The Weekly Sift

Hindsight is always 50-50.

— NFL quarterback Cam Newton

review all the Sift quotes of 2014

look at “The Yearly Sift: 2013“

This week everybody was still talking about …

last week’s murder of the NYPD’s Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.

Conservatives like Rudy Giuliani blamed the murders on — who else? — President Obama.

We’ve had four months of propaganda, starting with the president, that everybody should hate the police.

Since nobody can find any record of Obama saying anything about hating the police, WaPo’s fact checker awarded this claim four Pinocchios. In fact, no one can come up with any record of the leaders of the black-lives-matter protests calling for violence against police — there is no H. Rap Brown “Burn, baby, burn” quote — but somehow it’s their fault. (There was one group at one protest that chanted for “dead cops”, but no one knows who started the chant, no one endorsed it afterwards, and most protesters never even heard it. This incident has been covered in the right-wing media as if it encapsulated the whole anti-police-brutality movement.)

Media Matters collected the various times when right-wing crazies have killed cops, including the time when they draped the Gadsden flag over the bodies. Oddly, Fox and other right-wing media outlets did not hold conservative leaders responsible for this.

If fingers are going to be pointed anywhere other than at the actual shooter this time, I’d point one at the prosecutors who manipulated the grand juries into not indicting policemen for killing Michael Brown and Eric Garner. As any regular Gotham watcher knows, vigilantes rise when the people lose hope of getting justice through the system.

The worst reaction of all was Bill O’Reilly’s: that Mayor Bill de Blasio is the “true villain” of this story, and should “resign today” because he has “lost the respect” of the NYPD. This call was discussed by other Fox News hosts on their own shows as if it were a sane and reasonable proposal.

It’s not. Treating the police as if they were an equal-or-superior branch of government, rather than employees of the city, flies in the face of American principles that go back to the Founders. In third-world countries that are trying to achieve democracy, you worry about whether the elected government can get along with the army. But such notions should never come up in America.

Nobody elected the NYPD. If public employees don’t feel that they can submit in good conscience to the duly elected officials, they should resign. Remember when Scott Walker was having so much trouble with Wisconsin’s teachers? I don’t recall O’Reilly — or anyone — calling on Walker to resign. The teachers who wanted to be rid of Walker had to work through the democratic system by petitioning for his recall. If NYC police want de Blasio out, they also should have to proceed democratically.

Charles Pierce makes a similar point, and connects it to the CIA torture scandal:

It is very simple. If the CIA is insubordinate to the president, whom the country elected, then it is insubordinate to all of us. If the NYPD runs a slow-motion coup against the freely elected mayor of New York, then it is running a slow-motion coup against all the people of New York. … If we render our torturers superior to the political institutions of the government, and if we render the police superior to the civil power of elected officials, then we essentially have empowered independent standing armies to conduct our wars and enforce our laws, and self-government descends into bloody farce.

But let’s get on with reviewing 2014’s Weekly Sifts.

Themes of the Year

Every year I begin the Yearly Sift with the same caveat: I write the Sift week-to-week, without any larger plan to illustrate themes. But inevitably, I see themes when I look back at the end of the year.

Roots of conservatism. Like a lot of liberals, when I listen to conservative speakers, I often feel like I’m hearing something in code. The leaps of logic, the connections they see between events that look unrelated to me, the refusal to see connections that I consider obvious — there’s something behind it all, some frame, some vision, some unconscious attitude, some set of unstated prior assumptions — true or false — that make sense of it all.

This year I spent a lot of time trying to decrypt conservative thought, looking for its historical roots and hidden assumptions. I didn’t set out to be ungenerous, but I doubt many conservatives approved of the ways I described those roots and assumptions.

In the year’s most popular post, “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party“, I traced contemporary conservative ideas back to the Confederacy, arguing that the Tea Party is using the tropes and tactics that won Reconstruction for the South and reversed the apparent outcome of the Civil War. That article became necessary because previous articles “Cliven Bundy and the Klan Komplex” and “Rights Are For People Like Us” were too speculative and needed more supporting research.

After the election, I tried to abstract a the worldview from the Republican messages I had been hearing about immigration, Ebola, moral decline, and the general “otherness” of President Obama. In “Republicans have a story to tell. We’re stuck with facts.” I described that story as: America is a city on a hill with barbarians at the gates. I groped towards a liberal equivalent mythology in “Can We Share the World?”

A more light-hearted — at least I thought it was light-hearted — look at the conservative worldview was “A Conservative Lexicon With English Translation“, which resulted in so many good suggestions from commenters that I put out a second edition. Commenters on that post said that I should have combined the two into one post, which I have finally done in a page that I hope to update from time to time.

Privilege — the way life works differently for blacks and whites, men and women, rich and poor — has turned into a continuing background theme of the Sift since 2012’s “The Distress of the Privileged“. This May, Time published a privilege-justifying essay by a Princeton freshman, and I responded to him with “Privilege and the Bubble of Flattery“.

Specific varieties of privilege also got my attention. “Not a Tea Party” was the culmination of a race-and-history thread going back to 2012’s “A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System“, “Slavery Lasted Until Pearl Harbor“, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Goes There: Reparations“, and “Are You Sure You’re White?“. The most popular post from the first half of the year was “What Should ‘Racism’ Mean?“, a discussion of implicit and unconscious racism, using reactions to the Obamas occupying the White House as examples.

Ferguson and its related issues of race, police violence, and the biases in our legal system became an event-driven theme of its own. The best post in this series was “What Your Fox-Watching Uncle Doesn’t Get About Ferguson“. But (in addition to being discussed in many weekly summaries) Ferguson also figured in “The Ferguson Test“, “Infrastructure, Suburbs, and the Long Descent to Ferguson“, “Five Lessons to Remember as Ferguson Fades into History“, and “This Time Will the Outrage Matter?“.

The Donald Sterling incident brought up just about any kind of privilege you can think of. So of course the conservative media decided he was the victim, which I addressed head-on in “No, Donald Sterling Isn’t the Victim“.

Male privilege also came up, most often in the context of violence against women. After the Isla Vista murders I wrote “#YesAllWomen and the Continuum of Aggression” to explain why men and women viewed the events so differently:

Men look at Elliot Rodger and say, “I would never do something like that.” Women look at his victims and say, “That could totally happen to me.”

That piece later got picked up by UU World magazine. Male entitlement was the focus of my review of Angry White Men. Domestic violence was the subject of “Is Ray Rice’s Video a Game-Changer?”

Law. Making sense of important court rulings is a continuing focus of the Sift. Those legal-analysis posts never get really big readership, but I still believe they’re a public service, since the mainstream media does that job so badly.

This year I explained the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, the Schuette decision about affirmative action, and the McCutcheon decision on campaign finance, plus lower-court decisions involving net neutrality and a series of same-sex marriage decisions that I covered throughout the year, and then collected in October’s “Is the Battle for Same-Sex Marriage Nearly Over?” (Not yet; the Supreme Court is going to have to take the case.)

The Books

This year the Sift had fewer book reviews, but more posts that were the result of long reading projects.

“Not a Tea Party” could have used a bibliography, as it rested on Jefferson Davis: American by William J. Cooper, Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name (which had gotten its own review in March), Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman: a historical romance of the Ku Klux Klan, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, the two Douglas Egerton histories Year of Meteors and The Wars of Reconstruction, W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction, and Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, and a few other books not specifically named, like Away Down South by James Cobb and John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union by John Niven.

If I rewrote the article today, it would have to include some quotes from R. L. Dabny’s A Defense of Virginia and the South from 1867; I’ll be looking for opportunities to tell you more about that, as I see Dabny’s book as the best existing first-person account of the Confederate worldview. (A teaser: The mistake at the root of the North’s misbegotten abolitionism is social contract theory. Once you start thinking that government depends on the consent of the governed, you’ll end up not just freeing the slaves, but giving them the vote. And women too, God forbid!)

One book review that did get a lot of attention this year was of Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men. “Republicans have a story to tell. We’re stuck with facts.” was at least partially a review of Narrative Politics by Frederick Mayer. Justice John Paul Stevens Six Amendments got reviewed in “Restoring the Constitution is Now a Liberal Issue“.

Two reviews that fit in with the year’s deep-history theme were Aviva Chomsky’s Undocumented: how immigration became illegal, and Daniel Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line, a marvelous biography of three mixed-race American families that (over generations), migrated from black to white.

A mini-review of Meline Toumani’s There Was and Was Not made it into a weekly summary.

The Mosts

Most prescient comment. You may remember that January opened with a polar vortex, provoking the usual round of I’m-cold-so-global-warming-is-a-myth articles. I’m proud of this response on January 13:

Even when 2014 was just a few days old and wind chills were below zero for most of the country, there was a bet you could make that was almost a sure thing. No matter how it started, by its end 2014 will be yet another warm year. And by warm I mean: The global average temperature will wind up well above the 50-year average and the 20-year average.

Final returns aren’t in yet, but 2014 may well be the hottest year on record. If any of your friends believe global warming is a myth, you should offer them the bet that 2015 will be a warm year too — maybe not another record, but clearly above the 20-year average. If instead it’s a cool year (it won’t be) I promise not to sweep that fact under the rug, because belief in global warming is evidence-based, not ideology-based like global-warming denial.

I also feel pretty good about taking a wait-and-see attitude towards the Bridgegate Scandal, which hasn’t delivered Governor Christie the knock-out blow many liberals were hoping for. On February 24, I criticized MSNBC’s saturation coverage, and said:

If you are similarly ignoring MSNBC and/or Bridgegate these days, I’ll let you know when something important happens.

Least prescient comment. As in 2010, I stayed hopeful about Democrats’ prospects in the mid-term elections far longer than I should have. A lot of comments could illustrate this, but I feel worst about something I didn’t say: In June, when I was giving advice about the best Senate candidates to support and where your support would have the most impact, I left out Mark Udall in Colorado, thinking he wasn’t really in that much trouble.

Sorry, Mark. You will be missed.

The best post nobody read. In March, I gave an unfortunate title to “Does Paul Ryan Care About Poverty Now?” I suspect a lot of my regular readers looked at that question, decided the answer was obviously No, and figured they’d already spent enough of their lives reading about Paul Ryan.

I have an excuse: Ryan’s committee had just put out its report, The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later, and it looked like he was laying down a marker that would turn into policy down the road. (I covered the second step down that road in August in “Can Conservatives Solve Poverty?“, which a few more people read. We haven’t heard the last of this.)

But the March article is worth reading because of the way it frames the whole national discussion of poverty, independent of Paul Ryan. Conservatives like to claim that liberals want to give people hand-outs while conservatives want to get them jobs, when in fact everyone would rather see the poor supporting themselves in good jobs. But the get-out-of-poverty-by-working plan might fail for four different reasons — ranging from “there are no jobs” to “I’m too lazy to work” — which I list.

And here’s where it gets interesting: The vast majority of Americans agree about what the government should do for people in each of those four situations. The liberal/conservative debate about poverty in fact revolves around which of those four situations is most common and most deserves our attention.

The numbers

By all measures, the Sift’s readership increased this year, with a significant bump in both occasional and regular readers following August’s “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party“.

Last year this section was tricky to write, because I felt like the regular readership was growing, but the most obvious number to measure readers — page views — was down from 240K in 2012 to 215K in 2013. I had to explain that page views are tricky measure of a blog, because so much depends on the irregular timing of a few viral posts. (A little more than half of the blog’s 1 million views since moving to the new format in June, 2011 are for two posts: 342K for “The Distress of the Privileged” from 2012 and 183K for this year’s “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party”.)

So I focused more on stats like these: subscriptions tracked by WordPress went up from 504 to 908, and likes for the Sift’s Facebook page went from 183 to 256.

Well, this year had a viral post, so the numbers require much less explaining. Everything is up: Page views ballooned to 412K (with a few days to go), subscriptions to 2,281 (though I’m not completely sure that number measures the same thing as last year’s number), and Facebook likes to 382. Followers of the Sift’s Twitter feed went from 203 to 342.

I also started getting my wish for a commenting community; in the second half of the year it was a rare post that didn’t draw at least a couple non-spam comments. (In the short term I can be thin-skinned — that’s one reason I sometimes don’t respond promptly — but in the longer view I love comments. Even in cases when I feel a commenter completely misunderstands me, the comment helps me see how I’m being misunderstood.)

Obviously, “Not a Tea Party” was the most-viewed post of the year, followed by “Distress”, which garnered another 36,000 views in its third year. Then came “What Should Racism Mean?” with 32K, followed by 2012’s “A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System” (which had a renaissance because of its connection to “Not a Tea Party”) at 12K, “What Your Fox-Watching Uncle Doesn’t Get About Ferguson” at 9K, and “#YesAllWomen and the Continuum of Aggression” and “The Sifted Bookshelf: Angry White Men” at 5.4K each.

A typical weekly summary now gets around 300 views on the blog, plus another 250 or so from subscribers. (I’m not sure how WordPress comes up with that number, but I think it knows whether subscribers open the email it sends them.) A year ago those numbers were more like 200 and 100. A featured post that doesn’t catch a viral wave gets 300-600, plus 250.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. … This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

— George Orwell “The Principles of Newspeak” (1949)

This week’s featured post is “Newspeaking About Torture“.

Thursday, the Sift had its one millionth page view since I redesigned it and moved it to WordPress in June, 2011. (I have no way of figuring out who the millionth viewer was. If you looked at the blog on Thursday, maybe it was you. Thanks.) More than 400K of those views were this year. More about the numbers next week when I do the retrospective Yearly Sift.

This week everybody was talking about Cuba

After the midterm elections, President Obama entered what I’ve started calling the Aw-Fukkit Phase of his presidency, where he’s going to do things that make sense without worrying about polls or politics: first immigration, then smog.

That trend continued Wednesday, when he went as far to normalize relations with Cuba as he can without an act of Congress. He announced restoration of diplomatic relations, which will lead to the opening of a U.S. embassy in Cuba. Removing Cuba from the official State Department list of countries that sponsor terrorism should follow soon. Talks leading to this agreement apparently were brokered by Pope Francis, who seems to have decided to take “blessed are the peacemakers” seriously.

The economic embargo against Cuba is a law that Congress probably won’t repeal. (But administrative decisions might hollow it out a little.) So no Miami/Havana flights and no Cuban cigars in the Mall of America any time soon. Personally, I’d like to see Major League Baseball create a Latin Division with teams in Havana, San Juan, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami, but I’m a dreamer.

Embargoes like this can sometimes make sense as an attempt to push a shaky new regime off a cliff. But if that’s going to work at all, it usually works in six months or so, not after half a century.

We have normal relations with nearly all our other Cold War adversaries: Russia, China, Vietnam … basically everybody but North Korea, which (see below) is in a league of its own. The only thing special about Cuba is that a Cuban-refuge lobby has extraordinary political influence. The Cuban embargo is to Florida’s presidential politics what ethanol is to Iowa’s.

A few other things make Cuba special, but they push the other way: Cuba used to be an American colony. It’s only 90 miles away. A lot of Americans have relatives they’d like to visit in Cuba, or would vacation on its sunny beaches if they had the chance.

The arguments against Obama’s move all revolve around what I think is a misguided notion: that the U.S. is the world’s Heather #1, so we’re doing less-cool countries a favor when we talk to them. That view is implicit in Ted Cruz’ characterization of the new relationship as “a very, very bad deal”. We agreed to talk to Cuba and didn’t get enough in return for that “concession”.

In view of the fact that the 1962 Missile Crisis threat never came to fruition, Cuba has never actually done anything to us, except in fantasy movies like Red Dawn. They have more reason to be angry at us than vice versa — not just because of other ancient history like the Bay of Pigs invasion, colonialism, and mucking about in their pre-Castro politics, but the present-day fact that we keep a military base on their territory, where we do dirty work that we don’t want to happen on the mainland.

The Castro government is harsh, but its dismal Freedom House score (6.5 out of 7) is the same as China’s, and still better than ten other countries, including U.S. ally Saudi Arabia and several other places where we have embassies.

If they’re willing to talk to us and trade with us, we should be willing to talk to them and trade with them — unless you think the 55th year of an embargo is likely to accomplish something the previous 54 didn’t.

and Sony/North Korea

Sony’s decision not to release “The Interview”, a Seth Rogan comedy about an attempt to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, is still a mystery to me. Reportedly this costs Sony $100 million, and the threats to attack U.S. theaters that show the movie are the kind of impotent bluster North Korea is famous for.

Officially, the North Korean government is not behind this — the threats come from a hacker group calling itself “Guardians of Peace” — but the FBI says they are. (Other experts disagree.)

If this is a North Korean operation, it’s hard to know how to respond. The country is already subject to so many sanctions that it’s virtually cut off from the rest of the world, and its repressive government might be happy about that. It is plagued by famines, but its hungry people seem unable to revolt. The government constantly raises fear about a U.S. invasion — only the cosmic power of the Great Leader keeps the evil Yankees at bay — so an actual attack on something might also play right into the government’s hands.

A Hollywood insider’s view of this story and how it unfolded comes from George Clooney, who circulated a petition supporting Sony and got little support.

This was a dumb comedy that was about to come out. With the First Amendment, you’re never protecting Jefferson; it’s usually protecting some guy who’s burning a flag or doing something stupid. This is a silly comedy, but the truth is, what it now says about us is a whole lot. We have a responsibility to stand up against this.

No one in Hollywood would stand with Sony, Deadline Hollywood says, because they were “fearful to place themselves in the cross hairs of hackers”. And by releasing embarrassing emails before threatening terrorism, the hackers gave an excuse to those who wanted to chicken out rather than make a united front. Clooney says:

Here’s the brilliant thing they did. You embarrass them first, so that no one gets on [their] side. After the Obama joke, no one was going to get on the side of [Sony Pictures executive] Amy [Pascal], and so suddenly, everyone ran for the hills.

and murdered policemen

Saturday, two Brooklyn policemen were murdered in their patrol car, apparently by an African-American man who came to New York from Baltimore specifically to take revenge on the NYPD for the killing of Eric Garner. The man reportedly had a history of mental illness, and killed himself after killing the officers.

There are two opposite ways to react to horrible events like this. If you identify with the victims, you may react tribally: People like you are threatened by people like him, and your tribe needs to protect itself by lashing out at the other tribe. That was the response of NYPD union chief Patrick Lynch, who blamed the attack not on a lone lunatic, but on the anti-police-brutality demonstrations that started after Garner was choked to death by police while saying “I can’t breathe.”

There’s blood on many hands tonight. Those that incited violence on this street under the guise of protest, that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did everyday. We tried to warn it must not go on, it cannot be tolerated. That blood on the hands starts on the steps of city hall in the office of the mayor.

A memo that appeared to come from Lynch (but was later denied) said that NYPD had become a “wartime police department”, and “will act accordingly”.

But it’s also possible to have a universalist response: Having experienced how bad it feels when people like you are killed for no good reason, you want to prevent this experience from happening to anyone else. The murdered cops’ friends and family, Eric Garner’s friends and family, Michael Brown’s friends and family … you don’t have to pick a side. None of them should be going through what they’re going through.

You know how these killings are different that Garner and Brown? So far, the media has shown no interest in combing through the lives of the murdered cops to see whether they “had it coming”. I doubt it would be hard; surely somebody sometime had an unpleasant interaction with one of the cops and would be willing to help the media make a headline out of it. But so far nobody is going for that cheap shot.

Wouldn’t it be great if all victims got this kind of respect?

Before the attack on the policemen, these clueless guys wore “I Can Breathe” shirts, thinking they were making a pro-police statement.

In fact they’re just underlining the point made by the “I Can’t Breathe” shirt (worn here by Lebron James): Of course you can breathe, because you’re white and so police treat you with courtesy. That’s what white privilege means.

You know what would be a powerful demonstration against racism? Pair up white people wearing “I Can Breathe” shirts and black people wearing “I Can’t Breathe” shirts. Let them march together two-by-two.

and still torture

The neocon line from Bill Kristol and others is that what the CIA did wasn’t “real torture” because “you recover” with “no lasting effects at all”.  This sounds remarkably similar to the way some men minimize rape.

There’s good reason why, in interrogator slang, getting a prisoner to talk is called “breaking” him. A decade after he was seized and tortured by mistake, German citizen Khalid al Masri is still described as “a broken man”.

He’s abandoned his home. He no longer is part of the lives of his wife or children. Friends can’t find him. His attorneys can’t find him. German foreign intelligence will say only that he’s “somewhere in a western-leaning Arab nation.” When his Ulm attorney and confidant Manfred Gnjidic last saw him, he was broke, unkempt, paranoid and completely alone. He’d been arrested twice and sent once to a psychiatric ward, once to jail.

Al-Masri has not even gotten an apology from the CIA, and his lawsuit for damages was thrown out of court because a judge ruled that a trial would necessarily reveal state secrets.

But that’s all no skin off Bill Kristol’s nose. All the trauma in his privileged existence has healed without a scar, so he thinks that’s how life works.

I discussed the larger conservative reaction to the torture report in “Newspeaking About Torture“.

and Jeb Bush

Tuesday, the former Florida governor tweeted:

I am excited to announce I will actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States

He followed up by saying that in January he would establish a leadership PAC to “help me facilitate conversations with citizens across America to discuss the most critical challenges facing our exceptional nation.”

One of my friends is a self-described “ink-stained wretch” from the Newspaper Era, which happened sometime after the Jurassic. One of his early editors refused to publish articles about press conferences where somebody merely announced he was going to do something, like file a lawsuit, because announcements aren’t news. When the lawsuit actually got filed, that would be news.

Would that politics and political journalism still worked that way. These days, Bush’s announcement that he was going to do something next month to help him actively explore a possible presidential run … he might as well have gone to Concord and filed papers to put his name on the New Hampshire primary ballot. He’s running.

Together with Chris Christie, Jeb is the best hope of the establishment wing of the Republican Party (which still fantasizes about Mitt Romney, because that worked so well last time) to keep the nomination away from the Tea Party. Over the last few cycles, I’ve done better predicting Republican presidential politics than Democratic (maybe because I have more perspective). So I’ll venture this: It won’t work.

Bush will annoy the base more than he’ll inspire the establishment. He’s not anti-Hispanic enough. He’s not distant enough from his brother, who the base worshiped at the time, but now blame for deficits and bail-outs and all the other bad 2008 stuff they don’t want to think about. He supported the common core curriculum reform, one of those black-helicopter issues the base goes crazy over. He’s in no-man’s-land regarding the theocrats: He’s not really one of them like Santorum or Huckabee, but to anti-theocratic libertarians he’s stained by the Terry Schiavo case; don’t think you’ve heard the last of that. And purely on a surface level, he looks too wonkish. He’s the expert who knows what’s good for you, not the voice rising up from the soul of Real America. Nobody would ever look at Jeb Bush and repeat Barry Goldwater’s slogan: “In your heart, you know he’s right.”

Ultimately, I predict, the Tea Party will unite around Ted Cruz — after a Ben Carson boom-and-bust similar to those of Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain in the 2012 cycle — and he’ll just barely lose to a stop-Ted-Cruz candidate not specifically identified with either wing. I’m not sure who that will be, but it won’t be Bush, Romney, or Christie.

The eventual nominee will embody contradictions, the way “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush did in 2000. He’ll be a tough-love candidate — firm but not mean, unbending but not brittle, devout but not a crusader, a man of both the past and future. Like Ronald Reagan, he’ll put a charming face on heartless policies. A folksier Paul Ryan, a sharper Rick Perry, a less belligerent Scott Walker … several contenders could fill that role if they successfully recast their images, like the “New Nixon” of 1968.

and you also might be interested in …

During the invasion of Crimea, the Republican party line was that Putin had completely outmaneuvered Obama. Putin was the kind of swaggering leader conservatives admire. Rudy Giuliani laid it out:

[Putin] makes a decision and he executes it quickly. Then everybody reacts. That is what you call a leader. President Obama, got to think about it, he’s got to go over it again, he’s got to talk to more people about it.

Well, as the ruble collapses and the Russian central bank raises interest rates from 10.5% to 17% in one day, President Putin may wish he had talked to more people before executing his decisions. Paul Krugman outlines exactly what kind of hole Russia has dug for itself, and Rachel Maddow enjoys replaying clips of the Republican man-crush on “what you call a leader”.

Gordon Klingenschmitt is a Colorado state representative who used to be a Navy chaplain. He knows what we should replace ObamaCare with: prayer.

Father in Heaven, we turn away from the idolatry that so many have in their hearts, that they think government is a better healer than Jesus.

Because no true Christian ever gets sick. Everybody knows that.

So police conduct a no-knock nighttime raid on somebody’s house looking for drugs. The people inside only know that someone is breaking in — and there are no drugs in the house, so they have no reason to suspect why — so they shoot and kill one of the officers. What happens?

Well, if you’re white you can take advantage of the Castle Doctrine, which says you have a right to defend your home against what a reasonable person would interpret as an attack. But if you’re black, that may not work.

and let’s close with some Christmas music … sort of

On Black Friday afternoon I was wandering through the central square of Santa Fe. Musicians were scattered about, warming up for performances connected to that evening’s tree lighting. A lone guitarist played a familiar Christmas tune, but not until I got closer could I make out the lyrics he was singing:

Police got my car.
Police got my car.

I suspect that’s not what he sang in the evening, but a YouTube search traced his song back to Cheech and Chong.

Now, whenever the ambient Christmas music starts to become overwhelming, I sing “Police Got My Car” to myself, and I feel better. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always “I Found the Brains of Santa Claus” or Grist’s climate-apocalypse carols.

There’s never enough evidence to convict a white man of a crime against a Negro.

— Aaron Henry, a black businessman
interviewed in the CBS News report “The Search in Mississippi” (1964)

We have caused a thorough search to be made by the most competent authority in Richmond; and while many indictments are found against black men for rape of white women, none exist, in the history of our jurisprudence, against white men for rape of black women. And this, not because there would have been any difficulty in making the indictment lie: but because, as the most experienced lawyers testify, the crime is unheard of on the part of white men amongst us.

— R. L. Dabny, A Defense of Virginia and the South (1867)

This week’s featured post is “Can We Share the World?“

This week everybody was still talking about police killing black people

because it keeps happening with no one called to account. On the heels of the Michael Brown non-indictment, we have the Eric Garner non-indictment and the killings of Tamir Rice and Rumain Brisbon. Unlike the Brown killing, the choke-hold strangling of Garner and the roll-up-with-guns-blazing shooting of Rice were caught on video.

I’m reminded of the effect of television on the Civil Rights movement in the Sixties. The cops and white mobs in Mississippi and Alabama and Arkansas were just doing what they’d been doing for decades. But now the whole country watching from their living rooms. When you watch those video clips today, it’s clear the abusive whites didn’t understand what the TV cameras meant.

Now we’re in the era of ubiquitous video, and cops don’t seem to understand what that means either. You can look at any one case and imagine that there might be some mitigating explanation, some off-camera circumstances you can’t see. But the sheer number of these cases wears a person down. This isn’t just a Lemony-Snicket-style series of unfortunate events. Something is systemically wrong.

The grand jury in the Garner case hasn’t released voluminous records like the Ferguson grand jury did, but the same kind of rigged process I talked about last week seemed to be at work. Grand juries misfire when the prosecutor wants to defend the suspect rather than prosecute, as often happens when police are involved. The biggest flaw in the Garner grand jury process was that the prosecutor didn’t tell the jury about the lightest charge they could have brought: reckless endangerment. So when they gave Officer Pantaleo the benefit of the doubt on various forms of murder, their only remaining option was to let him walk.

President Obama has proposed putting body cameras on police, but clearly that’s only part of the solution. Unlike in Ferguson, we have video in this case, and the cop still doesn’t have to face a trial. In addition to cameras, we also need changes in process: an independent investigation and a special prosecutor when police are suspects. A recent Wisconsin law — passed after police killed the son of a white retired Air Force officer — is a step in the right direction.

Digby underlined a point that unites most of these cases: Police escalated the conflict when they didn’t have to. Michael Brown wasn’t going to flee to Costa Rica. Eric Garner was surrounded by six cops and not endangering any of them. There was no risk in giving Garner a few minutes to grasp that he was going to be arrested one way or the other.

Or check out this video of a traffic stop New Mexico, where luckily no one was killed. The driver obviously handles the situation badly, but at some point the police forget that they’re dealing with a woman and her kids, not Murder Incorporated. By the 12:30 mark the family has barricaded itself inside their van. Two back-up units arrive, guns drawn, and an officer bashes in a passenger window. The panicked Mom then starts driving away — the three police cars having neglected to block that possibility — and the police start shooting.

By contrast, in 2011 German police shot exactly 85 bullets in the line of duty. That’s all year, in the whole country. Seventy years ago, who could have imagined that someday we’d be envying Germany for its police?

Albert Burneko offers the interpretation that “The American Justice System is Not Broken“. Police are supposed to kill young black men from time to time, and they’re supposed to get away with it. That’s how the system functions, not how it malfunctions.

Wonkette wonders tongue-in-cheek why gun-rights advocates aren’t demanding justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford, both of whom were killed by police who mistook their toy guns for real ones. If merely appearing to carry a gun justifies your summary execution, doesn’t that invalidate our Second Amendment rights? If Randy Weaver and David Koresh can be martyrs for the cause, why not Rice and Crawford?

The obvious implication, the dots whose connection Wonkette leaves to the reader, is that the gun-rights movement is for white people. When have you ever heard the NRA respond to a public tragedy by suggesting that black people arm themselves? I mean, wouldn’t Trayvon still be alive if he’d been packing heat?

Maybe, though, there’s another explanation: Gun-rights people could just be applying the color-blind constitutional doctrine of originalism. When the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791, who could have imagined that someday blacks would be citizens and seek to defend themselves with guns? Only through the liberal notion of an evolving Constitution does the black-people-with-guns conundrum arise at all.

While I was researching that point about coverage of the Civil Rights movement, I ran across “The Search in Mississippi” — an hour-long CBS News Special Report hosted by Walter Cronkite and aired on June 25, 1964 about the then-current Mississippi Burning case and Freedom Summer movement. It’s even more fascinating than the movies and documentaries that have been made since.

and jobs

The November jobs report came out, and it was the best one we’ve seen in a long time, fueling hope that the steady-but-uninspiring recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 might finally be picking up steam. It was hardly a Happy-Days-Are-Here-Again report, but it pointed in that direction.

A jobs report is a mass of numbers justified by a lot of statistic wizardry, so it’s always open to interpretation. (If you need to put a downward spin on it, CNBC has one for you. Almost everybody else was more upbeat.) But basically you look for four things:

• total number of jobs. In November, that number went up by 321,000, the most in a month since January, 2012. A rule of thumb is that 100K new jobs per month just keeps pace with the increase in population. Beyond that, you’re starting to make some headway in employing the unemployed. This number bounces around a lot from month to month, so you want to look at the longer-term trend. USA Today comments on the chart below: “Labor market gains have been consistently strong this year despite a mixed economy, averaging almost 241,000 additional jobs a month, up from 194,000 in 2013. Employers have added at least 200,000 jobs for 10 straight months, the best stretch since the mid-1990s.”
• unemployment rate. This held steady at 5.8%, a number well below the 10% we saw in 2009 or 7% early last year, but not nearly as good as the 3% at the end of the Clinton administration. At first glance, this lack of improvement contradicts what I just said about employing the unemployed, but one of the first things an improving job market does is inspire discouraged workers to start looking for work again. The official unemployment rate is always well below the number of workers who wish they had jobs; the “extra” 221K jobs took up some of that slack.
• hours worked. Up slightly, from an average of 34.5 per week per worker to 34.6. Employers don’t like to hire and fire, so when business is bad they’ll cut back hours before they start letting workers go. On the upside, they’ll work their current staff harder before they start hiring new people. So an increase in hours worked is a good sign in two ways: Directly, it puts more money in workers’ pockets. Indirectly, it points to more hiring in the future.
• wages. Up slightly, from an average of $24.57 per hour to $24.66. Employers don’t raise wages out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it because finding new workers or hanging on to the ones they have is becoming a problem. So an increase in the average wage isn’t just good in itself, it’s a good sign for the job market.

None of those individual numbers really knock your socks off. But we’ve gotten used to ambiguous job reports, where the four big indicators point in different directions, suggesting that whichever one impressed you was just a statistical blip that will even out next month. Not so this month.

and Hillary

I was traveling this week, and as I sat by the gate in airports, I kept hearing CNN speculate about when Hillary Clinton would announce her candidacy. Now that the midterm elections are over, the pundits figure, what’s the hold up?

The logic here is really simple, even if it doesn’t make for exciting TV discussions: The shorter the campaign, the better for Hillary. Why would she want to get the campaign started if nobody is out there campaigning against her?

Think about it: If we all woke up tomorrow morning to discover that there was a national Democratic presidential primary happening, Hillary would win easily, because at the moment nobody else has the name recognition or the organized support to challenge her. Even if it turned out that most Democrats didn’t want her to be the candidate, she’d get maybe 40% and there’d be a bunch of 5% and 10% people. Elizabeth Warren might get 20-25%, but nobody’s sure she even wants the job.

The longer everybody waits to start the campaign, the closer we get to that surprise-election scenario, and the better for Hillary. In general, if you’re the front-runner, only bad things can happen during a campaign: You can screw up, or somebody else can catch fire. Why would you stretch that process out and run a longer gauntlet than you absolutely had to?

So if another Democrat starts actively campaigning against her, Hillary will announce a week or two later. Or if Republican candidates make her the focus of their rhetoric and start driving up her negatives, she may need to get out there to make her own headlines. (On the other hand, if Republicans are out-doing each other in competing for the right-wing-crazy vote, why take the spotlight off them?) Otherwise, she’d be smart to wait until late summer, then do a coronation tour of the early primary states just to show she’s not taking them for granted.

OTOH, I was talking to my favorite 20-something, who verified what Bonnie Kristian was saying in The Week: Young voters are not excited about a 90s-re-run Clinton presidency. Imagining a 1992-ish Clinton/Bush match-up, Kristian says: “If the kids don’t want broccoli, show ’em how good it looks compared to Brussels sprouts.”

No, I don’t think Clinton would lose the youth vote to Bush or Cruz or Paul — MF20S would vote for her — but turn-out might be a problem.

and religious freedom

The next time you hear someone claim that Christians are persecuted because a baker has to sell a wedding cake to two men, give them some perspective on what oppression really looks like and who the oppressors are. Here’s Pastor Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona:

Turn to Leviticus 20:13, because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.” And that, my friend, is the cure for AIDS. It was right there in the Bible all along — and they’re out spending billions of dollars in research and testing. It’s curable — right there. Because if you executed the homos like God recommends, you wouldn’t have all this AIDS running rampant.

As far as I know, no gay-rights activists are demanding that Christian fundamentalists be put to death. And no, refusing to let Christians carry out Leviticus 20:13 is not a violation of their religious freedom.

With that in mind, though, I read the text of the Michigan Religious Freedom Restoration Act, recently passed by the Michigan House and on its way to the Senate. The purpose of the act is “to provide a claim or defense to persons whose religious exercise is substantially burdened by government.” It defines an “exercise of religion” as “an act or refusal to act, that is substantially motivated by a sincerely held religious belief.”

So refusing to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple is an “expression of religion” rather than an indulgence of bigotry with Biblical cover. But so is stoning gays (or loose women; see Deuteronomy 22:20-21). Fortunately, the law still allows government to restrict such acts if it can prove it has a “compelling interest”. We can only hope judges will decide the Michigan government has a compelling interest in keeping gays and loose women alive.

BTW, some Sunday Pastor Anderson might have his flock turn to David’s lament after the death of Jonathan, in II Samuel 1:26:

I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.

If we’re going to read the Bible literally, let’s read it literally. The whole thing.

Atheists also face non-imaginary religious discrimination. An article in yesterday’s NYT discusses the effort to get bans on atheists holding office out of state constitutions. Those provisions have been unenforceable since a 1961 Supreme Court decision, but Todd Stiefel of Openly Secular comments:

If it was on the books that Jews couldn’t hold public office, or that African-Americans or women couldn’t vote, that would be a no-brainer. You’d have politicians falling all over themselves to try to get it repealed. Even if it was still unenforceable, it would still be disgraceful and be removed. So why are we different?

And Muslims face real religious freedom issues: The Kennesaw, Georgia city council refused a Muslim congregation’s request to rent worship space in a strip mall, breaking precedents established for Christian groups. An anti-Muslim protester said: “To me [the mosque] is a threat to my freedom, my liberties, and everything I own.”

and you also might be interested in …

It’s time for that annual assault on my self-image as a cultured, well-read person: The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2014. I’ve read exactly one of the novels (The Magician’s Land) and about a quarter of one of the non-fiction books (The Invisible Bridge). A somewhat less intimidating list is “The 10 Best Books of 2014“, of which I have read none.

Chris Rock has a movie coming out, so he’s been doing interviews, notably in Rolling Stone and with Frank Rich at Vulture. Here’s the money quote from the Rich interview:

When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before. … If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t.

The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

It’s been a heavy week, so let’s close with something cute

like a toddler in a snow suit discovering ice.