Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

Why so frustrated, America?

October 24, 2016 – 10:29 am

Divided government and partisan polarization have us stuck in a status quo that no one wants. Maybe we need fewer principled stands and more compromises.

For decades, Gallup has been asking people how satisfied they are with “the way things are going in the United States”. As you can see from the graph, results vary. Painting in broad strokes, most people were dissatisfied under President Carter, the country got increasingly more optimistic under Reagan, got discouraged again by Bush the First, were pretty happy by the final days of the Clinton administration, stayed happy for a while, and then became almost unanimously negative by the end of Bush the Second’s administration. Then the graph flattens out: There was an initial bump towards optimism when President Obama took office, but since then satisfaction has been running somewhere in the 20s. [1]

The last time a majority told Gallup they were satisfied was more than 12 years ago, around the time that we captured Saddam Hussein and thought the Iraq War might be over soon.

Ordinarily, you’d expect this level of dissatisfaction to lead to a series of throw-the-bums-out elections, but it hasn’t. Obama won a second term by nearly 5 million votes in 2012. Year after year in Congress, over 90% of incumbents get re-elected. President Obama’s approval rating is over 50%, and the candidate promising to continue most of his policies is far ahead in the polls. A handful of incumbent Republican senators are in trouble, but once again the majority of incumbents in both parties will return to Washington with the apparent mandate of their voters.

So we think things are screwed up, but we don’t seem to be taking it out on anybody in particular. Why not?

Neither party claims the status-quo. In a typical election year, the party in power tells us that things are going pretty well, while the party out of power says that things are bad and we need a change. So there’s a status-quo party and a change party.

The first step towards unraveling our current political mystery is to realize that neither party thinks it represents the status quo. Obama in 2012 didn’t run a stay-the-course campaign, and neither has Clinton in 2016. [2] Neither party’s congressional candidates are telling us that Congress is doing fine, so we should leave them in office to do more of it.

Both major-party presidential candidates talk extensively about the changes they want to make. Trump wants to scrap our trade deals, build a wall on the Mexican border, stop admitting immigrants and refugees from Muslim countries, cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy, reduce commitments to our NATO allies, get friendlier with Russia, repeal ObamaCare, repeal the Dodd-Frank rules on Wall Street, and reverse all of President Obama’s executive orders on climate change.

Clinton wants to raise the minimum wage, substantially increase spending on infrastructure, give undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship, let students graduate from college debt-free, put more restrictions on Wall Street, increase taxes on the wealthy, reverse the Citizens United ruling, end mass incarceration of non-whites, expand and repair ObamaCare, and invest in sustainable energy sources.

So the paradox isn’t that a status-quo-hating electorate keeps voting for the status-quo party and rejecting the change party. It’s that we have two would-be change parties dominating different parts of a divided government. Neither can achieve its vision alone, but they also can’t work together on more-or-less anything. So on issue after issue, the country is stuck in a place that no one likes, but neither side can muster the power to move it somewhere else.

Let’s look at some examples.

No one wants millions of people to keep living in the United States without legal status. The usual estimate says there are about 11 million undocumented immigrants. They have to work under the table, possibly for less than minimum wage or in unsafe or unsanitary conditions — which drags down conditions for any legal worker who competes with them. They are afraid to call the cops if they witness or are the victims of a crime. They are afraid to go to the emergency room if they’re sick, so God help us if there’s an epidemic. They may or may not dare to send their kids to school.

This is a bad situation that neither party likes, but they can’t agree on what to do about it. Throw them all out? Legalize them? Just throw out the “bad hombres”? If you legalize them, can they become citizens or just residents? Will legalization encourage more people to come, or can we prevent that somehow?

Three years ago the Senate, after much wrangling, negotiated a bipartisan compromise and passed it 68-32. And that was the last official action taken. The House has not even held hearings on that bill or any alternative. No one has any idea when or how we might resolve this situation.

No one wants to keep anticipating the next government shutdown. Back in 1974, Congress laid out a sensible budget process that used to produce a product more-or-less on time every year.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Each year the executive branch puts together a budget, which the president submits to Congress by February. Congress then either edits or rewrites it and passes a budget resolution by April 15. The various congressional committees then know how much money they have to work with, so they write 12 separate appropriation bills that spell out the programs in more detail and authorize the Treasury to write checks. Congress passes those bills, maybe with some amendments. The President either signs or vetoes them; if he vetoes, he and the congressional leadership work out their differences promptly, so that all 12 bills get passed and signed in plenty of time for the fiscal year to start on October 1.

There hasn’t been a successful budget process in years. In 2013, the government shut down for a little over two weeks, and we’ve had “fiscal cliffs” and a series of other scary deadlines that usually get met with only hours to spare.

This year’s struggle was comparatively tame: Authorization to keep the lights on past October 1 got passed on September 29. But that wasn’t an annual budget; it just keeps things going until December, when the lame-duck Congress can do it all again.

Nothing is gained by this brinksmanship. Whatever numbers and programs come out of the December negotiations — assuming something does come out of it — could have been agreed to by the end of summer.

No one wants a perpetual budget deficit. Most economists understand that a budget deficit can be useful in shortening a recession or necessary when fighting a war. But no one believes that a large annual deficit should be a permanent feature of the federal budget.

The federal government’s trillion-dollar annual deficits between FY 2009 and FY 2012 were worrying, but maybe not unreasonable as long as they were temporary. By FY2015, the shortfall was down to $438 billion — a number that used to seem stratospheric, but by then looked like progress. But FY2016’s deficit increased to $587 billion and seems to be headed back up. CBO projections have it returning to the trillion-a-year altitude by FY2022. That’s the baseline, and doesn’t assume any extraordinary emergencies. If there’s another major recession or war, the numbers could be much higher.

No one argues that this is a good idea, but (like the mule who starves because he can’t decide which pile of hay to head towards) we are caught between two solutions and end up pursuing neither: Conservatives won’t agree to higher taxes, and liberals won’t agree to spending cuts without higher taxes. So nothing happens, and the deficits continue to build.

No one thinks Medicare is in good financial shape or wants it to go bankrupt. Healthcare inflation has been lower since the Affordable Care Act passed, but Medicare is still expected to run out of money in 2028, when I’ll turn 72. (The Social Security trust fund is expected to hit zero in 2034, but for a variety of reasons that fix should be easier.)

Medicare is an enormously popular program, because no one wants to see themselves or their parents face a choice between death and bankruptcy. And there are many ways to keep it going well past 2028: raise taxes, cut benefits, raise the age of eligibility, or fold it into a larger universal healthcare program with a new funding stream. But we can’t decide which way to go, so the bankruptcy clock continues to tick down.

No one wants to leave Supreme Court seats vacant. The Constitution describes a simple process: the President

shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for

Justice Scalia died in February, and his seat is still unfilled. President Obama nominated Merrick Garland in March. But the Senate has not seen fit to hold hearings or votes on his nomination, so no one has had to explain to the public why Garland should or shouldn’t be on the Supreme Court.

Senator McCain recently said that the Senate might continue refusing to fill the seat after the election, if Clinton wins. If Trump were to win and Democrats regained control of the Senate, they might feel that turnabout is fair play. So there’s no telling when that seat might be filled, or what will happen if some other justice dies or retires.

Without a new justice, the Court often has a 4-4 deadlock, which leaves lower court rulings intact but does not establish any new national precedents. The longer this goes on, the more issues there are on which the country has no official interpretation of its laws.

You may blame the Senate for not acting, blame President Obama for not nominating someone Senate Republicans like better, or blame both of them for letting their relationship reach this low point. But you can’t argue that this is a good practice or a good outcome.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea well enough to find your own examples.

How did the Republic last this long? When the Founders wrote the Constitution, they were mostly worried about tyranny, so they created a system of checks and balances that kept any one person from having too much power. To get anything done in the Founders’ system, a political leader either needs overwhelming support from the public or has to cooperate with leaders of other parties or factions.

As a result, backdoor deal-making and horse-trading goes back to the beginning of the Republic, as the Hamilton musical makes clear

No one really knows how the game is played,
the art of the trade,
how the sausage gets made.
We just assume that it happens,
but no one else is in the room where it happens.

Hamilton comes out of that room with the votes for his financial plan, and Jefferson gets the national capital located next to Virginia.

We’ve made deals like that all through our history. Henry Clay was known as “the Great Compromiser” for the ways that he kept the slavery issue from wrecking the country. (In retrospect, he delayed the Civil War by several decades.) Think about that: These days it’s an insult to call someone a “compromiser”. We’re all supposed to be people of firm principles, not compromisers — much less “great” ones.

President Eisenhower and Majority Leader Johnson

President Eisenhower and Majority Leader Johnson

When FDR was preparing the country to enter World War II, he didn’t try to run over Republican opposition, he appointed Republicans to be his War Secretary and Navy Secretary — and they accepted.

We’ve had a number of periods of divided government before, and presidents of both parties have worked amicably with congressional opposition leaders, like President Eisenhower with Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, and President Reagan with Tip O’Neill [3]. The historic Clean Air Act of 1970 came out of President Nixon’s cooperation with an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress.

Traitors and the principle budget. The last such bipartisan pairing was President Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich, who managed to shrink the deficit to the point that Clinton could claim a surplus after Gingrich left office. Clinton ended his term not just with a budget surplus, but with low inflation, low unemployment, and the nation at relative peace.

President Bush and Speaker Pelosi never developed such a relationship. Neither did President Obama and Speaker Boehner or Speaker Ryan.

One reason Clinton/Gingrich was the last bipartisan power-pairing is that Clinton is remembered in some circles as having betrayed the Left. Betrayal is a word you hear a lot in our politics these days. Paul Ryan “betrays” conservatism every time he avoids a government shutdown. Bernie Sanders “betrayed” his movement by endorsing Hillary.

Principled, on the other hand, is an entirely good word. We all want to be principled. We admire the man or woman who takes a strong principled stand and refuses to be moved. If we have a choice between framing our positions as good ideas and framing them as principles of the highest order, we choose the later. It just feels stronger and purer.

Here’s the thing, though: We can’t afford too many principled stands. Our system of government isn’t set up that way. It’s set up for people who will take half a loaf and keep the process moving. In our history, we have had one period where principle won out over all other considerations: the Civil War. It was, by many descriptions, a glorious time during which giants walked the Earth. But it was also the fucking Civil War. It was the bloodiest, most destructive period in our history, and the Republic would not have survived if we’d tried something like that more often.

So I want to throw out a radical idea: Rather than trying to found our entire platform on unshakeable principles, we should be giving ourselves a principle budget: Is this the issue we want to be principled about? Is this short list of issues the hill we’re prepared to die on?

By all means, we should have principles and try to do right by them. But at some point we all need to accept a mixture of the things we want and the things our opponents want. The alternative is to wind up with things that nobody wants.

[1] Real Clear Politics averages a lot of polls asking similar questions, and shows a similar result: All through the Obama years, the “on the right track” number has struggled to stay above 30%.

[2] Most of us don’t even remember what a stay-the-course campaign sounds like. But examine some past presidential re-election slogans. War-time presidents Lincoln in 1864 and Roosevelt in 1944 ran on “Don’t swap horses in midstream”. In 1956, Eisenhower edited his 1952 slogan: “I still like Ike.” Reagan in 1984 optimistically claimed “It’s morning again in America”. “Stay the course” was not literally a Nixon slogan in 1972, but he said it a lot. His actual slogan was “Now more then ever”.

But my favorite has to be McKinley in 1900, who ran for re-election under the unbelievably modest: “Leave well enough alone.”

[3] O’Neill’s son wrote in 2012:

No, my father and Reagan weren’t close friends. Famously, after 6 p.m. on quite a few work days, they would sit down for drinks at the White House. But it wasn’t the drinks or the conversation that allowed American government to work. Instead, it was a stubborn refusal not to allow fund-raisers, activists, party platforms or ideological chasms to stand between them and actions — tempered and improved by compromise — that kept this country moving.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

October 24, 2016 – 8:07 am

One of the oddities of this election cycle has been that no one seems happy. Not conservatives, not liberals, not the mainstream, not the fringe — nobody. This week’s featured post “Why so frustrated, America?” will look at this anomalous situation and offer this frame for it: Divided government plus extreme polarization means that both parties want their own kind of change, and neither can achieve it. As a result, on a long list of issues the country is stuck with a status quo that no one likes or is willing to defend.

Immigration is a paradigm of this dysfunction: You may want to give them papers or you may want to throw them out, but literally no one — well, except for sweatshop owners and document forgers — thinks it’s a good idea for 11 million people to live here indefinitely with no legal status. Yet that situation continues with no end in sight. Neither Trump’s deportation force nor Clinton’s path to citizenship are likely to pass Congress anytime soon, so we all cheer for our candidates without really believing their plans will come to fruition.

If you look around, you can see that pattern everywhere: What we’re currently doing is obviously wrong, but neither party has enough power to change it alone, and they’re not capable of working together. So we lurch from one government-shutdown deadline to the next, leave the Supreme Court in a 4-4 deadlock, and watch the bankruptcy clock on Medicare keep ticking.

All that raises obvious questions: How did the American Republic survive this long? What’s different about this era? Can we do anything about it?

I don’t promise a complete answer, but I’ll at least try to frame the questions better. That post should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

In the weekly summary, I’ll thank God that the debates are finally over, and endorse Ezra Klein’s analysis of Clinton’s winning strategy. Friday’s internet outage looks more like a harbinger of things to come than a temporary annoyance. The Mosul offensive is on. The debates yielded some funny videos. And we’ll close with a look at the most beautiful bookstores in the world.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (2)

Making Them Cry

October 17, 2016 – 12:24 pm

Georgie Porgie, puddin’ and pie
Kissed the girls and made them cry.

– nursery rhyme

This week’s featured post is “A Teaching Moment on Sexual Assault“.

In other Sift news, the post “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party” has passed the 500,000 page-view mark. It’s the most popular Sift post ever.

This week everybody was talking about Donald Trump and sexual assault

Since this story has dominated the news all week, I’m going to assume that anybody who wants to follow the details has been able to. So rather than rehash it all, I’ll just hit the low points:

  • A week ago Friday, a video from 2005 came out in which Trump boasted about how easy it is to get away with sexual assault (unwanted kissing, grabbing women “by the pussy”) when you’re a star like him.
  • Two days later, in his second debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump said that what he said on the tape was just “locker room talk” (which didn’t happen in a locker room, but seems to mean: false bragging that men do to impress each other when no women are around). He said that had never actually committed such assaults.
  • Beginning this Wednesday, women started coming forward to say that Trump assaulted them in precisely the ways he described.

Huffington Post has been keeping a list of the women and their charges, updated as new charges arise. To me, the accounts vary in their persuasiveness. Kristin Anderson’s story would probably not be newsworthy if not for its similarity to the others: She recalls a 30-second encounter in a New York nightclub in which Trump put his hand up her skirt, but she can’t recall a date any more exact than “the early 1990s”, or who she was with who might corroborate her account, or even be certain which club it was. Not that it didn’t happen, but it’s hard to imagine an account so vague getting published in a different news environment.

At the other extreme, I found Natasha Stoynoff’s account compelling: She had regularly covered Trump for People magazine, and was well known to both Trump and his wife Melania. While she was at Mar-a-Lago to interview the couple for a first-anniversary feature, Trump lured her into a side room “and within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat.” She didn’t tell her editor, finished the feature (which was published without mention of the incident), and made sure she was never assigned to cover Trump again.

Trump denies everything, and has counterattacked.

These people are horrible people. They’re horrible, horrible liars.

One counterattack is particularly vile: He has been suggesting to his rallies that the women aren’t attractive enough to make their stories credible.

These events never, ever happened, and the people that said them, meekly, fully understand. You take a look at these people, you study these people, and you’ll understand also.

About Stoynoff in particular he said:

Take a look. You take a look. Look at her, look at her words, you tell me what you think. I don’t think so.

Of another accuser, he told a crowd in North Carolina:

Believe me, she would not be my first choice.

While he was at it, he also body-shamed Hillary Clinton. Answering the criticism that he stalked Clinton during the second debate, he blamed her for walking in front of him, and then said:

She walks in front of me, you know. And when she walked in front of me, believe me, I wasn’t impressed.

To me, that just sums it all up. She’s a grandmother who will turn 69 in two weeks. She’s been First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and Democratic nominee for President. And we’re supposed to judge her by her butt.

Trump has also attacked People and The New York Times, which started the deluge by publishing the first two accounts Wednesday. When Trump’s lawyer sent a letter threatening a lawsuit, The Times lawyer fired back what can only be described as a bring-it-on challenge:

We did what the law allows: We published newsworthy information about a subject of deep public concern. If Mr. Trump disagrees, if he believes that American citizens had no right to hear what these women had to say and that the law of this country forces us and those who would dare to criticize him to stand silent or be punished, we welcome the opportunity to have a court set him straight.

The next step here is easy to predict: Trump may file a lawsuit to grab a one-day headline and get his side on the record, but he cannot afford to pursue it. In a previous unsuccessful lawsuit against a reporter, giving a deposition under oath forced him to make a number of embarrassing admissions.

Trump’s other response to his problems has been to go further down the rabbit-hole of conspiracy theories and fascist tropes. In the West Palm Beach speech — which you can watch in its entirety via PBS — he painted himself as a savior. Typical American political rhetoric warns of future problems unless we change our ways, or unless the speaker’s movement or philosophy gains power. But Trump made it about himself: The political establishment

has taken our jobs away, out of this country, never to return unless I am elected president.

He repeated a claim he has made before: “I am the only one who can fix it.”

This is a struggle for the survival of our nation. Believe me. And this will be our last chance to save it, on November 8.

Trump blamed the sexual-assault allegations on a conspiracy that includes “the Clinton machine”, “the corporate media” as a unified entity “with a total political agenda”, and “international banks” plotting “the destruction of U.S. sovereignty”.

As Yochi Dreazen points out, only one word is missing from what is otherwise an ancient libel:

it’s true that Trump’s allegation Thursday that a global financial cabal is secretly working hand in hand with the media to destroy the United States doesn’t include the word “Jew.”

But here’s the thing: It doesn’t need to. Trump is using barely coded words that directly echo one of the most ancient of all anti-Semitic libels. Jews have long been accused of controlling the global financial system. Jews have long been accused of controlling the media. And Jews have long been accused of being disloyal citizens secretly working to maneuver governments to pursue disastrous policies solely for their own benefit. Trump has now chosen to combine all of those charges into a single paranoid and hate-filled rant.

If you need someone to supply that word, Trump’s alt-right allies are happy to oblige. The neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, ex-KKK grand wizard David Duke, and numerous other far-right sources are promoting the theory that the Access Hollywood tape that started this whole furor was leaked by a Jewish aide to Paul Ryan. A Daily Stormer editor posted:

The 35% or so of the country that is hardcore pro-Trump is going to know that it wasn’t “liberals” that defeated Trump, but traitors within the party who abandoned him. And they are going to want to know why that happened.

And there is only one answer:

The Jews did it.

[For the difference between standard conservative Republicans and the alt-right, see this conversation between Hugh Hewitt and Jonah Goldberg. At the time, Hewitt was supporting Trump, but more recently he has called for Trump to withdraw from the presidential race.]

Best response to the whole sordid mess: Michelle Obama.

and sexual assault in general

I cover this in the featured post “A Teaching Moment about Sexual Assault“.

It didn’t fit into the frame of that post, but subsequent to Jessica Leeds’ story, Slate did a story about airlines and sexual assault.

and more Clinton campaign email leaks from Russia by way of WikiLeaks

In particular, we now have transcripts of Clinton’s three speeches to Goldman Sachs in 2013. Personally, I’m glad they’re out. As long as they remained secret, Clinton-haters could imagine they contain some secret plot to do whatever. Now that they’re out, it’s clear that they don’t.

It turns out they aren’t even speeches, they’re Q&A sessions that mostly cover foreign policy. I found them educational, particularly the notion that the Chinese military is a power not completely under control of the central government, and that it is the force most supportive of North Korea.

I’m not sure what the point of keeping the transcripts secret was, or why Clinton refuses to verify their authenticity now. But I wonder if it has more to do with foreign governments than with the American public. For example, it might be convenient to maintain deniability of that China/Korea statement the next time she has to deal with either government.

As far as the other emails that have been released, there’s a lesson we all should have learned after the ClimateGate email dump in 2009: Whether you’ve done anything wrong or not, you never look good when your enemies get to comb through emails you thought were private and publish the excerpts they find most damaging. Countless investigations in both the US and the UK found no wrong-doing in the ClimateGate emails, but to this day climate deniers believe they revealed some nefarious conspiracy.

In emails to known associates, people say the same kinds of things they might say face-to-face: At times they are flip, snide, and short-tempered. They blow off steam to people they think will be sympathetic, and make statements they couldn’t support well enough to say them on the record. They float outrageous ideas, sometimes seriously, sometimes in jest.

I occasionally read articles in the right-wing press about some particular batch of WikiLeaks Clinton-campaign emails. Like this one where the main thing that strikes me is how tame it all is.

The emails, published by WikiLeaks after a hack of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s private account, also show Clinton campaign officials and Democratic leaders disparaging supporters of Sen. Bernard Sanders as “self-righteous” whiners, calling Hispanic party leaders such as Bill Richardson “needy Latinos,” labeling CNN anchor Jake Tapper “a d—k” and even lambasting longtime Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal.

Horrors! In the middle of high-pressure situations, Clinton campaign staffers privately said unkind things about people who were making their lives difficult. I fear for the future of the free world if such monsters get their hands on the levers of power. But wait, there’s worse:

The Clinton campaign’s biggest problem may be its assault on Catholics.

Podesta didn’t participate in this exchange himself, but he was copied on emails that Clinton campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri  received from someone outside the campaign: John Halpin of the Center for American Progress.

In the exchange, Mr. Halpin mocks media mogul Rupert Murdoch for raising his children in the Catholic faith and said the most “powerful elements” in the conservative movement are all Catholic.

“It’s an amazing bastardization of the faith. They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy,” Mr. Halpin said.

It’s actually a good point: Catholic economic doctrine is not even remotely conservative, and hasn’t been for over a century. So there actually is a mystery here. Palmieri had a fairly boring response:

I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they become evangelicals.

This is the “assault on Catholics” that The Washington Times thinks Palmieri should be fired for. And Paul Ryan believes Palmieri’s single line about the social status of Catholics compared to evangelicals “reveal[s] the Clinton campaign’s hostile attitude toward people of faith in general.”

I wonder how many emails they had to read before they found such a bombshell.

The other issue raised by the series of WikiLeaks releases of Clinton documents is the role of Russia.

There is mounting evidence that the Russian government is supplying WikiLeaks with hacked emails pertaining to the US presidential election, US officials familiar with the investigation have told CNN.

NBC News claims to know that U.S. intelligence officials had briefed Trump on this before the second debate, in which Trump asserted that Clinton “doesn’t know if it’s the Russians doing the hacking. Maybe there is no hacking.”

Yesterday on Fox News, VP candidate Mike Pence appeared to break with Trump on this:

I think there’s no question that the evidence continues to point in that direction [of Russian responsibility]. There should be severe consequences to Russia or any sovereign nation that is compromising the privacy or the security of the United States of America.

This is a problem we haven’t had to deal with before, and it’s hard to know how to think about it. On the one hand, the WikiLeaks dumps are what they are, and it seems silly to avoid knowing what’s in them. On the other hand, how do we assess the fact that one of our chief rivals wants Donald Trump to win?

and you might also be interested in

No, Canadians are not flocking to the U.S. to get health care.

Good news for the climate: 197 nations just agreed to cut way down on their use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are used in air conditioners. Originally, they were supposed to replace the CFCs that were killing the ozone layer. (And they succeeded, the ozone hole seems to be filling in.) But HFCs are powerful greenhouse gases 10,000 times as effective as carbon dioxide. Estimates say that the agreement will shave anywhere from .2 to .44 of a Celsius degree off the average global temperature by the end of the century.

A fascinating story in The Washington Post about the conversion of Derek Black, son of the founder of the white-nationalist Stormfront web site, who as a teen-ager had his own radio show where he helped popularize the notion of white genocide. He has now left the white-nationalist movement, which has created a family crisis.

His story reminds me of a New Yorker article from last November about Megan Phelps-Roper, granddaughter of Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, the people who picket funerals with “God Hates Fags” signs.

In both stories, conversion away from a hateful ideology happens not through logical argument, but by getting to know and admire people that the ideology condemns. The personal relationship opens up a channel for new ideas to come in.

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. A popular songwriter had never won before, but I guess the times, they are a-changing. I’d have voted for Thomas Pynchon myself, but what do I know?

A plot by anti-Muslim “Crusaders” was broken up before the group could blow up an apartment building in Garden City, Kansas. They were hoping to kill a lot of Somali immigrants and “ignite a religious war”.

A Republican Party office was firebombed in North Carolina Saturday night. Donald Trump immediately attributed it to “Animals representing Hillary Clinton and Dems”. Clinton denounced the bombing, and other Democrats raised $13K to help the Republicans rebuild.

So far, nobody knows who did this. If the perps think this helps the Democrats, they’re wrong and they need to stop before the “help” any more. Others have suggested a false-flag operation to gain sympathy for Republicans, but that’s a big claim to make without any evidence. Let’s hope the authorities solve the case soon so we can all stop speculating.

Washington Post editor Fred Hiatt got philosophical on MSNBC’s Hardball Friday:

I’ve covered a lot of countries — dictatorships, democracies, everything in between — and the key thing to a democracy … I mean, there are really two things that are key. You have an election, and the loser acknowledges that they lost, and the winner lets the loser survive for another day. Trump is challenging both of those things. He’s saying “If I lose, it’s not legitimate” and “If I win, I’m going to lock her up.” This is the Putin model. It’s not democracy.

Political science professor Shaun Bowler makes a related point: After every election, people who voted for the loser are tempted to doubt the result. One key to whether a democracy succeeds or fails is whether losing candidates try to soothe or enflame those responses.

and believe it or not, you should listen to Rush Limbaugh

Wednesday, Limbaugh unleashed the most amazing rant about how hypocritical it is for liberals to invoke moral standards against Donald Trump. The point, which he borrows from therapist Michael Hurd, is that liberals have no standards when it comes to sex, so how can we invent a standard to apply to Trump? Limbaugh explains this mystery, but does so in a tone of outrage and anger.

You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is? One thing. You can do anything, the left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it’s perfectly fine. Whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there’s no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left.

I and every liberal I’ve mentioned this to have had a well-duh reaction: What consenting adults do is their own business, but as soon as somebody stops consenting and another party keeps going, then you’ve got rape.

and let’s close with something amazing and hopeful

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have given a paralyzed man a robot arm that feels. Not only can his brain control the arm, but tiny electrodes in his brain allow him to know when a finger is being touched or pressed.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (18)

A Teaching Moment on Sexual Assault

October 17, 2016 – 10:36 am

“It’s only been a week,” Liz Plank tweeted. “But we’ve all aged a year.”

Despite how ugly it’s been, though, the last ten days of the presidential campaign does have one redeeming feature: Sexual assault is being discussed in a setting where the whole country is listening.

I’m not naive enough to think that everyone is going to “get it” now and take a more enlightened attitude. (As someone once told me, “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”) But men who are open to understanding the topic better might be paying attention now. Women who had repressed thinking about it, or comparing experiences with other women, might now be having those thoughts and conversations. Teens and even younger boys and girls might be learning that things they had come to accept as normal, or even OK, are really not.

I believe the country as a whole is getting a powerful lesson about four things:

  • how ubiquitous sexual assault is,
  • the myths so many of us believe about it,
  • why women often don’t tell anyone about it,
  • the tactics men use to get away with it.

#notokay. Twitter is famous for insults and snark, but the most powerful hashtags are the ones that gather testimony. Shortly after Trump’s Access Hollywood tape came out, author Kelly Oxford tweeted:

Women: tweet me your first assaults. they aren’t just stats. I’ll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my “pussy” and smiles at me, I’m 12.

Last I checked, that had been re-tweeted more than 13 thousand times. Oxford reported that over the next weekend tweets came in at the rate of 50 per minute. On October 9, her Twitter feed got more than 20 million views.

Eventually she created the hashtag #notokay to move the discussion off her personal feed and open it to more than just first-assault stories.

This is something that pre-internet journalism couldn’t do. A 20th-century reporter could uncover one paradigmic story, or at most a handful of them, and tell those stories in a way that invited readers to identify or empathize, maybe adding a statistical claim that X% of women have had similar experiences. But there was no way to capture the sheer avalanche of testimony. Scrolling down the responses to Oxford’s original tweet, I was struck by their unity-in-diversity. The settings are infinitely varied: a bus, up against a door at granny’s, a couch at home, a bedroom at an aunt’s house, a Halloween party, a friend’s apartment, at work, at the supermarket. The perpetrators are strangers, neighbors, colleagues, bosses, cousins, uncles, teachers. Each tweet has its own unique details, yet pounds the same theme like a hammer.

And the hammer doesn’t stop. A TV news segment or a newspaper feature has to end, so you can leave with a feeling of being done. But a viral tweet defeats you; at some point you just decide to quit reading, knowing that there’s more and will always be more.

Liz Plank took that insight one step further and raised this question:

Trying to find ONE woman who has never experienced a man sexually touching her without their consent.

Scrolling through that hashtag, I still haven’t found the “I’m the one” tweet.

Myths. The typical folk explanation of sexual assault is simple: A man’s libido overcomes his impulse control. From there it’s a short trip to a long list of standard excuses and explanations:

  • virility. I just have such a strong sex drive, sometimes I’m overwhelmed by it.
  • it’s a compliment. You’re just so sexy, how could I stop myself?
  • it’s your fault. Your skirt is so short; your jeans are so tight; your neckline is so low. When you just put it all out there like that, what do you think is going to happen?
  • it’s inevitable. Boys will be boys. You can’t expect us to control ourselves all the time. (Or, as Trump put it on Twitter: “26,000 unreported sexual assaults in the military – only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”)

and so on.

This is worse than just “objectification” of women, because we would never tolerate similar thinking about actual objects: If your drive for acquisition overcomes your impulse control, you’re a thief, period. The strength of your greed does you no credit; you’re not complimenting the wealth of the people you steal from; it’s not their fault for having such nice stuff or displaying it so attractively; and we don’t give in to the inevitability of theft whenever valuable objects are visible to people who might desire them. When it comes to object-lust, self-control is the price of staying in civilization; if you can’t muster it, we’ll lock you away.

But beyond moral considerations, that libido vs. control frame loses its explanatory power when you pay attention to women’s stories, or to the complexity of the male psyche. All women (or very nearly all) get victimized, not just the sexy, popular, or flirtatious ones. Sometimes it’s specifically the unpopular women, the ones no one is looking out for, who get assaulted. Sometimes it’s girls too young to understand what they’re supposedly “asking for”. Sometimes men are seeking dominance rather than pleasure. Sometimes it’s about asserting control over a woman whose self-assurance seems threatening. Sometimes it’s part of a man’s internal process that has nothing to do with the victim at all: Maybe assaulting a stranger is a man’s way of taking revenge on his spouse, or on the women who won’t go out with him. Maybe he’s been humiliated by his boss and wants to humiliate someone else to feel less helpless.

Another myth is that all men do it, or would if they were brave enough. At the very least, they wish they could do it and envy the men who do; so when they get together and trade “locker room talk”, they brag about real or imagined assaults the way Trump did with Billy Bush.

I remember believing something similar in junior high. (Maybe the worst thing Trump has done to me personally is make me remember junior high.) To see up a girl’s skirt or down her blouse, or to touch her somewhere we weren’t supposed to — it was a game: They defended the “goal” while we tried to “score”. To put it in a childish terms, it was like Yogi Bear trying to steal picnic baskets while the ranger tried to stop him. But imagine being an older Yogi, looking back at what once had seemed like youthful highjinks and realizing: “Oh my God, I was a bear. People must have been terrified.”

The earlier we can get that message to boys and young men, the better. And in some cases we are.

One afternoon, while reporting for a book on girls’ sexual experience, I sat in on a health class at a progressive Bay Area high school. Toward the end of the session, a blond boy wearing a school athletic jersey raised his hand. “You know that baseball metaphor for sex?” he asked. “Well, in baseball there’s a winner and a loser. So who is supposed to be the ‘loser’ in sex?”

Fortunately, this week many admired and imitated athletes came forward to say that the Trump/Bush conversation is not normal locker-room banter. Like LeBron James:

What is locker room talk to me? It’s not what that guy said. We don’t disrespect women in no shape or fashion in our locker room. That never comes up. Obviously, I got a mother-in-law, a wife, a mom and a daughter and those conversations just don’t go on in our locker room. What that guy was saying, I don’t know what that is. That’s trash talk.

Even Trump’s friend Tom Brady walked away from a microphone rather than defend him on this.

Why don’t they tell? One of Trump’s main defenses against his accusers has been: Why didn’t they say anything at the time? If these incidents have been happening for decades, why is this all coming out only now, just a few weeks before the election?

In particular, he wondered about People magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff whose account of being shoved up against a wall and forcibly kissed by Trump while she was at Mar-a-Lago to interview Donald and Melania about their first anniversary seemed (to me) particularly compelling. He challenged her at a rally Thursday in Ohio:

I ask her a simple question. Why wasn’t it part of the story that appeared 12 years ago? Why didn’t they make it part of the story … if she had added that, it would have been the headline.

Picture what Trump is assuming: If Stoynoff had made such a claim against Trump, with no witnesses or physical evidence, her editors would have simply believed her, and would have been willing to put their magazine behind her in a battle against a famously litigious billionaire. Weigh the likelihood of that scenario against the explanation Stoynoff had already published before Trump spoke:

Back in my Manhattan office the next day, I went to a colleague and told her everything.

“We need to go to the managing editor,” she said, “And we should kill this story, it’s a lie. Tell me what you want to do.”

But, like many women, I was ashamed and blamed myself for his transgression. I minimized it (“It’s not like he raped me…”); I doubted my recollection and my reaction. I was afraid that a famous, powerful, wealthy man could and would discredit and destroy me, especially if I got his coveted PEOPLE feature killed.

“I just want to forget it ever happened,” I insisted. The happy anniversary story hit newsstands a week later and Donald left me a voicemail at work, thanking me.

“I think you’re terrific,” he said. “The article was great and you’re great.”

Yeah, I thought. I’m great because I kept my mouth shut.

Notice that the idea of making the assault part of the story never comes up; it’s not even suggested by Stoynoff’s colleague.

Liz Plank created the hashtag #WhyWomenDontReport, which is another assemblage of testimony like this:

Because I was a medical student and he was the attending surgeon

Because he was my landlord. Because I was 21 and feared homelessness. Because my father told me to figure it out myself.

Because it was easier to pretend it didn’t happen than to face the police, the courts and my perpertrator.

But maybe the best explanation of why women don’t report sexual assault is watching Trump trash the ones who reported on him, which Plank wrote about in “Donald Trump is giving us a master class in #WhyWomenDontReport“.

While I was on set Wednesday night with Chris Hayes, [Trump spokesperson A.J. Delgado] said, “If somebody actually did that, Chris, any reasonable woman would have come forward and said something at the time.”

Any reasonable woman?

Was it reasonable for Jessica Leeds to come forward about her sexual assault only to have Lou Dobbs tweet her personal phone number and address, exposing her private information to his hundreds of thousands of followers? Was it reasonable for Natasha Stoynoff to come forward about her sexual assault only to have Donald Trump suggest she was too ugly for him to be interested in sexually assault her?

Trump said his accusers are “doing [it] probably for a little fame. They get some free fame. It’s a total set-up.” But who exactly wants this kind of fame? Are any women out there watching Jessica Leeds or Natasha Stoynoff and thinking “I wish people would pay attention to me like that”?

And that brings us to men’s tactics.

Tactics. Between the debate Sunday and the first wave of new accusers coming forward Wednesday, Liz Plank used Trump’s debate performance as an example of the tactics of abusive men. She listed

  1. Humiliation. Trump’s pre-debate press conference with women who have accused Bill Clinton wasn’t about seeking justice for them. It was about humiliating Hillary Clinton.
  2. Deflection. Trump minimized his behavior as “locker room talk”, and quickly segued to “ISIS chopping off heads”.
  3. Intimidation. He threatened to put Clinton in jail, and loomed behind her “in a way that almost made me feel unsafe for her”.
  4. Gaslighting. In other words: creating an entire alternate reality to make victims question their own perceptions and memories. For example, Trump asserted that it was Clinton, not him, who owes President Obama an apology for the birther movement. “So if you feel like you’re going insane during this election, that’s Donald Trump gas lighting you over and over and over.”

What we’ve seen since just bears this out. He’s been heaping humiliation on the women who have accused him. (They’re “horrible, horrible liars” who he obviously couldn’t have assaulted because they aren’t attractive enough.) He’s been deflecting his own guilt onto Bill Clinton (whose accusers should be believed even though Trump’s shouldn’t). He’s threatened completely ridiculous lawsuits against The New York Times and People for publishing women’s accounts of his misconduct. And (completely without evidence) he has gaslighted the nation by putting forward a theory that makes him the victim of a conspiracy involving the global financial elite and the entire corporate media. (He’s not a sleazeball who abuses women, he’s a messianic hero who suffers these outrageous attacks in order to save the common people. He’s not blowing an election Republicans might have won, he’s going to be defrauded at the polls.)

But the important thing to remember for the future is that this is not an isolated incident and Trump is not a unique character. Lots and lots of men do this kind of thing. They do it to anybody. They do it because they can. They have a standard list of excuses for doing it. They have tactics for getting women to shut up about it and men not to believe the women who don’t shut up.

The thing to remember the next time you hear something like this is that you’ve heard it before. It’s all part of the pattern.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

October 17, 2016 – 7:42 am

This is one of those weeks where it’s easy to get sucked into the same story that the news channels have been talking about 24/7: the women accusing Trump of sexual assault and other unwanted boorish attention. And I will link to that stuff for those of you who haven’t already had enough of it, but the point of the Sift is to be an alternative to the news-hype machine, not to participate in it.

So instead of joining the isn’t-this-awful chorus — it is awful, but you don’t need me to tell you that — I decided to focus on the silver lining of the story: The public is getting an education about sexual assault. That could have consequences well beyond the election. This week’s featured post will be “A Teaching Moment on Sexual Assault”, and it will cover four areas where I think the public consciousness is being raised: how ubiquitous sexual assault is, the myths so many of us believe about it, why so many women don’t tell anyone about it, and the tactics men use to get away with it.

I still have some work to do on it, and it’s the kind of topic where I have to check the wording of every sentence to make sure I’m not unintentionally saying something offensive or insensitive, or perpetuating myths of my own, so it may not come out until 10 or 11. (If I do offend you, complain in the comments. There’s a good chance I’ll say “Thank you” and re-edit some part of the post.)

The weekly summary is where I’ll talk directly about the Trump scandal and his responses to it, including a really disturbing revival of what would become a Nazi conspiracy theory if you just added the word Jews to it. (Some of his followers have done that.) Also: more WikiLeaks releases of hacked Clinton-campaign stuff, including transcripts of her Goldman Sachs appearances in 2013. (It turns out they weren’t speeches, but Q&A sessions.)

There’s also a thwarted white-supremacist plot to bomb an apartment complex in Kansas where a lot of Somali Muslims live, and the firebombing of a Republican headquarters in North Carolina. An international agreement made real progress on climate change. The Scots are looking at a post-Brexit independence vote. And probably some other stuff. There will be a closing, but I haven’t picked it yet.

And I turn 60 today. I am now officially entitled to start saying: “Not bad for an old guy.”

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Bizarre Talk

October 10, 2016 – 12:47 pm

If we’re worried about the longer-term implications of current policies, the buildup of greenhouse gases is a much bigger deal than the accumulation of low-interest debt. It’s bizarre to talk about the latter but not the former.

– Paul Krugman “What About the Planet?” (10-7-2016)

This week’s featured post is “Best Responses to the Trump Video“.

This week everybody was talking about leaks

In addition to Trump’s sexual-assault-confessing video, which I cover in the featured post, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails hacked from the account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. Included in the haul are internal Clinton campaign discussions about what they would have to defend if the text of her Goldman Sachs speeches came out.

I haven’t examined the Podesta emails myself. Matt Yglesias concludes: “The lesson of Hillary’s secret speeches is she’s exactly who we already knew she was“. In other words, she is someone who works inside the system and negotiates with the powers that already exist rather than sweeping in from the outside. Yglesias is not alarmed by this, for reasons he explains. I’ll try to formulate my own opinion in future weeks.

Andy Borowitz:

In what passes for morality in the Republican Party, leaders are calling for the presidential candidate who hates women to be replaced by the vp candidate who hates gays.

and the weather

Hurricane Matthew swept up the Florida coast and made it all the way to North Carolina before turning out to sea. It’s been downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone.

Three theories on why hundreds dead in Haiti isn’t news:

  • Haitians aren’t Americans, so who cares? (This echoes my comments last week about Gary Johnson and the decline of foreign coverage.)
  • Most Haitians are black, and (no matter what white people might tell each other) black lives still don’t really matter.
  • It’s Haiti. Something bad is always happening in Haiti.

In the conspiracy-theory world many right-wingers inhabit, Matthew’s path and intensity is no mystery: the government created it.

Hurricane truthers believe the government’s goal is to create unrest and distract the masses from election fraud [in Florida] — namely, the left’s attempt to rig the election for Hillary Clinton.

“Given the unparalleled significance of the 2016 election cycle, the politicos at the federal level would love to sow seeds of chaos any way they can in order to create cover for an election theft,” WorldTruth.tv wrote.

Since climate change is a myth in this alternate universe, there must be some other reason why more powerful storms are making it further north on a regular basis. The old reliable explanation is that liberals have offended the Lord with our gay-rights agenda and overall lack of piety. But if that doesn’t convince you — how’s the reconstruction going, Tony Perkins? — a nefarious human plot backed by sci-fi technology works too.

and more debates

The VPs debated Tuesday and Clinton/Trump had their second debate last night.

By far the strangest moment in the debate was when Trump told Clinton:

If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we’re going to have a special prosecutor.

And then followed up a bit later in this exchange:

CLINTON: It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.

TRUMP: Because you’d be in jail.

If you’re not familiar with how our justice system works, you might not realize why so many people were frightened by this. Ezra Klein, for example:

Tonight was a scary moment in American politics. In fact, it’s probably the scariest I can remember.

In our system, the Justice Department is supposed to be insulated from politics. Nothing in the Constitution says this, but it’s a principle deep in the mores of our system. The president is supposed to make policy and appoint people to carry out that policy, but is not supposed to have any direct influence on specific cases. That’s the principle Republicans were invoking when they objected to President Obama endorsing Secretary Clinton while the FBI was still investigating her. They were afraid that even the hint of the president’s opinion, without any direct orders, would affect the investigation. Democrats invoked that principle during the Bush administration when they objected to the firing of seven states attorneys for what they believed were political reasons.

Well, the President appointing a prosecutor to look at a particular person — especially a political rival, especially one the FBI has already cleared — is completely off the scale. That’s what happens in dictatorships, not in the United States. Trevor Noah was making this point about Trump already a year ago.

What you thought about the VP debate seems to have depended on whether you judged style or substance. Most pundits thought Tim Kaine interrupted Mike Pence too often and looked rude. But Pence chose to defend Donald Trump by simply denying that Trump has said what he said. On substance, that’s a losing position.

That denial is probably a preview of how Republicans will look back on a Trump defeat: what he actually said and stood for will go down the memory hole. Something similar happened on a larger scale after President Bush left office with historically low popularity. There was no discussion about what went wrong or how the party needed to change. Instead, they just stopped talking about Bush for a while, and when they started again they said amazing things, like “We had no domestic attacks under Bush.”

Many Republicans have expressed a hope that Pence will wind up running things. But I haven’t forgotten how Gov. Pence dodged and weaved last year in order to defend the supremacy of Christians over gays in Indiana.

They don’t get much publicity, but debates are also starting to happen in pivotal senate races. Here’s video of Hassan/Ayotte in New Hampshire.

and you also might be interested in

Columbia University’s Jay Rosen is one of the sharpest observers of the culture of political journalism. In this post on his blog PressThink, he discusses the underlying frame that most political coverage is based on, and why journalists are having so much trouble dealing with the fact that the Trump candidacy doesn’t fit in that frame.

The two major parties are similar actors with, as Baquet put it, “warring philosophies.” Elections are the big contests that distribute power between them. The day-to-day of politics is a series of minor battles for tactical advantage. The press is part of this picture because it distributes attention, but — in this view of things — it does not participate in politics itself.

But in the real world, the two political parties have gotten increasingly asymmetric and are no longer similar actors at all. Trump has taken this to an extreme, and journalists have not adjusted.

Campaign coverage is a contraption that only works if the candidates behave in certain expected ways. Up to now, they always did. But Trump violates many of these expectations. … Imagine a candidate who wants to increase public confusion about where he stands on things so that voters give up on trying to stay informed and instead vote with raw emotion. Under those conditions, does asking “Where do you stand, sir?” serve the goals of journalism, or does it enlist the interviewer in the candidate’s chaotic plan? … The premise is that a presidential campaign wants to put out a consistent message to avoid confusing people, and to deny journalists a “gotcha” moment. What if that premise is false? The rationale for interviewing the campaign manager, the running mate, or some other surrogate collapses. They say one thing, the candidate says something else and the confusion is not considered a problem. It may even be a plus.

In an some other version of the United States, an election would be a time to have discussions about really important issues. Lester Holt tried to raise one in the first debate: Should the United States have a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons?

Sadly, neither candidate rose to the challenge: Clinton cautiously avoided saying either yes or no, while Trump boldly and unequivocally said both.

It’s actually a good question. Most Americans probably don’t realize that we don’t already have a no-first-use policy. Originally, there was  a strategic reason for it: We were anticipating World War III in Europe, where the Soviet Union had an advantage in conventional forces. Since the Soviet Union was itself a European power, it could cheaply keep huge armies in a position to strike, while it was much more expensive (not to mention unpopular with the Germans) for us to keep a comparable defensive army stationed in West Germany. So if Soviet tanks started rolling west, we reserved the option of nuking them.

Russia, without its former Warsaw Pact allies and without former Soviet republics like Ukraine, isn’t nearly as formidable as the USSR was. But we still might be stuck for a non-nuclear answer if Putin decided to roll over one or more of the Baltic Republics, which we are committed to defend as members of NATO. Is that why we won’t renounce first use? Or does the Pentagon have some other scenario in mind?

I don’t believe for a minute this will actually pan out on election day, but one recent poll shows Clinton taking the lead in Arizona.

Geez, Bob, you need to stop holding back and say what you really think.

What interests me in this video is how De Niro is doing exactly what Trump does, but doing it better. They’re both 70-something guys who still know how to talk tough, but who (at this point in their lives) would probably be push-overs in any real physical confrontation. Picture the two of them joining 86-year-old Clint Eastwood in a barroom brawl. The result would play better in a slapstick comedy than in an action flick.

And Britain has a favor to ask: Could we elect Trump so that everyone forgets about their boneheaded Brexit vote?

Massachusetts is about to vote on Question 2, which would expand the number of charter schools in the state. The main argument against charters is that they drain money out of the public school system. The long-term fear is that a vicious cycle gets started, where pulling resources out of the system leads to poorer performance, which leads more families to take their kids out of the public schools, which in turn reduces state subsidies to those schools.

Last week, an editorial in The Boston Globe repeated claims made by the Massachusetts Taxpayer Foundation:

Examination of school funding trends in districts affected by charter school enrollments does not suggest that charter schools are over-funded, that students in district schools are suffering a loss of support, or that the per-student funding of districts is trending negatively. Rather, per-student funding has increased quite steadily across the state, and the district-charter balance has been stable.

But former state Education Secretary Paul Reville counters by pointing out that schools have many fixed costs that don’t go away when a student leaves:

Mainstream public schools would argue that the marginal savings associated with losing a student are not nearly as much as the marginal costs associated with losing a student.

But even that misses the point. The most valuable thing charter schools siphon off isn’t public money, it’s easily teachable students. My nightmare is that the kids who can sit still and process information from a teacher standing in front of a blackboard all wind up either in charters or in voucher-funded private schools. Meanwhile, the public schools are left to handle all the special needs kids, all the kids with undiagnosed vision and hearing problems, all the kids who bring their home problems to school and act out, etc. And when it costs more money per student to operate that public school, we’ll be told some nonsense about the efficiency of the private sector.

There’s a parallel to the healthcare system, particularly as it operated before the Affordable Care Act stopped insurance companies from rejecting sick people. Sometimes the way to make money isn’t to offer better service, it’s to make sure you only get the customers who don’t need service.

One bit of tax law that’s unpopular on the right, is the “Johnson amendment” from 1954, saying that churches can’t endorse candidates. The Republican platform calls for repealing it, a promise Donald Trump often makes to evangelical audiences, saying the repeal would “give churches their voice back”. Right-wing web sites call the Johnson amendment a “Christian gag rule“.

If you aren’t familiar with the details, that can sound convincing. I mean, religious convictions often go hand-in-hand with political stances, so why shouldn’t a pastor be able to speak his mind from the pulpit without worrying about his church losing its tax-exempt status? (In fact, many pastors do, and get away with it, because the rule is only enforced in egregious cases. Like when a church “placed full-page advertisements in two newspapers in which it urged Christians not to vote for then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton because of his positions on certain moral issues.”)

But the point of the Johnson Amendment is simple: Contributions to churches are tax-deductible, but contributions to political campaigns or PACs aren’t. So without some kind of restriction on church activity, churches could become money-laundering schemes: You give tax-deductible contributions to a church with the understanding that it will spend that money campaigning for your candidate. I have yet to hear any repeal-the-Johnson-amendment argument that addresses this problem.

but we should be paying more attention to Colombia

Last week I forgave Gary Johnson’s ignorance by citing the general decline in Americans’ awareness of other countries, and blamed a generational shift in news coverage. So let’s talk about what’s going on in Colombia, which produces the bulk of the cocaine Americans abuse.

One thing that makes the whole coca-growing enterprise harder to control is that Colombia has been fighting a civil war for half a century. Picture that: Our Civil War lasted only four years. If it had gone on as long as Colombia’s, we’d have been fighting until just before World War I. The BBC estimates that 260,000 people have been killed, and another six million driven from their homes. The whole country has less than 50 million people.

The government negotiated a peace deal with the guerillas (FARC, which translates to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which was announced at the end of August and signed with much ceremony on September 26. But in a Brexit-like reversal of government policy, the Colombian voters rejected the deal in a referendum on October 2. The vote was close: 50.2%-49.8%, to the great surprise of pollsters, many of whom had the referendum passing with over 60% of the vote.

FARC has a Marxist orientation, and claims to represent the interests of the rural poor against the landed gentry and the urban elite. The areas it controls are prime coca-growing territory, and it funds itself via the drug trade. (So if you think about it, the U.S. has been bankrolling both sides. Our tax dollars aid the government, while our drug spending keeps the opposition going.)

Vox has a good article summing up the situation, quoting extensively from the BBC about what’s in the peace agreement. The agreement sounds like a model of reasonability: FARC gives its weapons to the UN and becomes a political party guaranteed ten seats in Congress. (I’m not sure how this splits between houses. There are 166 in the lower house and 102 in the upper.). Its fighters apologize to their victims and won’t be prosecuted for the war-related crimes they confess to. (Though “crimes against humanity” don’t get this amnesty.) They get temporary financial aid to re-integrate into society.

Opponents of the agreement think that lets FARC off too easy. (One woman said: “How is it justice if I, who committed no crime, was ‘imprisoned’ in a rebel camp for four months, and these criminals get off without going to jail?” While understandable from a personal point of view, this feeling is why conflicts like this drag on decade after decade: By the time one generation gets “justice” for the wrongs committed against it, a whole new set of wrongs have been committed by both sides.) Some also don’t trust FARC to disarm, while others fear having another left-wing party in Congress.

Ironically, the voters’ rejection didn’t prevent Colombian President Juan Santos from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize Friday. Whether he’ll be able to salvage an actual peace, though, is still uncertain.

and Israel

The Obama administration is objecting to the announcement of a new Israeli settlement in the occupied territories. CNN summarizes.

and let’s close with something adorable

We could teach our children violence, or maybe we could just teach them to dance. The Irish magazine Galway Now posted this viral video.

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Best Responses to the Trump Video

October 10, 2016 – 11:06 am

It seemed like everybody had to comment. These people just did it better than the rest.

By now all the people who want to — and probably a lot who never wanted to — have seen the video of Donald Trump talking to Access Hollywood co-host Billy Bush in 2005, apparently without realizing he was being recorded. The Washington Post released the video Friday, Trump released what has been oxymoronically described as a “defiant apology” late Friday night, and the resulting firestorm dominated the news shows leading up to last night’s town-hall debate with Hillary Clinton. Many big-name Republicans who had tolerated Trump’s previous outrageous statements finally withdrew their support. [1] Trump’s running mate Mike Pence has not withdrawn his support, but has kept Trump at arm’s length, saying

I do not condone his remarks and cannot defend them. [2]

When asked about the video by Anderson Cooper early in Sunday’s debate, Trump dismissed it as “locker room talk”, a phrase he apparently wanted to leave vague, but Cooper (to his credit) insisted on unpacking: Was Trump saying that he did or didn’t do the things he bragged about, like kiss women without their consent or “grab them by the pussy”? After several attempts to get away with a general affirmation of his respect for women, Trump finally claimed that he had not done those things, i.e., that he had been lying to Bush. So Trump’s defense is that he is not a sexual abuser, he just likes to impress other guys by claiming to be one.

Cooper did not explore the trying-to-have-sex-with-a-married-woman confession in the video, so (as far as I know) Trump has not had to say whether that really happened. [3]

Obviously, there are many angles from which to react to this series of events. I’ve picked out a few that I found more insightful than the rest.

Best debate tweets. 

Erin Chack: Scary Halloween costume idea: Dress up like Trump, go to a party, and stand 3-5 feet behind successful women.

Jake Beckman posts a similar image with this caption:

Here’s the debate where Donald Trump tries to not look like a sexual predator.

And Erin Judge chimes in:

Every woman watching has had a creepy dude pace behind her.

Aren’t you guys supposed to be religious? Naively, you might think that the people who would abandon Trump first over stuff like this would be the family-values folks, particularly evangelical Christians. But the reverse seems to be true: Even as elected Republicans head for the exits, evangelical leaders like Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell Jr. are standing by Trump.

The best comment I’ve seen on that is the image on the right. If looks to be a illustration from the Bible story of the three men in the fiery furnace. During the Babylonian Captivity, three young Jewish men refuse to bow down to a golden statue of King Nebuchadnezzar, and are miraculously saved from his punishment.

The image has been annotated by having one of the kneeling men say, “He’s going to appoint pro-life supreme court justices.” In other words: If you want to bow down to the ruling power, you can always find some reason to do so. In the actual Bible story, the three heroes do not discuss Nebuchadnezzar’s policies before deciding what to do.

How abusers talk after they’re caught. In a tweet storm captured by Valerie on Storify.com, Leah McElrath responded to Trump’s “defiant apology” by taking it apart phrase-by-phrase and framing it as

an eerie replica of psychological manipulations made by abusers after episodes of abuse.

What McElrath hears in Trump’s video is less an apology than an attempt to make his accusers doubt themselves and their experiences. For example

“these words do not reflect who I am” = the reality you just experienced didn’t actually happen (gaslighting)

and

“We’re living in the real world” = I’m sane and you’re crazy

His contrast between himself and Bill Clinton, who “has actually abused women” translates to “the abuse you experienced wasn’t *really* abuse”.

McElrath’s interpretation explains Trump’s bizarre demeanor throughout this video: He is glowering and angry, not contrite or ashamed.

After reading McElrath, I see the apology video as an expression of the essence of a privileged and entitled attitude: It is up to me to judge whether or not I have done wrong, and if so, what I must do or say to make it right. Anyone who won’t accept the atonement I have assigned myself and move on is being unreasonable, and if they persist I will be forced to get angry with them.

Where have you guys been? Liz Plank does the 2016ish video series on Vox. (I got several of the tweets above via her retweets.) In this video, she raised the question: “The GOP is standing with women, but what took them so long?”

Dear GOP dudes who are suddenly realizing that Donald Trump is a flaming misogynist after more than a year of women telling you that he is, in fact, a flaming misogynist. Thanks for joining us and welcome to the club, or, as other people call it, planet earth. … So what was the moment that gave it away for you?

My favorite part of her video on this is her response to the line from Trump’s apology: “Anyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am.”

Anyone who knows you? You go out of your way to demean women. That’s your thing. That’s your brand. It’d be like saying that Mr. T doesn’t pity the fool.

How this looks if you’re black. CNN’s Van Jones went off on an epic rant, though not on CNN.

What if a black man — Candidate Obama in 2008, say — had been caught on tape talking about forcing kisses on women, groping their genitals, and trying to tempt married women into infidelity? To begin with

If Donald Trump were black, the very first word used to describe him would be thug. … The fact that we’re talking about “locker room banter” … what locker room you in?

If he were black, we’d be talking about crime.

Let’s just be very clear: Donald Trump has confessed to a sex crime. … When black people do stuff, we quickly rush to criminality. When white people do stuff, it’s like “OK, well, this is frat-boy behavior.” Whereas with us it’s thuggish behavior. … If I were to go up to Donald Trump and grab Donald Trump’s crotch and try to kiss Donald Trump, I would go to jail. I would be arrested. That’s called sexual assault. It is a crime.

… You have somebody running for president of the United States, who has confessed on tape to committing sex crimes, and people are talking about it as if there’s something wrong with the language. We’re talking about him using “lewd speech”. I don’t care about the speech. I’ve heard those words before. What I care about is the activity, the deed that he is describing.

What if Obama had had five children by three women, as Trump has?

If [Trump] were a brother, they’d be talking about the breakdown of the black family and all sort of stuff. What’s wrong with this man? Second of all, can you imagine if Barack Obama had been caught on video saying … he’s grabbing people’s crotches, he can kiss anybody he wants to, he’s a star, he’s a celebrity, he can do whatever he wants to, they like it. It would be over. We would be talking about the breakdown of values and what’s wrong with black men, and black male violence and all that sort of stuff.

To people who are sick of women “playing the gender card”, Jones asks:

What if Hillary Clinton were going around grabbing people’s crotches? Would we having this conversation or would she be on the first ship to Mars? … No black man in America could be in this situation without the entire universe coming down on the whole black community, number one. And number two: No woman could even think about going around grabbing nobody’s crotches and bragging about it, male or female.

Whose locker room? Like Jones, lots of men have a problem with describing the Trump video as “locker room talk”. Lots of men have come forward to say something like “I don’t hear that kind of talk in locker rooms.” But actually, this is a hard case to make either way, because there is no Locker Room Today that establishes national standards.

What we mean by “locker room” is groups of men talking to each other in ways they wouldn’t if women were present. And almost by definition, each of those groups is unique. For all I know there could be groups of serial killers who get together to trade stories about their latest kills. I personally don’t find myself in such groups, but really, who knows?

But we should at least pay some attention to professional male athletes, who spend large chunks of their lives hanging around with other men in literal locker rooms. AP collected several of their comments, like this one from Kansas City Chiefs receiver Chris Conley

Have I been in every locker room? No. But the guys I know and respect don’t talk like that. They talk about girls but not like that. Period.

This matches my personal experience of crude man-to-man talk: You’ll hear comments that objectify women (“Whoa, check out that butt.”) or fantasize about sex (“I wouldn’t kick her out of bed.”) or make exaggerated claims about a man’s own attractiveness (“I could totally nail her. She’s into me. You can tell.”). But even in a locker-roomish environment, I’d find it creepy and over-the-line to hear somebody brag about forcing himself on a woman the way Trump did. I don’t believe most men would confront a guy who talked like that — and I won’t claim that I would, because I think that’s a situation you have to experience before you can be sure what you’d do — but at a minimum I would expect the other guys in the room to quickly change the subject, or back away and find excuses to be somewhere else.

[1] The New York Times is keeping a list of them. For the most part, the Republicans rejecting Trump were never gung-ho about him, but previously had not been willing to take a stand against their party’s nominee. The explanation of 2008 nominee Senator John McCain is fairly typical:

I thought it important I respect the fact that Donald Trump won a majority of the delegates by the rules our party set. I thought I owed his supporters that deference. But Donald Trump’s behavior this week, concluding with the disclosure of his demeaning comments about women and his boasts about sexual assaults, make it impossible to continue to offer even conditional support for his candidacy.

In return, Trump has declared war.

On Twitter, Mr. Trump attacked the Republicans fleeing his campaign as “self-righteous hypocrites” and predicted their defeat at the ballot box. In a set of talking points sent to his supporters Sunday morning, Mr. Trump’s campaign urged them to attack turncoat Republicans as “more concerned with their political future than they are about the country.”

Someone must have pointed out to Trump that if McCain, Rob Portman, and Kelly Ayotte do get defeated and he himself somehow wins, he’ll face a Democratic Senate. But it’s not clear he cares about that.

[2] Trump, in turn, backhanded Pence during the debate. After moderator Martha Raddatz read him something critical Pence had said about Russia’s actions in Syria, a position apparently at odds with what Trump had just said, Trump’s response was bizarrely cold and abrupt: “He and I haven’t spoken, and I disagree.” Try to imagine President Obama saying that about Joe Biden.

[3] By several accounts, the unnamed married woman discussed in the video was Billy Bush’s co-host, Nancy O’Dell.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

October 10, 2016 – 7:01 am

The hardest kind of week for me to sift happens when we’re all staying up Sunday night watching a major news event and still buzzing about it Monday morning. So expect everything to be slow today.

My snap judgment on the debate is that both candidates did what they needed to do. Clinton was trying to stay on track to victory, so she wanted to appeal to the majority of the country. Trump was trying to stop a meltdown in his support by rallying his base. So if you already believed that Hillary belongs in jail, you were thrilled to hear Trump all but promise to put her there. But if you came to the debate looking for an American president rather than a third-world despot, you probably weren’t impressed.

I considered writing about something not related to the debate, Trump, and his 2005 discussion of sexual assault and trying to get married women into bed. But I came to the conclusion that nobody would hear it. I think that most people who aren’t paying attention to this issue are avoiding the news altogether right now. Also, there are some things worth saying about it — and a lot of things not worth saying, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. So for the second week in a row I’m going to take the name of this blog seriously and do some sifting: The voices you should hear are already out there, for the most part. I just need to collect and annotate.

I’m not sure how long that’s going to take. I’m guessing I’ll have an article out by 10 and a weekly summary by noon or so, but I don’t really know.

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Oily Opinions

October 3, 2016 – 10:18 am

It’s not that Trump is saying things he believes to be false. It’s that he doesn’t seem to have beliefs at all, not in the way people typically talk about beliefs — as mental constructs stable across time and context. Rather, his opinions dissolve and coalesce fluidly, as he’s talking, like oil on shallow water. That’s why he gives every indication of conviction, even when, say, denying that he has said something that is still posted on his Twitter feed, or denying that he said something that he in fact said on live television, in front of millions of people, just minutes earlier.

– David Roberts “The question of what Donald Trump ‘really believes’ has no answer“

This week’s featured post is “Investigative Reporters and Donald Trump: The 9 Best Articles“.

This week everybody was talking about the Clinton/Trump debate (and Miss Universe 1996)

A week ago, the polls looked like a dead heat, and the momentum was still with Trump. Last Monday’s debate seems to have changed that dynamic. But not because we learned anything new about the candidates’ philosophies or programs.

I’m not even sure it was the debate itself that moved the polls. Sure, Clinton did look sharper and Trump made mistakes. But the more serious problem for Trump came afterwards. He spent the rest of the week off-message, overcome by his inability to let go of any argument that he’s not winning. All week he’s been proving the truth of what Clinton said in her convention speech:

A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.

First, there was the Miss Universe flap. Josh Marshall pointed out how easily Trump could have stepped around the whole issue.

Anyone with the most basic communications experience or simply a conscience knows there’s a simple and solitary way to deal with something like this: “We quarreled years ago. I’m sorry we did. That’s a long time ago. I wish her the best.” Done and done.

But no. As with the Khan family, Trump took the attack personally and couldn’t let it go. Someone had implied he did something wrong, and he never does anything wrong.

He was still fuming in the wee hours of Friday morning. Clinton described this as “unhinged, even for him. Really, who gets up at 3 o’clock in the morning to engage in a Twitter attack against a former Miss Universe?” And Elizabeth Warren chimed in, tweeting at Trump: “You never tweet at 3am with ways to create new jobs for workers or hold Wall Street accountable.”

So does insulting a young woman 20 years ago mean Trump should never be president? No. It may not cast him in a positive light, but it’s a minor event far in the past. Does his reaction this week prove Clinton’s point that he is “temperamentally unfit” for the presidency? Yes it does. Ezra Klein did the best job of explaining why: Hillary set a trap for him and he has spent a week flailing in it. If he were president, ISIS and Russia and China could do the same thing.

The problem is that Trump is predictable and controllable. … As unpredictable and uncontrollable as he is to his allies, he is exactly that predictable and controllable to his enemies, and to America’s enemies.

Trump made two other unforced errors: He said “That makes me smart” when Clinton suggested he hadn’t paid any income tax. Ross Rosenfeld responded in The Hill:

I guess the rest of us are just stupid because we have to pay taxes. If only my daddy had left me a real estate empire, a host of political and financial connections, and no morals whatsoever — then I, too, could be “smart” like Donald Trump.

And on his own, Trump brought up his insults directed at Rosie O’Donnell, saying:

Somebody who’s been very vicious to me, Rosie O’Donnell, I said very tough things to her, and I think everybody would agree that she deserves it, and nobody feels sorry for her.

Lawrence O’Donnell said what I was thinking: “She deserves it. That is what every man guilty of spousal abuse always thinks.” So what exactly did Rosie do to deserve being called “disgusting” and “a fat pig”? She made fun of Trump on TV ten years ago. He can’t let it go.

The claim that Trump pays no taxes might be true, at least for a long stretch of years. The New York Times got hold of a few pages of Trump’s state and local income tax returns from 1995. They show Trump declared a huge loss, presumably on the collapse of his Atlantic City casinos.

Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.

I feel like this is half a story, and I hope we see the other half before we vote. Unanswered questions: Is that loss real, or the product of creative tax accounting? Did he in fact use it to pay no taxes in subsequent years?

Trump once again used that I-could-talk-about-your-mama-but-I-won’t tactic that we all remember from fourth-grade recess. (Build your vocabulary: The technical name for this is apophasis.) Even more immature is that both he and his son Eric expect credit for not bringing up what they just brought up by talking about how they weren’t going to bring it up.

If Trump starts the conversation about Bill Clinton’s infidelity, here’s how it ends: Chelsea Clinton explains on TV how grateful she is that her parents held their marriage together, so she didn’t have to go through a divorce at age 7 like poor Eric Trump did.

and there were some unusual newspaper endorsements

The New York Times‘ endorsement of Clinton and denunciation of Trump really shouldn’t have surprised anyone. That The Washington Post also dislikes Trump wasn’t that big a shock either.

But The Arizona Republic had never endorsed a Democrat in its 126-year history, until Tuesday.

Clinton has the temperament and experience to be president. Donald Trump does not.

USA Today also has never endorsed a presidential candidate, and it still hasn’t, exactly. But it did take a side. Its Editorial Board “does not have a consensus for a Clinton endorsement.” But the Board could agree on this:

This year, the choice isn’t between two capable major party nominees who happen to have significant ideological differences. This year, one of the candidates — Republican nominee Donald Trump — is, by unanimous consensus of the Editorial Board, unfit for the presidency.

The Cincinnati Enquirer has “supported Republicans for president for almost a century”, but this time it says

Clinton is a known commodity with a proven track record of governing. … Trump is a clear and present danger to our country.

The Dallas Morning News last endorsed a Democrat for president “before World War II”, but this time it says

There is only one serious candidate on the presidential ballot in November. We recommend Hillary Clinton.

Trump has not managed to get a single major newspaper endorsement (though the conservative Washington Times and Wall Street Journal have yet to commit themselves, and it’s not hard to tell who The National Enquirer is rooting for). Even New Hampshire’s conservative voice, The Union Leader, has defected to Libertarian Gary Johnson. So have The Chicago Tribune and The Detroit News (breaking a 143-year-old Republican tradition).

Along the same lines, the NYT’s Ross Douthat also makes the conservative case against Trump:

Set aside for a moment Trump’s low character, his penchant for inflaming racial tensions, his personal corruptions. Assume for the sake of argument that all that can be folded into a “lesser of two evils” case.

What remains is this question: Can Donald Trump actually execute the basic duties of the presidency? Is there any way that his administration won’t be a flaming train wreck from the start? Is there any possibility that he’ll be levelheaded in a crisis — be it another 9/11 or financial meltdown, or any of the lesser-but-still-severe challenges that presidents reliably face?

I think we have seen enough from his campaign — up to and including his wretchedly stupid conduct since the first debate — to answer confidently, “No.” Trump’s zest for self-sabotage, his wild swings, his inability to delegate or take advice, are not mere flaws; they are defining characteristics. The burdens of the presidency will leave him permanently maddened, perpetually undone.

and Congress avoided another government shutdown

The new federal fiscal year began Saturday. Wednesday, Congress avoided a shutdown by passing a bill to fund operations through December 9. Republicans gave in to Democratic spending requests on issues that really shouldn’t be controversial or partisan: Flint’s water crisis, the Zika virus, and opiod addiction. Money related to the Louisiana floods was also in the bill. Democrats didn’t get everything they wanted though: the SEC still can’t take “action to increase transparency in public companies’ political spending”.

Not so long ago, we all took for granted that Congress would figure out some way to keep the lights on. Now it’s considered an accomplishment.

but Obama suffered his first veto override

This is kind of an odd story. Some families of 9-11 victims would like to sue Saudi Arabia for its alleged role in the attack. The problem is a legal principle known as sovereign immunity, which prevents people from suing foreign governments. Recently, Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism bill to allow these suits. President Obama vetoed it, and Congress just overrode his veto, making the bill a law.

Overriding a veto takes a 2/3 votes in each house, so Republicans couldn’t do this by themselves. Apparently, congressional Democrats decided that opposing 9-11 victims right before an election was too politically dangerous, so most of them supported the override.

The problem is that when you take some action against a foreign government, it can respond. So Saudi Arabia, or maybe other countries, might start allowing their citizens to sue the U.S. for the damages we cause. This could result in the kind of huge mess that sovereign immunity is supposed to avoid.

So now congressional leaders are having second thoughts about what they’ve done, and Republicans are blaming President Obama for reasons that really defy analysis. Mitch McConnell said:

Because everyone was aware who the potential beneficiaries were, but nobody focused on the potential downside in terms of our international relationships. And I just think it was a ball dropped. I wish the President — and I hate to blame everything on him and I don’t — but it would have been helpful had … we had a discussion about this much earlier than the last week.

Because expecting Congress to do its own research into the consequences of its actions is setting the bar way too high. And McConnell listens so well when Obama tries to tell him something.

and you also might be interested in

Shimon Peres died. At 93, Peres was described as the “last link to Israel’s founding generation“. Because of that symbolic role, the articles this week about his death and career often say as much about the author’s attitude towards Israel and its current politics as about Peres.

David Roberts’ article in Vox, “The question of what Donald Trump ‘really believes’ has no answer” doesn’t meet the criteria for my “Investigative Reporters and Donald Trump: The 9 Best Articles” post, because it’s analysis rather than reporting. But it’s insightful and seems dead-on to me.

Roberts’ claim is that people use language in two sometimes-conflicting ways: to communicate ideas and to position themselves in the social hierarchy. But Trump is almost always focused on the second purpose. The reason it is so frustrating to discuss the content of Trump’s statements is that most of them were not intended to have content: They are pure maneuvers for dominance.

This point helps explain why Trump cannot ever admit a mistake or an error. He can only process accusations — of dishonesty, of cruelty — as social gambits, not as factual claims. To him, the demand that he apologize or admit error is nothing more than a dominance play. Apologizing is losing. …

It helps explain why Trump has such a long and rich history of defrauding investors, refusing to pay contractors, using his charitable foundation as a piggybank, and declaring bankruptcy to escape debt. Contracts and promises are just plays in the game, not words that carry meanings or create obligations. You sign them or say them when you need to, to win whatever negotiation you are in, and then they are gone like smoke.

Rush Limbaugh warns: “Don’t be fooled by fact-checkers.”

Usually we only talk about needlessly aggressive police tactics when someone winds up dead, but here are two videos of the kinds of interactions that might be happening every day without making headlines.

Calling attention to stuff like this is sometimes labeled as “anti-police”. But that’s not it. There is good policing and bad policing. You can be against bad policing without being anti-police.

and believe it or not, I decided to cut Gary Johnson some slack

This week Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson had what he described as another “Aleppo moment“: asked by Chris Matthews to name a foreign leader he admired, he couldn’t come up with a name without the help of his VP, Bill Weld. It looked like he had no idea who else belongs to the world-leader club he wants to join.

I was ready to ridicule him over this, when I noticed that I can’t list a lot of world leaders either. What’s the name of the British woman who came into office after Brexit? Who’s leading France? Spain? Italy? India? China? Iran? Iraq? Anywhere in Africa? Who’s heads the junta that took over Egypt a few years ago? I’d have to look all that up.

If you’re under 30, or maybe 40, you’ve lived your adult life in an era when the news media doesn’t bother much with other countries, so you may take this kind of ignorance for granted. Maintaining a far-flung network of foreign correspondents is expensive, and the economics of the news business has gotten harsher, so for decades we’ve gradually gotten less and less international news. Most of the coverage we do get is shallower, the kind you can do by pulling video of some disaster off the internet and narrating it from New York or London.

It’s all happened so gradually that the result is hard to notice, until something like the Johnson incident happens. But I’m about to turn 60, so I remember an era when the leaders of major countries were household names: Maggie Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand, Indira Gandhi, Willy Brandt, King (not Saddam) Hussein, Franco, Begin, Sadat, and so on. When I was a kid, Mad Magazine sometimes made fun of French President Charles de Gaulle, because of course their core audience of teens and tweens would know enough about him to get the joke.

As a society, we never talked it over and decided to become this ignorant of foreign affairs. It’s just one of those self-reinforcing cycles market economies are prone to: The less you know, the less you wonder. It never occurs to us to ask why we don’t know what we don’t know.

and let’s close with an ordinary person’s act of kindness and courage

Would you pull a Coke can off the head of a skunk?

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (15)

Investigative Reporters and Donald Trump: the 9 Best Articles

October 3, 2016 – 8:34 am

Introduction: Why we need reporters to investigate Trump

Typically, voters judge a candidate on three scales:

  • character or public image. Do we like this person, identify with him or her, and trust this candidate to understand our lives and our problems?
  • philosophy or policy. Do we agree with what the candidate proposes to do? Do we trust his or her overall approach to governing, so that we have confidence in the candidate to handle problems we can’t foresee?
  • record in public office. Does he or she have a voting record in Congress that matches that professed philosophy and those policy proposals? Or experience running a state, a cabinet department, or a major city that demonstrates basic competence, expertise in major policy areas, or an understanding of how government works?

Occasionally a candidate passes these tests in some non-standard way. Dwight Eisenhower, for example, had never been elected to anything before running for president in 1952. But his experience as commander of the allied forces in Europe during World War II gave him defense and foreign policy experience, as well as proving that he could manage a large, complicated enterprise.

Donald Trump, though, is unique in that his claim to the presidency is based almost entirely on his character. He has no record in public office, and much of his record in business is closed to public examination.

His political philosophy has changed many times over the years, if he can be said to have one at all. (He has been both a Democrat and a Republican, has been both for and against abortion rights, is both hawkish and isolationist on foreign policy, and now appeals to Evangelical Christians without ever repenting all the bragging he did about his sexual conquests.) His proposals are vague. (He will be “tough” with other countries and “put America first”.) They waver from week to week. (Will he deport all undocumented immigrants or just the bad ones?) And many of his supporters don’t believe he will do the things he talks about doing. (Maybe his wall will be virtual. Maybe Mexico won’t pay for it.)

But despite all that, he is Donald Trump. His name is on those big buildings. We’ve been seeing his picture on magazine covers and watching him on TV for decades. Unlike any previous presidential candidate, he is a brand. Attach Trump to something and our impression of it changes: Trump Tower, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump University.

So how does that translate to President Trump and the Trump administration?

Precisely because he is a brand, it can be hard to separate Donald Trump, the man and potential president, from the character Donald Trump we’ve seen on TV. Maybe they are the same, or maybe they are as different as Martin Sheen is from the President Bartlett character he played so convincingly on The West Wing. (Would Sheen react to a crisis as calmly and wisely as Bartlett did in scripts that Sheen had read and memorized before the cameras powered up? I have no idea, but I’d hate to bet my country on it.)

That’s why we need reporters to examine Trump, his life, and his record more than we’ve ever needed them to check out a candidate before. Most of the reporters who have written about Trump have not risen to that challenge. Some simply repeat his statements, or those of his campaign managers and surrogates, without bothering to find out what’s true or false. Others repeat scurrilous charges about him without gathering evidence to back them up. Neither of those kinds of articles is what we need.

I’m also not talking about analyzing the Trump phenomenon: who his voters are, how his movement either does or doesn’t fit into the recent history of the conservative movement, whether his authoritarian appeal represents some kind of danger to democracy, and so on.Those questions may be interesting in their own right, but answering them involves speculation rather than reporting.

What I’ve tried to assemble here is the best reporting about Trump, written by journalists who have taken the time and made the effort to investigate rather than simply call him names, or recite his legend, or psychoanalyze him, or navel-gaze to determine his historical significance. All in all, I think these investigations paint a devastating picture, but it is a portrait based in fact, rather than the fantasies of his political enemies.

Finally, a note because I’m sure someone will ask: I’m not including the NYT’s article Saturday about Trump’s taxes, because I don’t feel like we have the whole story yet. He could have avoided income taxes for 18 years, and he hasn’t denied the report, but we still can’t say that he definitely did. We also don’t know whether the $900 million loss in the story is real or the product of creative accounting. I have the feeling there’s another shoe that still needs to drop.

Also, there’s no Trump U story on the list, because there’s no singular article about it. Documents collected for the lawsuit against Trump were released to the public, and many news outlets covered what they said.

So here, in no particular order, are the best nine:

1. Newsweek’s “Donald Trump’s Many Business Failures, Explained“

If Trump’s claim that he can be an effective president rests on his business record, that record deserves some scrutiny. Kurt Eichenwald explains:

Trump’s many misrepresentations of his successes and his failures matter—a lot. As a man who has never held so much as a city council seat, there is little voters can examine to determine if he is competent to hold office. He has no voting record and presents few details about specific policies. Instead, he sells himself as qualified to run the country because he is a businessman who knows how to get things done, and his financial dealings are the only part of his background available to assess his competence to lead the country. And while Trump has had a few successes in business, most of his ventures have been disasters.

The successes primarily come from the investments and contacts he inherited from his father, Fred Trump.

Trump boasted when he announced his candidacy last year that he had made his money “the old-fashioned way,” but he is no Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg, self-made billionaires who were mavericks, innovators in their fields. Instead, the Republican nominee’s wealth is Daddy-made. Almost all of his best-known successes are attributable to family ties or money given to him by his father. … So to sum it all up, Trump is rich because he was born rich—and without his father repeatedly bailing him out, he would have likely filed for personal bankruptcy before he was 35.

His casinos went bankrupt. He bought Eastern Airlines and renamed it the Trump Shuttle before giving it to his creditors when he couldn’t pay its bills. Then he moved towards being a brand rather than a businessman.

Beginning in 2006, Trump decided to take a new direction and basically cut back on building in favor of selling his name. This led to what might be called his nonsense deals, with Trump slapping his name on everything but the sidewalk, hoping people would buy products just because of his brand.

Trump Mortgage started just in time to lose money in the real estate bubble. GoTrump.com failed as an online travel service. Trump Vodka. Trump Steaks. All failures.

But by licensing his brand to developers, and helping them use that magical name to convince middle-class people to make downpayments on condos that were never built, Trump managed to walk away with a profit on deals where everyone else lost: Trump Hollywood, Trump Ocean Resort Baha Mexico, Trump Tower Tampa. Finally, there is the outright fraud of Trump University.

But if he’s such a bad businessman, you might ask, why is he so rich? The answer is that no one knows how rich he actually is. He claims to be worth more than $10 billion, but refuses to release any information that might validate that. In reality, he may be worth little more than what his father left him.

2. The USA Today’s “Hundreds Allege Donald Trump Doesn’t Pay His Bills“

One admirable thing about billionaires like Bill Gates or Sam Walton is that they made a lot of other people rich too. If you worked for Bill or Sam back in the day and kept your stock options, you’re probably a multi-millionaire now. But with Donald Trump the exact opposite is often true: Signing a contract with Trump has been a good way to go broke.

Steve Reilly goes through court records to document a pattern of lawsuits against Trump and his businesses.

The actions in total paint a portrait of Trump’s sprawling organization frequently failing to pay small businesses and individuals, then sometimes tying them up in court and other negotiations for years. In some cases, the Trump teams financially overpower and outlast much smaller opponents, draining their resources. Some just give up the fight, or settle for less; some have ended up in bankruptcy or out of business altogether.

In the individual cases, Trump’s lawyers usually claimed that the work was substandard in some way. But in the aggregate that suggests a different problem:

[T]he consistent circumstances laid out in those lawsuits and other non-payment claims raise questions about Trump’s judgment as a businessman, and as a potential commander in chief. The number of companies and others alleging he hasn’t paid suggests that either his companies have a poor track record hiring workers and assessing contractors, or that Trump businesses renege on contracts, refuse to pay, or consistently attempt to change payment terms after work is complete as is alleged in dozens of court cases.

The cases that produce a public record may be just the tip of an iceberg. No one knows how many short-changed contractors decided that taking whatever Trump offered in payment was better than fighting his lawyers.

Edward Friel, of the Philadelphia cabinetry company allegedly shortchanged for the casino work, hired a lawyer to sue for the money, said his son, Paul Friel. But the attorney advised him that the Trumps would drag the case out in court and legal fees would exceed what they’d recover.

The unpaid bill took a huge chunk out of the bottom line of the company that Edward ran to take care of his wife and five kids. “The worst part wasn’t dealing with the Trumps,” Paul Friel said. After standing up to Trump, Friel said the family struggled to get other casino work in Atlantic City. “There’s tons of these stories out there,” he said.

The Edward J. Friel Co. filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 5, 1989.

Says the founder’s grandson: “Trump hits everybody.”

Paul Friel tells a more detailed version of his family’s story in this video.

3. David Fahrenthold’s investigation of the Trump Foundation and Trump’s (lack of) charitable contributions

This isn’t just one article, but a body of work that has been unfolding in The Washington Post over months.

Throughout his career, Donald Trump has recognized the brand-building power of charity. One stereotypic image of rich people — particularly those who were born rich, as Trump was — is that they only care about themselves; they suck money out of society and give nothing back. But a wealthy heir or businessman can banish that image by announcing that he’s going to give big contributions to help veterans, or a children’s hospital, or some other worthy cause. Rather than a parasite, he looks like a saint.

So if you’re rich and worry about your image, generosity can be a good investment in public relations. But there’s one way to make it an even better investment: What if you could get all the publicity associated with big gifts, but not actually have to pony up any of your own money, or any money at all?

That seems to be what Trump has consistently done over the years: make well-publicized announcements of gifts that never actually materialize, or are paid for by someone else. In that sense, his gifts to charity are like his business dealings with contractors (described in the previous article); after he gets what he wants from the deal, the rest is negotiable.

In the course of the current campaign, Trump or his surrogates have talked about tens of millions of dollars or even more than $100 million that Trump has given away. Ordinarily when a campaign makes claims like that, they’re happy to provide the details, because it’s one more chance to focus a reporter’s attention on a story that makes their candidate look good. But when Fahrenthold pressed the Trump campaign for details about the $6 million Trump had supposedly raised for veterans groups (instead of attending a Republican debate where Megyn Kelly could have questioned him again), they were oddly unhelpful.

The real start of it was the fundraiser that Trump had for veterans in Iowa in late January. He said he’d raised $6 million — and then he toured around Iowa and New Hampshire handing out big novelty checks to local vets groups. But then Trump stopped. And he hadn’t given away anywhere near $6 million. That started us looking. We found that Trump seemed to have stockpiled a lot of the vets money in this oddball Trump Foundation, which had no staff and very little money. In fact, for a long time, it seemed the Trump Foundation had actually *made* money on the vets fundraiser, because it had given out far less than it had taken in from other donors (who expected it to quickly pass on their donations to vets groups). 

The vets saga ended strangely: Trump’s people said he’d given the $1 million [which he personally pledged] secretly. We checked. That was false. Trump hadn’t given the $1M away at all. Then, he finally did, in the middle of the night. Then Trump held an angry press conference where he denounced the media for, in effect, forcing him to explain what he’d done with the money other people had entrusted to him, the money in the Trump Foundation. That made us more interested. 

For any other candidate, you could just check Schedule A of his or her tax return. But Trump won’t release his tax returns either. If Trump wouldn’t provide any details, though, maybe the charities would. So Fahrenthold started contacting charities that Trump had some connection to, then branching out from there. He found very little. Only in the last few months — after Fahrenthold started checking up on him — has Trump started giving money to charity again.

And then there’s the Trump Foundation. Since 2008, Trump has put virtually none of his own money into his foundation. (Over the previous 20 years, he donated a total of $5.4 million, not “tens of millions”.) Instead, he has collected contributions from other people and corporations, and has spent a lot of it on himself or his business interests. He used hundreds of thousands from the foundation to make charitable contributions that settled court cases against himself or his companies. (That’s illegal.) He used $30K to buy two portraits of himself in charity auctions. (Trump’s people won’t say where the paintings are, but one or maybe both are hanging in Trump businesses. If so, if the portraits weren’t themselves used for some charitable purpose, that also is illegal.)

Fahrenhold exposed another likely illegality this week:

Donald Trump’s charitable foundation — which has been sustained for years by donors outside the Trump family — has never obtained the certification that New York requires before charities can solicit money from the public, according to the state attorney general’s office.

… The most important consequence of not registering under the more rigorous “7A” level was that the Trump Foundation was not required by the state to submit to an annual audit by outside accountants. In such an audit, charity-law experts said, the accountants might have checked the Trump Foundation’s books — comparing its records with its outgoing checks, and asking whether the foundation had engaged in any transactions that benefited Trump or his busi­nesses.

In recent years, The Post has reported, Trump’s foundation does appear to have violated tax laws in several instances.

More disturbing yet is the appearance that he has used money from the Trump Foundation to squash fraud investigations into Trump University. He has paid a $2,500 fine for the Foundation making a $25,000 contribution to a PAC supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who coincidentally decided not to investigate Trump U. This would fit a larger pattern. Trump gave $35K of his own money to Texas AG (now Governor) Greg Abbott, who also didn’t investigate Trump U. And the Trump Foundation contributed $100K to another foundation that is suing New York AG Eric Schneiderman, who is suing Trump U for fraud.

In short, for the last 8 years or so, up until the last few months, Trump not only wasn’t giving to charity, he was using other people’s charitable contributions to benefit himself. Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway justified this by claiming — falsely — that the Foundations money “is his money”. The whole point of giving money to a foundation, or any charity, is that it’s not your money any more. And when the Foundation is under your control but is funded primarily by other people, then it’s really not your money.

4. Trump’s Politifact File

Fact-checking sites have some leeway about which statements they check, so small differences in the aggregate statistics don’t necessarily mean anything. But Donald Trump’s file is unique: 35% of his checked statements are rated False, and another 18% get the even lower Pants On Fire rating, which is reserved for statements that “make a ridiculous claim“. By a wide margin, no other major political figure so regularly says things that are provably not true. (So much for the claim that he “tells it like it is”.)

By contrast, 10% of Hillary Clinton’s checked statements are rated False and 2% Pants on Fire, a rate similar to Republicans like Paul Ryan (9%/3%) and John Kasich (13%/5%).

But the numbers don’t really capture it. It’s worthwhile to dig into some of his more ridiculous statements, like

and so on.

5. Newsweek’s “How Donald Trump’s Company Violated the United States Embargo Against Cuba“

In 1998, it briefly looked like the U.S. embargo against Cuba might come down. If it did, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts wanted to be ready to move in fast. So it sent somebody to Havana to investigate the business possibilities. That in itself violated the embargo.

6. The Washington Post’s “Trump: A True Story“

This is Fahrenthold again, this time teaming with Robert O’Harrow Jr. The question in this article is Trump’s honesty, and the unique opportunity to compare what he said while under oath in 2007 to what he had previously claimed when not under oath.

In Trump Nation: the art of being the Donald author Timothy O’Brien estimated Trump’s net worth at less than $250 million, rather than the $5 billion he then claimed, and made several other statements Trump was offended by. So he sued. Big mistake.

By filing suit, Trump hadn’t just opened himself up to questioning — he had opened a door into the opaque and secretive company he ran. … The reporter’s attorneys turned the tables and brought Trump in for a deposition. For two straight days, they asked Trump question after question that touched on the same theme: Trump’s honesty.

The upshot is that Trump isn’t very honest, and tells a different story under oath than he does otherwise. Thirty times, they forced an admission that what he had said previously was not true. When not under threat of perjury, Trump exaggerated his success, quoted numbers he knew to be wrong, blamed other people for his mistakes, and “made authoritative-sounding statements without any proof behind them.” Under oath, he had to back off.

The article makes me wish Trump were speaking under oath now. BTW, Trump’s suit against O’Brien was dismissed, and the author he hoped to ruin had his legal fees picked up by his publisher.

7. The Daily Beast’s: “DOJ: Trump’s Early Businesses Blocked Blacks“

In 1973, Donald Trump was still learning the real estate business from his father Fred. They were both sued by the Department of Justice for violations of the Fair Housing Act.

According to the DOJ, a former super at Trump’s Highlander complex claimed that he would also attach a coded piece of paper to let the “central office” know that an applicant was black. He added that a number of supers in Queens used a “phony lease” to enable them to refuse apartments to people of color. The super’s assistant backed up his story about the code and said she was told, “Trump Management tries not to rent to black persons.”

… In its lawsuit, the DOJ listed more than half a dozen cases in which a black person would try to rent an apartment at a Trump-owned building and would be denied; but when a white person—often a “tester” from New York’s Urban League—would inquire about vacancies, they would allegedly get offered an apartment in the same building.

The Trumps settled with DOJ in 1975, but by 1978 DOJ had them back in court for non-compliance with the consent decree. Reporter Gideon Resnick concludes: “the ugly details of this early clash with the Department of Justice shed light on alleged systemic discrimination at the heart of the Trump real estate empire.”

8. The New York Times’ “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private“

Trump’s public interactions with women have gotten a lot of attention, from decades ago to this week’s continuation of his feud with a former Miss Universe. But The Times Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey tried to find out what it was like for a woman to deal with Trump one-on-one, in private. So they interviewed dozens of women who had known him over the years.

The picture they paint is complex and fascinating. His father Fred comes off as a classic sexist, and Donald revolted against him by promoting women to prominent roles in his businesses. But Donald also carried forward other parts of the sexist paradigm:

He simultaneously nurtured women’s careers and mocked their physical appearance. “You like your candy,” he told an overweight female executive who oversaw the construction of his headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. He could be lewd one moment and gentlemanly the next. … [I]n many cases there was an unmistakable dynamic at play: Mr. Trump had the power, and the women did not. He had celebrity. He had wealth. He had connections. Even after he had behaved crudely toward them, some of the women sought his assistance with their careers or remained by his side.

9. Newsweek’s “How the Trump Organization’s Business Ties Could Upend U.S. National Security“

Kurt Eichenwald describes the impossibility of disentangling the Trump Organization from its “deep ties to global financiers, foreign politicians and even criminals”.

If Trump moves into the White House and his family continues to receive any benefit from the company, during or even after his presidency, almost every foreign policy decision he makes will raise serious conflicts of interest and ethical quagmires.

In the earlier Eichenwald article, he explained how Trump’s business strategy changed in 2007, when he began his TV career and decided to profit from fame and branding rather than building.

Rather than constructing Trump’s own hotels, office towers and other buildings, much of his business involved striking deals with overseas developers who pay his company for the right to slap his name on their buildings.

The problem is that these local partners are often deeply (and sometimes corruptly) involved with local politicians and political parties, or have financial interests in the local defense industries. (Eichenwald cites examples from Russia, Ukraine, South Korea, India, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Libya, and other countries.) Even if there is no corrupt intent on Trump’s part, his political decisions will affect his financial interests.

If he plays tough with India, will the government assume it has to clear the way for projects in that “aggressive pipeline” [of Trump Organization projects in that country] and kill the investigations involving Trump’s Pune partners? And if Trump takes a hard line with Pakistan, will it be for America’s strategic interests or to appease Indian government officials who might jeopardize his profits from Trump Towers Pune?

A conflict over a Trump property in Dubai led to a Twitter-feud between Trump a Saudi prince, whom he called “Dopey Prince @Alwaleed_Talal”. If he were president, it’s hard to see how this wouldn’t become problem between the two countries.

Sovereign wealth funds, which invest the money accumulated by oil-rich governments, sometimes make financial deals with the Trump Organization. In Azerbaijan, the Trump Organization partners with a company controlled by the son of the transportation minister, who might have laundered money for the Iranians.

Trump has said he will deal with these problems by turning the business over to his children while he is in office. This might work if the business were something simple and small, like a restaurant or a hardware store. But how can he avoid knowing whether a Trump Tower gets built in some foreign capital? Or not hear when a Saudi prince or Russian oligarch threatens to cancel a loan?

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