want people to know the truth”.  In his call, Zimmerman concocts a story in which a conversation about his girl friend’s pregnancy (which she denies) leads to her “going crazy” and destroying stuff. Why she wrecked her own stuff and then called the police on herself is unclear.

Ta-Nehisi Coates sarcastically comments: “It may well be true that, against all his strivings, trouble stalks George Zimmerman.” Coates then lists all the strange coincidences that hypothesis entails. The parallel with his claim that Martin attacked him is obvious. Also with the claim that Zimmerman’s ex-wife’s iPad got smashed in the September incident because she attacked him with it. (iPads are such popular weapons, after all.) And that her father’s glasses got broken because he threw them down before charging at Zimmerman. (“He knows how to play this game,” Zimmerman’s girlfriend told the 9-11 dispatcher Wednesday .)

Whatever happened with Trayvon Martin, Josh Marshall renders the clear verdict about Zimmerman’s character:

Zimmerman is a liar and a habitually violent and frequently out of control man who should never have been allowed to possess a gun.

Miniver Cheevy takes it one step further and compares liberal and conservative intuitions. The same pre-trial Zimmerman/Hannity interview that conservatives found so compelling gave him the creeps:

Watching that, to my eye, it’s obvious what kind of person Zimmerman is. I know that guy. He has no self-doubt. He could have done what I described and rationalized himself as being in the right, no sweat.

Conservatives, he writes, “are dead suckers” for that Oliver-North-style “earnest self-righteousness”.

Liberals have a deep-rooted skepticism about [earnestness], because we think that one needs self-doubt to check one’s self. … [C]onservatives are far too credulous about it, which makes them too supportive of the smug and self-righteous. And they never seem to learn.

and you also might be interested in

John Boehner tried to make a stunt out of his attempt to sign for ObamaCare. But then he succeeded. Probably got a good deal, too.

There’s a new world chess champion: 22-year-old Magnus Carlsen of Norway. His resemblance to Good Will Hunting is just a coincidence, despite the April Fool’s article a few years ago that claimed Matt Damon as Carlsen’s American cousin.

Magnus or Will?

The First Thanksgiving story is a little less heart-warming from the other side.

I get embarrassed whenever somebody posts a map of the states that haven’t accepted the federal government’s offer to expand Medicaid. Most of them are where you’d expect: in the South and the Great Plains. But there’s a little island of hostility to the working poor in the Northeast: Maine (where the legislature has passed Medicaid expansion, only to see the state’s Tea Party governor veto it) and my own state of New Hampshire.

New Hampshire got hit by the Tea Party sweep of 2010 worse than most states. For two years we had one of the most far-right legislatures in the country, with the power to override the governor’s veto on many occasions. Fortunately we reversed that in 2012, with Democrats regaining control of the House and getting the Republican Senate majority down to 13-11.

Well, this week the Senate Republicans held together and rejected Medicaid expansion 13-11.

From a state’s point of view, this is free money. The federal government is committed to pay 100% of the cost for three years and 90% thereafter. By shrinking the number of uninsured people who show up in emergency rooms, Medicaid expansion lowers costs for both the state and its hospitals. By helping people stay out of bankruptcy — medical bills are among the primary causes of bankruptcy — the program benefits a state’s economy across the board.

And the primary beneficiaries are the working poor, people who ought to have everyone’s goodwill. We’re not talking about the stereotypic bums who want a free ride. Medicaid expansion applies mainly to people who make 100-133% of the federal poverty line: up to $30,675 for a family of four in 2012. In other words: households juggling several part-time minimum-wage jobs, and probably working harder under worse conditions than most of the rest of us.

Arkansas and West Virginia are enlightened enough to see the sense of Medicaid expansion. New Hampshire isn’t. The shame, the shame.

The Christian Right isn’t just anti-science, they’re also anti-history. Alternet’s Amanda Marcotte lists “5 Christian Right Delusions and Lies About History“.

and let’s end with something moving

Sabadell is an old city in the Catalan region of Spain, not far from Barcelona. In the public square, a girl puts a coin in a hat to see what a frozen cellist will do. She gets a whole orchestra.

I’ve pointed to musical flash mob videos before. I find them wonderful and inspiring. They act out the old fairy-tale theme: If you start something, unexpected help may show up.

But as the “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” scene from Cabaret shows, that primal human power can work for either good or evil. Where does a generation of children first grasp the viral magic of the larger community: in the creation of beauty and wonder, or in the transmission of hatred and destruction? That’s one of those underlying cultural questions that determine a country’s political future.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

6 American Problems Republicans Aren’t Trying to Solve

November 25, 2013 – 11:22 am

You can’t compromise with people who aren’t working on the problem.

Compromise is great when it works, but it only works in a certain setting.

You can compromise with people who want to solve the same problem through different means. American households do this all the time. You can compromise with your spouse on what car to buy, because ultimately you both want to drive something. Similarly, the kids need a school, we have to live somewhere, we all want to eat something for dinner … so the details will work out somehow.

But without that sense of a common challenge, negotiations have nowhere to start. If I don’t think my drinking is a problem, if one of us wants children and the other is happy without them, if we disagree about whether monogamy is a good idea — those are the kinds of things marriages founder on, because without recognition of a common problem, you can’t both win.

The same thing is true in politics. Mainstream pundits never tire of writing pox-on-both-your-houses columns that praise bipartisanship and compromise, but compromise is impossible when only one side wants to solve the problem, or admits there’s a problem at all.

Historically, slavery was like that. Skillful politicians managed to work around the edges of the conflict and so delay the confrontation for almost a century, but ultimately Northern abolitionists thought slavery was a problem and Southern slaveowners didn’t, so there was nothing to talk about. One side or the other had to lose.

Once you recognize that pattern, the current stalemate in American politics makes sense. Because increasingly, the United States faces problems that Republicans either deny or would rather not solve.

1. Americans without health insurance. Prior to the Affordable Care Act, 47 million Americans had no health insurance, and perhaps has many as 30 million had “junk insurance” that would be useless in the face of a major illness. So if they got seriously ill, maybe as many as 1 out of every 4 Americans would have had to choose between not getting treatment and going bankrupt.

A Medicare-for-everybody system would have been the simplest way to solve that problem, but the conventional wisdom said that was too “socialist” for this country to swallow. So we wound up with ObamaCare, which isn’t a complete solution but will cut the numbers down considerably.

The Republican slogan about ObamaCare is “repeal and replace”. Since they took control of the House in 2011, Republicans have voted dozens times to repeal ObamaCare. But no Republican replacement plan has even come to a vote.

As for the repeal-and-then-we’ll-think-of-something option, remember that the Republicans had an alternative proposal to HillaryCare in the 90s. (That proposal is actually an ancestor of ObamaCare.) But as soon as they had disposed of the Democrats’ plan, they lost interest in any alternative. Expect the same thing this time, if Republicans ever succeed in repeal.

2. Climate change. Republicans don’t all agree on global warming. Some ignore the issue while others ridicule it. Some think it’s a conspiracy to establish global tyranny while others just think that all proposed actions are too expensive. But they all agree on this: Do nothing.

The exception that proves the rule is an NYT op-ed written by former EPA heads from past Republican administrations — back in the days when Republicans did occasionally try to solve problems. As you can see in the comments, they were quickly denounced as RINOs.  So was Jon Huntsman, the only Republican presidential candidate to take climate change seriously.

3. Decaying infrastructure. The occasional bridge collapse makes headlines, but every day Americans face delays and disruptions caused by worn-out or obsolete infrastructure.

We sit in traffic. When it rains, we lose power. Our cars wear out faster. Our internet is slower. And as for new technologies like bullet trains, smart bridges, or smart grids — who do you think we are, China?

The current situation is perfect for dealing with this problem: Real interest rates are negative, people are unemployed, and inflation is low. So borrow money to invest in the upgrades we need to grow our economy, hire people to fix stuff, and pay back (in inflation-adjusted terms) less than you borrowed. What’s not to like?

President Obama has made repeated proposals along these lines. The most recent was full of plums Republicans should like, like lower corporate tax rates. Its price tag was far lower than the $134-$262 billion per year that a bipartisan commission estimated we need. Republicans panned it as “tax-and-spend”; they made no counter-proposal.

Instead, the Ryan budget calls for cuts in all forms of discretionary spending, including infrastructure. When it came time to fill in the details, House Republicans were unable to do it.

4. Undocumented immigrants. Something like 11-12 million undocumented immigrants are currently in the United States. The existence of such a large class of people off the grid creates a wide range of problems, from security to public health. (Someday there will be another major epidemic, and undocumented disease carriers will be afraid to show up at hospitals.) Most of all, undocumented workers can’t avail themselves of the protection of police or the courts, so employers can exploit them at will. That atmosphere of exploitation makes it harder for documented American workers to claim their rights.

Some Senate Republicans, to their credit, took this problem seriously enough to join Democrats in passing an immigration reform bill. That was five months ago. In the meantime, the Tea Party dominated House has done nothing, and has no plans to do anything. Not only won’t Speaker Boehner bring the Senate bill up for a vote, in the unlikely event that the House passes an immigration bill of its own, he says “Frankly, I’ll make clear we have no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill.”

Once again, Boehner is not holding out for some alternate solution, so there is no deal he could be offered.

5. Gun violence. A Reddit subgroup is keeping a list of all incidents in which four or more people are shot. So far in 2013, it’s up to #320. So this year we’re averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of one mass shooting a day.

Sandy Hook was almost a year ago.  At the time, it seemed inevitable that at least some changes would result. Maybe renewing the assault weapon ban that lapsed during the Bush administration. Maybe mandating smaller-capacity magazines, which would have saved lives at Sandy Hook and probably Tucson as well.

Maybe universal background checks for gun buyers, a policy that polls around 90%. (Huffington Post tried to find anything that would poll that high. Only ice cream met that standard. Kittens, apple pie … nothing else was as popular as universal background checks.)

What did we actually get out of Congress? Nothing. Even background checks died in a Republican Senate filibuster.

But maybe there’s a different Republican approach to limiting gun violence, one that ignores the gun-control approach that has worked so well in Australia. Nope. Nothing.

6. The shrinking middle class. The American middle class used to be the envy of the world. It didn’t just happen, it was the result of policies that started with the Homestead Act and really took off with the New Deal: minimum wage laws, protection for workers forming unions, a social safety net, anti-trust laws, and tax policies that limited the accumulation of wealth.

The result was that median family income roughly tracked productivity growth … until the end of the Carter administration, when a new consensus started forming around de-regulation and supply-side economics.

That consensus was cemented by the Reagan administration and Bill Clinton ratified it. So now we have a situation where the median household income is declining (down 6.6% since 2000), monopolies and monopsonies are increasing, and almost all the growth in the economy is being captured by the very rich.

You can’t even get Republicans to talk about this long-term problem, or to acknowledge that income inequality is a problem at all. Their proposed solutions to the economic problems they do recognize are to do more of what got us into this situation: lower taxes on the rich and on corporations, end the estate tax, more union busting, weaken the safety net, and so on.

Post-policy nihilism. Greg Sergeant and a few others have been referring to the current GOP mindset as “post-policy nihilism“. Making policy — having actual ideas and proposals about governing — is so old-fashioned. Just say no, propose nothing, and criticize the other party for refusing to compromise with you.

So the next time you read one of those both-sides-are-at-fault columns, ask yourself whether both sides have actual proposals. If one side does and the other doesn’t, then the two sides are not equally to blame. Before you can expect people to compromise with you, you have to tell them what you want.

That’s how it works in marriage. That’s how it works in government.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (2)

The Monday Morning Teaser

November 25, 2013 – 8:49 am

The blog seems to be under a spam attack, so I’ve been deleting comments by the shovelful. I apologize if any legitimate comments get deleted by mistake. [Hint: Make sure there are no mis-spellings in your first sentence. That’s a spam trait.]

The featured article this week will be “6 American Problems Republicans Aren’t Trying to Solve”. It points out the fundamental flaw in the pox-on-both-your-houses columns that big-name pundits keep writing: Whatever you’re working on, you can usually compromise with people who want to solve the problem by other means, but you can’t compromise with people who aren’t interested in solving the problem at all. Increasingly — on healthcare, climate change, and a host of other issues — that’s what Democrats are up against.

The weekly summary will note the anniversaries of the Gettysburg Address and the JFK assassination, point to the interim deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program (it’s too soon to tell whether it will work), and also examine the invocation of the nuclear option in the Senate, the further adventures of George Zimmerman, Will Hunting’s victory in the chess championships, and my shame as a New Hampshirite about Medicaid expansion, ending with a moving musical flash mob in Spain.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

Repetition

November 18, 2013 – 12:34 pm

They say the next big thing is here
That the revolution’s near
But to me it seems quite clear
That it’s all just little bits of history repeating.

— “History Repeating” by Alex Gifford
performed by The Propellerheads/Shirley Bassey (1997)

Understanding today’s right-wing insurgency as a new phenomenon only weakens our attempts to defeat it. Grasping it instead as the product of a slow, steady evolution is our only hope of stopping the cycle before it repeats itself anew.

— Rick Perlstein “The Grand Old Tea Party” (2013)

This week’s featured post: The ObamaCare Panic.

This week everybody was panicking about ObamaCare

The discouraging thing wasn’t that conservatives were pushing bogus horror stories, or even that the mainstream media wasn’t debunking them. It’s that Democrats began wilting under the pressure, just like they did before the Iraq invasion or when the fraudulent ACORN-pimp-video came out.

It sucks to have to defend people too spineless to defend themselves, but here goes: The ObamaCare Panic.

and talking about journalists who ought to be fired

As I mentioned last week, Laura Logan of CBS’ 60 Minutes has apologized on-the-air for her Benghazi report on October 27. But it was content-free apology that made no attempt to undo the damage. I agree with Josh Marshall’s assessment:

In a narrow sense, Lara Logan did say she was “sorry.” But the entire 90 seconds was aimed at obfuscating what happened.

Logan said 60 Minutes had found out Thursday that they had been “misled and it was a mistake to include him in our report.”

Include him in their report? He was the report. And even in conceding that her team had been “misled”, Logan tiptoed around the real news, which is that it seems clear that Davies’ entire story was a fabrication. He wasn’t there. So none of the stuff he [claimed to have done] could have happened and he cannot have witnessed any of what he claimed to describe.

So if you’re a 60 Minutes viewer, you saw a full segment on Benghazi that re-ignited a bunch of Fox News talking points. (Fox certainly saw it that way, mentioning the report on 13 segments totaling 47 minutes.) Then two weeks later — after you and your buddies at work had plenty of time to hash that out over the water cooler — you saw 90 seconds at the end of the hour indicating that not everything in that segment was completely correct.

A lot of people have compared this episode to the Bush National Guard report that ended Dan Rather’s career at CBS and got a few other people fired. But Rather outraged conservatives, not liberals, so the cases are completely different.

Another person who should maybe retire early is Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. He landed in a kettle of hot water by pointing out last Monday that the Republican Iowa-caucus or South-Carolina-primary voters Chris Christie might need to impress are a little different than the New Jersey general electorate that gave him a landslide victory. Such folks are “not racist”, Cohen assures us, they’re just different from East-Coasters:

People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.

I can’t improve on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ response:

The problem here isn’t that we think Richard Cohen gags at the sight of an interracial couple and their children. The problem is that Richard Cohen thinks being repulsed isn’t actually racist, but “conventional” or “culturally conservative.” Obstructing the right of black humans and white humans to form families is a central feature of American racism. If retching at the thought of that right being exercised isn’t racism, then there is no racism.

In deciding whether or not it’s time for Cohen to go, I hope the Post looks at the broader sweep of his columns. In addition to the column in question, here are the last month’s worth:

On November 4, Cohen discussed how watching 12 Years a Slave was an “unlearning” experience for him. Turns out, Gone With the Wind wasn’t a documentary and slavery was really bad! Who knew?

October 28, he connected the problems of HealthCare.gov to the administration’s “inept” and “incoherent” Syria policy (which appears to be getting rid of Assad’s chemical-weapon arsenal without war), the bugging of the German chancellor’s phone, and the souring of U.S.-Saudi relations, and concluded that President Obama’s may not be as competent as Cohen had thought. It took a whole column to say that, and if you can find any more content than I just put into one sentence, please tell me.

October 21, he realized (four months late) that maybe his original assessment that Edward Snowden “expose[d] programs that were known to our elected officials and could have been deduced by anyone who has ever Googled anything” wasn’t quite right. Ah, the shifting winds of conventional wisdom!

That’s a month’s worth of work in one of the most prestigious jobs in American journalism. I’m reminded of a Rodney Dangerfield joke: When a woman wants to break up with him, Rodney asks her, “Is there someone else?” And she replies, “There must be.”

and 2016

I’m going to break my moratorium on 2016 speculation for The New Republic‘s “Hillary’s Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren“. Noam Scheiber is making an analogy between Hillary Clinton’s front-runner status now and her similar position in the 2008 cycle. Then, a successful insurgency was possible because she was on the wrong side of the Iraq issue. Now she’s too aligned with the 1% and Wall Street, which makes her vulnerable to a challenge from somebody on the progressive side of that issue, like Elizabeth Warren.

I agree with Scheiber’s scenario this far:

  • I love Elizabeth Warren. If the gods let me appoint the president, she’d be high on my list.
  • Along with his continuation of Bush’s war on terror. Obama’s Wall-Street-friendly policies have been the most disappointing part of his presidency. No Democrat is chummier with Wall Street than the Clintons, and nobody is in a better position than Warren to press that issue.
  • A lot of Democratic women (especially older women) felt robbed when Hillary was denied the 2008 nomination by a man. If that happens again I think we’ll have a problem. So (as much as I also like Sherrod Brown) the 2016 not-Clinton Democrat ought to be a woman.

So yeah, there’s logic behind the Warren-excites-the-base-and-beats-Clinton scenario. But I’m not buying it for these reasons:

  • Obama barely beat Clinton in 2008. There’s no room for error.
  • Warren is not the campaigner Obama was. As good as her policies would be for the working class, her professorial style is not going to inspire WalMart Democrats.
  • Obama didn’t just rally the progressive base, he excited new voters among blacks, Hispanics, and the young. Clinton might be vulnerable among younger voters and the Occupy-types love Warren, but I don’t see Warren inheriting the non-ideological parts of the Obama coalition.
  • In 2008 Clinton was pinned down by her undeniable vote to authorize the Iraq invasion. But in the 2016 primaries she has lots of room to slide left on economic issues. Like Romney’s rightward slide in 2012, Clinton’s leftward shift won’t be entirely believable. But it should be enough to fend off a progressive challenge.

At some point in the cycle the press will be hungry for a Clinton-is-not-inevitable story, so somebody (maybe Warren) will be cast as the progressive savior. But I expect that boomlet to fade.

you also might be interested in …

The most insightful article I saw this week was Michael Kimmel’s “America’s angriest white men: Up close with racism, rage and Southern supremacy” on Salon. He studies white supremacists and finds that they are literally disinherited: They are the “& Son” from the business that went under, or the would-have-been heir to the bankrupt family farm.

They wind up with a worldview full of contradictions: Pro-capitalist but anti-corporate, rabidly patriotic  but “the America they love doesn’t happen to be the America in which they live.”

For ordinary white conservatives, class is a proxy for race. (“Welfare queens”, the “inner city poor” … we know who they are, right?) But among the white supremacists, race is a proxy for class. “Whites” are the people who actually make stuff (that the government collects and gives away to non-whites), not the bankers and lawyers and bureaucrats and intellectuals (even though most of those people are actually white).

So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They’re every white guy who believed that this land was his land, was made for you and me. … But instead of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them.

Eventually I’ll probably write something about all the Weimar Republic stuff I’ve been reading lately, but for now I’ll just say that the parallels are striking. In Germany of the 1920s, the “rich Jew” and “Jewish banker” stereotypes channeled class resentment into anti-semitism. It wasn’t “real” Germans who were oppressing the working class, it was “Jews”.

Ever feel like you need an expert panel to determine what’s racist and what isn’t? The Daily Show assembled one.

Ted Cruz’s Dad turns out to be a minister who is way wackier than Jeremiah Wright. If Cruz runs for president, will he face the same kind of pressure to disassociate that President Obama did? Somehow I doubt it.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan explains why he now believes the Warren Commission conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

As the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination approaches, you can expect more conservative efforts to claim that Kennedy was really one of theirs. But here’s what conservatives thought about him at the time. The following flier was being posted in Dallas prior to the President’s fateful visit:

The parallels to President Obama are obvious, right down to attempts to expand health care. Let’s hope things turn out differently this time.

The revolving door keeps spinning: Ex-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner becomes president of a Wall Street buy-out firm. I have no reason to believe this is anything other than perfectly legal and above-board, i.e., no quid pro quo for favors granted. But how could the pipeline from Washington to Wall Street not be a corrupting influence?

And let’s end with something amazing

What a spider looks like when you get really, really close.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

The ObamaCare Panic

November 18, 2013 – 10:13 am

Here’s what I like least about being a Democrat: Way too often, when the conservative media machine either exaggerates or completely invents an issue, our leaders — in the media, in Congress, and even the administration — wilt under the pressure. Rather than rather than defend good policy (or even defend reality sometimes), they start legitimizing the phony issue created by their enemies.

Remember the bogus ACORN pimp video? It was a fraud perpetrated by conservative “journalist” James O’Keefe, for which he and his partner ultimately paid an ACORN employee $150,000 in damages. But the truth came out only after Congress had been stampeded into passing a law  banning ACORN from applying for federal contracts. (Ultimately, a GAO investigation found no evidence that ACORN had mishandled federal funds.) ACORN was forced into bankruptcy and no longer exists. So Democrats in Congress assisted in destroying an organization whose main sins were registering poor people to vote and trying to raise the minimum wage.

Good job, guys.

Over the years panicked Democrats have authorized the Iraq invasion without looking too hard at the “intelligence” the Bush administration supplied, supported torture, abandoned a public option in ObamaCare even though the public wanted it, and given in to the idea that the deficit — and not creating jobs — is the top economic problem.

Remember when the Obama administration fired Shirley Sherrod? On the basis of yet another video doctored by conservative activists? Even Bill O’Reilly apologized for that one.

Just last spring, Democratic Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus proclaimed the IRS scandal an “outrageous abuse of power and a breach of the public’s trust” while Senator Joe Manchin railed: “The actions of the IRS are unacceptable and un-American. … The president must immediately condemn this attack on our values, find those individuals in his administration who are responsible and fire them.”

Yeah, that one was bogus too.

So now we get to ObamaCare. The HealthCare.gov* web site has been a problem and first month sign-ups were below expectations. That has created an atmosphere of trouble around the program, which the conservative media exploited by drumming up a bunch of ObamaCare-killed-my-dog stories. A lot of them have been fabricated from nothing, and most of the rest are exaggerations.

Small business. Sean Hannity devoted a whole show to “victims” of ObamaCare. A tiny amount of follow-up by Salon’s Eric Stern showed that none of Hannity’s guests were actually victimized.

First I spoke with Paul Cox of Leicester, N.C.  He and his wife Michelle had lamented to Hannity that because of Obamacare, they can’t grow their construction business and they have kept their employees below a certain number of hours, so that they are part-timers.

Obamacare has no effect on businesses with 49 employees or less. But in our brief conversation on the phone, Paul revealed that he has only four employees. Why the cutback on his workforce? “Well,” he said, “I haven’t been forced to do so, it’s just that I’ve chosen to do so. I have to deal with increased costs.” What costs? And how, I asked him, is any of it due to Obamacare? There was a long pause, after which he said he’d call me back. He never did.

There is only one Obamacare requirement that applies to a company of this size: workers must be notified of the existence of the “healthcare.gov” website, the insurance exchange. That’s all.

Fox’ Megyn Kelly did a similar segment on a car-wash-chain owner who claimed he sold his business because of ObamaCare. Stern again followed up. It turns out Kelly had asked for no information to verify the impact of ObamaCare on the business. Stern’s interview paints a more complete portrait: The guy had been thinking about selling out for several years, he didn’t like Obama anyway, and the prospect of figuring out how ObamaCare would affect his business gave him an aw-fuck-it moment. In short, not exactly a horror story.

Hannity claimed, “These are the stories that the media refuses to cover.” But in fact the stories that aren’t getting covered are the positive ones. TPM’s Josh Marshall is in the perfect position to cover ObamaCare’s effect on small business, because TPM is itself a 20-employee business. He sums up:

[A]t least on year one in New York State, Obamacare seems to basically be a wash for us in terms of premiums versus last year. However, it’s arguably saving us money since this will be the smallest year over year premium increase since we bought our first group policy back in 2005.

I’m sure Megyn Kelly will be featuring Josh on her show any day now.

Canceled policies. The whole point of ObamaCare was to solve two problems: Nearly 50 million Americans had no health insurance at all, and about another 30 million had bad insurance; they might be insured against a broken arm or something similarly minor and fixable, but their policies either

  • didn’t cover the health problems they were most likely to have (i.e., complications from pre-existing conditions)
  • or had benefit caps that made the policy useless in the face of a major health issue,
  • or the insurance company could cancel the policy if they had the audacity to get sick.

Consumer Reports tells this story:

Judith Goss, 48, of Macomb, Mich., believed that the Cigna plan she obtained through her job at the Talbots retail chain was “some type of insurance that would cover something.” When the store she worked at closed in January 2011, she even paid $65 a month to keep the coverage through COBRA.

“I was aware that it wasn’t a great plan, but I wasn’t concerned because I wasn’t sick,” she says. But in July 2011 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, at which point the policy’s annual limits of $1,000 a year for outpatient treatment and $2,000 for hospitalization became a huge problem. Facing a $30,000 hospital bill, she delayed treatment. “Finally my surgeon said, ‘Judy, you can’t wait anymore.’ While I was waiting my tumor became larger. It was 3 centimeters when they found it and 9 centimeters when they took it out.”

That’s what you should picture when you hear about canceled policies. Replacing junk insurance with real insurance is part of the good news of ObamaCare.

Of course if you don’t get sick, you don’t notice that your insurance sucks. Such was the case of Dianne Barrette, a Florida woman CBS found whose inexpensive policy is being cancelled. Her story went viral, so Consumer Reports looked into it:

“She’s paying $650 a year to be uninsured,” Karen Pollitz, an insurance expert at the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, said. “I have to assume that she never really had to make much of a claim under this policy. She would have lost the house she’s sitting in if something serious had happened. I don’t know if she knows that.”

Yes, President Obama did say “If you like your health plan, you can keep it” in response to the liars who claimed that ObamaCare was a government takeover that would totally disrupt everyone’s health insurance. (Herman Cain, a cancer survivor whose coverage as a millionaire CEO would have been completely unaffected, claimed ObamaCare would have killed him.) Clearly Obama overlooked the possibility that you might like your junk insurance because you’re an effing idiot.

The media is also overlooking the possibility that when insurance companies say they have to cancel your plan and your new plan will cost more because of ObamaCare, they might be lying. TPM reports:

Across the country, insurance companies have sent misleading letters to consumers, trying to lock them into the companies’ own, sometimes more expensive health insurance plans rather than let them shop for insurance and tax credits on the Obamacare marketplaces — which could lead to people like Donna spending thousands more for insurance than the law intended.

Real ObamaCare “losers”. The exception are these folks, a couple found by Pro Publica. Because they were in a risk group cherry-picked by the insurance company to be people who never got sick, their premiums were lower than any policy for the general public can be. Since there’s no way to solve the overall health insurance problem while cherry-picking the healthy for special rates, they end up being ObamaCare “losers”.

But a TPM reader who shares their “plight” puts his situation in perspective:

Having insurance, even crappy insurance, in the individual market means we are almost by definition, healthy and relatively young. If we were not, we wouldn’t be able to get coverage of any kind in the non-group market. If our ACA-compliant replacement policy costs us more, it’s likely because we’re too affluent to qualify for subsidies.

It takes a remarkable degree of self-absorption and sense of self-entitlement to be healthy, young(ish) and affluent—and yet consider oneself a “loser.” It’s a label I reject out of shame (no matter how much the lazy, superficial MSM want to fixate on me and my “plight”) NOT because there’s anything shameful about being a loser; the shame is in thinking oneself a loser when one is actually fortunate.

Again, the positive cancelation stories aren’t getting covered. This week, one of my FaceBook friends posted his experience:

I got the notice yesterday from Anthem Blue Cross that my insurance isn’t ACA compatible and will be cancelled. I’m one of the million or so Californians to have their insurance cancelled.

If I do nothing, Anthem will automatically switch me to a comparable (slightly better) plan. The good news – it will cost $265/month LESS than the old plan! Woo-hoo! I think that the difference is because I no longer have to pay the higher HIPAA premium rate because of my pre-existing conditions. Thank you, Obamacare.

Wilting Democrats. If you believe that the major news properties are liberal, you might expect a lot of front-page stories debunking the ObamaCare panic stories. Guess again.

The so-called liberal media has piled on to the anti-ObamaCare memes promoted by Fox News, like a front-page NYT story comparing ObamaCare to Hurricane Katrina. The best response I found was this chart:

But what about Democratic politicians? Surely they are outraged at the unfair coverage and are jumping up and down to defend good policy and debunk BS.

You don’t know many Democratic politicians, do you?

The drumbeat of (largely bogus) negative media is having an effect on public opinion. President Obama’s approval rating is down to 39% in one poll. So of course the Democratic response is to deflect the short-term public ire by undermining the long-term viability of the program.

So when House Republicans put forward a bill that would give insurance companies the option to keep offering junk insurance plans — because it’s all about the rights of big corporations, not people — 39 Democrats voted for it.

Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu’s bill to let individuals decide to keep their non-compliant plans is just slightly better, but Ezra Klein points out the problem

Put simply, the Landrieu bill solves one of Obamacare’s political problems at the cost of worsening its most serious policy problem: Adverse selection. Right now, the difficulty of signing up is deterring all but the most grimly determined enrollees. The most determined enrollees are, by and large, sicker and older. So the Web site’s problems are leading to a sicker, older risk pool. Landrieu’s bill will lead to a sicker, older risk pool.

And that means premiums will go up. Similarly, President Obama’s “fix” will let insurers keep offering non-compliant plans for another year. It’s hard to tell how many insurance companies will “uncancel” canceled plans or what this will do to the risk pool. But the general effect is also to address a short-term political problem by making the long-term policy problems worse.

The most annoying thing from my point of view is that this short-term-politics/long-term-policy tradeoff probably won’t even work. It never does. Instead, it will just add to the vague public sense that ObamaCare is a bad law, rather than the huge improvement on the status quo that it is.

I’m with Chris Hayes on this one: The only way out is through. For the Democrats, the best thing to do politically is to do the best thing policy-wise. Going wobbly on ObamaCare is not going to get you any conservative votes in the next election. What’s going to get votes for all Democrats is to make this thing work.

After all, Democrats in Congress, you’ve gone squishy before in the face of short-term bad publicity. Iraq. Torture. ACORN. How has that worked out for you?

* By the way, I finally decided to try out HealthCare.gov Saturday morning, and it worked way better than press reports had led me to believe. The response time was good. Without creating an account, I was quickly able to see sample plans and rates in my area. It was easy to create an account and input information about myself and my wife.

I stopped short of applying for insurance, because we like the insurance we get through my wife’s job. (And like the man said, we can keep it.) So I can’t vouch for the end-to-end process, which apparently was still having problems as of Friday. But if you need or want health insurance and the horror stories have been keeping you from trying to get it, you should definitely make an attempt and see what happens. Probably, you’ll at worst get to a point where you’re one click from success. And then at some point the back end will be fixed and you can go do that click.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (6)

The Monday Morning Teaser

November 18, 2013 – 8:09 am

This was a depressing week to be a liberal, because the party that is supposed to represent us went completely AWOL. I’m talking about Democrats from my own Senator Jean Shaheen to President Obama himself getting panicked by the barrage of largely bogus ObamaCare-killed-my-dog stories and putting forward “fixes” that undermine the overall policy. In the House, 39 Democrats even voted for a Republican plan to sabotage the risk pool.

In this week’s featured article, “The ObamaCare Panic”, I’ll draw the parallel to other times when Democrats have run for cover rather than defend their ground (or even just wait to see if the media hype is true): authorizing the Iraq invasion, firing Shirley Sherrod, piling on to the “IRS scandal”, defunding ACORN, and so on. Nobody looks back on those moments proudly, and they won’t this time either.

The weekly summary will cover the CBS-Benghazi and Richard Cohen gag-at-mixed-race-families controversies, the speculation about Elizabeth Warren as a challenger to Hillary Clinton, an up-close look at what makes white supremacism attractive (and who it attracts), The Daily Show‘s racist-or-not-racist panel, and a few other things.

I’m hoping to get the ObamaCare article out by 10.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

Governing

November 11, 2013 – 11:21 am

Sometimes I feel like our party cares more about winning the argument than they care about winning elections. And if you don’t win elections, you can’t govern. And if you can’t govern, you can’t change the direction of a state, like we’ve done in New Jersey.

— Chris Christie, 11-5-2013

This week’s featured articles: “Nobody’s a Moderate in the Republican Civil War” and “Bullies, Victims, and Masculinity“.

This week everybody was talking about election results

After decades of rule by Republican/Independents like Mike Bloomberg and Rudy Guiliani, New York elected a Democratic mayor by a landslide. Bill de Blasio didn’t just wear the Democratic label, he put forward a genuinely progressive agenda.

In New Jersey, conservative (not moderate) Chris Christie was the landslide winner.

Here’s what stands out for me about the Virginia governor’s race: not that the Democrat won or that the final vote was closer than expected, but that the Democrat won a low-turnout election.

Conventional wisdom says that high turnout favors Democrats, low turnout Republicans. (That’s why Republicans work so hard to suppress the vote.) And it plays out in Virginia: When Obama took Virginia in 2008 and 2012, he did it by pulling in people who don’t usually vote. About 3.7 million Virginians voted each time, compared to 3.1 million when Bush beat Kerry by 270,000 votes in 2004. In 2010, when there was no top-of-the-ticket election and Republican House candidates outpolled Democrats by 275,000 votes, only 2.2 million voted.

Again Tuesday, about 2.2 million Virginians voted. They elected Democrats governor and lieutenant governor, and the attorney general race is still too close to call.

If I were a Republican, that would worry me.

and Typhoon Haiyan

As many as 10,000 may be dead in the Philippines in “one of the most powerful typhoons ever recorded”. Haiyan proceeded on to make landfall in Vietnam. I know there’s some famous quote about the number of deaths a disaster needs to make headlines being inversely proportional to its distance, but my Google skills failed me. (If you know, write a comment.)

Here’s Haiyan as seen from space:

and Iran

Negotiations about Iran’s nuclear program ended without a deal. It’s not clear how seriously to take claims of “significant progress”.

and the NFL, race, and masculinity

The Richie Incognito/Jonathan Martin bullying story jumped off the sports pages and became a discussion about race and masculinity. I discuss it in more detail in “Bullies, Victims, and Masculinity“.

and you also might be interested in …

CBS has pulled  the 60 Minutes segment on Benghazi off its web site, saying:

60 Minutes has learned of new information that undercuts the account told to us by Morgan Jones of his actions on the night of the attack on the Benghazi compound.

We are currently looking into this serious matter to determine if he misled us, and if so, we will make a correction.

It apologized on the air last night.

Apparently, their key witness had previously told the FBI a completely different story. Apologizing is fine, but that’s not going to correct all the misinformation that CBS’ report put into people’s heads.

Jonathan Chait notes that the limit of the Senate’s power to “advise and consent” on presidential nominees is limited by custom, not settled law. And then he raises an important question:

We may assume that another Supreme Court vacancy would result in the confirmation of a mainstream judge in the president’s broad ideological mold. But if one of the five Republican-appointed justices were to fall ill or suddenly retire, would Republicans really allow Obama to replace him with another Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor? We believe that the Senate would yield because that’s simply the way things have always been done. But in the Obama era, the way things have always been done has not turned out to be a reliable guide.

The Rand Paul plagiarism scandal keeps growing. It started with Rachel Maddow spotting unattributed paragraphs from Wikipedia in Paul’s speeches. Then BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski noticed pieces of an article from The Week showing up in Paul’s Washington Times column. And then he found that a chunk of Paul’s latest book was cribbed from a Forbes article. Politico found “borrowed language” in Paul’s Howard University speech and his 2013 response to President Obama’s State of the Union address.

Tuesday, The Washington Times ended Paul’s weekly column, saying: “We expect our columnists to submit original work and to properly attribute material”.

It’s kind of a weird scandal, because (in all the examples I’ve seen) quoting the source material properly would not have detracted from the point Paul was making. The issue seems to be more about sloppiness and low intellectual standards than about honesty.

There’s also character component now, because of the way Paul initially tried to bluster his way through rather than just own up to the mistakes.

if dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, you know, it would be a duel challenge. But I can’t do that, because I can’t hold office in Kentucky then.

That sounds big and tough until you realize that he’s fantasizing about dueling a girl, Rachel Maddow. (I don’t think they ever did that in Kentucky. Or anywhere.) By the time CNN called him to account, he was slightly more contrite: He blamed his staff, and then whined about “the standard I’m being held to”.

They’re now going back and reading every book from cover to cover and looking for places where we footnoted correctly and don’t have quotation marks in the right places or we didn’t indent correctly.

This all backs up my initial impression of Paul, which is that the champion-of-libertarian-philosophy mantle he inherited from his Dad doesn’t really fit. (How well it fit Ron Paul is a different discussion.) He appears to be an empty suit who doesn’t write, vet, or even understand very well the words he says or signs his name to.

That’s why he looked so silly when Rachel interviewed him in 2010: Rachel knows her stuff, and Rand only knows his talking points. Or why he seemed surprised that black students at Howard University know basic facts about American history (like that Lincoln was a Republican). (Jon Stewart described the Howard talk here, and then discussed it with Larry Wilmore.) His talking points say blacks are all Democrats because they don’t know that kind of stuff. How was he to know Howard students really do?

Young adults aren’t buying cars or houses at the usual rate. Are they just over-extended from student debt and poor job prospects? Or are they developing a different relationship with ownership?

and let’s end with something awesome

like the moon.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Bullies, Victims, and Masculinity

November 11, 2013 – 10:55 am

The Richie Incognito story is about more than just locker-room culture. It’s about how traditional masculinity sets poor men up for victimization by rich men.

Maybe I should eavesdrop more, but I seldom hear people in bars and restaurants talking about news stories … unless those stories have something to do with sports. A few weeks ago, I heard three guys at a bar talking about how silly it would be to change the name of the Washington Redskins. And Thursday night, a couple in a Thai restaurant were talking about the Richie Incognito bullying story.

We have a lot more speculation than facts about Incognito, but this much seems to be true: Miami Dolphins’ offensive tackle Jonathan Martin left the team October 28 for “emotional” reasons, and briefly checked into a hospital before going to California to stay with his parents. A few days later, fellow Dolphin lineman Richie Incognito was identified as the center of an ongoing harassment of Martin. Apparently it started last year, when Martin joined the team, as ordinary hazing of a rookie. But unlike most NFL rookies, Martin also appears to be a loner and a misfit in jock society. Perhaps his relatively upscale, intellectual childhood (both Martin’s parents are lawyers) was part of why teammates called him “Big Weirdo“. Incognito was suspended indefinitely after ESPN learned about a voicemail in which Incognito called the mixed-race Martin “a half-nigger piece of shit”.

Incognito claims that he had a good relationship with Martin, and that Martin knew the voicemail was a joke. His teammates more-or-less back him up, but The Nation’s Dave Zirin discounts that as “bully solidarity“. ESPN’s Adam Schefter (a former player) commented:

This is not about a football locker room mentality. This is about the right behavior in a workplace environment where people feel safe.

Whatever the facts turn out to be, the story has stirred up a wide-ranging discussion about the N-word (which I’m going to pass over) and about masculinity. To some people (like Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor) it’s obvious that Martin should have punched Incognito in the face, and that would have been the end of it. Martin is 6’5″ and over 300 pounds, so (according to this point of view) he should be able to take care of himself. By instead making this issue public, he has violated the code of the locker room and hurt his team and teammates.

The resemblance to the keep-it-in-the-family view of child abuse or domestic violence (in my opinion) is more than coincidental.

Implicit in the criticism of Martin is the idea that there’s only one acceptable way to be a man, and being shy or non-confrontational is not part of it. Also, that a professional sports team is not just a workplace, it is a culture that only certain kinds of people can join. That seems to be the point of view of a rather disjointed defense of Incognito by former player Nate Jackson.

Richie Incognito lives in the world that our rabid consumption of the game has created. It’s a place for tough guys, where the mentally and physically weak are weeded out quickly. For those who show themselves to be affected by taunting and teasing, the taunting and teasing get louder, until they either break or develop a good defense. If you can’t handle a joke from your teammates, how are you going to handle the fourth quarter when we need you?—that, at least, is the conventional wisdom. Jonathan Martin’s defense was to walk out. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe we need to get more sensitive about this stuff. But let’s also try to understand it. Richie Incognito acted like an animal because he lives in the jungle.

A particularly insightful discussion of the issue was on Melissa Harris-Perry’s MSNBC show yesterday. Perry connected the issue to larger notions of hazing (talking to documentary filmmaker Byron Hurt whose “Hazing: How badly do you want in?” will be released soon), and to the ways that traditional masculinity opens lower-class men to exploitation by those whose power comes from money rather than brawn.

In particular, Harris-Perry connected the Martin/Incognito story to the NFL’s concussion issue, which got that much hotter this week with the revelation that all-time-great Cowboy running back Tony Dorsett suffers from chronic trauma encephalopathy, a mood-and-memory disorder associated with repeated concussions. Harris-Perry talked to former NFL player Don McPherson, who said:

You hear all these men talking now about this “suck it up, take it like a man”. Well, should we therefore then take our concussions like a man? Should we stop complaining about the fact that we can’t remember our last Super Bowl, like Tony Dorsett was saying this last weekend? Should we take that like a man? Or should we understand that even though he’s a tough guy who plays football, he’s still a human being?

Hazing and bullying is often about group solidarity. And often the ultimate beneficiary of a solid group isn’t a team or teammate, or even the bully himself, it’s a boss or owner.

Ta-Nehisi Coates also made the Incognito/Dorsett connection:

I grew up in a time and place where you really did have to fight if you expected to be able to live. … when I was young our bodies were all we had. Imposing those bodies on other bodies was the height of our power. It was also the limits of it. All the while we knew that were other people with greater power, who imposed with force so great that it seemed mystical to us. To see football players—arguably the most exploited athletes in major sports—bragging about manly power, along the same codes that once ruled my youth, is saddening.

and in a different post, Coates says:

We all believe in the right to defend one’s own body. But the ability to kick someone’s ass is oft-stated and overrated. Jerry Jones doesn’t want to fight DeAngelo Hall. He won’t ever need to, because such is his power that he can erect a Wonderland of a stadium, reduce men to toy soldiers, and toss their battered bodies out onto the street when he’s done. Pimping ain’t easy, but it sure is fun.

If you squint hard enough you might dimly perceive the outlines of some phantasm, some illusion. You might see power back there behind the scrum. You might see how a national valorization of violence attaches itself to profit.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (4)

Nobody’s a Moderate in the Republican Civil War

November 11, 2013 – 8:21 am

The Tea Party and establishment Republicans differ on style and tactics, not goals.

After his loss in Tuesday’s Virginia gubernatorial election, Tea Party Republican Ken Cuccinelli refused to make the traditional phone call to congratulate the winner, Terry McAuliffe.

No big deal, you might say. Cuccinelli has admitted in public that he didn’t win, and McAuliffe becomes governor in any case. The Outside the Beltway blog argues that the congratulating call doesn’t matter, because such gracious gestures are insincere anyway. And Kevin Drum threw the question out to his readers: Does symbolic politeness still matter or not? (Typically, the comment thread quickly devolved into insults that leave no clear consensus answer. And that’s a meta-answer, I suppose.)

But whether the absent phone call has any direct significance on governance, I think it is important. Congratulating the winner, no matter how much your defeat still rankles, recognizes that in the end we are all on the same side. We are all Americans, or (in this case) all Virginians. However bitter the campaign has been, however overheated the rhetoric has become, we all want the collective project we call “government” to succeed, whether our side gets to lead that government  or not.

That is more-or-less precisely what the Tea Party denies: We are not all on the same side. In President Obama’s case, Tea Partiers often don’t even admit that he’s an American. And they see election campaigns not as contests between differing views of how to move our country forward, but as apocalyptic battles between Good and Evil.

The Obama/Romney election, evangelist Franklin (Billy’s son) Graham warned last fall, “could be America’s last call to repentance and faith. … There’s still time to turn from our wicked ways so that He might spare us from His wrath against sin.” And the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer saw the shutdown/debt-ceiling showdown as evidence “the destruction of America” is on President Obama’s “bucket list”.

Like Cuccinelli, Ted Cruz did not even fake politeness when the President visited Cruz’ home state of Texas this week: “President Obama should take his broken promises tour elsewhere.” Where’s that famous Southern hospitality?

Tea Party strategist

Legitimate rivals merit politeness, but if the AntiChrist wins you don’t congratulate him on his victory or give him a chance to implement the vision the voters have endorsed. You continue the struggle wherever and however you can. And if you bring the temple down on your own head like Samson, you take satisfaction in the number of enemies who perish with you.

The Republican establishment. One popular interpretation of Tuesday’s election results was that establishment Republicans had flexed their muscles and proved that they (and not the Tea Party) are the GOP’s best hope for victory.

Christie and AntiChrist

There was some truth to that. Cuccinelli’s campaign suffered from a lack of money, in large part because big bankroll donors like the Chamber of Commerce wouldn’t contribute. The Chamber also figured in the victory of establishment Republican Bradley Byrne over Tea Party Republican (and birther) Dean Young in Alabama’s 1st congressional district.

And the biggest Republican winner of the night was New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who had praised Obama’s handling of Hurricane Sandy and accompanied Obama on a photo-op tour of damaged areas late in the 2012 campaign: “It’s been very good working with the President,” Christie said. “He and his Administration have been coordinating with us. It’s been wonderful.”

Frontrunner? After his landslide win in a blue state, some pundits anointed Christie the early frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, while others were more skeptical.

But his potential opponents have treated Christie’s victory like a serious threat, barely even pretending to be happy about a Republican victory. Rand Paul gave Christie a backhanded compliment, saying that the Republican Party needs “moderates like Chris Christie who can win in New Jersey.” (Recall that “moderate” is an insult in GOP circles. It was Mitt Romney’s opponents who called him a “Massachusetts moderate“, which the Boston Globe characterized as “the two dirtiest words in the Republican lexicon”. Romney himself claimed to be “severely conservative“.) Rick Perry likewise questioned whether “a conservative in New Jersey a conservative in the rest of the country”.

Ted Cruz’ comments were even more pointed:

I think it is terrific that he is brash, that he is outspoken, and that he won his race. But I think we need more leaders in Washington with the courage to stand for principle.

So congratulations to the cowardly, unprincipled Governor Christie.

Moderate? For most of American history, moderate sounded reasonable and good, and to much of the electorate it still does. But what evidence is there of Christie’s moderation?

Traditionally, a moderate was someone who shared at least a few positions with the opposing party (like Democrat Joe Lieberman’s support for the Iraq War and waterboarding, or Republican Rudy Giuliani’s support for abortion rights and immigration reform), or shared goals with the other party but tried to achieve them by different means. (That’s what RomneyCare was about, and why Mitt Romney would have deserved the moderate label if he had truly run on his record. Mitt tried to achieve universal health care via private insurance and the free market. Obama’s embrace of that moderate-Republican approach should have earned him moderate status as well.)

I can’t think of any issue where Christie fits the bill. His position on marriage equality seems typical: He believes only in opposite-sex marriage. He vetoed a bill that would have legalized same-sex marriage in New Jersey, and then sued to prevent same-sex marriages after a state judge ruled in their favor. He eventually dropped the suit and allowed same-sex marriages to proceed in New Jersey, but only after it became clear he would lose.

That’s not moderation, it’s pragmatism. He doesn’t waste his effort on losing battles.

He occasionally makes agreeable noises about gun control, but in the only real test he vetoed three popular bills, one being a version of something he had proposed himself just a few months before.

On contraception and abortion, he vetoed funding for Planned Parenthood five times. The anti-abortion Life News says he proved wrong the “media elite [who] claim Republicans can’t win on a pro-life platform.”

He believes in tax cuts for the wealthy and spending cuts for the poor. There’s nothing in his record resembling RomneyCare.

ThinkProgress goes into more detail on Christie’s conservative record.

Opposing the Tea Party doesn’t make you a moderate. Likewise, you’ll search Bradley Byrne’s web site in vain for any moderate policy. He just won’t say stuff as gratuitously offensive as his Tea Party opponent Dean Young, who wants anybody who supports marriage equality thrown out of the Republican Party

If you want to have homosexuals pretending like they’re married, they need to go to the Democrat Party.

Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, as well as Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander and Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell are all likely to face Tea Party opposition as they run for re-election. They all (eventually) voted to keep the government open and not default on America’s commitments, but they’re no moderates. Just because they won’t set themselves (or the country) on fire to protest ObamaCare doesn’t mean that they secretly support it.

So when they run against Tea Party extremists in the Republican primaries, I’ll be rooting for them. But that offer expires the morning after the primary. I respect their higher level of politeness and their caution about burning down the house we all live in. But they differ from the Cuccinellis and Cruzes and Youngs merely in tactics, not in goals.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (3)

The Monday Morning Teaser

November 11, 2013 – 6:54 am

Lots of news this week: off-year elections, one of the biggest storms ever, a breakdown in the talks with Iran, more Rand Paul plagiarism coming to light, CBS admitted the 60 Minutes Benghazi story was bogus, the NFL’s bullying scandal, and a bunch of other stuff.

The featured article this week, “Nobody’s a Moderate in the Republican Civil War”, will focus on the confusion some liberals may feel about the Tea Party vs. Republican establishment battle that played out in the elections and their aftermath: Yes, it will be better for the country if the establishment wins that war, but not because the establishment is “moderate” or shares any progressive goals. The goals of establishment Republicans like Chris Christie and Mitch McConnell are just as extreme as the Tea Party’s; they just seek those goals pragmatically rather than self-destructively. Left to its own devices, the establishment would go to the same place as the Tea Party, but with less collateral damage.

So for the sake of the country, I root for the GOP establishment in primaries — in spite of my belief that Tea Party candidates are easier to beat. But don’t make the mistake of thinking “he’s not so bad” about Christie or McConnell just because they don’t play chicken with things like a debt default.

That article should be out shortly, and everything else by about noon.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)